Business Management Consultant - Stuntdubl Search and Marketing Consulting

Link development has changed. Links pages suck. Your reciprocal link value is defiintely goin’ down hill. You can outsource all day long and gain very little value from it. Roll with the changes, and stay ahead of the curve. Get yourself a qualified link developer and let them negotiate online media like a marketing manager would do with print, radio, or other medias. This is a valuable job. Most SEO’s started as link serfs that realized the value in getting the RIGHT links because of the indirect correlations to search rankings. If you rely on the web for your business, there is no good reason not to have someone in-house working on attaining links for you.

10 Tips to Train a Link Developer

1. Teach them the value of a link - TLA Guide to text link purchasing
2. Explain the contradiction of PR mattering
3. Show them “starting points” like the Google directory, keyword combination tool,
4. Teach them to mine competitor backlinks with yahoo, link harvester, or other methods.
5. Train them to skim and search pages for “hot words” like advertising, sponsors, resources, advertisements, etc. to establish if a site is open to, or currently offering advertising - cntrl+f works nicely
6. Show them how to check if a page is cached or in the supplemental index
7. Encourage them to be creative and learn link development from the right people and places
8. Train them on using ontology tools to write anchor text
9. Show them how to negotiate a link trade or purchase
10. Let them buy some links to understand the value
11. Set them up a paypal account to buy links from other places - trial by fire

If you would like help training your link developers. We really enjoy training people, and these prices are going to go up quite a bit in the near future.

Tags: Internet Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, Link Development, Website Promotion, Links, SEO Training

Despite being unsolicited, good e-mail link requests still *do* exist. Their not easy to do, because any webmaster with sites in the top 1000 for ANYTHING is tired of gettin’ arelis generated garbage requests that go out to everyone elese in the top 1000. Make your e-mails personal and relevant, and use the techniques that you can to get better conversion rates.

This makes it more difficult to write a good request that will have a likelihood for success. Crafting e-mails for successful link request conversion is an art and science like increasing conversions on a website.

I got the first VERY good request for a link that I’ve received in quite a while from someone that I didn’t know. I am going to republish the request with the permission of the author below. I’ve added a bit of insight of exactly what he did right, and a few things he may have done a bit better (or just different) below the mail.

It’s HARD to get good links, but if you do it right it can be done. If you’re gonna fish for lunkers, be sure to sharpen your hooks.

Example of a Good Link Request E-mail

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How long will it be “cool” to be a blogger? When will bloggers 15 megabytes of fame be out of disk space? I’ve finally started to come to terms with the fact that I’m a blogger. I’m really not that excited about it. There’s honestly not a whole lot of blogs that I like compared to the billions out there, and for the longest time I tried to refrain from even using the “b-word” on this site. Anyhow, I’ll keep my self-loathe for being a blogger realization for another time, and truly turn into “one of them”. Not only that, if I’m goin’ down, you’re comin’ with me. I’m gonna make it too easy for you to NOT start a blog at least to reach your customers and have a place for a “one to many” dialogue.

As reluctant as I am to admit it because of the “everyone’s doin’ it” vibe around blogs, they are potentially a very positive tool for your business or website. They are an alternate means of generating traffic, and the readership is definitely on the rise by making it easier for people to read them with things like myYahoo, bloglines, and other RSS reader services.

So now that you need yourself a blog so you can whine about your cat, and how cool you are because you’re visiting Europe and “blogging will be light”. Let’s find out how to get one rolling with:

Blogger Tools

Creating a blog
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Since I am a pretty poor coder and I have a propensity to break things, my old Wordpress install was pretty hacked to bits. The good news is, if you’re reading this, WP is reinstalled, and on a new and improved faster and more reliable host. Comments are back in action again finally (yeah!), as well as some other features that I managed to bust on the backend that I’m happy to have back.

There may be a few bugs here and there that I’ll be working out over the next few days, if you see any please drop me a line at todd (at) stuntdubl.com. Very appreciated.

A big thanks to Mike, the Word Press Wizard, who helped to make the move nice and smooth. If you need good web development work done…he’s your guy.

“You’re not a true SEO until you’ve been banned at least once!”" - not sure who gets original credit for this one…most likely Boser, Oilman or perhaps Jake.

Anyone who has pushed the bleeding edge of search engine optimization has had a site go greybar, or just totally tank from the SERPs. It really sucks. Sometimes it’s worth a reinclusion request, and sometimes it’s best to keep walking and never look back. Bannings are a very interesting phenomena that don’t get discussed often except by those who are proud to be blackhat. Fortunately, it’s not a problem I’ve had to deal with for personal sites, but I seem to have been getting requests for consulting from a lot of folks who managed to get themselves banned lately, and I wanted to put together some information on the subject. I would like to try to open up a discussion for a few of my own pressing questions including:

• How can you tell when your site has been banned?
• When is it a ban? Filter? Penalty? When is it just poor optimization or the sandbox?
• What percentage of bannings are hand bans vs. algorithmic collateral damage?
• Will the search engines admit to doing hand editing for quality control?
• How can you best prevent a site from incurring the wrath of a banning while still pushing the bleeding edge of search engine optimization?
• What are the best practices for reinclusion if your important or branded domain gets popped

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Affiliate marketing is tough. Anyone who tells you different is most likely very very smart, or very very stupid. Smart affiliates use button pusher marketing to crank out large sites quite often. I think these sites certainly help with the size of the SE’s index, though I don’t imagine many of them contribute to the quality of their indexes. The best affiliate marketing folks are generally very technically savvy as well as marketing savvy. I really respect the opinions of those who have been successful at affiliate marketing, because I know it takes a lot of work, ambition, and dedication. I’ve never been what I would consider successful with affiliate marketing, but I have dabbled a bit, and listened A LOT. There is definitely some gold available for those up to the challenge.

It’s getting pretty tough to come up with a weekly tool list these days. Mr. Ploppy’s list will most likely be a less frequent occurence in the near future. If you have requests for future lists, be sure to let me know, and I’ll try to keep the tools coming as I come accross them.

If you have tools you would like to see added to this list, don’t hesitate to let me know as well. With out further ado…

Affiliate Marketing Tools

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Do yourself a favor and checkout SEObook’s new backlink tool. Very impressive piece of FREE software bein’ given away by Aaron.