When Google says that inbound links from Facebook and Twitter count in your money making blogs’ ranking and serp ranking, it’s time to pay attention. As a blogger, what should you do to leverage on this piece of news. Matt Cutts said this, “Now, there’s a few things to remember. Number one is: if we can’t crawl a page (if we can’t see a page), then we can’t really assign PageRank to it, and it doesn’t really count. So if we’re able to obtain the data, then we can use it, but if for some reason a page is forbidden for us to crawl or if we’re not able to obtain it somehow, then we wouldn’t be able to use it within our rankings.”

Therefore, if blogging for money is in your mind, forget about the privacy settings and start making friends. Friends who happens to be interested in your niche. If you happen to be a Facebook enthusiast, start sharing your blog post. Open a group or fan page and start marketing your money making blogs to your followers.

As for Twitter, wait till I can find time for this…

Link building is never easy in blog SEO. I dare say, it’s one of the least fulfilling part when building money making blogs in your niches. I hate it!

Source: verticalmeasures.com

Anyway, back to reality. As it is, there are many different techniques and  methods that will yield varieties of result. This blog post is how I would recommend new and even experienced bloggers in starting and mastering the science of link building.

I would often break link building into  4 levels and usually it takes a lifetime to master this – just like a martial artist; from a white belt to black belt. Let’s make it fun. In my dojo class, I would break link building into white belt, blue belt, brown belt and finally the black belt.

White Belt: Links You Can Build Yourself That Require Short Amount of Time Investment

Before I get directly into this, I’d like to stress that you should begin with a really good keyword strategy and make sure you have optimized each page on your site around different keywords. Any link you’re creating should be designed in such a way as to assist a specific page rank high in the search engines to get a specific keyword.

With that said, the very first kind of links that each blog should get tend to be the ones that don’t require anyone else’s help. There are numerous business directories out there where you can just submit your URL, company name and a outline of your business. A number of them require approval. Some of them require a fee. Yahoo’s directory, JoeAnt, FreeLinkDirectory and some other directories with high PageRank are the ones you ought to do right away.

There are also numerous social media sites where you can simply build links in your site. Most of these will no longer pass SEO juice due to the “no follow” attribute, but they’re still good backlinks to get, assuming the target audience visits the website or these sites rank high for your keywords already. If you have the fund, you should rely on someone else to do this stuff for you. It’s menial work that generates low level returns. Please make sure that you manage this properly by building these backlinks gradually. If you are financially sound, make it like say 2 links per day and spread them out in the course of 1 to 3 months. In this way, you will look good in the eyes of search engines especially Google. Trust me, the fate of bloggers lies in the hand of Google. At this moment, they are still the Lord of the internet.

Blue Belt: Links Bloggers Build Themselves that Require Work

Before I get directly into this level, I’d like to emphasize that blogging in a business website should be done prior to doing this.

Without having a blog on your website with lots of  well optimized content, you don’t really have anything to link to. There are two different link building techniques that work well whereby you as a blogger does not need to stretch your grey matter. However, these activities require more time investment (more than directories submission) and you just might need to stretch your finance a bit to achieve optimum result.

I’m sure you have heard of article promotion and press release optimization. Both  these techniques require that you create relevant content that will attract your niche market. Therefore, it is more tedious than White Belt level. I hate doing this, honestly. If I have been doing article submission persistently enough, having individual articles from various article submission networks to individual pages of my blog, trust me, my blog may have already achieve PR 4 by now. You see, the process of getting the articles syndicated and your press announcements submitted and picked up : takes effort. Part time entrepreneurs like me and some of you may dread doing all these.

You might consider hiring a wired page rank firm or a strong seo firm to do some of this stuff for you. If done correctly, both of these strategies can significantly increase the hyperlinks to your site. Additionally, if you write your articles as well as press releases with a search term strategy in mind, sufficient reason for links that support the keyword strategy, it can substantially raise your rankings for specific keyword terms.

A word of caution, if you can help it, try not to copy your blog post word for word into your articles because Google may treat them as duplicate contents and therefore, may not rank them.

Brown Belt: Links You Network For That Need  Significant Time Investment

This category of  link building will be kind of like doing sales. You need to do a lot of cold calling, that can only be done successfully with grand stamina.

Apply your persistency and spend your time creating and building relationships. Most bloggers and webmasters in this era has a Twitter or Facebook account. Make yourself available to your acquaintance and build relationships with them. Again the tedious part is, you have to take time and try to approach them individually just like how you would approach a new colleague or a new prospect.

The kind of objective and the goal  is to make yourself visible among people interested in the same niche as you. The trick is to make your niche-peers like you and would link to you as a friend. But remember, your blog must be valuable enough for your new friends to link back to you because their reputations are at stake. You learn this level by behaving like a resource for folks in your industry. Remember, before they make friends with you, these people are your direct competitors. So, how can you do this?

It’s all about marketing and building meaningful interactions. The first step will be reading other people’s weblogs. Then, commenting on them. Next, eventually starting a relationship where you’re communicating one on one with them. I suggest you take the leap from a reader to a contributor, by pointing out to them interesting news and happenings that might be of interest to them. Here is where Twitter and Facebook will come in handy.

By the way, apart from the top two social media platforms, even Social Bookmarking sites like Digg is building itself into a kind of a social media, although the interactive part of the infrastructure is still primitive. Google Buzz, Delicious, Stumble Upon lets you perform this kind of social networking. Therefore, the communication part can undoubtedly be carried out through any social networking platform or system that enables one to one communication.

From a link building perspective, the top goal of achieving that elusive Brown Belt of link building is to get invited to write a guest article for other people’s blogs or website. So, spend some time in interacting with your fellow bloggers. Maybe 30 % of your weekly blogging time…who knows what kind of wonders these may bring.

Black Belt: Links Other People Give You Because You Generate Remarkable Content.

This is the level whereby you enter a ‘zone’. You may have master the basics; the blocks, the variety of punches, grasps, but you need to be inside the ‘zone’ where all those moves are able to merge with you emotionally. The part where your karate and you become one.

You spend most of your time just creating remarkable content. You know you have reached this stage when you don’t need to ask for links anymore. The people in your niche want to associate themselves to you.

If you’re a small business and you follow the path above, there’s no reason why you can’t stake your claim on the web. Link building is an important part of that. Hopefully, this post demystifies the process a bit and gives you a roadmap to get started. The biggest mistake that newbie internet marketers make is thinking that creating great content on their blog will be all it takes to be successful internet marketers.

My biggest frustration is when seeing new bloggers abandoning ship after just a month of writing because their blog doesn’t have an immediate impact on their search traffic and lead volume. At the end of the day, if you publish great content on the web AND connect, relate and build relationships with other humans, really good links will come naturally. Until then, put in some groundwork and earn your keeps through the link building dojo.

Already contemplating to buy links?  Have your website or blog comes to a point where you think that the only way of getting quality backlinks is through link buying? When you resort to buy links, what do you have in mind? Boosting your blog’s page rank? Or do you just want some big traffics to come in via the links provided from  established websites?

Source: mimifroufrou.com

Link buying can be helpful if you own an e-commerce site and is in a hurry to raise its search ranking. Links that were given freely a few years ago might require payment today. Many people believe that its unethical to buy links, and search engines certainly devalue such effort when they identify them. Who can blame them anyway. To Google or Bing, you should be putting your budget in adwords advertising instead of prospering other people.

Anyway, there are various issues that you have to consider before you burn your hard earned budget in buying links.

1. Beware of websites from link farms.

This is suicidal, what’s more if you have to pay for it. How can you tell which of these sites are money worth and legitimate source of links? Which are link farms or shammy websites trying to fool Google and gang? Identification has never been easy but there are some tell tale signs to spot the spammer

a. The site appears to have many links to sites that do not seem valuable, what’s more if those links look like advertisements.

b. If you own an e-commerce site, try to identify if any of the company listed sounds familiar to you. If not, run!

c. Check the page rank of the potential / suspicious site. A site with a very low page rank may spell disaster. Anyway, if we are prepared to pay for links, why settle for less? Go for those  with at least a PR 4.

d. Your list of potential partners may have links that seem irrelevant to its topic. Can you identify a central theme in the blog or website? For example, slash off a site with links to pharmaceutical, banking, photography all sitting side by side.

e. Check the IP address of the list of links you have identified. We don’t want two or more sites coming from the same IP address. In-breeding is unhealthy.

If after going through your directory and all the above tell tale signs don’t show up, well yes, go ahead and ask for quotation.

2. Spread out the campaign.

Search engines especially Google are especially apt in identifying backlink trends. Google is not God, but it’s status is near Demi-God in the internet world! It sees and observe what you are doing and the worse thing is, they get better every minute.

Usually websites or blogs tend to get links from smaller sites. As your blog progress and your knowledge on a particular subject deepens, you start to attract the big fish. Therefore, links from several high PR sites suddenly appearing overnight linking to your blog will sound the alarm of suspicious link buying. As a result, search engines will look for link patterns and will devalue them.

So, if you want to play this game, play it smart. A high PR website linking to your blog once every two months is more meaningful then 10 super sites coming in within a week.

Source: ttam1989.files.wordpress.com

3. Give due consideration to  reputable link partners.

a. Trade magazines. Their integrity makes them highly respected links. The journalist will be interested if the pages you suggest offer genuine service for readers seeking more information. A short URL helps too. Very useful for e-commerce websites and commercial blogs.

b. Reputable bloggers. Need I say this again and again. Who would discount the links from Chris Brogan, Problogger (forget about this coz Google has bought over the website) and Steve Pavlina. Make sure you get a DoFollow from their site if you do get a quote from them.

c. Research sites. If you are blogging about a product or it happens that your website carries a well researched scientific instrument, you may attract the attention from educational and commercial research sites. If you are lucky, they may just give you the link free.

d. Related sites. They could mean competing sites or even synergistic ones. If you own a hotel website, why not request links from reputable travel blogs.

e. Your personal network. This is a no brainer. If your mum owns a big conglomerate with an in-house portal, get a link from her. Just make sure the IP address is different.

4. Your campaign should depends on your objective for buying links.

If your objective is merely to drive related traffic en-mass to your website, then go ahead and splurge on a shopping spree. However, if you buy links to elevate your blog or website, then you have to tread carefully. Buy links from relevant websites with similar or slightly higher ranking to your own. Be prepared for the ‘sandbox’ effect whereby Google will discount the quick change in your links popularity. In other words, your website will be put in a probational period whereby despite all the links, it will not break into the top ranking for any keywords quaries.

However, if over time, your blog’s popularity continues to grow larger, search engines begin to remove the discounts and will give full weight to the link popularity. Search ranking or SERP will rise in tandem.

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