Quality Link Building and Content Placement for Amateur and Professional SEO's

Innovative Link Building

My name is Paul Geller and I’ve been working in internet technologies since I was 16 years old—some 10 years now. To find out more about me look below or to familiarize yourself with my other marketing related activities. I’ve been helping customers build business using Organic Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Pay Per Click (PPC) for almost a decade now and in recent months it has become significantly harder to build comprehensive results for my SEO clients. The reason is because GOOGLE™ continues to eat up search market share and as it does comprehensive and diverse link building is becoming more important than ever. With the recent dilution of paid link buying, the addition of the “nofollow” tag to many websites, forums and blogs and the increased skepticism by the algorithm and Google™ employees in regards to legitimate link identification professionals are having a much harder time building authority for sites—let alone amateurs.

After months of trial and error, testing various link-building offers and case studies in 90 day intervals of purchased and non-purchased link building campaigns my company has developed what we believe to be the premium blend of link building services. Below you will find a ranking in terms of effectiveness (excluding outside factors) of each type of link that we have identified. Please note that things like Text Link Ads or Graphic/Video Ads have traditional advertising value intrinsic to them but for the sake of this study we only account for the ad’s ability to increase your position in the SERPs.

Heirarchy of Link Value
Link Farms
Paid or non paid link trade programs. Usually you insert some code (java or php) onto your site that adds thousands of links and then you are included in their database. I don’t know of any top engine that values these and indeed may get you slapped or band for excessive participation.

Turn-Key Directories
Directories or services that submit to “hundreds” of so-called directories that have little intrinsic value or usefulness to a searcher. Although being penalized for participating in both paid or unpaid versions of this is low, the value is worse than arguable. May likely be a waste of time but will not likely result in a penalty unless anchor text links overly repetitive.

Paid Blog “Reviews”
Peddled by industry standard sites like Review Me or Pay Per Post, most of these blogs are replicants with multiple blogs run by a single person. The writing is generally terrible and the topic of the site is almost never within reach of your own. If you are diligent in specifying reasonable prices and weeding out just horrible posters, after a few months you may actually get some reasonable results. Before that happens you pretty much have to spend haphazardly. In my experience the low-priced blogs have garbage indexing and rarely translate to links that will improve your ranking. However, when used in conjunction with other methods and by a professional who has already weeded through the junky database, it can be effective in adding some quantity to your link base.

Purchased Graphic/Video Ads
Because there is no text associated with these Ad placements outside of title and alt tags and perhaps a sneaky div id, they are valued a tad less than text link ads which supply engines with at least a bit of information that it can reasonably assume to be relevant to the highlighted link or key term. Like Text Link Ads they are likely more and more now to contain the “nofollow” tag. If you can find ones that don’t then great for you but remember that there is intrinsic value in a link or an ad that does not necessarily have to translate into additional backlink counts in Yahoo™ and Google™.

Text Link Ads
Text Link Ads are likely more and more now to contain the “nofollow” tag. If you can find ones that don’t then great for you but remember that there is intrinsic value in a link or an ad that does not necessarily have to translate into additional backlink counts in Yahoo™ and Google™.

By Hand Low PR Custom Link Solicitation
You can sit there all day sending emails to sites that although are relevant, perhaps have low PR or another marginalized measure of value. I tend to like outsourcing because it generally does not take a ton of finesse to get these done right and since these are not the big wigs that need to be convinced of your relevance to give you a link, you can get it done for a reasonable price. Don’t expect it to work miracles for you overnight though. It might not ever.

Peer Edited Directories and Yahoo Directory
Peer edited directories like DMOZ and the Yahoo Directory (which is paid in regards to professional sites) seem to have a reasonable effect in getting a site out of the sandbox. However, I have had many experiences where a category in DMOZ was edited by a competitor of my client and tried numerous times to get listed to no avail. Indeed many categories don’t have editors at all which can leave you sitting on your thumb for years. This is a major identified problem of DMOZ that I hope is corrected in the near future.

SEO Press Releases (Transworld/PRWeb)
I am not sure how many SEOs use these services but strangely enough I have found them valuable for a quick bump for a few days. If you actually have something newsworthy to say (god forbid) you might get a lot more mileage out of it than you would expect. It can be pricey and of course you have to write your own press releases but this dual purpose application allows you to both (a) receive very quick syndication links and (b) has the potential to be picked up by a legitimate news outlet and create a social spark (no pun intended) that will fuel a long run of backlinks. The better you write and the more compelling your release, the more links you will get. No trick to it. Well maybe a little, like when you really have nothing valuable to say – which, let’s face it, is just about always.

By Hand High PR Custom Link Solicitation
Using third party software you can find great places to link from—where your competitors get links from, what their anchor text is, etc. However obtaining a link from these great High PR sites is hard. You have to convince them of your legitimacy, your value to their readers and that you are not competition. If their site is related to your industry then there is a reasonable chance that they may view you as competition or may already be affiliated with a competitor. If it’s not related then its value is subjugated. The higher your ratio of these High PR, in-content, relevant links you have to all the others can play an essential role in determining your authority.

Pre-sell Pages / Hosted Content
This interesting and innovative technique is gaining in popularity as it is exposed to clients by by first-rate search marketers. This technique allows an author to host a page on an authoritative domain that is relevant to its topic. The page contains backlinks as well as custom built content that both reflects the content of the hosted page and acts as an intrinsic marketing tool for the purchaser. It is well known by engines and hand editors but because these pages are designed to actually offer informative content and significant relevance it is counter productive for engines to work against them. At this point I believe them to be excellent tools but not the only answer. These too must be blended.

Blended Link Campaigns
This is what we do. We blend a campaign tailored to your site and industry that contains Press, High and Low by PR by hand links, EDU and if possible, GOV links, sprinkle it with relevant blog chatter and supplement it with paid text link ads. This proprietary blend will give you the best results in the shortest amount of time for both young and old sites with little to average authority.

Content Links in DOT EDU sites (non-student edited resources)
In regards to EDU links, the garbage is easy to obtain. I was successful in buying my way on to many .edu domains because a myriad of student organizations and personal student websites are indexed and available to be edited by students. I paid as little as $10/m to be on club sites. However, the real gold is appearing in published works by academics and links from faculty or administrative run pages or subsites.

Content Links in DOT GOV sites
Obtaining these is significantly harder than any but just a few can give you pertinent authority. Many government sites link to participants in government programs or qualified vendors for government programs. In many cases the site will deal directly with the business that you operate in so it is all the more valuable. Mentions in online published government reports. Providing a product or service for free that helps users use a particular government service is a fantastic way to get a back link.
I saw an excellent example of this just a while ago. Irfanview is a freeware image viewer/editor for Windows. the U.S. Patent and Trademark office suggests it for use in helping to get your Trademark file in the correct format before filing and provides a link on multiple pages from the site.


Find Out More About Blended Links


There are 2 problems with link building yourself as an amateur, or even as a professional SEO (Search Engine Optimizer)

  1. Lots of outsourced services are scams or even if unintentionally so, just simply do not produce results. The trial and error process can be a costly lesson.

  2. It is one of the most time consuming activities in Organic SEO today.

We present solutions to both of the above problems.

  1. We’ve tried a myriad of both domestic and international services and have lost tens of thousands of dollars doing so. Professionals and novices alike can benefit from our capital expenditure in research.

  2. We have an entire staff building links by hand and handling all sourcing activities including paid purchases, reviews and press release writing. That is something a boutique firm cannot do effectively at a reasonable cost and a large firm cannot do well because of the inherent disconnection from the customer associated with larger entities.

A problem that we have identified with link building as an industry or a methodology is that simply grabbing a few high quality links will not be enough for a young site. For an old site your SEO should already be actively cultivating links via “link baiting” or other natural techniques.

You could spend a week negotiating the placement on a relevant site, deep in the content on a PR6, convincing the webmaster that you are providing a product or service that is both non-competitive and yet somehow relevant to their site. Do this as often as possible at an expense of a few hours and perhaps grab one or two of those high quality links a month and you might be in great shape. Unfortunately for young domains authority is much harder to come by. As we have seen in the previous months—in fact for a bit over a year now, sheer link volume is a necessary factor as the TOP 3 engines weigh your relevance. Our blended link programs not only ambitiously pursue high quality, relevant high PR links by hand, they also pursue large quantities, spread over many months, of low PR (yet relevant) links, press links and traditional marketing text links (as ads) to supplement the organic growth with a real media marketing campaign.

The reasons the blended link approach is more effective than any single type of other approach are as follows.

  1. Low PR links and blog mentions build buzz which produces a volume of links but does not reassure the engines that you are an authority in said topic.

  2. High PR, EDU, and GOV sites reassure the engine that you have something quality going on in the site, thus adding credence to the massive up swell in low PR Links.

  3. Text Link Advertisements, Video/Graphic Ads and traditional internet banner marketing produce little relevant indexing (aside from the notion that if you are spending money on advertising something it is likely what you are selling) however they do produce traffic which (a) helps to finance the campaign, and (b) shows Google some sort of relevance in a specific industry if (i) your site is using Google Analytics and (ii) pages/files are named and “SEOed” to take advantage of standards in SEO naming.

About Paul Geller

If you Google “Paul Geller” you are more likely to find results pertaining to my passion for music, grass roots promoting, or guerrilla marketing before you find results relating to my career as an SEO or Search Marketer. I am first and foremost a musician, producer and deejay but have made a living for over a decade in internet technologies. I learned how to program C++ on an IBM 386 in 1992 and then transitioned into Basic and VB as fads persisted. With the popularization of online services like Prodigy® and then AOL™ my fascination with user-level online activities accelerated until Alta Vista™ made headlines with its groundbreaking search technologies. Today my employees and I perform tasks relating to search marketing for no more than a handful of clients a year. You won’t find me posting on message boards or participating in sphinn dialogs although I am an avid reader of many of the most popular search and anti-spam geared websites, mailing lists and forums.

Related Sites

www.nationalmetrics.com National Metrics is the High Volume reporting and educational service specializing in identifying and educating small businesses on Search Marketing.
www.republicintermedia.com The boutique arm of Republic Promotion Co. SEO, SEM, PPC, etc.
www.republicpro.com Our parent company that runs campaigns that require more than mere search marketing. Grass roots organizing and event coordination are staples of our business.
www.stereohype.org Turn-key event sponsorship from the bottom up. Sponsors solicit events instead of events soliciting sponsors.