Entries Tagged 'SEO' ↓

Well I just got back from India (24 hrs+ total travel time incl. layovers) and I’m a bit tired, but I can’t go to bed yet without posting about the Delhi SEO Meet.

The meet was organized by Pankaj Gupta, and it was also “Panks”–and his family (Mom & Dad, wife Shruti, daughter Mannat, and sister Nidhi)–who hosted us (Rich McIver and myself) all week. What wonderful hosts! They invited us into their home, fed us, led us on daily tours throughout Delhi (and Agra), and basically treated us as family The trip was a a great networking opportunity and vacation rolled into one, and I can’t wait for next year’s meet.

All photos are on Flickr, here are some highlights:

• After the sessions were over, the beer started flowing, the band started playing, so of course Rich started singing, and then we all started dancing
• The Taj Mahal
• Gandhi’s resting place
• Rich and the snake charmer
• A contingent of the DP SEO gang, at Panks’ house (before moving to the farmhouse)
• Here they are in the pool at the farmhouse
• Here are our hosts, Nidhi, Pankaj, and Shruti (need I tell you another plus of visiting India is meeting so many beautiful women )
• We finally met Sagar Satapathy (our top manager in India, who we’d never seen face to face)
• We also met some of our writers (Mini pictured here, we forgot to get a pic with Priya.)

It’s so much fun to put a face to people you’ve known online for years! Thanks to everyone who attended the Delhi SEO Meet, and to Pankaj and the other organizers for making it happen–and most of all to the Guptas for hosting us.

I usually consider “What I’ve been doing” posts to be boring and egotistical, sorry you’re getting one anyway!

Conferences

• Last week my company had our annual board meeting–on a Hunter 305 sailboat. The corporate strategy for ‘07 was nailed down, and we also got certified for coastal cruising by the ASA. Score.
• March 31st 2007 is the Delhi SEO Meet. I’ll be in attendance with my partners-in-crime Brian Thibault of Convert Up and Rich McIver of Biz Niche Ltd. We’re going to stay the week and see the Taj Mahal (thanks to Pankaj for playing host and tour guide!) If anyone lives near that part of the world or just wants to see India I highly recommend attending, it is going to be a fantastic opportunity to network with Indian web service providers and many familiar faces from DigitalPoint.
• 2nd week of April is Search Engine Strategies in NYC. I’ll be speaking with several cool folks on the social media panel, stop by after and say hi!

Domaining

• As you may or may not know, many smart and aggressive folks from the SEO side of things are seeing the huge potential of domaining (and its synergy with SEO and branding). I myself am beginning to dabble a bit, and I found How to: Get Started As a Domainer @ Aviva Directory to be a good resource for SEOs/n00bs/intermediates. It goes in-depth into several buying, financing and monetization strategies and also has a helpful toolset of links at the end.
• I also just got my first issue of Domainer’s Magazine in the mail (for free!), and was pleasantly surprised with the quality. In my opinion domainers are the rock stars of Internet marketing, and again let me reiterate I think SEOs should be looking into domaining if they want to maximize their ROI on future projects… a premium domain + SEO/linkbaiting skills is a case where 1 + 1 = 3.

Special Surprise

• I lied, there is no special surprise, this is just a lesson to remind you that it is an accessibility and marketing imperative that your blog post deliver what is promised by the title (otherwise the reader gets disappointed and your brand is adversely affected). So don’t call something ‘The ultimate guide’ unless it really is ultimate, and don’t call something the cold war if it’s just a friendly bet, not Russia vs. the USA in an arms race.

Unfortunately, the Google Sandbox now has two levels. Yes, you still need a lot of trust to get your pages ranking. But before you start worrying about that, you need to worry about getting your pages indexed in the first place.

Because, of course, you’re not really indexed if most of your pages have gone supplemental!

What happened? Well apparently the Google Indexer got tired of her nickname “Loose Louise”, she’s born again and now very choosy thankyouverymuch about who she lets enter. Rumor has it she’s only interested in trusted sites that are after a whitehat, long term commitment.

“What exactly is that supplemental index again?”

I won’t parrot the quasi-official Google answer here. (In fact, I can promise that I will never give you the “official Google answer” on Tropical SEO.) Take your pick:

• The Google Supplemental index is the Siberian work camp for web pages.
• The Google Supplemental index is to the normal index, as Scoreboard Media is to Tropical SEO.
• The Google Supplemental index is where they put web pages with little trust.
• The Google Supplemental index is where they put web pages that aren’t going to rank for anything important.

Got it? Cool.

Now, assuming your site is supplemental, here are five tips to get it out of Supplemental Hell.

1. Give each page a unique title. This is so basic it kills me but sometimes people still aren’t doing it. There is absolutely no reason not to do this, as a unique title also helps SEO-wise, it helps accessibility-wise, gets higher clickthroughs in the SERPs, etc.

2. Give each page a unique META DESCRIPTION. Remember when we all thought META tags were dead? Well, Google’s gotten funny about that. Let’s not waste time wondering why. Just give every page a unique META DESCRIPTION, even if it just matches the title tag.

3. Make sure each page has a good amount of unique content. This problem can rear its ugly head in a few different ways. Most commonly, a particular piece of content is being served at multiple URLs. This is usually a CMS or shopping cart issue, and the fix will be unique to whatever system you use. Also pretty common is the existence of very thin pages (a lot of large, hollow/empty web directories have this problem). My rule of thumb (and it’s not authoritative, just what I go by), is that a page should have at least 100 words of unique content at a minimum.

4. Get some more trusted links. Link building is all about trust these days. A few links from older, already-ranking domains will do wonders towards convincing Google a newer site deserves to be trusted. I also like to get a few higher-PageRank links in there (sitewide? even better). Yes, I know that tip is going to bring out the haters (insert “PageRank is dead!” comment here). But it appears that “overall link weight” seems to matter again in Google, if not in terms of rankings, at least in terms of indexing.

5. Get some links to internal pages. This is all about convincing Google your site doesn’t have “hollow shell syndrome”–when a site has, say, 20 pages, and a few dozen backlinks, but 100% of those backlinks are pointing to the homepage. Most often, the homepage of the site is in the normal index but all of the internal pages have gone supplemental. I usually go “brute force” at one internal page and get 3 or 4 links to it (giving this one internal page so much link weight that Google pretty much has to index it); normally, GoogleBot revisits the entire site and re-crawls and indexes the other internal pages, too (up to a point: if the site has hundreds or thousands of pages, you’ll need to rinse+repeat this a few times).

That about covers it. Usually the bottleneck & hardest part is building the trusted links: for help with that, see my link baiting guide.

Greg Boser has a very good point in this post: why is it that every time Diggers–or social media marketers–discuss digg-spamming, they always point to the “stumbling, stupid SEO jabroni”?

If someone is spamming social media, they’re a stumbling, stupid SMM jabroni. Stop throwing all the trash into SEO’s side of town, its getting old!

But something else caught my eye with Greg’s post. He seems to have no respect for what some good solid digging can do for your organic effort!

Digg (on behalf of a client) that rarely produces anything more that a short-term flood of traffic, and almost never has any direct impact in terms of helping a site rank for prominent phrases that people are actually typing into the little white box.

Six months ago I would have wholeheartedly agreed with this statement.

That was before I took a low-value-add, high-profit-margin, hopelessly-thin affiliate site, and digg-baited the piss out of it. 12 weeks and 6 Digg homepages later, I was looking at 6 (unimportant) traffic spikes–but hundreds of trusted links. Links from authoritative domains like MSNBC.com and Lifehacker.com and Oreilly.com. Links I would have drooled over back in the days when I was a pure organic SEO guy and laughed at “silly social media crap-traffic builders”.

Mr. Boser, I can assure you that these short term floods of traffic had a very direct impact in terms of helping my site rank for prominent phrases that people are actually typing into a little white box.

Which brings me to two self-evident truths:

1. Digg is a huge weapon for organic SEO. You may not like Digg, you may not want to use Digg, you may suck at using Digg. But the bottom line is, if you’re not using Digg (and the like), you’re giving up your cheapest and best link building weapon… and a guy like me is going to outTrustRank (and outrank) you sometime in 2007, working on a tenth of your organic SEO budget.
2. SEOs and SMMs may not like it, but their job descriptions are going to be hopelessy intertwined from here forward. Smart SEOs will be using social media marketing in their link and trust building efforts, and SMM’s–especially the bad ones–will continue to be identified with SEOs (and in all reality, I’ve never met an SMM who wasn’t related to SEO somehow; though the best ones are careful to hide the fact).

But is this really even news? SEO has long since ceased being “just SEO”, we added usability, conversion optimization, business strategy, and even “marketing” to our job description long ago; just put social media marketing to the list.

Let me conclude by saying, if you’re entering the organic affiliate wars where I play, you’d better bring your Digg nukes

Is anyone else sick of link baiting yet? I sure am. It’s dominating talk on all the SEO forums and conferences; it’s gumming up the works of all of my favorite social bookmarking sites; and it’s forcing me get off of my lazy rear and make good content.

Damn that link baiting.

Of course, it’s also the most cost- and time-efficient way of building relevant, trusted, editorially-given backlinks; it’s the critical success factor in getting ranked in Google for competitive keywords; and, it’s making smart SEOs a veritable boatload of money.

Damn that link baiting.

OK, go back to the “get off of my lazy rear and make good content” part: isn’t that what we’ve all been doing all along? Erm, well, sort of. Content is still king. But if you venture into my little world, you’ll find that packaging is queen, promotion is the crown prince and a baity title is the Sword of Excalibur.

Even that thought is nothing new—guys like Rand Fishkin have been giving us link baiting tips for quite some time now. Many of the other link baiting articles out there are quite good. However, many of them seem to be lacking in detail or comprehensiveness. The most common problem is that SEOs will tackle how to write link bait, without delving into precisely how it should be promoted. Well, I’ve been called the master baiter, and in this article, I’m going to give away my entire link baiting game plan—NO SECRETS LEFT UNTOLD. Beginning with this little tidbit…

Quit Whining

The most common thing I hear about link baiting is that it’s hard. “How the heck can I link bait on my industrial water pump site?”

Stop. Complaining. Start. Thinking. Anything can be link baited. Sell a special kind of Dacron pillow? Maybe you need to write “101 Secrets to Sleeping Revealed.” Or maybe your site is a thin affiliate page that simply generates mortgage leads? How about “How to: Flip Houses in a Hot Real Estate Market.”

The point is that your topic has a link bait piece (or a dozen of them) waiting to be written. Granted, some topics will require a bit more creativity in coming up with baity content. That’s fine. In fact, let’s skip the content for now, because…

It’s All in the Title

The single most important aspect of a link bait piece is its title. On social bookmarking sites such as Delicious and Digg, the title is pretty much all people see before they decide to vote or bookmark. In a 1000-word article with a 10-word title, the 10 words in the title are probably more important than the next 1000.

Which title do you think would get more diggs? “Some ideas about linking” or “55 Surefire Link Baiting Tips”?

Obviously the latter title would have a much better chance of success, even though both titles could describe the exact same article. The 10 or 15 minutes that you spend on titling can make all the difference in the world. So when beginning a link bait piece, clear your mind and focus on title ideas. I like to brainstorm three or four different titles, then have a friend help me pick the best one, and then, right before posting, give it a final tweak (if necessary) for maximum effect.

Now, the bad news is coming up with baity titles doesn’t come naturally to many people (including me). The good news is we have a cheat sheet! I load up Copyblogger’s 10 Sure-Fire Headline Formulas That Work every time I begin a new link bait piece.

Just as an exercise, pick a site that you think would be impossible to link bait, then put it through Copyblogger’s cheat sheet.

Copyblogger’s title cheat sheet:

1. Who Else Wants [blank]?
2. The Secret of [blank]
3. Here is a Method That is Helping [blank] to [blank]
4. Little Known Ways to [blank]
5. Get Rid of [problem] Once and For All
6. Here’s a Quick Way to [solve a problem]
7. Now You Can Have [something desirable] [great circumstance]
8. [Do something] like [world-class example]
9. Have a [or] Build a [blank] You Can Be Proud Of
10. What Everybody Ought to Know About [blank]

Want an example? Let’s run through the cheat sheet Andy Hagans style:

1. Who Else Wants Build Links and Rank High in Google?
2. The Secret of Link Baiting (It’s all in the title!)
3. Here is a Method That is Helping Webmasters to Link Bait Better
4. Little Known Ways to Link Bait Like an SEO Pro
5. Get Rid of Your Backlink Problem Once and For All
6. Here’s a Quick Way to Rank Highly in Google by Link Baiting
7. Now You Can Have that #1 Rank in Google
8. Learn to Link Bait like Andy Hagans
9. Build a Backlink Structure You Can Be Proud Of
10. What Everybody Ought to Know About Link Baiting

Now, notice that I didn’t follow the cheat sheet exactly; feel free to tweak. It doesn’t need to be a rigid structure—just use it as a springboard for ideas. Next on our plate…

The Ol’ “Quality Content”

Seeing as “content is king”, shouldn’t we have tackled this first?

Well, content is only crowned as king when it has focus. Focus comes from the title. In the title, you are making a promise to the reader: here’s what you’re going to read/learn/achieve in this article. All your content should be devoted 100% to meeting (or exceeding) this promise. Anything else—no matter how “valuable”—is fluff and should be cut out. Readers do want in-depth resources and advice, but they want it in a concise, focused serving.

A hook can help you keep this content focused and tight, and to fulfill the promise you made in the title. The hook has the potential to be the burning sensation that makes the article “write itself”. You sit down with a single purpose in mind, and this dictates how you write and package the content. What follows are the most common types of hooks (as expanded upon Nick Wilson’s list in The Art of Linkbaiting).

• News Hook. The news hook is when you are the first to scoop a story; everyone who carries the story will then (theoretically) link to you as the original source. To get a scoop you don’t need to have insider information (though that doesn’t hurt); you can just be the first site to publicly predict something or to reach a controversial conclusion. Bonus points if your scoop is “true”—too many later-proven-to-be-false scoops will make other bloggers and writers hesitant to reference you again.
• Resource Hook. The resource hook occurs when you make an extremely helpful piece of content that everyone will naturally want to bookmark (like this one!). This may be my favorite hook, because as opposed to the news hook, it encourages people to link to and bookmark it for a long period of time. Content that sits there and naturally obtains trusted, relevant backlinks passively? Isn’t that the original white hat SEO wet dream?
• Contrary Hook. The contrary hook is when you refute a common myth in your niche. Most little areas of the blogosphere hold certain beliefs to be self-evident; all SEOs know that META tags are dead; all Web2.0 designers know that writing validated code is the right thing to do. Calling these people wrong will usually incite them into talking about you, and linking to you.
• Humor Hook. People love to laugh, especially at people in their industry or niche. And most niches have so little levity that almost anything will get you a chuckle and a link. You can even directly cite influential people, and if done in a gentle way, they’ll generally be flattered into linking to it.
• Tool Hook. A good link bait tool has one of two characteristics: 1) It is actually useful; or 2) It feeds bloggers’ egos. (Very few examples can do both.) Firefox plugins, free design templates and financial calculators are all examples of tools that have received thousands of valuable backlinks. None of them are too hard for a decent programmer to create.
• Award Hook. No official awards in your tiny niche? Why not host them yourself? You can either have a more legitimate award with significant organization and actual prize money like the Bloggies, or you can basically nominate everyone in your niche and hope that half link back to you out of enthusiasm for the community, as with the Search Awards. Both tactics work well. The reason is simply that people like positive recognition and they LOVE rankings. Awards get linked to because they help to legitimatize other people—it helps the winners when they promote you. Ah, human nature…
• Giveaway Hook. Anyone who has been to an SEO conference recently (or any other conference for that matter) is stocked for life on pens, highlighters, key rings, and loads of over freebie junk. Companies fight to give trinkets away at certain events because, when directed towards the right audience, giveaways are a great way to drive sales and get a return far better than any ordinary advertising. The Internet is no different. Text Link Ads gets a lot of love around the blogosphere because they offer a free coupon for new clients. Aaron Wall seems to give away an AdWords coupon every other week—how else can you get such branding, traffic and links with a $50 piece of paper?
• Research/Statistic Hook. Sometimes just compiled numbers, or any kind of scientific survey, will get a lot of link love, especially in an under-studied area. And while a scientifically-conducted study with valid methodology will often get better links, the (sad?) truth is that almost anything can pass as “research” on the Internet.

Whew. With all the hooks available to you (Todd Malicoat’s listed even more of them here), and your handy-dandy title cheat sheet, you have no excuse now! Go forth and create content, and the InterWebs will reward you… or will it?

…No… it won’t. Not without sick skillz in the department of…

Packaging & Formatting

“My content may not look like much, but it has a great personality!”

You shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, but that doesn’t stop people from doing it. A good link bait piece should receive tens of thousands of unique visitors, but only a small percentage of those will bookmark or link to your site. That doesn’t mean you should stand idly by as thousands of visitors pass through your content without taking an action; what it does mean is that you need to pay attention to “small things” like formatting, structure and grammar. A single grammatical error in the first couple of sentences, or a text color which is hard to read against the page background, is generally enough to kill a link bait by itself. So before any big link bait ask a friend to check things over for readability and errors.

• Think scan-able, not readable. Most people scan content on the Web—they don’t read it like you’d read a book. If you make your content scan-able, it’s going to be more digestible—and bookmark-able—and linkable. This means liberal use of lists, headings, sub-headings, graphs, and graphics.
• Take down your ads. A link bait piece is not about making $500 extra in AdSense. It’s about gaining RSS and newsletter subscribers, links and good branding. But you’re not going to be maximizing these benefits if you keep up the annoying banner ad up top, the left column AdSense block, and the large Chitika unit floating in the content. Everyone wants to link to clean, juicy information; no one wants to link to your ads. So when you’re launching your link bait, take down all your ads on the landing page for the “launch period” (usually 24-48 hours). You’ll often pick up the vast majority of the links and traffic within that time, so if you want to spam the page up after that (for instance, when the link bait piece begins to rank in Google for some high traffic keywords), by all means go ahead. But until that point, if you’re keeping up spammy ads you are normally trading thousands of dollars worth of one-way links for a few hundred dollars in quick AdSense cash.
• A picture is worth a thousand words. People love pretty pictures, as any textbook will show. So take the time to add some good (relevant) ones to your link bait piece. Quick Warning: A lot of newbie link baiters either don’t think about attributing their pictures correctly, or just don’t care. Bad move. Besides being in bad taste, posting images without a proper license is illegal. In my opinion, the easiest thing to do is just go to iStockPhoto and buy a few for $1—problem solved in record time.

“Now, about that whole ‘promotion’ thing…”

It is a sad fact of life that many valuable, baity Web pages fail to ever go viral and attain a significant number of backlinks. Please, a moment of silence for these coulda-been’s and never-were’s.

Done? Cool. Let’s examine the front page of Digg. We must ask ourselves, how many of these stories arrived here by “natural” forces? (”Natural” defined as altruistic members submitting deserving links with which they have no affiliation.) Some of these stories “deserve” to be here. Others are part of power users’ personal agendas or projects. And still others are just average content that’s been promoted well.

The point is if you’re waiting on some random person to first (a) find your content, and then (b) submit it to bookmarking sites out of the goodness of his/her own heart, you’ll likely be waiting a long time. Sometimes you have to toot your own horn. Just toot it in a smart way. The following five services are my favorite places to “toot”:

• Digg
  The “bigg boy”, the motherload, the big kahuna, and so on. Digg has a mostly techie audience, so anything tech, computer, software, and blogger related will do well here. But the scope of Digg has become so broad that’s it’s worth submitting almost anything that’s valuable or interesting. Here’s a few tips that will greatly increase your story’s chance for success:
  • Use power words in the title and description. “In-depth”, “how to”, “comprehensive”, “Digg”, “HILARIOUS”, “Nintendo”… some words just scream, “Digg me! Digg me!” to the Digg user base.
  • Submit the story from a power account. If a person regularly gets stories on the homepage of Digg, other users will “befriend” him/her, and as a result, will be more likely to vote for his/her future stories. If you don’t have access to a power account, at least try to build some trust in your username and profile by regularly submitting stuff that’s not from your own site, commenting, and digging others’ stories.
  • Ask a few friends for a “bump”. I’m not recommending you set up 100 dummy accounts through proxies, and I’m not recommending you ask the same 20 guys to vote for your stories time and time again (that’s called a “pattern”, and, unsurprisingly, it’s detectable). Do however ask three or four people on your IM list to give the story a bump—stories that start off with a few votes tend to gain momentum.
• Delicious
  Delicious is the only bookmarking site that can rival Digg in terms of resulting backlinks. Because the Delicious interface is not very user-friendly, there doesn’t seem to be very many casual web readers using Delicious, so it does send less direct traffic than the other top social bookmarking sites. Many users here however are webmasters and bloggers, so you can get a ton of links by rising to the top of Delicious/Popular. It only takes 10 bookmarks in a certain period of time to get on Delicious/Popular, so, frankly, it’s easy to game.
• Netscape
  If Delicious sends links but not much traffic, Netscape is the opposite. It’s basically geared towards “the mainstream” (whatever that is). Basically if Joe Six-Pack and Jane Soccer Mom like your link bait piece, it will do well on Netscape. Because Netscape has fewer members than Digg, getting 12-15 votes in a short time can get you to the bottom of the first page. If you’re planning on trying to game the system, however, you should beware: the Netscape algorithm is sophisticated enough to recognize the worst manipulators. The site administrators are also rather trigger happy, with a “ban first, ask questions later” philosophy. So if you and some friends are pumping your own link bait, make sure to spread the voting around to other Netscape articles to keep your profile in good standing.
• StumbleUpon
  StumbleUpon is probably the most useful bookmarking site you’ve never heard of. The program is growing quickly but still doesn’t have the name recognition of Digg or Delicious. The StumbleUpon “algorithm” doesn’t seem to get gamed much, so getting your friends to “thumbs-up” an article won’t likely get it banned, though as the site grows in popularity gaming the site may become harder. The nice aspect of StumbleUpon traffic is that it continues over time. (The other sites I refer to generally work in 24-hour cycles.) A quality piece of link bait can receive StumbleUpon traffic in near perpetuity.
• Reddit
  Reddit traffic is small but growing. (This is definitely the least important of the five services we’re exploring.) Still, the audience is quite different than that of the other sites (it seems to be more politically-oriented, for one), so it’s worth submitting here just to see what happens.

Now, a note on all of the above sites—many users of one site will have an account at another of them. From a promotional aspect, this means the traffic from being on the Digg homepage can help you move up Delicious/Popular. You can help amplify this effect by submitting the content to all of the sites at the same time (otherwise it may “expire” on Delicious/Popular before it makes the Digg homepage). You may also want to add chicklets or buttons—they look a tad cheesy, but the bottom line is that you will get more votes if you include a “delicious this” text link at the bottom of a post, and a Digg button near the top of the article.

Now what?

Well, these are the basics. Are there tactics and tricks I’ve left out? A few—but the other minutiae are simply not important unless you’re link baiting on a regular basis. (Some of the finer points change anyway, as the systems evolve both organically and from the top-down.) At this point, you just have to go do it. Since I’ve given you my gameplan (one that has been proven successful by hundreds of successful baits), you have no reason not to be on the front page of Digg and Delicious by 5pm tomorrow. But just in case you’re still interested in handing this over to professionals, my link baiting service is without a doubt the best on the market.

Happy baiting!

In case you haven’t been following the melodrama, Neil “Princess” Patel and I made a little bet.

To win, I needed to rank this post for his name in the top three by Jan. 15.

Well anyway it’s the 11th hour, I had pretty much given up, and was even preparing to write a blog post titled “Neil Patel Is a Better SEO Than Andy Hagans”. Then I checked McDar this morning, and got a big old smile on my face!

Pretty princess Pretty princess Pretty princess and I win!!

For my prize, Princess is going to analyze one of my affiliate sites–my biggest earner–and do a thorough marketing, usability and conversion analysis with actionable tips.

Thanks for being a good sport, Princess I look forward to making a bunch more money based on the site improvements you suggest, but more importantly, the nickname is beginning to stick.

Greg’s running a trust meme, aren’t we tired of memes yet? Oh well I got trusted so here it is…

Greg Niland
trusts
Rae Hoffman
trusts
Michael Gray
trusts
Todd Malicoat
trusts
Andy Hagans
trusts
Princess …no wait Princess is being a little sh** and won’t play along… so instead, he trusts
Cameron Olthuis
trusts
?????

Getting high quality editorial links is currently the single most important factor in getting a site to rank.

Given that, you would probably assume that link building (and link baiting) services would be a very mature component of the SEO services industry. You would probably assume that most of the big name SEO firms would have a robust link baiting offering. And you’d be wrong.

Big name SEO firms–if they do any linking at all!–most often get a client in a few directories, rent a few links, and call it quits on the linking front (while continuing to charge a monthly maintenance fee for ‘on-site optimization’). Meanwhile most independent SEO consultants–and even link building consultants–hawk their ‘link building recommendations‘ and ‘strategy sessions‘, which, as you could guess from their names, are heavy on ideas and light on the actual links.

I’m not writing this post to blast on those firms and consultants who don’t offer a robust linking service. When it comes to building lower quality links, the job is extremely tedious; of course a good SEO consultant isn’t going to spend their time on such a task. And when it comes to building higher quality (trusted editorial) links, even the largest SEO firm is rarely going to have the resources needed to do this efficiently (such needed resources include industry connections, power accounts at social bookmarking sites, research assistants, skilled link bait writers, and, above all, quality control).

So, without further adieu, (screw strategy, recommendations, ideas and reports!) here is my recommended list of firms that can actually build high quality links to your site (in exchange for your hard-earned money).

• Neil Patel’s buzz/viral marketing service (price not listed)
• Andy Hagans’ link baiting service ($5,995 USD)
• Todd Malicoat’s link baiting service ($6,000 USD)
• Michael Gray’s linkbaiting & SMO service ($4,995 USD and up)
• I would like to recommend SEOmoz but you have about a 1 in 1,000 chance of getting in as a client.

Obviously the prices aren’t cheap, but on the other hand TrustRank is the new PageRank except it’s even more valuable, and link baiting is generally the only way you’re going to get trust.

Now as I said I do get fed up with all the ’strategy’ services, but if you do have good writers on staff and just need 5 star ideas and action plans, the following are very good options:

• Aaron Wall’s consulting service ($500 USD for one hour)
• Todd Malicoat’s consulting service ($500 for one hour)

If I have missed any good link baiting services please let me know.

In my experience the natural motivation to preserve wealth and income is even more powerful than that to increase it. For us SEOs, this means making our sites, rankings, traffic and revenue defensible.

The following quiz is a little cheat sheet to let you know how defensible your site is. (For some, but not all of you, ‘defensible’ is nearly a synonym for ‘Google-proof’.)

1. Does your site rank in more than one search engine? As Google’s share creeps towards 100%, this question becomes less and less realistic… still, there’s a big difference between 6% of organic referrals coming from Y!/MSN, and 36%.
2. Do you get type-in traffic? Whether type-ins occur because of branding and repeat users, or because your domain is keyword.com, is irrelevant. When people navigate directly to your site, no search engine penalty in the world can hurt you!
3. Does your site have a significant number of subscribers? Subscribers can be be to your RSS feed or email newsletter or anything really–the point is, you have repeat visitors and don’t depend entirely on transient traffic.
4. Is your revenue diversified? If a single CPC ad provider (ahem), or even a single merchant, provides a majority of your site’s revenue, then they certainly have you by the balls. They could cut your payout in half tomorrow without much of an explanation, or they could boot you without appeal or recompense.
5. Do you get bookmarked? If you’re booked on Delicious or on people’s browsers, you can count on some repeat visitors and possibly future links.
6. Does your site have citations and links that send you traffic? Maybe SugarRae’s Hall-of-fame post makes sense now It bears repeating: When people navigate directly to your site, no search engine penalty in the world can hurt you!
7. Does your site have some sort of remarkable value? This question is not asking: is your content “unique”? More like, if your site ceased to exist, would the Web as a whole lose something valuable? Would people’s lives be inconvenienced? If the answer is YES, your site is likely to get future citations, links and bookmarks–and further, search engines will have to think longer and harder before banning you or penalizing you, since not ranking your site might make their results less useful.
8. Does ‘arbitrage’–CPC, email blasting, affiliates–make up a minority of your promotional efforts? As Brian Provost points out, marketing methods such as these are often unsustainable over time due to increased competition, structural changes, commodization and margin erosion.
9. Do you have a strong network in your niche? Maintaining a friendly relationship with bloggers, stakeholders, and even competitors can be the key to standing back up when you get knocked down. Think about it this way–is a merchant likely to screw you out of money if you can get their bad behavior blogged about by industry leaders?
10. Are you thinking about/working on defensibility? There are many ways to make a site more defensible that I haven’t listed. If you are actively working on it (regardless of what you call it), you deserve a bonus point. Even thinking about defensibility–if you can apply some of the principles in the future–is going to go along way in protecting your future wealth (and pride).

Rate Your Site’s Defensibility
Well this wouldn’t be a hokey quiz if you didn’t rate yourself at the end! Count how many times you said ‘yes’ to the above questions.

• 1-3 yes’s: You’re fucked. Probably better and easier to start a new Web site that has a more defensible idea behind it than to fix the old site. In the meantime the old site can sit as an (indefensible) passive revenue stream. (It may also be a good candidate to unload at Sitepoint.)
• 4-6 yes’s: Your site is like most quality Web sites–you have some defensible traits, but still a Google penalty and Adsense booting (or equivalent) would likely cut your earnings by a very high percentage. Even most quality Web sites are fairly vulnerable.
• 7-10 yes’s: Congratulations, you don’t just have a Web site, you have a real, saleable business.

I obviously don’t want another SEO vs. CPC discussion here, but Brian Provost is on to something with defensible traffic.

If you ever have to go raise money from investors, one of the first questions they will ask you is going to be about the defensibility of your revenue/brand/traffic/etc. In the Lead Generation world, companies like Adteractive and Quinstreet generate a lot of leads from arbitraging search, email, and tapping into affiliates. But none of that is really defensible.

If you want to endure in the Widget Market, you have to treat it like war. You can’t arbitrage battle for very long… In the history of warfare, the only way the winner has ever held that claim is by having boots on the ground…

That’s defensible. I don’t care how blackhat or whitehat you are in your methods to build that asset, just make sure it’s defensible. Taking that thought up another notch, if your site is truly defensible, you could exist if search engines went out of business tomorrow.

I suppose the defensible holy grail is a 1996 domain with plenty of trusted backlinks and traffic from all 3 SE’s plus plenty of traffic from links and bookmarks… and an even holier grail would be all that plus type-in traffic and complimentary assets such as a newsletter list.

I won’t deny that every once in a while I think to myself what if Google nuked all (or most) of my sites? (And this isn’t just my tin-foilness–this recently happened to a friend who is much smarter AND more careful than me.) Of course with my CPC campaigns, it’s not really a ‘what if’, but a when ‘quality score improvements’ will crowd out my ROI.

So my resolution for ‘07 (besides working a lot less and earning a lot more) is to build defensibility into my sites–and only touch new projects that are highly defensible. First steps: disown Adsense completely, and hunt for some more juicy type-in domains…