Like many webmasters affected by the Google Penguin update, Trent Harbour of Berkeyshop.com needed to find out why his site had dropped positions in the Google organic results and how he could reverse that. So he reached out to Search Engine Watch for some answers. What follows is a cautionary tale of missteps towards the complex problem of ranking on search engines and an examination into why small businesses are completely at a loss as to what constitutes “ethical” SEO.

Before he was worried about Google and its algorithms, Harbour was a portfolio manager and investor. However, during the 2008 financial crisis he “hit rock bottom” and an illness forced him to give up his job of 10 years. Clean drinking water was pivotal in managing his condition and so he decided to become a distributor of water filters in October 2010. To date, he said he’s invested $20K in the business and turnovers peaked at $600/day consistently for four weeks before Google’s Penguin update went into effect. Harbour told me his revenues were reduced overnight to “next to nil, since I was penalized” and unique visitors to the site are down by 55%.

What emerged from phone conversations with Harbour was that he really could not distinguish between good and bad links and did not have a fundamental understanding of what really constituted ‘good content’. His grasp of the key principles behind the Google algorithm relied heavily on received wisdom from webmaster forums. From my perspective, the maxims he followed for SEO were taken completely out of context from Google’s actual goals. Furthermore, from his perspective the competitive landscape seemed to endorse the idea of actively manipulating search engines, whilst Google’s algorithm actually seemed to reward him – albeit temporarily – for engaging in what were clearly webspam strategies that were against Google’s guidelines.

Another challenge: he did not understand the difference between the Panda and Penguin update. He had received but never actually noticed the warning letter dated April 11, 2012 in webmaster tools because he hardly ever logged in. This letter detailed to Harbour that ‘unnatural links’ pointing to his site had been detected and that he should proceed to remove them, but gave little further insight into what that meant to Google and what actions he could take to rectify the issue.

The warning letter about ‘unnatural links’ combined with the algorithm update announced on April 24 and deployed on May 1, 2012, made Harbour feel like he had been penalized by Google. In those early days of the update it was difficult to explain what had really happened so I asked him to share more details with me so that I could conduct a deeper analysis of his site. Harbour kindly gave me access to his analytics account and lists of the bad links created.

WWW.WhatWentWrong.com?

It’s quite simple – Harbour bought article spinning services from a company in China. Article spinning, a form of webspam, violates Google’s guidelines.

Article spinning is a technique designed to fool Googlebot into thinking that hundreds of pages are linking to a particular website – however every page published is machine written junk or pure gibberish. Matt Cutts posted his own example of “spun content” on the Official Google blog in the announcement of the algorithm update later dubbed “Penguin.”

In a nutshell, the two months that he had commissioned article spinning, March and April 2012, just happened to be the exact same time that Matt Cutt’s webspam team at Google resolved to develop an algorithm update that specifically targeted spun content. Thus when the potency of those sites with spun content were rendered useless, Harbour’s site was demoted in the rankings.

Wrongly, due to the April 11 warning message regarding ‘unnatural links’, Harbour felt as if he had been penalized by Google and sought a reconsideration request from Google. However, despite Google providing a ‘feedback form’ regarding the Penguin update, this form was not a means by which any webmaster could have their website “reconsidered” because, unlike the Panda update that levied a manual penalty, Penguin was an algorithmic update which meant sites would simply be affected by changes in the algorithm for better or worse. Although this was not clear at the time, Google later said that reconsideration was not possible for the Penguin update.

Nonetheless Harbour took the blow to his Google rankings personally and wanted to appeal Google’s apparent ‘decision’. In further conversation with me, Harbour contends that he bought those services because ‘everybody is doing it’; he pointed to some examples from competitors that looked shady. Nonetheless, as far as I could tell, whilst the content they were putting up was not of a particularly high quality either, none of them had engaged in article spinning. No matter how much spam his competitor’s may have been investing in, Harbour’s website did the wrong thing at the wrong time.

However, in defense of Harbour, arguably Google rewarded him temporarily for engaging in webspam. During March and April of 2012 search traffic for his target term site shot up the rankings and he was making $610 in daily sales. It’s a testament to how poor Google’s spam detection algorithms actually are that prior tactics were even rewarded. It also shows how Google’s webmaster policies are in conflict with Google’s technology. To many, in a very real way, what Google ‘says’ and what Google ‘does’ are two completely different things. Take a look at the stats below and you can see that search traffic increased within a month (i.e. April 2012) of implementing the webspam strategy.

But to some degree Google’s problem is every webmaster’s problem. A poor understanding of the algorithm is fostering even poorer marketing strategies. Yet these strategies continue to force businesses to invest in spam as a kind of mimetic, competitive practice.

What’s more, newcomers don’t always fully understand Google’s guidelines. So they try to copy winning techniques of long established competitors. A deeper investigation into Harbour’s website shows that really he has been running a risk that his site would be deemed spam by the search engines for over a year.

Forcing Anchor Text, Rather than Creating a Better User Experience for the Web

Among webmaster and SEO forums, it is well known that links with the right words (namely,anchor text) pointing to your website increase the likelihood of your site ranking for the same term. It’s also well known that as the volume of those links with the same term increases, so will your rankings. Put simply, anchor text matches from other domains seems to be a ranking factor on Google and other search engines.

Specifically Google examines all sites’ anchor text to use as a signal to determine the ‘substance’ of the content on the destination page (i.e. the linked page, not the page that links). Anchor text is implicitly tied into the user experience of a website and the site architecture, which Google subsequently extrapolates the relevance of your site to the search query. Google intends anchor text to be used as easy to understand signposts to content to both the user and the search engines. Google does not intend webmasters to point as much anchor text to their site simply for the purposes of ranking.

Therefore the measure of whether you are creating spam or not should always be focused on whether a human user can predict what information they will find on the page they land simply by reading the link.

The Anchor Text Test

A good user experience is one in which the link is placed on anchor text phrases that naturally prompts the reader to investigate other resources that will help clarify any questions raised. Equally, if the logical conclusion is to visit the product page of the product discussed (so that the reader can buy it), that is a fair use too.

In that sense, anchor text should be chosen based on the predictive signals it can pass to the reader. As anchor text has the inherent quality of being both a word and a button you need to think about the linked text as a signpost and choose the placement of the linked text as a means of signalling that you are pointing to something else outside of the text.

In the case of creating links between web documents, if you find your writing does not have an immediately obvious place to include that link, then you should consider rewording your copy to make it more obvious that you are referring to another page and where you can find that page.

By that reckoning it should be easier to understand that a bad user experience is simply a poorly positioned signpost. In the case of links, a bad user experience would be one in which the anchor text does not sit comfortably within the overall rationale of the text or overall theme of the page it is on.

A bad user experience would be one in which the use of links is alarming to the point of being haphazard. Another bad user experience would be one in which it is not become obvious as to why the linked document is relevant to the reader. Such links will naturally occur to the reader as being suspiciously placed because they have a suspicious context.

As a rule of thumb, anchor text links should not be randomly peppered all over the page at unless that anchor text is a persistent design feature of a site – such as site navigation (in which case it would not be random anyway).

If a human user cannot explain what a page is about, or why it is linking to another page with those specific words then it is most likely spam.

Linking Strategies That Constitute Spam

In the conversation with Harbour, it appears that he could not clearly differentiate between a paid link and an organic link. In fact, the only way he recognized the difference was that he knew what links he had paid for and what he had not.

However, the distinction became more complicated when he tried to make the ethical argument that his site had been unfairly targeted by Google. The reason being that in his definition of organic link building was that paid links were unethical, unpaid links were ethical. Yet, a deeper analysis shows that his organic link building strategies would have been seen as unethical in most online communities – and eventually to Google.

In fact, what emerges is that his idea of an organic link was one in which he could not control the anchor text, therefore could not generate results and thus the prevailing common sense made the unethical option seem like the only option.

The Cesspool of Links

In analyzing Harbour’s own link building strategies I was reminded of the time Eric Schmidt famously called the internet “a cesspool”.

For the sake of clarity, what follows a list of the types of links that Harbour tried to create. The first set (1-3) are all the paid links, which are clearly spam – but I’ve included them as an anatomical guide to webspam. In every instance of the paid link is an example of deliberately exploiting the anchor text ranking signal.

The second set (4-6) are links Harbour believed he had achieved ‘organically’ and for that matter, ethically. What becomes clear is that he was not making strategic marketing decisions to guide his organic link building activities – he was merely doggedly following the rule that any link won (that hadn’t been paid for) was fair game. Making matters worse: he only had to look to his competitors to see they were doing exactly the same.

1. Spun content (Paid)

Pure gibberish (or as close to sensical as you can get without making sense), with links embedded in the text is tantamount to spun content. Even where the anchor text is irrelevant to the site, the fact that all these links are within written copy that barely makes sense is proof enough of its spam credentials.

It is spam. Expect Google to penalize your site if it’s associated with rubbish like this.

2. Splogs (Paid)

The characteristics of a spam blog, otherwise known as splogs, are poorly written posts about a wide array of disconnected topics that do not relate to any particular theme. In the example below you can see that the post author is nameless (simply ‘admin’), and the related posts are completely unrelated to any other content or theme of the site. To any webmaster or competitor this is clearly a splog as any real site would have a vested interest in ranking on search engines – which would be implied by a clear thematic focus to the content and design of the site.

Whilst Google’s web crawlers cannot fully comprehend the meaning of text, the average English-language user who came across the site above would instantly comprehend that is junk just by the opening sentences, “Aѕ a living organism, уου need tο gеt аn easy access tο сlеаn water everlastingly. Clеаn water іѕ ѕο crucial fοr уουr life thаt уου саnnοt live аnd wіll die іf уου spend more thаn a week without drinking сlеаn water.”

Like, no shit Sherlock. It is spam. Expect this site to get penalized in the long run and your own rankings to suffer.

3. Free Directories (Paid)

With advances in search engines, directories have pretty much taken a back seat. However, there is a noteworthy irony that online directories used to be the de rigueur way to find information on the web.

Directories classify and categorize information and should perform an important service of organizing information and making it easier to find via a system of increasingly granular taxonomies.

If you as a user cannot navigate from your listing to the home page of a directory by clicking through a series of increasingly broad categories, then it is probably not useful information to any human being and is therefore spam. Put simply, if the directory has no obvious or useful taxonomy it is spam.

In the example below, a supposed directory of webmasters and their sites has no category or sub-category folders.

This is useful to nobody as nobody would have any hope of reaching this page without a search engine. It is spam.

4. User Profile Spam (Organic)

The “secret to SEO” that everyone knows is that your website needs links from other websites, and links from ‘authoritative’ sites – namely those with a high PageRank (PR) – are “the best”. The challenge is to get links from high PR sites which tend to be islands unto themselves. Sites that require users to create user profiles often allow users to include a link to their website. However, such a reciprocal promotion is made on the good faith that you will be an active participant in the community and, by extension, contribute value.

So, creating links in your user profile for the intent of needlessly pushing your own site is tantamount to spamming the community. The example below is an example of a fake user profile used to push a website for none other reason than to get a link from a “high PR” site.

My personal position is that if you are not actively participating in a community as a real person then you do not deserve the ability to post a link or have a link on your profile. Creating a user account just to post a link is a tactic that creates no value for anybody. Reddit users would rightly be mad at Harbour for this pointless link from their domain to his site. Arguably he was not to know any better as his competitors are also doing something similar on Yelp.

5. Comment Spam (Organic)

Comment spam does not mean you are getting a quality link from a high profile website. If your comment does not contribute to the conversation and drive the discussion forward then it is not a useful link to humans and fails our anchor text test. You might think it would be great to take the discussion of in a pointless tangent for the sake of dropping links but that is not cool either. But if your comment is purely for the sake of dropping links or misleading in any way then I would call that spam.

Harbour may have gotten a link from Mashable in the result below – but it is the worst example of comment spam. Full marks for creativity in dropping a link to your own site by pretending you are sympathetically discussing a personal experience with a competitor.

Why would anyone tell people who the competitor is that they lost their talent to, without at the very least mentioning their own company?

Even if Google ever manually reviewed comment spam, I would argue that the example below is justification enough to be labelled as a spammer – which would probably lead to a penalty.

6. Personal Splogs (Organic)

In the hope of increasing the number of links from different domains to your site you may hit upon the brainwave to create a blog on a different domain and point about links to your site. Thus you have total control of the inbound links to your website! Genius.

Even more genius would be to link one personal splog to another, which then links to your website and so sends Googlebot on a digital “round robin.”

Except it is not genius and clearly just more spam.

When Google’s Problem Becomes Our Problem

At the heart of it, my personal opinion is that it is a lack of lateral thinking and creativity that is causing people to choose spam as a means to rank. However, in discussions with Harbour I have a more sypathetic view toward those who do not live and breathe the Google Guidelines.

The old adage “if you pay peanuts, you get monkeys” is as true in SEO as any other industry and in seeking to cut costs Harbour cut too many corners and played fast and loose with Google’s guidelines. Engaging in spam gets in the way of building a decent web eco-system that can survive the shifting sands of algorithm changes. Ultimately, what Harbour did not realize is that by winning with links from spam sites, he would eventually lose rankings when Google eliminated the ability of those sites to pass PageRank.

The rub for all webmasters is that Google’s definition of spam is a moving target. It is arguably hypocritical that Harbour is at the mercy of whatever Google’s definition of spam is, with no clear guidance from them as to what to do about it. Even if BerkeyShop.com was not receiving any paid links, the organic strategy was just as vulnerable to Google deeming it spam in the long term.

The converse is that to succeed on Google, you have to play by their rules, which to a greater or lesser extent means following their freemium business model whether you like it or not. The maxim small businesses must live by is “create lots of free value for users” and they just “might start to buy into your premium products and services”. But a freemium business model works best on an enterprise scale – or internet scale – which is outside the reach of most small businesses. Google has the luxury of enabling a freemium business model because they are an internet company – not a company selling water filters. When push comes to shove, most small businesses cannot grasp the concept of ‘creating value’ because there is no clear ‘editorial’ definition of what ‘value’ really is from Google. Yet there is a working value dynamic at the heart of Google’s own algorithm which creates a secondary market of services – namely the right anchor text from the most links.

But this is a simplistic, tactical view that obfuscates cornerstone elements of Google’s algorithm yet it has currency because it is often validated by experience. It essentially conflates two key Google concepts into one in order to exploit the resultant behavior of the algorithm:

• That inbound links are a measure of authority in the eyes of Google, because Google counts the number of unique domains (and the unique domains pointing to them too) to calculate PageRank (which is a dynamic score that Google uses to determine authority of any domain).
• That anchor text is a signpost for hyperlinks by which Google can infer what the linked page is about.

Ultimately it is the conflation of these two concepts that gets circulated online, packaged up and sold to webmasters as a quick win formula. Buying ways to increase anchor text matches from other domains is seductive precisely because of the infallible logic and the overall difficulty webmasters face in trying to get any meaningful link from anyone at all.

However, Google’s discussion of anchor text in their own Search Engine Optimization starter guide does not go far enough in terms of clarifying the long-term role anchor text plays in the ecology of the web. In fact, Google does not give sufficient advice to webmasters on how to think about the relationship between all websites.

So, there is no working explanation of relevance that anyone can look at. Instead we are furnished with advice that amounts to “how to make a good website”. At the very least, Google could provide webmasters with the clarity to understand that links and anchor text are intended to be two distinct quality signals and therefore require two different strategies.

In Google’s handling of the ‘unnatural link’ notices in webmaster tools, they did not provide clear guidance to all webmasters and treated webmasters as “guilty until proven innocent”. The entire process was badly handled.

Eric Schmidt once callously said, “We don’t actually want you to be successful… The fundamental way to increase your rank is to increase your relevance.” Indeed, Harbour ‘was relevant’ for 4 weeks and then dumped. What is clear is that relevance and spam are on the same sliding scale.

Google certainly does not owe webmasters a living but it is a failure on Google’s part that a lot of this type of stuff did work. Google needs to be transparent with all interested parties and admit that relevance is, for all intents and purposes, as ephemeral as spam. Flaws in the algorithm need to be acknowledged because they are open to exploitation and thus beget exploitation. Arguably the algorithms failure to pass its own Turing test is currently passed on to the webmaster. But Google’s failure to be real about what webmasters can do to succeed is letting these conditions persist.

This Achilles heel, unacknowledged, gives Google more rights to dictate the web rather than be part of the web.

An understanding of the strategic difference between anchor text and links, would help webmasters differentiate between what Google understands as organic marketing and what it considers spam. In turn, this understanding would help webmasters to choose a longer term content development strategy and not be swayed by the allure of a short term webspam strategy.

Harbour doesn’t naturally have the right to spam. But he does have the right to be upset about Google playing God.

Credit: SEW

Links matter. There’s no debate links are a big signal of quality to search engines, so you need to know your ABCs.

Whether you’re starting from scratch or looking to further enhance your link profile, links remain a critical method of marketing. However, if you’ve been paying attention, you can see that link building is a constantly evolving practice.

Certain tactics are overused then abused then penalized, with link builders running around trying to undo damage from techniques that worked well but maybe weren’t 100 percent safe ideas.

What follows is a list and discussion of 131 (legitimate) link building tactics, some of which worked just as well 10 years ago as they do today.

Start With the Basics

Ah, the basics…these are the tactics that can form the foundations of any link building campaign, no matter what your niche or budget. The basics don’t tend to change and they’re critical to understand so that you can move on to more advanced and creative techniques.

1. Email a webmaster, asking for a link to your site. Personalizing your emails is critical here (think about how many emails you get every day) so make sure you’re actually emailing webmasters who have sites that are relevant to yours, and, even more importantly, make sure that your site is actually link-worthy. We’re all busy people and no one wants to waste time so if it’s not a good place for a link to you, don’t waste anyone’s time.

2. Use the phone. Picking up the phone to do the same thing as listed above is also acceptable for those of us who aren’t averse to having to speak to another human being for work matters.

3. Find great sources for links by simply searching the web for your desired target keywords. Whereas even a year ago I would have said that sites appearing high in the SERPs would be good sites to contact, due to the truly amazing amount of spam and hacked sites that appear high up for certain search terms, I’d say you need to visit the sites with a very careful eye. Whereas we used to think that getting a link from any source was a good idea, after Google started notifying webmasters that they had bad links which should be removed, I’d say to be very, very critical.

4. Use social media to find great sources for links. There are loads of tools that can help with this (my favorite is Icerocket) but simply going to Twitter and searching for a keyword in the same way that you search through an engine’s results can show you some fantastic link opportunities.

5. Make the link negotiation personal. Even if you’ve emailed to ask for a link, don’t be opposed to speaking to this benevolent webmaster by phone, or in person if that works out. Sometimes this personal connection can be what secures your link.

6. Know what makes a site a good linking partner. If you’ve been building links for a long time, you can probably easily glance at a site and, in under a minute, determine whether it would be a beneficial linking partner. However, for the rest of the world, it’s not so easy. Know what makes me like a site more than anything else? Social love. If I see a blog post that is relevant to my topic, has ongoing relevant comments, a decent amount of tweets/likes/shares, that’s a good site to me because I’m thinking about traffic.

7. Think about traffic! Think about sites that can send you relevant traffic, not just sites that might improve your rankings. If you can see yourself going to that site, seeing your link, clicking on it, and thinking “nice, this is just what I wanted!” then yes, that’s a good traffic-generating site most likely.

8. Stop thinking about rankings and Google’s Toolbar PageRank. Rankings definitely matter but considering the amount of places that can send you traffic (like social media sites, sites that link to you, sites where you guest post, etc.) it’s silly to rely on rankings in one engine. Stop thinking that a link from a site with a PR of 0 won’t help you, and that a link from a site with a PR of 5 definitely will.

9. Check to see what your competitors are doing. While this should never be a definitive way to define your own link plan, it’s valuable to see what works for others in your niche. Just don’t think that you can mimic a competitor’s link profile and do as well as they have. It’s definitely not that simple.

10. Make sure your site isn’t hurting you. Many times we think that with the right links, our sites will soar in the rankings, even though they are usability nightmares with nothing real to offer anyone that can’t be found elsewhere.

11. Check out the sites that link to you and find the sites they link to. Sounds convoluted, but it’s a great way to figure out other good sites to contact.

12. If you get a link from a fantastic site that is exactly the type of site you want to link to you, after congratulating yourself on this achievement, do some digging and find out who else links to that site. Those may also be good sites to contact for links.

13. Search for sites that should link to you but don’t. If you find a blog post entitled “Top 100 companies that sell green widgets” and you sell green widgets but aren’t listed, contact the webmaster and point this out. Nicely, of course.

14. Don’t automate if you can help it. There are times when automation can be a lifesaver but when it comes to reviewing a site and making a personal connection that leads to a link, I’d make the decision to do it all manually.

15. If you receive a negative response, regard this as very important, as these refusals could be telling you something. Perhaps your site isn’t as link-worthy as you thought it was. If a webmaster takes the time to email you back and say no thanks, ask him or her why. Maybe you’ll uncover an error that is glaring to everyone but yourself. Regard this as a fantastic usability opportunity. Also, if a webmaster points out something fixable and you fix it, maybe you’ll get that link in the end.

16. If you move your site to a new URL, surely you’ll 301 it but for the maximum linky benefit, do yourself a favor and contact the sites (especially the really good ones) that link to you to point out your new URL.

17. Sponsor something. Sponsor a charity, a contest, an afterschool club at your kid’s school, anything.

18. Learn to love the nofollowed link. There’s more to life than link juice. Nofollows can be amazing for traffic so if someone says yes, I’ll link to you but I have to nofollow it, say thanks.

19. See who links to YouTube videos that relate to your industry and ask them for a link.

20. In that same line of thought, see who links to infographics in your niche. Ask them for a link.

Become a Content Provider

If you aren’t putting content out there for consumption, you stand little chance of acquiring links. People use the web to gather information, and if you aren’t giving it to them, someone else (your competitor) definitely is.

I know that many people who are fantastic communicators and great thinkers often don’t believe that they can write anything of value. However, as we’ll point out to start off, practice is the key here.

21. Write something even if you’re not yet very good at it. The more you practice, the better you’ll be.

22. Write something really, really good, something that no one else has yet written. Put a new spin on what you want to say so that it will grab people’s attention. For example, if you’re writing about pest control (and for the record I do not work with any pest control clients), then maybe write a piece about how you’re never more than a few feet away from a spider. Shivers.

22. Think about an ongoing content plan and write so that it’s easy to write a follow-up piece. Series are great, regular guest post slots are great, and knowing what your “thing” is can definitely be great. For example, for my agency’s blog, we’ve decided that we want to show how we think about links. We have a group of employees who are from extremely diverse backgrounds and we’ve had a lot of success with blog posts that do more than tell you how to contact a webmaster and get a link. Our “thing” is creative thinking about what we do for a living.

23. Produce something other than just textual content. Do an infographic or create a comic. Produce videos where you do things like interview people in your industry (hey, look how far it took Jonathan Allen!) Start a weekly online radio show. That kind of non-text-based content does get links.

24. Actively pursue new opportunities for contributing to your industry. Maybe you can moderate a forum or help curate a weekly newsletter. Maybe you can provide fantastic answers on Quora.

25. Find something that’s missing and jump into giving it to us. No forum for your industry? Start one. Looking for a list of all the preschools in your town but can’t find one? Do the research, write it, and put it out there for everyone to see and link to.

26. Do one major article that will become the definitive resource for something and that can be (and will be) updated on a semi-annual or annual basis. Think Rae Hoffman-Dolan’s amazing series “Link Building With The Experts.”

27. Create a curated list for something. Think about your industry and what you have trouble keeping up with.

28. Produce a monthly “best of” series to recap what’s happened in your industry in case people missed something.

29. Reference your older articles when they’re relevant. Michael Gray does a great job of this with his archived posts tweets.

30. Make sure that when you do promote your content, the right people are seeing it at the right time. If you’re publishing an article about the best pizza delivery in New York, don’t publish it when everyone on the East Coast is sound asleep. There are great scheduling tools out there, so use them if you can’t promote content at the right time.

Leave Your Links Everywhere

Well, not everywhere maybe, but links can be a calling card if used wisely. Some of these cross over with the above section on providing content. This is the same idea as any other marketing really; you want as many eyeballs as possible on your product.

31. Link to your site in your email signature.

32. Link to your site in all your social media platforms.

33. Link to your site on your business cards that you will naturally give out at industry events.

34. Tell people about your site. You’d be surprised at how much of a resource this can be.

35. Comment on relevant blogs and sites without doing so in a spammy manner. I wouldn’t suggest popping your link into a casual comment because that’s not a good way to build long-term link exposure, but using your site for your comment signature can lead people to you, even if it doesn’t actually generate a link on the spot.

36. As mentioned earlier, guest post. Ask to guest post. Approach sites and say hey, would you be interested in having me as a one-time contributor? Be prepared with something though, in case you’re asked for an idea or a writing sample.

37. Interview someone. Interviewees usually link back to these interviews, and they’re a great way to get to know people in your industry.

38. Write a testimonial or a review of a product.

39. Leave reviews for local businesses you’ve visited on sites like Yelp.

40. Give feedback online through social media. If you like an article, tweet that to the writer. If you had a great hotel stay, put it on their Facebook page.

Be Creative and Visible

There’s so much information out there that if you aren’t presenting a unique experience, you’re going to fall behind. If you aren’t drawing attention to your work, people aren’t going to see it.

Some people have difficulty promoting their own work, while some people seem to do nothing but promote their own work. You should definitely let people know when you have something new as we’re all busy people and will appreciate it.

41. Rewrite an old post in order to update the ideas.

42. Write a rebuttal or an alternative point of view to a post, publish it on your site, and let the webmaster know.

43. Do the same but ask to have it published on the same site.

44. Although I am very guilty of not going this well, include images in what you write. Sometimes your image will stick in someone’s mind longer than your words will.

45. Speak up on social media. Do it on Twitter, on Facebook, on Google+, and anywhere else there’s a conversation.

46. Participate in forums. Ask and answer questions. You can make amazing contacts this way.

47. If you can, sponsor a meetup in your area or maybe do a small drinks round at a bar after a conference.

48. Crowdsource ideas and feedback when you need them. I’ve met very few people who don’t enjoy being asked their opinion.

49. Introduce yourself to people online and offline. I’m always happy when someone comes up to me at a conference and introduces him or herself. Lots of friendships and business relationships are formed from a simple bold “hi.”

50. Speak at a conference! This is one of the ultimate ways to get noticed, and you can get a great link off the website of the people putting on the show. Your name will be in the conference materials, too…always a good thing.

Especially For B2B Sites

B2B can be tough at times. However, some of those difficulties simply come from how we think about it. I’m guilty of thinking that B2B provides more challenges than other types of businesses but if asked, I can’t actually give any concrete reasons to back it up.

Let’s just think of B2B as being unique, not difficult.

51. If you have a relationship with a supplier, don’t be afraid to link out and get a link back. While reciprocal links can be excessively spammy, if it makes sense, it isn’t always bad.

52. Simply ask your partners to link to you.

53. Publish an email newsletter that showcases anything new or creative that you’re doing and let your partners know about it. Maybe if you’ve never gotten a link off their website, you will once they see that you’re offering something new that can’t be found elsewhere.

54. Showcase a partner each month on your company’s blog or in a newsletter and ask the partner to promote this through his or her own company. You can get a great link off that blog for your trouble, and links like this are nicely relevant.

55. Create a contest for the guys who buy from you. For example, ask the 10 big ones to write a blog post on their company blogs about a topic relevant to both of you in your industry, with a link back to your site. For their trouble, enter them into a drawing where one lucky winner gets a discount on the next month’s agreement.

56. Put together a downloadable guide to your services and include the companies that you work with and list what they have to offer, to be used as an industry resource. Let them all know about it and don’t be afraid to promote this through social media channels, as everyone likes to know where they can find good information.

57. Think data. What kind of data would help you do something better, whether it’s find new suppliers/providers, cut costs, recruit employees, etc.? Search for it and if it exists and you aren’t a part of it, ask to contribute for the privilege of a link to your site. If this data isn’t out there, create it.

58. Participate where your suppliers, partners, and providers participate online. If there’s a big forum and you’ve never taken the time to get involved, do so now. If there isn’t anything major out there but you think there’s a need, get together with some of these companies and make it happen.

59. Sponsor a meetup or dinner where you invite your closest business associates. A small bar tab goes a long, long way in terms of engendering loyalty. More important than actual links, loyalty is what can keep your business running.

60. Try and be seen as a leader in your niche for online marketing. If you’re in a traditionally old-school company where no one wants to go online, be the first. When you learn how to successfully do it, take the lead and cultivate a following of people who want to learn from you. You know that guy who’s been running a mom and pop tractor repair place that he took over from his dad 40 years ago? Help him get comfortable with the web.

61. Make sure you’re listed in all the relevant online business directories.

62. Make sure you’re listed in all the local services like Yahoo Local and Google Places.

63. Become a member of your local civic organizations, Chamber of Commerce, marketing groups, etc.

64. Make a donation to a group in town that is somehow connected with your B2B. If you manufacture dog crates that you usually sell to dog breeders, make a donation to the animal shelter or ASPCA.

65. Check out the printed media available in your area. These can be great places to advertise and the cost can be low, but the visibility is excellent.

66. Ask for a link whenever you send out a new contract. While this should never be a requirement, it doesn’t hurt to mention that you’d like a link if possible, and make it easy by including instructions.

67. If you don’t have a blog, start one. Even the most seemingly-boring niches can be fascinating for the people who are involved with them.

68. Make sure you’re using social media at least on a minor level, even if it’s just having a Facebook page. Be the pioneer in your industry if you need to be and get comfortable with a form of marketing that is most likely going be around (and increasing in importance) for a long time.

69. Offer social media contests for a gift card. For example, if you “like” your business on Facebook, you’ll be entered into a drawing to win a $100 gift card to Amazon, Home Depot, etc.

70.Speak at tradeshows and industry conferences. Maybe you’ll pick up another business partner this way.

Whom Should You Target?

Sometimes the discovery is the toughest part of link building, and it can be difficult to figure out where your best contacts will be. If you wanted to promote a local Chinese food delivery place that had a delivery radius of 5 miles, you wouldn’t be dropping menus at a neighborhood 20 miles away would you?

Let’s talk about how to target the most relevant prospects.

71. Sites that turn up in a simple manual keyword search. Now, to be honest, there have been a lot of issues with relevancy recently so I would never rely on the accuracy of what any engine tells me are the top 10 relevant sites for my query, but still, sites that show up for your keywords “should” be decent prospects, provided you’ve vetted them a bit and determined that they’re actually relevant.

72. Blogrolls. I would never rely on blogrolls and they have been abused but still, you can find some great sites through following blogrolls.

73. People that you already have some sort of existing relationship with, just no links from (yet).

74. Bloggers who are influential in your niche.

75. Sites who are open to guest posting and are in your niche.

76. Sites who are open to guest posting and not in your niche…as long as you can find a way to connect what you do to what they typically write about.

77. Webmasters you’ve spoken with in forums.

78. People you’ve met virtually.

79. Sites that could benefit from learning about your services.

80. Sites that you regularly use as an authority and that you’d like to contribute to.

Be My Guest

Guest posting is kind of the current darling of the industry right now even though I imagine we’ll see it become abused like many other tactics. However, it presents a unique benefit: you showcase your work elsewhere. Sure you can write great content on your own blog, but when you can write great content for someone else, you get a link and you get known for contributing to something outside of what you control.

81. Use My Blog Guest to find people who are happy to post your content.

82. If there’s a site you read regularly, ask if they’d let you write something for them.

83. Pitch a series and not just a single post, as sometimes this offer gets attention faster.

84. Check social media to see who’s asking for guest posts.

85. If you write a guest post and it doesn’t go up immediately, don’t freak out and hassle the webmaster. Speaking from experience, I can say that sometimes getting a post up on my blog is not my highest priority of the day.

86. Use the guest post bio for a link.

87. Vary your guest post bio. Don’t do it to be spammy of course, but it’s a good way to get different bits of information out there about you and what you do.

88. Don’t be afraid to link to someone else in your guest post. If you’re referencing a competitor, link to him or her. It’s not going to kill you.

89. If you guest post on someone’s blog and are asked if the person can guest on yours, be gracious and say yes.

90. Don’t pay for guest posts. I am begging you. Keep them clean.

Keep Track Of What You’re Doing

Sometimes it’s easy to do so much that you forget what you have done, and you can duplicate your efforts. It’s easy enough to track but we don’t always think to do it. Doing so can save you a lot of time and effort though.

91. if someone says no to your request for a link/mention/guest post, etc. just move on. Don’t beat a dead horse or make it worse by harassing the person about it. Don’t email the same webmaster, who has said no repeatedly, 10 more times or you’re just begging for a reputation nightmare.

92. Watch your links and just generally keep an eye on things. Considering the amount of people who actually have been harmed by bad links, it’s worth making this a daily part of your marketing efforts.

93. Keep records of people who have been responsive but might not be able to help you out right now, and set a calendar reminder to contact them in a few months.

94. Keep a spreadsheet that lists the sites you’ve guest posted on or added your site to as a resource, etc. While it’s easy enough to pull a list of your links from the wide variety of tools out there, it’s also very easy to just keep track yourself.

95. Don’t submit the same piece of content to multiple sites.

96. Make sure that you aren’t speaking out of both sides of your mouth. For example if you’re an SEO, don’t write a post about how stupid it is to do link cleanup then turn around and write a post about how to do link cleanup. You’ll just get branded a hypocrite.

97. If you’re writing something new and you can’t remember if you’ve said it before, or if someone else has just said it, go look around and see. Even though you may mean no harm, many people have gotten upset over content that they view as being stolen or simply rehashed.

98. If you’re tried to reach out and connect with someone on social media but you’re not getting a response, just let it go and move on to someone else. No one likes a stalker, especially a persistent one.

99. If you’ve agreed to do a guest post series on someone’s blog, don’t make the webmaster track you down when the next installment is due, or you may find yourself out of a slot. Setting calendar reminders and sticking to deadlines when other people are concerned is simply good manners.

100. If you’re just read about something like an entire network being deindexed, pay attention and don’t waste your time and effort submitting content to those sites or trying to email them for links.

Link Checking Services and Information

There are free tools that let you check on links and there are paid tools. I use a mixture of both. Let’s just list a few that I can personally vouch for through either using them myself or through being lucky enough to have been asked to test them, and go through ways these can help you.

• Majestic SEO
• Link Research Tools
• Raven SEO Tools
• Linkdex
• Hitreach
• Ahrefs
• Buzzstream
• Screaming Frog
• SEOmoz
• Wordtracker

101. Check your new incoming links.

102. Check your overall backlink portfolio.

103. Conduct analysis on your own links.

104. Conduct analysis on a competitor’s profile.

105. Be alerted when a new link appears.

106. Check your breakdown of anchor text.

107. If there’s a drop in rankings or traffic, do a quick scan to see if anything looks fishy.

108. Check your portfolio after a major algorithm update.

109. Keep track of your existing links for various purposes.

110. Check out a site you want to get a link from before pursuing the opportunity.

Things to Avoid

What you should not do can sometimes be just as important as what you should do, so let’s talk about some things to avoid if you want to enjoy a sustainable link building campaign.

111. Spammy links. Should go without saying right? It doesn’t, unfortunately.

112. Footers and sitewides on totally irrelevant sites. I’ve seen some relevant footers and sitewides but by and large, they are very, very rare.

113. Links that won’t bring you any traffic whatsoever.

114. Links on sites that seem to exist only to sell links or publish scraped content.

115. Links on sites that are part of a very obvious (and spammy) network.

116. Guest posts on poor quality sites that, again, don’t have a prayer of giving you any good traffic or visibility.

117. Repeating the same exact keywordized anchor over and over and over again, on every site that you deal with for 6 months.

118. Not using brand and URL anchors.

119. Not using some form of analytics, and not using Google’s Webmaster Tools. If you rely on Google like most people, using the Webmaster Tools can save you a lot of time if anything weird/bad happens. It’s hard to understand what’s happening in the engines and with rankings/traffic if you aren’t set up to be able to see what’s going on.

120. Thinking that you won’t actually get penalized or deindexed for using link practices that violate an engine’s guidelines for inclusion. Familiarize yourself with what can and will get you into trouble and if you can seriously afford the risk, make your decision. If being penalized in some way will cripple your business, you don’t need to do something that will potentially harm you.

Extra Tips and Notes

121. Be nice please, no matter what. If you are asking for a link, be respectful. If someone says no, say thank you and move on.

122. Don’t get into a shouting match online just because someone disagrees with you. By that same token, don’t be a jerk and make rude comments to people just because you don’t agree with them. It really is possible to disagree without devolving.

123. Say thanks when someone does something nice for you, whether it’s mentioning you for a Twitter “Follow Friday”, praising your latest article, or sending business your way. These are great ways to get links down the road.

124. Test a variety of tools to see which ones work best for you. There are indeed fantastic free ones, but some of the paid ones offer amazing functionality that may save you lots of time and money.

125. If you see that someone who previously sent you lots of traffic through a link has just removed that link, email or call and ask why, and figure out what you can do to get the link back. If it’s a good link, it’s worth the effort.

126. Don’t be afraid to link out. Thinking that you need to “conserve” link juice is just the slightest bit stingy. If there’s a great resource but it belongs to your competitor’s site, it says a lot that you can take the ego hit and link out anyway.

127. Don’t set limits on who you’ll deal with. If someone with 200 followers on Twitter asks you to do an interview, don’t dismiss the person because everyone else you do interviews for has at least a 5,000 Twitter follower reach.

128. Don’t put yourself in a box. Maybe you’ve never done an infographic and you think they won’t work for you, but guess what? You’ll never know until you try.

129. Incorporate image links into your backlink profile. If a site owner won’t give you a text link ask if he’ll take an image link.

130. Watch what other people in your niche are doing. You don’t always have to do the same thing but you can definitely learn from what they’re doing, even if you learn that their latest marketing tactic isn’t something you ever want to do.

131. Don’t ever get comfortable and think that you know everything. You don’t. Even if you almost do right now, you won’t next week. Keep reading about what’s going on in the SEO industry, in link building, and in your niche. Look at all the opportunities you have to learn something new and take them.

Credit: SEW

Are you looking for ways to market your small business website with a limited budget?

Whether it’s with established sites such as Google and Facebook, or newer outlets like Pinterest, there are plenty of options available to promote your site.

There are at least 30 ways to market your website with a time investment and no credit card required. Some of these are oldies but goodies, while others are newer and exciting avenues you may not have tried out yet.

Here are 30 things you can do today to get started marketing your website for free.

1. Press releases still work. Granted a submission to PRWeb or a Vocus account make the pickup and link benefit much easier, but those cost dollars – so for this article lets reiterate the best free press release sources:
   • 24-7PressRelease.com
   • PRLog.org
   • IdeaMarketers.com
2. Send the press release to your local media outlets, or any niche media outlets that may be interested in what you do.
3. Claim, verify, and update your Google Local Business listing. This is extremely important. Google Local Listings have been absorbed into Google+, so be sure to check out this great resource over at Blumenthals.com to keep up to date on how to manage your Google Local Listing.
4. Find a niche social media site that pertains to your exact business and participate. Be helpful, provide relevant and useful information, and your word of mouth advertising will grow from that engagement.
   • Examples:
     • Travel or hospitality business – Tripadvisor.com forums
     • Photography store – Photo.net or RockTheShotForum.com
     • Wedding Planning or Favor site – Brides.com or Onewed.com forums
     • Search your niche or service plus forums to find ideas. If there isn’t a forum out there, consider starting one.
5. Build a Google+ page for your business and follow businesses that are related to your product or service niche. Share informative and relative content and link to your profile from your website. You should also consider allowing users to +1 your content on a page by page basis.
6. Setting up joint benefit with local businesses or others in your niche can help you reach eyes you never did before. Be sure to answer the question “Will my user find this information beneficial as they shop and purchase?” every time you link to a resource, or request a link or listing on another site.
7. Comment and offer original, well thought out, sensible information, opinion and help on blogs that are relevant to your website’s topic and be sure to leave your URL. Even if a nofollow tag is attached, you could gain a bit of traffic and some credibility as an authority on the subject matter. This is not blog comment spamming, this is engaging in a conversation relevant to your website’s topic.
8. Set up and verify a Webmaster Central Account at Google.
9. Set up a Bing Webmaster Tools account and verify it.
10. Update or create your XML sitemap and upload it to Google Webmaster Tools and Bing Webmaster Tools.
11. Write a “how-to” article that addresses your niche for Wikihow.com or Answers.com. This is kind of fun and a good resource for getting mentions and links. Looking at your product or service in a step-by-step manner is often enlightening in several ways. It can help you better explain your products and services on your own website. I will say I don’t know why some of these sites still rank well, many of them are junk. I do like most of the answers on the two sites mentioned above. Be picky with where you participate.
12. Write unique HTML page titles for all of your pages. This is still extremely important, don’t skimp on this one.
13. Share your photos at Flickr – get a profile, write descriptions, and link to your website. Don’t share photos you don’t own or have permission to use.
14. Start a blog. There’s nothing wrong with getting the basics of blogging down by using a free service from Blogger or WordPress.
15. Make sure your Bing and Yahoo Local listings are up to date.
16. Update and optimize your description and URL at YP.com. They’ll try to get you to spend money on an upgraded listing or some other search marketing options. Don’t bother with that, but make sure the information is accurate and fresh.
17. Use your Bing Webmaster Tools account to look at your incoming links. How do they look? Are all of the sites relevant and on-topic? If not, reevaluate your link building practices and start contacting any of the irrelevant sites you can and ask them to take down your link. A clean and relevant incoming link profile is important; cleaning up bad links is a necessity until we can tell Google and Bing which links we want them to ignore.
18. Make a slideshow of your products or record an original how-to video and upload to YouTube. Be sure to optimize your title and descriptions. Once it’s uploaded, write a new page and embed the video on your own Web site. Add a transcription of the video if possible.
19. Try a new free keyword tool for researching website optimization, then see #20.
20. Add a page to your site focused on a top keyword phrase you found in #19.
21. Build a Facebook Page and work to engage those that are interested in your product or service. Facebook is so much more robust than it ever was! Create groups, events, and photo albums. Link to your Facebook profile from your site and allow visitors to your site to like and share your content.
22. Install Google Analytics if you don’t have any tracking software. The program is pretty amazing and it’s free. You need to do this if you haven’t already. It’s that important.
23. Start Twittering or start doing it much better than you are now – it’s a great way to network with like-minded individuals.
24. Pinterest is hot right now. If you have visually stimulating content that is relevant to the site’s demographic, you can find great success right now. Be sure you’re using solid practices for marketing on Pinterest as you get started.
25. Create a new list in Twitter and follow profiles of industry experts you know and trust. Use this as your modern feed reader. I don’t use RSS feed readers anymore. I like content that has been vetted by my peers and is worthy of a tweet or two.
26. Try a new way to write an ad for a struggling PPC ad group or campaign.
27. Review your Google Analytics In-Page insights and take note of how users are interacting with your page. Where to they click, what is getting ignored. Make changes based on this knowledge.
28. Set up a Google Content Experiment through your Analytics account and test with the information you obtained and changes you made in number 27.
29. Build a map at Google Maps and add descriptions for your storefront, locations, and nearby useful points of interest. Make your map public and embed it on your own website. Add links back to relevant content on your site if possible to each point of interest.
30. Keep reading Search Engine Watch for more free tips and tricks.

There you have it – 30 ways to market your website. Get to work and make something happen! There’s no reason to say you can’t be successful because you don’t have a huge advertising budget. Time is all you need.

Credit: SEW