So you see a website on the internet, and immediately, you think to yourself “I want a link here”. I mean it’s a website – as long as it isn’t selling paid links, it has to pass some kind of juice or be of some value to you, right? Not really. Besides the standard evaluation practices, here are a few other tips to determining  whether or not a link is worth acquiring.

Is there duplicate content on the page? Sometimes a page can appear natural but actual be full of torrid, useless duplicate content. Google tends to dislike websites with too much of this. It’s a good idea to grab a piece of text and search for it in Google to see if the site comes up first for the result. If it doesn’t, there’s good reason to not pursue acquiring a link – it may pass no value anyways, even if the website still ranks for its own domain name or title tag.

What’s the cache date? So you found a link page on a personal page on some random EDU site in the middle of nowhere. Try searching for it in Google. Is it even indexed? If it is, when’s the last time it’s been cached? If it’s a top or 2^nd level page on the domain and it hasn’t been crawled in a long time, it’s a strong sign of the following things :

1. The website owner no longer maintains the site.
2. Google hates the site.

Based on all of these factors, it’s probably a waste of time to even send out a link begging e-mail now that you’ve gotten here. Your response rate is probably super low, and even if it gets posted, it’s probably of no value to you. Even if it is, you likely won’t get the benefit until months later, and it will only be incremental at best.

How does the MOZrank and PageRank match up? SEOMoz’s relatively new website valuation tool MOZRank is a good way to compare SEOMoz’s opinion to Google’s. If the MozRank SEOMoz gives is two or so points more than Google’s, there’s a good chance that the page has been devalued by Big Brother. It should never be the other way around, as SEOMoz does not penalize sites for their transgressions – it just views websites as poor based on standard link valuation policies.

A lot of link evaluation is gut feel and experience. While these tips won’t solve all of your link evaluation issues, they should help push you on the way to getting great, supportive juice to your website today.

So you’ve got a quality website, a good monetization strategy and superb, constantly updated content. Google sees you, but they don’t see you as nearly relevant enough to rank as high as you’d like in the rankings. Quite simply, Google is telling you that you need to link build.

If you’re like many business owners, you don’t have the time to do research on how to link build, or manually do it yourself. You don’t have a SEO in-house, and even if you do, he’s too busy to spend the sufficient time needed to get your URL air-dropped all over the internet. Read More

We all know that link building is tedious, frustrating, and for the most part, no fun. On the other hand, we know that building links can bring valuable traffic, exposure, and long term success of your site. Day in and day out, I’m sure you come across articles on link building, and they are usually the same old, boring routine. This article is for those that want to work on building links, but are up to trying out a few new ways to go about doing it. Keep an open mind, as these methods, while not as common as others, are definitely worth your time and effort. Read More

Link popularity. Backlinks. Inbound links. Call them what you will, but your successful web site marketing plan will only become successful when you have acquired quality links that point to your domain in specific ways.

If you are lazy or unmotivated – stop reading. If you are seriously committed to the long term success of your site – here are some tips to get you rolling with building quality links. Read More

Looking for an easy way to score inbound links to help your site’s ranking and scoring on systems like Google PageRank? Who isn’t, right?One of the easiest ways to grab more inbound links is by setting out some high quality link bait for others to enjoy and gobble up.

If you’re unsure of what link bait is, I’ll try my best to sum it up on a high level. Link bait is the creation of content and clever titles that encourage others to link to you and your goods once they come across it.

Clever Titles
Writing clever titles to your posts are one good way to get people interested in what you have to say. Things like lists, open ended questions, or references to popular topics are all great ways to grab the attention of readers everywhere – regardless of how they come across your site.

Good Bait = Good Content
People love lists. From the top ten ways to lose weight while sitting at your desk to the top five things you should be doing with your site optimization plans… quality content is the driving force behind long term link bait.

Be Original
Your link bait will do nothing if it’s just a regurgitated version of what someone else had released in the past. For starters, you’re probably guilty of plagiarism. Beyond that, your content is newer and probably hits up a smaller audience. What good is that? You need to come up with original ideas that really hammer home something that compels readers to check into the full length article.

Use Media!
Videos, pod casts, images and diagrams… are all wonderful ways to set the hook on your link bait efforts. Readers love to come across things that our out of the norm. If you’re scanning through a dozen new topics on your RSS reader, what will make one stand out more than the next? – Quality media! A YouTube video for example is begging to be clicked upon when it’s surrounded by boring text!

Remember, link bait is all about enticing readers to do something. Whether it is to comment or track back to your article, setting the bait out to your targeted audience is key. After a while, it’s not uncommon to see variations from market to market with regards to how to set bait. In other words, what may work for affluent business owners may not at all work with stay at home moms. So, use that to your information and test what works best!