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.

Unfortunately, not every business website has the ability to spread virally. No matter how hard you try, creating true link bait for nails or rocks is a virtual impossibility. Link begging is unlikely to succeed because no blogger or webmaster feels your product brings value to their readers – after all, boring business products just aren’t their thing.

This doesn’t mean you’re left out in the cold. Every other business in your vertical has the exact same problem! Once you recognize this, you’ll find that success is definitely achievable – it’ll just take a slightly different route.

Perform in-depth, rigorous keyword research. Utilize every tool you can, such as Keyword Discovery, Ontology Tools, and Google’s Keyword Adword Tool to peel back every keyword that can drive convertible traffic to your website. Often times these keyword tools won’t tell the whole story – try analyzing your competitor’s websites to find more keyword targets and see where your competitor’s are missing out.

Optimize perfectly on-page. Sometimes the only difference between first and last in these segments is proper on-page optimization. SEOMoz’s Term Target Tool can be a great resource for determining how well your keyword is optimized on page. Rand Fishkin of SEOMoz also put out a great article on the Perfectly Optimized Page that can help you show relevancy to the engines. I frequently see pages with a fourth of the domain strength rank first over a poorly optimized site based on excellent on-page optimization alone.

Don’t overdo it, though. You still need to appeal to your users, the customers. Make the user experience optimal for them as well as the engines and everyone wins. Aaron Wall talks more about this on his blog, providing his own take about the perfectly optimized page.

Maximize every high quality, legal trust signal you can.  High quality directories such as Best of the Web, Yahoo!, and JoeAnt are great places to garner trust from Google and other search engines. You can also list yourself on other internet resources such as AboutUs.org and Crunchbase for a free link back to your website. Be careful with paid links – doing so in these less popular areas shows up a lot more and puts your site at high risk for a ranking penalty.

Create content for article directories. By creating content that you can disseminate on article directories, you can plug in a few links that will flow some link juice back to your website. Unfortunately, this only has minor value, but it’s worth doing in the less social verticals where link juice is at a premium.

Harvest competitor backlinks. SEOMoz has a good backlink analysis tool as well as the Open Site Explorer which will show you who your competitors are getting backlinks from. Yahoo! Site Explorer is another good way to get a grasp of your competitors’ high quality links. This is a great means to find vertical specific directories, sporadic blogs, and educational resources that may have found their way into your vertical.

Get creative! Here comes the fun part. Once you’ve exhausted all of the above options, get imaginative. If your business has done something cool or special in your vertical, SHOUT out about it! Put out some press releases! PRweb, PRnewswire, and PRleap are all good resources for distributing news about your company. You might be lucky enough to get picked up by some high quality news sites, which can sometimes be enough to spring you to the top of the SERPs.

You can also sponsor conferences or have executives speak at them – this will almost always garner a link, especially if asked for. There’s always charitable donations, too. Your business will get a PR boost, you’ll feel better about yourself, and you’ll make the world better! Oh, yeah – and you’ll get a link almost always!

Follow these steps and you’ll be well on your way to dominating the search engines. Nails, toilet paper and filters might be boring, but people still need them. Let Google know that you’re a trusted seller through the above paths and you’ll continue to be boring — all the way to the bank.

Single Grain is very excited about the redesign of our website and with it comes a new attitude, purpose, and excitement about the future. We are extremely excited about the current outlook for Single Grain, and we are especially excited about what that means for internet marketing, the clients we work with, and the people that read our blog.

After a slight lull in our blogging efforts in 2009, the Single Grain blog has a new purpose and dedicated staff devoted to giving you the best content and information in the internet marketing space. While the voice and long-term makeup of the blog have yet to be established, you can be certain that we will do our best to bring you all the entertainment and learning our brain matter can conjure up.

Starting out, the Single Grain blog will be maintained by Sujan Patel, President of Single Grain, and Ross Hudgens (me), a Senior SEO Analyst and avid tech geek. Together, our experience covers every realm of internet marketing, so there is no rock potentially left uncovered.

Our specialty lies in SEO, but we have a particular interest in productivity and the tools that enhance that, PPC, Social Media, and the smattering of Web Analytics software that is found amongst the web. We will keep our archived content on the blog for your benefit, but the future of the blog means consistent, helpful content we hope you’ll enjoy.

We look forward to providing you a positive experience reading the Single Grain blog in 2010 and beyond. The internet can be a crazy place – hopefully we can help you figure it out.

Every SEO, when doing an initial evaluation, loves when he or she comes across great content. Sometimes, websites have other minor errors that prevent them from getting ranked well in the engines, but generally, one of the main things they lack is great, relevant content.

Content isn’t as simple as writing stuff on the page. Content means creating excellent, relevant writing that shows keyword relevancy to the engines, increases usability to its users, and offers “link bait”, content worthy enough to draw links from people that visit the website.
The reason SEO’s love this so much is often times, the first look at a clients website is met with many of the following negative content qualities:

1) Empty Product Pages: For e-commerce sites with pages upon pages of products to sell, increasing the relevancy on page with as little as a two-sentence blurb can help the rankings. Often times they will only include some specs, no information, and maybe a H1 or H2 tag with bad keyword placement.

2) Poorly Structured Content Blurbs: A lot of times the page will have writing on the website, but it won’t have strong enough keyword density to show true relevancy to the engines. Or, the content will have grammatical errors, increasing spam qualities and lowering usability.

3) Low Quality Content: Even if the pages have content with natural and strong keyword placement, sometimes the overall quality of the site is not up to par and not capable of drawing exterior links, naturally. Sometimes this has to do with industry, but other times the website just doesn’t have enough content that people would find interesting and worth linking to.

When websites lack any, two or all three of these qualities, it takes additional time to refine the website, write additional copy, and upload it to the website. With a lot of this comes downtime as one person in the chain waits for another person to approve and complete the task. The longer this takes, the longer it takes to get good rankings for the desired keywords.

SEO’s love when websites come with all three of these qualities attached. When they are, great rankings are only a good link building campaign away.

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.

You need to hire a link builder, whether in the form of a SEO freelancer or a specific company you’ve targeted. Unfortunately, it’s not as easy as throwing a dart at a dartboard, calling your mom, or tying your shoes. There are plenty of mediocre link builders out there who are professing the wrong things or not saying enough of the right ones.

Filtering through the muck and picking the right person, or company, for you, can be the difference between a hugely successful, million-dollar website and a blip on the internet radar. There are a few things to look for and do in your auditing process that will help you identify and differentiate between those who read articles on link building, and those who are link building professionals.

1)    Learn the SEO basics. The first step for SEO evaluator, before hiring an SEO professional, is to learn the basics of the craft itself. SEOMoz’s Beginners Guide to SEO and Aaron Wall’s SEOBook are industry standards for learning the basics of SEO. If you don’t have the basic knowledge to properly evaluate SEO hires, you will inevitably hire sub-par staff that are better at persuasion than the actual SEO fundamentals.

2)    Build a list. Come up with criteria you want in a link builder, do some research and find 3-10 potentials that you can compare and contrast, depending on your website, the industry you’re in, and the amount you’re willing to spend.

3)    Ask for a preliminary SEO audit. Requesting a basic audit of your website is a standard procedure that will immediately help you filter through a good percentage of your potential employees. Look for “red flags”, like outdated recommendations (i.e., recommending a large amount of “nofollow” links, a tactic that is now outdated), and bad keyword research.

If you know your business, you should have a good idea of which words convert and which don’t. When potential hires recommended building for keywords that will either be 1- impossible to rank for or 2- never make you a dime, you know he lacks the wherewithal to be a quality link builder.

An example of this would be trying to rank a local apartment company for “how to choose an apartment”. This keyword has no local relevancy, and little commercial intent. As stupid as this might sound, I’ve seen something equivalent, to worse, be recommended as a potential term to link build for.

4)    Get their past link building credentials. Some link builders are reluctant to fully out their past profile, and they often shouldn’t, for the sake of client protection. However, most will be able to cite one or two profiles, sometimes their own, that they did quality work for. Ask about what type of links they got, how they decided on them, their link evaluation process, and the time it takes them to build a certain quantity of quality links. Most importantly, see how the keywords they link built for rank, but be careful when evaluating their performance.

Ranking first for “Downtown San Jose luxury apartments” isn’t necessarily too impressive. Similarly, ranking fifteenth for “sports” isn’t too bad either. Knowing the fundamentals of SEO detailed in step one is vital for properly evaluating this part of the process.

5)    See through the fluff. Many link builders will cite some brilliant link building tactic that garnered them 50 links once, or the time they submitted a story to Digg that got their website 20,000 hits. However, a one-time success really doesn’t matter.  Many of these social media tactics are increasingly difficult to employ effectively, and will never work for your website. Don’t fall for the grandiose stories of one or two-time successes many link builders will tell you. Instead, listen for the fundamentals and metrics like rankings and their link building process that will truly get you rank. Believe it or not, many link builders are capable of getting you top three rankings without ever making you a cool widget for your website or getting you on the front page of Digg.

6)    Make a choice. Hopefully you have enough hard-data to do a comparative analysis of your potential hires. Depending on the size of the link building operation, putting in a large amount of time in to make the right choice can never be a bad decision. If you don’t feel comfortable with any of the potential hires you’ve evaluated, don’t be afraid to re-assess and go out and find more people that are willing and able to do the job right.

Additional Resources for Hiring a Link Builder:

Link Building Evaluation Guide

Choosing the Right SEO Vendor

Portrait of a Quality Link Builder

A 301 redirect is used when you need to tell the search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN etc) that your website or web-page has moved permanently. This allows the engines to update their indexes with the new information. Assuming you don’t deactivate the old domain (if you are doing a domain change) then theoretically Google will pass all your backlink and PR info to the new URL once the 301 redirect has been established and recognized. This should help maintain the integrity of whatever value and rank the old domain had established.

Most useful 301 redirects for Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

* 301 redirect an entire site (for example change of filename(s) or new domain name)

* 301 page-to-page redirect (for example change of filename(s) or new domain name; most commonly used in search engine optimization when many pages are indexing and ranking and you want to carryover PR [PageRank] to each individual page)

* Resolving canonical issues with a 301 mod_rewrite (this involves making sure your non-www domain resolves to your www.yourdomain.com domain. If you do not have this in place the engine may recognize your domain as being two separate domains which in turn could cause duplicate content issues or allow your Page Rank to be split between the two domains. When using a 301 mod_rewrite, the engine will be able to recognize that yourdomain.com and www.yourdomain.com are the same entity.

301 Redirect Scripts:

* htaccess
* 301 mod_rewrite
* PHP
* ASP
* ASP .NET
* CGI/Perl
* Ruby on Rails
* IIS
* Java (jsp)
* Coldfusion

Note:
Avoid using meta-tag refreshes and javascript re-directs. Due to abuse by some webmasters and deceptive SEO practices utilizing these methods these are deemed poorer choices and may not provide you with the desired result. You are better off implementing a 301 redirect and will have to deal with less hassles and possible complications from the search engines. Do yourself a favor and use a 301 redirect as advised by all the major search engines. (.htaccess and the 301 mod_rewrite should resolve most issues) Other scripting options have been provided for your convenience.

.htaccess 301 Redirect

You can save yourself some time by implementing your 301 redirects through the htaccess file. Instead of creating redirects on each webpage, you can just add the code to the htaccess file.
To implement a 301 redirect using htaccess:

1.Create a file on the root directory of your website, name it “.htaccess”.

2.Open the .htaccess file using notepad or what ever text editor that you prefer.

3.Add the following into the .htaccess file, save it and then upload it to your web server:

Redirect 301 /old/old.html
to http://www.yourdomain.com/new.html
NOTE:
Do not add “http://www” to the first part of the statement – place the path from the top level of your site to the page. Also ensure that you leave a single space between these elements:
redirect 301 (this is the instruction that the page has moved to a permanent new location)
/old/old.html (this represents the original folder path and file name)
http://www.yourdomain.com/new.html (this represents the new path and file name)
Also note that you can redirect the page to another domain, an equally useful purpose for using the 301 redirect, is redirecting old pages to the new pages on the same domain; it all works the same way!

301 Redirect Using Mod_Rewrite

As stated earlier this will resolve the issue of your non-www domain and your www domain. What does that mean? When we build sites we often use www.yourdomain.com. However, many webmasters when linking to a site may want to save time and simply link to the site by using yourdomain.com. In Google’s eyes these may be viewed as separate sites. So you may have a total of 100 hundred backlinks with 60 pointing at yourdomain.com and 40 pointing at www.yourdomain.com. Or you may be viewed as having duplicate content. Ideally, you want all backlinks pointing to one version of the domain to address these issues.

By inserting the code below into your .htaccess file, it will solve the problem by redirecting anything linking to yourdomain.com to www.yourdomain.com, and this allows you to pass on the PageRank [PR] from one version to the other.

RewriteEngine On rewritecond %{http_host} ^yourdomain.com
rewriteRule ^(.*) http://www.yourdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

PHP 301 Redirect

Add following code to page or script:

header( “HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently” );
header( “Status: 301 Moved Permanently” );
header( “Location: http://www.new-url.com/” );
exit(0); // This is Optional but suggested, to avoid any accidental output
?>

ASP 301 Redirect

Add following code to page or script:

<%@ Language=VBScript %>
<%
Response.Status=”301 Moved Permanently”
Response.AddHeader “Location”, “http://www.new-url.com/”
%>

ASP .NET 301 Redirect

Add following code to page or script:

CGI/Perl 301 Redirect

Simply add this code to your cgi/perl script:

$q = new CGI;
print $q->redirect(” http://www.new-url.com/ “);

Ruby on Rails 301 Redirect

Simply add this code to your ruby/ruby on rails script:

def old_action
headers["Status"] = “301 Moved Permanently”
redirect_to “http://www.newpageorsite.com/”
end

IIS 301 Redirect

1.In internet services manager, right click on the file or folder you wish to redirect.
2.Select the radio titled “a redirection to a URL”.
3.Enter the page that the page will be redirected to.
4.Check “The exact url entered above” and the “A permanent redirection for this resource”.
5.Click on ‘Apply’.

Once you have implemented the necessary changes. Test it. You should be able to enter your old URL and be seamlessly be redirected to the new URL. When moving many files (1000s) you may want to do it in small batches to make sure everything is propagating properly.

The 301 redirect is the safest way to preserve your rankings. The next time Googlebot, MSN, or Yahoo visit they will recognize that your webpage or entire site has permanently moved and they will make sure to update their index. As the indexes update your old URLs should drop out and the new ones will be presented. Even if your old ones are still displaying they will direct properly to the new domain. It is not necessary, but advisable to let others know (i.e. old link partners, directories, etc) that you have changed your address so they can make appropriate changes to your URL if they chose to. This is also an opportune time to review the anchor text linking to your site and have the necessary changes implemented as well. Good Luck in your endeavors.

With offices based in Orange County and Los Angeles, Single Grain search engine optimization specialists are available for SEO, Search Engine Marketing (SEM) and Social Media Marketing (SMM) consultation.

UPDATE: If your software is expired you are going to have to downgrade back to 2.2:

Restoring 2.2

Downgrading from 3.0 beta

On March 25th, 2009 10:00AM PST Will start of the 2nd iPhone 3.0 Beta giveaway. Single Grain has 50 more licenses to give away and it will be on a first come first serve basis. Last time we had this giveaway we ran out of licenses in 6 hours.

The giveaway is similar to last time. Heres the details:

1. Spread the word. Post this on twitter: “Single Grain’s 50 iPhone 3.0 Beta Giveaway http://tinyurl.com/c3zxra” & blog about the giveaway

2. Email us where you blogged (URL to blog post) about it and your UDID number (Here’s how you find your UDID Number on your iPhone) And we’ll email you the link to download it. Email your information here: sj@singlegrain.com

3. Give Feedback. So once you’ve installed 3.0 OS Beta leave a comment. How do you like it? Any bugs? Any particular apps don’t work? Anything will be helpful.

It’s really easy. Let’s begin. We will update this page when we run out of licenses.

Disclaimer: This is a first come first serve basis. Once you install iPhone OS 3.0 Beta on your phone you will not be able to revert back to 2.2.1 so be absolutely sure you want it. This is not the actual iPhone it is just the software. Single Grain is not liable to for any damages to your phone. If you do run into any problems we are more than happy to help. Please do this at your own risk

Update 1: The giveaway starts 3/25/09 at 10AM PST NOT RIGHT AWAY! You will not only have to post on twitter about the giveaway you will need to blog about it too. Please do both and include the URL of the blog post in your email with the UDID Number.

Update 2: Please make sure your UDID number is at least 40 hex characters. If it is not correct and you install your iphone it will not activate.

Update 3: We are almost out. Its only been 1 hours and we only have about 15 left.

Update 4: We are out of licenses. Stay tuned as we are going have another giveaway soon.

John Murphy’s Feedback:

1.) For some reason I can’t send SMS to multiple recipients anymore. It keeps giving me a “message send failure”
2.) My sound is a little out of whack. Intermittently the keyboard click and unlock/lock notifiers don’t work.
3.) MMS doesn’t work. I assume that’s an other carrier thing but who knows.

Other than that I love it and I assume these bugs will be worked out before the official release. Thanks for the opportunity to try it out!!

Single Grain is working on making an iPhone App. We are looking for some iPhone App developers so if you are a developer or know of a good developer please contact us. In order to spread the word we having a giveaway.

So let’s get down to business… We are giving away 99 licenses of iPhone/iPod Touch 3.0 Beta. All you have to do is spread the word and give us feedback.

1. Email me your UDID number (Here’s how you find your UDID Number on your iPhone) And we’ll email you the link to download it. Email your information here: sj@singlegrain.com

2. Spread the word. Post this on twitter: “Single Grain’s iPhone 3.0 Beta Giveaway http://tinyurl.com/couock” or email you’re friends or blog about it (We’re using the honor system so please do one of these things).

3. Give Feedback. So once you’ve installed 3.0 OS Beta leave a comment or email us with your feedback. How do you like it? Any bugs? Any particular apps don’t work? Anything will be helpful.

It’s really easy. Let’s began. We will update this page when we run out of licenses.

Disclaimer: This is a first come first serve basis. Once you install iPhone OS 3.0 Beta on your phone you will not be able to revert back to 2.2.1 so be absolutely sure you want it. This is not the actual iPhone it is just the software. Single Grain is not liable to for any damages to your phone. If you do run into any problems we are more than happy to help

iPhone Tips & Tricks:

Tethering your iPhone

iPhone 3.0 Walkthrough

iPhone 3.0 FAQ (Must read before you install)

Update 1: Please be patient as we have a lot of people downloading the iphone 3.0 beta software. Downloads will be slower until we can move to new server. Also please specify what iPhone you have (3G, Orignal iPhone, iPod Touch 1g/2g)

Update 2: Just added iPod Touch 3.0 software. So if you have and ipod touch let me know in the email.

Update 3: We’re out of licenses…We’re gonna do this giveaway again, check back tomorrow for more details.

Update 4: New iPhone 3.0 Beta Giveaway Details

I just wanted to post some pictures from twiist up 5. It was a great networking event at a hanger at the Santa Monica airport. There was everything that makes a good event: booze, free swag, a DJ, and best of all, great people.

Can’t wait to go to the next Twiist Up!

I’m a little late uploading these pictures but I was looking through my iPhoto and relalized that I never got around to post these. Go Rascals!!