Just a little humor today.  Can anyone else relate?

Vertical Measures

We’re always talking about keeping links fresh and how important it is to keep up with your link building efforts. It’s great to talk about, but it can be daunting after months of trying to generate new and different links that will register well with the search engines. This week we thought we’d give you ten quick ways to add some links so that you can take a breather from the strenuous stuff and still feel good about adding real link value to your site. Each one should not take more than 5 minutes, a total of 50 minutes!

• www.worldsiteindex.com (free Tue-Fri)
• www.webotopia.org ($15)
• www.all-linkdirectory.com

Vertical Measures

The main purpose of this blog is to present link building best practices so that others can learn from our experiences – good and bad.  We have written many posts giving tips and advice, but we would really like to hear from our faithful readers. 

We realize most of us in the business do not want to give away our "very best secrets", but surely some of you have had one or two nice successes that you can provide that will help others and still not reveal any strategic concepts you may have developed. 

As always we will certainly give you credit and link juice if you add your story below.  Feel free to change the name of your client to protect them. We will get things started with this success story…

We have a major client that has many related websites, all different domains, most on unique class C IP addresses.  For this example we will say they are flower shops.  There are 15 franchises, all with their own unique names and locations around the United States.  They have outsourced their link building to us, asking us to get as many contextual links on quality sites as possible, using a mix of their business name and some important keyword phrases for the anchor text.

We are tasked with getting them about 5 – 8 new links each month for each store.  We look for links in a variety of places, including niche directories, appropriate bloggers, some articles, etc.  But we also do some very basic approaches to link building that many often over look.   Some webmasters think link builders cheat or use some magic to get the job done, but really it just boils down to working hard, smart  and efficiently.

In this example, we just conducted a Google search for something like "flower shop links", which is about as simple as it gets.   We went through the results and quickly found a few sites where we could add links to links pages on their site.  The pageranks were decent, but these were link pages, so not the best link juice (although later some of them showed in Google’s backlinks). 

But then we hit on a nice success.  Down on page 2 or 3 of our search results, we came across a site that was all about the flower industry.  It had a few pages that were categorized by "flower types", "flower wholesalers", "flower growers", etc., but no "flower shops".  These pages were perfect.  Nice descriptions for the sites listed and only 10-20 sites in each category.   So we wrote to them asking if they would be interested in adding a page called "flower shops", we would provide all the content for 15 different flower stores across the US.  They would get fresh, unique content, and we would be willing to compensate them for their time to add the page.

They responded with an offer to add the content for $150 which we quickly accepted.  We sent over our page of content which included 15 paragraphs of great, highly relevant text and our text links back to our client’s 15 flower shops.  The best part is, this would be considered an authority site, as it was old, had a PR6 home page and many PR4 & PR5 inner pages.   All of their "category link pages" were PR4 and we are certain this new page will provide plenty of link juice to all 15 of our client’s stores in no time (we also sent a few links to the new page as insurance).  Not bad!

Vertical Measures