• Moderated by Jake Bailee
• Ken McGaffin from WordTracker
• Dixon Jones from Receptional
• Rob Kerry from Ayima

Up first was Ken McGaffin

First, a definition - What is cutting edge? - the most fashionable or the latest and most advanced, they don’t mean the same thing.
Example - Wordtracker free keyword tool. Most people used Overture then moved to a paid tool. So Wordtracker reacted quickly and pushed out a free tool.

• Emailed their list of experts and writers
• Pushed a release out on PRWEB

Result: a feature piece on the WSJ & Thousands of inbound links, many from quality sites

Then he made a slight change in the positioning of the link from the free tool to the paid tool, and traffic shot up dramatically. Don’t forget your SEO and to look at your analytics

1. Find out who links to you now, and who brings you traffic
2. Get the most out of what you already have
   1. Encourage deep lnks to specific links
   2. Ask for Keyword rich Links
   3. Explore relationships
   4. Consider Joint Publications
3. Look at market segments where you’re weak
   1. Carry out kw research
   2. Find the important authority sites
   3. Test markets with articles off and on site
4. Look for emerging markets and establish your position early- Microtrends by Mark J Penn (book)
   1. Does the market exist and is it relevant
   2. Use PR to establish position
   3. Customize product offerings
5. Plan initiatives for the year ahead
   1. Identify the Business Objectives
   2. Then Create Content and foundation
   3. Launch
   • http://labs.receptional.com/links
   • User: smxlondon Password: smxlondon

Next up Dixon Jones
Links are now such a large part of the SEO equation, link building is so much more necessary
Getting indexed was easy

Link tool available for the next 2 weeks

1. Strategic Partnerships
2. Out with the bomb (Google bombing allegedly removed) - still works on image results
3. Out of space - Google Earth - Maxim giant poster
4. Insider Trading - Internal Linking - Siloing
5. Insider Tricks - mistyped urls - mod speeling

Last up Rob Kerry
What’s hot and what’s not?

• The good - DMOZ, Yahoo, BOTW, etc
• The bad - Built for Search Engine Directories
• The ugly - fake page rank directories, spammy backlinks, promoting link exchange and accepting all sites

Google promotes snitching on link builders
Quality over Quantity - 2 great links can be better than 1,000 bad links
High Page rank != high rankings - link age and topic are becoming more important
Image is everything - Some webmasters respond better to link requests based on the picture they form of you.
For sites that link to you, to get spiders to realise that they’re updated send the url to pingomatic
Paid links
Text link ads publishers losing their ability to pass on link value
Other major paid link networks get filtered using pattern matching
Even link acquisitions are under threat from ’sponsored links’ and ‘advertise here’ footprints

Don’t waste your money:
Avoid broker footprints
Be stubborn when agreeing upon a link location
Try Paid Reviews, no footprint and great links
Stay away from link exchanges
Link pages make your site look bad to both visitors and search engines
Backlinks from link pages hold minimal value
it is the most obvious form of artificial linking

Behold the marvelous magic link network
Search Agency Spam networks
#1 today gone tomorrow
Digital point link co-op
A cross between a link exchange and link exchange
Currently used and abused in the finance and ringtone verticals
Content for links
Offer content in exchange for links
Control where and how your links appear
Guarantees a quality page for your link
Cost effective for those with in-house editorial
Publishers don’t see it as a paid link
In line links are much safer than blog rolls & Directories

Filed under: Education and Training, SEO on Friday, November 16th, 2007 by Simon Heseltine |
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