Let’s suppose you have a big site launch coming up, or your boss has asked you to begin marketing one of the company’s sites. You know you’ll need to build a ton of links, so you get to work on some research. And behold, you find several sites will to build 1,000 “high-quality” links to your website for the low price of $19.95. Sounds like quite a deal, right? You go out of pocket for those 1,000 links, and sit back waiting for all that juice to come flowing to your site. You’ll be ranking number one in the SERPs in no time.

If that scenario sounds familiar, you might have a few things to learn about link building. Sure, you’ll probably get those 1,000 links as promised. But where will they come from? If you’re lucky, they’ll be generated by an army of robots spamming blog comments and forums for a handful of no-follow, no-worth links. If you’re unlucky, they’ll come from banned or bad neighborhood link farms, and you’ll have a bit of explaining to do when your company’s site gets penalized by search engines.

Good Links are Hard to Find

It’s natural to go after the low-hanging fruit links, the ones that you can just buy and watch flow in. And don’t think for a second that Google isn’t on to the idea. When a page of your site gets a link from another high quality site, Google thinks of the link as a vote. The site, in essence, has voted for your site as being a relevant source of information for [insert anchor text]. For example, I might link out to a site using an anchor text like wireless internet review, which means that I’m actually saying the page I’m linking to is a good source for information on, you guessed it, wireless internet reviews.

But links get a little more complicated. Think of every link as having two parts of value that it can pass — juice and anchor text. To keep things simple, a link passing juice means that it’s not redirected, it’s not marked with a no-follow attribute within the code, and it passes general value to a site, independent of the anchor text. This is why, in some cases, getting a link with the anchor text “click here” or even “this site” can still be valuable, depending on the source.

On the other hand, links pass anchor text, sometimes even independently of juice. In this way, solid link building campaigns can include some no-follow links that, once again depending on the quality of the source, could still pass some keyword value. But all the technical stuff aside, good links are hard to find because they are:

• imbed within relevant and well-written content
• coming from a site with authority and value
• actually seen (meaning the page on which the link appears does get traffic)
• relevant on both ends

If both the linking site and the site receiving the link share the same niche, there’s a good chance that the link anchor text will seem relevant to both sites. In some industries, you’re going to have a very hard time convincing potential competitors to promote your sites. But in most others, you just have to get a little creative.

How to Build Backlinks to Your Site – Anchor Text

No-follow and comment links get a lot of bad press. In truth, no proper link building campaign is complete without a wide variety of low-quality links. If you are actually building links, you need to have some low-quality ones coming in for everything to look natural. This is the same concept as with your anchor text, where having 1,000 links coming in with the same anchor text looks fishy, while a nice mixture of anchor text looks fine. Once again using “wireless internet review” as an example, think of some varieties that still carry the same general relevance:

• reviews of wireless internet
• wireless internet comparison
• wireless internet review 2011
• review wireless internet services
• wireless internet reviews

All five of our above ideas will still suggest relevancy for the original anchor text, while making your link building campaign look natural. Don’t be afraid to mix up anchor text in your link campaign. Doing so can’t hurt your SEO as much as it can help it.

How to Build Backlinks to Your Site – Sources

Now that you understand anchor text, let’s talk about where you’re actually getting those links, starting with what Google wants you to do. Link bait is a broad term used to describe content (whether it’s an article, video, widget, picture, infographic, whatever) that people link to naturally, because they find it:

• unique
• valuable
• funny
• frightening
• scholarly

There are some sites that simply thrive on link bait. For example, most news sites like CNN and MSNBC will receive hundreds of links per day because they publish relevant news articles that people care about. Besides being shared endlessly on Facebook and Twitter, they appear on secondary news sources that want to republish the story. The main idea behind link bait is to create value, controversy, or interest. SEOMoz.org provides a great article on how to create link bait.

One of the most popular ways to build links is through guest posting. This is because, if done right, it’s a win/win situation for both the link builder and the blog owner. The link builder gets the link they so desperately seek, and the blog owner gets some free, and hopefully valuable, content. The best way to guest post is within your own niche, asking your contacts if they would be willing to feature a post you’ve written on their blog. You can do guest post exchanges, but having too many reciprocal links can dilute the value of your links. Simply offer something of value, and you should eventually be able to build some high quality links.

Next, we have the low-hanging fruit like directories, article submission sites, blog comments, and some social media. These are generally low quality links, although submitting to the Yahoo! Directory isn’t a bad idea. Treat directories as a way to build some backlink variety, but nothing more. Submission sites like Ezine can be a place to dump low-quality content decaying on your hard drive to target some SEO keywords, but shouldn’t form your overall strategy.

If you choose to comment on others’ blogs and include a link back to your site, don’t spam. Spam doesn’t do anyone any good. Just like with forums, add value to the conversation or don’t bother. Blog owners are fairly relaxed about including links in comments if you contribute something valuable. Some bloggers even use WordPress plugins like CommentLuv to make sure you get some value from commenting.

If you build a high quality site with relevant and valuable content, the links will eventually come. While low-quality links have always been a strategy for the short-term, good links come only with time and dedication. Even guest posting takes an enormous amount of time and provides significant value, so it’s worth using as a primary link building strategy. But in the end, creating valuable content on your own site is the best way to build links, even if it’s a tough pill to swallow.

Most people believe their website needs to be perfect before it goes live, but my question is, perfect from whose perspective?

I had a lady the other day that was driving my employees crazy!

Every time they would get the website like she wanted, she would come back with another thousand changes, most conflicting with what they had already given us.  I was forced to get involved. And I say forced, because if I am not interested in the website, customer or topic, it’s really difficult for me to care one way or the other how the site turns out. All that matters is that the customer is happy, and we get paid. I am sorry but that’s just me, but I’ve got to pay the bills.

You see, I believe it is the fine tuning and tweaking that goes into the offer, business model, and website that will make or break a business.

I am talking about the tweaking and fine tuning that can only be done after the site has gone live. When a business launches there should be a group of people driving traffic to the site, analyzing how that traffic reacted to the site, and then tweaking, and fine tuning that website before running another group of test.

The problem is that a lot of companies do not want to be associated with an inferior product or one that is lacking in capabilities and the ones that don’t care about their credibility normally don’t have the money for the testing, tweaking and fine tuning that has to been done daily forever.

I’ve been making my living online for the past 10 years and I can tell you, that without the desire and dedication to push a project through, it would be difficult to start a business from nothing with nothing and it become a success.

The desire that motivated me to start, build and continue running Geeks on Steroids has always been money. The problem is that as the need for money declines you begin looking in what areas your time would be best spent, and normally fighting a new start up isn’t the best use of time.

It’s the reason I started this project and dropped the ball.

At this moment and time I do not have the need, time or desire to start a new project. The amount of time it takes to start making money with a new business could be better spent working with one of my older already established businesses.

However as I write this I am reminded of one business I would be interested in, just for fun.

Here lately (lately being for about the last year or so) I’ve been getting bombarded by these so-called local SEO gurus.

Their idea is, you can find people to market your business to off-line, in your local area and tell them how great the online world is. From there you sell them an SEO package worth thousands of dollars.

My problem with this is that if you knew what you were doing you would be marketing your business online and not offline.

You see, small business owners are not stupid.

Don’t get me wrong, I’ve got no doubt that with all the professionally written scripts and emails going around these guys can get some small business owners interested, and even sell a couple. But the majority of small business owners will go online and do some research first.

While these guys are killing themselves running around educating potential victims, I’d like to go online and wait to educate that person before they get ripped off. As the lazy local SEO rolls out of the bed, I am sitting online researching, studying, watching and learning about them. While they are meeting potential victims at local breakfast, lunch, and dinner places, I am buying domain names and building websites. By the time they’ve cold called 200 people to get the first person to agree to meet them, I’ve already gotten their spam email, written and article about them and ranked for their name.

They get the local business all excited about the online adventure and when that business owner gets his credit card in his hand and goes online too make that purchase he’s blocked by my site.

My only problem is I have no desire to do SEO, Outsource SEO or Consult with people.   

But done correctly I think I could get a ton of traffic to the site. I guess you could build a website that reviews SEO’s and enforces the good ones and downgrades the bad ones. You could have a back office that allowed the good SEO’s to write articles and leave comments on articles but have it invitation only.

Other words, you would need three people to vouch for you before you could become a member of the site. Once you became a member you would have access to all kinds of free tools, as well as the ability to write blog post that would show on the site under your name or carry on private chats that are not shown to the outside world. You would also have access to a staff of professional SEO’s as well as SEO and conversion tools.

And while all these tools will make the site a home away from home for most SEO’s the fact that the website is getting thousands of visitors per day who are looking for SEO’s will make it a must have for anyone looking to start an SEO business.

Do you ever wonder what it really takes to get thousands of links to your website with a small investment? Web developers use link building all the time, whether it’s in the form of countless directory submissions or guest posting. But link baiting is so much more powerful, as long as you know how to do it. People tend to associate link baiting with a “viral or fail” attitude — either a single piece of content gets thousands of links or it was a failure. But that’s not really true. Link baiting is doing what Google wants you to do, creating valuable content that people want to link to, even when you don’t ask them to.

But creating link bait is not as easy as filming your cat walking on the top of the couch, or writing yet another Top 10 Nobody Cares list. Fortunately, however, it’s not as difficult as you might think.

What is Link Bait?

Link bait is content, whether it’s an article, video, picture, widget, or infographic, that’s interesting to a large audience. It stands out as being humorous, valuable, or referential to your niche community. It’s also well designed (or sometimes, as you might find, very poorly designed) to attract attention. Best of all, link bait attracts organic links. While the power of link bait can be limited for keyword SEO (as people are not always going to link to you using the anchor text you want), it is the absolute best way to build authority to a “brandable” domain name. Look no further for an example than a site like Mashable.com.

It shouldn’t take long for business owners to realize the potential behind link bait. After all, almost every television commercial is designed to be memorable – whether it’s sleek, funny, controversial, or provides truly valuable information. Why should the concept be any different with online content?

It’s important to remember that almost any topic can become link bait, depending on how you treat the subject matter. For example, an article entitled “wireless providers in my area” is obviously meant to satisfy an SEO keyword need – but it’s not going to get many links on its own. On the other hand, what if you were to create a widget that matches a user with all of the wireless providers in the area based on their price range, location, technical needs, and housing situation? That could very easily become something people would want to share with others in the niche – link bait at its finest.

How to Create Link Bait

Now that you hopefully understand the power behind link bait, and how it can be applied to any business, it’s time to learn how to create it. Depending on your budget and technical/creative prowess, you might be limited at first – but that’s alright. There are plenty of ways to create link bait without needing to be an all-star content writer or a brilliant graphic designer.

Free to Cheap Options

Link Directories – These tend to be overdone, but I’m including them because they’re easy for anyone to create. Simply find a niche, like “hedgehogs as pets,” and compile a list of links to any sites that you feel have solid information on the topic, or a portion of the topic. Not only to people like to bookmark these pages and link to them, but the people you linked to in the directory may notice your “shout-out” and return the favor.

News-Worthy Articles – Follow Google Trends and news websites closely and create content based on that. Don’t just dryly rewrite the news stories – give them an intelligent, or humorous spin. For example, you might create an article called “The Downward Spiral of [Insert Celebrity]” which tells a story, and links to some major news sources for credibility.

Write Something Scary – Fear really does sell. While you won’t be making anything up if you don’t want to land in hot water, you can take a topic and apply a sense of urgency in an article, perhaps even warning consumers of a danger. Consider the topic “dog food.” You can easily get some clicks or links to an article called “10 Poisonous Chemicals Found in Dog Food” – at least more links than “How to Choose Dog Food.” Remember, don’t fabricate anything to get some links. But do look for information that others might avoid.

Getting on the Expensive Side

Create a Widget – Widgets are absolutely fantastic link bait if you know a programmer willing to work on the cheap, or if you have a decent budget. Widgets don’t fall under the typical umbrella of duplicate content like articles do. So, you have to get your widget out there as much as possible for it to become link bait. The idea behind the widget is to create a useful tool, like a calculator, that people will literally imbed on their blogs or websites. This, in turn, gives you countless links back to your own. We don’t need any more mortgage calculators by the way, but we could use a calculator to help determine how our daily meat consumption matches up to lions, tigers, and bears (oh my…).

Create an Infographic – If done well, and it should be, an infographic is also an expensive investment. Don’t use an infographic to add some pictures to your content – that’s a waste of time. Instead, use the graphics to literally become the content. You could create an inforgraphic listing the tallest mountains in the world with some pictures of mountains to the side. Or, you could have the pictures of the mountains be the data, like a graph. The key to making good infographics is to create them so every image belongs in the graphic. But keep the word count as low as possible – people don’t like to read paragraphs in their graphics.

As you can see, it’s not really all that difficult to create link bait. While you might distribute the content to some friends, the idea is that the majority of people will come to you – not the other way around. Make sure people know your content exists, but don’t force it. You’ll want to have some accurate data to see which efforts work and which don’t anyway. And remember, one solid piece of link bait is worth 100 forced links, every time.

It almost seems like there are as many SEO firms as there are small businesses on the Internet. They all tend to promise the same thing – number one rankings for your keywords in just a few short weeks. And some of these SEO firms actually deliver on this promise. Most, however, do not. If you do see your rankings shoot up for a few weeks, it’s best to be a bit suspicious unless there’s a clear explanation like your site structure was off, or the firm was able to get a search engine suspension or ban lifted.

SEO can be very complicated, and it can be fairly easy. Most SEO revolves around creating high quality content, and generating links to your site using intelligent anchor text. For example, you notice that the term CLEAR 4G is getting a significant amount of searches in Google, and you’d like to have your own wireless Internet site get a taste of some of that traffic. In it’s simplest form, SEO would involve obtaining some links back to your site with the anchor text CLEAR 4G. Obviously, SEO can and usually does get a bit more complicated, creating the need for SEO firms.

But the truth is that not every small business needs to hire an SEO firm. And, if you do choose to hire one, you have to be very careful that you don’t get ripped off. With all of the potential dangers that come from SEO, and the mystery surrounding many of the practice’s concepts, it’s quite easy for an SEO firm to destroy your online business. When you invest in an SEO firm, it’s important to understand the dangers, educate yourself on the process, and identify specific goals.

The Dangers of SEO Firms

Of course, the primary danger of hiring an SEO firm is that they may not be able to deliver the results you need to stay competitive. Worse yet, their efforts could end up getting you no results at all. As you likely invested a great deal of money in the services, this can be detrimental to your bottom line. But just how detrimental can they be? Rand Fishkin at SEOMoz.com published a post in 2007 outlining his take on the general range of SEO service prices, and came up with the following for mid-range SEO services:

• Consultation/Review of Site: $2,500
• Link Building: $5,000
• Keyword Research: $500
• Viral Content Creation/Marketing: $7,500
• Monthly SEO Services: $7,500

If you’re shelling out almost $8,000 a month for SEO services that are not effective in giving you a decent ROI, you might as well be flushing money down the toilet.

Of course, there’s another danger of hiring an SEO firm, and one which can be significantly more costly. In early 2011, the New York Times published a revealing report on the fashion giant JC Penney, following allegations that the company had illegitimately gained backlinks when they began ranking highly in SERPs for terms that had many confused, like “bedding” or “area rugs.” As it turns out, an SEO firm that JC Penney hired simply farmed out links from unrelated sites, some of which included topics like casinos and property rentals. Needless to say, a lot of money had to be thrown at the problem, not to mention the amount of money JC Penney was likely paying the SEO firm for such “incredible” results.

And the problems caused by poor SEO can follow your site for what seems like an eternity, with bad neighborhood links festering in your backlink profile like scarlet letters. Ignoring the initial cost of the service itself, how much time and money will you spend undoing the potential harm to your website. It’s likely to be far more than the SEO firm could have hoped to make off you. Fortunately, however, there are some things you can do to protect yourself from such dangers.

Learn a Little SEO

It’s not all that complicated to learn the basics of SEO, and we’re not talking about becoming a guru. The more you know about SEO, however, the better service you can hope to get from an SEO firm. If SEO is done right, it’s not a matter of the tactics being some big mystery. Instead, any meaningful SEO task takes a great deal of time – time you should be spending on other aspects of your business. Link building is an especially arduous task that is best outsourced to an SEO firm.

Learn how anchor text, content, backlinks, and basic site code all factor into your overall site. If you understand how keywords work, you might not even need to hire an SEO firm to perform a keyword report for your site – you’ll already have an idea of what you’d like to target. Better still, you’ll know if the SEO firm you hire is completely missing the mark when they deliver their first reports.

There are countless good articles on basic SEO, and a lot of very poor articles. Business Insider has a list of the 10 Basic SEO Tips to Get You Started that is a quick primer into the rudimentary aspects of SEO. Any articles on sites like SEOBook.com are also excellent resources written by one of the industry’s leading experts.

Outline Some Basic SEO Goals

Before you approach an SEO firm, make sure you outline some basic goals (another area where some small knowledge of SEO can help). They should be as tangible as possible. For example, don’t approach an SEO firm saying “I’d like to get more traffic to my site.” Instead, say “I’d like to appear on page one of Google’s search results for the phrase rubber ducks.” If you’re interested in building links, come up with a general idea of your budget, and what you expect to receive. Some SEO firms will charge per link, while others will charge a contract fee, sometimes splitting it into chunks.

If possible, outline what’s acceptable and what’s not. If you can, try to reserve the right to reject any links that you do not feel are legitimate.

As long as you have some basic knowledge of SEO, set some reasonable and tangible goals, and monitor the project closely, there’s no reason to fear SEO firms. But be aware of the dangers and be prepared to make changes if things aren’t going as planned. Your SEO firm should provide regular updates on their progress, as well as clear accounting for any bills they send. Keep your expectations reasonable, but don’t let an SEO firm gouge you for unnecessary services.

Webmasters often forget just how important structure is in a website. And it can be an easy mistake to make. You likely add hundreds of pages of content after a site’s initial launch, based on new keyword data or to just get some fresh content up for SEO purposes. But you can easily betray your original site plan, and make your site difficult to navigate. Don’t make the mistake of thinking that the human visitors are the only ones that will have difficulty navigating your site. If your URL structure is off, or you have pages that are more than a few clicks from the homepage, Google may take notice as well — which will likely translate into lost rankings.

Why Website Structure Matters

One question that new web developers always seem to get wrong is “what do searchers usually click on first in search results?” The tendency is to repeat the mantra of “the first result.” But this is actually seldom true. Humans aren’t algorithmic robots. If the second result appears more relevant than the first, searchers will almost always click on it before blindly visiting the first result. In a perfect world, the first website on a SERP will be the most relevant page to a search query. This doesn’t always happen, however.

The same concept translates to your website. Every single portion of your site navigation needs to point visitors in the right direction, from the URL structure on down to your individual pages of content. If a site or page appears to lack relevancy in its structure, your bounce rate will soar. If you have a large site, think about how much content you could add before needing to change the navigation – 20%, 25%, 30%? A good rule to follow is that your site navigation is well implemented when you can add 30% more content without a navigation update.

Structuring Your URLs

Navigation is fairly simple to understand if you think about URL structure. Let’s say you have a wireless Internet service lead generation website, mywirelesssite.com, and a piece of content titled Compare T-Mobile 4G internet and CLEAR. As you can see from the page linked to that title, the URL structure is not what you might normally expect, or http://www.mywirelesssite.com/compare-T-Mobile-4G-Internet-and-CLEAR.html. Instead, the web developer shortens the URL to simply include /tmobile-vs-clear. This will ultimately allow for further subpages without the URL getting out of control. For example, the web developer might eventually want to add pages for each state – /tmobile-vs-clear/alaska or even city with /tmobile-vs-clear/alaska/anchorage.

With the original URL structure, the URL for the page could quickly get out of control. Use your URLs to quickly structure your website, not fit keywords into the address — this does nothing but overcomplicate things. With long URLS and poor site structure, your site will be difficult to index, and deep pages may likely not see a SERP for months.

To properly structure your URLs, create a simple spreadsheet that begins with your homepage in column A, mysite.com, for example. Next, think of all the primary navigation pages that you might have. On a business site, these might include services, locations, about us, contact us, and testimonials. These become your first extended URLs as:

• http://mysite.com/services
• http://mysite.com/locations
• http://mysite.com/about-us
• http://mysite.com/contact-us
• http://mysite.com/testimonials

If you were to flesh out one of those sections (we’ll use services as an example), your URL structure might begin to look something like:

• http://mysite.com/services/roofing
• http://mysite.com/services/painting
• http://mysite.com/services/scaffolding
• http://mysite.com/services/paving
• http://mysite.com/services/refinishing

Everything looks clean and simple, and it’s clear what each page’s relevance to your overall site is simply by looking at the URL. You could have done it the hard way with something like http://mysite.com.com/roofing-services. But, to a search engine, this looks like a whole new category in itself, and can get messy when it’s time to update content, update your navigation, or even switch up your design/coding.

Google offers some additional tips on URL structure, including warning site owners to not create URLs that are long ID numbers rather than easy to read words.

Addressing Physical Site Navigation

Take a look at the irs.gov site map. You’ll notice some fairly broad categories like “Individuals,” “Businesses,” and “Retirement Plans Community.” Not only are these clear in the site map, but you can locate each category in the top navigation of the site. While the site could still use some work on structure, and the site map is a bit out of date, you can see the main idea – just about every page on the site is two or three clicks from the homepage, even though the site is quite large.

With the Panda update, Google has placed emphasis on two major things – high quality content and intelligent site structure. The main reason why many theorists believe content mills are tanking in the SERPs is because they can’t possibly organize millions of pages to be only a few clicks from the home page because they were never really meant to be organized that way.

Structuring Content

The majority of Internet readers tend to scan content, not read it in its entirety. A study as early as October 1997 found that 16% of web readers read content word-by-word. Do you really think that’s changed in a social media era dominated by the likes of “teaspoon content” sites like Twitter and Facebook? This scanning makes it necessary to properly structure content to get the most important ideas to your readers as quickly as possible. Beyond using bulleted lists, lower word counts, specific (not clever) subheads, and highlighted keywords, you have to pay close attention to your page’s HTML structure.

It should go without saying that you should have an “H1″ or title tag for every page – this is important for structure and SEO. But you should also include 2-3 H2 subheads, and even an H3 for a sub-subhead. Just like the larger text helps break up content for readers, the subhead tags help search engines scan your pages faster, and determine relevancy more accurately.

Site structure really comes from careful planning, intelligent design, and a commitment to providing high quality, relevant content. Beyond some of the more technical aspects like using proper code and paying attention to URL structure, most aspects of a site’s structure should fall into place naturally. Remember that organization is paramount, and your site should be fine.