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Four Creative Link Building Tactics – Whiteboard Friday

admin — Sat, 04 Sep 2010 02:30:04 +0000

In this week’s Whiteboard Friday Rand Fishkin clues you in on four link building tactics that you likely haven’t heard about. Given the importance of link building to Search Engine Optimisation, this video should prove to be worth its (virtual) weight in gold. (I mean that in the best possible way ;-p)

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Search Engine Optimisationmoz – Search Engine Optimisation Software

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Hey, Search Engine Optimisationmoz fans! Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Today we’re talking about link building and specifically four tactics that are relatively creative, not talked about a ton in the Search Engine Optimisation sphere, that can help you get some direct links to virtually any kind of site.

Let’s start with number one up here, giving testimonials. I know this sounds a little odd. You’re thinking to yourself, "Wait, I’m a marketer. I should be trying to get testimonials about my product, my service, my company." But in fact, give and you shall receive.

So in this case, if are you are a site owner and you have a business and you say nice things about a product that you use, products that you like, free web apps, tools on the webs, blogs, resources, whatever it might be, or specific products or companies, and you email them and say, "Hey, I just wanted to let you know, I really like your service. I enjoy using it. If you’d like to use this as a testimonial, feel free." You can say some nice words and then have a, "My name is Rand Fishkin and I am the CEO of Search Engine Optimisationmoz." When they publish that, they will take it and put it on their GoodProduct.com website, and you can see that gets embedded right into their site and it will link back over to your site.

So, it is a great way to build up a repertoire of contacts, build good relations, and do something nice for the people who are doing something nice for you. I would definitely not do this disingenuously. Make sure that you are actually recommending things that you would recommend to a real friend. It will come back and bite you otherwise. But if you do this, you can get those great links too.

The second one, design galleries. This is an odd case because you do have to jump through some hoops. If you can contract some of those exceptional, high quality, CSS and web design folks to build a really great looking site, something that looks nothing like this horrific drawing. I don’t even know why I put so many boxes and lines. I am sure there was a reason. You can get featured on sites like CSS REMIX or Drawer or CSS Gallery. If you do a search for CSS galleries, in fact, you will find literally hundreds in the first few hundred results of places where you can get a live link pointing back from those pages just by submitting your site and having a site that looks great.

Now, what I would recommend is that before you go through the design process make sure that you visit a lot of these places and get inspired. See what makes it. See what is hot right now. Those designs have the added benefit of being often very good for users. Using CSS properly means that you’re loading pages, you are keeping code and design separate. It can often increase your rate of attracting links as well. Linking and quality of design are a direct relationship. As the quality of design rises, so too does the likelihood that people of all kinds, not just design galleries but of all kinds, will link to your site. They’ll find you more credible. They’ll want to show you off. They’ll want to share. This is a great investment both for the direct links you can get and for the future.

Number three. This is sort of an interesting one. Thanks to sites out there like HARO, which is Help a Reporter Out, and a few others, I think PR Newswire runs one as well, you can be a press source simply by combing through databases or lists of people who say, "Hey, I am a reporter in need of a story about a business that keeps dogs in their office and what the impact of having dogs around is. Can we interview you, show off your business?" Those stories when they get written about, they might appear in sources as big as "The New York Times" or as small as your local newspaper, but they appear online as well. When they do, that link will point back to your site giving you a link from a nice press resource, which is a great place to get a link.

Number four, the last one here, turning raw numbers into a data story. I like this a lot because the idea here is that people produce a lot of interesting data about virtually every industry, but they don’t always do great things with that data. They’ll produce interesting numbers or numbers that seem boring on their surface but can be used in interesting ways. It is up to you to be creative about, hmm, okay, comScore published this, Nielsen published that, Forrester published this data research. If I combine some of those numbers or if I think about how they play out, I can come up with a great story and maybe some cool graphics too about what that means. I can take some of the data over time and build a story about what’s happening. I can show that data next to something like Google Trends data or Search Insights data or data from a second or third source. When I combine those, I have great link and media bait. The nice thing about producing this is it is not just sort of classic link bait where, "Oh, that’s interesting, I want to share that." But it is interesting because when you are the reference resource for the data, everyone else who writes about the story or who wants to share it has to link back to you.

A good example of this, check out www.Search Engine Optimisationmoz.org/dp/free-charts and you’ll see a bunch of places where we have taken data from great folks like Eightfold Logic used to be Enquisite, comScore, Hitwise, Nielsen, Forrester, and we’ve combined them into unique and interesting ways to view that data. We didn’t even do much with it, just showed sort of, "Hey, they said that 30% of searches come from Europe and 40% come from Asia, etc., so we’re going to build a pie chart of that that looks great and people can embed that." Now when they do, they link back to Search Engine Optimisationmoz and have the source in there. We’ll always say what the original source is too. But by hosting this stuff and creating it, you get all these great links.

All right everyone, I hope we have helped out your link building efforts here today. I look forward to the discussion in the comments. We will see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.

Video transcription by SpeechPad.com

If you have any other advice that you think is worth sharing, please post it in the comments! This post is very much a work in progress.

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A New Day, A New SEOmoz

admin — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 01:30:29 +0000

Posted by randfish

It’s been a wild few weeks at the mozplex. Today wrapped up the amazing mozinar with our half-day tools training just in time to launch the new version of Search Engine Optimisationmoz. Should we slow down this crazy pace? Nah.

If you’re feeling a sense of deja vu, don’t worry; it’s perfectly normal. We’re the same old moz, but with a new look, faster loading pages and a surprising amount of new functionality. Let’s walk through it together, shall we?

Big Improvements to PRO Membership

It’s a good day to be PRO; we’ve just released:

• A brand new PRO Dashboard, that’s designed to be the center of everything you can do with your membership, including access to your web app campaigns, tools and tool reports, webinars, Q+A, discount store, etc. If it’s part of PRO, you’ll find it in the Dashboard.

• The web app has made some big improvements and we’re now announcing a full public beta – campaigns should be faster, more accurate and dramatically less buggy. There’s also some cool new functionality I’ll cover below.

• The dramatically upgraded Search Engine Optimisation Tools page, which will likely show off plenty of tools you may not have seen/heard about until now.

• Slide decks from our PRO Tools Training are now downloadable. We had a highly interactive, terrificly valuable day sharing tips, tricks and applications for the data and resources and wanted to give you a small taste of that experience by making those slides available.

If you’ve been curious about what’s in PRO membership, there’s a new PRO Tour section that gives you a more complete look at the features and functionality. Also – the last chance to get PRO at $79/month and be locked into the rate before it rises to $99 is now – after Friday, the price change goes into effect.

Zoinks! A New Search Engine Optimisationmoz Website

Rub your eyes a bit and have a look around. We’ve done a considerable amount of work to make pages load faster, let the design highlight the content in a cleaner fashion and added a few fun bits, too. Big changes include:

• A new home to Learn Search Engine Optimisation. I’ve recorded an "Intro to Search Engine Optimisation" video and we’ve made all of our learning-focused content available through that page (nearly all of it is entirely FREE!)

• A renewed focus on YOUmoz and the Blog (both of which are featured more prominently on the homepage). We’ve re-designed all of these to help make them more useful and usable, as well as focusing on the content itself with a less-intrusive design. As always, we’ve kept a strong focus on comments and participation and we’re planning to do even more with it in the future.

• More accessibility to our Search Engine Optimisation tools, including a free sneak peek at our LDA Labs tool (more about that in my next post)

There’s lots more coming soon (a new about section, upgrades to the marketplace, more free information in the Learn Search Engine Optimisation section, etc.) so keep an eye out.

The Web App is Now in Public Beta

Our private beta launch to PRO members had more than 2,000 folks create thousands of campaigns. While the feedback has been phenomenal (your very kind tweets really helped keep our engineers pushing through sleepless nights and crates of pizza), we know there were a lot of bugs and missing functionality in the early release. Starting today, the app is far more stable, speedy and powerful. Crawls should come back consistently, rankings should more consistent and accurate and issues/recommendations are rocking.

We’ve also added a brand new feature – one of our most requested – exportable PDF reports for rankings (with crawl diagnostics and on-page reports coming very soon). As Adam Feldstein, our head of Product, discussed today in his roadmap presentation at the tools training, next on the list is additional crawl issues, Google Analytics integration and exciting new functionality for competitive comparisons in the link analysis tab.

As always, we welcome feedback – your messages have been instrumental in helping us improve, and while we’re feeling good about this wider launch, the web app is likely staying in beta for another few months as we add features and continue to tweak, bug fix and get better.

Still Ironing Out Some Kinks

There’s a few known issues with the new site that should be cleaned up in the next 12-24 hours. These include a bit of CSS oddness on the Beginner’s Guide and the Keyword Difficulty tool (though both still function), the thumbs highlighting being a bit softer than intended (for thumbs up/down you’ve already left), some headline/text font sizes and spacing, etc. Sadly, we’ve also temporarily broken the long beloved functionality of highlighting "new" comments in a post – that should be back soon.

I also noted that we had some issues with Domain Authority in our last push of the Linkscape update. Amazingly, thanks to the hard work of our engineering team, we’re expecting to have new scores up in the next few days (rather than taking a full 2 weeks). We still need to run some tests, but we’re hoping to fix many of the odd outlier issues.

We Love Your Feedback

If you see anything you love, hate or think might be an error, we’d love to hear from you. Every page on the site now has a "Feedback" button on the far left-hand side and we read those obsessively! Of course, you can also leave us comments on this post.

Thanks so much for joining in the adventure that is Search Engine Optimisationmoz. In the weeks and months to come, well…. let’s just say you ain’t seen nothing yet

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The Evolving Ecosystem

admin — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 01:30:06 +0000

Just over four months ago, at Chirp, our Twitter developer conference, I talked about how “Twitter is too hard” and what we’re doing to address that.

One major area of difficulty I highlighted was getting Twitter on your phone. We did iPhone user tests and confirmed that even though there was a plethora of third-party Twitter apps, people were having trouble finding and selecting one because none were called “Twitter.” This kept them from using Twitter at all. For this reason, we acquired Tweetie and turned it into Twitter for iPhone, complete with a new user sign-up experience.

Mobile apps – Everywhere
We quickly understood that we were doing users a disservice by not having a great client on each of the major mobile platforms. So, we took a similar approach with Twitter for BlackBerry (developed by RIM) and Twitter for Android, which launched a new version this week.

This strategy has been quite successful. Total mobile users has jumped 62 percent since mid-April, and, remarkably, 16 percent of all new users to Twitter start on mobile now, as opposed to the five percent before we launched our first Twitter-branded mobile client. As we had hoped in April, these clients are bringing more people into Twitter, and, even better, they are attracting and retaining active users. Indeed, 46 percent of active users make mobile a regular part of their Twitter experience.

How people are using Twitter
Our Twitter for iPhone and Twitter for BlackBerry clients are now two of the most popular ways to use Twitter. This may not be surprising. What may be more surprising are the other top ways people use the service. The following chart shows the top ten applications people have used to access Twitter in the last 30 days. This is based on number of unique users. That is, out of all the people who logged into their Twitter account during the month, what percentage did so via each service. (The total is more than 100% because people often use more than one app.)

As this data shows, while smart phone clients are important, there are even more people who use the mobile Twitter web site and/or SMS. We’ve been seeing strong growth in both of these areas.

You’ll also note that third-party clients continue to play an important role for many people. And, it should be underscored that users of programs like TweetDeck are some of the most active and frequent users—which is why, along with the nature of how these clients work, a disproportionate amount of the traffic from Twitter runs through such tools.

And, while the percentage of overall users drops off pretty sharply after the few listed here, there are a tremendous number of other apps that people are using, not necessarily as their main Twitter client, but as an alternative way to create or view Tweets. The number of registered OAuth applications is now at almost 300,000—this number has nearly tripled since Chirp. (This can include multiple instances of the same software.)

It’s great to see this kind of variety and growth in the ecosystem as it moves beyond basic Twitter clients. These new services help people get the most out of Twitter, contributing to user growth and new business opportunities—both of which are critical to the long-term viability of the ecosystem. We’re making great progress in these areas—we currently have more than 145 million registered users and the performance of our Promoted Products has exceeded our expectations. But we still have lots of room to grow and improve. We look forward to seeing what’s next.

Twitter for iPad: Sharing content in Tweets

admin — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 01:30:02 +0000

People are increasingly sharing different types of information on Twitter. For example, Tweets point to web pages, photos, videos, hashtags, people, check-ins, and more. Exploring Tweets is a great way to discover new and interesting information. And with devices of all shapes and sizes connecting to the Internet, we’re constantly looking for new ways to make this easier. To date, we’ve created applications for a variety of mobile phones, giving you instant access to Tweets and great content when you’re on the go.

Today we are bringing Tweets to a device that really lets content shine – the iPad. Twitter for iPad takes advantage of the iPad’s fluid touch interface, letting you move lots of information around smoothly and quickly – without needing to open and close windows or click buttons. There are a few things we want to point out that make this app a really fast and fun way to read real-time content.

Panes: Tapping on a Tweet opens a pane to the right. Depending on the content in that Tweet, you’ll see a video or photo, or maybe a news story, or perhaps another Tweet. You can continue tapping on Tweets, opening new panes, and getting new content as long as you’d like to. And, it’s really easy to move between panes by swiping to the right or left.

Media: When you tap a video link or open a web page with an embedded video, you can play that video inline. And, let’s be honest, video is great but sometimes it can take some time to load. The panes in Twitter for iPad let you look through your timeline while a video is loading, and then you can just swipe back to the video when it’s ready to play. You can also pinch on a video to watch it fullscreen.

Gestures: You can pinch on a Tweet to quickly view details about the author and to take actions on a Tweet, such as reply or retweet. Put two fingers together and pull down on a Tweet to peek at the replies, showing the entire conversation leading to that Tweet.

No need to login: You don’t even need to sign up to get started with Twitter for iPad. We’ve selected great Twitter accounts that you can see in various categories, such as Art & Design, Sports, and News. You can also search, view trends, and find breaking news. Sign up at any time to create your own timeline and start tweeting.

Twitter for iPad is available worldwide from the App Store. Try it out and let me, @lorenb, and @bhaggs know what you think.

SEO and Web Hosting – The Connection

admin — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 21:11:38 +0000

Search engine optimization is the best way to get consistent traffic to your web site without having to continuously invest money in advertising and other forms of marketing and promotion. By optimizing your web sites properly you can bring in a steady flow of traffic and forget about marketing and other annoying and repetitive aspects of online business. In fact, many webmasters spend the majority of their time trying to find more ways to increase their search engine ranking and traffic. Unfortunately, many webmasters don’t realize they’ve already hurt their chances of being as successful online by choosing the wrong web hosting plan. Contrary to popular belief, there is a solid connection between web hosting and search engine optimization.

IP Addresses and SEO

For the advanced SEO expert that routinely does link building through various web 2.0 properties, the most obvious aspect of a web hosting plan that has an impact on SEO is the amount of IP addresses given to each webmaster. When search engines index web pages they do so with automated crawlers that index every aspect of the page and site, including the web site’s IP address. If you own a network of web sites and you would like to build a link network using these sites, then you will need to have a separate IP address for each web site. Fortunately, IP addresses are not a major factor for webmasters that don’t own a lot of web sites that are interlinking in the same niche.

Hosting Reliability and Features

Most people don’t realize that an unreliable hosting network can have a negative impact on a web site’s search engine ranking and site indexing. When your web site is down (as it often may be with unreliable web hosting) search engine robots will be unable to index your new pages. This may have a very negative impact on the amount of pages that are indexed for your site, and how often updated pages are indexed in the search engine results.

A powerful hosting plan will also be able to handle more software installations and tasks, which can be especially useful if you are using automated software for link building or to perform other mundane tasks involved with SEO.

Robots.txt

The robots.txt file is another overlooked connection between your web hosting plan and your SEO efforts. The robots.txt file is a file that is located on your web server, which dictates how robots (particularly search engine bots) interact with your web site. If the robot.txt file is set to dis-allow all robots then your site will not be able to get ranked by any search engine, leaving you without any form of SEO traffic. Most hosting companies leave this file blank or do not include, so it is important to verify whether or not the robots.txt file is present in the web server that hosts your web site.

Where’s Red Hat this September?

admin — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 21:02:24 +0000

The 2010 RedHat Road Tour, kicks off September 15, 2010 in Atlanta! These free, half-day business seminars will be coming to a city near you this fall including Seattle, Vancouver, Chicago, Toronto, Dallas, and many more! Registration is filling up fast, so be sure to sign up for a seminar well in advance. Can’t make it to the Road Tour? Check out where else you can find RedHat this month.

Want easy, up-to-date information about RedHat events? Follow us on Twitter.

Global

Join RedHat September 14, for one of two live events, “Managing RedHat Enterprise Linux in an Increasingly Virtual World.” This is the final of four in the RedHat Enterprise Virtualization Webinar Series. To see event times and to register, click here.

Click here for a full list of RedHat Webinars.

Looking for information about RedHat Government Solutions? Click here.

Click here for a full calendar of Fedora events.

North America

**RedHat is coming to a city near you! Join us for a complimentary half-day seminar in your city focusing on cloud computing, virtualization, middleware and the future of IT at the 2010 RedHat Road Tour. We’ll feature real world examples, RedHat cloud experts and your peers all discussing the reality and the future of cloud computing. Check out our September dates below. A full list of tour dates is available here. Act fast, spots are filling up quickly!**

Atlanta, GA, September 15: Westin Buckhead Atlanta
Washington, DC, September 16: Hyatt Regency Crystal City
San Mateo, CA, September 29: San Mateo Marriott
San Diego, CA, September 30: Del Mar Marriott

RedHat exhibited at VMworld, August 30-September 2 in San Francisco, CA. Those stopping by the booth learned more about RedHat Enterprise Virtualization and had the opportunity to speak with RedHat experts. For more information, click here.

RedHat also attended the Air Force Information Technology Conference (AFITC) in Montgomery, AL, August 30–September 1. For more information, click here.

RedHat is a Gold sponsor of the CIO Summit being held in Dallas, TX on September 13. RedHat’s CIO, Lee Congdon, will be speaking as a part of an expert panel at the event, and RedHat will be highlighting various products on the exhibit floor. For more information and to register, click here.

RedHat is a Bronze Sponsor at the InSight 2010 Annual Conference, Sept. 14-17 in Denver, CO. The event will be held at the Colorado Convention Center. For more information and to register, click here.

RedHat is a Gold Sponsor at the 2010 High Performance Computing Financial Markets Show and Conference, held September 20 at the Roosevelt Hotel in New York City. RedHat Technical Director, Cloud Engineering, Carl Trieloff, will present Session 9 on cloud computing. For more information and to register, click here.

JBoss, by RedHat, will be an Exhibitor at JavaOne, Sept. 19-23rd in San Francisco, CA. JBoss will be presenting in-booth sessions, demos and various giveaways at booth #5206. Jboss will also be hosting a party on Tuesday evening, Sept. 21. Stop by the booth for more details. For more information and to register, click here.

RedHat is a Silver sponsor of iTech Summit in Canada. RedHat will be located in booth #18 in both Calgary on September 28, and Vancouver on September 30. For more information and to register, click here.

For more information on North American events, click here.

EMEA

Each year, RedHat sponsors various Fedora Users and Developers conferences (FUDCon) around the world. This year’s conference in the EMEA region is being held in Zurich, Switzerland, Sept. 17-18, 2010. This conference is free of charge, and it’s an excellent opportunity for people who are interested in Fedora and free/open-source software to learn more and collaborate with people in the Fedora community. There will be formal presentations on a wide variety of topics, as well as less formal working sessions.
Please pre-register.

RedHat will host JBoss Forum 2010 in Germany, Sept. 21-22, 2010. For more information, click here.

Michael Tiemann, RedHat Vice President of Open Source Affairs, will be co-leading and reporting for the first-ever BRIC Think Tank at the Open World Forum. Senior government officials and representatives from Brazil, India and China will meet to discuss the strategic role that information technology and open source software will play as these countries look to march toward world economic prominence. This invitation-only session will be reported to the whole conference of the Open World Forum on Oct. 1, 2010. For more information, click here.

For more information on RedHat EMEA events, click here.

APJ

Join us for an in-depth look at RedHat Enterprise Virtualization at the RedHat Enterprise Virtualization Demonstration Webinar, Sept. 1, 2010. In this webinar we will be demonstrating advanced features such as templating, live migration, high availability and system scheduler. For more information, click here.

Unlock the value of cloud computing at the RedHat Road Tour. Join us for a free, half-day business seminar as RedHat travels city-to-city for the 2010 RedHat Road Tour in Australia. For a full list of dates and locations, click here.

** Denotes a RedHat Featured Event

How To Silo Your Website:The Sidebar

admin — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 15:31:52 +0000

The following post is part of a series on How to Silo Your Website. You should review, How to Silo Your Website the Masthead, How to Silo Your Website the Breadcrumb, How to Silo Your Website the Content. For this part, we’ll be taking a look at the sidebar.

You want to keep the sidebar content dynamic …

IMHO the sidebar is the second most abused and misused part of a website (the footer is the most abused which we’ll talk about in a later article). The sidebar is so abused because people stick too much third party content, widgets, social blocks, and simply too many links. In the past year I have worked on 5 client sites with between 300-500 links in the sidebar. No, that’s not a typo. That’s over 300 links in just the sidebar.

My first bit of advice: do some click tracking to see what people are clicking on. I like to use crazyegg (full disclosure: they are an advertiser, but I used them before they became one) or similar service that actually tracks X/Y coordinates on a page. See what people are clicking on and remove the elements that people don’t use.

Next make sure links to your most popular pages/content/products are there. Resist the temptation to go overboard. 10 is a good number; 15 is as much as I would recommend. If you are in a shopping environment, links to the main departments or categories is also a good idea. If you use faceted navigation (ie product/category links that change based on where you are or your last click), be careful. If the links are straight with no URL parameters, you have nothing to worry about. If the links change and pass parameters you are better off using no-follow. This isn’t to conserve page rank: it’s to prevent creating an infinite site from a search engine perspective. Using the rel=canonical tag is a good back up, but bandaid solutions are no substitute for bad architecture. You never want to leave thinking or decision making to chance with an algo.

Remove links to your service pages (privacy, contact, tos, etc) unless you need them for visual aesthetic (to balance out the content section). In fact, you want to reduce and remove as many links as you possibly can. We aren’t trying to conserve link equity but to control where it goes. It’s a slight but subtle difference.

If you are selling advertising, have affiliate links, or other banner-type content, this is probably where it is. If it’s what pays the bills and keeps the site running, keep it; if doesn’t convert then remove it.

If you have the ability to add in featured content THAT CHANGES daily, weekly, or (at the bare minimum) monthly, then do it. Also if you can add in related content links that change on a per page basis, then do it. You want to keep the sidebar content dynamic, with static and non parametric url’s. Bonus points if you can change the order based on templates or randomization.

So what are the takeaways here:

Reduce the number of links to a minimum.
Remove non essential elements, especially third party content, based on user testing.
Include links to related or featured content, especially if it changes.
Looks for ways to change or randomize content.

Next in the series: How to Silo Your Website: The Footer
photo credit: Eyeshotpictures

This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an Search Engine Optimisation Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis WordPress Theme review.

How To Silo Your Website:The Sidebar

How To Silo Your Website: The Breadcrumb Trail In Part 1 we looked at How To Silo Your…
How To Silo Your Website: The Masthead One of the more powerful tools an Search Engine Optimisation can use…
How to Silo Your Website: The Content The following is part of the series How To Silo…
Putting a Content Based Website Together We’ve covered long term content and short term content, information…
Website Informational Pages Now that I’ve covered long term content and short term…

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Colocation Hosting – Is it Right For You?

admin — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 05:54:41 +0000

Colocation web hosting is very different from every other hosting service, primarily because it is not a service in which web servers are leased. Instead, colocation hosting is a web server storage service in which adequate server storage space is provided in a state-of-the-art data center that is equipped with highly trained staff and maximum security 24 hours per day, 365 days per year.

In essence, you are simply paying for storage space so that you can store your dedicated server without problems such as hardware damage and theft occurring. While this may seem as if it is a great service that everyone should use, only a small percentage of webmasters will ever need colocation hosting. If you are not sure whether or not your business needs access to a colocation hosting service then you may want to consider the following information.

Do You Own a Web Server?

If you do not own a web server then you should know that you will need to purchase one before a colocation hosting service will be of any use to you. Web servers can cost anywhere from $1500-$10,000, depending upon the model and its capabilities. If you can afford to invest that much money in to a web server, and you are ready to pay for the monthly cost of colocation hosting, then it may be within your budget ton purchase a colocation hosting plan. However, if you are like the majority of webmasters, then you will not be able to afford or justify such a purchase.

What Kind of Sites Do You Own?

If you own a single medium sized web site then you may not have a need for a dedicated server at all. Dedicated web servers are ideal for people that have dozens of web sites or a single corporate web site that needs to be maintained professionally and kept at peak performance. With the availability of cheap and powerful web hosting you should be able to find a plan that will accommodate your needs with ease. Dedicated servers and colocation hosting is only recommended for corporations and enterprises, or people that own hundreds of sites.

How Technically Skilled Are You?

As mentioned, a colocation hosting service is simply a web server storage service, which means that most colocation hosting plans do not come with technical support. As such, you will need to provide your own technical support for server maintenance and administration. Most administrative duties can be done remotely, however this requires an advanced level of knowledge in the way web servers work. If you do not have a decent amount of experience in dealing with web servers then you may want to consider a colocation hosting solution that includes technical support.

Unfortunately, in order to have full technical support included with your colocation hosting plan you will need to pay an extra fee each month. When you add this fee to the mountain of other expenses associated with colocation hosting, it becomes clear that this type of hosting solution should only be utilize by highly successful online businesses.

I Love Lunarpages Contest – iPad Winner

admin — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 00:30:04 +0000

By Amy Armitage

It has been a fantastic 6 weeks and we have thoroughly enjoyed this contest and the creativity from our customers! Thank you to all who entered!

The winner of the iPad is..

Peter Han
San Diego, California
www.beavant.com
Hosted with Lunarpages for 2.5 years

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Natural Link Building: Past, Present and (Predicting) The Future

admin — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 15:16:56 +0000

A while ago I wrote my case study on how I listened to Google and failed. The post got a lot of attention from the Search Engine Optimisation community. Many people wondered whether natural link building was really dead and what was the future of building natural links. I’ll try to answer some of those questions in this post. The statements below are a mix of my opinion/my personal observations.

1. Is There a Universal Definition of ‘Natural Link Building’?

There’s one thing I’ve learned from some of the reactions of my previous post: Not all people have the same definition of what natural link building is.

Put in simple terms, a natural link is a link you get from someone who found your page and decided (on his/her own volition and without any direct influence from you) to link to it.

Why did the person decided to link to you? Some of the possible reasons include:

- Not necessarily for the content but because you’re an authority in that topic

- For the valuable/controversial/funny content

- Or maybe s/he had a good day and wanted to link to a bunch of random folks on the web

As you can see, there are many reasons why someone would link ‘naturally’ to you. Valuable content is only one reason.

2. Natural Link Building: The Past

In my previous post, I mentioned this article on 25 Free People Search Engines as a case study of a successful link bait. The article got 140k+ views from StumbleUpon and also a bunch of editorial links (check Yahoo and OpenSiteExplorer for more details). Lists were quite popular back in 2008-2009 and you could write anything that was somewhat interesting as a list and get popular on Digg/Stumbleupon/Delicious.

Some Search Engine Optimisations realized this opportunity and started creating a bunch of these types of posts (Search Engine OptimisationMoz is a good example. Rand once talked about how they went crazy with list posts during that time). After a while, the effectiveness of list posts as a link bait method reduced drastically because many people realized how powerful they were and everybody started creating their “top x ways to ____” type of articles.

Twitter and Facebook weren’t very popular back then, so you got a lot more links from unique root domains rather than re-tweets or Facebook ‘likes’.

Then images became quite popular (people love pictures more than text–not surprising) and a bunch of web design blogs suddenly appeared with their “30+ Beautiful ____” showcase posts. Just type “beautiful site:stumbleupon.com” or “beautiful site:digg.com” if you want to see how popular they were. As with lists, ‘showcase’ posts are also dying slowly, but their popularity lasted long enough to give rise to a whole new category of web design blogs (which are more like gallery resources, honestly).

By the way, I am talking about the ‘rule’ here. There are always exceptions. Some amazing list posts still go popular occasionally (Cracked.com is very good in making creative list posts).

3. Natural Link Building: The Present

The number of people who tried to get their posts to go viral (by writing list posts and publishing images) increased dramatically and, at the same time, Twitter and Facebook REALLY took off. People that wanted to ‘share good stuff’ found these services easier to use for sharing than having a WordPress or Blogspot blog. The result? If you create linkbait and it goes popular, then you should expect a lot of re-tweets/stumble thumbs-ups/Facebook ‘likes’ but a very small number of links from different unique root domains. Do these links from Facebook/Twitter carry any special importance?

Matt Cutts once said in a YouTube video that they rate links from Facebook and Twitter just like any other link! Yay!

One recent lesson I’ve learned about ‘niche’ link building is that you can get viral in your niche community. Take Search Engine Optimisation and this blog, for example. I’ve witnessed how different Search Engine Optimisations follow each other and, in case someone has something interesting to share, then other people in the industry re-tweet him and the chain goes on. This is not the case for every niche market unfortunately.

4. What’s the Future of Natural Link Building? Is it DEAD?!??!

Okay, 3 points here:

Many people who link ‘naturally’ have switched to Twitter/Facebook (this is from my personal observations)
Matt Cutts said Google treats Facebook/Twitter links the same as any other link
Thus, if you want to build natural links, you need to appeal to a VERY SMALL number of people who still own sites and want to link to other resources (very, very tiny minority)

This is, of course, a very ineffective strategy, which is why, in my opinion, you have an increasing number of people who go and hunt for links (that are not natural of course). They can get some great links with great content but the result is re-tweets and so on which aren’t very important in Google eyes.

PLUS, according to some Search Engine Optimisations, people that own websites became stingy because of the ‘do follow’ paranoia of ‘leaking PR,’ so that could be a big factor as well.

5. What Does the Future Hold?

I am pretty sure Google will start treating Facebook shares/Twitter re-tweets as more than just 1 ordinary link from a same domain. These links will probably become more important for ranking in the SERPs.

The only problem here is spam. If Google starts giving greater importance to Facebook/Twitter, they know people will start spamming these platforms like crazy and new markets will emerge where people will sell re-tweets/Facebook shares depending on the profile ‘authority’.

I hope you found this post to be useful.

This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an Search Engine Optimisation Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis WordPress Theme review.

Natural Link Building: Past, Present and (Predicting) The Future

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Natural Link Building: Past, Present and (Predicting) The Future

1. Is There a Universal Definition of ‘Natural Link Building’?

2. Natural Link Building: The Past

3. Natural Link Building: The Present

4. What’s the Future of Natural Link Building? Is it DEAD?!??!

5. What Does the Future Hold?

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