Well… Rand’s done it again. Rand Fishkin over at SEOMoz recently started a new series of blog posts called “Headsmacking Tips” for Link Building. Great idea for a thread and one I’ll certainly be keeping an eye on. In his first post, Rand covers link requests in order confirmation emails.

The concept is a simple one. Whenever someone places an order on your site, ask them to link to you if they own a website. Pretty awesome idea, leveraging your customer base to build links, but one that seo’s don’t consider all that often. At the bottom of your order confirmation page and/or within your order confirmation email, politely ask your customer to link to you if possible.

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In my last post, I discussed the different types of link building methods that can be utilized. In this post, I want to look further at what factors determine the value of a link. Every link has a different value and you need to understand this if you want to make educated decisions on how you should invest your time and money. Since nobody has complete insight into the inner workings of Google and their algorithm, except people at Google of course, many of the factors that effect the value of a link are not completely agreed upon by experts in the industry. Although there are certain factors that everyone seems to agree on.

The most commonly agreed upon factors are Alexa ranking, Robots.txt excluded page, domain authority (in quality of backlinks), page relevance and the number of links. The most controversial factors are TLD, type of links, domain authority (in PageRank), domain authority (in rankings on irrelevant keywords) and target page location. The most important factors are Robots.txt excluded page, Anchor Text, link is on penalized page, page authority (inbound links), domain authority (in quality of backlinks), amount of outbound links on a page, total amount of links on a page, age of domain, relevant authority (in rankings on relevant keywords) and Javascript link.
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Link Building is essential for achieving top rankings in a competitive space. Your website can be perfectly optimized for the search engines but if you don’t have links that have been acquired naturally or through manual efforts your website will never rank as high as you want it to. I will assume you know what a backlink to your website is and instead describe some methods you can utilize to acquire links as well as the effectiveness of each and the value of the link that can be acquired.

Having a website write about your products or services and link to your website provides the most effective link to increase your rankings. The common method of acquiring a link of this nature is through press release distribution. Unfortunately, this is also the most difficult link to acquire because your product or service needs to be news worthy in order to be written about on a website that is actually worth getting a link from. You also may need to have some that is dedicated to PR at your firm in order to make sure your press release is picked up by the major publishers of the Internet. There are press release distribution services out there but there is nothing like having someone dedicated to this task either in-house or out-sourced from an agency.

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