Link Building Archives

SEO: How to Identify Low Quality Links

September 26, 2014 • Jill Kocher Brown

Links are the lifeblood of organic search. But the quality of those links can boost or kill a site’s rankings. This article suggests methods to determine the quality of in-bound ...

Link Building

SEO: Google Devalues another Link-building Tactic

August 2, 2013 • Jill Kocher Brown

Google’s search result quality mission stands seemingly opposed to the search engine optimization practice of link building. For years, SEO professionals have worked to increase the number of external in-bound links to a site in an effort to build authority and trust, thus boosting orga...

Link Building

SEO: 3 Ways to Grow Links to Your Ecommerce Site

November 2, 2012 • Jill Kocher Brown

Search engine optimization relies in large part on relevant content and authoritative links from other sites. As the search engines develop ever-more stringent algorithms around relevance and authority, it becomes harder to acquire links that will actually matter to your site’s SEO effo...

Link Building

17 Tools to Analyze Your Links

June 6, 2012 • Sig Ueland

Monitoring your inbound links is a great way to gauge the progress of your website. Inbound links, or backlinks, give you a picture of who is taking an interest in your site. Compare your inbound links to those of your competing websites, and discover new relationships to build. Here ...

Link Building

SEO: Avoid Link Building Shortcuts

April 19, 2012 • Jill Kocher Brown

There are no safe link building shortcuts. Instead I want to warn marketers about deceptive search marketers and the dangers of using “easy” link building tactics. In the latest instance, the search engine optimization community is abuzz with news that Home Depot’s SEO team has attempt...

Link Building

SEO: Build Relationships, Not Links

April 13, 2012 • Jill Kocher Brown

When the Internet was new, it was difficult to find interesting and relevant websites. Link building was easy in those days. It was often just a matter of letting webmasters know that your site existed and they could link to it. Things have changed in the last couple of decades. Webmas...

Link Building

Bing Social Search: Are ‘Likes’ the New Links?

October 28, 2010 • Jill Kocher Brown

Organic search revolves increasingly around personalization, delivering relevance not just to a searcher’s literal query, but also to the implied intent, geographic location, and historical preferences. Earlier this month Bing took another step toward integrating Facebook’s social dat...

Link Building

SEO: 5 Ecommerce Link-Building Ideas

September 24, 2010 • Bill Hartzer

To obtain good organic rankings in the search engines, web pages need inbound links. This is because search engines look for some way to determine how to rank one page over another. They look for some sort of indication of quality, some sort of "approval" that one ecommerce product page...

Link Building

Ask an Expert: Do No-Follow Links Help with SEO?

August 16, 2010 • PEC Staff

"Ask an Expert" is an occasional feature where we ask ecommerce experts questions from online merchants. For this installment, we address a question about the search-engine-optimization value to no-follow links on social bookmarking sites, such as Digg and StumbleUpon. The question come...

Link Building

Combine Search Engines and Social Media for Link Building

April 27, 2010 • Bill Hartzer

I recently spoke at an Internet marketing conference about that state of search engine optimization in 2010. One of the points that I made during the presentation is that search engines and social media networks are converging. In 2010, if you want to rank well in the search engines, yo...

Link Building

SEO: Link Bait Can Increase Rankings

February 17, 2010 • Jill Kocher Brown

Link bait is the practice of creating useful or compelling content that will lure links naturally to a website. It’s fun, it’s trendy, and it can produce very big search-engine-optimization results. Contrary to most interactive marketing goals, link bait’s primary goal is increasing t...

Link Building

SEO: Remember LinkedIn for Inbound Links

December 23, 2009 • Bill Hartzer

Editor’s Note: Bill Hartzer is a contributor to Practical eCommerce and manager of search engine optimization and social media marketing with VizionInteractive, a Dallas-based online marketing firm. Hartzer wrote the article, below, which first appeared in that company’s blog. Inbound...

Link Building

SEO: Link-building Opportunities

December 3, 2009 • Jeff Muendel

Link building is an ever-changing landscape. This is because the search engines make changes to their algorithms to thwart artificial link building, and because link building as a practice continues to morph. As time goes on, more webmasters will become aware of the importance that inbo...

Link Building

SEO: Buying Links is Risky Business

December 2, 2008 • Jeff Muendel

Garnering inbound links from websites with good PageRank is a mainstay of search engine optimization. Links are like votes for a given website in the eyes of search engines, and their number and quality have much to do with determining the outcome of search engine results. That’s why ...

Link Building

Find and Measure Links Better with Linkscape

November 7, 2008 • Jeff Muendel

One of the most important attributes of search engine optimization (SEO) is link building, which is garnering quality inbound links to a website. A single link from a high-quality, trusted source can raise the rankings of multiple pages on a website because search engines aren’t just co...

Link Building

SEO Report Card: Link Building Could Improve Strong Site

October 1, 2007 • Jeff Muendel

Candlesandsuch.com is a website run quite frugally by its two main proprietors. For a site that hasn’t had a lot of professional help with regard to search engine optimization, it possesses some positive SEO attributes. That’s not to say there aren’t issues, but some of the main facets ...

Link Building

SEO: Link Baiting Tips To ‘Juice’ Your Site

May 7, 2007 • Stephan Spencer

Link bait, simply put, is content that is so funny, so interesting, so useful, or otherwise remarkable that it becomes irresistible to bloggers and website owners, who set up links from their pages to the original material. I've seen link bait take the form of Top 10 lists, humorous vid...

Link Building

SEO: Tools for Link Building

April 1, 2006 • Stephan Spencer

In last month's issue, I discussed links and their importance in search engine optimization. Now let's get acquainted with some powerful tools to aide us in our link building efforts. Yahoo! Site Explorer offers a quick way to review competitors' and your own inbound links. PageRank Se...

Link Building

SEO: Weaving a Web of Links

March 1, 2006 • Stephan Spencer

Links are the currency of the web. Not only do their drive traffic in their own right, but they also are essential to high search engine rankings. Without good inbound links to your web site, your search engine optimization (SEO) efforts won't get off the ground. Link building isn't ab...