From the category archives:

Link Building



My Internet World Presentation on Link Building for Ecommerce Sites

by Patrick Altoft on April 27, 2010

We’re down at Internet World this week and I’ve just done a seminar on Off Site SEO for Ecommerce Websites, if you want to get the slides click here for a PDF.

The sites I mentioned in the presentation are the excellent SEOmoz and their Open Site Explorer tool.

Come and see us on our stand for some free SEO advice.

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Link Building Seminar at Internet World 2010

by Patrick Altoft on April 15, 2010

In a couple of weeks time I’m doing a half hour seminar on Off-site SEO Strategies for eCommerce Websites at the Internet World event at Earls Court, London.

Internet World always has an excellent seminar programme with case studies and insights from big brands being the highlight of the show. My talk is going to be 100% non-salesy so if you want to learn about the link building strategies we use on a daily basis for ecommerce clients then this is the talk for you. It’s at 1.50pm on Tuesday 27th April in the eCommerce theatre.

Internet World

If you’ve not been to an event such as Internet World before then I really recommend you give it a try. The event is free and you get access to over 180 seminars across 7 different topic areas. There are hundreds of exhibitors all under one roof and most are more than happy to give free tips and advice to people who visit their stand.

With keynote speakers including Ciao, Google, Discovery Channel, Stella Artois, Unilever & LinkedIn there are some big names to attract attention too.

We won’t be taking any sales people to the event so if you come to our stand you will get to meet and chat to the people who actually do the work at Branded3, whether it’s design, development or SEO.

If you can make it to the event please come and say hello, we’re on stand E5050.

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Using Pivot Charts to visually analyse competitor link profiles

by Patrick Altoft on March 29, 2010

Analysing the link profile of your website and comparing it to your competitors is a fundamental part of any link-building strategy. The normal method is to download all of your competitors links and try to replicate them but sometimes you need to take things further and do some data analysis before you start work.

A link profile is the single biggest SEO asset that a site can have and yet not many people stop to think about what their current profile looks like before trying to improve it.

Link Profile Read more >>

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Amazing free link building script for your site

by Patrick Altoft on December 3, 2009

Recently we discovered Tynt which allows web publishers to add links to content that is cut & pasted from their websites.

Today I’ve removed Tynt and added a better script that allows me to add a link to the story page and a link to my homepage with the anchor text of my choice. The script is called Link Building Pro and you can download it for free here.

If you want to test it just try copy & pasting some content from this page into your Wordpress editor or a Word document. There are a few options you can configure and the script is easy to edit if you want something a bit different.

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Are Links a Good Proxy for Traffic?

by Dixon Jones on December 2, 2009

One of the most exciting developments on the web in the last two years has been the increased ability to combine two or more technologies to create something new. We see this most in the Social space, of course, but overlaying data sets could lead to a dramatically increased understanding of the world we live in.

Today – after a delay of some months – I received my Hitwise (now called Experian Hitwise) newsletter. It is one of the very very that I actually remember signing up to. The other 100 a day never seem to get to my in-box now. Hitwise always use the newsletter to focus on on me as a UK user and choose an industry to give us some insight about the market share (in terms of traffic) about that industry and today chose to focus on the UK’s online property websites. Read more >>

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Free Travel Search Data from Kayak – Brilliant Linkbait

by Richard Baxter on October 9, 2009

Kayak have just launched a search volume trends tool at Kayak.com/trends showing travel search trends and price index data from a global perspective. The reporting includes: most popular destinations, biggest upward trends and downward trends in destination search and travel pricing. The data can be exported by CSV and includes pricing data, daily, in the file.

As reported by Travolution:

KAYAK Chief Scientist, Giorgos Zacharia, an accomplished expert in predictive modeling, who developed the KAYAK Travel Indexâ„¢ added, “the index essentially models how much an average traveler is willing to pay to visit a given destination by analyzing search behavior and selection patterns across all destinations searched on KAYAK sites.”

Sweet. Here’s a screenshot of the tool:

Kayak releases travel trends data Read more >>

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Revealing a competitor’s long tail SEO success

by Dixon Jones on October 7, 2009

One of the many misconceptions of “Page Rank” is that it refers to a website. In fact it refers to a single page. It is entirely possible for an inner page to rank for a big term, but it was much harder to get decent back-link data for an internal URL until the birth of the Link Intelligence industry. Now those barriers to understanding are starting to fall. This post is about analyzing back links of inner pages.

How do you find out what PAGES are pulling rank on competitor’s website?

If you know what phrase you are chasing in the search engines, then it is easy to see who you are trying to beat. But how do you find out what nuggets your competitor has found, that you did not even know existed? Typically, these golden long tail terms are sending traffic to an inner page. Read more >>

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Killer Link Building Strategies at a4u Expo

by Patrick Altoft on September 21, 2009

a4u Expo was my favourite conference of 2008 and this year it’s bigger than ever. Based in Londons ExCeL and with more useful actionable tips than most other conferences a4u is a great event to attend.

At 9.30am on Day 2 I’m speaking alongside Christoph C. Cemper, Lyndon and Jon Myers about Killer Link Building Strategies.

a4u Expo

Read more >>

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Linktive intelligent link building network

by Patrick Altoft on August 26, 2009

Techcrunch is reporting about a new service called Linktive which is “a fast, simple way to grow your business by creating an intelligent link building network that you control”.

Most people want to build links to their sites and on the face of it this seems like a scalable way to build links. Users have ultimate control over the links they display and the goal is to build a “quality network” rather than mass spamming.

Linktive takes the legwork out of searching for sites to link with. We’ll send you link recommendations for businesses that compliment yours, and at the same time, recommend your site to others. You may preview and submit requests for link exchanges at any time, keeping total control over your link network. You could say Linktive is your link building relationship manager.

Read more >>

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Secrets out – It’s Trust that Google kills for paid links

by Patrick Altoft on March 4, 2009

My presentation on Saturday at Think Visibility is about link building and the idea that there are three types of links – links for PageRank, links for TrustRank and links for keyword rankings.

People seem to worry about whether paid links and paid blog posts are passing PR or if they pass anchor text for keyword rankings but the actual issue is that paid links don’t pass Trust.

Makes sense when you think about it that way, doesn’t it?

Because Trust isn’t something that can be tested, unlike PageRank and anchor text, not many people really talk about whether a link passes Trust or not.

We’ve been focussing on building natural links for years and the thought that Google blocked Trust on paid links was one of the key factors behind that focus. Now Matt Cutts has blogged about it everybody else might catch on too.

The Forrester report discusses a recent “sponsored conversation” from Kmart, but I doubt whether mentions that even in that small test, Google found multiple bloggers that violated our quality guidelines and we took corresponding action. Those blogs are not trusted in Google’s algorithms any more.

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