When it comes to serious link building, a strategy that involves nothing more than social bookmarking just won’t cut it anymore.

If you have NO IDEA where to find good links this little article will help you to get started: you’ll find GREAT places for links, you’ll produce links that hold MORE WEIGHT AND they won’t be spammy. To boot, these links will help your rankings in the long run – unlike social bookmarking, they don’t just provide a short-term boost.

PLUS – There’s a FREE download with this post to keep you busy!<

So, let’s get started:

An important thing to determine first: Why bother? Why don’t we just submit to a couple of social bookmarking sites instead?

Well, a few years back social bookmarking lost its importance (in link building) because of spam. Now, social bookmarking is pretty useless for SEO (well, unless your page gets thousands of Diggs, or you’re optimising for the world’s longest-tail phrase). By bookmarking pages you’re just temporarily fooling Google into thinking they’re important. After a few days the ranking will drop and frankly, it just isn’t really worth it.

Instead, you should build quality links on niche community sites and show Google that people are engaging, sharing and commenting around your content.

This can lead to BIG RANKS.

Further, a niche community is a dedicated group of people willing to talk about your topic, it’ll bring targeted link sharers AND potential customers to your site. You’ll be able to build trust and authority PLUS <network with people in your niche who could offer you with great SEO opportunities later on.

To do this, you should try:

Posting quality news & articles

Let’s be clear: I’m not talking about starting up a blog. That’s SEO 101.

I’m talking about joining specialised communities/groups and posting interesting, relevant and useful content in them. And as long as the content you’re posting is valuable, the odd APPROPRIATELY placed link should be fine.

To get started, first join Gather and find groups centered on appropriate topics to the niche you’re optimising for. Now write quality articles and post them into those groups.

Example: Optimising for the term ‘pet shop’: Find a group about pets and post well-written pet care articles in the group. A single link to your (or your client’s) pet shop will be fine as long as they’re in context.

Some other places you should try: Instablogs, Snipsley, SheToldMe, Zimbio, Xomba.

Remember: the key is to write news about your industry and craft articles that people will be interested in, share and promote. Learn how to write great articles when you’re not too familiar with the topic by visiting my blog here.

Why not make your own social network?

If you can’t find a social network appropriate to your niche, create one. You can build a DIY social network for free. Usually they’re really easy to set up. I suggest spending A LOT of time getting the design and content just right. Make your social network attractive, interesting and appealing and people will join.

TOP TIP: Mail out past customers or subscribers and alert them about the new community. Their active participation will attract new members too!

To get started, visit Web Jam and sign up. Create a ‘hub’ of information, news and stories. This site isn’t fussy about how many links you use but remember: the idea is to attract OTHER people to participate in your hub.

Try these places too: Slinkset, Grou.ps, Spruz, Igloo, Social go, Grouply, Mixxt, Big Tent, Qlubb, Elgg.

How to find these great communities yourself!

If you’d like to find niche communities yourself, I have three top tips for you on my blog:

• Using Google’s advanced search operators
• ‘Sites like’ sites, and
• Tools including Google discussions and BoardReader.

You can read my Niche Communities blog post here.

Bonus: Free Download

Do you want loads of my social media links?  Hundreds of blogs, websites, communities and resources directly in your bookmarks folder?  If so, visit my website here and you can have my stash for free.  They’re neatly organised for ease of use too!

This guest post was written for my blog by Carly (AKA SuperCarly) who really doesn’t deserve any links in the bio because she snuck several into her post.  But because I think she’s so lovely she can have one to her blog anyway: http://www.supercarly.co.uk

Needless to say she wrote her own bio.

Ahem.

Pre Party

I arrived fairly early on the Friday, checking in to the obscenely swanky (by my standards) City Inn Hotel in Leeds City Centre, when I was greeted with messages to meet in the Skybar (the 13th floor bar of the hotel) for a pre pre party party (if that makes sense), was greeted with smiles of various SEO’s and after an Indian meal, and a few drinks (including me shouting “Twat” at the TV with events that were happening at Wembley, an enjoyable networking session was had. We shared tips, tricks & a few stories, often rarely talking about SEO.

Onto the talks now, and I’m desperately trying to keep these brief, as a lot of other people covered them in a lot better detail (more links at the bottom).

The Talks

There were multiple talks spread over two rooms, here’s just a brief overview of said talks.

Mel Carson (@melcarson) – Learning & Earning Through Social Media

Mel works as Community Manager for Microsoft Advertising, and his talk centred on how Social Media can provide a real return on investment – but only if done correct. He shared examples of eventual ROI of Social Media, which were the following:-

• Mel shared a twitter picture of a magazine seen in a drugstore in Washington DC, within half an hour the CEO of the drugstore (who monitored brand related keywords on Twitter) contacted him online, and despite having a two minute, whimsical discussion, Mel would now visit said drugstore over the others, because they care about him now. He may not do it immediately (after all, the store was in Washington DC), but for two minutes investment it could convert into a client for life.
• The second example was a monistary, who wanted to recruit monks online. So with a small adwords campaign targetted at monks, with a low CPM (Cost Per Monks), they were able to cost effectively recruit a new monk, which took them two years.

Both had ROI from their niche.

So in summary, to earn through social media, it’s important to keep costs down – for example Microsoft Advertising’s social media presence is 1 blog, 1 forum & 2 twitter accounts – easily manageabe & more authoritative than a number of other sources.

Another way this keeps costs down is that they now release news on their blog, rather than traditional press releases.

Gary Taylor (@garyptaylor) – Keyword Domains & Mini Sites

Something I’ve done more & more with, as well as see incredible results with, is exact match domains dominating search engine rankings. Gary’s talk was how to research them, and what they are & how to have successes with them.

First of all, forget creating a huge site, exact match domain sites need to target at most one or two keywords. They need to be fairly long tail (or rather they usually are, as a lot of the top ones have already been snapped up) or geographical based. They are small websites that are easy to replicate & maintain, with one or two ways of making money (usually CPC, affiliate programmes, or a link directory).

They need to make a minimum £3 per domain per week, as this helps keep them running, and if you have over 100 off them, that’s £300/week. Not bad for no work, is it?

A fascinating talk, Gary gave real insight into how to approach keyword domains & how to make money from them.

Lisa Myers (@lisadmyers) – Social Media for SEO

Lisa’s talk and insight given in her talk was great for bloggers looking to gain links. Links & Social Property are the currency of the web, crucial for ranking highly. Before creating a piece of link bait, you need to find a target age, gender & location – examining what they would search for, as well as sites that they would visit.

She also gave a massive secret about link bait- that it needs to be simple, well marketed & easy to share. Linkbait doesn’t need to be groundbreaking, and in the example she shared was for an advent calendar link bait, with a few inexpensive prizes, that was marketed to the correct audience.

Of course, it’s also worth remembering that linkbait needs to be hosted on your own site, rather than on social networks, as it’ll offer no value to your brand if links are going to Facebook or Youtube.

In result, the client got the following:-

• 50% more traffic to the site
• An increased email database
• Twitter followers jumped 300%
• And significant exposure

Lisa also talked about Article Marketing to help improve the link count to websites & generating buzz for websites. Content must be relevant to their site, in fact really relevant to the site you’re targetting, so don’t just jump straight in with a blog post – examine discussion & the links of the sites you want to target.

When you have about 10 or so sites, hunt down the appropriate contact and approach them directly. Calling or Skyping somebody can get a lot more done than an easily ignored email, but be direct.

Finally, the best way to get your content out there is by trading content, be it exclusive news, products or discounted products or competition. This also needs to be super relevant.

Jaamit Durrani (@jaamit) – Linkbuilding In Real Life: A Practical Guide to Dominating the SERPS

Jaamit’s talk was about Linkbuilding, and how to do it effectively. Most bloggers from my experience are actually quite shit hot at this, but there are a lot of things that we can do better. Nonetheless, Jaamit had a few home truths to share:-

1. Linkbuilding Can Be Daunting – Plan it each month, break it down & do it slowly if need be.
2. People Choose Between Quantity of Links & Quality Links - Why not use both?
3. Build internal links as well as home page links.
4. Anchor Text of the links is your friend.
5. Content is king is misleading - and you need a network of influencers.
6. Forget about black or white hat links – you need to test links anyway.

Spam links work because there’s nothing else is better, so if your competitor is using spammy links (with a tool such as Link Diagnosis), don’t immitate, but understand how they work.

The first time of links Jaamit recommended were Low Level Anchor Text Deep Links – these are links of spun articles, with three links on each article, submitted to a number of article directories. Boom, you get domain diversity for your articles.

The second method is Guest Blogging – which as most of you guys know is a great place to get links. To get guest blog post opportunities, you can go to the following:-

• My Blog Guest
• Google [your chosen keyword] “guest post” (so if you’re writing about SEO, Google “SEO Guest Posts“) – this will bring up a range of guest blogs in most niches.

Finally, Jaamit shared ways of getting links from .ac.uk (as well as .edu) domains, which involves running competition with schools & colleges. You need to google the following:-

• inurl:ac.uk [keyword]

Karyn Fleeting (@karynfleeting) – PR’s Guide to World Domination

Karyn Fleeting’s talk surrounding write great press releases & pushing them to the right people. For a great press release, you need a following:-

• A great database of contacts including a correct name, what their job is, email address & any associated information, that can be easily copied for each press release.
• A great first line hook:-
• Inverted Pyramid Writing, which included the following:-
  • Important information at the very top.
  • Additional information 2nd
  • And the least important information going down.
  • However, each paragraph much have a meaning.
• Date
• Contact Details, such as your phone number & your email
• Stockist information & telephone number (If you’re selling a physical product)
• Price

Karyn told us a great site for Press Release following the Inverted Pyramid Writing – the Daily Mail site.

Tailor each PR to each to each journalist, and avoid language such as “revolutionary”, “iconic”, “leading” & “unique”.

As somebody who gets shed loads of unsolicited press releases for Retro Garden, I’m in the process of creating a page on that site aimed at what Karyn suggested for a covering email to each press release:-

• Addressing me by name.
• Big sell early on.
• And a high res image.

Again, will let you know when it’s done, and to see what I’ve learnt.

If you have a successful press release picked up, put the logo of the website on your website with a link to the coverage, furthermore it’s a way of saying thank you (plus gives social proof to your readers that you’re more important!).

In Conclusion

I loved this weekend. I always was terrified with conferences, thinking I was sacrificing my weekend for an overly stressful retreat. However, meeting likeminded SEO’s & webgeeks, in such an informal atmosphere, it was great to network, and may have been the best thing I’ve done for my career.

Although I may be saving up to be at Wrestlemania XXVII in or around the next Thinkvisibility, I would love to go to another one. Meeting friends (and yes, I do consider people I meet on Twitter “friends”), learning & having access to some of the finest minds in this industry, as well as drinking copious amounts of alcohol, is well worth going.

Bravo to The Hodge for organising a remarkable conference!

Other Things I’ve Learned

1. Despite being one of the most popular niche for SEO, an amazing number of SEO’s don’t have a clue of the rules of Texas Hold Em (much to the dismay of myself & Ian Pouncey. How Al Carton kept his cool I’ve no idea).
2. These people are the most dangerous when it goes to poker.
3. Goosh is The Geordie Jason Manford, and is an accomplished poker player, despite what anybody says.
4. Calling for a big 6 in Blackjack usually gives a big 6.
5. To work in the SEO industry, you need a liver that’s as good as filtrating shit than North West Water’s treatement plant.
6. If you are to write a blog post on a conference, getting a post out there first & foremost is very good, as people who would rather play Tiger Woods for 6 hours instead of writing a blog post will link to you (may expand this in a blog post soon!).
7. If you want to get the most retweeted tweet at a conference, swear creatively.
8. I really need glasses.
9. Never trust a croupier.
10. SEO’s bake the best cookies (seriously, who baked them for lunch?!?)

Other Conference Round Ups

Here are some other conference notes & round ups:-

Slides

• Keyword Domains and Mini-sites – Gary Taylor’s Slides
• Using Social media for SEO – Lisa Myers slides
• Link Building in Real Life – Jaamit Durrani slides
• The PR’s Guide to World Domination – Karyn Fleeting slides

Transcriptions

• How to Gain Ranking Dominance in Any Market Sector – Dave Naylor (Transcribed by Saurav Rimal)
• Learning & Earning Through Social Media – Mel Carson (transcribed by Peter Young)
• Various Think Visibility transcripts – Dave Chaffey
• Submit your site for review with SEO, Design and CRO – Notes by Dave Naylor

Opinion Pieces

• Think Visibility: Cherry Popping SEO Goodness – Claire Carlile
• Think Visibility live blogging – Kieron Hughes
• Think Visibility 4 Roundup from @ismepete #thinkvis – Peter Handley
• Think Visibility 4 Catchup – Scott McLay
• 10 Reasons Why Think Visibility Rocked – Illiya Vajestica
• Key Takeaways from Think Visibility September 2010 – Paddy Moogan
• Think Visibility - A Love Letter – Annabel Hodges
• Think Visibility 4; Discoverability, Linkerati, and Hat Burning – Iain Harper
• ThinkVis – Social Media, Spamming & SERPS – Carla Marshall

Photostreams

• http://www.flickr.com/photos/sk8geek/
• http://www.flickr.com/photos/martin_88/

Opinions?

Were you there? Do please share your thoughts in the conference!

In any rate, I’ve been around & you can see me at the following places:-

• Holistic Search Guest Blog - A few weeks ago I wrote a guest blog on Holistic Search SEO blog, entitled “City Agencies vs. Country Agencies: What’s the Difference?“. You may want to check that out.
• Thinkvisibility – This weekend I’m off to Thinkvisibility in Leeds, a search engine marketing & affiliate conference. I am well and truly a conference virgin, so I’m really looking forward to it & meeting people I’ve spoken with online, anybody going to this conference? I’ll be looking to post a round up sometime within the next few weeks.

As my head has been down, I’ve missed a lot of blogging, missed anything good?

Of course, if there’s a cause you want to start, the barrier of entry is lower, with often a well constructed hashtag and a few select followers getting behind it and boom – you’ve got a phenomenon on your hands.

One such tweet is a cause close to my heart – #nonleagueday.

Non League Day is on 4th September 2010. Which is the first Saturday of the first international break in the football season. With the league’s top flights taking a week off to spank Estonia or whatever, Non League is encouraging you to attend a lower league game.

Why? Well a number of reasons:-

• Much Needed Money - A lot of these clubs are owned not by Russian Ogliarchs or Middle Eastern Oil Millionaires, they’re owned often by fans, or local businessmen, or a combination of both. They are often run by volunteers. Money is tight with these clubs. So your £5-10 on the door (along with £10-20 spend in the club, at stupidly reasonable prices, more on that later) can help pay a player’s wages for a week.
• Much Needed Exposure - Your local club, beyond the odd  appearance on the back page and a whimsical look at it on Football Focus when they go far in the FA once every 20 years, gets sod all coverage off their own back. Often through community initiatives or just giving free tickets to local schools. Causes like this help improve the exposure of the club in the local area, so get you & your friends involved!
• You Will Enjoy It - I love live football. I’ve been trying to do the 92 as well as see as many games as possible. Compared to on the box, which I struggle to watch sober, live football is an enthralling experience, and probably the best view of British Male culture you can get, and if you think footballers are overpaid prima donnas, you’d be pleasantly surprised by non-league football.

There’s a map on the Non League Day site of games that are on, if you’re short of things to do, I’d recommend taking in a game. You will enjoy it!

Unfortunately, I won’t be attending the Colwyn Bay vs. Hucknall Town game, as I will be attending Think Visibility (more on that next week!), but I’m attending Colwyn Bay vs. Bradford Park Avenue this weekend to make up for it.

If you do attend a game, do please let me know!

Anyway, bar that, one of the most incredible things to come from the promotion has been this parody song of probably one of my favourite songs at the moment – “Empire State of Mind (Part II) Broken Down”:-

Click here to view the embedded video.

This has pretty much been tweeted & facebooked by everybody from North Wales (myself included), but outside of North Wales, not a sausage. I guess it doesn’t resonate with them.

I’m not a viral marketer, but I do know how this works – because it mentions things that resonate with so many people (which are the towns of North Wales). We have a phrase in wrestling – cheap heat. It’s when you deliberately praise or deride the local town – Mick Foley was an expert in it. Hell I’ve done it before now & it worked. You’re more likely to connect with people.

Okay, on the flipside you sacrifice a lot of your audience who you won’t connect with, but with an area such the size of North Wales (around 250,000 people), connecting with enough of them and you should get – say – 50,000 views of a video on Youtube, which as Jordan Cooper found out & reported to on Problogger, is more than Mashable send you.

I had first came into contact with Jem – the blogger behind Jemjabella – in the dim & distant days of Han, I remember reading this blog that – quite frankly – were head and shoulders above every other blog on her RSS feed (and yes, I’m even talking about my own). Her writing style had that brilliant style, the same way that Lionel Messi has a twinge of arrogance when he scores. Yes, she did regularly bitchslap people, however she was write, and they often deserved it.

You see, even as a woman (I say in jest), she is remarkably brilliant at anything that’s connected to the internet (besides her Modern Warfare 2 skills, which remain untested), even still today I use her Top Five SEO Tips & PHP Security Tips as a basis to begin either my PHP or Optimization work – and even today she has a catagory page on her blog that has had 18,000 hits on Stumbleupon. A catagory page. Furthermore, you know that list that Lisa Barone said that were 5 things that were killing your blog? Jem were doing them before they were cool.

Unlike other bloggers who are considered gurus, she is not such a thing. She doesn’t make much money blogging – because she chooses not to. When John Chow was selling Page Rank 6 links for $200 a month, she gave them away for free, not whoring herself out. In fact, she doesn’t whore herself out at all, people follow her because she’s awesome – and even today even she walked passed me in the street & slapped me, I still wouldn’t have a clue what she is, she remains hidden, hiding behind a familiar avatar you see on this post. Her readers are awesome as well & network themselves, in fact I met Mel & Carly through her blog.

So yes you probably don’t have her on her RSS feed, but yes you should also add her right now. At the moment she doesn’t blog about much bar baby vomit & gardening, any post that is even remotely geeky will be 10 times better than the best thing you’ll read that day.

Happy blog day Jem, here’s to you!

From a BBC article about the service, it says this:-

Participating sites will sport a Flattr button in the same way that many have clickable icons that let visitors send information to friends or refer something they find interesting to sites such as Digg and Redditt.

So where you see Digg & Tweetmeme buttons now, you may see Flattr buttons appearing. But instead of sharing content, every click you make donates some money to the creator. You choose how much you pay for the service per month, and then 90% of your cash gets split between the number of buttons you click. (so say if you have 10 clicks & you pay $10 a month, each individual click recipient gets $1).

It’s a fascinating idea, as it does seem in principle to sort out the problem when it comes to people donating (people often say they will, but the effort in doing so often puts a lot of people off), also, with this micropayments platform, if somebody knocks a doozy of a blog post out, then giving them something for it is as easy as Digging it or tweeting it.

However, a service like this needs members, which begs the question – would you sign up to receive payments? More importantly, would you sign up to give them?

The #songsincode takes a song and puts it into some sort of (syntactically accurate) code. Kinda like those literal song lyrics a while back, only with code. Anyway, here’s my offering. “Three is the magic number” by Embrace & Blind Melon. Apologies for syntax errors now to people like Jem.

define(MAGIC_NUMBER, 3);

if (MAGIC_NUMBER == 3 && (preg_match (MAGIC_NUMBER, $ancient_mystic_trinity))
{

$past + $the_present + $the_future + $faith + $hope + $charity + $heart + $brain + $body = MAGIC_NUMBER;
$tripod = requires(MAGIC_NUMBER);
$table = requires(MAGIC_NUMBER);
$tricycle = requires(MAGIC_NUMBER);
$family = requires(MAGIC_NUMBER);

while ($i=1;$i<10;$i++)
{
echo 3 * $i;
}

while ($i=10;$i>10;$i--)
{

echo "3x" . $i . " is " . 3 * $i;

}

while ($i=1;$i<6;$i++)
{

echo 3 * $i;

}

while ($i=10;$i>10;$i--)
{

echo "3x" . $i . " is " . 3 * $i;

}

$family = requires(MAGIC_NUMBER);

define(MAGIC_NUMBER, 3);

}

Hell, Sitepoint are jumping on the act. Leave yours, or some of your favourites, in the comments!

Edit: One more. It’s a Cure song:-

if ($monday == "#0000FF" || $monday != "#0000FF")
{
 if ($tuesday == "#CCCCCC" && $wednesday == 2)
 {
 if ($thursday != "care about you")
 {
 $friday = "I'm in love";
 }
 }
}

$monday = "you fall apart";
$tuesday.myheart = break();
$wednesday.myheart = break();
if ($i == 1 && $i != 1)
{
 $thursday.start();
}
$friday = "I'm in love";

$saturday.wait();

if ($sunday == "comes too late")
{
 $sunday != "comes too late";
}

if ($i == 1 && $i != 1)
{
 $friday = "hesitate";
}

if ($monday == "#000000" || $monday != "#000000")
{
 if ($tuesday == "heart attack" && $wednesday == "heart attack")
 {
 if ($thursday != "looking back")
 {
 $friday = "I'm in love";
 }
 }
}

$monday = "hold your head";
$tuesday = "stay in bed";
$wednesday = "stay in bed";
$thursday = "watch the walls instead";
$friday = "I'm in love";

@the_ashes – The easiest to follow. Big shots called, as well as wickets, centuries & half century partnerships. The fact it’s not ball by ball is great.

@BumbleCricket – Viewers of Sky Sports’ coverage will be familiar with David ‘Bumble’ Lloyd. The former Lancashire & England batsman has transferred well to the microphone, and he offers 4-5 tweets of what usually happens behind the microphone.

@tomfordyce – BBC’s Tom Fordyce was designed for Twitter. The man comes up with some of the most intelligent and witty quips known to man, and if he’s not the most non-linked retweeted man on Twitter, then I don’t know who should beat him.

@ bbctms- The BBC Test Match Special covers all the test matches, not just the Ashes, or indeed England matches. This account is the radio reporters at the ground, and offers a look behind the scenes at the BBC.

@TheAshesLive – A lot more of a regular update of the game than the Ashes, close to ball by ball coverage, as well as opinions. All good.

Furthermore, #Ashes seams to be the hashtag (or…should I say ashtag?) of choice.

Check out the accounts above to get comprehensive Ashes coverage. Also share the accounts you have found in the comments, as well as one important question.

Who’s going to win?

photo credit: geishaboy500

“But wait!” I hear you say, “Wasn’t that game called Boomshine? And ridiculously addictive? And 2 years old?”. I’ll say – yes it was – but now it has Facebook integration, and all the wonders that entails.

Namely bragging when you are on top of a leaderboard.

Sure, there were two hours where my brother and Charlotte overtook me, but I am once again on top! I may have played solidly for 2 hours to beat that, but that’s beside the point.

The reason? A lot of the people I have beaten I am going drinking with on Saturday, yes it’s a birthday, and I’m off out. To say I need a night out would be an understatement, so Saturday should be fun! Drinky drinky in Caernarfon! See you Monday.