Inbound links are now so important in the constant battle to achieve top search engine rankings, that tons of people are using every tactic under the sun to gain that one additional link. You must be careful when it comes to linking though. You could jeopardize your whole linking plan by getting links in a shady manner which could have an adverse affect on your search rankings. These inbound links are seen by search engines as votes for your site within a particular community of sites.

It seems it was only a matter of time before the cleverer element of the SEO world developed a workaround for Google’s penalizing of paid links. The workaround involves a pretty creative “dynamic” linking strategy, and it’s playing a little bit dirty.

No longer the province of tax accountants, lawyers, and politicians, an elaborate loophole has been developed by Andy Beard proposing how to get around Google’s paid-link vigilance via robots.txt and paid reviews.*

Beard’s explanation is complicated, lengthy, and loaded with historical context so visit Beard’s blog for further clarification, complete with nifty diagrams. What we will provide here is an overview and basic introduction, and not necessarily an endorsement.

You know you need inbound links to your site to succeed in SEO. What you may not know is, you don’t need to spend a dime to get them. In fact, I would advise you not to purchase links.

The recent Google shakeup is all about paid links. Stop paying for links now! Google is now “punishing” websites for having paid links, because they feel it’s cheating the algorithm. You might be upset by this, but they are doing it to improve the quality of their results. Here is how you can take advantage of it.

Don’t buy paid links! Paid links are bad! Don’t cloak either. Search engines don’t allow it. You’ve all heard this before right?

Well as it turns out, not ALL search engines are as hard line on these issues as some claim to be. MSN Live specifically has now gone on the record that none of the above are necessarily taboo.

Over the holiday break, Jeremiah Andrick, product manager for MSN Live Webmaster Tools, stopped by our offices. We did a lengthy video interview where we chatted about all kinds of good searchy things. Highlights of our chat included some of the emerging differences between Live Search and engines like Google on subjects like cloaking and paid links.

Just in case you missed it… the Web has changed.

I think a little history of the Internet is in order to grasp the big picture. I’m not going to give any dates (late eighties and early 90’s)… I’ll just give a quick run down.

I would say nearly fifteen years ago I had a dial up Internet connection that allowed me to log into various College computers, BBS’s (bulletin boards) and Newsgroups.

By Lani and Allen Voivod (c) 2007

Now more than ever, if you want to be a successful business owner, you need a successful business website. Which means you have to make nice with the search engines. And the long-standing rule of search engine friendliness is to create inbound links — links from other sites pointing to your site.
Ten-ish years ago, when Google started the shift away from code to content (including inbound links) as the preferred way of determining “relevance,” the world changed. Immediately, businesses owners started scrambling, and begging, for every link they could get. Thank goodness that’s not the case anymore! But inbound links are still important. In many ways they’re more vital than ever.

By Dave Foster (c) 2007

Last year saw the arrival of online social media. If you operate a website or blog, you would be well advised to realign your site to exploit the popular social media sites for increased traffic.

You should also introduce social media components to your site because web users are experiencing these new forms of interaction on more and more sites and they will have an expectation of the same from your site too.

If you want to attract repeat visitors and want them to stay longer, your focus for the next few months should be on the social aspects of your site.

Paid links and PR drops were a hot topic at Pubcon Las Vegas last week. We talked to Matt Cutts about it in a video interview, and he explained it quite rationally.

What’s interesting to me though is the reaction we see from our readers. Some are vehemently opposed to what they consider Google strong arm tactics and then there are those of you who think Google is performing a service to the internet community by cracking down on paid links.

As a site owner, it’s important to devote what link building time you have to creating connections that count – really count – as far as search engine spiders are concerned. In fact, there’s a range of site link types – links diversity. Some are more valuable than others. Spend your time and resources building the highest quality links and you’ll quickly see the value of these efforts.

Hosted Content

Hosted content, also sometimes called pre-sell pages, makes your site look very good. The problem is, there are usually costs involved. Here’s how it works.

Link building has long been the staple dietary topic for SEO and Internet marketing experts, but with good reason. This is hardly ground breaking news but having a powerful link profile will help you to rank well in the search engines. Having an especially powerful link profile will also drive traffic directly to your website.