These techniques will seem crude and rudimentary. And they’re work to implement. But the work. The difference between many successful SEO campaigns and those that fail is whether or not you do the grunt work to lay the foundation. So don’t say I didn’t warn you - ignore this stuff and you might as well not even bother.

Here’s the dealo. We are going to go looking for links in the following locations:
- sites that rank
- sites that link to sites that rank
- sites that rank on related terms

Now I’m not going to show screenshots as I don’t want some poor soul to get inundated with link requests. But lets use ‘mortgages’ as our target market.

First, go to Google and search on mortgages. There you go - thousands of sites talking about mortgages.
Next, hover over each listing and click your scroll wheel. In firefox this will open up a new tab in the browser. Click, click click on each of the top 10 listings. Go to the second page, click click click. And so on. Do this for the first 100 results.

No browse through each of those sites. Do any of them look like they might give you a link? If so - send them a personalized email. If they look like they won’t give you a link, close the tab and move on. In any regard you’ve just looked at a 100 relevant sites. Maybe you get two or a half a dozen link requests.

Wasn’t that easy? Sure it was. And the difference between those that rank and those that don’t, is that those that rank actually sat down and did this very boring exercise. Repeatedly. Over and over.

But that’s only 100 sites to look at. Let’s find some more. Let’s search on ‘related’ terms. Do the following searches:
- mortgage brokers
- morgages (a typo)
- mortgage rates
- mortgage application
- online mortgages
- mortgage rates online
- mortgage calculators
and so on.

For each of those terms, repeat as above. Open up and visit each of the first 100 results. You will start seeing duplicates which will speed things up a bit. But keep searching - any term you can think of. Let’s say you do 20 terms. You’ve just evaluated 2000 websites and sent out 40 to 100 link requests. Let’s say you get 10 of those back. Booya! 10 links! That’s 10 more than your competitors have.

Sorry, that’s not sexy. But it just plain works.

Now let’s kick it up a notch. Who better to link to us, than sites that link to those sites that are already ranking? Why, nobody of course - that’s who we want to link to us. First we know that links from those sites do make a site rank, and secondly, if they link to our competitors they might also link to us.

So, lets go back to the Google search on ‘mortgages’. Open the first result in a new tab (again using the scroll wheel to open the URL in a new tab). Now click that tab so we’re looking at the site. Let’s see who links to that site.

Right click on your search status plugin. Select ‘Show Backward Links’ > ‘Domain External Only’ > ‘Yahoo’. That will show the first 1000 backlinks to the top ranking website. So we’ve got 1000 websites that link to a mortgage site. Let’s go have a look!

Open each of those sites in a new browser tab. Have a look at the site, and where they link to your competitor. If it looks like they might give you a link, send them an email asking for one politely. Mention that since they’re already linking to your competitor (or ‘I notice you’re linking to mycompetitor.com, I’ve got a similiar site, would you consider linking to me as well please?’) maybe they’d link to you.

Repeat 1000 times.

Now go to the second site in the Google search for mortgages. Open it up in a new browser. Check the backlinks to that site using the searchstatus plugin.

Repeat for the top 50 results for the search term mortgages - i.e. check the backlinks of all the top ranking sites.

Now repeat again for all those related terms.

You’ve just reviewed 50 sites X 1000 backlinks each X say 20 terms. A million sites. So don’t give me any crap about not being able to find people to link to you. Somewhere in those million sites are quite a few who’d be happy to link to you just because you asked nice. Let’s say you send 5 emails out per 100 sites visited. That’s 50,000 emails. (note; these must be personalized emails. Do not automate.). If you get say one in 10, you’ve just developed 5000 backlinks to your site.

Isn’t that some funny math? 5000 backlinks. And no fancy footwork either. Just gruntwork.

I can’t emphasize enough - this is one of the bigger ’secrets’ in the SEO industry. Just do the work. Find relevant websites and ask them nicely for a link. Over and over and over. Boring yes. Tedious yes. Sexy, not so much. Works? Like crazy it does.

If you did nothing else than this you can get enough backlinks in most industries to rank decently. That’s it! Just do the work - that’s what’ll seperate you from everyone else. And the more search terms you can think of - related, and in related industries - the more of a platform you have to find people to link to you.

WTH does that have to with with search or the internet? Well, is it just me or is MSN rooting through your instant messages? Didn’t think they would, hey? Don’t think a search engine will use your data when it suits their purposes? They can and will. But just as importantly, most people have no clue as to how much data the SE’s are actually collecting about you.

If you use gmail you are providing them every bit of info about all your email. If you have Google toolbar installed every single web page you visit is sent to Google. Every. single. page. If you surf sites that use Google analytics, they can and do track your visits - and can track you across websites. If you visit sites that run adsense, they can track you across sites. And they can compile all that data together to create one big profile over just about every site you visit. Scared yet? You’re not nearly paranoid enough.

Google, Yahoo, and MSN are compiling this data for the purposes of making money off of your profile. Don’t kid yourself - otherwise why track and collect it? The new search engine Cuil doesn’t track this stuff. But what should be even more of a concern is what happens if either they get hacked, or the government decides to serve them with a ‘cough up the data’ order. Do you want the government to have access to your surfing habits?

This ‘analysis’ by MSN for the purposes of some stupid study should show you that your data and online habits are not safe with the search engines. They’re collecting the data, using it, and we don’t have a clue.

(I swear, I’m not a crackpot theorist! Honest! My concerns are based on fact…and others have the same concern. You’ll develop this concern too the more you get into the habits of the SE’s. They’re the new telco’s. Huge power, little accountability. They just haven’t tripped up publicly yet.).

When you’re out in the wild rummaging around for links or looking at what others are doing to rank there’s a few tools you can use to get a sense of what’s going on with a site.
First, remember that searchstatus plugin you installed? That plugin gives you a small @ symbol in the bottom right corner of your browser. A right mouse click on that symbol will bring up a menu.

1) Checking who links to your competition:
Visit your competitor’s site in your browser. Next, right click on the searchstatus plugin symbol (the @ symbol at the bottom of your browser). Choose ‘Show Backward Links’ -> ‘Domain external only’ ->’Yahoo’. This will show you the first 1000 pages that link to your competitors. Visit those pages. This seems straightforward, but actually looking at the pages that link to your competitors can tell you quite a bit about why people are linking to them, how they are developing links, and frequently other websites that they own.

2) Checking the history of your competition:
Let’s look at their site over a period of time. Again visit your competitor’s site in your browser. Right click on the search status plugin symbol and select ‘Show in Archive.org’. That will show you snapshots of their website over time. Simply click on a variety of time periods and have a look. Like checking the backlinks there’s no defined thing we’re looking for, we’re just snooping. Seeing what’s up. Maybe nothing, or maybe we see something that’s changed over time.

3) Use Google for references:
Google your competitor’s name and website. See who’s talking about them. I’ve used this to find a ‘testimonials’ section of an SEO company - the SEO company that is doing the work for one of my competitors. Now I know what I’m up against and the techniques they use to get ranked (ranked below me mind you ).

4) Who owns their IP address?
Bring up a DOS prompt. Enter the command ‘ping yourcompetitor.com’. That will give you their IP address, it looks like 123.123.123.123 (four groups of up to 3 numerals seperated by periods). Write this down. Now visit this site: http://ws.arin.net/whois/ and enter in that IP address. Now you know who owns the IP address. In many cases that will tell you where they are being hosted.

5) Check their domain registration information:
Visit whois.opensrs.net and type in their domain. This will show the underlying registration information for their domain. The ownership can in many cases be interesting. You’ll also find the age of the domain. And don’t forget to look at the nameservers. Those nameservers will be on another domain, like ns1.someotherdomain.com. That someotherdomain.com may either be their hosting company, or it may be another related website. In any case the nameservers can sometimes provide additional connections to other websites.

6) Who else is on the same IP (part I):
Type the raw IP address into your browser. On shared servers that will take you to the first website listed in Apache. And that website is typically the ‘owner’ of the IP address. That may be the hosting company. It may just be another site on a shared IP. Or again, it may be a related website.

7) Who else is on the same IP (Part II):
Go to MSN and search on ‘IP:123.123.123.123′, replacing 123.123.123.123 with your competitors IP address. This search will list all the sites that MSN knows that exist on that IP address. If your competitor’s have their own server, you likely just got a list of every site they own.

Who else is on the same IP (Part II):
As in number 7, but run the search up one or two IP address and down one or two (i.e 123.123.123.122 and 123.123.123.121). Servers normally get IP addresses in blocks, so again you can find related websites using this technique.

That’s some easy snooping!

In the beginning there was on page optimization. People would change their website and get better rankings. Search engines soon learned onpage stuff (stuff on your own websites) was not trusted. Aside: this is why developing links is still more important than changes to your website.

So Google figured out that links or citations from other sources was a good way to rank websites. Links on other people’s websites was more trusted than the content on your own website.

They also created the concept of pagerank. Basically pagerank is a number between 1 and 10 that indicates the weight of the links that point to a page. The more and higher pagerank of the pages that link to your web pages, the higher the page rank will be of your web page. If you then link out to another web page, that recipient webpage will receive some of your page rank. So, page rank flows down through the web via links between pages.

Initially using that pagerank was a good indicator for Google and they used it heavily in ranking. Higher pagerank was better.

Enter the age of reciprocal linking. I link to you, you link to me. More pagerank for both. I run a program that crawls the web and finds other copies of the program and auto-swap links. Result: 10,000 reciprocal links overnight and a really high pagerank fast - and thus a high ranking. Google soon figured out that pagerank alone could not be trusted. Goodbye sites that were doing high volume reciprocal linking.

Enter the digitalpoint network (see the digitalpoint forum link in the sidebar). I enter two sites into the network. Site A has 50,000 pages in it. I run ‘ads’ (links) for 5 other members of the network on each of those 50K pages. so 250K outbound links. In exchange, 250K pages from other sites in the network link back to my site B. Voila - large scale one way linking and great rankings. Yes, those were the good old days.

Google soon found footprints for the network. Goodbye sites that were using the DP network. (Aside: it seems that a site I had in the DP network years ago has actually finally recovered and is now ranking on it’s own again - as of the last couple of weeks).

Enter blogs and paid links. I pay you $30, you write a blog post about my site and include some links. Instant one way links. Google has not really killed this yet, but trust me, Google is DYING to stop this. It’s their #1 crusade right now.

So what is Google trying to do? As noted above, they want to server trusted and relevant sites. The problem is, how do we define trusted and relevant? And how do we stay ahead of the curve of Google finding link schemes? Just remember the mantra: trusted and relevant. Even if you’re not doing exactly what Google’s algorithm is testing for today you’ll be sitting there waiting whe Google’s engineers figure it out. And they’re getting better at it.

Now lets define trusted and relevant. A trusted and relevant website is a website that has trusted and relevant backlinks. How do we know if a site that links to us is trusted and relevant? Simple - they have trusted and relevant backlinks themselves.

But what’s relevant? That’s easy enough. A relevant link is a link from a site that has content related to our website and has links from other relevant sites.

Trusted is a slightly more complex issue. I picture trust this way; trust works like pagerank. It flows through links. We want to build lots of links from trusted sites. That gives us more trust, and a better chance to rank. But how do we know a site is trusted? Simple - a gut check. Look at the backlinks of a site. Are the backlinks full of authority, non-spammy sites? Old sites? Do the sites look trusted? If so - that’s all you can do.

For example, would a link from a low end poker site be trusted? Not likely. What about a link from the government? Absolutely - that’s trusted. And there’s a huge range in between. Just use your head you can tell trust mostly just by looking.

Long boring post I know. But important! Trust and relevance - that’s IT. Everything you do in link development needs to center around these two concepts. It worked 5 years ago, it works today and I expect it will work in another 5 years. Build for stability. If all the trusted and relevant websites say your site is worth referencing, Google will think so too. And even if the factors aren’t being measured explicitly right now, it’s where Google is looking to go - be ready for them. Most importantly, that’s pretty much all you need to know about the why of link building. Now all we need is the how (which will be coming soon).

Remember - build trusted and relevant backlinks. That makes your site trusted and relevant. And you will therefore rank.

Let’s address the first point. You are in business to make money. I’ll assume you also run an ethic and moral company because you’re an ethical and moral person. That doesn’t mean I’m going to listen to you carry on about how you’re making the world a better place with your website or how content is king, or natural links are best. If you’re going to connect Google rankings to ethics, you’re in the wrong place.

Secondly, Google is a publicly traded company. They are required to make money for their shareholders. Not have a hugfest. Or ‘do no evil’. MAKE MONEY FOR THEIR SHAREHOLDERS. Their interests are their interests first, not yours, not ‘organize the world’s data’ or any other crap. Ignore this at your peril. If you think a company that cows to China’s dictators, scrapes and republishes entire websites and will ban entire websites at the drop of a hat is your friend, you’re in the wrong place. Google is using your web site to make them their billions. Turnabout is fair play.

Their is no blackhat and white hat. And if there is, blackhat is NOT illegal when used in an SEO sense. Nor is it immoral, unethical or bad for the web. Blackhatters for the most part do not ‘hack’.

White hat means you abide by Google’s terms of service. If you feel the need to do that, reread my second point above. And if you still feel the need to be a whitehat, go hug a tree somewhere else.

Black hat means two things. First, black hatters do not abide by the search engine’s term of service. (Again, nobody’s forcing you to abide by any publicly traded companies arbitrary terms of service). Secondly, they tend to find holes in the search engine’s algorithm and exploit those holes. Blackhatters also automate tasks. They set up hundreds of websites to churn and burn where a white hatter will run on one only.

Of course, there’s a very large range between the two. What I do, and what I’ll be talking about here is how to mostly look like a white hat, but to also test some grey hat stuff. I don’t do true blackhat (honestly, I’m not smart enough to stay ahead of the search engines. I prefer to build so that they come to me instead).

In that large grey range of course are very large tolerances of risk and reward. Where you fall in that range should be a deliberate choice, as mine was. However you should also dabble seperately outside your range in order to learn and grow. It’s worth noting that Google continues to change the line where white hat is. You can find yourself a grey hat one day having done nothing different - Google just decides what was OK today was not OK tomorrow.

If you’re just getting started out with SEO, stick to white hat as much as you can. The time to learn grey is not on your money sites or on any sites where you have a trail.

The search status plugin gives us some details about the links related to whatever page we’re looking at - both inbound and outbound links. If you’re doing SEO at all,you should be making heavy use of this plugin. I use it all day everyday.

I actually bought it for one of my business sites, then upgraded to the developer’s edition so I can use it on multiple sites - specifically this one. And the reason I did is very straightforward - conversions.

If you look at the layout, you’ll see a rotating image in the top right of the blog. Sometimes it’ll be a picture of soup, or some clouds, or some people. Wonderful stuff I suppose. But I want conversions - and that spot where the pics are is a hot spot for visitors eyeballs.

So on my money site I changed those rotating images to be a form. The form is how I convert visitors to leads or purchasers. That form is the basis for all my clients. Bring the traffic in and convert. And this seem so far seems to be doing well as a result. The form is there, right in front of all visitors on every page, no matter what long tail search term they came in on. (the nice thing about the DIY theme? Making that change can be done through the theme controls. Just turn off the ‘images’, turn on ‘custom code’ and paste the code in. Poke me with a fork I’m done.)

Conversion of visitors is something you should spend some time on. Realistically, I’m no onpage conversion specialist. But check out this scenario; you get 100 visitors a day and convert 2% of them - two buyers daily. Now you want to double your business. Most people react and want 200 visitors. But that’s a lot of work - and may not even be possible. Double your visitors? A pretty lofty goal.

However, there’s a far easier way to double your business. DOUBLE YOUR CONVERSION RATIO! Spend some time figuring out how to take that 2% to 4%. You’ll find this a far easier way to double your business than doubling your traffic. It’s the low hanging fruit.

There’s three ways to do this (again, I’m not a conversion specialist). First, Google your brains out and read. Secondly, do A-B or split testing. Try one page, try a second page. Find out which one converts better. Thirdly, hire a marketing firm who specializes in this (or find an on page conversion specialist).

P.S. I suck at blogging. I don’t think I should be talking about two seperate unrelated topics in one blog post. Ah well. I guess that’s three topics; new theme installed to increase conversions, a tip to focus on conversions, then a tip on don’t blog on multiple topics.

Still, they were very pleasant and seemed to enjoy the presentation. I’ve been asked to speak at Toronto LUG as a result and plan to do that some time in the fall.

In addition to my occassional speaking gigs, I regularly post on various forums on the subject of SEO. I think I’m going to tone that down a bit and start posting here instead.

So - assuming I start to use this site as a regular blogging platform on the subject of SEO, what subjects would you like to talk about?

If you’re interested, visit www.kwlug.org for directions and details. The meeting is downtown kitchener and it’s free. They do however pass the hat around to collect some money. They then donate the money to worthy open source projects. (A fabulous idea). So if you’re coming, bring a few bucks to toss into the hat. I promise I’ll make it worth the ‘cost’.

Going forward, we’ve moved out of our home office to our own office digs downtown New Hamburg. I’ve got way more office space than I can possibly use. So I may be inclined to have a meeting in the fall or winter here at my place for those that feel like making the drive.