10 Super Smart Link Building Strategies

Tired of trying to build links the same old way? Here are some great tips to get you started on thinking out of the box in order to grab some precious links to your website:

1. Conduct a link audit. In order to figure out what's working with your link profile and what's not, it's often helpful to find out what your current link profile looks like. Plus, if you find lots of spammy links with their claws in your website, you can take this opportunity to remove them. Learn how to conduct a link audit here.
2. Create a page of resources. You can attract attention from websites you're interested in by adding them to a list of useful resources for your clients. Not only will your clients love that you're helping them out, but the sites you're linking to will see visits from your websites in their Analytics account and take notice. For example, you might create a list of the "Top Ten Dog Training Resources" or the "Top 15 Cooking Blogs."
3. Interview an industry expert. This is a great way to create linkbait - if you ask the right questions, people in your industry will definitely be curious to hear what this leader has to say. Post the interview on your website and share on social media.
4. Write a testimonial for a product your company uses. Submit the testimonial to the company - if it's published, you can make sure that your company website is linked where your name is mentioned.
5. Sign up for HARO. Help a Reporter Out is a website that helps connect reporters and sources. Patrol their emails daily and respond to any call for a source that fits in with your industry.
6. Donate to charities and nonprofits. You don't have to shell out the big bucks - donate $50 or $100 and ask for a link on their donators page.
7. Capitalize on local SEO. Make sure that your company is listed in Google Places and on Yelp. This way, it's easy for customers to find you and post reviews.
8. Submit articles and blog posts to syndication sites.  Make sure to include links wherever relevant. A good place to start is HubPages.
9. Take advantage of Google+ authorship. Yes, you can get your picture and G+ profile in the search results, and boost your SEO while you're at it. Find out how.
10. Use your Twitter profile for LinkBuilding. That's right - you can use your Twitter profile to build some juicy links. Learn more about that here.

Happy link hunting! 

5 SEO Tips for Your Business

You can only get the most out of your site if you boost your web presence through SEO. Here are some helpful tips for getting started:

1. Research top keywords for your industry and your site and get some statistics to help you decide which ones would be best for your optimization process. This helpful free Google tool is a great place to get started.
2. Include meta tags on each page for your site. You're going to want to make sure that you have a meta description, meta title, and meta keywords in the code for each page to help the search engines better index you. Having an H1and H2 with keywords in the title is also helpful.
3. Optimize your on-page copy by using keywords you have selected for your meta tags on each page. Be sure not to put too many keywords on one page - this keyword stuffing could get you in trouble with the search engines.
4. Build links to trusted websites and blogs. If you have partners who have websites, ask them to provide a link to your site. Offer to guest post on popular blogs to gain more backlinks as well.
5. Provide blog content on your own site and add more pages when you can so that there are more pages indexed by search engines. The more new, fresh content you can provide, the better. It's also a great opportunity to ask for guest posts on your blog from others in exchange for a guest post on their blog.

If you're itching for more tips, just check out this Soshable article.

Counting on Humor to Create Consumers

Have you ever heard of an "Explainer Video?"

Explainer videos or “explainers” are powerful marketing tools that deftly use humour to engage audiences while communicating a company’s value proposition. - Lumeo Inc press release

That's right - you can easily boost conversions, engage audiences, improve SEO, and kick off a viral marketing campaign with a video like this. 50% of internet users regularly watch humorous videos, and if you get creative with your content, yours could be one. To get some ideas, watch this fantastic commercial by the Dollar Shave Club and read this TechCrunch article for more ideas on how to get started.

Why Did My Rankings Fall in Google?

Yesterday, Google held it's second live webmaster chat event. During the event, Jonathan Simon discussed why webmasters can fall down or even out of the Google rankings.

Duplicate Content was cited at the top of Jonathan's list. It can be caused by multiple URLs, syndicating content and even scrappers pulling content from several sources and sticking them together. Ten Golden Rules Tip: If you have duplicate content on your site, be honest about it. Disallow those sections in your robots.txt. Syndicate your content carefully, ensuring that your original work gets credit through a text link or require posters to exclude your article in their robots.txt.

Server Issues are another factor that can effect your rankings. If your server is down or timing out because it's being over taxed, the Googlebot might arrive at your site, ready to spider it and find nothing there. Ten Golden Rules Tip: Make sure you're hosting your site on a reliable server. And if you do some viral marketing to boost your traffic, make sure your hosting company is prepared to handle it.

Competition might have made recent changes to their SEO campaign, either by improving their content offering or getting more link love from authority sites. Either way, it spells trouble for any company that's sitting on their SEO laurels. Ten Golden Rules Tip: The best never rest. Just because you have great SEO rankings today, doesn't mean you'll have them tomorrow, so keep adding new content, building more quality links to your site, and show Google through your hard work why you should be Number 1.

Changes in Search Trends can also affect your rankings. Google is constantly tweaking their algorithm to improve their results. One factor might be weighed more heavily one week and less the next. Ten Golden Rules Tip: Follow SEO best practices and don't stress about Google's tweaks. Your rankings might flucuate here and there. However, give it some time to level out before you start making changes to your SEO campaign.

Webmaster Guidelines Violation by your staff or 3rd party vendor can have a serious negative effect on your Google rankings. Ten Golden Rules Tip: Make sure you know who you're working with. If your site gets flagged for a violation, fix the problem and then submit your site for reconsideration.

New Video Ten Free Tools to Prepare Your Company for a Recession

We are producing a series of videos on how to recession proof your business. Here is tip #1 - how to generate free traffic to your website with search engine optimization