Well it’s this time again, it has been a hectic week and thank you to those of you who both commented on the Meta tag post and inquired as to the welfare of my goldfish “Mr Fatty”. He is, to give you an update, still swimming on his head, but for shorter periods of time. Anyway, back to the training, last week saw me dipping my toes into fathomless waters of “social media”, in particular “the basics of link building” which i am not afraid to say, is rather like an online form of OCD and the fact that most webmasters will shake a link condom at you rather than look at you, makes it a tough gig.

So here is my, “Basic linking guide” to not loosing your hair to link building. OK, so before you start. Decide what type of link negotiation your client is willing get involved in:

Paid: (what can they actually afford)

Unpaid one way: (this goes without saying)

Unpaid reciprocal: (Is the site a good resource?)

Offering a free service or gift for the right link (have they anything to donate?)

Lets say for arguments sake, our client Mr Bird has a shop selling tiny scarecrows (iscarecrows.co.uk), the product emits a silent but powerful ultra sonic pulse to scare away most large and small birds from gardens and roofs. The flexible little device can be placed in gardens, window boxes, next to carp ponds, on home & office roofs and is powered by a solar charger. He is willing to make one off payments for good links on reputable directories or sites and is offering a free “scarecrow” to anyone who owns a similar site and will give him a link as trade. He has also stipulated that he does not want to be associated with pest control sites that promote the killing of animals and birds, he feels that his products are eco friendly and he is very worried about what his competitors are doing.

Firstly i would make a list of keywords

that we are using to promote the “iscarecrow” site: (here are some examples)

• bird scarers
• garden helper
• scare crows
• pond protection
• humane pest control
• bird deterrent
• bird control product
• natural garden pest control
• eco pest control
• protecting pond fish
• eco friendly bird deterrent

(this would usually be broken down into segments, so for this example – lets say we are promoting the iscarecrow pages:

• Eco friendly pest control – eco pest control, natural garden pest control and eco friendly bird deterrent
• Fish pond protection – pond protection and protecting pond fish
• (Home page) Roof bird control – bird deterrent and bird control products
• Garden bird scarers – garden helper, scare crows and bird scarers

Now we have our landing pages and we have our brief. The client has mentioned some competitors of his:

Competitors:

• www.Pond-Terminator.com
• www.Thescarecrow&mrsking.co.uk
• www.Wizard-Oz-pestcontrol.co.uk

So we can throw these sites in a tool called a backlink checker (i have used all of the top 3 and they all tend to deliver the same information, i would pay more attention to the Yahoo links, mainly because i found these to be the most accurate). Remember that it isn’t an exact science, we want to get a feel for the type of sites we should be looking for and those that are willing to share the love.

My recommended Tools:
Backlink watch (these guys have some great tools, good information, PR, URLs and more)
Marketleap (good information and that for the competiton)
iwebtool (As above, with rankings thrown in)

I personally like to use the old fashioned route of links:www.nameofsite.co.uk in the yahoo & Google search bar. See what they come up with, it might take a bit longer, but i think it’s all about what you feel comfortable doing.

• You find that Pond Terminator has a high link popularity, but mostly from general directories, some pond landscaping sites and fish breeders but not many and most of the links are simple URLS not keyword rich.

• Thescarecrow&mrsking have a blog and write a lot about fighting garden pests, they have a lot of support from some big garden centres etc and have a major weed killer as a backer. Most of their links are via the blog, not many are on internal pages and a lot of their deeper product pages have no PR.

• Wizard-of-Oz-pestcontrol have over 6,000 links on Yahoo half internal, half external. They have one link from the BBC website and a lot of gardening advice sites and a few review sites.

Once I’ve got a handle on the kinds of industries that might well benefit from the iscarecrow website i write them down and save them with the keywords to use in the final link choices. I now have a list of URLS and companies attached to the competitors that i may well approach on behalf of the iscarecrow site. I also have a list of words and phrases describing areas and sites that i am looking for. Lastly i consider each of these for my word cloud, i truly believe that the only way to do this well, is to look at it from every angle, every possible avenue until you have saturated paths in to this area. Example: I sell baby clothes, where are the people looking for baby clothes hiding?, what sites are they going to visit, what do they need, who are they talking to, do they need advice?, could a link on a “new mothers advice page” help them? or on a “babies names site” or a “babies health site” perhaps.

To help me i use a word cloud and Mapping Search Tool – Quintura

I admit that i have become pretty addicted to Quintura and it has worked miracles for me so far, but it is still the honey moon period (once it moves out of Beta who knows?). I mainly use this tool when i have completed the other research, but you might find it is easier to go straight here with your keywords, this could really help with an industry you are not familiar with or one which is unique. Quintura builds a word cloud, like a keyword mind map linking one word to another and suggesting a list of sites that match this word or phrase.

Drop the word “pest control” into Quintura and you get this. It needs some fine tuning, but you get the general idea. You can also search for videos and images here.

As you can see, the word cloud gives you a range of terms matching the original searc
h, so we could look at “pest companies”, “pest control products”, “pest control experts” etc. As with the “babies example” someone who has just had two of their favourite koi nabbed from their pond by a heron might be desperate for a cover for the pond, where do they go, what questions do they ask, are they angry (possibly) do they type in “pond protection?” wanting a net for the pond and then do they see “bird scarer” and decide to buy both “just to be sure that it won’t happen again”.

When you get your results, try not to be as naively chuffed as me. You might think, fantastic, my job is done. But not yet, get used to reading the descriptions & the URLs so that you don’t waste your time. It would be difficult to get a link on wikipedia for instance and their links pass no love (which at my age is about as much help as a chocolate fire guard).

This leads me to a mini checklist that Simon asked me to do, when you hit a site you think would be good for your client and helpful to their visitors. ASK THIS:

1. Is it relevant?, would the users of the site have any need to visit that of your client? if not, forget it. Even if people arent going to follow the link, a spider will.

2. Is it likely that the webmaster will allow you to get a link on a relevant content rich page?In an ideal world it would be better to gain links on content rich pages with the links ‘adding value’ by enabling the user to ‘find out more’, as opposed to simple links or resources pages, but these both still hold value.

3. Does it have a Resources (links) page? or is their a place to add an appropriate link? if they have a lot of useless links on their, don’t be afraid to let them know it in an email. It would be better for your link if some teenwebcam site wasn’t sitting below it (unless of course its a bunch of teenagers onto eco gardening in realtime)

4. Does the site have pagerank? Yes. Good around 3 is ideal but if it is a new site it could be low so check out the sites age (a good tool to keep handy to check ranking, age and links etc) is SEO Quake a plug-in for Mozilla, if you have I.E you can also add it or check the http://www.whois.net/ tool. A lot of blogs don’t have page rank but we’ll talk about that another day. If a site has no page rank and is established, i normally won’t include it.

5. Check the HTML for a no follow tag, if its high profile site then it’ll still be worth adding a link but normally, no follow means no.

6. Check that the Links are true, if they show the websites URL when you hover over them in the lower left hand corner of your browser this is fine. If they have the websites address or a number of characters after the link (anything different), then it isn’t a true link and so won’t pass on any juice to your site.

7. Do they offer keyword rich links or plain URLS? (could it have keyword link?)

8. What is the site like? does it have a lot of links, adwords and banners? is the content good. You don’t want a link from a spammy website going to that of your clients, it will simply loose it’s page rank and stop passing any link popularity to your site.

9. Is there contact details for the webmaster or owner?. You’ll need to contact them directly if they do not have an online contact form, so use the whois.net tool i mentioned earlier to get their name and telephone number.

10. Is the link free or paid? and if so how much? is it worth it?

11. If the site is a directory,does it have an appropriate category for your link (if not can you suggest one?) it is better to get on a page with only a few relevant others, but make sure the page has a ranking, if not the spiders probably won’t know it exists.

12. Check who is linking to the site? does it have authority sites linking to it? this shows that it’s a worthwhile partner.

Once you are sure this is a good site, you should note it down and later check if the client is happy with it. You may have to email the site owner or webmaster to add the link and this can take sometime, it is a nice touch to offer something in return for the link if needed as this is a partnership, not one nightstand. Some webmasters will want a reciprocal link, this dilutes the link popularity, so a one way link is best, but a link from a good site shouldn’t be ignored. The site owner needs to understand that their users could benefit from being directed to your site, that by doing this they are adding to their customer experience, not loosing a customer to a competitor. If the site has a submissions page, then save the details and once the client has given the ok, and your ready to submit your link. But we shall go into that in another post.

Of course this is just basic one way linking, I will go into more detail in my link baiting and social media posts. I hope that this makes sense and is helpful in some way. Once again, please add to my knowledge by leaving a comment (its the only way I’ll learn) and even disagree with things you agree with (i like it!). See you next Monday with another adventure in S E M.. (you’ll have to imagine the re-verb on the deep voice over, this is low tech) Good luck and let me know how you get on.

My Chihuahua is demanding her evening meal as i type and i fear a tantrum of epic proportions as i see the large fluffy pig being dragged across the hall way, so bye…!
Oh and thanks to www.thingamababy.com (how to host a snail race)for the snails image. I had hoped to race my pet snails when i was young, but a big black bird put an end to that one lonely summer evening in 1978 “where were you then iscarecrow? – too late, thats where”

It’s difficult not to get consumed and indeed enthralled in all things widgety with an event like the inaugural Widgety Goodness that was hosted yesterday.
Brighton’s Corn Exchange welcomed a range of digital agencies (both large and small), new media consultants, widget developers and intermediaries to present, listen and participate in discussions of Google’s Open Social, widget development and syndication and I would be surprised if anyone left uninspired.

Steve Bowbrick described an evolution of widgets, their uses and the internet as whole – and it’s one he termed the “Darwinian Disco” – but does this evolution ultimately mean something will die?

From my experience both within Leapfrogg and in the affiliate marketing industry prior to joining the company I experienced this evolution as a publisher and the continual challenge of driving conversions. It was never enough just to include vertical banners within a webpage, and it is not enough for a company director to say, “We need a viral” or “We need a widget”.

Simon Andrews provided the above image in his presentation, which I think, really speaks volumes.

Perhaps websites, as the existing destinations we know and love will be replaced by personal – widgetized – start pages including iGoogle, Netvibes and PageFlakes, adorned by all manner of widgets from news, product and video feeds.
But of course the future in unforeseen – however isn’t it better to try something out, to experiment, to take a gamble (which, when considering the cost of developing widgets can be a low cost gamble) to make a mistake and learn from it?

Conversely, and of course this is open to discussion, I believe widgets aren’t for everyone – both in terms of budget, business model and business objectives – but they still can represent an excellent tool, for some businesses, in increasing or complimenting their brand awareness if executed and syndicated effectively.

STA Travel Tools, from STA travel (the largest supplier of student and youth travel) are just one example of an inspirational deployment of widgets (call them gadgets or applications if you so wish) which include ‘travel to do lists’, ‘Weather comparison’ tools and ‘travel offer’ widgets that users can integrated into their personal pages, blogs, Facebook/ Myspace profiles or download onto their PC or Mac desktop.
With each widget branded with the STA colour scheme and logo, the company have added value to their business by offering something useful for the user, who in turn, by embedding these widgets, are advocating the brand through their social spaces. In the era of social media and the power of social recommendations would you not agree that a recommendation from a friend carried far more weighting than a recommendation from a marketer?

But again, lets not rush into this…. Creating a widget isn’t just about throwing something up and should be proactive and not reactive.

One factor that was continually impressed yesterday was that of ‘user centricity’, the recognition and full understanding of your target user or customer and it is a point which I firmly believe is key to any strategic decision, not least when thinking about integrating widgets into your online marketing campaign(s).

If you, as a developer or marketing strategist do not recognise and fully understand your users but simply create an application with the ‘hope’ it will go viral, then you are fundamental failing. Don’t forget the importance of content and context – of which STA travel tools provide excellent and relevant examples. The Widget Success Factors – raised in Steve Touhill’s presentation are also work consideration in adding the most value and maximising the return from a widget.

But again, as with previous ‘diary of a link builder posts’, I feel a good point of conclusion would be to quote the late Malcolm Muggeridge and it is a quote I feel the Widgety Goodness delegates, sponsors and speakers would be fully behind and that is to:

“Never forget that only dead fish swim with the stream”….

To find out more about Widget and all things Widgety be sure to check out the following sources:

- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_widget
- http://widgetavenue.com/
- http://www.widgetbox.com/
- http://www.apple.com/downloads/dashboard/

And of course: http://widgetygoodness.com/

On another note, I’ve posted a few photographs of the conference on the Leapfrogg Flickr account and I’d welcome any annotations or comments if I have missed out anybody’s name or website.

The latest offering from Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares aired on Channel 4 last night, followed the somewhat disastrous adventures of ex-boxer Mike and his wife Caron Ciminera as they struggled to run the Fish & Anchor, a restaurant in Lampeter, West Wales. Whilst the couple’s arguing appeared to better the food they were originally sending out (a mix of jarred sauces and home cook book trophy dishes) they did let slip on a fantastically poor bit of black hat optimisation, which I hope made all white hat SEOs laugh out loud.

If there was one lesson to take away from the show, it would be – Don’t fake reviews!

In order to gauged the feeling of the local community for the failing restaurant come sports bar, Ramsay conducted a search on Google for the Fish & Anchor, to which he was presented with a range of reviews, two of which were rather suspiciously from a character calling himself Michael or Mike Burns.

On the Wales portal of the BBC website Burns had posted “Well i don’t get excited about food too often, and having dined in Rick Stein’s, and Gordon Ramsay’s,I think i have found a better restaurant in West Wales”. On the SugarVine website he also posted “what a fantastic restaurant for couples, and families. it seems to have everything, the food has to be the best i have eaten (home or abroad) this place will go far”. Other online reviews echoed what has already been said, but with the dire state of the restaurant, its food, its reputation and its perception from both the local community and Ramsay itself, would it not be right to question who was telling the truth?

The restaurateur confessed to posting the reviews, his rational pointing to stimulating custom, however with any reactive strategy it requires a degree of foresight – and I am not sure he really thought through the wider ramification of posting these “inaccurate” reviews.

Firstly, a warning must be expressed. For example, if someone finds your restaurant or hotel via a positive (fake) review and they have a bad experience, there is a chance that they will post a true review to assist fellow users and generally have a rant. The initial seeding of this true review has the potential to lead to an onslaught of further reviews from other visitors who might not have otherwise posted. Don’t forget the saying “people don’t lead… they follow”.

But how can you manage your reviews and ultimately what your customers are saying about you? Well first and foremost, address the problem(s)!
You wouldn’t put a sticking plaster on a gun shot wound, so why think that a positive review about the quality of your food or the softest of your sheets is going to counteract the adversities of your customer service?

The customer is king, a point stressed by Ramsay, and one that should ring true for any business, after all, without them, where would we be?

By rectifying or at least making plans to manage any failings within your business, regardless of its size, will be the first step in managing your online reputation, but this is an area I will not going into comprehensive detail for this post. Instead, I will offer some simply pointers as to how to harness online reviews for good.

Sites like Trip Advisor, which boasts over 10,000,000 user generated reviews of various hotels, holidays and restaurants is gaining increasing weighting as an resource for honest and unbiased review and via its system of community recommendation it really has the power to drive custom, and in many instances, divert customer – the key factor being positive, and consistent reviews.

But if you do run a successful hotel or restaurant and wish to harness these social spaces, but wish to do so in a more ethical way than that demonstrated in Kitchen Nightmares than why not encourage your diners of hotel guests to post a review after their stay.

When the customer is paying their bill or even booking their hotel room why not take their email address, or even ask them to submit their business card in return for entry into a monthly prize draw for a free meal in the restaurant?

In addition to building up a client database by collecting this data – for use in promotional mailings including notifying customers of events, promotional and the launch of a new menu – you can also harness it to stimulate online reviews by dropping your customers a short email after their stay / meal, which might look something like the following example…

“Good afternoon Simon, and thank you very much for your booking at the Leapfrogg Restaurant, we hope you had an enjoyable meal.

We pride ourselves on the quality of our food and our attentive staff however we’re always striving to enhance and improve what we do, and as such we would appreciate you taking two minutes of your time to write a review for us at Trip Advisor (http://www.tripadvisor.com), a free travel guide and research website that allows users to post review and ratings.

Your comments are important to us, and will be used to improve the Leapfrogg restaurant.

Thank you very much for your time and we look forward to welcoming you again to the Leapfrogg restaurant in the near future.

Sincerely,

A Restaurateur
Leapfrogg restaurant
Brighton
Tel: 01273 669 450”

Of course, many of your requests will be ignored, but providing you are personal in your emails (a point we at Leapfrogg have mentioned previously in this blog) then you are more likely to get a response, and even if you only have a 5% success rate, this is still 5% of valuable customer feedback.

A point to which I will conclude this post is one which has stuck with me from London’s SMX, and one that I will most certainly be repeating from here on out is that “Yesterday’s news no longer wraps today’s fish and chips”. Online news and online content, including user generated reviews do not simply get binned like a newspaper at the end of the day, but they remain live, and can even appear within the search results for a brand keyword search… so isn’t it worth paying attention to what your customers are saying?

Ramsay image courtesy of Buddy TV

Attending SMX London earlier this month provided an excellent opportunity to meet and hear the thoughts of many of the large/ small companies and freelancers of the search marketing community but it was only a shame it didn’t continue for a third day in order to attend all of the tracks that clashed with those I attended.

But even so, the seminars and informal networking in between oozed excellent advice and examples of outstanding search marketing campaigns, particularly from the larger firms whose clients include those as big as Cadbury’s. As with managing any budget the skills resides in scaling down these often ‘big’ ideas to something workable for the SME client and related budget.

After the two day event, I left inspired, and perhaps a few pounds heavier from the second helping of Crème Brûlée but I was again faced with the predicament of ‘building links’.

Whilst web 1.0 methods of generating relevant links (“hey, can I have a link on your site”) will only get your campaign so far, there is increasing scope to harness more creative methods of generating brand awareness, backlinks and traffic – which, surprisingly, can be achieved on a budget.

But what do I mean?

Well, for this post, I want to explore link bait, which Jim Westergren defines rather simply as creating “something that naturally attract backlinks for your web page by getting people to talk about it…. In addition to attracting a lot of visitors”.
Successful link baiting campaigns can therefore assist in brand awareness in addition to strategies of differentiation presented by the richer top level multimedia search results of Google’s Universal Search.

Comprehensively exploring each link baiting strategy is not something I will carry our in this entry, but instead I will focus solely upon video content – which is but one of the many tools at ones disposal.

Viewing examples of existing video content provides an excellent method of establishing the wide range of videos formats to inspire you when creating your video content.

Creating a video product review:
This product review with details of price, what’s included and where to buy is an excellent example of harnessing video content to increase sales of your products.

Interesting and useful content:
Thought provoking and interesting videos like this one about global warming scream out to be shared, blogged about and commented on. These videos might also include high quality interviews or research within your subject area.

Funny Viral Videos:
Viral videos, ranging from Mentos and Coke and the numerous follow up spoofs needn’t cost the earth to produce, and if you are not creative enough to develop a new idea, why not borrow or tweak an existing idea?

Including these examples:

Using humour to get the message across is an excellent way of keeping the user engaged.

Downloading and remixing existing content is an excellent approach. This example sees 1980’s Horror ‘The Shining’ remixed as a family friendly love story.

Or this video, which rips off the original Sony Bravia advert, to excellent effect.

But creating a good video isn’t enough to guarantee success – and requires further promotion, be it organically through word of mouth or coordinated within existing marketing efforts including press release submission, networking with influential bloggers and posting on targetted forums for example. This is of course not to mention where the video itself is going to be hosted, which I will get onto shortly.

As more and more people jump on the link bait bandwagon it’s becoming increasingly difficult to promote traditional link bait over larger budget campaigns and with Internet users becoming more savy as to what’s entertaining and what’s simply an unsolicited infiltration of ‘their’ online spaces, care is needed in not only what is created by how it is presented.

Now obviously how you present your video is dependent on the objectives of the campaign. For example, is it simply a branding exercise and if so, why not upload the video to the major video sharing websites including Blinkx and YouTube along with a keyword researched title, description and tags before continuing your promotion.

If you however, wish to build backlinks to the core company domain or traffic to your website then you might wish to upload the video to the core domain, paying particular attention to the fundamentals of your ‘on the page’ optimisation including:

- Page titles
- Meta Tags
- Meta Description
- Alt attributes
- Page copy
- Video properties (author, copyright, description etc)

In addition, ensure you don’t orphan off the video by launching it in a Javascript popup player, instead embed it in both Flash and Quicktime player formats to ensure as many users can access it as possible.

But before you turn the green light on the video, ask yourself whether it fits in with the culture of the organisation and whether users (made up of bloggers, webmasters and forum users) will want to link to CorporateUrl.com/funnyvideo.com from their web space?

To overcome this, you might consider creating a custom domain solely for the purpose of the video, an example being http://www.willitblend.com/ (which Ciaran Norris featured in his excellent SMX presentation) as users will probably feel more comfortable linking to you on this custom site rather than its ‘corporate’ big brother. Once the video has generated some traffic and backlinks you can always 301 redirect the custom domain to a new page of your corporate site.

Creating a concept:
If social spaces are to be social and existing viral content is either informative, thought provoking or hilarious then don’t forget to use these rules to your full advantage. In these spaces there isn’t a great deal of room for blatant business and sales, but this doesn’t mean you can’t get a message across.
Now, whilst I mentioned about keeping the video on an external domain, you might also consider creating the video external to the business, for example in the eyes of a customer, a new staff member or perhaps something unrelated altogether… think about the Cadbury drumming Gorilla advert?

The best strategy for increasing the exposure of your video:
Harnessing the major video sharing engines including YouTube and Blinkx is an excellent method of generating exposure to your video, but pay particular attention to your keyword research when selecting the title, description and tags for your video.

In addition, if you want to create traffic and backlinks to your website (or wherever you have hosted the video outside of YouTube) then why not only upload a short clip or trailer o
f your video to sites like YouTube along with the location URL of your full video so that users can view the full video or ‘find out more’.

In short, the aim of the trailer seeks to excite the user to find out more and, like a traditional trailer, should not give the punch line away.

In conclusion:
Creating video content doesn’t have to cost the earth, but, if executed properly, it can potentially lead to increased levels of traffic, brand exposure and backlinks. In the age of increasing social networking and indeed social time on the web it’s certainly not a tool to ignore, but that’s not to say it is suitable for every business.

Although not a marketers himself I think Charles Darwin provides an excellent point to conclude this post when considering exploiting new tools in marketing for the SME client in that:

“It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the ones most responsive to change.”

For further information on the subject: be sure to check out:

1. searchenginejournal.com
2. doshdosh.com
3. logodesignworks.com
4. toprankblog.com

This morning, during my continued quest for quality links I received an email from a prospective link partner, questioning, rather aggressively, exactly why he felt he should set up the link and in his words “advertise” another business for free on his website.

Before I sent my response, I wondered where the love had gone and why webmasters and their websites were becoming more like private residences and not the green open fields I once thought of.

Had the unforgiving and ever more complex spam attacks led webmaster to put up impenetrable barriers to genuine emails and communication from fellow web masters and marketers, who, unlike the spammers, wanted to recommend and raise the profile of established businesses?

I wondered if webmasters were now more concerned about recommending particular websites because of security, when referencing viruses and Trojans. Or was it the development of something a little closer to their chests?

Taylor, hailed as “The Father of Scientific Management” was perhaps right in his belief that it is money which motivates, and certainly with the development of affiliate marketing over the last ten year, Google’s Adsense and the popular Amazon Associates program many webmasters are recognising they can monetise their websites, including by selling links.

Whilst I am not opposed to webmasters selling space on their website, providing it is relevant and justified of course, I remain concerned as to how far the sale of links will go? Will a webmaster drop a good quality website in lure of a high paying poor quality link partner?

In casting my eyes back to the original email, I wondering why the sender had chosen to use the word ‘advertise’, particularly as I wished to gain a link on his resources page. I then questioned whether users would even navigate to this page, and if they did, why would they?

The answer was simply. Users would navigate to that page in order to find some more information on the subject, which the resources page currently did not offer.

Now I ask you to consider what you do if you are on a website which doesn’t fulfil your needs? I’m pretty confident you’ll leave it, right?

My belief with ethical link building sits firmly with the premise, not of optimisation and manipulation of the major search engine algorithms but of the optimisation of the user experience. If your website includes quality and useful content, in addition to, for example, a range of external websites where users can ‘find out more’ then you’ve adding value to your website and are acting as an authority as you clearly have an awareness of the key areas of your industry.

I count myself lucky that I get to relive my childhood whilst conducting my daily link research, viewing all sorts of circa 1994 (and near epileptic fit educing) animated gifs on rarely updated websites before finding a true diamond in the rough.

I only wish there was more of an understanding from webmasters of the true value of ‘sharing the love’ and adding reputable links to their websites. Ethical link builders, like me, are not second class citizens so why not join us. Let’s push things forward and make the web more useful for everyone!

1. A good link builder appreciated the necessity of sharing. With a good link builder, it’s not all about take take take, but he offers reciprocal links to quality and complimentary resources – he shares the love to enhance the experience for everyone.

2. A good link builder is personal in his emails, referring to webmasters by their first name and establishing an informal repour – call it foreplay if you will.

3. A good link builder will call back and follow up any communication between link partners. One night stands mean nothing to a good link builder, as a link partner can be called upon again in future.

4. A good link builder will incorporate methods they perhaps have never tried before including link baiting and the penetration of social media in order to spice up the campaign. A good link builder appreciates that monotony is not going to get anywhere, but by keeping the experience fresh and exciting he knows he will succeed.

5. A good link builder is honest, will not say “it’s not you, it’s me” and won’t string a webmaster along by dangling an offer of a reciprocal link in front of them, only to withdraw when their link is live. A good link builder either wants you, or he doesn’t.

6. Of course the matter of paid links might cause some critics to consider the notion of prostitution, however I consider paid links to be like massage oils, ‘toys’, and lingerie in that they serve – providing they are good quality – to enhance the campaign. A good link builder, and a lover, knows this.

Please note, that whilst I have used the term ‘He’, I refer to and include all link builders whether they be men or women and in addition, I feel I have to add that whilst at Leapfrogg, I go far in my quest for high quality links, there are some things that I just won’t do…

It’s that time of the week again when our wonderful frogg shares with you his extensive search vocabulary. If you are new to all this ‘word of the week’ stuff, there is a good reason for this regular article.

If however, you are already sitting on the edge of your seat desperate to know this weeks letter, here goes…

‘L’

OK, let’s keep this simple…it’s been a long week!

‘L’ is for ‘Link’

A link is an area on a web page, perhaps an image or a word, which can be clicked upon to take the user to another page or area on the same page. Links are the primary means by which search engines spider websites and thereby create their indices.