Search Engine Optimization Blog � SEM News & Opinion

Quality inbound links are key to achieving great results with organic search.

As SEOs, getting quality incoming links for clients is a time-consuming routine of content creation, web browsing, info submission, and link requests. The question is how to build link popularity efficiently without wasting time.

There are a number of ways to get incoming links, but two that show the most results are creating quality content (linkbait) and requesting links directly from relevant sites. We all know how to create quality content (or buy it). The question is really how to find relevant sites to approach for a link. Advanced keywords searches are a great way to get started. One of the most efficient ways to target potential linkbacks is still competitor backlink analysis.

Competitor backlink analysis is no stranger to SEO; our site owner David Ogletree has made several worthwhile posts about backlink research recently. There are a number of free and modestly priced tools on the market that streamline the link analysis of any website. But a new tool has entered the backlink analysis market that truly aids in streamlining your backlink management.

Link Hound is a great backlink research tool for discovering and managing any backlink endeavor. The process of adding a website campaign and relevant keywords to that campaign is simple. The tool actually suggests numerous websites to analyze based on any keyword phrase entered and determines the links with the most potential to backlink to your site based on the information you give. Link Hound also offers a contact management system within its results page which makes it easy to keep track of links and contacts within the tool instead of exporting that info to Excel. But if you are old-school, you can still export the data to CSV and have fun.

After spending an afternoon using the new tool, it definitely provided relevant potential. Even if you are already using link building software, Link Hound can serve to bolster your reservoir of potential link targets.

Bottom line: Link Hound will help you find relevant backlinks to pursue and help you manage them too.

I was just over at www.searchengineland.com and 2 pages into reading article titles they tell me I got to pay to read more. On twitter I saw that www.jensense.com has a “Pro” section. www.seobook.com, www.seomoz.com, www.webmasterworld.com, www.shoemoney.com and I’m sure there are others all have premium sections. I miss the old days when everybody talked online and you did not have to pay them extra. These people are all now very rich because they gave great advice online. Now that they are all famous they want to make an extra buck. They get lots of business from giving away information in the past and now they just rest on that fame and charge for their information. They don’t have to prove that they are smart any more so they want to charge us for it.
Another thing that has happened is that the forums suck now that everybody has their own website. You used to be able to go to one or two forums and talk with everybody now you have to go visit 20 websites to talk to the same people. At least everybody is getting on twitter but you don’t get discussions like you did on the forums.

One of the thing I run into the most when evaluating a website for seo is the same title on every page. This can be fixed with a little bit of code. If all the pages are static you just go to each page. If the page is using a header file then you have to make some changes. If they have a lot of static pages with an include file for the header you are still going to have to go and change every page. If you have a lot of data in a database you can just make some changes in the header file. Here is the php code to fix the problem.

Website using header file on a bunch of static pages.

Include File:
<title>
<?php
if($title){echo $title; }else{ echo "Generic Title";}
?>
</title>
 
Static Page
<?php
$title = "Unique Title";
include 'header.inc';
?>

Your still going to have to go to every page and put that on it. This allows you to keep a header file that you can change in one place. If your site is completely dynamic your going to need to add a title field to your database and populate it with Titles. Then use the same if statement on the title tag but echo the title from the db.