Websites come and go, this is the nature of the internet. Bloggers grow tired, directories shutdown, businesses fail and  this all leads to websites that cease to exist. Everything has a life cycle, living beings, businesses and web projects. I’m going to show you how you can use this life cycle to your advantage, help out another webmaster and get your self some good backlinks in the process.

For this example, and to show you how to apply it to your affiliate site, I’m going to show you how to use it for an affiliate site operating in the diet/weight loss industry.

• Your going to need a copy of Xenu Link Sleuth (it’s a backlink checker which can be downloaded here)

• Go to Yahoo Directory and Search for Weight Loss Supplement Retailers. (Why do we use Yahoo Directory? If they have a link in the directory we assume they understand the benefits of it’s link and have built up an active link profile

• Copy the URL to Xenu Link Sleuth and kick it off

• It will check the links of yahoo directory for broken links, any broken links will be highlighted in red or display “No Such Host”.

• We are now going to check that the sites highlighted in red don’t exist and if there are any websites still with links pointing to them. For this example we are going to use http://www.diet-weight-loss-center.com. We begin by checking to see if it’s indexed in google:

• We then check to see if there is any backlinks pointing to it using Yahoo SiteExplorer

• All of these websites with links to http://www.diet-weight-loss-center.com are generating 404 errors. 404 errors can penalise sites in terms of search engine optimisation because they are all dead links.

How do I get my backlinks?

You get your backlinks by contacting the webmasters of the sites linking to the dead/non existent site and explaining that the site they are currently linking to is dead or no longer exists. You then offer them to replace the dead link with a link to your website which has similar content as the dead site. You will usually get the link because:

1. You’ve helped the webmaster by identifying dead links on their site. Dead links are a problem for all website owners
2. You’ve offered a suitable replacement (your site) for the dead link. (You have saved them time so they dont have to look for a replacement themselves.)

Try this and let me know how many links your receive!

Popularity: 37% [?]

I read a lot of blogs, I have to, just to keep up with trends in the industry! There’s a well known saying, “Knowledge is Power!” and it certainly rings true regarding internet marketing and search engine optimisation. The big search engines are constantly updating their algorithums and keeping up with every update or new patent is time consuming for anyone. Thats why I rely on other peoples blogs to keep me informed.

One of my favourite blogs to keep an eye on search engine patents filed is Bill Slawski’s SEOByTheSea.com. The reason I like Bill’s blog so much is that he goes into so much depth regarding patents filed by Google, Yahoo and Microsoft.

With so much information out there regarding how google ranks websites and serves up search queries, like chinese whispers, sometimes misinformation can be put out there or vital information can be completely omitted. It is therefore good practise to go back and look at the original patents filled and go back to basics.

Today was one of those back to basics days, so I was viewing Bills Google patent’s page. The google patent I decided to focus on was :

• 6,526,440 Ranking search results by reranking the results based on local inter-connectivity (Google, Inc.)

The abstract definition for this patent is:

A search engine for searching a corpus improves the relevancy of the results by refining a standard relevancy score based on the interconnectivity of the initially returned set of documents. The search engine obtains an initial set of relevant documents by matching a user’s search terms to an index of a corpus. A re-ranking component in the search engine then refines the initially returned document rankings so that documents that are frequently cited in the initial set of relevant documents are preferred over documents that are less frequently cited within the initial set.

Now everybody knows we should be building links from relevant or related sites. To give an example from Brian Johnson’s Halloween Costume site from this post, he had built links from a Halloween Cat site. Are these links going to be beneficial for ranking purposes? The answer is yes, they are related themes. Are they possibly the best links he could have obtained? Probably not, because although related I highly doubt that a Halloween Cat site would rank for the term “Halloween Costume” due to the level of compeition for this keyword term. If you look at the abstract definition for the google patent above to see what happens:

1. Initial Query
2. Google locates suitable websites for the query
3. Google then reranks these websites based on links from these sites to other sites within this subset of results.

So there you have it. When we’re looking to rank for certain terms, we should be looking for links from websites that already rank for these terms.

Popularity: 5% [?]

I was on Kirsty McCubbin’s Affiliate Blog, AffiliateStuff.co.uk and I came across an interesting post on how to embed links in Youtube videos.

Basically to embed links using a service called Linkedtube. It will create a button like the one you see embedded in the Youtube Video above. This is a great tool for the Affiliate Marketer. Now if you use video on your affiliate sites, you can embed your affiliate links.

To use the service is quite simple. Just fill in the Youtube Video ID, the button text, the url you want to link to, the Hover Title and Hover Text. Then just click save and get the code to place in your website

So head over to linkedtube.com now!

Popularity: 3% [?]

I just noticed when checking the site that Google has finally assigned PageRank for the site. We are now a PageRank 4, a very respectable number for a blog that has been running for less than a month.

If you don’t know what PageRank is, PageRank is a number between 1-10 assigned to your site which classes how authorative your site is. The higher the PageRank, the better. PageRank is actually assigned to every page on your website. Usually your home page will have the highest PageRank, as in our case where our homepage is a 4 but a lot of our internal pages have been assigned a PageRank of 2.

Given the fact we’ve been assigned PageRank and do offer “do follow”, it makes it a no brainer for somebody link building to participate in the comments on this site!!

Popularity: 8% [?]

Link building is a pain in the ass! It is one of the most labour intensive, monotinous tasks you can do, so it always begs the question to me why do it yourself? Even in saying that I can understand the need to control the process yourself, I don’t mind outsourcing directory submissions, this is fine, the outsourcing company have their directory lists and it’s just a matter of them filling in a form to get a directory link but the real links I want don’t come so easy. They are usually on blogs and it means building up a relationship with the webmaster in order to earn a link. How can I outsource this process and insure it’s being done correctly?

Well I’ve figured out the answer! It’s a two step process, outsourcing and then a new online app called BuzzStream! I read an interesting guest post on shoemoney’s blog recently by Justin Brooke from Sitefling.com. It was a very interesting post about outsourcing your link building to the philipines by hiring a full time virtual assisstant. Wages are quite low in the Philipines and $400 is a good monthly wage and should hire you a college graduate full time.

Justin recommends sourcing your virtual assisstant by placing an ad on craigslist. He conducts full interviews with all prosepective applicants. Once hired all employees sign on to skype every morning at 9a.m. and await to be assigned there work through the web. This process is quite similar to sourcing copywriters/directory submitters on getafreelancer.com

Now for the second part of this solution, BuzzStream. BuzzStream is a new online app to track your link building campains. It is currently in beta testing and is missing some of the functionality I’d like but is well on its way in becoming a great tool for link building.

Why is this app one to watch? Well the company is being advised by Eric Ward, one of the foremost experts on link building. So how does BuzzStream work? BuzzStream is a cms for your linkbuilding campaigns combined with a bookmarker for your browser which allows you to add prospective link partners to BuzzStream. It also offers the ability to setup employee accounts and assign prospective link partners to employees so that relationships can be built and links acquired.

BuzzStream Dashboard

The Dashboard will display your list of potential link partners, PageRank, site rating and relationship status.

The detail page of link partners has some excellent info, such as estimated uniques, technorati ranking, PageRank and it also pulls in the potential link partners twitter and linkedin contact details.

To add potential links to employees accounts is easy. Just click the Link Buzzmarker in your browser when your on a potential link partners site.

BuzzStream automatically gathers all details about the prospective partner including the webmasters twitter details.

When you click save you can assign it to an employee to develop the relationship and aquire the link.

Hope you find this post useful!

Popularity: 5% [?]