Obtaining good quality backlinks without paying for them is becoming increasingly difficult. In this short post, I thought I’d share 3 link building tactics that have been working for me lately.

1. Hubpages: Hubpages is a community of articles, or “hubs” on various topics. Their unique system discourages spammers by slapping no-follow tags on outgoing links if your “hubscore” falls below 75. You can increase your hubscore by participating in forums, commenting on hubs, and most importantly, submitting high quality, completely original articles. It takes some work to maintain your hubscore, but the high quality links are worth the effort. I’ve seen some of my hubs picked up by Google in less than 2 hours.

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Tags: Article Marketing Internet Marketing Link Building Search Engine Marketing Web Marketing

Now that everyone and their mother has a website and thinks they know SEO, odds are the number of websites competing for your keywords has increased drastically. Within any business, it’s vital to keep track of what your competitors are doing. This practice is even more important when it comes to SEO. In this post, I’ll share some steps to keep tabs on what your competitors are doing so you’ll remain on top.

1. Identify Your Competitors:  Obviously, the easiest way to find your competitors would just be to Google your keywords. Another good way would be Alexa Traffic tool and look at the related sites.
2. Setup Google Keyword Alerts: A great way to monitor your competitors as well as your industry in general is to setup Google Alerts for each of your primary keywords. Every time Google finds a blog post, press release, or article featuring your keywords, you’ll get an email with a link to it. Many times, Google alerts have alerted me to the fact that a competitor was using a less than ethical SEO tactic, such as splogging.  
3. Setup Google Company Name Alerts: In addition, setup a Google alert for each of your competitor’s names.
4. Check Your Competitor’s Back links: By using the “link:www.yourcompetitorurl.com” command in Google or Yahoo, you can see where your competitor’s back links are coming from. This is a good way of generating ideas for link building.
5. Check Your Competitor’s On-Site Tactics: What keywords are your competitors targeting on their landing pages? I can’t tell you how many times I’ve discovered keywords on a competing website that I’d never considered.

I’ve spent hours scouring the web for the best article directory sites. After finding more than I knew what to do with, I wasted time submitting to most of them. As time wore on, I’ve come to realize there are really only a few that matter and that Google still likes. I’ve listed them below, along with my thoughts on each.

1. Buzzle: My personal favorite, Buzzle is the most SPAM free article directory, in my opinion. However, they are also the most difficult to get your articles into. They require you to submit previous work in order to be approved as an author.
2. EzineArticles: A very popular directory, EzineArticles is another great site, although the author admin is very buggy. They allow you to initially submit 10 articles, and then you must be reviewed again in order to continue submitting (which seems odd to more, but what heck)
3. IdeaMarketers: Offers instant article approval, as well as a generous number of backlinks allowed in the article text and author bio.
4. GoArticles: Not bad, articles are instantly approved. While the author bio only allows one link, you can put several in the body of the article.

Besides the sites listed above, I haven’t found any other worthy directories. Be sure to leave a comment if I’ve missed a good one.

Lately, I’ve been quite disturbed reading articles and blog posts about negative SEO. For those of you who aren’t familiar with the term “negative seo”, let me briefly discuss the topic.

Negative SEO occurs when a malicious part (often a competitor) create hundreds of junk backlinks to your site in a short amount of time. It’s common for the anchor text of these links to contain spam words like “online gambling” or “viagra”. The most common source of these links are from Splogs (SPAM + BLOGS) created using a free blog account.

Google sends up a red flag anytime you acquire too many backlinks too quickly, especially if the links look spammy.

As this unethical practice seems to becoming more common, how will Google respond? How will their algorithm know the difference between ethical seo links and spam links?

Has anyone heard of a way to report negative SEO? Please leave a comment if you have any ideas.

As an SEO consultant, I’m always looking for new linking strategies. In this post, I’ll share my current favorite 3 sources of high quality backlinks.

1) Newsvine: Newsvine is well known as a news site similiar to Digg. However, some people don’t realize you can submit articles to Newsvine as well. The articles can contain html links, and they’re quickly crawled and indexed by Google.

2) Buzzle: While many article submission sites have fallen out of favor with the SE’s due to SPAM, the Buzzle article directory remains high quality. It is however, harder to become an approved article contributor. Since you’re required to submit previous work, don’t count on using Buzzle as your first article submission endeavor.

3) Squidoo: Relatively new to the social scene is Squidoo. Wikipedia explains the concept behind Squidoo, “Squidoo is a network of user-generated lenses –single pages that highlights one person’s point of view, recommendations, or expertise.” A Squidoo lense is highly customizable, allowing you to add links, images, and more. If you network your lense properly, it will be crawled and indexed regularly.

Have any creative link building strategies of your own? Feel free to drop a comment.