Today, in this video we are going to learn about link building basics.  This is not going to be one of those videos that skims the surface.  We’re going to dive in and step by step build back links for a real website during this video.  When we’re done you should understand the basic concepts of how to build links for your site.

In part two of this video we will talk about “no-follow” and “do-follow” links and also about how TrustRank and PageRank play a roles in your link building strategy.  But for this video, we will not take those into account.  It’s much more important that you learn what link building is and how it works before we move onto advanced topics – and how better to that then for me to actually walk you through building a link for an existing website.  I’ll also show you the results of how well my strategy worked at the end of this video.

Understanding Backlinks

The first thing we need to is understand what a backlink is in the first place.

A backlink (sometimes called an IBL or inbound-link) is a link from another website to yours.  In our example, Geek Camp might be linked to by three other websites.  Each one of these backlinks count as a vote of sorts for our website.  With a few but very important exceptions that we will cover in part two of this video, the more of these votes your website gets the better!  And while multiple links from one site can be good, we’re specifically targeting links from multiple sites.

Understand Anchor Text

The second thing we need to understand is anchor text.

This might be a little complicated if you’re not familiar with how an actual link is built in HTML, but it will make sense when we’re done.  In HTML, a link is formed with the <a> tag (or anchor tag) combined with the href attribute which contains your URL (or link), followed by your anchor text and closed with a </a> (or closing anchor tag).

In our example, the words Geek Camp would appear on the web page and clicking it would take you to www.geekcamp.org homepage.

Besides the content on your site, and your site’s domain name, anchor text is one of the most important ways that Google and other search engines learn what your page is about.  In this case Google will use the anchor text “Geek Camp” to know that www.geekcamp.org is the name of our site.

That might make perfect sense to you, but what if I own a place called Mike’s Cafe in Dallas, TX and I specialize in donuts?  My website’s domain name is MikesCafeDallas.com.  That doesn’t help search engines know I specialize in donuts.  So people searching for donuts in my city won’t find my website.

In order to get our website to show up in the search listings for the search term “dallas donuts”, we need to create links to our site with dallas donuts as the anchor text.

Are you starting to see the picture?  Search engines will start to associate your site with term dallas donuts.  When you combine targeted anchor text with multiple backlinks thats where the magic starts to happen.  All of those sites in effect vote for your site to be associated with dallas donuts.  If your competitor JimsCafeDallas.com only has three links with the keywords dallas donuts in the anchor text and you have 10, you will most likely be listed before him in the search results when people search for “dallas donuts”.

We’ll talk about how link PageRank, TrustRank, your site’s SEO, and the quality of your content can affect that number and your search positioning in the next video.  But for now, just understand that all things being equal, that’s all it takes to outrank a competitor for a search phrase.

Backlink Strategy

The first question I usually get asked at this point is “Now that I know this, how do you expect me to get all of the links I need?”  In this video I am going to answer the question with how to get fast and simple links that won’t do much for your overall PageRank, but will help you rank well for targeted keywords and phrases.

First, get links from your friends!  Surely you know some people with blogs who can link you?

Second, submit articles to article directories such as ezine-articles.  In the text or signature of your article, link your website.  For MikesCafeDallas.com I would write an article about my favorite pastry and somewhere in the article link the keywords dallas donuts to my domain name.

Third, seek out blogs that are on a similar topic to your site and comment on their posts.  You can use this same tactic on forums.

Lastly, create other blogs on a similar topic to your site and post links back your site.  There are many free blog services such as wordpress, blogger and livejournal.  Go to each one and create a new blog.  In your blog postings link your website with the anchor text you are targeting.

One last note before we move on to our live example:  Please do not post SPAM blogs or forums.  Your comments will just be deleted and you’ve wasted everyone’s time.  Be part of the conversation and stay relevant and on topic.  Don’t post about your fabulous pastries site and link it to donuts on a computer support blog.  You will get banned.

Link-Building in Action

Now I want to take you through an actual link building exercise.  First, a little background.  The website I want to rank higher is a small website I am just starting to build.  The site is called I Live in Keller and its domain name is www.iliveinkeller.com.

I’m already ranked #2 for my domain name keywords and site title. So, in my case, I’ve done restaurant reviews and want deep pages of my site to rank well when these local restaurants are searched for.  In this example I am targeting the search phrase “bison station keller”.

Bison Station is a new restaurant in Keller and they are advertising a lot in the local papers.  I can take advantage of some of their current search trend by ranking with (or even above them) for their name.  My current ranking for our target keyword phrase is #86.  That’s right.  I’m smack in the middle of page 8.  At the time of this video, their own website only ranked #4, under Yelp, and Urbanspoon for their own name!  I checked their number of backlinks and they were minimal making this an easy target!

My Link Strategy

I’m going to make this link strategy very simple.  I am going get 13 links with the anchor text “bison station keller” pointing to my site.  Here’s what I plan to do:

• Get 5 links from food related blogs by leaving comments.
• Get 5 links from food related forum sites using my signature links.
• Create a wordpress, livejournal and blog.com blog and link back to my site.

I’ll update this post in one week

One week Later

So where do I stand just one week later?  I’ve taken the #6 spot.  Not bad.  But I also hold the #11, #13 and #15 spots!

I moved over 80 spots in the SERPS after posting just a few links to blogs and forums using my target keyword phrase. And we’re not done!  There’s a good chance as Google indexes the rest of my pages and recalculates rankings over the next two weeks I will take the top spot for this search phrase.  I’ll update the blog post with additional details in a month or so with the final results.

Well, today I am going to give you 4 blogging tips that might not seem so obvious until you know them:

1. Don’t try to be everything to everyone

In simpler terms Know Your Audience.   This may sound obvious at first, but I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen bloggers start a blog with no real direction and no real target audience.  It is very likely that the people who come here to learn about creating and growing an on-line business are not interested in fixing the transmission on their Ford Mustang!  You need to know your audience.  What are they after?

Think about a shopping mall for a minute.  You wouldn’t go to the pet store in order to look for a pair of running shoes would you?  For that matter, you wouldn’t go to Nine West (they sell high heeled shoes) to buy running shoes would you?  Finding and targeting your audience is very important if you want to succeed.

2. Be clear and easy to understand

You might be a rocket scientist.  You’re blog might even be about teaching people how to launch their own rocket.  But don’t assume because I am interested in rockets, that it means I have a 200 IQ and already know about propellant formulas, or even basic physics.

Most of the best selling How-To authors are good at one thing.  Teaching people something new, in a creative and simple way.  Sometimes our own knowledge level makes it hard for us to teach because we simply don’t remember the questions we had when we were learning our subject of expertise.  For example, it might be obvious to a mechanic that you need to put the parking break on before you jack up the front of the car.  Did you know that the parking brake generally doesn’t lock the front tires?  It might roll away!  So telling your readers to “jack up the car” might not be enough information.  You need to break it down further.

3. Answer your emails and blog comments

This might seem like a “no brainer” but you might be surprised how many times I’ve commented on a blog post, or sent a blogger a question via email and gotten no response at all.  Answering your posts might be a lot of work, and maybe not even possible if your blog is large enough.  But you should try!  If 40 people ask the same question, one reply will do to all of them.

Answering blog comments and emails create an atmosphere that makes your readers want to return.  They start to think of you as a friend, rather than webpage.

4. Tell the truth, in everything you do

Whatever you do, tell the truth.  If you can’t tell your listeners/readers the truth, then you are in the wrong business.  Don’t tell your readers you have 10,000 subscribers if you have 5.  They will figure it out, and when they do, you lose them.  It will get around they Internet and fast that you are a scammer and your business will fail in short order.  Tell the truth!

1. You feel like you’ve made enough money that you don’t need to or want to continue working anymore.
2. You’re home-based business is taking more of your time than you can handle working two jobs.

Where you need to be careful is with number two.  If you have more work on your side business than you can handle, you need to make sure it is a viable business venture before you quit your job.  If you can make $100K/yr working 40 hours a week at your job, quitting that for a home business that makes $60K/yr working 50 hours a week is a bad idea.

Earning Two Incomes

There’s a lot to be said for continuing to “work for the man” while you build your passive income stream.  Earning a passive income while working a regular job can actually help you grow faster because you can re-invest your money into growing your online business.  Don’t discount the opportunity to make even larger long term gains.

Finding the Extra Time

Finding the time to run your business is by far the number one issue people discuss with me.  While I usually tell them “If you want something bad enough, you make the time.” I do recognize the need not to get divorced as you build your business.  Much depends on how willing you are to give up other things for business.

Here’s a few tips that you should seriously consider:

1. Turn off the Television
   Seriously.  Nothing irritates me more when I ask people “How much television do you watch?” and their answer is “not very much.”  Yet I know they have seen every episode of The Office, Glee and American Idol.  That’s a LOT of TV.  Maybe you could even learn to watch Television while you blog.  But the more TV you watch, the less time you’ll have to dedicate to your online business.
2. Pay attention to your existing free time
   If you get 5 minutes here and 5 minutes there, you might find that you can utilize those 5 minutes for a brainstorming session.  Or maybe you can use them for checking your email, rather than doing it later during your work time.  Maybe you only take 15 minutes to eat lunch, but get an hour.  Use that 45 minutes wisely.
3. Compound your work/multitasking
   I recently talked to a video editor who tried to tell me how he had no time for his blogs, because creating his podcast took too much time.  “It takes me 45 minutes to edit my podcast together and compress it.”  Really?  What do you do with your time while the compressor is running?  Stare at the screen? His answer was sadly “I play iPhone games.”  If it takes 20 minutes for your podcast to compress, that’s plenty of time to write a small blog update!
4. Spend less time with Alcohol
   I’m certainly a big fan of an ice cold beer.  But it is impossible for most people to drink beer and seriously concentrate on your home business.  Save alcohol consumption for the weekends so you can concentrate on your business in the evenings.

If you’re new to backlinking, let me quickly explain.  A backlink (sometimes referred to as an in-bound link or IBL) is a link from another website to your site.  Backlinks are the key to getting your site higher in the search rankings. The quality of the links is much more important the number of links.  See my video and article on TrustRank for more on why quality matters.  It’s also important to get links not just from quality sites, but also from higher PageRank sites (sites with more links to them).

Content is King

There is no exception to this rule.  High Quality content is still the king.  If your copy other people’s content (blogs, articles, etc) don’t expect to ever get anywhere on the web.  It doesn’t work.  Google is smarter than that.  They filter duplicate content and they are smart enough to detect many types of spun articles!  Also, just because you’re an SEO whiz… what good does it do to get 10,000 page views if your bounce rate is 98%?  Bounce rate is how many visitors click the back button rather than staying on your site, for some of the new readers.  You’re goal is to keep them on your site and get them to buy something or click an advertisement.  You don’t want to lose them by posting junk do you?

But to my real point.  Quality content is link bait.  People want to link good stuff.  If you want another blogger to link your site, you better be posting something of value.  As one of my favorite bloggers Pat Flynn says “[You want backlinks] from people wanting to link to your content simply because your content rules.“.  In many cases, just having quality content will eventually get you backlinks without you doing anything.

But how can we get there faster?

Article Marketing

One of the first ways is article marketing.  Article marketing involves creating content not for your site, but for article sites.  These article sites allow you to post one or two links in the article back to your site(s).  This is a very important resource and while it takes some work, you need to do it.

Sites I like to use include:

• EzineArticles
• GoArticles
• Amazines
• ArticleDashboard
• ArticleBlast
• ArticleAlley
• Buzzle
• iSnare
• TheFreeLibrary

There are others, but these are some of the best.  Be sure to write quality content for these sites.  If you’re into spinning, make sure you re-read your article before you submit it and correct any grammar mistakes.

Web2.0 Sites

You’ll want to go to each of these sites and create a blog.  Then you follow a similar strategy to the article marketing strategy.  Create some decent quality content and link your main site in the articles.  Be sure to link relevant anchor text.  Also, be sure to enter your blog URL in the profile pages too.

Sites I like to use include:

• WordPress
• Tumblr
• Live Journal
• Blogger
• Squidoo

Backlinking the Backlink Sites

If you really want to get the Google Juice flowing (and it takes tame…. lots of time… none of these will show benefit immediately), then you need to backlink all of your articles and blogs by repeating the article marketing and Web2.0 strategies again.  Only this time you’re linking your backlink sites.  This will increase their ranks, and that in turn will increase your main site’s ranking.

I also recommend using social bookmark sites such as Digg, Delicious, etc and book-marking each and every site you create.  I recommend using many separate unique accounts though.

Whatever you do, do this naturally and slowly.  Don’t do this all overnight.  Google likes to see links happen naturally.  Otherwise you’ll find yourself in the sandbox.

Hopefully, this guide will help you avoid making those mistakes in the first place, and keep your subscribers in sync and happy with your emails.

Buying Email Lists

This is probably the biggest mistake you can make.  Don’t do it.  Buying someone’s email and sending them a unsolicited message is just about as SPAMmy as you can get.  It’s a low, bottom feeder, thing to do!  You don’t like it when you get SPAMmed… why would you think someone else would?

Even if the list is sold as “fully qualified opt-in” for your business category, it’s still SPAM.  People won’t remember that they signed up, even if they actually did. And they are even less likely to associate your message with a list they signed up for six months ago.

Hard Recognize From Names and Subject Titles

This is huge.  I’m not likely to open an email if I don’t recognize who it’s from, or if it appears to be SPAM.  Make sure your from name is the name of your business, website or newsletter, or your personal name.  Sending the email from “Marketing List” or “Undisclosed Recipients” is a great way to get that email sent to the SPAM folder.

Once you’ve got a great from name in place, make sure your subject line is clean and direct to the point.  A subject line of “Hello!” is pretty pointless, but surprisingly common.  Hello! goes right to the SPAM folder.  Try something more descriptive like “Geek Camp Newsletter”.   Remember, you’re trying to present something of value to them.

Not Following CAN-SPAM Requirements

CAN-SPAM is designed to reduce SPAM in your inbox, and it’s not just a suggestion.  It’s the law!  However, many marketers fail to include their full company name and physical address in the messages as required by the act.  This is especially true of small operations and individuals marketing from a home office.

Beyond the legal ramifications of not following the law, having your address and phone number at the bottom of every email is a good thing.  It gives your customer confidence that you’re a real person and that you’re not a fly-by-night operation.  That gets you one step closer to your goal of selling them something.

Lack of Regular Updates

The rule of thumb is that you should contact your subscribers at least once every six months.  If it has been over six months since your last update you should delete them from your list.

But the truth is you need to contact them more often.  My rule of thumb is that you contact them with 1 to 4 touch points per month.  Anything more than that can seem overwhelming (depending on the nature of your emails), and anything longer than that is grounds for them to forget you exist.

Irrelevant Emails

One sure fire way to lose a ton of your audience and have them unsubscribe from your list is to send irrelevant emails.  If you don’t have something of value to deliver to your customers, don’t send them anything.  They couldn’t care less about how your dentist appointment went, or how you’re car broke down if they subscribed to learn about building 401K.  Make sure your email updates are relevant to the original reason they chose to subscribe.

Forgetting Your Call to Action

Don’t just waste a touch point with your customer just for the sake of touching.  While putting your brand name in front of their face is important, it’s also important to make sure you give them a call to action.  With this site for example, I try to use each touch point to give my subscribers a taste of what they are missing in the members section.  But be careful not to be so bold as to annoy them,

Forgetting to Test before Sending

While it may sound like a no-brainer to test an email to one person (your own account) before sending it, many times we don’t.  Many times things just look different in the inbox than they looked in your editor.  Sometimes you miss typos, or forget to add personalization tags.  Always test your emails before clicking the mass send button!

Today I am going to teach you the concept of Big Banana Little Banana.

If you’re a project manager, this will likely be very natural for you and you’re probably already doing something very similar.  For developers this might also be familiar if you practice Agile.  This video is to help those of you who need to better manage the time you spend working on your on-line businesses and blogs.

Take this graph.  You only have so much time to spend each month on your business.  This is especially true if you work a full-time job and manage your online business at night.  The vertical bar is for work you need to accomplish while the horizontal bar is for the time you have to complete your mission.

Yale did a study in the early 1980s following several different projects over a one year period.  What they found isn’t actually all that surprising.  When you have a set time line, the majority of the work will happen towards the end of the time line.  Humans naturally put off work when they know there is time to do it later.

The end result, is that instead of this straight line of steady work, we get a curved line with more work happening towards the end of the time line.  This is known as the Big Banana.

This means that in many cases we could have done more work over the same time period if you hadn’t procrastinated at the beginning.

So what happens if we make smaller, more manageable chunks of work? Let’s say we break all the work we need to accomplish into six separate pieces.  Project managers, will call these milestones.

Again, what happens isn’t all that surprising.  The same study from Yale answers this question.  Most of the work will happen towards the end of each milestone.  These are the little bananas.

What might be surprising is that the study found that not only does more work get done in the same time frame, but the quality of the results go up while stress levels go down.  Even more surprising is that the milestones can be completely arbitrary and meaningless from a managers perspective, as long as the workers didn’t know, and the effects were still positive results.

So set smaller, more bite sized chunks of work for your projects.  You’ll have less stress.  You’ll be more productive.  And the quality of your work will go up.

This could be as simple as writing one blog post a night, rather than 5 on the Saturday. Or it might mean breaking your day up into one hour mini-tasks rather than just having a big list that you work each morning.

I hope this helps you better manage the tasks you have to accomplish!

What is DoFollow?

Before we get started, I want to take a minute to explain what DoFollow is.  Many of our new Geek Campers might not know, and this is a very important concept.

Let’s start with NoFollow.  NoFollow is concept that search engines introduced to allow blog owners and webmasters to remove credit from a link.  Google and most other search engines learn to value a website based on how many links from other websites point to it.  This caused SPAMmers to start posting links all over the web to their sites to increase their own rankings.  Google quickly responded by asking blogs and any websites who allow automated posting (think comments and Wiki sites) to add rel=”nofollow” to all links the author or administrator did not add.  Google still recognizes a NoFollow link and follows it for the purposes of indexing, but does not count it towards your search rankings!

As of this writing, most blogs and websites follow this standard.  So posting a comment and linking your site on 500 blogs isn’t nearly as valuable for PageRank building as it once used to be.  They are still valuable as they help anchor text associations with your site, but they do not add to your PageRank count.

DoFollow is a slang term created by webmasters to let you know that they do not support the NoFollow standard and hence comment links on their websites do count towards PageRank.  In other words, DoFollow sites and blogs do not add rel=”nofollow” to their links and Google (and other search engines) will count the links!

How do the Major Search Engines Handle NoFollow?

Let’s take just another minute and let me explain simply and quickly how each major search engine handles rel=”nowfollow” links.

Google: follows the link for the purposes of indexing the site, but does not give credit to the link for rankings.

Ask.com: completely ignores NoFollow.

Yahoo!: follows the link for the purpose of indexing the site, but ignores it for all ranking calculations.

Bing: May or may not follow.  Ignores link for all ranking calculations.

How do I find these DoFollow Sites?

Finding DoFollow sites can be a major PITA (Pain in the @$$).  There are many lists out there.  Most of them outdated and useless.  That’s why I created this post.  Because there are MANY ways to get DoFollow links, and many sites to get them from.  You just have to know where to go.

STOP!  Please do not be a SPAMmer!!!
I am not providing this information to you so you can be a SPAMmer!  I am providing this information to help honest, legitimate website owners build their sites.  Please only post on these sites if you can and will provide valid, interesting, unique and valuable content to their site.  If you can’t do that, please stop reading and go away.  Besides, if you don’t cram keywords and you give real value, your effort will match your results and Google will reward your site.

For those non-SPAMmers out there, be careful how you create these links.  Google and other search engines are rather smart about figuring out your links vs. organic links.  If you go to one DoFollow blog and post 200 links back to your site on different article, your just wasting your time.  Google will see these and devalue them.   Links need to occur naturally over time and from different places around the web.  Also, be sure to provide value and relevancy in these links.  Commenting on an ice-cream lover’s blog about your “mad seo skillz” is pretty much useless and waste of everyone’s time, including yours.

Spotting a DoFollow site (and NoFollow for that matter) is difficult without a plug-in for your browser, as you have to view the source code of the page and look for rel=”nofollow” on the links.  I use a plug-in called SearchStatus for Firefox that makes it super simple, and you get the benefit of Alexa Rank and PageRank in your status bar.

List of DoFollow Blogs

With these sites you can create a free blog, and then create a keyword rich (but not SPAMmy) article that links back to your site.  You should name the blog using keywords that are relevant for your site.   If your site is about dog collars your might night the blog Fido’s Collar is Blue and blog about Fido…

Do to the fact that numerous SPAMmers want this info, I have made it available to registered users only.  Please register for a free account.

List of DoFollow Social Sites

Social sites are great way to show others all about your site.  You just have to learn to do this naturally.  You can get loads of traffic from social sites.

Do to the fact that numerous SPAMmers want this info, I have made it available to registered users only.  Please register for a free account.

List of DoFollow Community Sites

These are great!  They allow you to submit your blog with a unique review and provide a DoFollow link back to your site.

Do to the fact that numerous SPAMmers want this info, I have made it available to registered users only.  Please register for a free account.

List of DoFollow Article Sites

Do to the fact that numerous SPAMmers want this info, I have made it available to registered users only.  Please register for a free account.

List of DoFollow Portal Sites

Do to the fact that numerous SPAMmers want this info, I have made it available to registered users only.  Please register for a free account.

List of DoFollow Bookmark Sites

Do to the fact that numerous SPAMmers want this info, I have made it available to registered users only.  Please register for a free account.

Today I am going to talk about blog traffic over time.  I hope in this video I can help you visualize your traffic, and hopefully help you with some strategies to increase your blog traffic faster.

So let’s get started.

Typical blog growth looks something like this:  You start off very slow, and then begin commenting in forums and other blogs.  Slowly…  and then Google eventually starts picking up some of our keywords and we start to see some acceleration and decent increases after 7 or 8 months.

The problem for us as web marketers, is that we need traffic in order to sell our affiliate products or generate an Adsense income.  It literally takes forever.  For some bloggers, and niches, this can be a 16 to 18 month time frame.  I’m sure that’s why the web is saturated with stale blogs.  People give up.  They’re looking for quicker results and they’re not prepared with the Internet marketing knowledge to grow their blog faster.

What if I told you there’s a much faster way?  Look at this graph.  We see some peaks and valleys.  But after each peak we see our traffic has steadily remained higher than before. So what do you think is happening at these points where the traffic spiked?  There’s a lot of different approaches, and each one might be different.

What about Guest Posting on another blog?  Guest posting is one of the best ways to bring new visitors to your site.  You’ll find new people who become regular readers every time.

How about posting something to the social networks?  Submitting your site to StumbleUpon, Digg and others is an excellent way to increase traffic and find new loyal followers.

Maybe we get something viral on Twitter by giving away an iPod for example?  That’s right, give something away!  It’s one of the quickest ways to promote your site.  Ask people to re-tweet your blog post as a way of submitting to an entry to win.  You’ll wind up with 50,000 people tweeting about your site.  When the contest ends, randomly select one of those tweets as the winner.

Then repeat it all over again!  Look at the numbers.  You’ve reached the same level as others in half the amount of time!  Which line on the graph do you want to be?  In future videos we’re going to break down each one of these topics into further detail, but for now think about how this affects how you promote your website.  Thanks for watching!

I talk to people and companies all the time who are fighting SPAM.  Usually contact@somedomain.com, or similar address.  I’ve even seen some of these companies change their address to newcontact@somedomain.com in an attempt to stop the flood of SPAM.

But the truth is, if your email address is posted on the web, the SPAMmers are going to find it and you are going to get SPAM to it.  The good news is that there a few simple steps you can follow to slow down that flow of SPAM and just about anyone can implement them.

TIP 1: Generic Email Addresses

I personally own and operate over 100 domains. Some are parked, and some are live.  Like me, if you control several domains then you’ve probably noticed that SPAMmers target generic email addresses, even if they aren’t active on your domain.

contact@geekcamp.org gets several hundred emails attempts a day, and we’ve never even used that email! Try to come up with something that is simple for your customers to remember, but at the same time something SPAMmers won’t be trying by default.  atyourservice@yoursite.com for example.

TIP 2: Catch-All Email Addresses

SPAMmers proudly search the web looking for emails.  Did you know they also just try sending to a random-name@yourdomain.com?  They do this in hopes of you having a catch-all email address enabled.

A catch-all email address works by sending emails sent to your domain name at any non-working address to a catch-all email box.  For example ceo@yourdomain.com does not exist, but you have a catch-all box called admin@yourdomain.com.  The email sent to the CEO address will be delivered to admin’s box!

If you have catch-all email addresses enabled, turn them off!

TIP 3: Domain Registrations

If you register a domain and use your personal contact email addresses, you are just asking to be SPAMmed.  SPAMmers routinely import the WHOIS databases into their SPAM servers.  You should setup separate, single use emails for your:

• Registrant Information
• Administrative Contact
• Technical Contact

You could also elect to pay your registrar a fee to keep this information private.  Most domain registrars offer this service.

TIP 4: Online Contact Forms

Once again, if you place your email address on your website, SPAMmers are going to find it.  The number one best way to avoid SPAM is to not place your email address on the web in the first place.

Most all CMS software in use today has a contact form you can place on your site.  These include:

• WordPress
• Drupal
• Joomla
• DotNetNuke

These contact form modules (or plugins), will send an email to you without ever letting SPAMmers know what your address is.

Beware that some SPAMmers will fill out these forms, so you will likely want to enable a CAPTCHA to prevent contact form SPAM.  CAPTCHAs are generally included with contact form plugins.

TIP 5: Encrypt your email address

If you have a situation where you absolutely must publish your email address live on the web, then you should make it as difficult as possible for SPAMmers to obtain it from an automated script.

The first way to do this is use a Javascript email encoder.  These are available free on the web and will randomly encrypt your address.  Some SPAMbots are capable of decoding these however.

The second way to do this is to display the email address as an image file, rather than text on your webpage.  This means the person who wishes to send you an email will have to manually type it in.  Some SPAMbots also look for these, but it’s costly as the SPAMmer must consume a lot of bandwidth and CPU cycles to download images and process them.

I hope this helps you prevent SPAM to your addresses!

Let’s imagine that you’re a search engine.  You have this vast array of website that you need to index.  Probably a good 10 percent of those sites contain highly valuable content and are very trustworthy sites.  Then there’s probably another 15 percent that contains really good content, followed by another 25 percent that contains OK content.

Then you have a huge percentage of sites.  Probably more than 50 percent that are just junk or SPAM.

The search engines had to come up with a way to devalue those SPAM sites.  We don’t want to show them in the index, and we certainly don’t want to value links from them – and that’s where TrustRank comes in.

Let’s pretend again for a minute that we’re a search engine. We need to devalue this SPAM content and highly value some of the best content. If we use a concept known academically as trust distance or better known as TrustRank it will work something like this: We’ll pick a set of sites known as seed sites. These sites will be our highly trusted set of sites. They will contain no SPAM. We’ll refer to these as our level 0 sites.

These may include (and we don’t know, we’re just guessing. Only google knows.) but again may include sites such as

• nsf.gov
• usability.gov
• lii.gov
• etc.

We’ll probably start with 200 or so sites. These site won’t have SPAM and won’t link to SPAM sites. And not only are they highly trustworthy, their content is also 100% main index worthy. So as our pretend search engine, we’ll index these sites first, and then see who they link to. Who they link to will be known as -1 trust rank sites.

-1 sites might include sites such as

• harvard.edu
• yahoo.com
• wikipedia.org.

There’s probably slightly more than 10,000 sites, a tenth of percent SPAM and 95% of these sites are Main Index worthy.

Now, we’ll repeat the same procedure again and see who the -1 sites link to. These might include sites such as

• digg.com
• chase.com
• pornohub.com???

Ah!  You’re starting to see what’s happening. About 10% of these 5 million or so sites will be SPAM.  Now, when we get down to the -3 and -4 trust rank…. things start to get real bad, real fast and we don’t want any of our sites associated with them!

Now that we know how Google, and most other search engines learn how to trust sites, it probably changes how you’re looking at link building. And that’s good… it should.

Remember, new sites have no trust rank. So setting up a 100 new domains and linking to yourself really isn’t that valuable in the big scheme of things. You’re looking for links from sites as close to level 0 as you can get, while avoiding links from -3 and below sites. And lastly… as always… avoid paid links. These are almost always from bad neighborhoods that you do not want your site associated with.

So, I hope this helps you in your link building strategy and feel free to leave a comment send us an email.