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One thing a good SEO gets in the habit of doing is back-link analysis. That is, they find out out what websites link back to their client websites as well as to competitors websites.

The reasons for doing this are many and varied. One is to find potential links for you and your clients’ websites. You may find a highly regarded blogger, link directory or influential website from which you can get a link. Another reason is competitive intelligence. You may find out information about your competitors business strategy, business partners and new projects.

If you want to know a simple and effective way to use Yahoo Site Explorer (the latest version as of today), click through to my brief screenshot tutorial. It will take you less than 5-minutes to read it and you can begin using the information on Yahoo’s free tool immediately: Brief Yahoo Site Explorer Tutorial.

With the demise of Yahoo’s free Overture service and Wordtracker’s drastic curtailing of their free trials, you may be wondering, “Where can I go for quick and free keyword data?” Here are a couple of free services to consider:

Trillian’s Keyword Discovery

Trillian has a free search term suggestion tool. It’s gives you over 100 terms, in order of occurrence, the way Overture used to do it: http://www.keyworddiscovery.com/search.html

Seo Book Keyword Suggestion Tool

Seo Book has pulled together a nice resource that includes info from WordTracker, Google, Yahoo!, MSN and others: http://tools.seobook.com/keyword-tools/seobook/index.php

I will add other services to this post as time and energy permit.

cheers - Ryan Nagy

This topic will be old-hat to most SEO experts and consultants, but I wanted to mention it as it has come up in several client conversations recently. When you create Press Releases on PRWEB.com and other press release sites, the links that you have in the release do NOT pass Google Page rank to your website.

How do I know this? I know it from Matt Cutts, head of Google’s webspam team:

…a legit press release can get you written up by reporters, or editors/sites may subsequently choose to link to your site. But the actual content of the press release itself doesn’t directly affect a site. For example, on http://www.prweb.com/releases/2005/10/prweb296086.php those hyperlinks don’t help avatarfinancial.com (in Google).

Directly from Matt Cutts’ comments on his blog: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/seo-article-in-newsweek/

Several years ago when I first started blogging, I made a mistake that I see many first time bloggers make. My blog posts were very short, often just a couple of sentences with a link to another website. In essence, my blogging was simply about sharing cool websites and interesting ideas that I found on the web.

While that is fine in the short term it did nothing to build my web-presence and readership nor to develop web content of my own. Later, I swung to the opposite extreme. I began writing long, content-rich posts with few links to outside websites. This was more useful as it helped me to develop readership, gain more incoming links and generally develop my ideas.

However, I think it is important to link OUT to other websites. Linking to other websites can help bring you more traffic, more links and get others to read your content. Below is partial analysis from Rand Fishkin of SEOMOZ on why you should link out:

1. You tend to get more links coming back in
2. Your domain and pages appear in the referral analytics of other sites, inviting site owners (who are often very likely “linkerati”) to check out your site
3. The search engines have at least looked into algorithms that reward external linking behavior
4. Karma - and not just the invisible, metaphysical kind - bloggers really do look at who links out and who doesn’t and they tend to reward the more generous
more of this post by Rand

And if you like to see stastical analysis on web-topics, consider the link below that shows some small evidence that the more outgoing links that a “news” sites has, the more likely it is to also have a higher number of incoming links: How good is the mainstrem media at linking out?

Link baiting?! Link bait?!

I subscribe to a job board that lists companies who want to hire SEO Managers and SEO Gurus of one type or another. One of the job qualifications that seems to be popping up more and more these days is:

“..must be proficient in link baiting strategies…”

Like much SEO jargon, link baiting is simply a new term for activities that people have been doing for some time already. Link baiting are the activities of creating online content to which other people want to link. - i.e do something great that other websites will link to.

Here’s a brief list of some link-baiting techniques.

Note that for businesses, some of the techniques might require ongoing internal efforts - such as a marketing intern or in-house staff blogging on a regular a basis.

Create a valuable resource for your industry or niche and post it online.

The resource could be a top 20 list, a special report, how to guide, or story about your industry (or people in it) that few know. Keep in mind - your goal is not to sell but to inform and entertain - provide something of value that others will want to link to and share with colleagues.

Interview prominent people in your industry and publish the interviews.

You could interview someone via phone or email. Or record the interview and publish it as a podcast. There are “rock stars” in any niche. No matter how small the industry or group, some people stand out. Talk to them. And when someone searches for that person’s name on google? They find your website and your interviw.

Tie some of the interviews to specific industry events. Is there a conference coming up? Interview the organizer or one of the keynotes. They will be happy for the free publicity and you will get conference goers to take a look at your website. They may even link to your interview.

Write regular blog posts and articles.

You have experts on your staff, do you not? Let them share their expertise online. Have them write interesting and informative articles or publish technical information that few people know.

They could be the first to write about news and developments in your niche. Do it often enough, and you will get repeat visitors and, um LINKS.

Run a newsworthy ‘event’ such as a contest.

Do you have a new product or product line coming out? Offer a prize to the person that gives you best name for it. or who can write the best description, or gives the most unique use for it.

Use Your Imagination: Do something new that has not been done in your niche.

Be the first to research and document something in your industry and then post it online. Or be the first to doing something on the internet - could the CEO in your company be the first in your industry to blog? Do you have someone on staff that could create a free tool or application and give it away?

Coin a new acronym in your industry and get people to talk about it.

This one should be fairly simple. Ever heard of the Nagy Method? Me neither. But let me see if I can make it up. N = NEW. A= AND G=GREAT Y=?? Yodelling? Yoda? Y2K? Aha! How about YouTube? Nagy stands for another link-baiting technique: Create a New And Great YouTube video. In other words, C. Nagy.

On a cautionary note, you may want to view a brief post and discussion on some possible limitations to linkbaiting on the SEOMOZ website