Well…right now it’s 9:00pm on a Sunday night, and I’m at the We Build Pages office (where I’ve been all weekend)….I’ve ended up working several nights past midnight for the past several weeks…but I’m about to have a lot of time away from the company…it’s all the ying to my yang in my time….I work hard, but I also am able to get away from it for periods to refresh.

Tomorrow I’ll be going under the knife again, this time a hernia…..but overall I’m in better health than I’ve been in 10 years, and am working to be in my best health of my life in less than a year from now. (I’m 40 pounds lighter than I was about a year ago, and I’m still loosing weight…and on a raw food diet)….and the business…we’ll, we’re back with a vengeance this year, and so am I.

But anyways, here’s my speaking schedule for the next 4 months.

Aug 16-20th I’ll be San Francisco for SES where I’ll be speaking on “How to Become a Link Magnet” and “Link Building in August 2010″…and I might drop in on the “Black Hat, White Hat” gathering.

Sept 21-23 I’ll be at SEO Oktoberfest Munich Germany – where I’ll be 1 of the 16 speakers at a very private gathering.

Sept 27-29 I’ll be at Performance Marketing Expo Affiliate Conference in Miami speaking on “Link Building Methods and Risks”.

October 7-8 I’ll be at SEMcon in the Philippines talking about link building with these characters:

* Aaron Wall of SEOBook.com
* Todd Malicoat of Stuntdubl.com
* Charlie Ellis of GallantFish.com
* Dean Chew of Ayima.com
* Mike Borras of Tupalo.com

November 8-11 – Pubcon Vegas, just confirmed last night -  I’ll be speaking on Link Building again, as well as we’re going to help sponsor pubcon this year.

It seems like a lot…but I feel like there’s so many conferences that I’m still missing because I don’t have time to attend them all….

I’m going to have to start to look into which conferences that I’ll be attending in 2011. If you’d like me to speak at your conference please see this page.

I hope to see you all on the 2010 World Tour!
I’m Feeling Lucky,
Jim

I was lucky in that I had a 1 hours time slot all to myself, rather than the usual 10-15 minutes that one normally gets when you’re on a panel with others.

I’ve often felt that at conferences where a speaker only gets 10-15 minutes, that you tend to get an “introduction” to a topic…when often, what I’m seeking, is not an “introduction”, but “Here’s what’s important, here’s why, here’s what to do, and here’s how to do it”….at least with an hour I can get a ways beyond “introduction” and more into the “dirt” of the topic. At Hostingcon, SEO Class, and Internet Marketing Ninjas I often had an hour or more of talking time….and I always preferred that over 10-15 minutes of talking time…sheeet…when it comes to links, I can talk all day and all night….

For my talk, I split my time between “Link buying – methods and risks”, and “Trust Bait for Links”. I also talked about some of my ideas on how trust flows through sites, and  my values of different types of links. I also showed how content can get great links, and some ways to do this.   It was great to go a bit deeper into my topic of love (link building)…and I could have talked for hours if they’d of let me.

But in any case, I had a great time, met some great folks, and I can’t wait to get back to the UK again. I also had some nice things said on twitter about my presentation that I thought I’d share (and use for a selling point for those future conferences which I’m seeking to speak on)

philipmorgan:  I think @avinashkaushik and Jim Boykin @webuildpages stole the show at #ses - really enjoyed both, some awesome tips shared by both.

MartinHayman: Enjoyed SES but was gutted that JimBoykin had to rush at the enddue to lack of time… great link building advice… wanted more.

davedewar: @RelevancyStream Came across just how much @jimboykin loves his job!

JessicaWHealy: RT @evolutionuk: #SESKEY I think we all could had done with another hour with jim from @webuildpages.

evolutionuk:  #SESKEY I think we all could had done with another hour with jim from @webuildpages.

JessicaWHealy:RT @RedwebSearch:@webuildpages Best presentation of ses2010 so far! #seskey

I went to a marketing party to reminisce with my old friends
A chance to share new techniques and talk of links again
When I got to the marketing party, they all knew my name
No one recognized me, my hat color wasn’t the same.

But it’s all right now, I learned my lesson well
You see, you can’t buy links anymore, so you got to go long tail.

SEO’s came from miles around, everyone was there
Giovanna brought her SEOBook, there was tweeting in the air
And over in the corner, much to my suprise
Mr Sullivan in yellow shoes wearing a Rand disguise.

But it’s all right now, I learned my lesson well
You see, you can’t buy links anymore, so you got to go long tail.

Talked all night about link building, thought that’s why they’d came
No one believed I’m not link buying, even though I’ve changed.
I said Hello to Stuntdubl, he used to work for me
When I started talking about old site buying, he said it was time to leave

But it’s all right now, I learned my lesson well
You see, you can’t buy links anymore, so you got to go long tail.

Someone opend up a conference door and out stepped Matty C. Goode
Writing down SEO operators of interest, like he thinks he should.
If you gotta go to SEO Parties, I wish you lotts luck
But if SEO were all I sang, I’d rather drive a truck.

On Tuesday I’ll be Moderating the “Hot Topics and Trends in the Affiliate Space” panel.

Speakers:
Steve Schaffer, Publisher, Offers.com
Elisabeth Archambault, Freelance Affiliate Marketer, Wedding-Resources
Rae Hoffman, CEO, Outspoken Media
Jerry West, President, SEORevolution

On Wednesday I’ll be moderating the “Interactive Site Reviews: Focus on Links” panel

Speakers:
Todd Malicoat, Independent Marketing Consultant, Meta4creations, LLC
Aaron Wall, Author, SEO Book
David Klein, CEO, Purpose Inc
Dixon Jones, Managing Director, Receptional LTD

The Focus on Links panel reminds me of this old song I wrote about showing your sites to Mr. Cutts.

And also on Wednesday I’ll be speaking on the SEO/SEM Tools

Moderator: Kate Morris
Speakers:
Jon Henshaw, Product Manager, Raven Internet Marketing Tools
Jim Boykin, CEO, We Build Pages
Aaron Kronis, Director of SEO, Wpromote Inc.
Rand Fishkin, CEO & Co-Founder, SEOMoz

It’s been a long time since I spoke at an SEO conference (Besides SEO Class)…in fact it’s been 2 years….2 years ago at Pubcon I was on the “How to Buy Links with Little Risk” panel… Even 2 years ago the name of the panel seemed to scare me a bit….even at that time, buying links was a risk…and being on a panel whereby admitting that “yes, I buy links” seemed like a great way to paint a target on me (since I bought links back then)…I basically stood up and said, “Stay under the Radar, and Don’t piss off Google”… that was really the only advice I had back then…it was hard to give some of my real thoughts knowing that there were several google engineers in the room including Mr. Cutts.

And wow…. It was also almost exactly a year ago that we stopped buying links. I’m actually amazed to this day the types of links that our ninjas are able to get w/o paying a cent….Tomorrow I’m doing an hour and a half interview with Stuntdubl on MarketingMotive called “White Hat Link Building for the New Millennium” …can ya believe it??

For part of that interview I’m going to talk to Todd about the last 2 link building clients that Todd sent to us, and we’ll talk about how we were able to achieve these links in just a few weeks:

Both these clients are on our 10 links per month package and so far they’ve received:

Site 1:
out of 30 links so far for that client in the first 3 months:
12 edu’s
7 other colleges
1 org
1 k12
1 gov (library of congress)

Site 2:
so far we have 19 links in just over a month.
out of 19 links:
7 are edu’s
3 are schools that aren’t edu’s
5 are orgs (3 of those are schools)
2 are police websites
1 is a gov from NASA

That’s pretty dang good if I do say so myself…these are certainly links that I’d never have been able to buy….but with the right content, and writing to the right people, it’s amazing the links one can get.

———————

So I’ll be at Pubcon Mon -Wed…then I’m going to head out on the open road to Death Valley for a mini-vacation.

Chuck Price will also be at Pubcon with me…he’s got the morning shift, and I have the late shift.

….gosh, I miss blogging… but there’s something to be said for just quietly going about my business…but FYI,  I’m alive and doing wonderful….and yea, I’m still a link addict….just not shouting about it anymore.

Hope to see ya in Vegas,
Peace,
Jim

Listen, I have one of the most awesome jobs on the planet.   My day-to-day job activities actually include blogging about whatever’s on my mind, strategizing with the brains of We Build Pages and then traveling to conferences once my brain needs a bit of a vacation and I want to see my friends. It doesn’t suck to be me.

And last year the search conference that rocked my world the hardest and gave me the most value was absolutely SMX West. And it’s about to come around again.  I’m going to be there and I know some of the other ninjas will be too.

Are you?

The answer is that you need to be.  And you need to register now because rates increase Friday at midnight. We’re in a recession; why pay more?

I don’t usually pimp shows. It’s not really my place and the whole idea of it actually makes me feel a little slimey. But SMX West holds a very special place in my heart after last year’s debut performance. The networking opportunities at West 2008 were amazing and introduced me to some of the people that this year I call my very best friends.  But all the high level of networking isn’t even the best reason to attend this one.

So why should you attend SMX West?

• For the keynote with Google’s Vint Cerf. [ Hello, he's the father of the Internet!]
• For the Developer Day that I am irrationally obsessed with considering I don’t even know enough about technical stuff to make a joke about my lack of knowledge.
• Boot Camp for your brain.
• For the session on Google’s SearchWiki, Customized & Personal Results.
• For the 301 redirect session that is guaranteed to be just a tad evil.
• And for all the other great sessions packed into three days of search marketing learning.

Like I said, I don’t promote shows that often, but this is one that I definitely recommend attending. And I know I said it already, but have you seen the Developer Day sessions? They were my absolute favorite at SMX Advanced last year and they look even juicer this time around.

We’re going to be at SMX West and we’d love to see you there.   The rates go up tomorrow at midnight, so make sure you book your place now.  You can thank me later.

And far be it for me not to add my two cents to the conversation.

Liveblogging helps people like me, who can’t attend conferences because 1) other work and family obligations, 2) company has already sent a gazillion people to Pubcon (or other conference) and didn’t want to lose any more of its workforce for the week.

In my case, there would never have been another ticket for me to go to the conference. Pubcon didn’t lose anything from me not being there. Sure, Lisa will come back and share what she learned with the rest of the class here at WBP, but who’s going to remember everything they learned at ALL of the different sessions throughout the week? Yeah, liveblogging will never get EVERYTHING from every presentation, but it’s a way to retain more of the information that would otherwise be forgotten due to information overload. And communicate it with others.

If the conferences didn’t want this information to be shared in this manner, they wouldn’t allow it. Why do they allow it? I mean, people who aren’t paying to attend the conference are benefiting from this liveblogging information, right? But this is Internet marketing. Not only is that the industry, but it’s the tactic. After all, if you can learn this much from the liveblogged sessions, just think of how much more you could learn from actually being there and being able to talk with the presenters! It’s publicity.

We all know that we’re not going to get everything from reading about a session, but it piques our interest about what we’ve missed. And maybe next time, people who aren’t like me (different reasons for not attending the conferences) will buy a ticket so they can experience it for themselves.

As for the criticism that liveblogging isn’t edited and refined and whatnot… Livebloggers are human. They aren’t robots. They’re typing away furiously for hours on end, expending energy both listening and translating to a written medium for their audience, session after session. It’s a bit unreasonable to expect them to go back and spend half again as long going back and trying to tweak everything they’ve taken a full day to write about. They’d never get to day two.

Critics should cut livebloggers some slack. Filter what you read. If you know that someone is writing crap, then don’t read the crap. Read the good stuff. Or not. If you’re a presenter who’s worried about being misrepresented, treat the liveblogging of your sessions as you would the rest of your reputation management. Make a comment to set the record straight.

Livebloggers rock.

The super smart Jake Baille is up moderating the group of Lawrence Colburn, Peter Adams, Patrick Sexton, Will Price and Peter Yared. Lots of boys. Where are the ladies?

Lawrence Coburn is up first. He says he’s not going to talk much about widgets. Heh, okay.

The four pillars of a distributed Web strategy

• Widgets: Users spread your content/functionality. Examples: Photobucket, MyBlogLog
• Toolbars/Extensions: Users stay engaged. Examples: Google, StumbleUpon
• Platform Apps on Facebook: Viral distribution. Examples iLike, RockYou
• API: Batch/Mass distribution. Examples – Yahoo Maps, Amazon AWS

API: a set of functions, procedures, methods, or protocols that an operating system library or service provides to support requests made by computer programs. Or it’s a widget on steroids.

The Case for APIs: Batch distribution, Expand footprint, Innovation, Branding, Explore new business models, Content acquisition, Advance Business Model and Internal Content Distribution/Innovation.

Case Study: Netflix: Every movie, actor, director, TV show, description, etc, is available for people to take. Their goal was to drive more subscriptions. Success was measured by the number of developers, number of referrals to Netflix.com, and the number of new sign ups.  Their big risk is that Blockbuster may take their data.

Case Study: RateItAll: Just released first consumer rating API. They want people to build cooler applications than they can build inhouse. They have attribution requirements. Their pitch is that you get to use their content and promote their products on RateItAll.com.  Risks: Duplicate content and fueling competitors.

The REST format is the most popular API format.

How do you promote your API? Hit tech blogosphere, API directories, conferences, PPC field, organic search, API Documentation, attribution on content posts via API Partner API and detailed attribution policy.

API Challenges: limited number of developers, scaling, duplicate content, fueling competitors and legal distribution rights.

Notable APIs: BestBuy, Netflick, Flickr, Twitter, Google, Amazon, Hoovers, RateItAll, Lastfm, etc.

Resources for more info: Mashery, Programable Web, Sexy Widget

And with that Lawrence has to run out and given another presention in another room.

Pat Sexton is up. Yey, Pat.

What are widgets: Wigets are portable pieces of functionality. Widgets are what’s left of a Web site when you remove the header, footer, sidebars, etc. That’s the poopy stuff.

If you go to Google.com and remove all the poo, its just a search box. That’s their functionality.

If you go to YouTube and remove the poo, you just have the video player. That’s their functionality.  YouTube’s video player is the most successful widget ever.

The problem is people like your poop. You have AdSense in your poop. So why use widgets? Interaction, money, SEO, and traffic. You have to pleasure people. [chokes on water] They need to be social, entertainment-oriented and support business.

[Peter Yared is in total giggle fits over Pat's presentation]

People make money off widgets by selling something, by the ad revenue or from creating more efficient work models.

Traffic: Everyone wants traffic. Direct traffic is anything that doesn’t come from a search engine. The thing to remember is that sites are spread by people, not search engines. It is easier to rank for your keywords in widget directores than it is to rank in the search engines.

If Pat was to create a Web site about kittens, he’d never be able to rank for it. However, he can rank well in the Google Gadget Directory.

SEO: Word of mouth in communities increases the pool of people who might link to you or like your product or service. Links do not have credit cards, people do.

Whitehat opportunities for widgets: Widgets provide a ridiculous amount of links…but those links need to be relevant.  The main goal of Google is to provide searchers with results that are useful and relevant. Google uses many factors to be able to do that. If a whole bunch of cat Web sites are using your widget, then you will be considered a cat resource — even if Google can’t “see” your widget.

People think that widgets in an iFrame don’t provide SEO value. Pat disagrees. Images were, and are, a black hole of information to Google. He did a search for [blue hat] and got results for blue hat. Google knows which images are of blue hats even if they can’t “see” them.

Spreading widgets: He believes in a cross platform approach. That means iGoogle, Facebook, iPhone, etc. You should tailor your widgets for each platform.

Put your widget in every widget directory that exists – iGoogle, MySpace, WidgetBox, etc. Viral installers are wonderful but they DO NOT list your widget in the directories or individual platforms. iGoogle has over 100 million users. Most major brands are NOT in the widget directory.  If you are a small brand, you can take advantage of that to basically steal traffic from the big players.

Will Price is next.

Web publishers have needs. They’re trying to reach new readers, drive traffic back to their Web sites and to monetize what they’re doing. Widgets provide them with a model to do that. You can leverage existing content, reach new users and deliver on your business model goals.

Widgetbox is for publishers. They have 90,000 bloggers who use their widgets.

Blidget (blog widget) 3.0 Custom Blidgets: Convert RSS feeds into compelling widgets. You have the ablity to mix many feeds. Supports custom header/footer/wrapper. Enables SEO. Embeds driven from Widgetbox.com. You can track widget views, installs and domains.

Widgets can be viral if you use a gallery, the invite mechanism of social networks and the feed updates on the social networks. They focus a lot on the gallery side of it.

Branded widgets based on feeds across network. Partners are able to fully manage users and feeds. The widget has all blidget premium features. They’re allowing people to build Web rings of common people writing about a topic. They all put a widget on their page. And as they post, their content shows up in the Web ring’s widget.

There is a definite SEO benefit to using widgets, but you have to use them correctly. Awesome.

Next up is Peter Yared.

There’s a dirty secret on the Web right now: No one is going to your Web site. And it’s not just YOUR Web site, it’s all Web sites. If people are spending more and more time online and not going to Web sites, where are they going? They’re hanging out on social networks and portals.

The content has inverted.  Old model: Take the users to the content and monetize on Website – millions lost as users shift. In social advertising, you put the content where the users are.

Social widgets are more viral and monetizable than widgets. Rich media is the fastest growing ad spend.

Peter Adams is up.

Ad widgets are widgets that generate income for publishers. The “ad” part of it could be the widget itself, embedded in the widget, etc.

Different kinds of ad widgets include display ad units, text ad panels, search boxes, product panels, sponsored widgets, and text links.

In page examples: He mentions Vibrant and Snap. Both of which have widgets that are revealed when you roll over or click on text links.

Ad Widget Pitfalls: What do you want to be? Do you want to be a Nascar where you have widgets covering your whole page or do you want to be like a magazine where the ads are just as important as the content?

Publishers get paid a percent of conversion: Make ad units relevant to increase sales. Make ad widgets a seamless part of your user experience, not an appendage. Customize, customize, customize. Don’t use the default theme. Decide if you want them to blend in or stand out. Ugly sells.

Question and Answer

I’m hearing a direct to consumer concept here, correct?

Peter Adams: You want to get your content in front of users.

Widgets are not just geared towards Web, right?

Pat: Absolutely.  Widgets can be on desktop screens, in mobile, etc. There’s this old model of putting an ad up and hoping that someone clicks it and interacts with you. That’s pretty old. He believes that your content needs to be where people are. It’s all about people.

As site owner, If I put widget on my Web site, what do the search engines see?

Pat: It’s dependant on the code, but a lot of them are iFrame-based which means the search engines won’t see anything. But it gets around that by other factors. They still know you have a widget on your Web site.

If I’m looking to place content on my site, do I have to be careful of what widget I use?

Pat: If you’re using it for content for the search engines, then yes.

Can you talk about video and widgets?

Peter Yared: You want to use clips and nothing longer. You want a “lean forward” experience, not a “lean back” experience.

Can you talk about widget fatigue? People went nuts with Facebook widgets when they first came out…and then they just sit there and don’t get used. How do we make something that’s more than just a badge?

Pat: That’s the goal — interaction. If not, your widget is going to suck and no one is going to use it. As far as a broader problem of widget fatigue, I think that would be better defined as crappy widget fatigue. It’s not widget fatigue.  If people don’t get value back, the widget will die.

Peter Yared: Facebook used to have iLike and then it became throwing sheep at each other. The big takeaway is that the most successful apps bring content from outside of Facebook, let you do something with it and then syndicate it to your friends. That’s the model for success.

This time we’ve got Eric Enge, Rebecca Kelley, Roger Montti and Greg Hartnett. Chris Tolles will be our moderator of awesome.

Eric Enge is kicking things off.

Eric says: Social Media and Link Building: Think BIG

Opportunity: Get tens of thousands of visitors and links.

Key: Match your content to the demographic. If you’re on a site like Digg, know the age range (13-28 year old males). Study what has worked before. Write a great title. Vote for posts in front of you on the upcoming pages.

He shows an example of a post on the front page of Digg with some potty-level content (literally).  2/3 of a year later that page still had 159 links and it’s prominent in the Google SERPs. But did it help the site? Why is it relevant?

Authoritative content can win.

He shows a post from a blog design site about 45 Excellent Blog Designs with 1,100 Diggs.  If you do a search for [blog designs] they’re number one. Stuff like this is successful because it fits the theme of the Web site, the content is credible, it had 1160 links a year later, and the term [blog designs] gets 645 searches a day. And it’s relevant to their site.

Maximize Your Success

• Write content that is of interest to the audience
• Be Authoritative
• Reflect Well on your Business
• Target big search terms: Put it in article title and Digg submission title.

Eric talks about a site that used Facebook to attract users. They created great social media applications on Facebook that were targeted at sports fans.  You could run an entire fantasy baseball league in Facebook.

Why is this link building? They got a link from MLB.com, a link from ESPN, TechCrunch, Google, and BattelleMedia. Success!

Lessons:

• Build content and tools that increase your reputation. Be authoritative. Create the right image for your company.
• Match the demographic to the business needs of your site and the social media network
• Think big

Rebecca Kelley is up.

Becs asks how many people enjoy link building. Four people lie and raise their hands.

Traditional link building sucks. It’s time consuming, it’s repetitive, it’s risky and it has a low ROI.  However, we all need links. Links are a vote to your site. More links equal better rankings. They bring traffic. Yada, yada, yada.

Strategy 1: Find Brand Mentions and Ask For a Link – if they mention you, they may be willing to link out. Go to Yahoo Site Explorer and see who’s mentioning you without a link.

Strategy 2: Identifying Broken Inbound Links — Google Webmaster Tools’ Crawl Error Sources. Contact site owner and ask them to fix the link.

Strategy 3: Take Advantage of Broken Links To Your Competitors: Do a search for “no longer available” or “no loner offer [keyword]“. Contact the site owner and sites linking to the broken page and say that you’re offering a similar product, maybe they’d like to link to you instead.

Strategy 4: Who’s Linking To Your Competitors: Yahoo Hub Finder lets you enter in a list of sites and a keyword and it’ll tell you who’s linking to what hub.

Strategy 5: Take Advantage of Confirmation Emails: When you send people their order confirmation, encourage people to link to you. People who like you will comply. Links are editorial and relevant. It’s scalable.

Strategy 6: Embed links in Widgets, Banners and Badges: Create a quiz, poll or other shareable content. Offer embeddable tools or programs and include a link back to your Web site.

Strategy 7: Create Link Bait – Brainstorm content ideas and host it on your site. Promote the content via social media sites, forums, blogs, etc. Get links!

Identify link bait opportunities by researching your sector’s link worthiness. Discover the big players in your field and target those sites. Analyze current trends to take advantage of what’s hot.

Don’t neglect your own industry. ID niche blogs and forums. Start participating and networking. Build those links.

Greg Hartnett is up to talk about link building via directories.

Isn’t a directory just a paid link? No.  Pay for placement vs Pay for review

Isn’t a directory just a link farm? No. A link farm is a collection of uncategorized links. There’s little to no discretion and they’re created to manipulate the search results.

How can I tell a directory from a “directory”? Good directories have a history, contain great resources, are designed for the user, have populated categories and add lots of sites.

What kind of traffic can I expect? Not the Digg Effect. You’ll receive a mere percentage of what you’re getting from the engines, however, the traffic is much more targeted.

Can I list my Web site multiple times? Yes. It’s called “deep linking”. As long as you have relevant content for the category.

Is submitting to the Yahoo Directory Worth It? Yes. It’s an aged, trusted domain. And a primary hub of Internet mapping.

Is the ODP corrupt? No. There may be a corrupt DMOZ editor or two, or stories about people bribing editors to get listed, and he’s not going to say that never happened, but a few don’t represent the whole.

Which directories are the most trustworthy?: Yahoo, DMOZ, BOTW, Business.com, Librarians Internet Index.

How can I ensure my site gets listed if I go and pay one of the review fees? You can’t. TO help your chances you can follow the rules, read their guidelines, comply with their guidelines, write good titles and descriptions and beef up your content.

Where can I submit my blog?: Yahoo and DMOZ have categories. BOTW Blog directory.

Roger Montti is going to finish us off.

There are two main link building initiatives: Traffic and links with popularity.

Dot EDU links are NOT special…but can I have  a second helping please? These links are desirable because they’re usually in good neighborhoods, they’re relevant and they often feature original and authoritative content.  They’re NOT desirable when the pages aren’t authoritative, if they’re link farms or if they’re poorly linked to.

Find Industry Heavyweight Backlinks

• check the backlinks of the largest most important companies in your sector.
• Find opportunities to sponsor events or donate to charity

Do the following queries for your keywords and add .edu modifiers: hotlinks, bookmarks, links, directories.

White Hat Black Hat Strategy: Almost every black hat technique can be turned to white hat by using no follow or rendering link with JavaScript.  Blog widgets, counter, calculators, wordpress theme.

Up we have Rank Fishkin, John Lessnau and Aaron Wall. Todd Malicoat will moderate.

John Lessnau is up first.

Link buying is NOT link building.  You have to be careful with your link footprint.

Why should you buy links? You get the anchor text you want, you get on the page you want, you get the location on the page you want and you get the links that help you rank better.

Why people don’t buy links: Fear of Google and a PageRank drop. They don’t understand link buying. The upfront cost is too high. They’re hoping for a wave of natural links miracle. It takes time, salesmanship and effort.

What is a safe paid link? The link should be in relevent text. It should be the only paid link on the page/one of the very few on the Web site. There should be lots of variation in your anchor text. It should be on inside pages. It should be long term and you should do it in moderation.  Like drinking. [John pays a "subtle" dig to Rand and his "seo comany" and those of us in the know quietly giggle while Rand grins real big.]

What’s a powerful link? The host Web site should have good rankings. They should have lots of natural links. They should not be a major link seller. Obviously, the link should be dofollowed.

John’s Link Buying System

• Search Google for the various keyword phrases you want to rank for.
• Look through the results for Web site and Web pages where your link would fit.
• Verify that the potential link partner does not link to major link buyers.
• Contact the webmaster and make a fair offer for the text link you want.
• Your links should pass a handcheck to avoid being reported by competitors looking for personal gain. Google “embarrassment to Google” to learn more.

After The Buy

• Monitor your links to make sure they stay up and the host sites stay clean.
• Use your rankings as a springboard to gaining natural links.
• Keep making your site better.
• Know when to quit buying links.

He talks about prices. He sold a PR9 link for 2k a month.  If you go through a link broker you’re going to pay a lot more than if you do it yourself (about double).

Rand Fishkin is next. He’s going to talk about buying links without “buying links”.  Not that Rand doesn’t recommend that route, because sometimes he does.

Event Sponsorships: SEOmoz sponsored Seattle Startup Weekend –$250 for pizza and beer. He paid $250 for that link. He didn’t “know” they’d link to him for that sponsorship but he “thought” they “might”.

Process: Locate the event. Get in touch with them. It’s often $1-$500 for a permanent link from a good page. You also get branding, networking and goodwill.

Charitable Donations: Google “bought” a link on the FreeBSD Web site.

Process: Find the nonprofit. Locate their sponsorship page. Check that the links are passng juice. Call them personally to ask for the link to aid in “brandng”.

Web site Purchases: CondeNet bought a bunch of Web sites and now links to them.

Process: Find relevent Web sites. Negotiate ownership. Create relevant links that help with your needs.

Content Buying: BuddyTV bought Wentworth Miller’s Web site because they liked the blogger and wanted the content. Now they rank well for his name.

Process: ID valuable contet. Negotiate Purchase. 301 to our site and host. You can also buy articles on sites.

Viral/Linkerati Traffic Buying: Put your Web site content in front of the types of eyes that are likely to link to it. SEOmoz worked with FareCast. They were doing well when they got the right people to look at the site.  Went to the StumbleUpon guys and used their paid program to buy traffic, which then got them links

Process: Create viral worthy content and then find the relevant viral traffic sources. Buy traffic/ads. Measure/improve “link acquisition” Conversion Rate.

Bloger Product Reviews: SEOmoz blogged about a free book they got and linked to their Web site.

Process: Meet bloggers in person. Send bloggers free stuff. Follow up with email. Don’t ask for a link. Ask for a review. The smaller the blogger and the bigger your brand, the more likely you are to get it.

Content Parternships: VentureBeat and Read Write Web have partnerships with the New York Times.

Process: ID sources that could use your feed. Get in touch with them.

Blog Incubation: McCain’s political party incubated (aka paid to launch) blogs to try and pass out messages from the campaign.

Process: Put out ads for bloggers. Have them use existing sites or give them a marketing plan to grow their blogs. Explain the marketing you want.

Aaron Wall aka Catt Mutts is next.

Alternatives to Link Buying

• Syndicate Content: Builds authority, reputation, traffic and PageRank
• Barter: Give stuff away. Offer discounts for certain sectors.
• Buy competing Web sites
• Social Interaction
• Public Interactions & follow up publicity

Encouraging Organic Links

• Cumulative Advantage: If you look popular, more people will read you. It makes them feel better about themselves.
• Regular editoral voice
• Community Participation
• Show social proof
• Beautiful social design
• Signs of crediblity — About Us

Yahoo Directory: Pick the best category that you have a chance at being listed on. You want to be in the first 20 result. You can the sponsor category if you’re not.

The Directory/Purge of 2007: Google killed many directories in 2007. Only buy in if the home page Page Rank is where you expect, if the cache dates are recent and the listing quality is decent. He likes niche directories like JoeAnt and BOTW.

AdWords Ad For Linkbait: Create industry leading content for authoritative easy-to-link-at topics. Buy adWords for a wide basket of related keywords.

Clean Bought Links

• Blog about new Google products and wait for someone to blog about your blog post.
• Sponsor Events
• Contest & Awards Programs
• Donate or Give Stuff Away
• Affiliate Programs

Dirty Links: Try to buy links in content or organic looking links list — without disclosure. Run really dirty stuff through your affiliate program.

Link location matters. Yahoo doesn’t count links located at the bottom of the page.

The bigger your brand is, the more aggressive you can be without worrying about being penalized.

No matter what you do, you have to assume that eventually someone will see it. Google hires about 10,000 quality editors from remote locations. Some popoular SEOs like to out sites to cause contoversy and get attention. [coughRANDcough]

Question and Answer

When you’re asking or a link, what percentage of these deals are done by email vs phone calls?

John: Sometimes its hard to get a phone number. They start out as personal emails and then evolve into a phone call. You have to build a person’s trust.

Is there more power given towards a relevant link that pertains to my topic over sheer quantity?

John: He’d like to say yes but sheer quantity does still work. He still says to keep it relevant to be safe.

Rand: At the top of rankings you’ll see big brands ranking and stuff that just has a ton of targeted anchor text.

Aaron: He asks if there are any Lindsay Lohan fans in the room. He ranks in the top ten for [lindsay lohan nude]. When you have decent domain authority, you don’t need that many links to get pages to rank.

Brent Payne chimes in and says that if you have been mentioned by any Tribune article and they didn’t link out, Twitter @brentdpayne and he’ll fix it for you. Send him ONE page.

What if someone linkbombs you?

John: Post on Matt Cutts blog.

Rand: You can send it through the spam reports, but that takes time. The stuff that gets acted on the quickest are the things that are public. You can post about it on the forums or Sphinn or your blog.

Aaron: Turn it into a story and write about how that person is trying to manipulate Google. [It's fun watching Rand turn colors. ]

Todd: Email Rand. He loves outing spam.

I’m seeing competitors putting my site on a bunch of spammy sites and it’s affecting my rankings. How do I combat that?

Rand: That’s tremendously rare. The engines have tended towards saying rather than penalizing a site we’ll just discount those paid links. File a reinclusion request and tell them what happened. Write about it publicly.

John: If you DO do that, make sure the rest of your site is clean. Because Google will look at your whole site.

The search engines have come to say that cloaking is always bad and buyng links is always bad. With cloaking there are legitimate reasons if you don’ say cloaking. Where’s the semantic line with buying links?

John: He thinks the engines draw the line where money changes hand. He thinks relevant links in content, regardless of how you get them, are inbounds.

Rand: He thinks it comes down to three questions: Intent, Character and Relevancy. Are you buying this because you know SEO and you know this will help your SEO? Who you are and what you’ve done in the past.

Aaron: If the money is just incidental. If the link is editorial, that’s okay.

It seems that Ted Ulle is playing double duties as speaker and moderator. Marc Juneau, Bryan Gmyrek and Lachlan Hunt will be helping him out with the speaking duties.

Laclan Hunt is up first and I’m coughing like a crazy person. Darn air conditioning.

New Structure and Semantics of HTML 5

They’re adding more structure and semantics to the document. He shows what a typical blog post looks like. Header, footer, sidebar, text, etc. Normally you would use div elements to style your document. In HTML 5, they give you elements for specific purposes.  There are self-contained Article, Side, Footer and Header elements to use.  The advantage of that is search engines can take advantage of the semantics. A screen reader can more easily skip or jump to the navigation. They can see how many articles there are.

They also added a time element that gives you a machine-readable way of marking up dates.  The advantage of this is so that you can easily export calendar information.

They added a figure element to make it easy for screen readers to recognize captions and associated images.

Meter element: Lets the browser decided how to draw a widget. Or something? I’m so lost. I’m sorry.

Section element: Helps you break up a page without worrying about h1, h2, and h3. This way you can just use h1s for all of them and let the nested system take care of the hierarchy.

Element Implemenations: No native supprot but can be styled with CSS in Opera, FF3, Safari, IE6 and IE7.

New Multimedia Elements

Video: Traditionally you’d use  a Flash-based plaer. They wanted to add native video element support to browsers so that video becomes a first class citizen. They added a Video element which gives APIs to embed the video and gives you native controls. The JavaScript APIs let you make customizable interfaces using HTML features. One of the problems with adding video is what video player to use. They can’t get browsers to agree on a single format.

Canvas Element: Created by the Webkit team for the Apple dashboard. Allows you to dynamically draw graphics and text. Grapics-oriented DOM APIs. It’s different from SVG which gives you vector graphics. Canvas is more bitmap so you can draw lines and shapes.

Developer Tools

One of the most important things for developers is to have tools.

Validator.nu: HTML 5 Conformace Checker. Exceeds the capabilities of traditional DTD-based validation.

Parsing HTML 5: html5lib Parsing library for HTML. Off the shelf parser reduces reliance on RegExp hacks.

Ted Ulle is up.  He thinks people care more about money than code purity.

He’s going to give us the number one cutting-edge approach that no one does.  If you listen to him you will speed up your development time, reduce maintenance time, send clear signals to the search engines and have more time to work on core business tasks.

This major secret: RTFM (Read the Freakin Manual)

You need a basic understanding of what you’re doing. There’s so much that goes into creating a Web site that people trying to rush through it and end up shooting themselves in the foot.

HTML: The M stands for markup. The document is assumed to be the foundation of what you’re doing.  HTML is simply a way of marking up a document. If you know that you start looking at things differently.

Semantic Meaning vs Visual Rendering

• HTML tags = semantic information
• CSS rules = display information

Go to strict code, not transitional code. (I hope this makes sense to other people.  I may as well be blogging in Russian.)

The goal is to learn lean and mean HTML. That’s a trade secret.

Underused CSS

Common element deserve their own default style rules. You don’t need more than one h1 tag so you can define its style someplace and then the h1 sits there and takes that style automatically. It doesn’t need span or class elements.  Put your rules for h1, p, li, etc in the external CSS file.

Multiple class declarations with a space separator. Put together a basic kit of the rules that are going to come.  .c = center .r = right .s = size.  Allows for easier coding on the fly. It lowers the need for new classes.  Easy team coordination.

Line height. Line height is like leading in print technology. He sets line height as a ratio. That way the ratio is there and people are more at ease on your Web site. It’s more readable.

Abused CSS

Hidden Anchors: Don’t let aesthetics hurt communication. Links are the core of the Web. Keep your visitors in touch.  If you’re going to remove underscores and the default blue link color, then use redundant link cues like color, font variations, hover behavior, etc.

Span tag: Just because it validates doesn’t mean its not abusive. The span tag should be extremely rare. If you’re using it, you’ve been painted into a corner.  It should only change part of a larger containing element.

H1, H2: They have semantic meaning, they’re not for presentation.  Use an “imitation” class for the H2 look.

Bryan Gmyrek is here to confused me even further. He’s going to talk about programming. [cries]

Web Programming is Problem Solving

Bryan is making PHP jokes. I am completely lost.

First thing you need to do is just get started. Choose a platform. He uses LAMP.  It’s free. Webmasters are halfway there.  You can solve little problems. Don’t get carried away and start coding in the bathtub.

Read the right books.  You don’t have to read all the books, but its important to not get all of your information off the Web.

PHP: Ease of integration into Web pages. It’s very plug and play. It’s portable. It’s fast. It has attitude.

Perl: Not as shared hosting, plug and play as PHP. Its better to have a dedicated server. It rocks for Web apps, especially larger ones.  It’s great for sysadmin tasks and text processing/spidering.

MySQL Database: phpMyAdmin. Use apache .htpassword.

Sigh. I’m sorry to both the speakers and WBP readers if I’ve botched this session. Coding is another language to me. My apologies.