* In our weekly link building technique column I'd like to elaborate on last week's post on ego feeding and introduce the concept of trust transfer. By definition links provide trust transfer to some extent. You link out to a site you trust in most cases, even if you disagree. There is even a so called Trustrank by Yahoo. Many people argue that Google uses a very similar concept to assign trust to websites. I don't want to cover this aspect of trust on the Web. Instead I'd like to focus on t [...]

* In our weekly link building technique column I introduce acquiring links by feeding egos. It might sound a bit weird as most people consider egoism or the ego itself a trait to be ashamed of. So do we actually forage on the negative or even try to take advantage of people into linking to us? No, we and you have just to appeal to those who you like and make it worthwhile to link back to you. So again this technique is not a "SEO trick" to fool people, it's a way to ensure a true win to win [...]

* This is the third post in our weekly column - Link Building Technique 3: Hunt for Blunders. The probably most positive aspect of mistakes is that you can learn from them. Unfortunately in most cases people only learn from their own mistakes if at all. Learning from mistakes made by others seems to be too difficult. We rather repeat the mistakes from the past. On the Web the situation is completely different, it's much better. You can see how other people fail in real time and not only l [...]

* Somewhere around 2005 SEO practicioners have started to hail social media sites like Digg as the new holy grail of link building. Others even started to use a new acronym for this new way of getting numerous links and high website traffic fast: Social Media Optimization or SMO. Today everybody does SMO in some sense but almost nobody uses the term anymore. Social Media Marketing or SMM seems to be a bit more popular by now but similar to the SEO/SEM differentiation it reflects paid advert [...]

* This post has actually two headlines but Wordpress allows just one. The other headline is "Link Building Technique 1: Return for More". From now on we will cover one link building technique or tactic each week. Today I want to talk about one of my favorite topics, link love. As the second part of the term implies link love is about long term relationships. In contrast many traditional SEO practicioners and link builders act as if link building is a one night one stand. It isn't. I don' [...]

* While most people argue that SEO is either white hat or black hat in reality much of it is more or less gray. In fact most people don't even know when some technique ceases to be white and starts to be black. Some techniques considered by Google to be black hat are seen by people in the SEO industry as only gray. Why is there so much confusion whether a given technique is black, gray or white? Well, the reason is simple, in spite of all so called transparency by Google the Go [...]

* I've been following the SEO industry long enough to be able to recognize an SEO expert from what s/he says or writes. Also I'm humble enough to recognize that while I rock at getting links there are link building specialists out there who practice it on a daily basis for projects where you need more than outstanding content to get to the top. We all know that SEOmoz and Search Engine Land have several writers who are among those but here I'd like to name some of the best link bui [...]