Online Marketing Blog

There’s a long standing debate in the search marketing industry about links versus content. Which is better?

On the one hand there’s the perspective that if you create great content, people will link to you naturally. That’s true, but it’s a bit misleading.

On the other hand there are those that say links are the answer. You can get pages to rank well based purely on links. Again, that’s entirely possible, but such a statement does not give you all the facts.

When I read or hear people ask whether links or content are better, I liken such a question to asking, “What’s better, air or water?”. Links and content are both necessary for competitive search marketing efforts. Emphasizing one over the other depends on the situation. Excelling at both is the ideal.

Andy Beal comes over to the dark side and launches a new blog design using WordPress.

Rae posts an excellent interview with Brian Prince of BOTW.org.

Gord Hotchkiss of Enquiro does it again with a great article on search marketing reaching critical mass in a follow-up to his previous “Cross the Chasm” article.

Aaron Wall posts “Trusted vs Untrusted Links” and follows up with another “vs” post, “Tactical SEO vs Strategic SEO“, which is excellent, but has more to do with SEO for sites/blogs whose business model is ad revenue than advice most business web sites can take advantage of. Great advice all the same though.

“3 Link Bait Lessons from a Master Link Baiter” SEO Black Hat.

The PG SEO (pre-Google) and master linker, Eric Ward has recently launched a new newsletter on link building called, The Ward Report.¬† I’ve seen the initial free-trial issue and it’s pretty good with topics including:

• Linking Fact, Fiction and Your Inbound Link Profile (INLP)
• Social Linking and Tagging
• Linking for Search Rank
• Linking and Publicity Opportunity Watch
• RSS To The Rescue

It’s a paid subscription and well worth it. Subscribers will have access to discounted training, how-to Podcasts, video training modules and other resources as well.¬† You can sign up for the Ward Report here or request the trial version.

Unless there’s any doubt, I am a linking fanatic. I appreciate links like they’re gold. When I talk about link building with our team, I can never stress enough the importance of linking for traffic and SEO. To me, the best way to learn about link building is to get out there and do it.

However, if you’re new, you can save quite a bit of time learning from the wisdom of others’ experience. Here are three recent posts and one bonus link on link building I highly recommend:

Rand Fishkin presents his thoughts on why email is still king for link building.

Jim Boykin has a great post about the quality vs quantity issue with link building.

Eric Ward dispells a common myth about .edu links in his post: “.edu link fallacies dispelled“.

Eric Ward, the mac daddy link master or as Debra likes to call him, “LinkMoses” has published his Linking Commandments (part one). These inspired, toungue in cheek linking tips include pearls of wisdom including:

• II – “Thee who linketh in exchange for gold is Link Whore” *
  (linking in exchange for a return link may be marginally slutty)
• III – “Thou shall not social linketh thyne own site” *
  (nor send a memo to all employees telling them to digg it, or ask your children to link to your site from their MySpace space)
• VIII – “Just because MSN search is stupideth dost not giveth thee permission to link spameth them”
• X – “The link schemer eats from a bountiful table today, but the link farmer eats for a lifetime”

Aaron Wall and Andy Hagans have put up a nice piece of work on the topic of link building. 101 linking tips to be exact.

Our next installment of ongoing ad:tech Chicago 2006 coverage provided by Online Marketing Blog focuses on link building.

This SEO related session was two thirds full, which dispells my earlier suggestion that interest in SEO might be slipping here at ad:tech. What was to be a rounded topic of on-page and off-page optimization turned out to be focused on linking as one of the presenters was not able to attend.

It was good to see different speakers on SEO here at ad:tech, but SES or Pubcon veterans would have balked at some parts of Dan Perry’s presentation as being too basic or not entirely useful. However, this is ad:tech and many aspects of SEO are still a mystery to most attendees. As a result, the information presented by Dan may have been more palatable and provoking of questions as there was a good Q/A session afterwards.

Last night a PR manager from the New Yorker emailed me about the Terry Semel interview, so I watched it and put up a link to the actual video. I emailed a few SEO related bloggers about it and thought nothing more. (other than the interview being great insight into Yahoo).

While the bloggers I emailed did not mention the video, a few other sites did link to the blog post I put up about it including Digg.com (front page right now) and the Financial Times.

While I’ve had other things hit Digg and grow traffic as part of a SEO program, this was 100% natural. There was no suggested email to a large network of friends with digg accounts or anything like that. Not that I would ever do THAT.

As blogs continue to mature as marketing tools, there are an increasing number of “blog optimization” articles and posts appearing. However, many of these resources underestimate the importance of inbound links.

To think that researching and placing keywords in the “right places” alone with improve a blog’s traffic is only part of the story. Blogs are simply web sites/content management systems with some special features. Getting web sites to rank well and to engage more traffic involves a large number of variables and the same goes for blogs. The difference is that there are unique linking opportunities with blogs that are not common with web sites. These include:

• Trackbacks
• Comments
• Social book marks
• Tagging
• Blogrolls
• Guest writing on other blogs
• Blog, RSS directories