When link building, ideally, you’ll want to look for pages that are related to or on topic to the keyword you want to use as the anchor text for your link. For example, if you are trying to rank for liposuction, you’d ideally search for liposuction in Google and ask the top 30, 40, or 50 ranked sites for links, and they’d give them to you… Chances are – not.. BUT, definitely worth trying and asking.

But, getting links from pages where there is relevant text, and then using your keyword as the anchor text for your link, you’re on the right track. You can establish on page relevance quite a few ways as well. You can find blogs or industry specific pages on which you can contribute and leave your link in your signature line if they let you, you can create forum profiles, then in your profile, or on the forum, write a semantically relevant paragraph, embedding your anchor text and link, and post it, and literally 100′s of other ways.

One thing that is extremely effective as far as link building goes, that way too many people overlook, and one that is easy to do, is to take advantage of the links that you DO have going to your site, and leverage them to increase not only your link juice for that specific keyword, but boost your site overall, and increase your rankings across the board. Check out Yahoo’s Site Explorer (while it’s still around), and tools like MajesticSEO and put together a list of all of the links that you have going to your site. Then, begin building links TO the links you have to your site. You could of course go about this manually, but it would take some time. You could outsource this, as well, there are plenty of automated ways you could do this, like SENukeX, Instant Social Anarchy, xrumer, and quite literally hundreds of other tools. Link wheels are one way of implementing this, but done exactly, and over and over, they create a footprint that’s detectable by the search engines. Whether random link creation or link wheels are the solution is another topic entirely, depending upon many thing.

Bottom line, take advantage of the resources and links that you currently have, and inventory them, and link to them…

This article at Hubspot is interesting:  http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/27535/Google-to-Limit-Keyword-Search-Referral-Data-to-Marketers.aspx

Google is going to start limiting keyword search referral data to marketers from users logged into Google.com and the search strings will be encrypted.

The short of this:  If you are logged into Google when you perform a search, your search string (what appears in the address bar of the browser when you are passed to the site will be encrypted, and you will not be able to leverage this information, one of the main things being – being able to determine the keywords that were typed into the browser that landed someone at your site.

In other words, if someone is logged into Google (Gmail, Keyword Tool, Google+ or any other Google property) – you won’t be able to tell what keywords they used to land on your sites if they do in fact type in keywords into Google.com to get to your site.

There are many things that this could affect, including external tools that webmasters or marketers are using to measure traffic, etc.
My first thought was how many people would be affected or how many searchers would
be affected by this, as I know ginger and the kids aren’t logged into Gmail most
of the time, as are my parents, sister, nieces, brother in law, other sister, her
husband, etc. Well, actually Ginger is, but out of my immediately family
(about 15 or 16 folks) only two are logged into Gmail when they surf the web
(Ginger and I). So, in this scenario, only Ginger’s and my search activity
would be hidden. Also out of quite a few friends and clients (noticing their
e-mail address, etc.- so it is possible they are logged into google or gmail
or some other google service, but sending -email from a different account) – only
a few of my friends and clients (again, from what I can surmise from what
I see e-mail wise only) are logged in. Then Matt Cutt’s estimates 10%
further down in the article.

The really interesting thing to know would be the demographic of the 10%
mentioned by Matt Cutts… Again, from what I can tell, i’s probably more
power users, marketers, etc. Sort of like the skew at Alexa and their results…..
In my estimation, probably most of the data from Alexa is from marketers, site
owners, or someone with something to do with marketing or web traffic of some
sort, because they would mostly be the ones using the toolbar and using the
services to monitor such things. I know my mom and my sister sure as heck don’t
care much about what traffic the sites they visit gets or what keywords they get
hits on…LOL

However, I hit Alexa just about everyday (or Compete or whatever) for data
about clients sites and their competitors, trying to gauge campaigns, keywords
being addressed, competitors keyword traffic, etc.
In the article, Matt Cutts states that this will probably only affect about
10% of users.  While 10% is a relatively small number, it could have bigger
implications, if the majority of the demographic that hits your site is logged
into Google.com and types in your big money keywords.
The changes will hamper our ability to mine information about both our own
sites, as well as competitors sites possibly to some extent, which isn’t a
good think, but life existed before Google Analytics and will after as well.
Where there’s a will, there’s a way, and we’ll just have to figure as best
we can how to get this information, or how to adapt to not having it and
still maintaining successful ranking and marketing campaigns for our
clients and ourselves….

Not the end of the world, but possibly more of a road bump….

Mike

Also, conversely, it may actually clean up some of the “noise” in
the results from the keyword tool from repeated searches by marketers
and site owners looking for their sites daily, any could theoretically
provide us with a cleaner, more pure information set that is closer to
real world results and enable us to better project actual traffic numbers
coming from actual real people looking for real solutions, not marketers,
automated searches (although I’d suspect that most automated searches, queries, etc come from people logged out), etc.   So, potentially, it could work to our advantage…

I LOVE blog comment spammers, when I view the comments for this blog, I find awesome place to put your link.  I look for footprints, and then find even more.  For example, if you search for smflogo.gif which is the logo for simple machines forums, which are a popular forum software, you can literally find thousands and thousands of places to put you link.  You can also find by searching for “powered by kick apps,”  another popular forum software.  I just came across the smflogo.gif by observing and looking at the places that other people are putting their links, and one in my blog comments.  Places to put your link are invaluable, and something not to be overlooked or taken lightly.   Link often, link smart, link fast.   Find the best places to put your link, and watch you site sail up the SERP’s (search engine results pages).

http://www.theroot.com/views/how-much-do-you-musicians-really-make?GT1=38002

It’s a much different picture than is mostly painted. Just a quick off topic interesting post about how much do musicians make.

Now many of you I suppose… why on earth would you want to dominate the “New” yellow pages, online, with exponentially more visitors than the original could hope to scrape together? 

Well, I’m in the process of setting something up JUST for you, if you might be interested.  In a week or so, I’m going to publish a page where you can share this information with a few people, and for doing so, the first few folks will win a completely complimentary “Local Search Blast” from me.  A $697 value.  Keep your eyes peeled and, better yet, sign up for the e-mail list to be one of the first to find out about my latest freebie.  This will be delivered immediately.  If you are one of the fortunate winners, you will be sent a spreadsheet to fill out and return to me.  Upon it’s return, you’ll be entered into and appear on dozens and dozens of local search sites – Yelp, City Search, Online Yellow Pages, InfoUSA, etc. 

If you are the winner of my “Local Search Blast,”  make sure to have your phone staffed and answered.  The process of it going out to all of the sites can take from 4 to 8 weeks, but typically, close to immediate results are more apparant.