Many SEOs think that finding link prospects is a rather boring and tedious task because sometimes it takes days to select a reasonable quantity of good sites. In this guide I'll show you how to reduce the time spent on this activity from several hours to 15 minutes using Google and an Excel spreadsheet you can download for free below.

When it comes to finding sites for link or content placement, all SEOs can be divided into 3 main groups:

• Novices. They don't know where and how to search and filter results.
  Estimated time spent on the research is from several days to "damn, let's skip it and do something else!"
• Intermediates. They know what they need to do and filter the results using a couple of tricks.
  Time spent ranges from several hours to one working day.
• Professionals.  They know all the best practices of finding what they need, have a number of tools to help filter the data (quite often they develop the tools themselves).
  Time required is 15 minutes max.

By link prospecting I mean searching for appropriate websites which don't link to my site BUT will most probably place a link to it if I knock at their door.

Good news: after reading this guide you'll be able to do link prospecting at the velocity of sound.

Read more »

guest post by Brian Dean

Are you looking to add something new to your link building campaigns?

While there are plenty of classic link building strategies from 2009 - like guest blogging and press releases - that still work, it's important to mix things up.

Why?

Because if there's one thing to keep in mind about SEO it's that you shouldn't rely on a single technique or strategy to rank. Otherwise, if Google decides to devalue that particular link type, your site could get knocked off the first page overnight.

Well today I'm going to show you a few link building techniques I've had a lot of success with lately.

Although they don't get a lot of attention, they're just as powerful as the bread-and-butter techniques you already know and love.

#1: "Level Up" Other People's Content

Full disclosure: I'm a huge video game nerd...

...and I love applying nerdy concepts like experience points and leveling up to the SEO world. Read more »

guest post by Nick Stamoulis 

As a site owner myself I know exactly how it feels to see your competition doing everything that white hat SEO link building dictates you don't do—things like link exchanges, blog networks, links from unrelated sites, posting content on article spinning sites, general directory links, etc.—and benefitting from it.

It's pretty frustrating, especially if it seems like they've been at it forever and Google hasn't penalized them for it yet. After all, wasn't that what Penguin was supposed to do? Catch our sneaky and spammy competitors that were trying to stay one step ahead of the algorithm and nail them so sites that deserve to own the SERPs, like ours, actually do.

And even in the aftermath of Penguin and all its refreshes, in which a lot of sites were hit hard, there are still a few sites here and there that seem to be riding off into the sunset with the traffic that our sites should be getting. Read more »

Dear SEO SpyGlass users,

I am writing this as an answer to many questions that arose after Matthew Woodward published the results of his experiment where he compared the performance of the industry’s several top backlink checkers:

• SEO SpyGlass
• Majestic SEO
• Ahrefs
• Open Site Explorer (SEOmoz)
• Raven Tools

The experiment involved 3 websites and the average number of backlinks found on the three websites was as follows:

Needless to say I was surprised at these results. As you know, we run tests in-house on a regular basis, to make sure that SEO SpyGlass stands to its status of the most data-rich backlink checker. So it was quite surprising, why on the three sites tested by Matthew, SEO SpyGlass was observed as the poorest performer. Read more »

guest post by Nick Stamoulis 

If you've invested any time and effort into content marketing in the past year, chance are you sitting on top of some great content.

But just because a piece of content is old that doesn't mean it can't still attract new links for your site! In fact, older and aged content tends to do better in the search engines because it's more trusted, so why not leverage this little bit of extra value and bring your old content back to life!

Here are 5 ways you can bring new content to life and use it to generate new links:

1. Update white papers for 2013.

If you've ever written a white paper you know that it's no easy task. Even if you're used to pumping out a lot of great content on a regular basis, writing, publishing and promoting a white paper is a big step up from the usual blog post.

Let's say it takes you an hour or two to write a 500-1000 word blog post—how long did it take you to write that 9 page white paper? Chances are most of the content in your white paper is still relevant to your target audience, and even if there have been major updates to you industry in the past year all you need to do is add a new section as needed. Read more »

guest post by Nick Stamoulis 

I'm always amazed when I hear a small business owner say they don't have time to invest in or both with SEO? Really? You don't have time to bother building up your online brand? Connecting with your target audience? Driving quality traffic and leads to your site?

As a small business owner I completely understand what it's like to run a business and how pressed for time you can be but SEO is one of those things, like ordering new inventory and paying the bills each month, that you need to make time for!

If you are a site owner that is struggling to make time for SEO here are few time management tips: Read more »

The recent launch of the Google disavow tool (to remove links regarded as unnatural by Google) has set the whole SEO community on fire. The tool has been intended for webmasters who recently received the unnatural link warnings in Google Webmaster Tools. Sounds like a final solution for your Penguin issues? But do you really think that the brand new tool is the complete answer to the overall backlink profile problem?

The flow of discussions has surrounded the tool since its launch – some marketers are relieved, others are pretty skeptic on the whole matter.

What we know for sure is that before you decide to disavow any of your backlinks, you should get the full objective picture of your backlink profile, analyze where your real weak points are and only after that take the decision to either remove or disavow the links. But why should you be so careful with the tool? Read more »

guest post by Nick Stamoulis  

Everyone in the SEO industry is waiting for the next Google Penguin update to hit. Penguin first went live in April and was a radical wake-up call to many site owners, going after sites with poor quality back link profiles, an overuse of exact-match anchor text and other web spam tactics designed to trick the search engines.

Many sites that were hit have yet to fully recover, although there have been a few reports of some sites being able to stop the free fall and earn back some of their lost visitors.

Then, back in August, Matt Cutts of Google's web spam team said that "next few updates will be 'jarring and jolting' for webmasters and SEOs."

This has many site owners and SEO professionals understandably anxious. If a site was hit the first time around, could it possibly get worse with a Penguin refresh? Could a site that wasn't tagged with Penguin 1.0 get caught in the filter?

Until the next Penguin update comes down from Google no one can be 100% sure that their website is safe, but there are a few things that site owners can do now to protect their website from the next Penguin update, and any search engine update to come. Read more »

Has it ever puzzled you  that your press release distribution service, no matter how reputable and pricey, won't deliver the results you expect? Or you do free PR distribution and keep wondering if your time and efforts are worth the aftermath.

PR effectiveness is the topic I covered in my recent guest post at  State of Search.

I think that to see if a press release was effective, we should state the list of PR goals first. Here's the pyramid that summarizes the most common goals for PR distribution:

In 5 Key Indicators to Measure your Press Release Effectiveness you'll find out that things worth looking at when assessing the PR distribution results include: Read more »

guest post by Geoff Kenyon

While infographics are a popular means of link building, there are oftentimes may infographics that receive far fewer links than they deserve.

Below are 4 things I've learned (mostly the hard way) about getting more links out of your infographic.

Give Them The Facts (And an Intro)

When you're reaching out to bloggers to get them to put your infographic on their site, you want to make it as easy as possible for them. This means you need to think about it from their perspective.

Real bloggers aren't simply going to embed your infographic in a post and hit publish, they need to minimally give it an intro. Additionally, many bloggers will want to write a bit more about the infographic. Read more »