Link building is about more than just traffic building, it is about gaining ranking on the search engine results so that traffic is organic and sustainable. Outsourcing your link building tasks is becoming very popular but there are a few rules to the game that will keep the business fair, professional and successful.

#1 Long term relationships are good. When establishing a relationship with outsourcers for link building, a long term relationship is best. Building links is a slow process that takes time. This means gathering some great freelancers or an outsourcing company and sticking with them for the long term. Long term relationships also means a common goal and familiarity with the project over time.

#2 Personal relationships are good too! Getting to know a bit more about your outsourcing company, the workers or the owners can prove very beneficial. Talking with the freelancers or outsourcing company on a more personal level will bring them into the circle of friendship that will bond them to the project. The more personally responsible they feel for the businesses growth, the more they will give to your efforts.

#3 Know where the outsourcing company is located. Not every company hired to build backlinks will be located in the United States. This means different holidays and different times of work. Learn these and respect the fact that your 9 to 5 may not be their 9 to 5. On the other hand, link automation software companies will work 24 hours a day to build link to your website pages.

#4 Be clear with what you expect. When you outsource, you have to assume the link builders know nothing about your business. Be clear about your expectations including the Must Dos and the Never Dos. The project guidelines need to be provided in an easily accessible format, possibly a deep page on your website that is not set for bots to crawl. A blog could also be a great place to publish the scope of the project.

#5 Negotiations are always good. Negotiating a price for the link building service may take the most time. You want to get the most for your money, but you also need to be fair to the link builder. There are very low cost services, medium cost services and expensive services. The budget you have set for marketing needs to be long term as link building is not an overnight process. Spending all of the budget on one service that does not build sufficient links is a waste of time and money. Again, link automation is a great way to build links to EVERY page of your website for one, fixed rate.

There is NEVER enough time to work with the promotional side of an online business. Yet, this is one of the most important (if not THE most important) part of a business’s success. Link building is perfect for freelancers, link automation software and outsourced companies. The money spent on building great quality links, over time, will come back many fold in sales and profits in the future when page rank soars and traffic continues building.

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In order to get the best ranking results from your social pages and posts, there are
a few things you need to know about how Google manages to index the billions of new
posts per day, and which ones they decide to add as search results.

The first thing you need to know is that the social pages that are indexed are no longer
stored on a hard disk like they were ten years ago. Instead, the results are stored in
RAM across thousands of machines which is incredibly fast but also very volatile.

This is necessary because there are so many new posts that storing them in a hard disk
memory and sorting them later for the index is not an option. They have to be stored
temporarily and organized practically immediately for near instant (within minutes)
inclusion in the SERPs.

This means two things, because RAM is so volatile, a small system glitch or power
outage on the machine that is storing your new post could mean that the data is deleted
and will never appear in the index, second that the SE needs to find a way to pick out
the few pages and posts from each social network that they are going to index and add
to the serps, and they need to do it fast.

Not all new sites are treated this way, this is a new index system that was developed
specifically for social networks and sites because they are updated so frequently and the
data becomes outdated so quickly. We have seen pages that have been posted to Digg
appear in the serps in as little as two minutes and typically within 5.

With that in mind, the second thing you need to know is…

Obviously, every new social page such as a Digg post or a Squidoo lens cannot become
a top ten listing, regardless of how well optimized it is, otherwise the search engine
results pages (serps) would change every second!

So Google looks at a couple of things to determine the ranking of a users page or post.
First they look at the at the amount of time a post stays on the main page of the social
site and then they look at the amount of views it gets, how many users link to it, and
the amount of time users spend viewing the page.

What does this mean? It means that you need to find ways to get your new pages and posts
to remain on the main page of the social site longer, you have to get eyeballs looking
at them and you need to make sure they are looking at them for a long time, long enough
to read them in their entirety.

In conclusion…

First and foremost, and although I did not mention this before, it should make perfect
sense: The title of your post, page, lens etc. is the most important part of the process!
The more interesting and thought provoking it is, the better the likelihood of it getting
clicked and read.

Try to get your pages, posts etc. listed in the featured section of the social site main
page, the longer the post remains there, the better the chances of it becoming a top ten
search engine result.

Another way to keep it on the main page longer is to get your readers to vote it up, this
feeds into the next thing to do, which is…

Get people reading your new post as soon as it is posted, twitter it, send an email to
your list, post it on facebook etc. The more people that read your new page the better the
chances again, of it staying on the main page and ranking in the serps.

And this should go without saying, but I’m gonna say it anyway, make the post interesting
and informative so that the people reading it will read it all. This not only helps get the
current post listed, but it assures that the next time you make a post and ask your readers
to take a look, they will, because they expect it to be good.

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You can find relevant keywords in many different ways, but the easiest way is to use Google’s research tool.

You can find it at: http://adwords.google.com/select/keywordtoolexternal

Simply type in a keyword for your website and Google will give you many keyword ideas.

Example: If you’ve got a website about pet recipes, you would enter terms like “cooking pet food”, “homemade pet food”, “natural pet food’, “cook dog food”, etc.

Google also gives you the numbers that tell you how often people search for each term. That way you know the keywords you’re targeting are worth your efforts.

Another important piece of the puzzle is figuring out how much competition there is for each keyword. If you are targeting words that have too much competition it’s going to be harder for you to reach the top of the search engine results pages. Don’t worry about that happening, because it’s easy to figure out how much competition there is.

Simply go to Google and type in your keyword surrounded by quote marks. The results that pop up are the other sites that are specifically targeting that term.

Example: When I search for “Pet recipes” I see there are 66,600 webpages that are already listed for that term.

Google Search for "Pet Recipes"

Now that you have these keywords you can use them to give you a basis for your articles. It’s easiest to choose one keyword per article and focus the topic around that keyword. Remember to put the same term in your title as well.

***Bonus tip for keyword research:

Her’s how you can expand your keyword research using the Search Results you get from Google.

When typing the keyword into the search box, add the tilde symbol before the term, for example: ~pet recipes

This will tell Google to search for and display results that Google Searchers have used in place of or that are similar to the term “pet recipes”, it will highlight these terms in the results making them easy to spot.

You can further refine this by showing only the results with terms that are similar and not the results that contain the term “pet” by adding the following to the search:

~pet recipes -pet

So now you’re saying, search for results containing terms similar to “pet recipes” but don’t show the results containing the term “pet”.

Article Marketing Tip #2 will be coming tomorrow so be sure to bookmark and come back!

If you found this tip useful, click the twitter link below and send it to your tweeps

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