SEO Question: I was thinking about buying a link exchange software product. I was looking at ___________ and ___________ and wanted to know what one is the best?

SEO Answer: I think Arelis can be decent for harvesting email information, but many sloppy webmasters screw that up by using too much automation. You really need to try to connect to a webmaster, and since each site and each person has different motives anything that is automated or generated is crap.

For example, I recently got this gem of an email:

I'm an editor of a website ______ about watches. I looked through your site http://www.threadwatch.org and I think that it is very interesting. I have an offer for you. I'd like to send you a few of interesting, cognitive articles with unique content about structures and machinery of watches, which will be written by a group of authors. If interested, feel free to contact me. I appreciate your opinion.
Thank you in advance.

Sincerely yours, Anastasia

Notice that they didn't specifically mention link exchange, but they wanted to put link laden content on my site that was unrelated to my site.

Most of the software designed for automation leaves footprints if it generates pages, and / or is crap for other reasons.

And while it may seem like the watch example above is a rare one many authoritative sites tend to rank for terms that are a bit random in nature. For example, Matt Cutts ranks at #173 for Bacon in Google right now. If you fired off emails to the top 200 bacon resources sure enough one of those spam emails would hit Google's search quality / web spam evaluation leader, and obviously that is not a good thing.

The links that you really want do not exist on generic will-exchange-with-anyone link pages. Most of those pages are not designed for humans and are likely rather easy for most sophisticated search engines to detect.

I think pretty lowly of most link exchange networks as well.

Automation works well for some people, but if you are new to the market you probably are not going to figure out how and what to automate until you have a bit of experience. As a general rule of thumb I never automate any human interaction and avoid using software that leaves footprints, especially if that software is typically primarily used by people who aim to game search relevancy.

If you are in a competitive marketplace with a new site and the only links you can get are ones that you have to request then you eventually are going to need to mix up your methods, especially as your market becomes more hyper saturated.

you decide to name your company (or a pseudonym) with a 4 or a 9 because those are the numbers with the fewest outbound links on the Better Business Bureau Online site.

SEO Question: Your mention of blogs got me thinking. Do you know of a reliable "paid to post" service that will not spam blogs but will find related/relevant blogs to post notices about the site I'm launching simultaneous with the launch?

SEO Answer: I would not recommend ideas like pay to post. There are a whole slue of reasons, but at the core of the issue is that the people who are going to be blogging and ranking for terms related to your field can probably burn you pretty bad in the search results if they dislike you. The community aspect of the web is probably the single most important marketing mechanism for the average new webmaster and it is one of the easiest things to screw up.

Here are reasons why the webmasters and site owners should work directly with bloggers and other website owners to market their sites.

• People who write often tend to also read often. If the people who write often are friends then they likely will defend you or alert you when others bring up your name or brand in a negative light.

• If you learn the interests of those talking about your topic it is easier for you to appeal to their interests.
• Search engines want to move toward counting naturally earned organic links. Google is heading that way quicker than Yahoo! or MSN, but you can't count for them to be behind the curve forever.
• Traffic from related sites should convert exceptionally well, especially if it is from people who write about you or your products in a positive light.
• It may not be this way right now, but eventually sites that have few or no votes from sites within their topical community are going to struggle to get high enough in the search results to earn self reinforcing links from others outside of their community.
• With how many scams there are on the net I think people tend not to trust new sites until they are repeatedly exposed to them. If the first exposure smells at all like a marketing message they you may have to pay for any further exposure.

All the above information assumes you want to build a long term brand and business. If your goals are more short term and your name is not attached to the site both low cost outsourced labor and automated somewhat sophisticated comment spam bots can market your message, although that is pretty shitty to do and not something you want to do if you are in the business for the long haul.

Here are a few legitimate ways you can get bloggers attention:

• Search for what they are interested in and talking about. Create a story that is more comprehensive than anyone elses or takes a different perspective.

• Create something that is web based that bloggers can integrate into their blogs. Try to make it something social.
• Ask some of the bloggers that you want to cover your stuff if they would have time for an interview. I have seen exceptionally new bloggers get to interview old time web gurus just by asking. Odds are you may get an I was recently interviewed by link which leads to many secondary links. You also can then offer that blogger a free version of your product as a thank you, although there are still some tact issues with how you do that.
• Come up with a controversial blog advertising program. Try to involve some big names in it to where all the blogging ethics crew talk about it.

Some people tend to think that you just need enough money to get seen, but that can backfire if you offend the ego of bloggers. All you need to do is find a way to appease their egos.

Recently a few people contacted me with press releases. The emails were deleted and I sent some of the people the optional are you an idiot? replies.

One person was creating a parallel and competing channel and sent me a press release about it. When I suggested that they could buy ads they said that industry news should not need to buy ads. I told them that since they offered me nothing in return I thought they could go to hell.

You don't get much help by telling others what you expect them to do. Especially if there is no return / reward incentive in the exchange.

Occasionally a smart person comes along and doesn't ask for a link. They ask for feedback or my opinion, and in that they likely get greater value. I am not going to link to something that I think is crap, but if I think their product is no good I will tell them why. If I review it and like it then odds are pretty good I would mention it.

Focus on a niche and focus on getting the right core users.

I have been getting lots of questions about marketing a site on no budget. The words that are used are not the following, but the question invariable is How do I market my bland useless me too site? The answer invariably is don't make your site bland and useless and expect to market it on $0.

There is a balance on time and money. If you can't afford much money to market your site it likely means you do not place exceptional value on your time. Thus they surely can afford to learn about something they are interested in and then share what they learned.

Most information is in one form or another repackaged. As the amount of information continues to grow logarithmically there is going to be an increasing amount of value in being able to create vertical editorial websites that point out the best news and information.

If you have no money to invest in marketing does it make sense to try to learn how to market something useless? Why start your brand with a meeee ttooooo empty product database?

Or does it make more sense to learn your market first, create content about things that interest you, and then later use that channel to help push your other ideas?

A site does not need to be big to make lots of money, but original content that grows over time draws passive traffic streams that continue to grow. It also helps you get quick feedback and allows you to launch new ideas and have them spread quickly.

The guys at Google are geniuses who are amazing marketers and had great market timing. Most people will fail if they try to go that broadly though. Think of how many search engines you can think of. There have been thousands of attempts and almost all have fail.

You can own large verticals with algorithms too though. The guys at Topix, a leading news site, are no doubt geniuses and were able to smartly create amazing algorithms and then use that to leverage great partnerships.

Most websites and webmasters are not going to do fundamentally innovative things that allow them to work on large data sets the way some of the large resource rich companies do.

But you do not have to be a programming whiz or have infinite resources to do well so long as you are:

• interested in a topic

• willing to work hard at tracking and learning it
• focused on a niche
• opinionated

If you are all of those 4 you should be able to beat out an algorithmic driven process every time. If you can't then it just means you need to focus more on a niche, become more opinionated, or pick a topic you are more interested in.

The feedback cycles take time and unless you are absolutely great at writing the first 6 months to a year can start to look a bit bleak, but after that you should be able to grow quicker than the market does, so long as you did not start off in a niche that was already hyper saturated.

More and more companies are fighting to create ad networks that help automate the monetization of content. If you don't have any money to push an ecommerce site then you might do well to push content creation and leverage that original content, mind share, and traffic flow for profit.

Negative publicity or affiliates may end up eating a large amount of the search results for your brand name.

If it is negative publicity of course you should take the message on board, but what do you do if you solved the problem and the bad search results will not go away? Directly contacting them and showing the problem has been fixed might help. Maybe even offering to donate to a charity may help, but if the person will not work with you it is going to be up to you to create other content that can be deemed more authoritative than theirs.

If the affiliates add a lot of value of course them listing below you for your brand name is no big deal, but what happens if they are thin affiliate pages that add no value, or worse yet try to use your brand to push people to a competing product with a higher payout? Is there another way to add search results to the index that will not cost you a percent of your sales?

Press Coverage:
The first thing you want to do is ensure you are leveraging your authority and brand correctly. Are you well known? Has your company been covered in the press? If so do not be afraid to point a few links at the good press pages.

Extend Press Coverage:
Look for press coverage in search results for your brand name. Also look through your backlink data. You may be able to talk to people who were mildly interested and get them to do more in depth coverage of your goods and services.

Wikipedia:
If you have a strong enough brand you may be able to list your company in the Wikipedia. If your stuff is legitimate I typically recommend creating a whole page instead of just adding a link because I believe most pages have to go through a deletion cycle vote before they are deleted. Make sure to reference media coverage in your Wikipedia article.

Creating your own topic page in Wikipedia also makes it easier for it to rank for your brand since the whole page is focused on your brand, instead of your site just being mentioned in a link.

Keep in mind that if you are trying to block out negative comments and have not changed the business model or issues that caused them you may be giving people another avenue to criticize your business in the Wikipedia page about your company.

The earlier you get into Wikipedia the lower the bar will be. As they create more content, get more citations, and have logarithmically growing costs it will be harder to get into the Wikipedia.

Social Networks:
Set up pages on sites like MySpace.com, Facebook, and Twitter. Sites like Knowem make it easy to register your brand on many sites.

Press Releases:
Press releases typically do not pack a huge punch in the search results, but they do well in news search, and if you point a few links at them it could also help them outrank other pages that are not on high trust websites.

PRleap and PRWeb are a few free resources on that front.

Good press releases can also lead to other media coverage.

Interviews and Writing Articles:
Just like press releases it is another easy way to create content that is highly relevant to your brand or name. Make sure you link at it to help build it up. If you write for a somewhat well known site, and especially if you can make something a bit controversial or appealing to a link authority rich group that page should pack a punch in the SERPs.

If you interview someone else that is popular then others may heavily link at it. Add a few more links and it may be able to rank.

Blog for Others:
You have to build up some amount of trust before you can do self promotional stuff on other sites, but if you are creative with how you write you can keep a page from sounding too self promo while virtually guaranteeing it will rank by including the right words in it and placing it on an authority site.

Sites like Lockergnome have guest authors write some of their channels.

Vertical Databases:
Sell software? Do you have a profile page on Download.com, HotScripts, or sites like ZDnet.com? If not why not?

Give away software? Are you listed on all the software AND freeware directories?

Highly Relevant Second Page on Your Site:
Create an about page that you link to sitewide. When you write content and submit it to other sites point some of the signature links and whatnot back at your about page instead of at the home page. Do this to try to get a double listing.

Subdomains:
You probably do not need to create many of them for this purpose, but maybe you can create a subdomain for part of your business and then link it up.

Local Sites:
Create sites for different regions. Maybe create sites for different user groups. One domain for consumers, one for distributors, etc.

Profile Pages:
MSN's Small Business Directory allows you to create a company profile page. Make sure you point a few links at it and it should rank for semi competitive phrases.

There are also other types of profile pages that may require deeper thinking to find and then deep thinking to debate the consequences of. Creative Commons has a directory with profile pages.

Rent a Pre sell Page:
Rent a whole page advertisement on someone else's site.

Blogging, Forums, and Social Sites:
Create a blog on Blogspot or one on Wordpress.com. Or maybe one on each.

Create forum user names and make a few posts. Link back to that profile to build up its authority.

Many sites such as Newsvine, Squidoo, or some free host sites also allow you to create pages on their sites which may help you leverage the authority of their domains.

Creativity:
There are many ways to leverage big ideas that are not your own. For example, what is to stop you from creating a Wordpress theme that is named after your company.