In the paid links section of Google’s Webmaster Central, they acknowledge that buying and selling links is “a normal part of the economy of the web when done for advertising purposes, and not for manipulation of search results”. Additionally, if you are buying links, you should include a nofollow tag or a redirect to an intermediate page that is blocked with a robots.txt file. One might set up an intermediate page for tracking and analytical purposes.

The reason why I bring this up is because there are a couple websites off the top of my head that (to me) are clearly in violation of Google’s rule: Best of the Web and the Yahoo Directory. Both sites charge hefty fees for including your link into their directory, and its well known in the SEO world that shelling out the $300 per link will give you additional authority and PageRank for the purpose of increasing your keyword rankings, aka manipulating search results.

In another fantastic GoogleWebmasterHelp video from back in June 2009, this question was answered by Matt Cutts. He stated that the Yahoo Directory is not considered a paid link source because there is an actual review process that takes place, that you cannot request whatever anchor text that you want and that they reject sites on occasion. It appears as though he is classifying paid link sources as those who charge a fee and don’t require any sort of editorial review process whether it be of your requested anchor text or of the site that it’s being placed on.

As opposed to what Matt said in his video, I would assume that Google would classify a paid link as an anchor text link on a site, that is paid and that purposefully affects and manipulates keyword rankings. I’d assume that Google’s real concern is people trying to manipulate the search engines and not whether there is any sort of editorial review process. That is why they want paid links to have one of the two prevention measures that I mentioned above. In addition, aiding your trust with Google and improving your rankings is the only reason why people purchase links on the two mentioned sites, therefore, people are using these two popular sites to their advantage because Google clearly likes them.

If the definition that Matt gave is accurate, then any website that will take your money and place your link on their website after giving it some consideration is fair game. Yahoo Directory and BOTW are just doing it on a larger scale.

It seems as though BOTW and Yahoo Directory are direct offenders for offering these services because their well-known purpose is to aid your search engine rankings. I would seriously doubt Google cares more about whether there is an editorial review process rather than if the purchased links are actually affecting somebody’s rankings and ultimately, the searchers user experience. Also, this is similar to the services TNX.net and Mark Stevens (from a secret link selling company mentioned in the New York Times article) were selling because I’m sure they were providing some level of review and relevant website placement.

I know, there are extremes with this topic. Some might think, “I hired an SEO company to build links for me, wouldn’t that be considered as paid links?” No, I’m talking about giving a website money, to list your link for the purpose of bettering your trust and rankings regardless of whether they have any sort of useless, irrelevant screening process.

I have a feeling I may make a few enemies in this post considering the thousands of companies who’ve purchased links on the mentioned sites. I’m just looking for some discussion on this topic because some of the biggest and most obvious black-hat link sellers are making a fortune.

I’m very interested what some people might think about this. Is the Yahoo Directory and BOTW more legit than I make them out to be? Am I completely wrong? Let me know below.

Can Google (or any of the search engines) suspect strong SEO efforts whether it be absolute perfect onsite optimization or perfect link building? Do they care? Will they adjust the ranking they give you in the SERP’s because they understand what you’re trying to do?

This post is definitely up for discussion and argument. On one hand I believe that the fact that your doing SEO is irrelevant because it all sums up to the general trust that the search engines have with you. However, on the other hand, if you are doing absolutely textbook perfect link building and onsite optimization, I wonder if the SE’s can determine that you’re trying to manipulate them.

I guess the ultimate question is: can you be doing everything SEO-wise perfectly that the SE’s can identify it, and deem you as being unnatural and unfit for top rankings?

People, I need you to comment and give your personal experiences. Don’t glorify yourself or your SEO knowledge, just give your experienced opinion.

The Strategy:

When I decided to do some blog comments for my website, I purchased very valuable software that would go out and grab blogs based on their topic. When I went out to those blogs, I left a valuable comment that I believed was worthwhile and used a name as the title (not keywords).

The Problem:

Where did I goof up? Well you see, when you have that many blogs in front of you that you can so effortlessly go through and comment on, it’s easy to get carried away. It’s not that I was leaving spammy comments full of links and keywords, I think I simply did too many in a short amount of time. How many did I do? Well, I’m not quite sure on the actual quantity of blogs that I left a comment to, but my Yahoo link count went from roughly 1000, to roughly 1700 in about a week. Don’t be confused, I didn’t go through 700 blogs, Yahoo was just indexing pages where my link was visible in the sidebar or footer. Why is this bad? While it’s great to have lots of links, getting that many in that short of time can throw up a red flag to the search engines.

The Repercussions:

This is where I’m making assumptions but because I don’t know the details of Google’s algorithm, I feel somewhat justified jumping to this conclusion. I do believe that my blog commenting caused my drop in rankings. About a week after I had started with that commenting software, my rankings dropped. Badly. It wasn’t because of the commenting software and it wasn’t necessarily because of the quality of comment I was leaving. It was (I believe) the number of links that got indexed in a short amount of time as a result of my burst of blog commenting.

The Takeaway:

If you are questioning whether blog commenting works to brand your business or increase your search engine rankings; my answer would be yes. However, I also believe that too much of anything is a bad thing. I know of several different businesses and websites that comment on blogs for the sole purpose of increasing their rankings and it absolutely works for them. Just provide valuable input to the discussion and spread out your commenting over months, not days.

If you have already experienced the same problem as me, don’t worry. You can wait for the search engines to work out the duplicate pages/comments that it indexed or you can directly contact the webmaster of the site you commented on. Currently my problem site has dropped down to roughly 1300 links and has gotten back on the first page for my targeted keyword. It’s not back to normal, but it’s getting there!

For those who may not know, when you go to somebody’s blog, you are usually able to leave a comment at the bottom. This comment space is used to add to the conversation and give your two cents of knowledge. Unfortunately, these comments can be abused by inserting your anchor text in the “Name” field and posting a generic, useless comment rather than taking the time to read the post and give an honest response.

Example of Comment Spam:

Example of a Quality Comment:

I am not against going to a blog, leaving an honest comment with my name and linking it to my website. I believe that is appropriate and should not looked down upon. I do not agree with going to other peoples blogs, leaving a worthless comment just so you can obtain a link from 1000′s of blogs in a relatively short amount of time.

I just hope Google and the other search engines can differentiate between the two when they place value on these links. Matt Cutts, head of Google’s WebSpam Team has openly come out saying that they are looking to fight comment spam and other spammy links. You can even send Google a link spam report or report somebody for paid links.

If you are looking for affordable link building techniques, do not hire a company to leave blog comments. They are worthless and will get flagged by most content management systems, as you can see from my comment spam list.

The ironic part of this is, some of these comments are from SEO businesses. You’d think they’d know better. Maybe I should send them this article, but then again, they’d probably try to post a link promoting Viagra or other online pills.

What’s your area of expertise?

Whether you love hunting, auto racing or even stuffing your face full of food, there is always something that relates to your interest that can be profitable. You don’t necessarily need to build a website around your interest for it to be worthwhile or profitable, but having experience and knowing what you’re talking about can be a huge benefit. Also, if you don’t know what you are talking about, then you’ll just either sound inexperienced, or your bounce rate will be through the roof since you have no valuable content.

How will you make money?

What is it you’re providing or selling? Is the visitor meant to buy something, subscribe to a service or are you simply selling ad space? Granted, there are hundreds of ways of making money online, but those are just a few of the more popular options. Say your hobby is hunting; are you going to have an online store, provide an online community for hunters to gather or provide information regarding the best places to hunt in your area? Keep in mind, if you go too niche with your interest, there might not be too many people searching but you will also have less competition.

If you are creating an online store, providing product reviews or building a informational site that caters to a specific group of products, you may want to see what affiliate programs are available. A popular online affiliate program to consider is Amazon.com. You can make 4% on up depending on how much product you sell. Commission Junction also offers affiliate programs, though you need to be careful on how you build your site as they have strict guidelines that may impede your acceptance.

If you have an informational site, you can do really well with Google Adsense. This program has literally created millionaires. Though your odds of that happening are slim, you can potentially make decent money.

Who are the current leaders?

Once you have your website idea picked out, try and think of the main keywords you’ll want to rank for. Type them in and look at the top 10 pages that show up. Do they look like large businesses or organizations? If they are, then it may be pretty difficult to bump them from their position as they are already established. A huge ranking factor is the age of your website. If the top 10 ranked sites on the SERP are from around 2000, that’s a good indication that it’s going to be fairly difficult.

Analyze your competitors for the keywords you’re wanting to rank for. Things to look at are site age, number of links, quality of links, whether their domain includes their keyword or not and their on page relevancy. If their title tag doesn’t have their keyword in it, then odds are getting to the first page may not be very difficult. If they have 5000 links, keyword in the domain and/or sitelinks, then more time and effort will be required.

You can use other SEO websites to help analyze your competitors websites. Don’t look at just one resource, rather, use these websites to compare your competition. Most sites will give you different metrics since there is not one “right” way of judging a website. Check out spyfu.com, compete.com, sitereportcard.com, SEOmoz’s tools (if you’re lucky to get a login) and websitegrader.com.

Don’t forget the free tools that can be added to your browser. For example, SEO for Firefox will make looking up sites details quick and easy, and there are hundreds of other plugins that can give you quick stats on other websites.

Will you be able to build the site?

How advanced are your web development skills? You may need to hire a web designer to build your website if you are unable to. If it’s a basic website then I’d recommend building it out of WordPress.

If you are creating a site that is a copy of a site that already exits like youtube.com or fmylife.com, keep in mind you can buy similar PHP scripts from hotscripts.com.

Where will you get your content?

If you are good at writing and have some time on your hands, then creating it yourself is definitely the cheaper option. If you choose to oursource your content writing, there are several options in which you can do so. If you choose an English fluent writer, you will pay more, but you will probably get better articles.  You can choose the cheaper option of going through odesk.com to find a writer, but the quality could suffer. Whatever route you choose, I would recommend you proofread the content as well as check its originality by Googling random sentences.

Nobody wants to waste their time; that’s why if you create a website that is worthy of the front page it will gain search engine trust and better rankings will follow. Don’t be spammy, don’t use blackhat techniques and be persistent!

As always, feel free to comment or ask a question below. Feel free to also leave your professional opinion.

Are People Looking For Me?

Take for example, if you are a dentist in the Denver area (or anywhere in the US) then SEO is most likely for you. As you know, there are very few people that go beyond the second page when looking for their needed services. “Denver Dentist” gets about 1300 searches per month on average. That’s a lot of potential customers that dentists in Denver are missing out on, unless you’re the smart few that have thought about SEO in the past.

Do I Have The Funds & Patience?

SEO can be very expensive and it can also take a lot of time! This all depends on the keyword. If you want to pursue a keyword that targets an outlying suburb of a major city then getting great rankings may not take so long (ie Indian Hills Dentist rather than Denver Dentist), also understand that there may not be very much search volume. Another benefit is that it would probably be cheaper. However, on the other hand, if you go after the major city keyword with the most search volume then there is probably more competition, more money will be required but the payoff of being on the front page of the SERP’s is much more valuable. Don’t think that you are trying to rank for the industry either, you are ranking for the industry plus the location of where you are. If you are a Denver dentist, then ranking for “Dentist” will be worthless to you.

The search engines change all the time. Every year Google changes its algorithm hundreds of times to try and give the best results so keep in mind that your rankings WILL fluctuate. Just because you are putting all your money towards the goal of ranking, does not mean you will succeed. However, if you have patience and are practicing SEO correctly then you’ll likely see results. Remember that there is no certain time frame.

Setting Your Expectations

Do not put minimum effort and funds into your SEO campaign and expect maximum results, it almost never works. I have worked with hundreds (possibly thousands) of local businesses that are looking to rank for a local keyword that just don’t see results. Why you ask? Simple, they are not dedicated! If you want to rank, you need to do what it takes. Your website needs to be relevant for the desired keyword and you need to put an appropriate amount of money forward to get the quality links needed to gain authority.

Have any questions? Are you a local business that would like more information about local SEO? Feel free to leave a comment below.

Well you see, when a search engine’s bot (automated robot that crawls the web) comes to your website, one of the first things it will look at is the robots.txt file that is located on your root domain (ie: yahoo.com/robots.txt) From there it will read this simple file to see what you (the webmaster) would like it to index. With this file, you can specify what pages or directories within your website you would like to keep the search engines from indexing or showing in a SERP.

You do not necessarily need a robots.txt file. If you have a simple site that you’d like the search engines to completely index, leaving it out would be just fine. However, if you have a large site with plenty of pages that are useless or that you simply would rather keep private, having a robots.txt file can help.

Keep in mind that confidential items that you really don’t want people to see should be behind a password protected page. Just because you specify to leave out certain pages in your robots.txt file does not mean they will not get indexed. If another site links to that page you want to omit from the search engines index, it can still get indexed!

What Does a Robots.txt File Look Like?

All robots.txt files will look differently. Some can be simple and some can be complex. Take for instance the robots.txt files for the following sites.

Complex: http://www.google.com/robots.txt

Simple: http://www.youreviewelectronics.com/robots.txt

You’ll notice that there are two kinds of permissions; “Allow:” and “Disallow:”. Pages that you do not want the search engines to crawl will be created as “Disallow: /whatever-page”. Everything past “/whatever-page” will also be omitted from the search engines crawl (ie: /whatever-page/another-page)

How Do I Create & Upload a Robots.txt File?

Here is the simple way that requires no real effort; click here. This generator allows you to restrict certain search engines should you want to. I would recommend keeping the top 2 drop down options the same. If you have a sitemap, it is also very beneficial to add it to your robots file as it will give the bots an easy path to a page that lists all your pages, increasing the likelihood for your pages to be crawled and indexed.

Now, if you don’t care to restrict any of the bots listed, skip down to “Restricted Directories”. This is where you can list the pages that you would like the search engines to exclude. List the pages or directories of your site and make sure a forward slash follows. Make sure you do not just input a forward slash without the directory in which your prohibiting! That will be telling the search engines to not look at your website all together.

Once you have the file the way you want it, copy the text, open Notepad, paste the text and save it as “robots.txt”. From there you can upload it using an FTP program or through a file manager in your cPanel. Make sure to upload it to the root directory! Meaning example.com/robots.txt rather than example.com/folder/robots.txt.

Hopefully this was helpful and answered some questions regarding robots.txt files. If you have any questions or would like to add to the discussion, please add your comment below.

Hopefully if you’re reading this, you already have the CMS installed to your website. If you don’t, bookmark this page and come back. Here are some tips and ideas for you to take into consideration when building your WordPress site while also keeping SEO into consideration.

Configuring Your WordPress Settings

When you go into your WordPress Dashboard, make sure you have the right Blog Visibility setting selected.

This will do exactly as it says. Selecting the other one will apply a <META NAME=”ROBOTS” CONTENT=”NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW”> tag preventing your content from being indexed.

Having your keywords in your URL is a great way to show relevance for a keyword. If your post or page is at dogs.com/golden-retriever then it’s a good indicator that the page is about Golden Retrievers. However, if it is at dogs.com/view.php?post=89 then the search engines and users have no idea what the page is about. To enable you to change the URL structure, go to Settings, the Permalinks and enter /%postname%/.

This will automatically pull in the post name or page name, and insert it into the URL.

If you are looking to create a business site that just has your homepage, a contact page, your services page and possibly a blog, then I would recommend setting your homepage as a Static Page. However, before you do this, I would recommend going to your Pages section and creating a Page called “Homepage” and a Page called “Blog”. Then you’ll need to go to Settings, then Reading and select “A Static Page.”

Once you do that, click the Front page drop down, select “Homepage” and that will then be your new homepage. Then go to your “Posts Page” drop down and select “Blog”.

NOTE: Depending on your WordPress theme, this may or may not work correctly. Ideally when you go to your home page, you’ll want to see your Home button, your Blog button and other pages that you may have added (ie: services, contact, etc).

If you see that you have two homepages on your actual site and they are both the same page, please read on as there is a fix for it!

Great SEO Plugins for WordPress

1. Hide Pages Plugin
   This plugin will allow you to have as many pages as you want, but hide them from particular areas of your website. To fix the issue earlier of having two homepages, install this plugin and go to the plugins page under Settings. When you get there you’ll see the pages that you’ve created (blog posts not shown). Simply click the homepage that you created and hide it. Save, and refresh your homepage and see if it clears up the duplicate homepage buttons. It should, leave a comment if it didn’t.
2. All in One SEO Plugin
   This is a wonderful free plugin that makes your onsite SEO optimization much easier. Once you have it installed go to it’s settings page. Make sure you have enabled the plugin’s status as it will not work unless it is. From this control panel, you are able to change your homepages title tag and meta description, the format in which the title tags are written for category pages and post pages as well as many other things.Another added benefit of this plugin is you can change the title tags and meta tags within the post that you are creating at the bottom of the page.
3. Google XML Sitemaps
   As you know, having a sitemap can help the indexation of your pages within the search engines. Installing this plugin will make your life a lot easier since it updates automatically and you can adjust page and posts’ priority. Unless there are specific pages you would not like the search engines to see, skip all the way down to “Priorities”.

   

   If your using WordPress for a business website with a static homepage, I would have the Homepage have a 1.0 priority, Static Pages by .8 priority and the rest a .4 priority. Setting a priority shows the search engine what the important pages on your website are.

4. SEO Smart Links
   This plugin makes internal linking much, much easier. The setup for this plugin is fairly simple, but it allows you to say, “Every time my website says “Colorado Attorney”, set it as a hyperlink to my homepage” or whatever page or term you’d like. Even though Google doesn’t place much value on it, it’s still worth implementing.

Hopefully these plugins will help your onsite optimization efforts more effective and efficient. If you have any other plugins or tips you’d like to suggest, please feel free to leave them as a comment below. I may just incorporate them into this post.

Before you start, here is some information it would be smart for you to compile:

• Category of your business (ie: plumber, photographer, landscaper, etc)
• Payment options (ie: cash only, credit cards, etc)
• Business hours
• Service areas
• All contact information (ie: address, all phone numbers, email addresses, website, etc)

First Step, go to http://www.google.com/places, login to your gmail account or sign up for one. Click “Add New Business” and begin.

I would recommend you input as much information as you can. Most business probably don’t have videos on YouTube but if you do, include it. Once you are finished, Google will either call you, or send you a postcard to your provided address, whichever you prefer. I’d recommend you accept the phone call, unless you have an automated phone system as that likes to screw up the phone call.

As you can see in the image, Google only selects certain companies to show up for specific local keywords.What some people don’t know is that you can actually optimize your Google listing, much like you can with typical SEO tactics.

Improving Your Google Places Listing

Just like with optimizing your website, Google wants to see that you are relevant for the keyword their user is searching for. Including what I recommended about inputting as much business information as possible in your Google profile, here are some other helpful ways of increasing your odds of getting ranked in the A-G position for your keyword(s) of choice.

Be relevant for your keyword, include it in your…

1. Business summary, don’t stuff it in there 15x, but have it be present.
2. Categories. Even creating a new business category for your site can help.
3. Additional details if it applies without looking spammy.

Another very helpful way of optimizing your Google listing is creating citations throughout the web. What’s a citation do you ask? A citation is something that mentions your business name, address and phone number on a particular website. For example, if you search for “Los Angeles Dry Cleaners” and click to “view more info” on a particular business; you will see their citations at the bottom of the page labled as “More about this place”.

These citations are much like links, in the way that they pass value to your profile. Ways to receive a citation on any number of websites includes submitting your website to as many online directories as you can including superpages.com, insiderpages.com, citysearch.com, yelp.com, foursquare.com and yellowbot.com. You can even get a citation from somebody blogging about you. Just remember this one word: NAP. Name, address, phone number. Having Google crawl those pages that include that information will benefit you and your Google Places rankings.

I would also recommend having people leave reviews about your business. Unfortunately you cannot edit bad reviews, but you can influence good reviews by encouraging people to go on and comment when they have received fantastic service.

Do you have a question or know of any other ways to improve your Google Places listing? Leave a comment.

]]> http://www.kevin-phelps.com/adding-your-business-to-google-places/feed/ 1 http://www.kevin-phelps.com/seo-basics-onsite-and-offsite-optimization/ http://www.kevin-phelps.com/seo-basics-onsite-and-offsite-optimization/#comments Tue, 04 May 2010 20:47:11 +0000 Kevin Phelps http://www.kevin-phelps.com/?p=20 If you’re looking to go after a particular keyword and are debating on whether you want to focus on onsite optimization or offsite optimization then slap yourself, because you need to do both. You cannot focus too much on only one aspect of SEO. If you focus to much on your link profile then you won’t get ranked because your website isn’t relevant since you haven’t spent some time optimizing your website. If you focus too much on onsite optimization then you won’t get ranked because you do not have anybody credible linking back to you.

Here are some onsite and offsite tips that can help you with your SEO efforts.

Onsite Optimization:

This obviously consists of everything onsite. Luckily you have control of this part of SEO and you need to make sure you make yourself relevant. The basics of making yourself relevant include including your keyword in your…

• Title Tag
  
  • Make sure to keep it under 65 characters and to not keyword stuff.
• Meta Tag
  
  • Make sure to keep it under 160 characters and to not keyword stuff.
• H1 Tag
  
  • Make sure it’s relevant if you’re going to put the keyword in it.
• Body Text
  
  • Make sure to only insert the keyword if it actually applies. Do not put dozens of keywords at the bottom.
• Image ALT Descriptions
  
  • If the image relates to the keyword, make sure to put the keyword in the description. This also helps hearing impaired people.
• URL
  
  • If you haven’t purchased your domain yet, make sure to do some research to see if you can find one that includes your keyword. Check out why its important to have a keyword in your domain.
• Sub-domain
  
  • Having SEO friendly URL structure is important. If you have product pages, make sure the URL reflects that product.

There are other areas of SEO that you’ll need to look at when trying to optimize for a particular keyword. If you’re having indexing problems, pretty much everything else relating to SEO is irrelevant because the search engines aren’t listing you. Possible problems to look for include…

• Duplicate Pages
  • If your homepage URL can be yoursite.com, www.yoursite.com, yoursite.com/index.htm, and www.yoursite.com/index.htm and be the exact same page, then the search engines can index them all and not know which one to show.
  • Real example: All the below images are of different URL’s but exactly the same page.
  • Solution: Make sure to 301 redirect all these homepages back to a main page. Ideally www.arcolockandkey.com.

• Duplicate Content (on other sites)
  • To avoid any problems, always make sure you create your own content. Also, do not publish content that you have placed on your website, on other sites. Even a bio or summary of your business. Take the time to create a new one if you are adding your site to a different directory for instance.
  • Worried about having duplicate content? Go to copyscape.com and enter your URL. This tool will show you if somebody has stolen your content. If they have, this could count against you, however this isn’t exactly the ultimate factor to improving your rankings.
• Problems with Server Headers
  • This is a bit more complicated and I really doubt most people have issues with this. You can go here to find out if there is a problem with your server header. Most common code is 200, and that is just saying everything is okay. Whatever code your website pulls, research it to make sure it’s not hindering your SEO efforts.
• Hosting on Same IP
  
  • When you host your website with places like bluehost.com, godaddy.com or dreamhost.com, they will host your website on an IP that is being shared with other websites you may not know. Having too many domains on the same IP can cause an issue especially if there are shady sites grouped with you. If there are under 300-400 sites sharing that IP I wouldn’t worry about it, but when you get upwards of 1000 or 2000, I’d look into new hosting. To see other sites that your website is hosted with, check out this website. To resolve this issue, though typically not a common one, you can purchase a dedicated IP address for your domains.

Offsite Optimization

This is more focused toward link building and becoming a trusted expert in your field. While onsite optimization is important, your site isn’t going to go very far unless you have quality links pointing back to it.

There are hundreds of link building strategies, some are more technical than others. These include…

• Directory Submissions
  • dmoz.org, local directories, etc.
• Social Bookmark Links
  • digg.com, mixx.com, reddit.com etc.
• Article Submission
  • contentcrooner.com, ezinearticles.com, etc.
• Press Releases
  • prweb.com, marketwire.com, etc. Make sure you include your link in the press release!
• Comment Linking
  • Don’t go overboard with these. The hold value but too much could result in a penalty.
• Guest Blog Posting
  • Wonderful way to obtain links. Bloggerlinkup.com is a great way to connect with blog owners that want content, and are willing to give you a link if you write for them.
• Creating Squidoo Lens’ or Hubpages
  • squidoo.com, hubpages.com.
• Link Trading
  • You can manually contact webmasters and ask them if they’d like to trade links (reciprocal or triangle), or you can use this great resource that can make the process easier.
• Link Suggestions in Forums
  • Find a forum that relates to your industry. Answer  peoples questions, make friends and when appropriate, provide a link to your services.
• Linkbait
  • Creating trendy infographics that are informative and interesting and distributing a funny video are good examples of linkbait.

Remember, it’s about the quality of link rather than the quantity. I would rather have 1 link from an authority than 100 from other relating sites. Also, don’t bother pursuing links that are not related to your business or industry. The search engines know what is relevant and will add or remove value from a link depending on where it is.

As always, feel free to add to the conversation below. :)