There is a “green” trend in the survey business. People are slowly moving away from printed survey documents and towards online evaluation surveys. There are many advantages to this move. With the proliferation of WiFi in most locations where people congregate, wireless cards in laptops and WiFi enabled smartphones, more folks are opting for the convenience of technology in data collection. If you Google ‘online surveys’ and you will find a plethera of online survey software and businesses to suit your every possible situation. It can be overwhelming to say the least.

I dare say that most data-centric researchers don’t really want to have to learn the ins and outs of setting up and maintaining an online evaluation project. Considering all the details of buying and learning specialized survey software, designing survey forms in a browser environment, webhosting issues and costs, database construction, etc., can leave one’s head spinning.

There are a few online surveys specialists midst all the “do-it-yourself” packages that can take care of all the details for you. You simply supply the questions and they will do the rest. Don’t get me wrong, the challenge of creating an online survey can be a rewarding learning experience and provide you with many new tools to achieve your data collection goals for future projects. I know, that’s what I do. There are plenty of tools out there for you to choose from and free instructional information on the web. Most people, however, like to leave these things to the specialists.

In this article a SEO guy Jim Westergren gives some precise link building tips for webmasters. It’ll help you to study and understand the effective ways to get links as well as work out your own link building program.

Link Baiting

This is the single most important method. It has mainly to do with good content that gets links the natural way. To keep things simple in this guide I have decided that everything that makes people link to you because of the content on the page/site falls under this category of link baiting. You need to read this post on link baiting.
Comments: Pure white hat, recommended but sadly not very effective if not something real major.

Directory submissions/Link Building using directories

There are specialized SEOs and Link Builders that are doing directory submissions. There are 4 kinds of directories here: pay-for-inclusion, reciprocal required, free and niche directories. And there are of course specialists in each one of these. There are almost one thousand free SEO friendly general directories, a list of these and a submission service can be seen here.
Comments: Cheap way to get many low quality links. Can take months before effect is seen. Deep links usually not possible. New edit and comment on this: since BigDaddy Google has been smashing and deindexed internal pages on a lot of directories, but the indexed pages still show a PR value even though they are deindexed. Keep this in mind and run a site: command or type the URL of the internal page in Google to see if the directory/page has been hit.

Link Exchange, 2 and 3 ways

The good old way. I link to you and you link to me. This is more useful if you have 30 or more sites as you can get and provide relevant links. Rule of thumb: you contact people, not the opposite. There are also Reciprocal Link Programs but I don’t recommend that.
Comments: Don’t overdue it …

Link-Vault

I am myself getting 200 permanent links a day from this program to 40 URLs, all with varied anchor. The links you get from this program are mostly footer links and other low quality links but the program is extremely powerful. Do not, I repeat, do not display Link-Vault ads on your most valuable web sites – that is a red flag, especially since BigDaddy.
Comments: Only negative is that the links are mostly footer and the relevancy is not that good, other than that it is great.

DP Coop Ads (Grey Hat)

This program gives you a lot of rotating temporary backlinks from mostly footers of sites. I have been using this program successfully to boost SERP ranks in Google, especially at the V7N SEO contest. This program is extremely powerful as well as dangerous and can have your site banned or harmed if you are not careful. My rule of thumb: maximum 5K weight on a single ad. At one moment I had 120K weight and I was getting many many thousands of links to more than 40 ads that I had.
Comments: Remember that these are all footer, irrelevant, temporary and with fast growth.

Linking from your own web sites

This is an excellent way if you have many relevant pages in the same niche.
Comments: Don’t interlink all, keep sites on different C-class IPs and avoid patterns.

Pay bloggers

You can post on the business section of webmaster forums stating that you will pay to get the blogger to blog about and link to your site.
Comment: Good to get the word out. The blog post will over time be buried down in the blog structure.

Article submission

Write an article with links in the article and/or in the resource section to your site. Or pay somone to write these for you.
Comment: Long term strategy, takes time to see effects. Can be good for traffic.

Search the SERPS and make offers.

Yahoo and MSN both gives some extremely valuable information in regards to backlinks. Both of the engines tend to list the site with the most link power first in a backlink query.

Study and understand the following queries:

* seo linkdomain:seobook.com -site:seobook.com linkdomain:seomoz.org -site:seomoz.org -link:jimwestergren.com (MSN or Yahoo)
= Sites containing SEO, that link to both seobook.com and seomoz.org but not to jimwestergren.com.

* site:jimwestergren.com link building (Google)
= Which page on the domain jimwestergren.com is most relevant and has the most power for the query link building?

* site:jimwestergren.com (Yahoo)
= Which page on the domain jimwestergren.com has the most power? Not always the home page and the list is interesting to see. You can do the same in Google if you find the right query, valid example.

Use both of the above examples in this technique and send off a nice e-mail on your link offer to the ones you choose.
Comment: Expensive …

Make directories and make the link submitter reciprocal to a site of your choice.

I use this on 2 general directories of mine. My directories are free but the link submitter gets his link featured if he reciprocal with my other site. I get about 10 links per week using this.
Comments: Irrelevant, certain percantage come from bad neighbourhood and not always from same language.

Write testimonials and reviews

Write and send a testimonial to your web host, web designer, web developer and SEO. They probably publish it at their site and if you are lucky they link to you as well. Send a review to your favorite sites and have your name and link at the bottom of it.
Comments: Time consuming …

Links under articles

This is a new method I developed myself, here. In the future I think more will start to use this as well. It enables to link builder to exactly specify which articles, the anchor and the URL of each link. Good for deep pages.
Comments: All same IP. Permanent.

There are more ways but the ones above are supposed to be most effective.

Source: Link Building Guide

Here Im thinking of some link exchange issues:

Would a site be penalised by being a on page with more that 100 links on it ?

What are the implications ?

Not really penalized but the quality signal of the page may be diminished. Many users find it very difficult and annoying to navigate through hundreds of links. Google is pretty clear on this too…

Just for the record, we can process more than 100 links per page . We do however recommend the limit of 100 because it generally makes sense for users (and search engines).

It has been written in their guidelines and has become a reference point for topics such as this. Yes, I know, there are plenty of sites doing just fine with 500+ links on their pages. They most likely have the authority and PR to get away with it. A smaller site with a large number of on page links may have some challenges trying to distribute its minimal PR.

What type of links are we referring to? On site and off site? Or both?

I’m confused on this point as well. A sub-page on one of my sites has 139 links. Ranked pretty good until 120. After that the giggly spider came back less often.

That said, the page has grown and can be split, and that is for the convenience of visitors (just makes sense). Just haven’t gotten around to that. When I do, which will be soon, I’ll let you know. No problems with indexing (that I can see) but the FREQUENCY of updates has gone south.

Is there a “100″ rule out there we should be watching?

Only the one that I’ve seen in Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. Other than that, it is open for interpretation or misinterpretation.

I believe it is all relative. Larger sites tend to have a larger number of links per page. I don’t know what the calculations may be but common sense tells me that if I have a 10 page site and have hundreds of links all over the place, things are going to be out of whack.

We’ve had discussions here on internal navigation systems and how “overloading” them with links can be a detriment to indexing in some instances. If you have a site and it doesn’t have the link equity to pass amongst that many links, things are going to be challenging. Your best option may be to serve section specific menus with a link to all primary sections always visible. Once the visitor arrives in that section then the menu is specific to that.
I’ve found more challenges with the “link overloading” issue on websites. I mean, people tend to put entire sitemaps in their navigation. I don’t think this is a best practice. I’m more for specifics. Give the visitor the top levels at all times and then let then drill down once inside one of those levels. Not from every page of the site.

The benefits of having your website at the top of search results are obvious. It is also no secret that an effective search engine optimization campaign can take you there. But what are the components of successful SEO efforts?

First and foremost your site requires comprehensive analysis. Your SEO company should clearly understand the needs and goals of your business and tailor the whole process according to them.

As soon as the priorities are set, the first stage should be keyword research. Just like in any other type of advertising you need to find out all ins and outs of your target market. The most important thing is how people look for products and services similar to yours. The chosen set of keywords should be highly relevant to the theme of your website. You should also consider the level of competition for the keywords you’ve identified in order to find out whether it is possible to obtain high rankings for these keywords with the budget you have. It would be an overkill to compete for the most popular keywords, but on the other hand it won’t do your business any good if you win top ratings for phrases that no one will ever search for. Try to find a reasonable middle ground.

Once you’ve come up with the keywords for your website, its time to develop the content in which they will be used. Titling a page according to the keyword and using corresponding meta tags is a poor excuse for an effective search engine optimization. Your page should have informative content related to the phrase you optimize it for. Content development may range from adjusting the page titles and meta tags to creating additional sections with new content and reorganizing the whole structure of the site. The way you do it will depend on the requirements of your site and business.

Another kind of efforts involved in an effective search engine optimization campaign is link building. Once you’ve completed optimizing the content you should concern yourself with acquiring incoming links to your site. It is important that you start doing this as soon as possible and continue as long as it is needed. The best way to gain link popularity is writing compelling articles, posting on forums and blogs. Do not resort to potentially dangerous link farms and free-for-all sites. It may bring about unwanted consequences such as getting black listed from search engines.

Just like any other service SEO will provide you with what you pay for. If something seems too good to be true, it isn’t. Effective search engine optimization is not a trick. It takes a lot of time, effort and, yes, money. Thoroughly chose SEO company, make sure they understand your needs and concerns. If you make the right choice the investment is sure to pay off.

SEO issues can be chat out in forums or blogs!

We are starting to run thin on potential link partners. I have sent hundreds of requests (most of them customized) to high values sites and now the pool is running dry. For you guys who have been in my situation, where do you turn to find new link partners?So far, I’ve hit the search engines and went through all the industry link sections of my competitors and related sites/industries.

Oops Links Links and Links……

We need to be #1, how can we get links? Almost every other client has this question.

My answer:

1. Content: If you don’t have content on your website, you don’t deserve links. So work on the content, make it worthy of a read.
2. Services: Do you really exist? What do you do? Do you offer something unique? If you are doing something useful probably there are a bunch who want to talk about your site.
3. Don’t live in an era of Link exchange. Those days are almost over, rely on creating talkable content. There are tons of articles on it.
4. Focus on few links, get the relationship moving. If a public speaker is impressed with your website, he will spread to many who will link back. So make sure you take your site to people who are talkers for your subject.
5. Press releases are tricky, don’t publish one article across many sites, max 5 and if possible, let all of these articles contain a link to one article so that you can cash in more juice.
6. News websites: There are tons of services that offer paid exposure and getting you to news sites.
7. Gadgets: Make gadgets and get links from there. It will also prompt many people to talk about your services.
8. Target technical neighborhood, they like to talk about things, so keep doing something that they can talk about.

There is a ton that one can write about links. I wish I had enough time. You can get some good links for $s too (most of them do it but very smartly).

But remember this formula
Year 2003: – Page based optimization, get links to targeted pages only.
Year 2008: Site based optimization, get links to site, make your site credible, pages of a credible websites are credible, get some topical links to the pages and you rock the SERPS.

Easy said than done . Do your dirty work yourself or pay the experts.