I got a junk email the other day. I knew it was junk mail the second that I looked at it.

I was just going to delete it, but then I actually read it and decided it would make a good blog post.

Dear Webmaster,
I have visited your site http://www.lillicotch.com and found it quite impressive.

My guess is here that if you HAD actually visited my site you would know that my name is not Webmaster.

I am in the process of building up a business wrapped about my website and I am looking for some inbound linking to grow my page-rank.

Why should I care about what you want?

If you could link to my site I would be much appreciative. You probably receive quick a few link requests a month so I would really appreciate it if you could help me out by adding my site with this information.

The link to information and the from email address were different, so I’m assuming that this spam was sent by a supposed “SEO” company for their client. If I were the client I don’t think I would like this kind of tactic.

Since it’s an SEO company they probably know that link exchanges are devalued these days, so they are just telling you to give them a link. They’re not offering anything in return for your link, but you never know, this tactic may work.

They might get a link back every couple of hundred thousand emails.

Whenever I’m at a networking or social event where someone asks about my business, there is always someone who wants to know what they can do for their site to be number one on the search results page for whatever it is that they are selling or promoting.

My first answer is usually the same one. “You need quality one-way links from high ranking sites that point to your information.”

I then wait for their surprise and follow up, “You mean there’s no secret formula that you can use on my site to (magically) do it?”

I try to explain, “Of course, you need to have the search engines be able to find and index your pages, but then it’s mostly about having good inbound links.”

Sometimes I get a blank stare, sometimes just disbelief, but usually I get The Magic Question. “Why would a high ranking site want to link to mine?”

I usually answer, “That’s exactly what every site owner needs to ask themself. I also believe the best way to get links is to first have content on your site that’s worth linking to.”

I also try to offer more help and send them to this blog where I have written many times about how to promote your site with the search engines. I also read a post recently by Mike Grehan on the ClickZ site that can help.

Read Why Linking Is so Important for Ranking

I found this list of Free SEO tools. I have tried many of them before and there are many others that I haven’t tried yet, but will.

I do recommend bookmarking this post on Investintech and at least having a look at all of the tools.

Visit 101 Free SEO Tools

Whenever I go somewhere and talk about my work the question that gets asked first and most often is “how do I get to the top of the Google search results page?” Many times I’ll foolishly attempt a quick answer, which almost always leads to many more questions.

Well, who better to ask these questions to than Google? On their blog last fall Google published an SEO Started Guide. It covers pretty much every question that a newbie as well as veteran web promoter will ask regarding promoting their site on Google.

Lately I’ve been passing this link on to everyone who’s interested.

Read SEO Starter Guide

It looks like the CircuitCity.com name has been sold for $14M. I just read about it on the SEOBook website.

Here’s the thing, if I were to sell recommendations on my blog posts here and provide links to my sponsors products (and not use nofollow) Google wouldn’t like it very much and would probably penalize my site. In fact, that was the whole reason given for the nofollow link attribute in the first place.

I don’t think that I would sell undisclosed advertising or recommendations here on this site, but I’m trying to understand why a giant company can buy and sell their page rank and I can’t. Seems like a double standard on Google’s part to me.

On second thought,…
I probably would sell out for $14 Million.
(sorry, I went away for a second, but I’m back now)

More Details On What Does $14 Million Worth of PageRank Look Like?

A little while ago I noticed on Twitter a post by a local SEO company that was trying to get Pittsburgh to #1 on Google for the term “best city in the world”. I realized that this was more about them than Pittsburgh, but I was a hometown boy who likes his city and thought I might add a link and help them out. Some also said that they should have picked a more appropriate search term, but I thought it was fine.

I checked back occasionally and this past Saturday the City of Pittsburgh website was on the 12th page. That’s pretty good considering they were not anywhere a week or so ago. Visit Pittsburgh was on the foruth page and the thing that really caught my eye was my blog post was on the first page!

Today the City site is on the first page of Google (#2, congrats Eyeflow) a respectable fourth page on Yahoo and still not anywhere on Bing. My post is still right up there, too and it got me thinking. I just wrote a quick blurb to try to help my city out, not even thinking about what it would do for my site. I’ve had quite a few visitors come through for that term.

I know that the search term “best city in the world” is probably not going to bring me any new business, I would much rather be found for “best web designer” or even “best web designer Pittsburgh”, but who knows?. The point here is that the best way to promote yourself in the search engines is to constantly add new content to your site. Some will say (rightfully so) that you need good outside links pointing to your site, but the best way to get those is to give them something that they want to link to.

Write about your business, tell anecdotes about your customers, give advice and make sure that if you are sending a newsletter that they all are available as a page on your site. This is called the long tail of search, having your site found for things other than your primary keywords. Especially with a new site you will be much more likely to find yourself at the top of a less popular search term, but perhaps one of these terms can land you a great customer!

Read The Newspaper Article

I was at a networking lunch yesterday with the Business Leads Exchange Group, it’s a wonderful group that I recommend that you check out if you are near The ‘Burgh.

I’ve been going every month for quite a while now and much of my time is spent catching up with members that I know and finding about what they are doing for their business and how it’s working (or not). I always like to offer my opinions and advice when I can.

One of my friends asked me a question that I have heard before, “which works better organic search listings or paid ones?” I quickly answered that I believe the organic listings are better received.

My friend asked me why and I replied that organic listings are usually free (or less expensive if you are buying SEO services), but even if you leave out the cost factor I believe they are more trusted. Maybe it’s because you can’t (easily) buy them.

When he asked me more questions about it, I found myself quoting from a post I read on the Search Insider blog the other day. Rather than me repeating it again I’ll let you read it for yourself.

A Tale Of Two Houses

Making your site have more value with search engines has always included inbound links. These links from other sites to your pages have always been considered a “vote” for the value of your page. Why would some site owner link to your page(s) and risk sending a visitor from their site to yours unless they thought it would offer their visitor some benefit which would end up benefiting them as well?

Don’t get me wrong, having pages and navigation on your site that search engines can read, follow and index accurately is important and necessary, but having other sites “vote” for your content is becoming the main factor in getting your site to the top or the search results.

In the old days, before SEO was called SEO, you could have a page with a list of links to other sites and those would give value to the sites that were being linked to. Search engines learned that these “link farms” were of little or no value to their searchers and devalued them completely. Site owners then learned that if they linked to only a few sites per page that search engines still considered these links to have value and proceeded to sell and trade links with other site owners.

Well, the rules have changed again as they always do. Now reciprocal links carry very little, if any, weight even if both sites have value for the searcher. So what you want to get now days are one way links from important sites to “vote” for you.

How do you do that?

There are new schemes that have three, four, or more sites do reciprocal links in circles, but search engines are going to catch on to that as well and you’ll have to start over again. My advice today is the same as it’s always been. Write good content on your site that’s valuable for your human visitors and then other sites will want to link to you. That way you won’t have to worry about what changes are made by the search engines this week, or probably next.

With billions of web pages out there how do other sites find you to link to?
There are many ways to get started and here’s a post on Elites TV with some good ideas that I agree with.

Read 3 Ways To Quickly Build A Link Campaign

I recently got in touch with a high school classmate of mine. Barb Girson is an International Direct Selling expert, trainer and coach who recently set sail with her own business called mysalestactics.com. We had a few emails back and forth and an interesting conversation about where we have been and what works in promoting out businesses.

I mentioned to her that Craigslist has been one of the best tools that I use to find new customers. Barb asked me about how I get it to work for me and also asked me an interesting question, “Would you consider this a networking strategy?”

My first thought that no it was not, but after pondering the question for a while I have decided that it is. I’ve met new people through the use of it and have used my networking rule of trying to offer something of value (free information) without expecting anything in return, so I guess it could be called networking.

Her next request was for me to describe the process that I used for this. I decided to write this post about it because I believe what Scott Ginsberg says “Writing is the key to all wealth“.

There are two methods that I use to promote my business on Craigslist:

First, I have written a series of advertisements that I rotate through several cities in my region in the “computer services” section. It is important to follow Craiglist’s rules by not posting too often and only posting these ads in the appropriate section.

I have seen many ads for different services posted in the “web design jobs” or “computer gigs” sections. Since these sections are for people looking to buy web services these ads usually get flagged and removed pretty quickly, but more importantly they are not read by the people who are actually in the market for their services. I know that personally I would never hire someone who didn’t understand or care that this was not the correct section to post their ads.

Second,  the “web design jobs” and “computer gigs” sections are the ones that I need to be reading to find people advertising jobs that I can do. To read those I use RSS. Every Craigslist page has it’s own RSS feed and I can subscribe to those just like any blog and get these ads almost as soon as they appear in my feedreader. For that I use Thunderbird another great free Open Source tool. Not only do I get my email, Thunderbird brings all of my RSS feeds into it as well and I can read them just like my regular email.

Even though there is quite a bit of Spam on Craigslist using Thunderbird I can still monitor many Craigslist cities, have all the post sent to one folder and go through 30 or 40 posts in a couple of minutes. I currently subscribe to two feeds in well over 30 Craigslist cities and still only spend about ten to fifteen minutes a day working on it. I probably actually answer five to six ads a day and I have a general outline that I use for this. I try to personalize each reply to the individual city and request, but here’s the basic outline:

Hello,
My name is Jim Lillicotch and I am replying to your Craigslist ad.
I live in Pittsburgh PA and have customers in (local city) and many other areas that are very satisfied.

For information about my business, I invite you to tour my blog:

• seo
• promotion
• email
• viral
• management
• security
• do it yourself

Feel free to comment on any posts that strike your interest and contact me with any questions

Thank you for your consideration.

Jim Lillicotch
Lillicotch.com

I have found that people posting these jobs on Craigslist tend to be bombarded with responses to their ads, but if I get a reply I try to find out exactly what their job entails and offer to be as helpful as I can. I have foud several customers this way and also a few good friends.

One of the best ways to move your site up the search engine results page for your keywords is to have incoming links from outside websites. The higher ranking and more authoritative these sites are the better it is for you.

The problem that people and companies with new sites run into is how to get these popular sites to link to them.  Unless you are already a household name there are few authoritative sites that will easily share their “link juice” with an unknown, right?

That’s not necessarily true. I was reading a post today by Dana Larson on the Online Marketing Blog called 5 Link Building Tips for New Websites. It offers some great ideas on where a new site owner can get links from authoritative sites that will help you get started.

The post and commenters had some good ideas that you should check out, but it also made me think of some more. For example

• If you have an account on a social networking site like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. you can easily get a link to your site from there. While it’s true that most of their content is locked up behind your password and Google can’t read it, if you have a link to your site on your profile page and select “make it available to everyone”, you have a link to your website from some of the highest ranking sites there are today.
• If you belong to a group like a networking group, or a professional group many of them will give you a link as well.

For more tips read 5 Link Building Tips for New Websites