A recent link building service I’ve tried and wholeheartedly recommend is One Hour Backlinks.  The dude who created Linklicious launched this creative site that makes it super simple and super quick to blast your sites with backlinks.  I’m a big fan not only of the ease-of-use of the site but its pleasing design.  It’s rare to find an internet marketing / SEO site that doesn’t look like it was designed using Geocities in 1997

Here’s what the order form looks like:

Like I said, super simple.

1. Use the top slider to select how many backlinks you’d like (the more you want, the cheaper they get per link).
2. Optionally choose radio buttons for “indexed links only”, “dofollow only”, or “PR1+”, keeping in mind that each option costs extra
3. Enter your keywords
4. Enter your URLs

Done!

Once you’ve placed an order and its been completed (mine took about 20 minutes), you can view the data on your “Complete Projects” page:

As you can see even though I paid for 2000 links I received 2420 of ‘em and the Indexation rate was 45%.

The “download links” hyperlink lets you download a CSV file that contains, for each link:

• URL
• PR
• Indexed (yes, no)
• DoFollow (yes, no)
• Keyword
• Target URL

This spreadsheet is super handy for loading into other link building systems to further boost the SEO-juice of your new One Hour Backlinks.

WINNING.

Occasionally I come across an SEO tool that I feel is worthy of blogging about, and oddly enough today I have two of ‘em.

Linklicious

Instead of wasting hours building RSS feeds and pinging the feeds hoping for crawls, Linklicious eliminates all of the guesswork by providing a guaranteed 100% crawl rate.   It comes with a WordPress plugin so every post is added to an RSS feed, auto-shortened, pinged, and tracked so you can see exactly when your links were spidered.

Linklicious is quite affordable too:  they have a free account and the most feature-packed paid account is only $54/mo.

Here’s a chart that shows the improved crawl late with and without using Linklicious:

Link Pushing

I was looking for a completely automated, hands-off service that combined multiple backlinking techniques.   So I headed over to the Warrior Forum and a quick search brought me to this WSO.

Here’s what the “Link Pushing” service offers:

1. User enters their information; a 2 minute process.
2. System grabs an article from a random article directory.
3. System spins the article using The Best Spinner.
4. System submits the articles to Web 2.0 Properties and Auto-Approve Article directories backlinking to the money site.
5. System then submits to various Doc share sites splitting the backlinks randomly to the money site, the Web 2.0s and the Auto Approve articles.
6. System then submits to microblog sites with links randomly split between the money site, the Web 2.0s and the Auto Approve Article sites.
7. System then submits spun articles to non-auto approval article sites with backlinks to the Web 2.0s and the auto approved article sites.

I had a couple questions before signing up and was super impressed with how quickly and professionally Greg (one of the owners) responded to me.  Although this service is in its infancy, so far I really like how easy it is to use and it seems like these dudes have some great features planned in the next release.  I don’t have enough data on its effectiveness to improve SERPs yet but I’ll post an update when I do.

On June 8, 2010, Google officially completed development of its new “Caffeine” indexing algorithm.  Many marketers were left wondering, “How does this impact me?”  Well, I’ve done a fair bit of research and here’s what I’ve come up with…

• 50% fresher results – Google actually says “Caffeine provides 50 percent fresher results for web searches than our last index, and it’s the largest collection of web content we’ve offered.”  So that sounds like they’re now indexing more pages than ever, which means more competition.   Not good!
• Less chance of dominating Page 1 – Now, more than ever, Site Authority plays an important part in rankings.  So if you previously had your main site, plus a Squidoo lens, plus a bunch of articles showing up on Page 1, there’s a good chance you’ll no longer have such a smattering of listings.  Chances are that some of the big players like Amazon, About, Wikipedia, etc have taken over your spots.

So what methods should a marketer use in this “new world” so that Caffeine has more love for you?

• Use old domains (obviously this is easier said than done…but if you have the chance take it…)
• Backlink inner pages too (not only the home page) – Google now sees each page as its own entity moreso than before.  So just because your home page has a ton of backlinks no longer means that link juice will automatically flow through to your inner pages.
• Regularly add fresh content (which is preferably unique).

My thoughts

I’ve noticed many, shitty, 1-page, “Made For Adsense” sites drop in rankings after the latest Caffeine updates.  My take on this?  Great!

It’s embarrassing to be an internet marketer when it seems like the vast majority of our kind serves no purpose other than to flood the interwebs with useless spam.  So if Caffeine means the public will see less of this crap and more useful search results, then I’m all for it.

If you’re like me and obsess over how your sites are ranking with the search engines, you’ve likely been looking for a tool that’s fast, user-friendly, and reliable. You may have tried some of the various FireFox plugins that are slow, buggy, and not good at tracking historical ranking changes.   Or perhaps you’ve tried one of the many websites that offers a Google position checker service but were disappointed in its speed and lack of features.

Well look no further…

Meet Traffic Travis.  

Here’s how it works:

First, you setup a “Project”.   This requires entering the name of the site you want to track, it’s URL, the search engines you want to use, and a list of keywords.  You can even enter competitor’s sites to see how they compare against your keywords, over time.

Next, you click “Start Update” and Traffic Travis goes to work.  Very quickly you see results coming in.   Whenever the current ranking beats the previous best ranking, a row is colored yellow.  And similarly, when the current ranking becomes worse, a row is colored blue.  Pretty handy for easily seeing where you stand.

Finally, Traffic Travis tracks all your historical ranking data.  You even get a cool graph or can print/export the data to BMP / HTML files.

If this was all the Traffic Travis could do, I’d be satisfied.

But it’s not…not even close.

Here’s a list of other features, some of which I haven’t even tried yet:

• Keyword research
• Backlink checker (also shows PageRank, noFollow, anchor text, and IP of each backlink…pimp!)
• PPC analysis
• Page analysis (how good is your on-page SEO?)
• SEO analysis (how competitive is certain keywords…for the top 20 listings in Google)

Last but not least, it just feels solid.  As a software developer, I can recognize good code when I see it.  For whatever reason, in the internet marketing world there’s a lot of bloated, slow, buggy, and visually unappealing…shit.  But Traffic Travis is sleek, slick, and sexy.  It’s no wonder that it’s had more than 100,000 downloads on Download.com and is considered by many to be the most popular SEO application EVER.

Well what the heck are ya waiting for?  Go get the best Google position checker (and bask in the glory of all the extra features you didn’t even know you wanted)!

A friend of mine was recently wondering, “What’s the difference between being ranked #1 and #2 on Google?”

He guessed that it wouldn’t be very much, maybe like 10% max.

Well, surprisingly it’s much higher than that!

While I haven’t seen any data from Google for the click-through rate averages for each position, there’s data floating around from AOL that could easily be applied to any search engine.

• Ranking #1 gets 42.1 % of clicks
• Ranking #2 gets 11.9 % of clicks
• Ranking #3 gets 8.5 % of clicks
• Ranking #4 gets 6.1 % of clicks
• Ranking #5 gets 4.9 % of clicks
• Ranking #6 gets 4.1 % of clicks
• Ranking #7 gets 3.4 % of clicks
• Ranking #8 gets 3.0 % of clicks
• Ranking #9 gets 2.8 % of clicks
• Ranking #10 gets 3.0 % of clicks

This means that if a keyword gets 100 searches a month, the #1 result will get 42 clicks whereas the #2 result will only get 12!   Pretty big difference.

Great example of why it’s so important to be ranked #1

Even better, if you’re #1 for organic search results, Google Maps listings, AND AdWords, you can completely dominate the competition.