1. Build a “101 list”. These get Dugg all the time, and often become “authority documents”. People can’t resist linking to these (hint, hint).

2. Create 10 easy tips to help you [insert topic here] articles. Again, these are exceptionally easy to link to.

3. Create extensive resource lists for a specific topic (see Mr Ploppy for inspiration).

4. Create a list of the top 10 myths for a specific category.

5. Create a list of gurus/experts. If you impress the people listed well enough, or find a way to make your project look somewhat official, the gurus may end up linking to your site or saying thanks. (Sometimes flattery is the easiest way to strike up a good relationship with an “authority”.)

Developing Authority & Being Easy to Link At

6. Make your content easy to understand so many people can understand and spread your message. (It’s an accessibility thing.)

7. Put some effort in to minimize grammatical or spelling errors, especially if you need authoritative people like librarians to link to your site.

8. Have an easily accessible privacy policy and about section so your site seems more trustworthy. Including a picture of yourself may also help build your authority.

PPC as a Link Building Tool

9. Buy relevant traffic with a pay per click campaign. Relevant traffic will get your site more visitors and brand exposure. When people come to your site, regardless of the channel in which they found it, there is a possibility that they will link to you.

News & Syndication

10. Syndicate an article at EzineArticles, GoArticles, iSnare, etc. The great thing about good article sites is that their article pages actually rank highly and send highly qualified traffic.

11. Submit an article to industry news site. Have an SEO site? Write an article and submit to WebProNews. Have a site about BLANK? Submit to BLANKinformationalsite.com.

12. Syndicate a press release. Take the time to make it GOOD (compelling, newsworthy). Email it to some handpicked journalists and bloggers. Personalize the email message. For good measure, submit it to PRWeb, PRLeap, etc.

13. Track who picks up your articles or press releases. Offer them exclusive news or content.

14. Trade articles with other webmasters.

15. Email a few friends when you have important relevant news asking them for their feedback and/or if they would mind referencing it if they find your information useful.

16. Write about, and link to, companies with “in the news” pages. They link back to stories and blog posts which cover their developments. This is obviously easiest if you have a news section or blog. Do a Google search for [your industry + "in the news"].

17. Perform surveys and studies that make people feel important. If you can make other people feel important they will help do your marketing for you for free. Salary.com did a study on how underpaid mothers were, and they got many high quality links.

Directories, Meme Trackers & Social Bookmarking

18. This tip is an oldie but goodie: submit your site to DMOZ and other directories that allow free submissions.

19. Submit your site to paid directories. Another oldie. Just remember that quality matters.

20. Create your own topical directory about your field of interest. Obviously link to your own site, deeplinking to important content where possible. Of course, if you make it into a truly useful resource, it will attract links on its own.

21. Tag related sites on sites like Del.icio.us. If people find the sites you tag to be interesting, emotionally engaging, or timely they may follow the trail back to your site.

22. If you create something that is of great quality make sure you ask a few friends to tag it for you. If your site gets on the front page of Digg or on the Del.icio.us popular list, hundreds more bloggers will see your site, and potentially link to it.

23. Look at meme trackers to see what ideas are spreading. If you write about popular spreading ideas with plenty of original content (and link to some of the original resources), your site may get listed as a source on the meme tracker site.

Local & Business Links

24. Join the Better Business Bureau.

25. Get a link from your local chamber of commerce.

26. Submit your link to relevant city and state governmental resources. (Easier in some countries than in others.)

27. List your site at the local library’s Web site.

28. See if your manufacturers or retailers or other business partners might be willing to link to your site.

29. Develop business relationships with non-competing businesses in the same field. Leverage these relationships online and off, by recommending each other via links and distributing each other’s business cards.

30. Launch an affiliate program. Most of the links you pick up will not have SEO value, but the added exposure will almost always lead to additional “normal” links.

Easy Free Links

31. Depending on your category and offer, you will find Craigslist to be a cheap or free classified service.

32. It is pretty easy to ask or answer questions on Yahoo! Answers and provide links to relevant resources.

33. It is pretty easy to ask or answer questions on Google Groups and provide links to relevant resources.

34. If you run a fairly reputable company, create a page about it in the Wikipedia or in topic specific wikis. If it is hard to list your site directly, try to add links to other pages that link to your site.

35. It takes about 15 minutes to set up a topical Squidoo page, which you can use to look like an industry expert. Link to expert documents and popular useful tools in your fields, and also create a link back to your site.

36. Submit a story to Digg that links to an article on your site. You can also submit other content and have some of its link authority flow back to your profile page.

37. If you publish an RSS feed and your content is useful and regularly updated, some people will syndicate your RSS content (and some of those will provide links… unfortunately, some will not).

38. Most forums allow members to leave signature links or personal profile links. If you make quality contributions some people will follow these links and potentially read your site, link at your site, and/or buy your products.

Have a Big Heart for Reviews

39. Most brands are not well established online, so if your site has much authority, your review related content often ranks well.

40. Review relevant products on Amazon.com. We have seen this draw in direct customer enquiries and secondary links.

41. Create product lists on Amazon.com that review top products and also mention your background (LINK!).

42. Review related sites on Alexa to draw in related traffic streams.

43. Review products and services on shopping search engines like ePinions to help build your authority.

44. If you buy a product or service you really like and are good at leaving testimonials, many of those turn into links. Two testimonial writing tips — make them believable, and be specific where possible.

Blogs & the Blogosphere

45. Start a blog. Not just for the sake of having one. Post regularly and post great content. Good execution is what gets the links.

46. Link to other blogs from your blog. Outbound links are one of the cheapest forms of marketing available. Many bloggers also track who is linking to them or where their traffic comes from, so linking to them is an easy way to get noticed by some of them.

47. Comment on other blogs. Most of these comments will not provide much direct search engine value, but if your comments are useful, insightful, and relevant they can drive direct traffic. They also help make the other bloggers become aware of you, and they may start reading your blog and/or linking to it.

48. Technorati tag pages rank well in Yahoo! and MSN, and to a lesser extent in Google. Even if your blog is fairly new you can have your posts featured on the Technorati tag pages by tagging your posts with relevant tags.

49. If you create a blog make sure you list it in a few of the best blog directories.

Design as a Linking Element

50. Web 2.0-ify your site. People love to link to anything with AJAX. Even in the narrowest of niches, there is some kind of useful functionality you can build with AJAX.

51. Validate and 508 your site. This (indirect) method makes your site more trustworthy and linkable, especially from governmental sites or design-oriented communities. There are even a few authoritative directories of standards-compliant sites.

52. Order a beautiful CSS redesign. A nice design can get links from sites like CSS Vault.

Hire Help

53. Hire a publicist. Good old fashioned ‘PR’ (not PageRank) can still work wonders. Andy Hagans now offers a link baiting publicity service.

54. Hire a consultant. Yes, you can outsource link building. Just make sure to go with someone good. We recommend WeBuildPages, Debra Mastaler and, ahem, Andy Hagans.

Link Trading

55. Swap some links. What?! Did we really just recommend reciprocal link building? Yes, on a small scale, and with relevant partners that will send you traffic. Stay away from the link trading hubs and networks.

56. In case you didn’t get the memo — when swapping links, try to get links from within the content of relevant content pages. Do not try to get links from pages that list hundreds of off topic link partners. Only seek link exchanges that you would consider pursuing even if search engines did not exist. Instead of thinking just about your topic when exchanging links, think about demographic audience sets.

Buying Sites, Renting Links & Advertisements

57. Rent some high quality links from a broker. Text Link Ads is the most reputable firm in this niche.

58. Rent some high quality links directly from Web sites. Sometimes the most powerful rented links come direct from sites not actively renting links.

59. Become a sponsor. All sorts of charities, contests, and conferences link to their sponsors. This can be a great way to gain visibility, links, and a warm feeling in your heart.

60. Sell items on eBay and offer to donate the profits to a charity. Many charities will link both to the eBay auction and to your site.

61. Many search algorithms seem biased toward older established sites. It may be faster to buy an old site with a strong link profile, and link it to your own site, than to try to start building authority links from scratch.

Use the Courts (Proceed with Caution)

62. Sue Google.

63. Get sued by a company people hate. When Aaron was sued by Traffic Power, he got hundreds or thousands of links, including links from sites like Wired and The Wall Street Journal.

Freebies & Giveaways

64. Hold a contest. Contests make great link bait. A few-hundred-dollar prize can result in thousands of dollars worth of editorial quality links. Enough said.

65. Build a tool collection. Original and useful tools (and collections of tools) get a lot of link love. What do you think ranking for mortgage calculator is worth?

66. Create and release open source site design templates for content management systems like WordPress. Don’t forget the “Designed by example.com” bit in the footer!

67. Offer free samples in exchange for feedback.

68. Release a Firefox extension. Make sure you have a download and/or support page on your site which people can link to.

Conferences & Social Interaction

69. It is easy to take pictures of important events and tell narratives about why they are important. Pictures of (drunk?) “celebrities” in your industry make great link bait.

70. Leverage new real world relationships into linking relationships. If you go to SEO related conferences, people like Tim Mayer, Matt Cutts, and Danny Sullivan are readily accessible. Similarly, in other industries, people who would normally seem inaccessible are exceptionally accessible at trade conferences. It is much easier to seem “real” in person. Once you create social relationships in person, it is easy to extend that onto the web.

71. Engaging, useful, and interesting interviews are an easy way to create original content. And they spread like wildfire.

Here is a list of 23 tips for getting top search engine rankings. Follow them in see the results :-

1) Increase your site’s link popularity by increasing your internal and incoming links.

• Internal links – Cross link all your sites and important pages within each site. This will maximize the PageRank of all your pages within each web site.
• Incoming links that you control – Create several small web sites related to your main site. Each site should only consist of a few pages. Then cross link them all together using the most important keywords. Don’t forget to include links back to the main site.
• Incoming links that you don’t control:
  • Ask sites that link to your competitors to link to your site. To find out which sites are linking to your competitors, visit a search engine and enter, "link:" followed by the competitors’ domain name.
    For example:

    link:www.yourcompetitor.com

  • Exchange links with sites listed in the same category as yours in the major web directories, such as the Yahoo! Directory and the Open Directory.
  • Find sites that accept site submissions. Visit your favorite search engine and search for:

    "add url" "your keywords"

    Also try searching for the actual submission page using its page name.
    For example:

    addurl.html, addsite.html, addlink.html, etc.

2) Include a TITLE tag as the first META tag, directly after the HEAD tag.

3) Try to avoid stop words in your TITLE tag. Stop words (a, an, and, but, he, her, his, i, in, it, of, on, or, she, the, etc.) are common words and characters ignored by some search engines to enhance the speed and relevancy of their search results.

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Happy Holidays from Google AdWords!

In this new year Google is giving you $100 to promote your blog and boost your reader numbers. Try it for yourself before this offer expires on March 18, 2011.

Note: This is a non-transferable, limited promotion open only to those that received a promotional offer via direct mail. This offer is valid only through Google. Your promotional code and terms and conditions can be found in your direct mail piece. Promotional codes will not be distributed after you’ve created your account. Full T&Cs found here.

Firstly, What Is An Authority?

I would define an authority as someone who is looked to for knowledge about a particular niche.  They are people that are trusted to give an unbiased opinion on certain topics.

They have the knowledge, but they are also looked at as people that are honest.  In other words, they are people that are trusted to deliver the goods.

Why You Should Be An Authority

There are two simple reasons for this.  To make money and to help people out.  It is two simple reasons, but two very good reasons.  There is nothing better than making money online and helping people out at the same time.

We can break it down even further.  In order to, run a successful online business, you need to obviously start making money online, but you also need to maintain that.  Being an authority is a great way to do that.

One of the problems that people have is that they make some money and just can’t sustain it going forward.  If you’re an authority and you keep delivering, it is easy to maintain your income online because it is an ongoing process.

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There are thousands of affiliate programs all over the web. No matter what you buy online, chances are if you check out the site for an affiliate program, you’ll probably find one.

However, not all affiliate programs are the same, and there are several questions that you should ask before investing your time and effort into any program.

1. What am I interested in? Affiliate programs will work best for you if you actually have an interest in the program you are selling. If you know a lot about fashion or clothes it would be a good idea to join up with an online store that sells the type of clothes you like. That’s just one example. For every interest there’s a product and I’m sure you can find a business that supports whatever you’re interested in.
2. What type of support is available? Somewhere on the program’s site it should detail what type of support is available for affiliates. It’s important to know how you will be helped if you have a question. You don’t want to get involved with a company and then you can’t get any assistance down the road. Find out the answers to the following questions before joining: Do they have a dedicated e-mail address or contact person for affiliates? Is there training available? How will they help me if I have questions or concerns? Do they have a forum?
3. Does the company offer any resources? Do they offer pre written emails, banners, graphics, sample PPC ads, keywords etc.? Maybe they offer websites and templates or reviews and articles that you can use?
4. Do I agree with the terms outlined? Review the terms closely before signing up. Print out a copy for your records. It’s very easy to bypass the TOS and click the ‘I agree’ button, but make sure you know exactly what you’re agreeing to.
5. What if I cancel my affiliate account? Will I still get paid? Make sure you will still get paid if you cancel an account before payment is due.
6. Does the company have cookies? Make sure your affiliate program has a way to track repeat visitors that are referred by you. If a company does not track repeat visitors, then you could be wasting a lot of your valuable time. Many online shoppers do not spend money upon their first visit but will return later to make a purchase. It’s only fair for affiliates to get paid for these sales. A reasonable time of 30 – 60 days should allow enough time for your referrals to make a purchase.
7. Do they have good customer service? Although as an affiliate your job is not about customers, you still want to know you are referring people to a business that believes in treating their customers fairly. A company that doesn’t treat its customers well probably won’t treat their affiliates well either.
8. Does the company have a good product? Are the products or services the company offers something that will sell? Don’t waste your time on products that no one wants to buy. This includes products that are overpriced. Always keep an eye on the latest trends – for instance right now in this time of economic crisis many people are shopping differently to how they used to.
9. Does it cost to join the program? Most affiliate programs are free to join. Unless you have a very, very good reason avoid any programs that charge you a fee to sign up. After all the goals is to make them money as well so there shouldn’t be a fee.
10. Who can join? Is there an age or location restriction? Many affiliate programs are open to people worldwide but some have age restriction.
11. Do I support the products/services being offered? A program will work best for you if you believe in what you are promoting.
12. How long does it take to get paid? Some programs are weekly, some are monthly and some are quarterly like Amazon.com. Just make sure the terms make sense to you and that you understand all the requirements and criteria before signing up. For example many people who use ClickBank for the first time don’t realize that they will withhold payment of any account balance until sales have been made with 5 or more different credit card numbers and two of these must be different payment methods (either Visa, MasterCard, or PayPal).
13. Is there tracking available? Any online affiliate program should have a reliable means of tracking the referrals you direct to the parent company’s site. Make sure it is available in real-time and you can check at anytime. The technology for these tracking functions are readily available so serious companies should have no trouble letting you know how well you are doing.
14. How much money can I make? The possibilities are only limited by your efforts for many affiliate programs. Some affiliate programs there could be a limit. Some only provide a 5% commission and the average sale may be only $30. Others offer considerably more for higher priced items. Get to know your affiliate programs and the products they offer so you’ll know just how much time you’ll have to spend to make an income that is right for you. For instance, if a program offers 20% commission on a product that is $300, it would mean you would need 5 referrals to earn $300 in commissions.
15. Do I need a web site? Not technically. You could use e-mail signatures, newsletters, forums, newsgroups, and of course articles. Check with your program to see what type of ads are acceptable. You can find affiliate programs by entering the following text within brackets: [ “your key phrase” + affiliate]  in the search field of Google.

HostGator Review and Coupon Code

HostGator is a world leading provider of shared, reseller and dedicated web hosting and is one of the top 10 web hosting companies in the world with more than 4,000,000 hosted domains. All the HostGator shared plans offer Unlimited Disk Space and Unlimited Bandwidth and all the hosting plans comes with a 45 day money back guarantee and 99.9% uptime guarantee.

HostGator have three shared hosting plans namely Hatchling Plan, Baby Plan and the Business Plan. Among that the most popular one is the Baby Plan and it offers Unlimited Space, Unlimited Bandwidth and Unlimited Domains.

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You will come across many web hosting companies providing a varieties of services. So, you are more likely to get confused looking at these endless options where all bragging to be top hosts. As the web hosting needs differs from individual to entrepreneur to any business, it is most important to check if the web hosting deal chosen fits the particular needs of your website. If you are looking for cheap, affordable, discount web hosting or I should say free hosting plans you need to visit WHDeals. They have done the crucial task of researching the top ten web hosting plans available. You can make a wise choice for yourself by selecting from them that offers you 100% cash backs on some of the top web hosting plans.

WHDeals.net can be an excellent guide for locating full line of innovative and reliable web hosting plans. With the changing trend in web hosting technology, WHDeals has done the imperative task for their customer by reviewing the top ten web hosting companies and plans across the globe. Today many small and large businesses rely on WHDeals as they bring 100% secure, consistent and value-rich plans along with 100% cash back depending upon the plan chosen. The most impressive feature here is that the customer deal directly with the web hosting company by using the partner links.

Till date you might have stumble upon many companies offering you coupon codes claiming 5 to 30% cashback. This is where WHDeals.net stands out by offering you up to 100% cash back on your purchase when you sign up with any of the web hosting plans. Sounds fancy? Well know how it works, those web hosting companies pays them a commission for each referral(s) and a part of this commission is paid back to the loyal customers as cashbacks. So, it’s like getting a professional web hosting plan and a domain name free for one year after that you decide whether to renew or not. So when you sign up with them you are getting free professional web hosting, a .com domain and free pay-per-click credits for the first year. Getting a web hosting deal was never this exciting. Remember you are not compromising on service by saving money!

You must now be loaded with lot of questions on how does it work? Well, they have a clear-cut format on how the process works. All you need to do is to visit their home page and check out their web hosting comparison page to select the best deal for you. Don’t forget to go through their FAQ page before you sign up. Upon deciding, just sign up for the specific plan and submit the rebate request form. That is all and you will receive your rebates via PayPal once the money back guarantee period is over. Usually it takes 30 to 60 days to process your rebate depending upon the web hosting company and their plan. So, what are you waiting for? Establish your online presence by visiting WHDeals. I’m sure that you won’t find a better deal.