Here is the scenario: You have several domains that need quality content for link building and syndication, maybe as much as 5-10 articles per day, You have a limited operating budget for outsourcing, limited time to manage outsourced writers, and you have to maintain a certain level of quality or risk jeopardizing your link building program. Sound familiar?

Finding and hiring quality writers does not have to be hard or time consuming. In this post I will give you a few best practices that, if done correctly and consistently, will ensure that you have a team of dependable and cost-effective freelance writers in no time.

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Here at BuildMyRank, we have a pretty unique opportunity to see a variety of keyword and anchor text strategies used by customers. We also get a lot of questions asking us how to select the best anchor text or how much of what text to use. Since this seems to be a popular topic with BMR users, I thought it would be helpful give a few pointers concerning anchor text usage that will help you get the most out of BMR and keep your back link profile nice and natural.

The Exact Match Fallacy

For years, the prevailing SEO advise was to build nothing but exact match anchor text links. If you wanted to rank on the phrase “cheap auto insurance” then you just built as many links as you could with that phrase as your anchor text.
These days the search engines are a lot smarter and too many exact match links will almost certainly put you on the radar. So how do you future proof your anchor text strategy against the next algo update?

Partial or Phrase Matches

If your target term is “cheap auto insurance” then you should look at variations that include parts of your phrase even if these are not necessarily your main target. Some examples would be “cheap insurance” and “auto insurance”. You can also insert other terms and create new partial combinations like “best auto insurance” and “auto insurance deals”. These will still provide value and associate your linked url to relevant anchor text without using the same variation over and over again.

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Every day we get questions from BMR users asking us for tips on how to best utilize our service. Over the last two years, we have seen thousands of customers get great results when using the BMR network as part of their linkbuilding strategy. But BMR is a tool and and it’s effectiveness, in large part, relies on the person who is using it.

To that end, we are going to be greatly increasing the depth of our knowledge base and ramping up the number of blog posts and how-to videos over the coming months. If there is something specific you would like us to address, leave a comment or send us a tweet.

In the meantime, here are a few do’s and don’ts we have put together based on questions from users. Feel free to add to the list.

Anchor Text

- Do use plenty of variations of your root key phrase.
- Do mix in commonly used generic anchor text like “click here” or “for more information”.
- Do build links for the “long-tail” terms.
- Don’t just use your “money” term over and over again or exclusively when building links.

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This is the final post in my PageRank vs. MozRank discussion. In Part 1, I busted some of the myths and misconceptions surrounding Google’s PageRank. In Part 2, I explained how the biggest contender in the page/domain metrics game, SEOMoz’s mozRank, measured page and domain trust and authority.

As a long time SEO and SEM guy myself, I have some pretty strong opinions concerning toolbar PageRank and the hold it has over a lot of stakeholders and marketing professionals. Even though the consensus among SEO professionals is that toolbar PageRank is not an accurate way to measure much of anything, it continues to be seen as an important indication of site strength and authority. Fortunately, this appears to be changing as more major players ditch PR in favor of mR.

Over the course of writing these posts, I have narrowed all of the variables down to  three major factors. I believe these factors are the big ones that should concern anyone that is actively monitoring site trust and authority of their own domain or of domains that they are linking to or from.

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This is the second of three posts covering the pros and cons of both Google PageRank and the biggest contender for page and domain level metrics, SEOmoz’s MozRank. In this post I will break down the various elements of MozRank and explain how each can be used in your search engine optimization strategy.

What is MozRank?

Similar to PageRank, page level MozRank (mR) is a measure of link popularity. A page’s mozRank is determined by the quantity and the quality of other pages linking to it. Essentially, a link from one page to another counts as a vote for that page. Also like PageRank, it is measured on a logarithmic scale of 1 to 10. This means that it is much easier to move from 1 to 2 than from 3.5 to 3.6. MozRank also factors internal and external links from the domain of a given page. Technically, MozRank serves many of the same functions as Google’s PageRank. It takes an index of a portion of the web and applies and algorithm that produces a score for each url in the Linkscape index.

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This is the first installment in a three part series in which I will point out key differences between the two most popular page analysis tools being used by SEO’s; PageRank and MozRank. In Part 1, I will give an overview of Google’s PageRank and bust a few popular myths. Part 2 will focus on SeoMoz’s MozRank algorithm, and Part 3 will conclude with a comparison of the two tools.

What is PageRank?

PageRank was developed by Sergey Brin and Larry Page as a method to create a link graph of the web and give priority to pages based on their position on the graph. By looking at the links between sites and how they correlate, Google is able to establish a ranking for each page. This is what separated Google from competing search engines early on. Over the years, PageRank has continuously evolved but it is still an important algorithm, although only one of many, that Google uses to determine what appears on the search engine results pages (SERPs) for specific queries.
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Some of the most frequent questions we get from BMR newbies are 1) should I vary my anchor text 2) should I deep link to inner pages and 3) how quickly should I build links.  While our answers are always the same 1) Yes 2) Yes, and 3) start slowly and work your way up, sometimes it never hurts to have this advice backed up by industry pros.

The guys over at seowizz.net have just added a new blog post Anchor Text Has Lost Its Edge that backs up this tried and true advice.

One of the interesting findings is that link builders should frequently include links for their brand names too rather than just all generic anchor text.  As an example, rather than building all of your links to “red square widgets“, you should mix in some brand name links like “Farmer Joe’s Widgets“.

So you finally bit the bullet and put together a website. It’s very well designed, you believe, and has a lot of helpful information that a visitor would enjoy. You’re so happy with it you don’t think anything needs to be changed or done at all. And yet, you aren’t getting a whole lot of hits on the website. Why is this? Why isn’t anybody coming to see it? There are actually several things you can do to make more people aware of your site, and that includes the concept of backlinking. It’s a simple thing, but very important if you want to get anywhere on a search engine.
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Unless you’ve been living in a cave for the last 10 years, you already know that link building is the best way to increase your search engine ranking permanently. While there are many ranking strategies floating around on the web, most of these provide short-lived results, if any. Using a gray or black hat approach may help you rank high today, but a week from now your site may disappear from the search results altogether.
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With so many myths floating around the web about link building, most newbie website owners are understandably confused about where to start. At its simplest, there are only two types of links: those that bring traffic and those that help rank positions.

Traffic links could be paid links, PPC campaigns, or reciprocal links with related sites.  While these will hopefully help drive traffic to your site, they’ll offer little to no help with your search engine rankings.
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