The guys over at Out Spoken Media put out a new back linking interview with SEO professionals. And NO I didn’t get asked, (go figure) but here is how I answered the questions before reading their answers. I am only going to post a couple at a time so yall can digest.

And sow reading what main stream seo’ers think, (you can read the whole linking interview) I’m glad I rely on testing and experience as I just don’t agree with a lot of what they say. But there are some good tidbits that left me going, hmmm interesting. I can see some testing coming down the pike. 

Anyway, here are my answers to three of the questions. More coming later.

1) What are a few emerging link tactics that you’ve seen in the past 12 months providing tremendous value to sites/pages? Can you give a specific example or two?

Dori’s Answer: I am seeing rankings for sites that have what would be perceived as “worthless” links coming into them. When I say worthless, I mean, sites that are NOT indexed or only have a Page Rank of 0. I wouldn’t of believed if I didn’t see it for myself on a friends site who is competing on a mega keyword. This got me to start doing more competitive analysis to see what was really linking to page one sites, and more times then now, 30-40% of all incoming links are from sites that are NOT in Google’s index! So with a swamp of these with PR0-1 set you up pretty nicely to score with a couple of quality links from PR3 and above.

2) What are the criteria for the “perfect link”?

Dori’s Answer: Any link does better if coming from within a text block. Cream is getting them from high pr .edu or .gov sites and what would make it perfect is if it was the only out going link on the page But heck, I would be happy if it had less then 10 other outgoing links. Oh and the obviously.. keyword anchor or link text.

3) How do you go about creating a link marketing plan that will A:) Get tangible search results in a 6 to 12 month period and B:) Create sustainability for the website you are creating the plan for (i.e. keeping the links clean and adding links with long term value)

Dori’s Answer: First, I am ALL about off page optimization so that is what I am going to talk about and assume the on page optimization is good and with keyword title tags. Second, I have to look at the clients site and find out what thier goals are.

With mid-range keywords I typically like to go after 5-10 at a time, nail those and then move on. Once we do enough of the mid-range, often we naturally rise for the MONSTER keyword of the market which is always exciting.