BackLinkFast.com

Search Engine Optimization as an industry is growing, and will continue to grow for years to come. As a result, more and more companies are seeing the value in hiring an in-house SEO consultant, which means more opportunities for us. It also means there will be more competition in the future. Notice I said, “In the future”; I recently went on an SEO job hunt and had people contacting me left and right, so depending on your area of the world, it may not be as competitive as you think, and finding an SEO job may be a lot easier than you predict.

So here are my top 5 places to find an SEO job:

1. SEOmoz

The SEOmoz team has put together an amazing resource for SEO professionals. They’ve also went the extra mile and created an SEO services board where you can find very credible SEO jobs. Some of these jobs are very specific (ie: link building, social media manager) and others are very broad (ie: SEO consultant).

http://www.seomoz.org/marketplace/jobs

2. SEMPO

The Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization is a non-profit site which feeds useful data to the hungry minds of SEO/M professionals. They’ve taken it a step further and added a regularly updated job board for SEO and SEM jobs alike.

http://www.sempo.org/jobs/

3. Indeed:SEO

If you haven’t heard of, or used indeed yet you are missing out. This glorious search engine searches nearly every job site on the internet to find exactly the job you’re looking for. It’s not always 100% accurate as far as search results go, but it’s definitely very useful, not to mention a huge time saver.

http://www.indeed.com/q-Seo-jobs.html

4. SEO Jobs Finder

This site is growing on me as I see more and more quality SEO and SEM jobs posted every day. Sort jobs by freelance, part time or full time, and everything is properly labeled. This site has a great user interface which makes it easy (and quick) to search for the SEO job of your dreams.

http://www.seojobsfinder.com/

5. Craigslist

Of course, you can’t leave out good ol’ Craigslist. Yes, there tends to be a lot of spam, especially when searching for telecommute or SEO jobs. However, you can often find a diamond in the rough since Craigslist is one of the first places tech-savvy employers post to. To date I have been hired from 3 out of 3 jobs I found on Craigslist.

http://www.craigslist.org/

Blog commenting is one of the fastest and cheapest ways to build quality links. So what’s the catch? It’s time consuming, obviously. You have to find the blogs, skim through the post, write a relevant comment and pray for approval. Is it worth it? Absolutely. Strategic blog commenting can boost your rankings fast. As a bonus, if the link is not marked as nofollow, you can gain a higher page rank by carefully picking the right blogs. I have been blog commenting for close to 3 years now and have found enormous results for the fruits of my labor.

Whether you’re a webmaster, SEO, or a blogger, you should be using the following method regularly. Adapt it to your niche and watch your rankings soar.

Step One – Compile a List of Blogs

1. Go to Google.com
2. Type in: yourniche “Remember my personal information” “Notify me of follow-up comments”
3. Replace yourniche with a keyword related to your niche
4. Click Search
5. CTRL-Click on the first ten results
6. Go back to steps 3-6  and type in a different keyword, repeat as needed.
7. Copy and paste the URLs you’ve gathered into a list for future reference

Step Two – Find High Page Rank Posts

1. Use an internal page rank checker  like This One
2. CTRL-Click 1-3 posts with the highest page rank for each URL you gathered

Step Three – Prepare your Comment

1. Get ready to be witty, inquisitive, and argumentative.
2. Skim through each post and try to find an interesting fact

Step Four – Make it SEO Friendly

1. Go down to the comment section
2. Fill out the comment form like so:

• Name: YourKeyword (Don’t use anything that looks like spam)
• Email: You@YourEmail.com (Use a junk email address, but make it real, some blogs require email confirmation to activate your comment)
• Website: Enter your site’s URL (The one you’re building links to)

Step Five – Write the  Comment

It is very important that your comment doesn’t look automated, if it’s unrelated or too short it probably won’t get approved. Many bloggers are also webmasters who know of techniques such as these. It is your job as a blog commenter to convince them you are a reader who wants to express his opinion. Comments like “I agree with this post. Great blog, keep up the good work!” almost never get approved. Bloggers are smart, and many are SEO savvy enough to know what you’re trying to do. I’m a blogger, and I know of these techniques. However, I embrace blog commenting, as long as it doesn’t look automated.

Comment Approval Tips

• Keep it clean, don’t use profanity
• Check your spelling and grammar
• Comment in the same language as the post, don’t waste your time translating a foreign language, just move on to the next blog
• Ask a question
• Make an argument
• 4 Sentences, minimum
• Only 1 comment per post
• Maximum of 2 words per keyphrase (for the Name: field)

Looking to buy those nifty little 125 x 125 graphic ads on sites related to your niche? Maybe you’re just looking to buy a text ad. Whatever your need may be, there is a market for these effective ad spots. I have found the following 3 sites incredibly useful for buying and selling ads on websites. If you know of some better ones, please post them!

Digital Point Forums

This monster of a forum can be a very valuable resource to webmasters, if (that’s a big if) used properly. Check out the Buy/Sell/Trade section and click on Advertisements. There are hundreds of new posts every day in the ad sales section. As you can probably guess, this free-for-all attracts a large amount of junk, but don’t be discouraged by the scams and junk posts because there are very often hidden gems to be found here. On multiple occasions I have managed to locate high traffic/authority sites with cheap ads for sale, so be patient when using Digital Point Forums. Also, make sure to check the iTrader feedback of every solicited ad, (think eBay feedback), and always read the replies to each thread. Just use common sense and you’re much less likely to get ripped off (which is a very common occurrence on DP). Start off with small purchases until you are well acquainted with the DP marketplace.

SitePoint Marketplace

Sitepoint is one of my favorite sites to frequent, there is a wealth of information to be found on their forums, and the marketplace is “pay per post” so this weeds out most of the scam artists. Over time I have purchased hundreds of banner ads through Sitepoint, and, if you’re smart about it you can make money doing ad sales arbitrage or brokering with Sitepoint. Out of the ads that I’ve purchased, 9 out of 10 of these were sold well below their market value. How do you know the market value of an ad? I will save that for a future post. As with DP forums, always check the feedback of the user you are buying from. Sitepoint takes this a step further with their phone verification system, but since the dawn of pay as you go phones, this still doesn’t completely guarantee a legitimate seller.

BuySellAds.com

This site has taken the webmaster world by storm, and they did it fast. Go to a popular design or webmaster related site and you can almost always bet they are using this service to sell their ads. Why? Well the question is more like, Why Not!? BuySellAds.com offers a simple way for webmasters to sell ad space on their websites, no more writing long, convincing posts on Digital Point. Gone are the days of successful webmasters paying $10 to post a single ad for sale on Sitepoint. What does this mean for the buyer? Affordable, highly targeted ad space that is readily available. You are only limited by the size of your bank account. The downside? Currently BuySellAds only serves websites that are related to webmastering, design, development, or SEO. So if your niche is outside of this realm you are better off finding ads on Digitalpoint or Sitepoint. If you’re looking to sell ads, don’t get too excited; they have a 100k impressions/month minimum to become a seller.

Company: BackLinks.com

Services: Buy & Sell Text Links

The Rundown

Backlinks.com exceeded my expectations within 15 minutes of registering as a new user (advertiser). The advertiser’s user interface is very straight forward. You can add your sites very quickly without having to worry about writing long descriptions and lists of keywords. Simply enter in your site URL, your desired anchor text, and select from the large (but manageable) list of website categories. Click next and you’ve just added your first site.

Once your site has been added to their system, click select links to begin finding relevant backlinks to your website. You will be brought to a page which lists all categories, or you can simply search for the type of site you’re looking for. One click later you are presented with a list of websites related to your selection. I was impressed on the speed of the backlinks.com system, there is almost no wait for returning search results and I must say they’ve built up quite a large and impressive clientele.

Anyway, back to the process. You are now shown a list of sites,  each site is labeled by their brief description, followed by Google Page Rank, whether or not the link will be on a homepage or subpage, and the cost of the link. But the best feature, which sets backlinks.com apart from the rest of the link marketplace; click the description of any website and you are shown the URL of that site, but don’t worry it is in the form of a “CAPTCHA” type of image. This ensures that nobody is penalized by search engines for intentionally purchasing or selling links.

Pros

• Rapid sign-up process
• Great user support
• Quality, categorized web sites
• Shows URL’s but in a secure way
• Pay, and get paid fast via PayPal

Cons

• Limited sorting capabilities
• Confusing User Interface

Overall I have become a fan of backlinks.com and will continue to use them for backlink building. I have already purchased 3 high quality links for $15. As far as results go, well I have already seen a 3 position jump on one of the keywords I used as anchor text through backlinks.com not to mention several clicks (some unexpected traffic). I would highly recommend these guys to any SEO or backlink building professional.

Goto BackLinks.com Here

A very important, yet, often overlooked aspect of SEO and link building (for a blog) is your ping list. This is one of the simplest ways to get your content indexed by search engines, and it can be within a matter of minutes. It will also help you to get ping backs from other blogs (and “scraper” sites) which will in turn build your backlinks.

If you’re using WordPress as your blogging platform simply go to your admin section. Click Options, then click Writing.

Paste the following text in the ping list field:

http://xsincome.com/?p=434
http://api.feedster.com/ping
http://api.moreover.com/RPC2
http://api.my.yahoo.com/RPC2
http://api.my.yahoo.com/rss/ping
http://bblog.com/ping.php
http://bitacoras.net/ping/
http://blog.goo.ne.jp/XMLRPC
http://blogbot.dk/io/xml-rpc.php
http://blogdb.jp/xmlrpc/
http://blogmatcher.com/u.php
http://bulkfeeds.net/rpc
http://coreblog.org/ping/
http://mod-pubsub.org/kn_apps/blogchatt
http://ping.blo.gs/
http://ping.bloggers.jp/rpc/
http://ping.cocolog-nifty.com/xmlrpc
http://ping.feedburner.com
http://ping.rootblog.com/rpc.php
http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php
http://ping.weblogalot.com/rpc.php
http://ping.weblogs.se/
http://pinger.blogflux.com/rpc
http://rcs.datashed.net/RPC2
http://rpc.blogrolling.com/pinger/
http://rpc.icerocket.com:10080/
http://rpc.pingomatic.com/
http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2
http://thingamablog.sourceforge.net/ping.php
http://topicexchange.com/RPC2
http://www.a2b.cc/setloc/bp.a2b
http://www.bitacoles.net/ping.php
http://www.blogdigger.com/RPC2
http://www.blogpeople.net/servlet/weblogUpdates
http://www.blogroots.com/tb_populi.blog?id=1
http://www.blogshares.com/rpc.php
http://www.blogsnow.com/ping
http://www.blogstreet.com/xrbin/xmlrpc.cgi
http://www.lasermemory.com/lsrpc/
http://www.mod-pubsub.org/kn_apps/blogchatter/ping.php
http://www.newsisfree.com/xmlrpctest.php
http://www.popdex.com/addsite.php
http://www.snipsnap.org/RPC2
http://www.weblogues.com/RPC/
http://xmlrpc.blogg.de/

http://xping.pubsub.com/ping/

SEO Is Growing Up Fast

If you haven’t noticed, there are SEO and SEM companies, websites, and jobs popping up left and right. Being an SEO, I am always looking for new sites on the forefront of this evolving industry. It seems that each new year is bringing new, innovative SEO companies.

So, I did some research and the results are pretty amazing. Below is a graph of the SEO Job growth from July 2005 to Today.

seo Job Trends