Readers, please take a look at this new Sales position opportunity with TLA and consider applying yourself or please pass it on to someone you think might be a great fit. The job is located downtown NYC (see map) at our brand new parent company MediaWhiz. The candidate would be working with a fun team in a fast paced internet marketing environment in the greatest city on the planet! It is a no brainer! Here is a little more about the job:
TLA Sales Agent NYC Office
Responsibilities include sales and business development of TLA services to companies of all sizes as well as interactive media agencies. This person is responsible for the sales and the development of new business partnerships for these services.
Individual would be handling incoming sales leads as well as prospecting new sales opportunities.
Sales experience within the Search Engine Marketing industry a plus. This is a salary + commission opportunity. Start date February 1, 2007. Please send resume to: resumes (at) text-link-ads.com
There aren’t too many really, really good link builders out there — and of those who are, most are overbooked with clients, or spend most of their time on their own sites.
The best way to retain the likes of Caveman, Aaron or Todd is to get in early, before they’ve been overwhelmed with thousands of service enquiries.
Which is why you should run, not walk, over to Graywolf’s consulting page. (Maybe this has been around a while, but I only found it just now.) Besides SEO phone consulting and site reviews, he’s offering a link baiting service which covers several areas of SMO, and is geared towards a strategy encompassing multiple baiting efforts over a period of time.
If you’re having a hard time beating the ‘box, or if you’re losing the SERPs battle to uber-trusted authority sites, I suggest you whip out the checkbook and send Graywolf a retainer, before a dozen other people do 
Readers, we are constantly improving the TLA system and we are excited to announce MANY new features to make it easier and more efficient to use TLA. Please let me know what you think of the new features and of any new ideas you would like to see implemented. Thanks! Patrick
RSS/Email Inventory Alert System. You now have the ability to sign up to receive alerts of new inventory added to TLA directly into your rss reader or your email inbox. You can set up to receive inventory alerts based on your top keywords or top categories of interest. The “Inventory Watchlist” can be accessed by logging in to this page.
Advanced Sorting. On all category pages you can also sort by: Highest Link Popularity, Highest
Price, Lowest Price, Lowest # of Pages, Highest # of pages, and Zero Ads Sold. This is a great way to find the inventory you are looking for by many new criteria.
Previously Purchased Inventory Marking. When you log in to your account and browse the marketplace, all inventory that you have already purchased is marked in red so you know not to purchase duplicates that are already live in your account.
We couldn’t help but to throw our hat into the new linkbaiting service industry. We have had our share of linkbait successes here at TLA including:
The Link Calculator
Blog Juice Calculator
Andy’s Guide To Beating The Sandbox
Linkbaiting can be a very effective way to supplement your comprehensive link building campaign. This is a high end service designed to get results. Check it out and let us know what you think!
Link baiting, social media, article syndication… with all the hype on the many types of linking strategies, sometimes we miss linking opportunities "from real life". Always get new links is a reminder that you can get links from people with whom you already have real world relationships: suppliers, partners, distributors, other marketing channels… check it out.
We are happy to announce TLA’s newest hire: R. Marie Cox. She will be doing web development/design work here at TLA. No we didn’t really steal her from SEOMOZ but the cool part about Marie’s background is her own personal project, Side Job Track, won third place in the "Business, Money, Ecommerce" section on SEOMOZ’s Web 2.0 Awards.
Marie will be working on some cool link bait projects as well that are destined to push Rand off the first page of Digg and Del.icio.us once and for all. 
Welcome aboard Marie!
In case you missed it, Jim Boykin wrote a great post this week, Why that site with 50 backlinks beats your site with 1000 backlinks. I think we all ocassionally tend to overcomplexify SEO and link building, focusing on numbers or other mostly meaningless data, when instead we should be focusing on macro-trends (in this case, the trend is quality over quantity).
I would also like to use this post as a time to start a little petition for one of Jim’s former projects that he canceled:
That is all, please resume your weekend relaxation.
Yes, yes, yes — online reviews are very important. Heck, Web 2.0 sites seem to live or die by their TechCrunch review. The same phenomenon is observable many other industries on the Web.
Lest you doubt the importance of online feedback, Guy Kawasaki has written a post encouraging companies to embrace online reviews:
- Use reviews to improve your operations. Some negative reviews are off the mark, but most provide at least a kernel of truth about problems in your business. Take steps to fix these problems.
- Encourage your customers to post reviews. Mention these review sites to your regular customers, and tell them how much you would appreciate them posting an honest review about you.
- Use positive reviews in your marketing. Just like a write-up or a newspaper profile, a good online review can be posted in your shop window or on your Web site.
Hmm, I wish there was a company that specialized in these points… oh well…
My recently published article, 101 Ways to Build links, shows that you have many, many link building tactics at your disposal. For any given website, you probably need to use at least a few dozen link building different tactics over the course of a year or more to rank for anything remotely competitive.
One thing I didn’t mention in the article, though, was that for a brand new site you need to build certain types of links first. Why? Thank TrustRank/the sandbox. To even get fully indexed (now that we have sandbox crawling), let alone ranked, you’ll need to get the domain some trust right off the bat, and this is only going to happen by building certain types of links in a certain way.
OK, so what is “certain types of links in a certain way”? Basically, we need trusted links to happen first, and then a “natural growth curve”. Want specifics?
When I launch a new site, I go after two types of links right away:
- My short-short-very-short list of trusted paid directories (Business.com, Dir.yahoo.com, sbd.bcentral.com)
- Link begging/buying/bartering at sites which already rank in the top 1-200 (if they’re ranking, they have some trust)
The latter is time-consuming and frustrating — but it has to be done, and sooner is better than later. From Stuntdubl’s recent post:
Other Notes: Authority links are an absolute must for improving your trust score these days. This is a MUST for a new site, and should be where you start your efforts, and always be dedicating SOME time. Suck it up, and take the time it takes to get some quality, trusted links. The existence of trusted authority links will make or break your site. Find the 800 lb. gorillas in your field, and **find a way to get on a dozen or so of them. Failing that, hunt their backlinks, and find a way to get on some of those pages. Use some creative queries with the combination tool. Give the tattler a shot.
Anyway, once I have a few authority links (even getting 3 is quite an accomplishment), I wait a week or two, make sure the site gets indexed deeply, and then move into other types of link building tactics — article syndication, social networking gaming, quality reciprocals, etc. Even if a few (or more than a few) low quality links make it into the link profile, it’s not going to kill anything, since I gave the site a spine first.
Readers, Rich over at MindSmack just completed a real cool video that gives an overview on the link buying process at TLA. Their team did a great job on the flash video, if you ever need any help in that department, Rich can be reached at: rich (at) mindsmack.com Head over to this page to check the video out now!
