Link Marketing isn’t only about getting clickable links, it’s about getting your URL spread. These 10 links won’t pass any link juice, but they certainly can help getting your website out there.

1. Your Bluetooth profile name
Considering the fact that you’re into SEO and computers and geeky gadget stuff, you’ll probably have a phone with Bluetooth. When you select your URL as your Bluetooth profile name, everybody in your direct surroundings scanning for nearby Bluetooth phones will see your URL. This can get you at least a few visitors, especially when you use this strategy during an SES conference.

2. Your license plate frame
Take advantage of that daily traffic jam by adding your URL to your license plate frame. You can even add up to four URLs if you have a large frame before it gets cluttered. Or before the person driving behind you thinks you’re spamming. You can also give license plate frames with your URL away (they’re actually quite cheap).

3. Your wireless router profile name
I’m Dutch. Dutch people are cheap. So when I’m taking my dog for a walk, I’ll let my phone scan for unprotected wifi connections in stead of using my providers network. A few weeks ago, I noticed someone in my neighborhood named his profile after his URL and I visited this website straight away. Right after taking advantage of his unprotected network, of course.

4. Your voice mail message
“Hi, this is Wiep. You tried to reach me, but unfortunately I’m not available at the moment. Please leave your phone number, or visit wiep.net and drop me an email or a comment, and I’ll get back to you.”

5. Your roof
Your roof is the perfect Google Earth or Live Visual Earth promotion. Paint the URL on your roof an just sit back and wait until your neighbors are checking out the digital version of your neighborhood. If you have a big house, you can even try to paint a deeplink. Do not try this when you don’t live on the top floor, btw.

6. Your pens
Write your personal URL on every pen on your office desk. Because people at work usually have the strange habit to steal pens, this is a great way to spread your website around the office. Beware, that if your website happens to be NSWF, this can get you or even the colleague who’s visiting your website fired. Tip: you can also use promotional pens.

7. The local internet cafe
If you regularly visit an internet cafe, it can pay off to set your website as the default start up home page. It’s better to see people visiting your website than the standard MSN or Mozilla page. This also works at conferences, where there usually are several free to use computers available.

8. Your clothes
Walk around wearing a yourwebsite.com polo shirt or a yourprofile.org cap. People will see it and some will think your website is the new trend. They will visit your website straight away. Don’t overuse this strategy by wearing nothing but URL inserted clothes, because people will think you’re some kind of promo guy wearing link spam clothes.

9. Your phone number
If you don’t have a domain name like this, you can also choose to set up your domain name as your phone number. Choose 1-800-YOUR-DOMAIN-COM as your personal phone number if you want your URL out there.

10. Fill this one in your self
What other uncommon places are out there where you can drop your URL? Add a comment with your suggestions. And while you’re at it, don’t forget to leave your URL as well.

Although Google stated that Googlebombing would become very difficult in the future, SERPs show still examples of pretty good results. Most of them are intentional, some are by accident.
The example below (thanks for the tip, Hamoedie ;) ) is a great example of an accidental, but very effective, link bomb.

The web design market is very competitive, even a phrase like “Open Source Web Design” shows 350 million results. Number one is oswd.org, like the screen shot below shows. With over 225k links, that isn’t a big surprise.

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You have probably already read the articles with 5, 50, 66, 101 or even 131 strategies to attract links (if not: go read!). Some strategies (the most effective ones) are being mentioned in each of these articles. The following 4 activities are not very ordinary ways to build links, but can be at least as effective.

1. Get a dog.
Dogs are not only a great way to pick up girls (for some reason, women digg puppies) or an overly underestimated networking strategy (you’ll meet lots of other interesting dog owners), but it can also help you to build links.
When you’re staring at a monitor almost 24/7, getting out once in a while can really open up your mind. That dog scratching your leg is your appointment with fresh, creativity stimulating air. A walk around the park provides enough time to think about at least 3 linkbaity articles, 2 improvements for your website and 1 new marketing approach each month. So besides a date and a bigger network, getting a dog can also make you think of a new way to attract dozens, hundreds or even thousands of links. And maybe a link from one of your dog’s new pals.

2. Teach.
Because SEO, Link Building, AdWords and Social Media are relatively new, there aren’t a lot of studies related to these subjects. Some Colleges and Universities are desperately looking for someone to teach their students something about Search Marketing. Even if it’s just a workshop or a few lessons, they don’t care. Volunteer.
No seriously. Ok, maybe not completely voluntarily, you can offer yourself in exchange for a link on the college or university website. You can even offer to write an introduction page (with a few links and info about you and your company) about the subject you’ll be discussing.

Using this strategy will not only be an opportunity for you to get your brand out to marketing-managers-under-construction, or to get a few tech savvy students to work for you during the summer (cheap labor!), but it can also get you a few (.edu) links.
Keep in mind that some of these students may know more about the subject than you, so you’d better know a lot about the subject you’re teaching.

Are there no schools looking for Search Marketing teachers near you? If you happen to speak a second language, you can try to teach SEM in that language.

Warning: offering your services in exchange for a link definitely makes you a link whore.

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There is enough info available about how and why to use LinkedIn and how you can add links to your profile. But why would you neglect optimizing your profile links, by leaving out the anchor text?

Recently, I came across two profiles with links that didn’t have one of the standard LinkedIn anchor texts, but also dind’t have a “polluted” anchor text. This means no company names, high competitive keywords or common anchor texts. In both cases it were links with a (pretty) unique anchortext.

Here’s Michael Gray’s profile. There are three links listed in his profile. Two of Graywolf‘s links aren’t anchor text optimized (the ‘My Company’ and ‘My Blog’ links) and one has a customized anchor text (Central Hub Website). Now check out Google’s search results.

Example number two is Peter vd Graaf’s profile. Peter has also optimized one of his three links; the link to his SEO workshop page has an optimized anchor text (not anymore; see comments). If you check the Google search results, you’ll notice that this page also ranking quite high (please note that the page’s language is Dutch, so I had to adjust the query language a bit).

In both cases, the anchor text used has no occurances on the page. I guess this is LinkedIn Google Bombing :)

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With the “Are paid links evil” session at the San Jose SES in sight, it seems like the buying-links-discussion has started all over again during the past few weeks. Rand and Aaron both published great articles about buying links and the discussion seams to get hot again in other places -and in other languages- as well.

Last week’s SESSJ session has already been covered in a few places (thanks for that, those recaps are really useful for us home stayers), which should get this thing heated up again. I guess that, because buying links as a link building strategy still works, this discussion will remain to go on for a while. Great, I love this discussion, so there will be a lot of new blog posts about paid links during the next few weeks :)

Here’s something about paid links to think about:
- If link purchases have a positive ROI for a company, they’ll continue to make them. If they have a positive ROI, chances are good that they must also be serving the searcher effectively and thus, be good results for the engines. (Todd Friesen)
- Link Baiting, what Google’s suggest as link building strategy, is as egregious if not worse for relevancy than paid links – viral content of such an off-topic nature should not help your rankings and is more “polluting” than relevant paid links. (Greg Boser)
- Google often uses the example of the Yahoo! Directory as a place where paid links are acceptable, because these links get an ‘editorial review’. However, not only is Yahoo!’s directory filled with spammy sites, but the $299 reviewing fee is a recurring fee. What kind of editor needs an annual fee of almost 300 bucks to review a website?
- Matt Cutts states that the FTC has said that word of mouth marketing is like any other kind of marketing, and if you’re being paid to say something, you should disclose this to both people and machines. Do regular ads have hidden disclosure messages for the Yellow Pages? Should I disclose that the link has been disclosed to search engines as well?

And I really love Michael Gray‘s theory about paid links & Google (copy/ pasted from SEOmoz):

• Both commercial and non-commercial queries exist on the web;

• Commercial websites are NOT generally linked-to naturally;

• Non-commercial websites are much more likely to entice natural links;

• By eliminating paid links, Google will fill the top results for commercial queries with primarily non-commercial results;

• Thus, when a searcher wishes to take a commercial action, the only relevant results will be the paid listings;

• And, thus, searchers will be more likely to click on AdWords links, which earns Google money.

Not that I think that this theory is the truth, but it is a nice point of view.

Viral Marketing seems hotter than ever. Where everybody in the SEO world is talking about link bait, the traditional marketing agencies are pushing their viral skills. Almost every marketing agency has some viral experience and is profiling themselves as an expert. With lots and lots of new funny, clever and great viral campaigns every day, it hurts my SEO heart to see what some businesses are missing out on.

The great thing about a successful viral campaign, is that it generates a lot of attention (and links!) in a very short period of time. When you look at some viral campaigns, it seems that there are still lots of marketing agencies that forget one of the most important factors of the 21st century; The Search Engine. Just take a look at these 4 examples that completely missed the link boat. Keep in mind that I found these examples in under 30 minutes, what must be an indication of something…

1) Subservient Chicken (Burger King)
A great viral campaign, but it’s 99% Flash. When you take a look from a search engine’s point of view, you’ll see that almost 30,000 links are pointing to“© 2004 Burger King Brands, Inc. All rights reserved.”. There isn’t even a simple link on the page to the Burger King corporate website…

2) WhySoSerious.com
This campaign was apparently launched for the latest Batman movie? I don’t know that for sure, because the domain WhySoSerious.com is already redirecting to a The Joker fansite. With a 302 redirect. No, seriously. They’re almost throwing away the 900 blog links WhySoSerious.com attracted during the past few weeks…

3) The Skittles Touch (Skittles)
Ok, maybe this isn’t a viral campaign, but I still wanted to mention this one. A lot of webmasters and bloggers embed YouTube (or other) movies on their websites, when they think it’s a cool one. In some occasions, YouTube (or the other movie website) will show the opening frame of the movie, when the movie isn’t playing. This means that the first frame is a great branding opportunity, and this is what The Skittles Touch is missing out on. Oh, and they didn’t add their URL to both the last frames of the movie and the YouTube page…

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