• Affiliate marketing:
• http://www.2parale.ro/
• http://profitshare.emag.ro/
• Blog agency:
• http://www.agentiaspada.ro/
• http://www.standout.ro/
• http://blog20.info/
• http://blogalinitiative.ro/

And just tell them “Hello, we’re this & that & we want to sell ads”. Contact them and see what you get out of this.

Strategy #2:

Another strategy would be to go to companies that would be interested in your kind of visitors (banks in Romania, private medical services in Romania, stuff like this) and approach them directly.

• People will love your web site.
• Once on your web site, people will tend to link to it more, if they found a great content.
• Google probably has algorithms to detect (especially for English-written pages) how good content is. Google might have a look on your content and rate it – Good /Bad.
• People will remember you and might come back. Even if they do not become loyal fans, they might want to come back to your web site from time to time.

Of course, this is just one type of link building strategy.

There are other solutions:

• Link Bait – creating content designed specifically to gain links (very attractive content – see above – which aims at making people so happy, that they naturally link to you).
• Social Communities – using social networks to gain specific advantages to your web site (like, well, links).
• Paid/Traded Links – not such a great method, but you can still do it, as long as you can keep it away from Google’s eyes.
• Cherry Picking Links – this implies looking for links which are usually discounted (from people not generally giving links, from people who usually do not participate in the web ecosystem).
• Content Submissions – a good way to do this is via guest blogging. A not so good way would be to do content submission via article marketing.

___________
As a bottom line, I highly suggest using great content as a link building method, but there are alternative to this.

Marketing Infographic by SEO Book

But, to me, the most important & simple at the same time element is this – the title attribute. It’s simple, basic, and sometimes ignored.

The rules for it are simple:

• Less than 65 characters (with spaces);
• The targeted keyword(s) should be at the very beginning of the title;
• Put at the end of the title your brand name (or, if you’re a huge brand, right at the beginning);
• Don’t over optimize – don’t try to work with 6 keywords at once; for a regular page – 2 keywords maximum, homepage? OK, you can have 3, but no more;
• Don’t do keyword cannibalization – avoid optimizing more than one page for the same keywords;

Avoid having too many keyword synonyms – stick with the basics;

Do this, and you’ve easily done a change with a big impact for the search engines. The change has one of the highest ratio between results and efforts.

Read more on keyword cannibalization:

• Romanian - Keyword Cannibalization: Dezavantaje SEO – Web Copywriter;
• Romanian - SEO pentru avansati – Keyword Cannibalization;
• How to Solve Keyword Cannibalization – SEO Tips | SEOmoz;
• Are you Cannibalizing Your Own Keywords?

and on general title tag information:

• Romanian - Meta Tag-uri: Importanta si beneficii SEO – Web Copywriter;
• All about the Title Tag for Search Engine Optimization;
• 15 Title Tag Optimization Guidelines For Usability and SEO | Usability Geek;
• Title Tag SEO Best Practices – Meta Tag Optimization | SEOmoz.

Happy titling in the New Year!

Sometimes I comment on other people’s blogs. From my experience, it’s best to read what others have said after you. There is more than one option to do so:

• (if the blog clearly allows it) Subscribe via email to comments on the blog post – I dislike this method because after two weeks from a message, further replies are irrelevant. I don’t care what people say 3 months after I’ve written something (1) and it’s also hard for me to remember the specific context I said something 3 months ago (2) and people don’t expect me to read & follow-up after 3 months (3).
• Let’s say a blog doesn’t have a “Subscribe via email to the comments” option. You can use the method below to generate the email subscription yourself, although it’s a bit complicated:
• How to subscribe via email to RSS feeds? – Get a result now!
• You can subscribe via RSS to the comments of a specific blog post. If the blog author, hasn’t displayed it, you can usually find it with the method described here:
• WordPress Feeds « WordPress Codex
  (which is: just add /feed at the end of a URL of a blog post:

  http://example.com/post-name/feed/)

• (my favorite method) After I leave a comment, I copy the URL and create a Google Calendar event the following day (so, I will reply to any quick & intense comment left after my comment. I also create a Google Calendar event ~7 days after that specific day, so I will get most of later comments. If, during that time I get no reply to my comments, I stop checking the thread. If I do receive comments, I put subsequent reminders. I get a reminder for each event via email.

So, here goes – a best practice to commenting on someone’s blog is to follow-up.

OK, so how to get links? A good solution is: Back Link Service (a service by Linkvehicle.com).

What’s good about the service?

• They have a vast range of web sites you can buy links from;
• Their services have been ranked by others as of good quality (they’re still on the market, aren’t they?);
• You can get targeted traffic to your web site, not only benefit from the links;
• It’s fast – in a matter of a few days you can get real results;
• The bloggers to have to freedom to write about anything they want, within some limits (you can say, for example, to write only positive things);
• It’s quite a brand, and you can trust them for a good service; Google them for details;
• They have a team of SEO experts on board.

How about you, how do you feel about this?

Yet, in real life, things tend to get more complicated; I try to do good; but sometimes, social norms give me the hind that I’m evil & twisted, and what seem to be wrong doers are actually the good guys.

Partially, this can be explained (see I liked this book: “The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil” by Philip ZIMBARDO – Get a result now!); but it’s more than this, it’s not just social & norms; what the answer is – life is complicated.

I don’t claim to know the answer, I just want to point out that, sometimes, doing good makes you the bad guy; in SEO and not only.

I do feel bad for some of the ethical things I’ve done (or, at least, this is how I consider them to be).

What they currently do is answer a few basic questions about product availability, delivery, costs;

What they should do is offer suggestions (we don’t have X product, but product Y has similar capabilities, for a better price; we don’t have this product on stock, but would you be interested in our best selling product for the requested category, which has these advantages and is in stock? do you know an extra battery for that video camera is only X lei? do you know a photo camera works best with a tripod?)

We do need more upselling.

You can see the services of such a company here:

• Free SEO Analysis
• Professional Search Engine Optimization
• Web Design Quote

As you can see, more than one service provided by one company; so, as a first tip – more than one service is required for a holistic experience as a company.

In order to choose among such companies, one has to be able to make a difference between many providers; so, if X has a service, and Y has the same service, one criteria can be price; another one the portfolio (list of clients); another one past performances (how well do those clients perform?);

On the other hand, another good idea would be to compare between these companies based on a quotation – a company will provide you with a quotation for a service; it may look that this is free SEO – actually, it’s only an offer; yes, indeed it has a strategy behind it, but the implementation should suffice to make the difference between one company and another.

If I were in a customer’s shoes, I’d first look at the most relevant examples in the past, and I’d also have a look on what went wrong, to avoid those mistakes.