Here’s wishing you and yours a Happy New Year ahead. It promises to be an interesting year indeed.

Cheers!!!

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Thanks to the great success of Microsoft CRM, our company has been growing consistently over the past few years. And right now, we have multiple job openings that’ we’re trying to fill. These positions include:

• .NET Software Developer  (Chicago)
• Microsoft SQL Database Developer  (Chicago)
• Microsoft CRM Project Manager/Consultant  (Chicago, Denver)
• Microsoft CRM Sales and Business Development  (Denver)
• Business Systems Analyst (Chicago, Denver)

We already offer a great employee benefit package, but today we expanded it even further by announcing new employee benefits for 2010:  

• We’re expanding our work-from-home program to EVERY Wednesday (it used to be just every other Wednesday).  From Memorial Day to Labor Day, we still offer Summer Hours where people can adjust their work so that they can work from home on Friday (not Wednesday) and take off at 1:00pm. After Labor Day, it will be work-from-home on every Wednesday again.
• Everyone will get their birthday off as paid time-off in 2010! We got this idea from the Gen Y award application. We liked it so much, we decided to steal it for ourselves. Don’t worry if your birthday falls on a Saturday or Sunday, you can take off the preceding Friday or following Monday.

If you’re interested in any of the jobs listed above, please contact us ASAP! We’d love to speak with you. You can even apply online for these positions through our website.

As part of the Gen Y award that we recently won, they put together a quick photo tour of our Chicago office if you want to see what our place looks like.

Today I wanted to take some time to talk about link building with relevant sites. I wanted to start off with a couple of questions, concerns, or push back that we tend to get from clients and people who just don’t understand link building. One of the things that I am told by clients is “that site is not relevant to my site! I don’t know why you are looking at obtaining links from sites that aren’t relevant to mine, because those links are worthless”.

Another concern we hear from clients is the links we are obtaining aren’t passing any page rank, or trust, or authority, or whatever you refer to it as.

First, I wanted to cover what’s relevant and what isn’t relevant in terms of link building. This will help us understand which links are good and which links aren’t the best use of our time to obtain.

The first thing to understand (that I think many people tend to overlook) is the fact that search engines rank pages, they don’t rank sites as a whole. When we understand that search engines will rank a page, and won’t necessarily not rank a page, because the rest of the website might not be relevant to your site; we can understand link building with relevant sites or pages a lot better than we could before.

I want to quickly go over what is not relevant in terms of link building. Two of the biggest factors that make a link not relevant are:

• Building links from pages that aren’t related to your website. For example, I have a website about MacBook computers that I am trying to get links to. I obtain a link from a page about fishing supplies. Having a link that says MacBook laptops from that fishing page is definitely not relevant and isn’t going to pass as much value compared to another computer or laptop themed website.
• Building links where you link is surrounded by other “non related” links. For example, if you are linking to your website from a page that has links about viagra, shoes, or jeans, or whatever… if those links surround your link that says Macbook Laptop, those links aren’t going to be the greatest links coming back to your website.

So, what is relevant?

Obtaining links from pages where you:

• Control the title tag
• Control the content
• Control the anchor text of the link
• Control where the link is on the page

These links are from relevant pages that are related to your website with links coming back to your website and are some of the strongest links you can obtain.

So, here are some examples of these types of pages where you control the aspects of the page:

• Hub Pages
• Squidoo Lenses
• Ezine Articles (other highly authoritative article sites that you can submit content to)
• Blog posts
• Some Directories

So again, it all comes back to what is relevant? Links are relevant when you control the title tag, content, anchor text of the link, and where the link is on the page, those are relevant links, don’t ever say that they are not.

So, when I tell clients this, I get back from them, “That’s not true”. Well, yes it is and here are a few examples of why it is true.

Amazon.com is the king of ranking for tons of different products. Amazon doesn’t have a specific theme around it and it can rank for just about anything. For instance, the search that I did in Google for Flip HD. Amazon ranks in position 4 and 5. The only site that is outranking it is the actual Flip website. Click on the image to enlarge.

Another example of a site that ranks well for many different search terms, Wikipedia.org. I did a search for Blink 182, Wikipedia shows up in the sixth position for Blink 182. Again, this website has so many different pages that aren’t related to Blink 182 and yet it ranks for Blink 182. You can also click this image to enlarge.

The next thing that I want to address is the statement, “That page is passing no juice to my website, why would you get a link there?” Ninety-nine percent of the time, you are definitely correct! Ninety-nine percent of the time, that link is going to pass very little value to you out of the gate. Here is the thing, ninety-nine percent of the time, it will pass link juice to your site in the near future. All new pages that come online, come in with zero trust and authority, but as those pages age and obtain trust and authority, they will start to build a reputation that will pass juice to your website. Those links will become extremely valuable in the future.

How can you make sure that those links will pass juice in the future?

• Look at other deep pages and category pages on the site and see if they have juice flowing to them. If they do, your page will eventually have it too.
• You will also want to make sure that the links on those pages are not no follow. That will ensure that you have maximum SEO effect from those links.

More shoppers went online to retailers’ Web sites this holiday season, and overall they were happier with their visits than they were in 2008, a survey by ForeSee Results found. For the second straight year, Amazon.com led ForeSee’s pack of top 40 U.S. e-retailers in terms of customer satisfaction. Netflix and QVC took second and third places, respectively, and Apple tied with Cabela’s for fourth. The report is based on a survey of more than 10,000 visitors to the top 40 e-tail Web sites in terms of sales revenue, as reported by Internet Retailer’s June issue.