This is part of a series of posts about how to get free links pointing to your website in order to raise your search engine rankings and generate direct traffic from websites.

Site: Hive411. Ok. I own this site. But, that's a good thing. It is designed from the ground up to help small businesses be more findable. There are NOT many sites out there like that - that are free. That's why we built it. Here's some press coverage of it that explains what it is all about.

Quick Instructions: Go to the site and search for what you do in the town that you do it. (Eg Residential Contractor in Worcester MA) Then, scroll down and click "Add New Nomination". Enter your website address and other contact information for your business. Encourage other people to vote for you by sending them a link to it. Then, nominate and vote for other people in order to get more visibility and votes for your business.

Benefit of a Link from it:

1. Local Search Engine Optimization: If you're a business that does business locally, your website should be designed to attract local traffic from search engines. For example, if you're a cosmetic surgery place in Southborough, MA you should also be getting visitors from google who type in "rhinoplasty boston ma". If your website isn't designed to do that, we should talk.  But, even though your website is designed to catch that traffic, you still need links pointing to your website that confirm that your website is about that. Do you really expect google, yahoo, msn and ask to just believe you? So, that's what Hive411 allows you to do. It helps locally focussed businesses get a link that helps them attract local traffic to their website.
2. Secondary Search Result: Hive411 also acts as permanent endorsement of your business. The nomination that you create on Hive411 is likely to be found in the search engines too. (The site gets lots of traffic from search engines.)  Since your clients, friends and family can vote that you're the best "Home Designer in Birmingham, Alabama", you can get to the top of each page if you rally your supporters. Also, it shows who voted for you. So, if John Smith voted for you and Barry "I'm looking for a house plan" Jones knows and trusts John, Barry is more likely to want to hire you to design his house.
   
3. Direct Traffic from the Site: The site also drives some traffic to people directly. The site is pretty viral and gets a decent amount of repeat traffic where people are using it to actually search for things. I anticipate this will happen more often in the future, as more businesses are nominated. However, you can control how many times you get seen on the site by doing a few things. Your business gets automatically rewarded when you nominate and vote for other people like Russ did. So, spend some time clicking around and voting for people you know. Or spend some time nominating new businesses. If you want to send an excel spreadsheet, we'll even bulk upload a bunch of nominations and notify them that you nominated them. They'll be likely to return the favor, getting you more votes and more visibility.
   

I launched a landing page that encourages people to share info about their business and when they do, I agreed to build 3 free links for them.

On the first week I launched this landing page - with just a small amount of promotion - I had 9 leads. Since I don't want to become a full time link builder, I am rethinking this approach.

I am sure people are attracted to the "Pete will do it for us. I don't want to do or understand this stuff." approach. So, I am sure this new approach will cost me some new friends. However, I want to be in the business of advising people how to do this stuff. Not doing it for them. I want to attract people that want to learn this stuff because they recognize that it's important for their business. If they don't want to learn it, I have trusted internet marketing partners who will help them. Even though it takes time, building links is probably the least expensive and most effective way to promote your business on the web, assuming you have a solid website in place already. (I'll have to define "solid website" at some point. You probably don't have one.) Plus, you are the best person to build links for you, as it often requires writing, which requires knowledge of your domain.

Originally, I was going to build 3 links on one website. One that I run. But, If I am going to take the approach of instructing people how to get 3 free links, I think I'll pick 3 different websites and tell them how to get a good link from it.

Most people forget that if it wasn't for Yahoo, Google wouldn't exist. Yahoo had enough foresight to realize that Google's algorithmic search engine was better. And they did a deal to use Google's technology to power Yahoo's search engine, before anyone ever heard of Google. Years later now, Yahoo has spent a lot of $ and time to try and duplicate Google's technology. And they've developed a nice "me-too" search business for both organic rankings and paid listings. It's a big business for Yahoo! Huge, actually. But, they are very far behind Google in terms of search volume and revenue.

Find me 10 websites that get more search traffic from Yahoo than Google and I'll kiss a monkey's ass. Most people use Google. As a result, Google makes a lot more $ from search than Yahoo! Some people have suggested that Yahoo should throw in the towel and use Google again to power their search and ppc ad platform.

I highly disagree. It would be disastrous for both democracy and commerce. Without Yahoo in the race, Google would be the closest thing to Big Brother as the human race has ever invented. Maybe they aren't evil. But, they'd wield way too much power and influence. They already wield too much power with an almost unbreakable ecosystem of SEO & SEM professionals, small businesses, advertisers, media companies and individuals reliant on it for survival.

Not only would Yahoo throwing in the towel be bad for womankind. But, I think it'd be like quitting a marathon because you're behind in the first mile. There's lots more room in the search race for game changing innovation.

One of Yahoo's secret weapons is Del.icio.us. If you haven't heard of it, you may soon. It's generally a site that web native early adopters use to save web pages they want to visit later - like you probably use internet explorer's bookmarking tool. However, del.icio.us saves the web pages to an online account that you can search, gives you tools to organize lots of pages, and share it with others.

Unlike Digg, many different types of demographics (besides pimpled slightly-post-pubescent internet geeks) use delicious. So, it's not constrained to one demographic. For example, I did a search for Vegetarian Chili Recipes on delicious this weekend, and it returned a ridiculous amount of great results. I used the recipe that had been bookmarked by 264 delicious users, and the chili turned out delicious! (Pun fully intended.)

In a conversation I had a week or two ago with a prospect, we talked about Delicious. Among other things, HubSpot's website grader reports how many times your website has been bookmarked on Delicious vs your competitors. It doesn't mean a whole lot by itself other than the fact that your website may be "viral" if a bunch of people have bookmarked it. In "non-marketing" other words, if one company has a lot of bookmarks on delicious vs their competitors, it means they are probably better at publishing information that people find useful. But, delicious itself doesn't send a lot of traffic to websites and it doesn't help you increase your search rankings in search engines since it uses the "nofollow" tag in all outbound links.

Atleast not yet. TechCrunch reported last week that Yahoo is inserting Del.icio.us bookmark data in Yahoo's search results.  It's not clear whether Yahoo is planning to use Del.icio.us data to reorder Yahoo search results. But, I'd highly doubt if they weren't thinking about using it as a factor to atleast help rank search results. They'd be stupid not to consider it.

Both Google, Yahoo, MSN and Ask all use formulas that take into account the number, quality and construction of links pointing to a website to rank websites in search results for a given keyword phrase. However, most people don't create links on the web. I'd hazard to wager that more people bookmark stuff more frequently than they do create links on the web. So, by using delicious bookmarks to rank search results, Yahoo could drastically improve the quality of its search results. It's like running two different polls. The one with more votes is usually a more accurate poll results. Right now, Google has more votes in its poll. But, with delicious, Yahoo could leapfrog google.

Assuming they are considering this, Yahoo isn't the first company to consider letting people more directly influence search rankings. Back in 2004, Eurekster started an interesting trend of letting people directly build search results. I actually started an unofficial blog to cover it. Google has an experiment in place too. And Readburner is a cool application built on top of Google reader which shows which stories are shared the most. (Ironically - or not - an article about Delicious is at the top right now.) Techmeme is a much more popular memetracker which uses link patterns between a small group of tech blogs to create a list of top news. There's one for baseball, gossip and politics too. It's certainly feasible that a search engine could take this approach for every topic conceivable. Both Mahalo and Wikia search are attempts at throwing away the algorithm and letting users build search engine results pages.  Google Web History also uses your previous search results to rank your own search results. Many SEO professionals think that click track data affects the main search result rankings too.

In short, there are all kinds of experiments being conducted to leverage different user inputs to rank search results. Many different types of approaches are being tested to let users rank search results more directly; to crowdsource search rankings. As search engines expand the variables in their algorithms to include more user inputs, the search engine with the most user inputs will most likely serve the best search results. Delicious is a huge bank of user inputs with a thriving community of inputters. The question is whether Yahoo + Delicious search results can attract searchers to Yahoo from Google?  Combined with a new more-useable Delicious look and more prominence in search results, could Yahoo's search business see a rise in usage? Will SEO professionals start using Delicious to engineer Yahoo search results? Can Yahoo leverage the user base at Delicious to increase usage of their search and impressions for Yahoo Search marketing? I wouldn't bet against it. On the other hand, are they too disorganized to pull it off?

I've moved my blog over to the Hubspot Internet Marketing platform. I was using typepad, which has pretty much useless web analytics.  Hubspot's analytics are exactly what a marketer needs. Hubspot marketing analytics ranks keywords by the number of visits and leads each term attracts, making it real easy for marketers to see which keywords generate leads.

The funny thing about my blog is that there are about 4 posts (out of 2200) that attract a disproportionate amount of traffic. And those 4 are not related to internet marketing. They are all posts that were "That's funny. I think I'll post about that" posts. Despite their direct irrelevance, there's an internet marketing lesson in disguise here.

One of the posts was about buying and selling breast milk.
(I'll link to it, once my blog posts are moved over to  Hubspot.)


Then, this morning, I received an email from my wife, by way of Jennette Frem at Mothers & Company. The email asked us to vote for Mother's Milk Bank of New England to win a $10k business startup competition at Ideablob (Ideablob profile at Mashable). The milk bank's goal is to collect breast milk and donate it to premature babies. (Certainly a very worthy cause. Both my wife and I voted. So should you.)

Whew! That was a lot of background. What's the internet marketing lesson in disguise?  There's too many. But, the main one is...

The Milk Bank should do a little keyword research. Based on my web analytics, I think they might find that there's a lot of demand for a milk marketplace where people can buy and sell. A marketplace might create the kind of market liquidity (no pun intended) necessary to finance purchase of the equipment needed to pasteurize milk and even fund ongoing operations. I now know from first hand experience that breastfeeding has numerous health benefits for babies. And many mothers have difficulty breastfeeding. I also have heard of mothers who produce more milk than their babies can handle. Despite the high price of formula, I bet that the number of babies being fed with formula is at a record high. If there were a way to buy SAFE breastmilk, I bet it'd be a best seller.