SEOLinkVine is a recently launched, new article network run by Brad Callen. I have been testing this network since shortly before the official launch and by now, I have gathered enough data and gotten a good enough impression of the system for an initial review.

I am not going to go into great detail about what an article network is, if you want to know more about the basics of that, please check my blog networks post.

Alright, now let’s find out whether SEOLinkVine is worth it or not…

Overview

SEOLinkVine is an article network where you can submit articles including your keyword targeted backlinks to many blogs in the network. All of your articles get posted to blogs relevant to your niche and since you can choose the anchor text of the links, that should ensure that all the links you get from the system are high-quality and valuable.

Features

First, let’s cover the two most basic features for any blog network: Submitting and receiving articles.

Submitting Articles

SEOLinkVine has an editor very similar to the one you might be familiar with from a WordPress blog, where you can enter and edit your articles. Since the article will be submitted to blogs and not article directories, you can include links directly in the body text and you can even include pictures and embed video (although in my experience, the video usually remains unpublished).

You are encouraged to spin and rewrite your articles, to make sure that each published post is at least somewhat unique. There is a built in article spinning tool as well as a (useless) thesaurus that can make synonym suggestions for you.

Check out this video to see an overview of all the article submission features:

Receiving Articles

Of course, you can also “plug in” your own blogs into the network and start receiving content from SEOLinkVine users. Depending on how you make use of it, getting a constant stream of fresh content can be very beneficial to your own sites – at least, if the content is any good.

In this regard, I’ve been pleasantly surprised by the articles I’ve received from SEOLinkVine. Let me be realistic, here: The articles are never stellar (they are written for the links, not for Pulitzer prizes) and there are always a few bad apples in there. I have received some examples of articles that were spun to the point of illegibility. But most of the articles I’ve received were quite good.

What I really like about the “get articles” bit in SEOLV is that you can view and accept or reject articles directly from within SEOLinkVine. This means that you don’t have to log into each one of your sites to check the posts, you can conveniently do it all from one interface.

Stats

SEOLinkVine has some very interesting stats-checking features, as well. You can get an overview as well as a graphical representation of how many of your articles have been presented to site owners, how many have been accepted and rejected, how many have been published and how many are still pending.

Even more interestingly, it comes with a rank-tracking application. All you have to do is install a small program that runs in the background (Windows only, at the time of writing) and periodically checks your ranking. For this purpose it simply uses the links from your articles and check where the linked-to site ranks for the anchor-text keyword.

The program goes 500 results deep in Google and Yahoo and about 100 results deep in Bing.

As I’ve mentioned several times on this site, I believe that a good rank-tracking application is absolutely essential for SEO marketers. You have to have an easy way to track the progression of your pages in the SERP and see how your link-building is affecting them. The rank tracking tool in SEOLV is very simple and requires practically no user-input, but it’s still a solid tool that delivers clear information. Clear thumbs up from me, as this is truly an extra bonus that no one would even expect to get, bundled with a blog-network membership!

Is it Any Good?

Of course, the extra features and slick user interface are nice, but the most important question about any blog network is: Is it any good? Do my articles get published, does the system work, do I get a good amount of high-quality backlinks?

The answer is: Yes, it is good and it’s a solid system that works. There was a bit of a glitch during the first few days after launch, where they were apparently having trouble getting all the queued up articles published, however, even then I saw a steady stream of publishes and daily backlinks to all sites I  was promoting through SEOLinkVine.

Let’s look at some exact numbers:

Currently, I am averaging 55.8 publishes per article submitted. That’s pretty good, especially considering that the articles are all still being published to new blogs and the publishes per article have steadily been climbing. Also, some of the publishes are still in a “pending” status, meaning some site-owners have not taken a look at the articles yet, to decide whether to approve or reject them. If my approval-rate stays constant, this will result in about 60 publishes per article over the course of a few weeks. Not too bad.

Does it work for getting your sites ranked? Let me show you two examples, using the SEOLV rank tracker.

This first one is on a site that I’ve already done lots a fair amount of backlinking for, but the particular page I’m promoting has only been getting links from SEOLV, no other sources:

As you can see, there’s a distinct improvement in ranking, more or less from day one of using the system. (Update: The above page has now reached position number 3 in the SERP).

Here’s another one, which is for a brand new site that, as of yet, has absolutely no on-page optimization for the targeted keyword:

We’re definitely looking at some heavy Google dancing, here, but the indications are good. The dance will probably go on for a while longer, but once I actually set up the target page with on-page SEO, I’m pretty sure I’ll stick to page one. (Update: This page is now in position number 6 and has stayed there for several weeks. I haven’t done any link-building beyond submitting two articles to SEOLV, for this site).

SEOLinkVine Reopened

SEOLinkVine was closed for a while and Brad Callen and his team spent some time improving the system and upgrading the blog network. It’s now open again and I can still fully recommend it. Now more than before, in fact.

If article marketing is part of your strategy and you write and submit on a regular basis, I can recommend SEOLV. Click here to get in, if it’s right for you.

SEOLinkVine Bonus

So, I’m actually offering something of a bonus for SEOLinkVine. I’ve put together a very powerful strategy guide (PDF plus Video) that teaches you how to get the maximum benefit from SEOLinkVine. And here’s the kicker: You can have this bonus for free, whether you buy through my affiliate link or not.

You know how usually you have to clear your cookies, then go through a particular affiliate link, then buy and get the receit number, then mail than number to the affiliate and wait for them to send you the bonuses? Yeah, pretty annoying. So I thought: Let’s not bother with all that.

If you haven’t bought SEOLinkVine yet, then I invite you to get it through my link, by clicking here.

If you already have it, you can still get your awesome, free bonus guide, by clicking here.

Enjoy!

Cheers,

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• cache:SPCqxNH7ZVsJ:richquickreview com/market-samurai-keyword-blueprint-keyword-elite-2/ keyword elite competition strength
• Free publishs articles & pr Directories

Be that as it may, I will still gather useful posts and resources and post them up on a Friday once I’ve found several.

Without further ado, here’s today’s collection:

• Split Testing Calculator
  This is a very simple online tool that has one purpose: To tell you whether your split-testing results are significant yet, or not. When you are split-testing and you don’t want to spend a huge amount of money to get tons of clicks, this tool can help you find the probable winner even with a relatively low number of clicks.
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• CommentLuv Blogs Sorted by Niche
  If you want to promote your blog by doing some blog commenting, then you’ll always welcome the CommentLuv plugin, which shows your latest blog post below your comment. Here’s a list of over 100 CommentLuv blogs, sorted by niche. Just remember to leave relevant, non-spammy comments.
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• Backlinks Explained on BloggerIllustrated
  Allyn Hayne of BloggerIllustrated has changed gears recently and seems to be going in a more newbie-friendly direction. The post linked above contains several, well-made videos covering pretty much all the basics you need to know about backlinks for SEO purposes. Definitely worth checking out!
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• Who Are You Trying to Impress? on Shoemoney
  Best post I’ve ever seen on Shoemoney. Shoe talks about why it doesn’t matter that he tends to get a lot of flak from other IM bloggers and the community in general. Do yourself a favour and give this a read.

And that’s all, folks. Have a great weekend!

Cheers,

This post covers the most important basics you need to know about backlinks. Getting backlinks to your web pages is an essential part of search engine optimization (particularly for Google). However, not all backlinks are equal. In this post, I describe the three things that matter most, in terms of backlinks. These three factors are: Amount, value and anchor text.

Note: If you prefer watching a video to reading, scroll down to see my video accompanying this post.

Here’s a short description explaining each of the three factors:

Amount

This first factor is the simplest. The higher the number of backlinks pointing to your site, the better this is for your ranking.

The thinking behind this is simply that every link to your site represents something like a “vote”. Someone linking to your site is basically saying: “Check this out, there’s something worth seeing there.”
And the more people are saying that there’s something worth seeing on your site, the better your site must be.

On a perfectly innocent Internet (what a weird concept), this would be all it takes to determine the rank of websites. But because there are many people with commercial interests online and it’s fairly easy to build links yourself, determining rank based solely on the amount of backlinks would just result in those pages whose owners have the most powerful link-spamming bots working for them to rank highest.

This is where the other two factors come in.

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Value

This is the most debated and most elusive factor determining website ranks. The value of any given backlink is dependent on many different variables and no one, apart from a few engineers at Google, knows exactly how link value is determined.

Here are some factors we can be pretty certain about:

• Page Authority
  A link coming from a high authority website is more valuable than one coming from a low authority website. How the authority of the website is determined, is an entire subject of its own. You can assume that the more traffic a website is getting, the more people are participating on that website and the higher the Google PR of that website is, the more valuable a link from it will be.
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  As example, a link coming from a blog with thousands of subscribers and many people participating in the comments is more valuable than a link coming from a blog that hasn’t been updated in months and sees hardly any traffic.
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• Link Location
  Another important factor is where on the page the link is located. For example, a link placed in the footer of a website is less valuable than a link that is part of the main text on the page. The context, and number of other links on the same page also play a part.
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  For example, if your link is just one among hundreds a page consisting mainly of links, then it’s not very valuable. However, if the link is one of only a few integrated in the text flow, then it carries a lot of value.
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• Link Distribution
  In a greater context, it also matters where your links are coming from. Hundreds of backlinks, all coming from the same domain are probably less valuable than just a handful of backlinks coming from many different sites.

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Anchor Text

Finally, the anchor text of your links is what determines which keywords you will rank for. For those who don’t know, the anchor text is the text you click on, to follow a link. As an example, here is a link with the anchor text reading “Killer Bunnies”: Killer Bunnies

The anchor text of your backlinks help the search engine spiders decide which keywords to rank your page for. Ideally, you want to get many backlinks that have your targeted keyword as their anchor text. However, you should avoid getting many backlinks that all have the identical anchor text, because this looks unnatural.

For the links you build yourself, I recommend using your keywords in the anchor text in most cases, related keywords in some cases, and something completely unrelated (e.g. “Click here”) in a few cases.

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Rule of Thumb

The rule of thumb for good backlink building is this: the more natural your backlink-profile looks, the better.

In other words, aim for diversity when you build backlinks. You can’t go wrong with links from different sites, using variations of anchor text and placed in different contexts on the sites.
Also, don’t shy away from getting links from low-authority sites. As long as it doesn’t take you too much time to get those links, even low value links are useful and make your overall link profile look more natural.

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Video

Here’s the video, where I say the same stuff I wrote in this post:

If you have any more questions about link-building, ask away in the comments section below!

Cheers,

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• anchor text backlinks
• natural link building