When it comes to link building, it’s very important to submit your website to high quality directories. After a little research, I found that Alive Web Directory gives great value for your submission fee. If you decide to submit your blog to their blog directory, your will benefit from a high PageRank listing on an established, trusted and well indexed directory. Standard and featured listings are available with yearly and permanent submission options. You can get your link listed starting from $29.95 per year, and considering their Alexa rank, Pagerank and heavy promotion, it’s definitely worth every cent!

What I like about some SEO Services, is that they always publish some useful articles that we, webmasters, can learn so much from. I found a great article published recently — 7 Steps To A Google Top Ten Rank. Its not a short, yet highly informative article that tells you exactly what to do and most important, what not to do. It also tells the readers what sort of links one should get and how to build a strong ranking website.

If you are still not a SEO pro, I strongly recommend to go and educate yourself!

The fact is — most people don’t click affiliate links nor trust them. Just imagine, every time you enter a store, (this happens especially often in cosmetics / pharmacy stores) — you enter willing to buy Product A, face an assistance who has a badge on her chest saying “Product B”, who starts talking you over into buying the product she advocates. You know she gets a commission off every sale, and even if Product B is not that bad, you will not trust her “objective” opinion, right?

Same on the internet. If I will write a review about how fantastic product B is, but when reader rolls his mouse over the URL and sees it has a referral extension, he will instantly guess you are just trying to trick him into clicking and buying something that will put a few bucks in your porcelain piggy. So, how to play smart?

1. Use an iFrame to hide your links.

Basically, you are working with a cookie and when it comes to affiliate cookies, all you need to do is set it in your visitors computer. An iFrame allows you to embed another HTML page inside the current page you are displaying, so you load the affiliate page inside your current page using the iFrame, but the trick is to make the iFrame so tiny that the readers wouldn’t be able to see it.

<iframe src=”http://toptut.com/affiliate-URL” width=”1″ height=”1″ frameborder=”0″ scrolling=”no”></iframe>

This code opens the targeted URL in a small (and invisible, due to the size) 1px*1px frame. The affiliate page is there, so the cookie gets set in visitors computer. Tricky enough?

Disadvantages: 1. Some affiliate programs do not allow such play with cookies and will BAN you for this, so you have to make sure it’s not forbidden before you start framing. 2. The visitor still has to visit the target URL and sign up / buy your advertised product.

2. Using php-based redirects.

This is slightly time consuming but I often use it myself and you only need to do the work once. For every affiliate link you promote, create a simple HTML file in your notepad:
Read More from "3 Ways to Hide Affiliate ID Links and Boost Sales"

Right from the oven, just launched my new Top Tut Directory and I want to invite my readers to submit your website(s) FREE. This is going to be a top class directory, dominated by submitted quality links, not banners or advertisements. The site has been online for less than 24 hours now and already has 160+ sites listed, so… you won’t be alone there!

No illegal content websites will be listed (e.g. adult material, cracked software, etc). Currently, until December 31st 2007, the listing is absolutely free for all, backlink is appreciated but not required and all the sites will be approved within maximum of 2 business days.

Benefits of submitting to Top Tut Directory:

1. The submission is fast and hassle-free, as no backlink is required.
2. The Directory is going to be aggressively promoted and going to gain a PageRank upon the next update.
3. Your link(s) will remain listed permanently after the directory will switch to paid submissions.
4. We use SEO-friendly URL’s for utmost benefit of the listed websites.

Thanks in advance for your submissions!

So many times, on the pages of this blog, I mentioned the importance of quality, and relevant backlinks. These days when Google PageRank is updating, and some of us experience unpleasant results, we realize we need to take the link building in our hands and start working hard towards better traffic from top notch sites and improving our SERP’s, as well as ranking. From my experience, links exchange has a lot of value, but the downside of the process is that links exchange consumes a lot of time, seeking partners for links exchange with relevant websites can take weeks, and overall is not easy.

Today, I found a revolutionary tool — LinksManager Toolbar. Our sponsors from  linksmanager.com kindly provided me with an account so I had time to test it in real time and see all the advantages of this software.

What does it do? Basically it is a small toolbar, that saves you ALL the time and hassle, as you request link exchanges directly to your LinksManager Account from your browser window! No need to search miscellaneous forums for doubtful partners, let alone waste time seeking relevant websites. Since it’s “just” toolbar — it runs without slowing down your system (mine was not slowed down at all). Since everything s monitored, a special checker finds and flags dead links listed on your links pages and temporarily removes them until they become available again.

Search Engine Benefits: The best aspect of Editor Based LinksManager.com  is that the generated pages are static HTML and are W3C valid, with full CSS support. Fully conforms to the Robots Exclusion Standard (robots.txt) and, moreover, editor-based design makes it technically impossible to use LinksManager for spamming, email harvesting or auto-linking.

You can download a 30 days trial version of the toolbar and see for yourself how  incredibly useful LinksManager Link Exchange Toolbar is, no upfront payments or obligations required. If you decide to keep using it after the trial period is over, LinksManager will cost you $19.95 a month, or, alternatively — get one month free service for each user you refer. Managed to refer 12 users? You got one year free.

Platform Limitations: The Toolbar is currently only supported on Internet Explorer and FireFox, running Windows XP or 2000. Vista and Safari are not yet supported, so the minorities would have to wait a bit for now.
Bottom line, it’s a great innovation and I am sure soon will become a popular method for high quality links exchange. Anyone who is willing to invest minimum time in SEO and get maximum benefits and results should definitely consider  LinksManager Toolbar. You can even get help directly from your toolbar!

Finally, after 40% of internet users switched to Firefox, Alexa took the time to develop toolbar for Firefox. Download and install the toolbar HERE.

Okay, the tension is raising, some sites show a bouncing rank, others remain intact (yet) so here are some tools that will help you to pass the time.

PageRank Prediction

1. I Web Tool Great and most popular tool, yet sometimes shows that it cannot determine the rank due you too little backlinks - this is often a bug.
   
2. Rusty Brickm Not a very accurate tool, but better than nothing.
   
3. Page Rank Prediction Relatively new.

Full Data Centers Analyzer

1. Dig Page Rank Excellent tool.
2. I Web Tool Very good, yet not all the servers are listed
3. Services Seo Small list of all the essential DC’s.
4. My PageRank Net
5. SEO Logs
6. PR Checking Tool
7. Rank Alert

This should be enough for the time being, let’s not forget that the update can take place any day, or any hour now…

PageRank update is at the door, webmasters are hysterical, checking their PR across all the data centers every 5 minutes, sweating, nervous, shaking… Come on, don’t worry, everyone’s PageRank will get updated eventually, the problem is, not everyone’s is gong to be changed…

The best example of PageRank fever is currently going on Digital Point Forums. A thread about the Q3 PR updated already contains 1500 replies (!!!) while even the back links update did not come to an end, yet. I won’t be a hypocrite and say I am not waiting for it too, needless to say that like any webmaster who’s life depends on his blog I am also sweating, nervous and shaking, but let’s not forget that there is life after PageRank update because after 3 months it will get updated again.

This blog is not predicted to raise a PageRank, which is a shame because I worked hard on it, however, there is still time and maybe Google will surprise me, just like it did last time when my PR collapsed from 5 to 4. Maybe it’s about time G will give me back what’s mine. Some of my sites are predicted to double their PageRank, which I doubt, but let’s see, I don’t worry too much about it… *wipes the sweat drops offer her forehead*.