I had the good fortune of sitting in on Debra Mastaler's link building presentation at SES Chicago last week. Mastaler is commonly regarded as one of the primary thought leaders in link building. Her presentation didn't disappoint.

Ken Lyons (from WordStream) dropped in to guest post on the Trail this week. He is highlighting their new tools and how it can be used to create a system to manage link text diversity. Pretty cool actually.... Give it a read!

Whether you have a large or small link building budget, you must face challenges. Everyone struggles to get the rankings they want because SEO is competitive and link building is difficult work.

Hi Team, I’ve got something exciting to share with you about Market Samurai. We just released an improvement to the SEO Competition module that makes backlink anchor text analysis of web-pages that have a lot of back links much faster, and easier to complete.

The link building component of your SEO strategy can be the most important, as well as the most difficult and time consuming, task that you undertake.

Link marketing can be expensive -- especially in competitive fields. Let's look at how a business with a small budget can accomplish the task, and get good rankings.

When we think about getting links, typically the concept is quantity over quality. Granted, we often look at things like PageRank to see if the potential link has value in the eyes of Google. But we often don't look at the inherent value that a potential link might have.

Link building tends to be viewed as on off-page activity – you’re not messing with title tags or site architecture and you don’t actually have to touch the site itself or write new content. However, if all you are doing is building more inbound links to your site without doing any analysis of on-page factors, you’re selling the effort short. While it’s certainly not necessary to do much more than build inbound links, on page factors are definitely something that you should look into if you want to boost your overall link building effectiveness.