We are extremely excited to introduce the newest functionality from Lavalinx — Social Bookmarking Management and Exchange.

Now you can manage all your social bookmarking sites in one interface including knowing which of your pages you have bookmarked personally as well as getting other social bookmarking users to bookmark your pages.

What’s so great about Social Bookmarking?

1. Instant social traffic. A well written news article or blog post has the potential to drive massive traffic to your site. (I have had over 20,000 searches in a single day from both Digg and StumbleUpon!)
2. Hundreds of one-way links to your website in a short amount of time.  (Many of these are hard links, but even those that are not probably influence the rankings anyway.)
3. Backlinks appear very quickly in Search Engines.  Most links on regular pages often take weeks or months to be indexed.  We have seen a majority of our social backlinks get indexed within a couple days.

Why exchange Social Bookmarks?

1. More links.  If you bookmark a page in 10 of your favorite bookmarking sites, you get 10 links.  If you do 4 exchanges with other users that each have 10 bookmarking sites, you can get 40 links.
2. Different discoverers.  It is much more effective if all of the recommendations for your pages don’t come from you.

We recently rolled out a few major upgrades to LavaLinx that we’re really excited about. Here’s a few of the things that were added.

1.    External trade process

• Sending Domain: At the beginning of the external trade wizard we ask for the domain of the site that will be sending you a link. We also check to make sure the domain name is valid. The reasons why this is the first step in the external trade process is because
  1. if we already have that domain in our external trade database most of the link information for that domain will be populated in the link wizard automatically
  2. if you have already made a trade with that site, you can be made aware of this fact before you go through half of the linkwizard
• Form URL: Now when making an external trade you’ve probably noticed that we’ve added a few steps. We found that 30-40% of external link trades are made through an online form, so now you can store the form URL. This will make it easier to follow up on trades made through a form.
• Email Checker: Each email address added is checked to make sure it is a valid working email address.
• Tagging: At the end of the external trade wizard we’ve added tagging functionality for sending and receiving site pages. Tagging pages will help LavaLinx users to find the most relevant web pages in link trade scenarios.

2.    External sites – Every time an external trade is made, the site will be stored in a way that will allow you to use it in trades with your other sites more easily.

3.    External Trade Directory – Now has search functionality for finding the most relevant sites to trade with.

Here are other major projects that we have in the works

1.    Automated Trade Suggestions – Lavalinx itself will be able to propose trades to you that match the themes of sites and/or pages.  This functionality will serve a two-fold purpose:  1) it will allow link traders with no time to still be able to take advantage of the system, and 2) it will allow less savvy link traders to make the right types of trades without the struggle of learning all of the SEO rules before trading.

2.    Social Bookmark Management and Exchange – You will soon be able to do much more than simply bookmark your own pages or articles in a couple of your favorite social bookmarking sites. Cross your fingers, we may just revolutionize the SMO (social media optimization) industry.

As most webmasters have probably noticed, link building via link exchange is making a strong come back. I have a number of sites that are receiving link exchange requests almost every day now. I think SEO experts are seeing great value in diversifying their link portfolio, and link trades are making up a good portion of that portfolio.

I asked a couple of our best link traders if they’d share some advice on link building through link exchanges. These link builders are averaging a 25% conversion rate on link trades and are completing a boat load of links each month.

Aubrey’s advice

Aubrey cranked out 77 reciprocal and triangle link trades last month with a 25% conversion rate. All trades targeted industry-relevant websites.

On looking for trades:

1. Start at a relevant site and use their links pages to find partners. This is a lot easier than always looking through a search engine for people to link to, and it gives you quite a list.

2. Bookmark! If you find a site that has good resources, make sure you keep a note of that page. This way you don’t forget it if you wanted to trade with them or their partners. This works best if you keep different bookmark lists for each site that you own.

On trading:

1. Trade with a variety of websites. Sites that are related, sites that are slightly related, or even sites that aren’t related but are willing to link to you. As long as their sending page checks out good (indexed with no robots or nofollows, etc), there is no reason to pass up a link from an indexed page.

2. Don’t be afraid to ask for a trade other than a reciprocal. Even if they have a reciprocal form, sometimes a simple personal email will do the trick and you will both be able to benefit from a triangle or a parallel trade. The worst they can say is no, or, “I only accept reciprocals” , in which case it’s still a good deal.

3. Don’t be afraid to ask for a different page than the one that they put you link on. Gently explain your reasons, and let them know that you are giving them a quality page and that you would love to arrange the trade in a way that will benefit both partners equally.

4 Ask the webmaster if they have any additional sites they would like to trade with or include in a trade.

5 Ignore page rank for the most part. It’s still important, but it’s always changing. A webmaster may require for your site to have a certain page rank before they link back to you. Example: webmaster wants a PR 2 for a page that doesn’t have any page rank. Solution: Don’t back down from requesting the trade. Email them and let them know that since both partners pages are of good quality, a link back from your site will benefit them with or without having to have pagerank.

6 Pay attention to Cashed, Indexed, and make sure the site doesn’t have any robots blocking spiders from following your link. Also make sure you check for nofollows, noindex and frames. Remember, Pagerank is just the icing on the cake if it is present.

7 If your link is removed, email the webmaster and ask why. You never know, they could have had their site hacked or had a crash where all the links got taken down.

On being a nice link partner:

1. Watch the way you word things so they don’t come across rude. Always be polite!

2. Don’t let your link be “out of sight, out of mind”. Reply to emails in a timely manner. The person on the other end will appreciate knowing that they are important to you, and if you are good at a fast reply you have a better chance of getting the link accepted.

3. Learn to be good at accepting criticism of your site or methods of trading. If someone emails you about exchanging links and they are rude, just either don’t email them back or email them and kindly thank them for their consideration and let them know that you will trade with them in the future if they are ever interested.

Margo’s advice

Margo completed a whopping 143 reciprocal, triangle and parallel link trades last month. She had a 41% conversion rate on on reciprocal trades and 25% on triangles.

Having a tool like LavaLinx to simply cut and paste makes it very easy and saves a lot of time.

Having dynamic sending pages also makes it easy, because I can create a trade and immediately submit it! I know the link is on the page and the trade partner can see their link is up ! I don’t have to keep some kind of list to go back and check with partner b to see if their link has been installed yet, so I can finally ask for a link exchange.

Always respond politely, and usually briefly, to webmasters seeking link partners if you want to keep their business. You never know who may have more sites to trade with, and they will offer them if they like working with you and they like the way their link looks on your pages.

Follow their lead in emails-if they are super friendly, be friendly back, if they are more formal, follow suit.

Check any possible site-some stick within their own specialty, but many have specific pages dedicated to other subjects of interest to their customers.

Marci’s advice

Marci completed 113 reciprocal, triangle and parallel link exchanges last month. She had a 40% conversion rate on reciprocals and 20% on triangle and parallel trades. All trades were made with relevant websites with SEO value.

Marci has also begun work on her own website card customize, and looks forward to success on that site.

Advice for link trading:

1. Everytime you come across a potential link partner, check the cheating tactics (robots.txt, nofollows, noindex, iframe, frameset) and check to make sure the page is indexed in Google before proposing a link exchange.
2. Keep URL’s as bookmarks of previous link partners, then go to their partners’ sites and ask for exchanges with them as well.
3. Any follow-up email with the webmaster or link manager, try to use proper vocabulary and make sure to be nice, even if they weren’t very nice to begin with.
4. Try to be honest and up-front with anyone you’re doing a link trade with (example: letting them know your company is honest and will never try to cheat them out of the exchange).
5. Thank them for their time and consideration.
6. If they don’t understand something, take the time to write it out to help explain things better, and ask if they still feel confused.
7. Try to place their link on a relevant page within your site (we’ve had great success lately within our blog posts) so they will have the best benefit out of the exchange as well.

LavaLinx will no longer be providing Page Rank as part of its trading functionality. We feel that Google’s ability to give a quality score to a web page has diminished to the point that it is no longer of value to our users. Although there are still a fair number of webmasters that look to Page Rank as a measurement of a valuing a web page, we decided that supporting a flawed system is not in the best interest of webmasters seeking successful link trading. Successful link trading should be focused on a cached, content page that is relevant and user-friendly.

We are looking into other services that determine the value of a web page and will implement one that best serves this purpose.

If you want your link trade efforts to really work well, stop putting your links in links pages and link directories. Why? Because search engines are making an obvious effort to devalue lists of outbound links on pages. This may stem in part from the search engines crack down on paid links, but they may also be looking for aggressive link traders as well.

LavaLinx does not create link pages or link directories. What we recommend is that our users use content pages and blog posts as Sending Pages. We then recommend that only relevant outbound links are placed on each page. This creates a scenario that is good for the user. They can read whatever the post or content page is about and then be able to visit sites relevant to that content. Google’s Adsense works on the same principal.

Ok, so what is a Sending Page?

A Sending Page is any page that points links to another site. In LavaLinx you can tag as many pages as you want as Sending Pages. As recommended above, Sending pages should be content pages or blog posts. We currently are working towards a plugin for Wordpress that will dynamically create a Sending Page each time a post is selected for such.



Sending Pages can be either static or dynamic.



Dynamic sending pages

These pages require a small snippet of code to be placed on each sending page. It also requires one file to be placed in the root area of your site. It currenly only works on PHP pages, but will soon be available in other formats. The code is generated server side and we purposely left any comment tags off so there are no patterns left for search engines to see.

The great advantage of setting up dynamic sending pages is that whenever you make a link trade, with any site in the internal network, the link of the site you’re trading with is automatically placed on your sending page. This means that link trading will be just making decisions not messing with html or FTP.

Static sending pages

Some site may not have PHP, or the webmaster may choose to have static pages. This just means that when link trades are made the webmaster will need to update his sending pages manually.

Ok, so what is a Receiving Page?

Receiving Pages in LavaLinx are pages that links are pointed to. The most common Receiving Page would be a site’s home page. With LavaLinx you can have as many Receiving Pages as you want. They don’t have to be home pages. This will allow you to get a number of links pointing to pages deep in your site. You can also have as many different keywords point to the same Receiving Page as you want. Doing this is important because it allows you to optimize for multiple targeted keywords, it makes your backlinks appear more diverse and it gives you control over the copy surrounding those links.

For instance let’s say I have a design site and I’m going after design keywords. I may set up my Receiving pages like this:

Receiving Page 1: URL: www.example-design-site.com

Link Description: We provide the best logo design on the internet.

Receiving Page 2: URL: www.example-design-site.com

Link Description: We are so confident with our web design services that we provide a 100% money-back guarantee on all design work.

Receiving Page 3: URL www.example-design-site.com/design-blog/

Link Description: Are you looking for design advice? Visit our design blog for advice, tips and how tos.

Notice that all link descriptions are contextually placed links. We recommend contextually placed links on all link trades.

Old-school link trading methods are not going to cut it moving forward in SEO. If you want to see a dramatic increase in your rankings, for your link trading efforts, incorporate the methods above.