Mark Faggiano

Website consultant who loves helping others build online companies. Sold @beelya & @filelater. Working on my next cash machine: @taxjar. Crazy about golf & sports. Connect with me on Google+

A Few Things We All Can Learn From The Top Link Building Sites

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Last week Majestic SEO posted a really cool table that you probably didn’t see unless you regularly read a lot of SEO blogs. The table is made up of the Top 200 domains ranked by referring domains. (Majestic, by the way, is one of my favorite SEO tools.)

For those of you unfamiliar with SEO fundamentals or the basics of  search engine optimization, this table lists the websites from around the world that have the most unique domains linking back to their site. So, for example, let’s say your website has a two websites linking to it. One of them is WebsiteA.com and the other is BWebsites.com. That would mean your site has 2 referring domains. Not to mention a lot of work to do to get on Majestic’s next list!

For me – an Internet Marketing consultant who helps companies get more links through content strategies – here are five interesting tidbits I noticed while perusing the list:

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Startup Lessons: Guard Your Equity and Make Every Day Productive

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Here’s the latest installment of our Q&A Series – short interviews with talented, experienced, and successful entrepreneurs who are on the front lines of running online businesses.

My guest is Curt Dalton, founder of the new search engine NowRelevant.com – yeah that’s right. I said new search engine. I had a chance to chat with Curt this week. He had a lot of great insight’s about the entrepreneurial game and the search business. He’s got an interesting idea.

This interview is super interesting because of the industry involved – one that’s obviously occupied by giants that we’ve all heard of. Here’s our discussion:

B5: Before we get into your new venture, tell me about being an entrepreneur.
For me it has always been about how you think about a problem and how you look to solve it.  I have always been the “I can create a better mouse trap” type thinker.  So, you will strike out some, but you if you stick with it and be persistent you will find success on a project sooner or later.

new search engine

B5: So tell me about NowRelevant.com.
NowRelevant.com is a new search engine that shows you everything about a subject, but just for the last two weeks. We want to give users relevant information on topics without having to sift through 55 million results that date back to the beginning of time. We’re able to remove spam and SEO dummy sites from the users results as well.

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Worst Internet Marketing Strategy: Claiming Victory

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internet marketing strategyOne of the common questions I get asked about Internet Marketing strategy is about how long of a commitment it takes for a website to perform well in search. What I’ve found is that the person is really asking if they can put in a few months of work towards improving their search positioning and then reap the benefits.

When I hear that question, I often think about a quote from Hall-of-Fame basketball star Larry Bird.

Don’t laugh. Hear me out.

Someone asked #33 why he works so hard (in case you didn’t know, the guy was renowned for his work ethic). His response went something like this,

“I work so hard because I know that there’s always someone better than me out there working even harder than I am.”

Before you get mad at me for attributing the quote to Larry Legend because you think someone else said it, forget it. This child of the 80’s remembers it coming from one of my boyhood heroes. It certainly didn’t come from Magic Johnson.

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Annoying Vuvuzela – Proving the Randomness of Viral

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vuvuzelaI’d be willing to bet that 99% of people who have watched more than 1 minute of World Cup coverage on TV has asked a question similar to this:

“What the heck is that noise?”

Inevitably people find the answer. Either they call their buddy to find out if their TV is also making a strange humming noise that sounds like 1 million bumble bees or they head to the search engines and Twitter and figure out it’s the sound of tens of thousands of crazed soccer fans all playing the vuvuzela all at once – non stop for a 90-minute soccer game.

The obligatory follow-up question everyone asks:

“What the heck is a vuvuzela?”

Here’s the wikipedia definition:
The vuvuzela (English pronunciation: /vuːvuːˈzeɪlə/) , sometimes called a “lepatata” (its Setswana name) or a stadium horn, is a blowing horn approximately 1 m (3 ft 3 in) in length. It is commonly blown by fans at football matches in South Africa. The instrument requires some lip and lung strength to blow and emits a loud monotone.

So what does all of this have to do with Internet Marketing?

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