Lavalinx rolled out a major upgrade this week, making it easier than ever to get relevant one way links for your site or blog.

Here are a few of the major upgrades:

1. The whole front-end website was redesigned with a more bold look-and-feel that covered a number of important usability issues. Now whether you represent an SEO agency, or if you just have a personal blog there’s an easy to follow path to signup. In fact, we have signup calls-to-action all over the website, so there shouldn’t be any problems signing up for an account.
2. The core functionality in Lavalinx for advanced link trading and social bookmark management and exchange has been an extremely effective SEO tool for those that got their sites set up properly. However, getting a site setup properly has been a challenge. We spent the last couple months developing a setup wizard that makes it easier than ever to get your site set up for advanced link trading and social bookmark exchange.
3. We’ve added an Automated Trade Suggestion tool that makes finding relevant link partners easier than ever. Why? Because our comprehensive algorithm does it for you. Based on tagged pages we can find the most relevant reciprocal, triangle and parallel link trades. Just keep your pages tagged properly and we’ll keep finding the most relevant trade scenarios.
4. We’ve totally revamped the way social bookmarking accounts are managed making it a simple process to setup and manage your accounts. We’ve also differentiated between social bookmarking sites that can be used in trades, and ones that can be used for private or personal bookmarking.
5. We are now offering a Wordpress plugin that will “talk” to Lavalinx allowing bloggers to more easily manage Receiving and Sending pages and Social bookmark pages.
6. We fixed a number of bugs and made a number of smaller improvements

We are constantly looking at ways to improve and innovate the link building process. We appreciate your feedback.

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.

Some of the topics covered in this podcast are listed below.

A few link trading basics

1. Search Engines rank pages not websites.
2. Relevant link trading does work and will always work because it’s good for your users.
3. You may not have control over who links to you, but you do have control over who you link to. Let’s face it when you place links on your site to other sites you are recommending these sites. Make sure you place them on a relevant page and make sure they are worthy of linking to. I think that Search engines do take into account who you link to and that your site will gain authority by linking to sites the help the user.
4. Avoid placing links in big lists on a links pages, or making a “links” directory.
5. Don’t try and cheat on links. The experienced SEO will see it in a second, drop your link and keep you from trading with all the sites that they are working on. So you’ll lose way more than you’d ever gain.
6. You can also trade image ads and use alt tags to diversify your backlink portfolio.

Emailing link trade requests

1. Send personalized emails. If you can find a name use it. You can also include their domain in the subject line.
2. It is a common courtesy to place their link on your site first, although I’m seeing less and less of this.
3. Don’t send emails that say you’ve just deleted their link or something like that when you’ve never really traded with them. With Lavalinx I know all the sites that I’ve traded with and I can easily search them. Yes this method gets my attention, but then it just annoys me when I find out that I’ve never traded with them and they’re just using it as a hook to get a better open rate.

Pages that links are placed on

1. Ideally you’ll want your link on a content page or blog post with your links placed contextually within relevant content.
2. The page needs to be indexed and cached in Google.
3. Don’t worry about Page Rank. Too many webmaster get caught in this trap.
4. The page should be related to the page on your site that the link is pointed to.
5. Make sure no link cheating methods are being used, for instance:

a. nofollows in links or in the meta tags
b. javascript links or redirects
c. links in frames
d. links in iframes
e. robots.txt disallowing the page your link is placed on.
f. Some pages even with Page Rank may not be indexed.

Your anchor and link description

1. In your anchor text use the keywords that user would use to search for your service or products in the search engines.
2. If possible, place your anchor text contextually within your description
3. Diversify your anchor text backlinks. For example if your site is about online education use online education, online degrees, online classes, online schools etc in your anchor text
4. have your links point to more than your homepage. Remember Search Engines rank pages not websites.

Adam Sorensen talks about a few of the benefits of using LavaLinx.

This podcast contains a simple overview of LavaLinx and touches upon the following:

• A brief overview of Adam’s SEO background
• Why LavaLinx was built
• Receiving Pages
• Sending Pages
• Reciprocal, Triangle and Parallel link trades
• Manually reviewing LavaLinx site submissions
• LavaLinx’ pending patent

We are pleased to announce the new LavaLinx seo and link trading blog. We’d like this blog to be a great resource for link trading tips, advice and instructions on how to be successful in link trading. We will be posting podcasts that will cover LavaLinx’ core features and cover the most effective ways to build links.