The last few days, I've been spending a little time researching the ins and outs of the AdAge Power 150 blog rankings. If you don't know (and you should), the Power 150 is a ranking of the top English-language blogs in the world. It was developed by Todd Andrlik and currently ranks hundreds of blogs written about everything related to marketing and PR.

Increasing the number of quality backlinks to your website can be one of the most impactful and difficult tasks of a sound SEO strategy.

What's a Backlink?

A backlink is traditionally defined as another website that links to your own. At their most basic level, a quality backlink acts as a vote of confidence for your website. The more votes you have, the better you rank!

If a directory is human edited, which most all paid ones are, as well as DMOZ, the editor will typically just change it to your business name. Yes, it's annoying to them, but you are always going to face that opposition. It's good for your site, but there is a time and place for it.

Twitter is great for social networking, learning, and a host of other uses. But few know about its potential (yes, it's minor) for generating backlinks for your website. Here's how you can do it.

Site directories are much like traditional business directories except for hyperlinks. They can include links to commercial, informational, educational institutions, and non-profit websites. The links are categorized into different high level taxonomy and then taken to the most specific description of the website. The Yahoo! Directory and Open Directory Project , Dmoz.org were two of the earliest lists of links which turned into a basses for many search engines' results.

Other examples include: Business.com, Joeant.com, Best of the Web (BOTW.org), Sevenseek.com

Despite many objections, Google Page Rank is an inescapable metric in the online community. Two forms of Page Rank exist online: what Google lets you see in the Google Page Rank Toolbar and what your Page Rank actually is in the Google servers. The Google Toolbar PR is seen by many on the Internet as a be-all and end-all in gauging the credibility of a particular site.

Everybody's got to have a gimmick, a shtick. Pizza Hut has the cheese crust, car dealerships throw in the key chain, and in the online marketing and seo industry, one of these gimmicks is the free marketing tools offered by websites that guarantee to yield results for the marketing team lucky enough to find them first. Over the past year, many sites and marketing tools have been used and discarded, however a few gems have managed to woo us into regular usage.

Overall Website Measurement:

A recently popular sales training book called No More Cold Calling™, by Joanne Black, has reopened the idea of sales without cold calling. As eluded by the title, the book offers tips and alternatives to avoid being that no name person calling and asking for someone’s business without some type of connection.

I imagine blog owners feel the same way about receiving new comments with links from strangers as business owners on the receiving end of a cold call. I call them cold comments. Below are some similarities between cold calling & cold commenting.