This week’s hot news, events and videos from the online marketing and social media world.

From the Position² Blog This Week: Harry Potter Finale Stirs Up Social Media Magic. Ten years after the first Harry Potter film, the final installment of the series, “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2″ was released last week. Read on for the Position² Brand Monitor team’s analysis of the social media promotions preceding this film’s launch, and the buzz around it post launch.

Comeback: How Domino’s Used Social Media And A New Pizza Recipe To Completely Reinvent Itself. 5 Steps to Take Today: Using Social Media for New Business Development. Accident: Microsoft to Launch New Social Network Called Tulalip Via Socl.com. Exclusive: Inside Anon+, The World’s First Anonymous Social Network. LinkedIn CEO: We Don’t Have Time For Google+ How Google Makes Its Billions: The 20 Most Expensive AdWords Keyword Categories. .co Fever: Google Buys G.Co To Create An Official URL Shortcut For Google Products. Stats: Mobile Now 12 Percent Of All Paid Search Impressions. Tips: Eight Tools And Techniques To Boost Your Link Building Efforts. The Future: Google Looks for the Next Google.

Video of the Week Hot Trends in Social Media: Globalization and Real Time. Steve Rubel, EVP/Global Strategy and Insights at Edelman Digital reviews the biggest changes in social media over the past 12 months. He also shares the latest social media trends and gives tips on what businesses should focus on in the future.

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Link building is a process of placing your text link on highly relevant and related websites or directories. Link building is one of the most important activity that should always be a part of your SEO strategy. Link building usually requires ample amount of time and dedication.

Building links can enhance your page rank. It can also improve the number of new visitors coming to your website. Link building, if done meticulously, can help your site rank high on major search engines.

Below are 5 tips for placing text links on free directories and websites:

1. Identify free directories or websites with high Page Rank. Ensure these directories or sites are high quality sites and are relevant to your industry.
2. Choose the relevant category where you would want to place your text link. For example: If your website is about internet marketing products, you can choose Business >Advertising & Marketing> Internet Marketing. Many directories offer 2-3 levels of subcategories; make sure you choose the closest category which is relevant to your website.
3. Post appropriate Titles, Descriptions, Meta keywords and URL of your site. Do not exceed the number or the character limit provided by the site.
4. While doing the submissions, make sure you vary your titles and descriptions. Using the same title and descriptions across different directories would create duplicated content and may have a detrimental impact on your ranks.
5. Always provide valid information about your company, email id or address. The email id’s should preferably be domain name email id’s. Make sure you provide active email ids during your submissions.

As you complete your link building submissions, check your email account used for link submission. Ensure that all the emails are validated and monitor if these links are active or inactive on a regular basis. These basic activities need to be included in your link building campaign. However we will be discussing more useful link building techniques and strategies in our next posts.

Contributed by Asha Krishnan

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Link building is a process of increasing the number of links pointing to your site from other sites on the Web. Building links is one of the most important factors in getting top placements on the major search engines.

There are three primary reasons to build links;

1. Direct Click-Through Traffic
2. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and
3. Help save advertising costs

The goal of most search engine optimization and social media marketing campaigns is to build traffic and higher rankings. Link building can be done in many ways, it is difficult and time intensive but when done properly it is worth the effort.

Most effective ways of link building:

1. News and Article Syndication
2. Directories & Social Bookmarking
3. Q&A sites
4. Forums and discussion centers.
5. Blogs and blog commenting.

There are many other ways of increasing links like Advertisements, Giveaways and Conferences & Social Interactions. All these processes take time and can lead to spam if not done properly. Link dropping has to be done carefully in a relevant, good site and should have content similar to your site.

Contributed by Ganesh Vel

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