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The Link Building Cookbook was made to be the internet’s most popular free link building strategy guide, and I would say it has achieved that status long ago.

In doing so, I am proud to announce the first user-submitted link building tip from a reader of mine named Ben, who owns and operates a site called EveryCall.us.

The site Ben offered me to share with you is called AmericanTowns.com. Rather than explaining it myself, I will partially quote Ben’s email (with a few minor spelling edits to the quote).

[…] it’s a website which has local sites for each city. I’ve used this website in the past to announce site launches, new features, [and it has] driven quite a bit of traffic for my efforts.

What interests me most though is that you can write an announcement or press release and then use the American Towns Press Services to have them send your story or release to local news outlets to possibly get picked up. This lead to an enormous amount of press for a past project [Postacrime.com/press] and eventually a 5 minute interview on Fox News […] Not to mention your stories on American Towns will generate backlinks and some traffic…

In my opinion, this is an excellent tip because of how detailed AmericanTowns is. The site will not only help you build backlinks for any posts you might write, but it also has the potential of sending you targeted LOCAL traffic, as well as the possibility of local offline exposure. Just taking a quick glance at their site, and by navigating to my city it looks like they are looking for anyone who blogs in the city and they get a free link, so head on over to your city and see if the writers are doing anything similar.

AmericanTowns just received a $3.3 million dollar investment, so you can assume they are here to stay.

AmericanTowns looks like a great free way to promote your website, so head on over there and enjoy Ben’s free website marketing strategy. If you are looking to learn more about AmericanTowns, you can read their about page. If you have a lot of luck with them, be sure to give me an update as I would love to see how AmericanTowns has helped your site.

Aside from hitting the 6 month blogging mark, Google has finally given my blog sitelinks for my blog’s name: Mixed Market Arts.

While this may seem like a lame reason to post because there is nothing special about ranking for your website’s name, but it is a little more than that. Sitelinks are an automated feature of Google’s algorithm that gives a website an authority status for a specified keyword. This means that unless I do something extremely stupid, there is no reason I should ever stop ranking for that name. This also means that Google is now giving my domain, with my newly acquired pagerank 5, a good amount of trust in the eyes of the search engine, which should be later reflected across every page of the site. In simple terms, sitelinks are basically Google reminding you that you are slowly but surely growing into a ranking powerhouse, and that there is no denying that you are the only one who should rank for that term.

So now that I am an “authority listing” for Mixed Market Arts keyword, I will move onto “MixedMarketArts” and then later “Collin LaHay,” and ultimately, “Website Marketing Strategies.”

I just wanted to make a quick post thanking Geoff for writing a “free paid review” of my blog through a program he calls Reviewu. You can read his review here.

To follow up with that, I wanted to let you know that a few days ago my friend Richard over at the Link Building Bible Blog made a post about getting free backlinks from free reviews which is definitely worth the read, however I believe that CantGetRich.com should be added to the list.

I recommend reading Richards post, as well as taking a look at CantGetRich.com and especially his ReviewU section. For a blog with 162 RSS readers that is offering anyone free links and promotion, you would be stupid not to take up that offer.

Due to the nature of these posts, it may take awhile before Geoff gets around to reviewing you, but like people always say, you get what you pay for!

It is sort of embarrassing to admit, but for whatever reasons Google may have, they were ranking my LinkedIn.com profile #1 in google for a “Collin LaHay” search. For those of you who don’t know yet, Collin LaHay is my name.

It seemed odd that I had received a pagerank 5 and having an extreme amount of trust on my domain, that Google wouldn’t think I should rank the top result for my own name. It just goes to show that you should register your name, as well as your companies, and possibly even your competitors as users on many of the web2.0 websites because they are growing so fast and the search engines give them so much authority.

My LinkedIn profile had only 41 backlinks to it, while my blog has over 10,000, yet Google still considered it to be the most trustful result for my search.

Since it was my account, I was not too worried about it, but the thought that worried me was what if someone else registered the LinkedIn name “Collin LaHay” and was using the profile to make me look bad? Since LinkedIn.com doesn’t know who you are, you could potentially register some honest persons name and have a bunch of racist URL’s as your homepage, and Google would think that since the page was on LinkedIn.com, it should rank really high. Can you imagine what kind of annoyance this would be?

Well, thankfully my blog now ranks #1 for my name, but the lesson that YOU ALL should take out of this is to register your name on any big social media website that you can think of, even if you are not planning on using the website. You will thank me 6 months down the road before a competitor grabs your name and tries to blackmail you or make you look bad… A 30 minute fix now can save your reputation (or that of the businesses you are affiliated with) down the road.

Has anyone had any bad experiences like this one? It would be a very lame thing to do, but I know there are people out there who have tried it.