Don’t Write Off Reciprocal Links

• February
• 28

A common question these days is the issue of the effectiveness of reciprocal links. People have often made compelling arguments for both sides. Here’s my take.

Recips Work

I think reciprocal links never really stopped working, it’s just that Google got better at detecting relevancy. Before it seemed like Google used to count all recips regardless of whether or not the two sites were relevant, but now far fewer are passing juice. Recips from pages that have a high probability of being unrelated, and who reciprocate with plenty of other unrelated sites more than likely had their links discounted. But there were still some recips that counted between pages that were on the same topic. I think Google is too advanced to discount or give credit for all recips, and still give the same amount of credit for links between two sites in similar categories, regardless of whether or not they’re reciprocated.

This is often why you look at some competitors sites and conclude that all they really have going for them is links on other sites links pages, and they’re still ranking real well in the search engines. Although lots of those links may not count since they’re from old school unrelated sites like mentioned above, there are still likely more than a few that are from sites that only linked out to sites within the niche and who are passing the majority of the overall link juice.

How to Find the Juicy Sites

In order to make it easier to figure out which of the reciprocal links might be the few that are passing juice, you can run some queries in Yahoo utilizing the linkdomain command. The first query I would do is something like: linkdomain:competitorssite.com intitle:”key phrase”. If a site has the keyword phrase you’re targeting in the page title, it is a decent relevancy signal and the page is worth examining. If there are links only to related sites on that page, then it is a link worth getting, and you should have no qualms about linking out to that page from your own site.

Manufacturing Authoritative Links

• February
• 27

What is an authoritative link source?

In my opinion, a good answer to this question can be found by reviewing what a Google engineer has written on this topic. Krishna Bharat (Google Engineer) and George A. Mihaila wrote a paper called “Hilltop: A Search Engine based on Expert Documents” in which they

“..propose a novel ranking scheme for broad queries that places the most authoritative pages on the query topic at the top of the ranking. Our algorithm operates on a special index of “expert documents.” These are a subset of the pages on the WWW identified as directories of links to non-affiliated sources on specific topics.”

The gist of the Hilltop paper is that a site that has many links from category specific hub pages that match the user query will be more relevant. This is really not much different than what consider as hub and authority pages today. However one thing that often gets overlooked is the part about how the hub pages (‘expert documents’ as they’re referenced in the paper) are scored. The only parts of the hub pages that get indexed, and consequently are used to compute relevancy, are the page titles, the headings, and the anchor text:

“..we only index text contained within “key phrases” of the expert. A key phrase is a piece of text that qualifies one or more URLs in the page. Every key phrase has a scope within the document text. URLs located within the scope of a phrase are said to be “qualified” by it. For example, the title, headings (e.g., text within a pair of H1 & /H1 tags and anchor text within the expert page are considered key phrases. The title has a scope that qualifies all URLs in the document. A heading’s scope qualifies all URLs until the next heading of the same or greater importance. An anchor’s scope only extends over the URL it is associated with.”

I believe this is one of the primary ways that Google determines the relevancy of a link. The amount of relevance given to a link can be based on how the URL is ‘qualified’. If the page title, headings, and anchor text are all relevant (but make sure they’re not identical to avoid tripping over optimization filters) to the user query, there is a very high percentage chance that the linked URL is also relevant, more so than if some of those relevance signals were not there.

How Can I Use This?

This is something that can be utilized when building links. Obviously, this further validates (if you believe Google has implemented elements of the Hilltop algorithm, which I think they have) the enormous impact that a presell page can have on rankings. Other ways to use this information are if you are syndicating content that has links to some of your other pages, try to use variations of your keywords in “key phrases” throughout the page as often as possible without sounding unnatural. If you are buying links, shame on you! But while you’re at it, see if you can pay extra to have the page title changed, or see if you can provide the text surrounding the link instead of having them write it for you, and see if you can include an h2 tag or something above your link with some keywords.

Think Like a Search Engine

As a link builder, I think it’s important to have a general idea of what the search engines are trying to achieve. The more you learn will allow you to get more benefit out of your links. By having a general idea of what the engines are trying to accomplish plus what data they have access to (just about everything) and may use to compute relevancy, you can make educated guesses as to what may work well and what will not, and how to utilize keywords throughout the page.

The most direct way to cultivate this train of thought in my opinion is to read research papers and patent applications. I admittedly suck at math but I am still able to understand the general idea of most research papers and patent applications. Some of the other papers are more complex, but I don’t think I’ve come across one where I couldn’t grasp the overall concept. And if I can do it, anybody can. Bill Slawski’s blog is a great resource for this type of info and should be read by anyone who is interested in learning more of what the search engines are trying to accomplish.

Your Competitors CAN Hurt You … Here’s How.

• February
• 25

It’s often said that there’s nothing that your competitors can do to your site that would get it penalized or in trouble with the search engines. While this may be true for a mature site, it doesn’t hold for new sites.

First Impressions Are Crucial

New sites have little history in the search engines and your early link profile says a lot about what type of site you have and what neighborhood your site belongs to. As in real life, you never get a second chance to make a first impression, so those first few links go a very long way towards letting the engines know how your site fits into the overall web graph. This is why links from large authoritative general directories (Yahoo, Best of the Web, DMOZ) and quality niche, topical directories are quality links for new sites as they allow the engines to classify your site.

Now imagine a site which is brand spankin new that also has no history with the engines. They know nothing about it besides what they can infer from on-page data (which isn’t enough to rank your site in the majority of markets), but beyond that don’t really know what the site is about. This webmaster, instead of paying to get reviewed and admitted into the quality general directories listed above, decided to go the quick and dirty route of getting 1000 directory submissions for $0.99, or whatever the hot, spammy directory deal of the day may be. In the eyes of the search engines, this new site now has 1000 links all coming from places that have a very high probability of being spam. This is not good. It will make it harder to rank for your core terms and you will need even more quality links to offset the Spamage (spam + damage = Spamage) that has already been done.

Spammy Links and Spammy People

Why does this happen? It’s really no different than the real world. Think about a situation where you just met somebody for the first time. First impressions are huge. Because you have had no interaction with this person before, your first impression of the person will be entirely based on that one interaction. If that interaction sucks (search engine spider lingo: is spammy), you are not going to like that person, whether or not it is an accurate representation of who the person really is (ie the quality of their content).

This could be how search engines also view your site. If your first links are from sites that have been marked by the engines as likely to be low quality spam, the search engines are not going to want to rank you, regardless of the quality of your on page content. Ideally if the content is good, you will attract links from the right places over time and you will rank, but that’s a different story for a different post.

Another Benefit of Aged Sites

The reason this doesn’t pertain to an aged mature site is that the engines have plenty of signals regarding what the site is about and where it lies in the grand scheme of things. Aged sites have had a longer period to acquire links and for those links to age. Adding 1000 low quality directory links to a 6 year old site with 30,000 backlinks and 800 .edus is a lot less risky than adding them to a brand new sites with no link profile.

Using the above information, I’m sure you can figure out how a competitor can get a newb site started on the wrong foot and make it hard for it to rank. I do believe that karma will come back to bite you in the ass if you did go out of your way to do this to a competitor, but it’s something to be aware of so that people understand just how important those foundational links can be to the overall well being of your site.

Long Term Costs of Poor Content

• February
• 20

Being about three weeks deep into my role as Chief Link Maestro at Elixir Systems, I have quickly learned why content is considered king. I’d dabbled in link building previously but had never really taken the reins and planned a link building campaign from scratch. Previously it had always been as a compliment to the SEO that was already in place. I’d see which terms needed a boost and figure out how to get some links. It’s not that I didn’t already know that content was king, I just wasn’t 100% on board with the slogan.

Lack of Quality Content is Expensive

Lacking linkable content is expensive and will make it increasingly difficult to compete. The site that is churning out great content and is continually getting links from all different parts of the web will be top of mind and top of search results. In order to stay competitive those that fail to do so will be forced to buy and/or rent links until they can figure out how to naturally attract links. Making an initial investment in quality unique content that people naturally want to link at will save you money on rented links and time in the future. Good content attracts links over time. A small investment (of time and/or capital) can yield many links today and will always be able to attract links in the future.

Secondary Cost of Buying/Renting Links

Bought or rented links rarely yield additional links as they are purchased mostly for ranking purposes, not traffic generation. Once the contract is up, the links are gone and possibly the rankings go with it. The most costly factor is the advantage that your competitors are growing by producing and syndicating quality content that attracts visitors and links. They’re building brand awareness and gaining traffic, two things that are very difficult to accomplish by purchasing and/or renting links.

Canonicalization issues are quickly becoming a thing of the past

• February
• 12

In the recent interview of Adam Lasnik by Eric Enge, it was noted that Google has become pretty efficient at determining the intended versions of web pages. By submitting a .xml sitemap to Google with your intended version of the site, you can minimize the chance that Google will get this wrong.

“There is one other tip here though that can also help Webmasters that have this particular problem. That is to submit an XML sitemap using our webmaster tools, because what we’ve been doing increasingly is taking a look at the URLs that are submitted on that sitemap, and using that as a canonicalization hint. So, if we are uncertain whether we should be using the, just site.com, or site.com/index.html, but, you list site.com and not site.com/index.html in your sitemap; we are going to be more apt to go with that.”

More surprising is how Google attributes all link juice to the proper version of the page, even if sites link to other versions internally or externally.

“When we canonicalize stuff on our end, we also combine PageRank. So, if we see that people are linking to the exact same resource in three different ways, again thankfully in the majority of cases that I have seen, we are able to not only know that’s the same page, we are also able to take the different links, the different URLs that are linking there, and combine that PageRank so that it gets the total PageRank from those links, and it’s not separated out.”

Waiting For Your Cat To Bark

• January
• 22

I just finished reading Waiting for Your Cat to Bark?: Persuading Customers When They Ignore Marketing by the folks over at Grokdotcom and must say I came away impressed, but more importantly much more knowledgeable about how the customer buying process and selling cycle interact.

My key takeaways from this book were:

• Customers behave more like cats since they now have the ability to control the interactions that they have with your brand.
• Due to consumer generated media and the rise of social networks, what your brand does is significantly more important than what your brand says
• The goal of the sales process is to minimize friction throughout the buying cycle.
  • This is directly correlated with how much confidence the consumers have in your site.
• Customers will voluntarily engage with with your sales process as long as it provides relevant answers to their questions.
• Buying cycle begins once the customer has identified a problem that needs to be solved. These early stages are when you can have the greatest impression
• For every sale there are micro sales, which are won each time a customer clicks through or advances in the process
• 3 Primary Questions of any conversion process
  1. Who are we trying to persuade?
  2. What do we want them to do?
  3. What do they need?
• Relevance is critical and must be present at every touchpoint.
• Customers interact with brands, not channels, which is why cross channel customer experience needs to be on point.
• Figuring out how to increase conversion rates of a channel is more valuable than pushing more traffic to the channel
• People want personalized experiences, but aren’t willing to sacrifice their personal data necessary.
• Using ‘personas’ allows you to simulate the buying process of a typical segment of your audience
• Engagement as a metric is faulty. It is a means, not an end, and just because people engage something doesn’t mean they’ll advance to the next step.
• Benefits are based on people, features are based on things. If there’s a feature, there’s a benefit, and by identifying benefits you appeal to customers emotions.
• Key question to ask is, “Who are your prospects and what kind of questions are they asking to make them feel more comfortable about buying?”

This does not even begin to go into the level of detail as the book, as it discusses in much more depth how to create personas and guiding them through the conversion process.

For more information about creating personas, check out Creating Personas 101.

Customer Seduction Process

• January
• 14

The level of intimacy you can establish with a prospect is directly proportional to where they are in the buying cycle.

This is something to keep in mind when planning information architecture and keyword research. Virgin prospects that are just starting out researching a product or service will be looking at broad level terms with that will likely be featured on the higher level pages of your site. It would be inappropriate at this point to get into all the juicy product or service details before the prospect is comfortable heading in that direction. For those of you that saw The Pickup Artist on VH1, this is akin to entering into the intimacy stage before establishing comfort. If you go too quickly and jump straight into seduction, you will likely get a slap in the face, and a prospect will be lost.

Hopefully your initial higher level content is attractive and can entice a click through or two. Now you get into the steamy details. On these pages you’re targeting long tail terms and it’s ok to get into juicy product details and customization options since you’ve already been through the comfort phase and it’s not out of line to start the seduction process. A little on chit-chat about what others felt about the product and how it’s going to make the customer feel after purchase is fine here.

If all is well at this point, the final step is sealing the deal. The prospect has been attracted and seduced by your content, now it’s time to close the deal. They have given you permission to go all the way, no reason to keep trying to seduce. It is imperative that you don’t give the prospect any reason to have last minute resistance. Make sure the check out process is quick and painless without unnecessary forms or any other BS.

If all of this is done well, you can sit back and add another notch in the bedpost sale to the cash register.

Are you aware of your customer interactions?

• January
• 12

Marketers go to great lengths before creating an ad campaign or other actions that are going to serve as a point of interaction with prospects. While this is obviously time well spent, marketers should be equally concerned about existing customer interactions that they do not control, mainly what appears for their brand name and most important products in the search results.

In a world where anybody and their mother can easily create a web page about anything they desire, it is becoming more and more important that you (as an owner of your brand) are aware of what’s being said about you online. In the good ol’ days when media was consolidated this was a fairly easy task to undertake, as you just had to check a few places. But with consumer generated media being all the craze these days, there is plenty of opportunity for brands to thrive or suffer its consequences.

In the eyes of a customer, what a third party says about you can be far more powerful than anything you can say about yourself. With more potential customers doing their product research online, it is crucial that you are at least aware of the interactions that a potential customer can have with your brand. When searching, most people don’t go beyond the top 10 results, so if you can control the top 10 for your brand you will be in good shape. In my personal experience when I’m searching for a product or service online if I see intelligent (intelligent is a completely subjective term, concerns I may have with a product may be unimportant to you) criticism about the brand I’m looking to do business with, I won’t necessarily write it off, but I will look for alternatives. Negative listings create lots of unnecessary friction in the customer buying process by putting the seed of doubt in their minds and making them far more susceptible to buyers remorse. If they still end up purchasing from you despite this and you don’t deliver you will have validated the doubt they previously had and lost a customer for life, and could potentially have a greater reputation issue on your hands.

Another thing to keep an eye on which is consistently overlooked is what is being said about your other important assets, mainly your employees and your flagship products. While you can usually catch what is being said about key employees by monitoring your brand references (since most people will say John Smith of XYZ corp to provide context to their readers), you will likely have to separately monitor your core products. The Pareto Principle says that 20% of your products will drive 80% of sales. Obviously the 80/20 ratio is not exact, but a similar ratio is evident in most businesses. If you aren’t aware of what’s being said about your most important products and your brand, you are likely leaving money on the table.

Building Links the Right Way the First Time

• January
• 8

When first starting out on a new site, webmasters often get caught up in building as many links with targeted anchor text as fast as they can. For high profile start ups with large advertising budgets this may work, as they will likely generate many natural links as a result of their advertising, marketing efforts, and buzz if done properly. But for those of us who are not operating with large marketing budgets this is a plan that will likely lead you to lots of time spent away from the top of the rankings. It will be a while before individual webmasters realize that their ‘quick solution’ to build links will likely cease to produce results in the future.

Ignorance is Bliss

A person who knows nothing about SEO but has a solid handle on being social and genuinely cares about helping people will likely generate more high quality links in long run than a person who thinks they know SEO and link building. When I first started out on the web, I thought I knew about SEO and how to get ranked. I was sure that the key to high rankings was submitting my site to as many directories as I could (I purchased a package for $15 that got me submissions in 500 directories) and using my keyword terms as many times as I could on the page and in the anchor text. I thought the fact that I even knew about anchor text was going to separate me from the pack. I thought rankings were everything and once I got there I was going to be able to quit my job and move to a warm island in the Caribbean. Shockingly this did not happen. Although I genuinely wanted to help people. I neglected the social aspects of doing business on the web and my initial link profile featured 500 crappy, offtopic, directory links. In retrospect, this was something that I couldn’t recover from and I believe was one of the primary reasons why I was never able to get the site off the ground.

Doing it right the first time

I chuckle now when I think of what my mindset was back then and how I was convinced I was going to the top with my plan. My biggest problem was that I thought I knew SEO and had a rankings mindset instead of a traffic building mindset. Had my focus been on building traffic streams to my site I would have been better off and would never have done the directory buy, as I did that to get links to improve my search engine ranking. Little did I know that I was nuking my link profile right off the bat and consequently minimalizing the chance that I would be able to rank for anything mildly competitive. Although I was able to achieve a small bit of visibility in Yahoo and MSN, they were not driving traffic and it was going to take a lot of hard work to legitimize my link profile in the eyes of Google.

(Artificial) Ignorance is Bliss

So knowing what I know now about building links and SEO, what would I do if I could start all over again? I would attempt to simulate as much as possible the link profile of somebody who knew nothing about SEO. I would avoid all large directories off the bat (I like to get those links a little later after topical relevance has been established), and try to get two or three quality topical links from within my industry and maybe submit to more industry specific directories and/or local directories. I think large directories have their place, but they are links that anybody with $500 can get and in addition to being a pretty obvious SEO footprint, they really don’t tell the engines too much about your site that can’t be achieved using more effective means. I would also buy an advertisement where most of my prospects would likely be. If I get a link out of it, great, but it’s not my primary concern. My main goal with my first few links would be to establish myself in my desired community of sites by getting links from the sites that rank well for my keywords. Yes, this is much easier said than done and could take time (possibly a few months depending on industry), but I think by starting off on the right foot you are setting yourself up for success in the long run and the wait will be worth it.

A query you can do right now to easily generate more links

• January
• 7

It’s likely that sites are mentioning your site but are not providing you a link. An easy way to find these sites is entering this query in yahoo (using a fictional site wutangwidgets.com as an example):

wutangwidgets -linkdomain:wutangwidgets.com -site:wutangwidgets.com

A quick, polite email asking for the link will likely do the trick.