What on your site is linkable?

• January
• 4

If you have to hesitate to answer this question or have no answer at all then it is going to be difficult to build links. In order to attract links, something on your site must be citation worthy. By not giving any reason for visitors to link to your site, then why would they want to let their visitors know about you? If you fail to differentiate your site from the other sites in the your niche, your chances of long term success decrease significantly.

Often site owners will begin with the link building phase immediately after getting their site to a functioning level. This is essentially putting the cart before the horse. Consider that when other site owners are linking to you they are basically vouching for your site to their visitors. You have to have something on your site that conveys your site is quality. That could come in the form of a unique site design, useful tool, quality article, or any thing else you can think of. By producing or purchasing something that is citation worthy in your niche, you will be making your job much easier in the long run. Without such a thing on your site, the only links you will be able to secure are the same links that every other webmaster is getting, the few prominent directory links and a few rented text links, which give you no competitive advantage.

Buy Traffic, Not Rankings

• January
• 2

Site owners would fare far better in the long run if they placed less emphasis on getting their site ranked and allocated more resources towards utilizing traditional marketing tactics online to generate targeted traffic.

Buying rankings

There has never been a worse time to rely on paid links from brokers than right now .. and it’s only getting worse.  I find it unlikely that Google will ever be able to completely filter out all paid links and as such a market will always exist, but it’s getting to the point where the opportunity cost of buying a paid link is greater than the potential reward. As a webmaster with a budget, do you want to spend $100 per month to buy a text link on a site that is unlikely to drive any traffic, could lose it’s effect at any time without you knowing, has a chance of giving you no rankings boost ever due to Google already identifying it as a paid link, and with the odds getting worse for you everyday?

A wakeup call to small business website owners

Every time webmasters partake in actions for the sole purpose of improving rankings, they are slowly relinquishing control of their business to the search engines. By continually allocating resources to improving search rankings at the expense of other marketing channels (which is often the case for smaller businesses on limited budgets) site owners will increasingly rely on the search engines to bring them business. All is well when rankings rise, traffic surges and sales are at a high, but it can get to a point where the search engines (mainly Google) will be providing 80-95% of all traffic to a site, making the site one algorithmic hiccup away from going out of business.

Find your audience

Instead of slowly handing over your business to Google, try to develop other traffic sources. Find where your target audience hangs out on the web and see if you can buy an ad or get a link there. It may be nofollowed, but that’s not important since the link has a much better chance of driving targeted traffic. Sponsor relevant whitepapers, advertise in email newsletters, and focus on building your brand recognition. Find local or specialty directories and submit your site there. Make sure to check the quality of sites in the directory to make sure they’re not spammy and it’s a directory worth the money (if it’s not free). The quicker you can build defensible traffic and become less reliant on a single source for your traffic, the better off you’ll be in the long run.

How to use Yahoo Answers for content ideas and links

• December
• 28

Yahoo Answers is an underutilized resource that can be mined for content ideas and drive targeted traffic and possibly links to your site. The easiest way to begin is to type in your highest level queries that you’re targeting on your home page to see what kind of questions people are asking. Using the advanced search queries, you can filter to see what people have been asking recently, however I generally like to see what people have been searching for consistently over time so I leave it unfiltered. Once you have a general idea of some of the questions people have about your industry/product/service, go and write an article or blog post on your site about it. Yahoo Answers gives you 5 days from the day question is published to submit an answer, so keep that in mind when writing your post. Once this step is completed, you can go and post your answer on Yahoo Answers, but in the answer you should summarize your blog post and insert a link to it, instead of answering it outright. This accomplishes many things.

• Provides content ideas to your site that are relevant and for which there is current demand
• Attracts highly targeted traffic which could turn into customers/subscribers
• Allows you to teach people in your industry, which is the easiest way to build trust with your audience
• Depending on how competitive your industry is, the Yahoo Answers entry can rank for certain terms.
• I’ve seen sites move up in the rankings for mildly competitive terms after links were dropped in relevant Yahoo Answers queries. Even though the links are nofollowed, what I’ve seen makes it seem slightly more plausible in my opinion that we’re being lied to about nofollow.

A similar strategy can be used for forums as well. Research and see what questions are consistently being asked in your industry and create content to answer the question. Then come back, summarize your article and put a link to it in the forums. Assuming you adequately answer the questions on your blog, your link drops will be welcome, on topic, and provide relevant traffic to your site.

Don’t go out of your way for .edu links

• December
• 27

All things being equal, there is only marginal benefit from a .edu link over links from other top level domains (TLD’s). Assuming you have two different pages with the same domain level and page level inbound and outbound link profile, one with a .edu TLD and one with a .com TLD, the .edu is slightly more valuable if you believe the search engines are using a form of the TrustRank algorithm due to .edu sites being selected as ‘good’ seed sites. I personally believe that they are using TrustRank or something similar, so I believe it to be true.

However ….

Since the situation outlined above with two identical sites having the same inbound and outbound link profiles is unlikely, you should forget about TLD’s when looking for links and use traditional link analysis methods to determine quality. The inherent value in a .edu link is it’s more likely to have a higher number of trusted, authority .edu backlinks than other TLDs, but just like there are many worthless .com links, there are also many .edu links that either link out to bad neighborhoods and promote spam, are off-topic, and/or do not present worthwhile linking opportunities for other reasons. When investigating link acquisitions, domain age, .edu backlinks, anchor text, and the community your potential link partner belongs to are far more important than whether or not it lies on a .edu.

Using Content to Increase Conversions, Build Trust, and Get More Links

• December
• 26

Many ecommerce store owners shoot themselves in the foot by only listing item essentials such as product name, ID, and price. This may allow you to rank for long-tail exact match product specific terms, but assuming the terms you’re targeting on your home pages and other top tier pages are in mildly competitive markets, you will be no where near the top of the rankings.

When searchers arrive to your site from the search engines, the majority of them will be in the information gathering phase of the buying cycle and looking for descriptions, specifications, reviews, etc., to identify what they need to solve their problem. You need to provide them with the information they’re looking for in order to be comfortable and confident that the product you provide is the solution to their problem. Connecting with your prospect and building trust is arguably the most important thing you can do at this point. The best way to build trust online is to teach your prospect something that will help them make a buying decision. Whether it’s a comparison chart showing different product specs, or a buyer’s guide informing prospects what to look for when purchasing, having information in addition to your products will go a long way towards helping keep visitors in your sales funnel. These are the things that will differentiate you from the Amazon’s and other online mega stores and allow you to compete. By not having any of that information you are ultimately losing potential sales and link opportunities.

Getting Links From Your Content Pages

Now you may be saying, well I sell (insert boring product), what kind of information can I utilize that people will help build trust and people will want to link to? Well it is true that it is difficult to get links to individual product pages, you can do the next best thing and get links to a page that talks about and links to your own product pages. Ways to do this?

Buyers Guides to …
How to get the most out of …
Product manuals
Questions to ask before purchasing a …

These four examples can be relevant and would be added value to any business online that doesn’t currently have them. When done exceptionally, these pages can become industry wide resources and provide many topically relevant links. Inside each of these pieces of content you can point links to relevant products and parts of your site. The better and higher quality that you can make these content pages, the more likely they are to get links and provide you Page Rank to pass directly to your product pages. These pages do very well in forum settings as the ask/answer/discuss format of forums is an ideal setting for these purely information pieces. In addition, if you can genuinely inform and educate prospects about the products they’re interested in you will gain their trust, which makes it easier to secure the sale at the end. Another easy way to get ideas and is by looking at the top ranking sites in your field and figuring out how they’re using content to their advantage. If they are not doing anything remarkable, a quick back link check will enable you to see what they’ve done to achieve high rankings and would be easy to replicate. Your content options are only limited by your creativity.

Sphinn, Viagra, and Andrew Bendals

• November
• 30

If you do a search on Google for Sphinn.com, the indented listing links to a spam post selling Viagra. If you look at the backlinks to this Sphinn page, you will uncover a whole network of spam blogs and comment spam on Digg. Digging a little deeper, if you do a Whois search for a bunch of these splogs, they are all registered to a gentleman named Andrew Bendals in Buenos Aires, although the server (which is blacklisted) is in the UK.

The purpose of this is not to crucify Andrew, as I’m actually more interested in why it’s ranked in Google but not in Yahoo, or MSN (also, why does MSN only show results 1-8, but then page 2 shows 11-20). How did this not trigger red flags in Google almost immediately? Also, why did Sphinn moderators not remove this once they saw it as it’s clearly spam? It seems like a decent sized spam network that probably took some time to put up (unless he has automated the process, in which case it was probably a few clicks) and is actually less spammy than many of the similar spam blog networks I’ve seen. One thing I can’t figure out is where the links back to the Sphinn story actually are located. I’ve searched the source code of the pages where some of the 292 links supposedly originate from and can’t find them. I’m sure some more technically savvy and/or black hats would be able to identify almost instantly how and where the links are coming from, and probably much more about this.

3 Issues to Handle Before Investing in Social Media.

• November
• 5

It’s easy to get caught up in the recent discussion surrounding social media. Successful social media campaigns have the potential to drive enormous amounts of traffic and there should be a place for it in your overall online strategy. However there are many other things that can have a greater long term impact on the success of your site which I think should take precedence over any time or money invested in a social media campaign.

Usability analysis - It makes little sense to drive large amounts of traffic to your site via social media if it isn’t yet optimized for conversion. A thorough usability analysis can pay for itself many times over by showing you where conversions are being lost and things you can do to improve navigation, information architecture, copy, and other things.

Keyword analysis - Ideally this was done to some extent before launching the site, but it should be reanalyzed every now and then. Are the keywords your targeting and/or ranking for the most profitable? Are there other keywords or modifiers you target that would drive even more traffic? In depth keyword research will provide answers.

Link Building - Getting links with targeted anchor text will go a long way towards boosting your rankings for your key terms and is always an ongoing project. I’d rather have three or four links with my chosen anchor text on high authority relevant sites than the links that are gained from a piece of linkbait.

If you have the budget, everything listed above can be outsourced to save time. Reanalyzing keywords is not particularly time intensive, as most of the initial legwork should have been done before the site was launched. Link building by hand could be tedious, but the payoff of getting links on authorative, popular sites is huge.

I can’t stress enough how much of an impact a professional usability analysis can have on your site. If you are thinking of investing money in a social media campaign and you have not had a usability analysis done yet, I would strongly recommend reallocating those funds. It will identify holes in your conversion process that should be patched before you drive traffic via social media. Once all the issues mentioned above have been handled then by all means get going on that social media campaign. But if you haven’t recently analyzed your keywords, acquired quality links, or had a usability analysis, then getting those affairs in order should be higher on the priority list.

How to prepare your linkbait

• November
• 1

Often marketers will put in significant hours developing linkbait. With such an investment in time, you’d think they’d take action to lengthen the impact of their hard work. Unfortunately this is not the case.

As Wiep discussed in his excellent post about different types of linkbait, it is imperative that you define goals for your campaign before developing anything. Depending on the audience you’re targeting and the goal of the link bait there are certain actions you can take to ensure you’re desired outcome is achieved.

One Way Links

If you’re looking for links back to your site, then you should go out of your way to put in messages around your link bait instructing visitors how to link back to your site, even going as far as providing them the html needed in order to link back to you. An advantage of this is you can select the anchor text people use to link back to you, assuming they copy and paste the html directly from your site.

Feed Subscriptions, Repeat Traffic

Prominently display your RSS button on your page, even more so than on other pages. Make it huge! Make sure you have links to many other relevant pages on your site from the link bait page. Have an ‘If you liked this, you will also like…’ or ‘If you found this funny, sign up to get similar material sent to you.’ Put an ‘email this story/photo/video to a friend’ button around the linkbait to increase it’s virability (my spell check is giving me guff cause it’s not a word, but I’m riding with it). These are just examples and I’d advise you to change up the text to make it more appealing and industry specific, but hopefully you get the point. The lower your link bait’s bounce rate, the more likely you are to get repeat traffic and/or RSS subscriptions. Do everything you can (within reason) to keep them clicking through to relevant pages on your site.

Sales

Why not create a landing page that has a one time discount or a buy one get one free limited time offer for people that enter the site via your linkbait piece? Having complimentary products along with the featured product is a basic e-commerce technique, but you’d be surprised at the number of stores I see that don’t do it. Something I’ve seen work well is an email sign up saying something along the lines of ‘Don’t feel like buying now? We’ll let you know when this product is on sale again.’ In addition to the contact info, the next screen allows them to enter other products/services they would be interesting in receiving notifications about. Congratulations, you just got one more person who has expressed interest in your product and given you permission to market to them, over and over again.

These are just a small fraction of the actions people can take to ensure they receive the maximum benefit from their link bait. You put in too much time to put out linkbait, have a profitless traffic surge for a few days, then be back at square one a few weeks later. With these tips and others you develop on your own, you can *elongate* the impact of your hard earned traffic.

*Before all you Webster’s point it out, I know ‘elongate’ is not the proper word here, but I can honestly say I don’t think the word has EVER been used in an SEO blog, and I think it’s a funny word, so leave it alone.

Internal Linking 101

• October
• 31

*This will be constantly updated as I find more and more resources regarding internal linking*

I was reviewing the internal linking structure for a client the other day to see if there was anything further we could be doing to help flow Page Rank throughout the site. Before I did that, I wanted to review the materials that were online regarding internal linking to gather some further ideas. Not surprisingly, there were plenty of great free resources around the web discussing internal linking strategies. Here are some of the best resources I could find:

Posts about internal linking:

Andy Beard has an excellent technical post regarding internal linking strategies for Wordpress blogs, and another post discussing ‘Ball Linking strategy and Toolbar PR. He goes into great detail and even provides examples using one of the Page Rank calculators listed below. A must read.

Jim Boykin’s post about getting pages out of the supplemental index.

Aaron Wall had a great post about blocking less valuable sections/pages of your site so your other pages get more link love and another post discussing how he significantly improved Shoemoney’s traffic by doing the same thing.
Update: Aaron has posted a video regarding effective internal link architecture.

Rand has a post regarding internal linking for large enterprise sites, and another about flowing PR.

Dan Thies has a whole section of his blog devoted to site structure

Eric Enge via Search Engine news wrote about flowing Page Rank using nofollow.

Dave Davies over at BeanStalk did a 10 part series to building an optimized site, and section five was dedicated to internal linking.

I have to apologize to Sebastian over at smart-it-consulting.com for leaving out his article about web site structuring (as he pointed out to me in the comments). It’s fairly technical, but very insightful.

E-Books

Dyanmic Linking and Revenge of the Mininet are two free e-books that go into more detail than you’ll probably ever need to know regarding internal linking strategies.

SEO Fast Start by Dan Thies has a great section regarding internal link structure (which he discusses in detail in this post) in his free ebook, which I highly recommend to anyone learning SEO.

Free Page Rank Calculators

Webworkshop.net’s Page Rank Calculator

Mark Horrell’s Page Rank Calculator

I’m sure there are plenty of other resources out there that I did not list. Please let me know of any and I will add to this post to make it more comprehensive.

Google is the Walmart of Search

• October
• 30

Walmart dominates the retail space. It is far and away the world’s largest retailer and nobody else is in the same galaxy. They do around a quarter trillion (yes, trillion!) dollars per year. It’s absolutely mind-boggling. As I was reading an article about Walmart and how they completely dominate their space and deal with their suppliers, I couldn’t help but notice similarities with how Google controls the search space and works with webmasters. I have taken segments directly from the article (http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/77/walmart.html) and replaced Walmart with Google and related it to search instead of instead of retail. My version is in italics. You’d be surprised at how little editing was necessary.

Excerpts

“Wal-Mart is more powerful than any retailer has ever been. It is, in fact, so big and so furtively powerful as to have become an entirely different order of corporate being.”

Google is more powerful than any search engine has ever been. It is, in fact, so big and so furtively powerful as to have become an entirely different order of corporate being.

“For many suppliers, though, the only thing worse than doing business with Wal-Mart may be not doing business with Wal-Mart. Last year, 7.5 cents of every dollar spent in any store in the United States (other than auto-parts stores) went to the retailer. That means a contract with Wal-Mart can be critical even for the largest consumer-goods companies. Dial Corp., for example, does 28% of its business with Wal-Mart. If Dial lost that one account, it would have to double its sales to its next nine customers just to stay even. “Wal-Mart is the essential retailer, in a way no other retailer is,” says Gib Carey, a partner at Bain & Co., who is leading a yearlong study of how to do business with Wal-Mart. “Our clients cannot grow without finding a way to be successful with Wal-Mart.”"

For many site owners, though, the only thing worse than doing business with Google may be not doing business with Google. Last year, 65% of all searches conducted online were done on Google. That means being ranked in Google’s search results can be critical even for the largest widget companies. Wily Widgets Corp., for example, gets 68% of its traffic from Google. If Wily Widgets lost that traffic source, it would have to double its traffic and sales from the next nine largest search engines just to stay even. “Google is the essential search engine, in a way no other engine is,” says Bob Wiley, a partner at Wily Widgets., who is leading a yearlong study of how to do business with Google. “Our clients cannot grow without finding a way to be successful with Google.”

“No one wants to end up in what is known among Wal-Mart vendors as the “penalty box”–punished, or even excluded from the store shelves, for saying something that makes Wal-Mart unhappy. (The penalty box is normally reserved for vendors who don’t meet performance benchmarks, not for those who talk to the press.)”

No one wants to end up with what is known among webmasters as the “hand edit”–punished, or even excluded from the search rankings, for doing something that makes Google unhappy. (The hand edit is normally reserved for websites that blatantly violate Google guidelines or those sites that are knowingly operated by well known SEO’s.)

“There is also no question that doing business with Wal-Mart can give a supplier a fast, heady jolt of sales and market share. But that fix can come with long-term consequences for the health of a brand and a business.”

There is also no question that doing business with Google can give a site owner a fast, heady jolt of sales and market share. But that fix can come with long-term consequences for the health of a brand and a business.
Lessons to be learned:

1. It is a poor business practice to put all your eggs in one basket. If you are relying on Google for a significant portion of your traffic/sales, you are setting yourself up for failure when Google has an algorithm shift or your site gets penalized, justifiably or not. They effectively own your business.
2. Google currently owns the search space. If you are going to be playing in their space, it is best to play by their rules, especially if they supply most of your traffic. If you feel the need to take risks with your site, you should have a solid customer base along with a permission asset that allows you to successfully market to these people over and over again.
3. Both Google and Walmart provide great services to end users. Although Walmart wreaks havoc on their suppliers margins, they do it to provide people with ‘Everyday low prices.’ Similarly, Google operates with the goal of having the largest most relevant index so people can find what they’re searching for.

There are many other quotes that could be applicable to Google in this article, but I have decided to only touch on a few. There are plenty of people out there who have their own opinions of Google who could find other segments of the article and relate it to their own personal experiences. I encourage you to go and read the article here, and let me know of any other similarities you can find between the two behemoths.