Investing in Link Building

Syndicated From: SEOmoz Daily SEO Blog http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/Jo10XlWO3jA/investing-in-link-building

Posted by MikeCP

There’s no such thing as a free link. Whether it was the time taken to craft that blog post, the cash used to film that viral video, or even just the opportunity cost of thinking about how to build links, there is an investment involved. For my first post here at SEOmoz, I want to talk about how a small business might approach the investment into link building.

To make this post a little less hypothetical, we’re going to set a budget of $2,000 and/or 60 hours. This isn’t to say that one needs $2,000 to build links, but for the purpose of this article it helps to keep things in perspective. And for those big business readers out there, I’m sure you could just ratchet up the investment by whatever order of magnitude you’d like.

The Budget is Set

So let’s imagine your client or boss (if you’re in-house) has promised to commit some time and money into a link building campaign. Huzzah! Finding yourself in a position to invest in SEO both financially and resourcefully is a great place to be, and these opportunities don’t grow on trees. So it’s tremendously important that this sum of money (and time) is invested wisely and provides a return, or else that “crazy SEO wizardry” might never make its way into the company budget again.

♫ If I had $2,000…I would send Matt Cutts some flowers ♫

So how best to go about spending this money? That, of course, depends on a lot. There are different kinds of link building strategies for different kinds of businesses in different stages of their SEO development. Answering some of the following questions may help with the “Who am I?” questions your website is surely asking itself (your-site.com/existential-crisis).

1. Have we done any link building in the past? In other words, how low are the “low hanging fruit”?
2. What is a reasonable goal here? Increasing overall domain authority and maybe increasing long tail traffic? Or boosting a specific page in the SERPs?
3. How does the competition stack up? How much work needs to be done to overtake the competition?

Directory Submissions

We COULD invest $2,000 pretty easily with directory submissions and it wouldn’t have to take anymore than 5 hours. The better strategy would be to invest a bit more time into the research phase before throwing $2,000 into a bunch of spammy directories.

Some of the big paid directories are a given; Yahoo!, Best of the Web, Business.com and JoeAnt have established themselves as strong, link juice-passing options. Assuming our web site is not found in any of these directories we’re looking at almost $800 already, and that isn’t considering the annual renewal cost of most of these top-tier directories. This leaves us with around $1000 for submissions to niche and local directories that are deemed worthwhile; Rand discussed the litmus test for identifying these worthwhile directories in a recent Whiteboard Friday.

Who should do it?

In most cases, anyone that is not currently listed in the top-tier directories should make the investment. You do NOT want to be submitting to directories if your site is of low quality, as your site could be declined and you won’t get that money back.

Investing in directories is a good idea early, but I wouldn’t suggest shelling out $2,000 in directories and declaring “mission accomplished”. The better plan would to be to submit to paid directories slowly over the course of a few months, supplementing directory submissions with some more creative link building strategies. Also, don’t forget that a sudden spike in backlinks followed by a lull of no new links is sure to set off a red flag or two.

Outreach (PR for links)

Outreach can be an inexpensive undertaking in terms of cash spent, but the real cost is in the time it takes to do it right. Commissioning under-worked call center staff or interns to call or email relevant site owners can be a great use of “found” time to generate links, but they’ll still need some guidance. I find its a great idea to craft a quick “SEO 101″ document, including bits about how search engines value links, anchor text, and other best practices. You might do well to give a primer on how to quickly evaluate a potential linking partner (say, only target sites with a domain authority over 55?), so your minions don’t go wasting their time on spammy worthless links.

Where outreach can get costly is in offering products, discounts, or other financial incentives to acquire links. Of course, we’re getting a bit close to grey-hat SEO here, but is there really anything wrong with offering free product samples to generate interest? I suppose the white-hat method of product samples/discounts/etc. is to not require a link back, but if you ask me this is where the whole distinction gets kind of silly.

Can you spot the difference? Regardless, I am infinitely clever.

Your odds of acquiring links through outreach get a lot better when samples or other incentives are involved. B2B? No problem. Incentives could include a free trial, a demo or white paper. If you do your homework, you’ll know who to approach to make sure your not just giving away hundreds of dollars of product without any hope of acquiring new customers.

Your overall outreach costs could get a bit fuzzy, and measuring a return will require some serious tracking in most cases. Some tracking ideas include:

• Utilizing separate coupon codes for every outreach target
• Sending visitors to a mini-site, landing page, or tracking URL
• Making use of custom variables in Google Analytics to track the long term value of the campaign

Who should do it?

There’s not much of a disadvantage in spreading the good word of your company around via public relations, so really every business should do it. Your SEO mileage may vary, however, if your business’s website is not finished, a complete mess, or an otherwise unattractive linking partner. No matter how attractive your pitch, no one will want to link to a one-page or “coming soon” site.

No matter what, you’ll want to make sure you’ve got all your tracking ducks in a row, so that you can report good things to the big boss (wo)man.

“But what’s the lifetime value?!”

Buying Links

Buying links is sort of like the elephant in the room. In one hand, we have 2,000 dollars, in the other, we have a mouse that can easily point its way off to a link broker network. We can spend 10 hours max and lock down $2,000 worth of links and have them all live by COB. Do those links lead to better rankings? They might. BUT! The likelihood of these links ceasing to pass value in the near future is extremely high.

Who should do it?

Almost no one. Investing $2,000 into paid links, especially from a link broker, is not liable to provide a long-term return on that investment. While I agree with Rand in his post about the somewhat discouraging amount of webspam making its way into the index, the optimist in me is hoping Google’s just working on some super spam detector and soon all the white-hats will be rewarded.

Linkbait/viral marketing

Call it what you will, but the name of the game here is content. Whether its a blog post, an infographic, a widget, a video, a funny 404 page, a comic, and so on, if its done well, there’s no greater way to invest in link building.

There are tons of great examples of linkbait that have cost less than $2,000, but the most recent campaign that went hot was the whiteboard HOPA girl. After conceptualizing the project, theChive put out a job listing for a “girl next door” model at a rate of $400 per day. Even if the shoot took 2 days, theChive probably paid no more than $1,000 to make it happen.

This image brought to you by Comic Sans™.

Who should do it?

Most anyone. With a great idea, $2,000 is plenty of money to build some great links via content marketing. Of course, the important part is the great idea. This is where your 60 hour allotment of time may come in handy for brainstorming. If the idea can’t be executed in-house, tap your network for a good resource to help, or use services like oDesk, guru, and eLance to find a freelancer.

One caveat here is that your link building campaign can only go as far as your (social) network will take it. Before hitting “publish”, make sure you’ve got a good seed of retweeters, rebloggers, and likers standing by.

Reporting Your Results

This is arguably the most important part of your SEO campaign! Keep an eye on your website’s organic traffic and mark any upward trends. Can this be attributed back to your link building campaign? If so, this is no time to be shy.

Best of luck!

And now a quick introduction! My name is Mike Pantoliano and I work for Distilled in the US. I would love your feedback on my first post and I hope you get something from it! Follow me on Twitter @MikeCP because my complaining about having to wear shoes is absolutely vital to your SEO success.

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Market Research for Link Building – Who You Can Get Links From

Syndicated From: SEOmoz Daily SEO Blog http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/uSyuOvU2Ka4/market-research-link-building

Posted by Paddy_Moogan

Following on from my debut SEOmoz blog post on How to Get Links in Tough Industries, I wanted to go into a bit more detail about the processes you can use to find people who are likely to link to you.  Using the right processes to identify the leaders in your industry can give you a much better return on your time spent link building.  This is for two reasons -

1. You are finding people with a genuine interest in your industry who are more likely to reply to you
2. You are finding people who are influential which can lead to more links from their audience

We all know that link building is hard, it takes time, patience and an uncanny ability to handle rejection.  I often like to talk about improving your link building conversion rate, if you can do this then you are making your life a lot easier.  This post is designed to help improve your link building conversion rate by reaching out to the right people.

Here is a quick visual to show you the basic process of what you are doing:

This is the process I like to work to when getting links from specific targets.  It is very simple but from experience, many people struggle with finding the right people to get links from.   Here are some specific ways you can find these people.  I’ll probably cover the other areas in more detail in a subsequent post.

Getting Inspiration

I like to start the process by brainstorming a few ideas of what type of people are interested in my topic, luckily I’ve got some great colleagues to bounce ideas off and help with this process.  If you tend to struggle with this process, Spezify is quite a nice tool for visualizing a topic and seeing what is happening online related to that topic.  This can often give you some links to places you may not have previously thought of to reach out to.

Find Influential Tweeters

Although strictly speaking, Twitter is not good for building links,  finding people on Twitter who have a large number of followers and have a lot of influence can be very useful in spreading the word for you.  These people usually have their own websites outside of Twitter too that may be of help to you for traditional link building.

So how do you find people on Twitter who are influential?

WeFollow is a nice little tool for this, a quick test of “SEO” as a keyword proves to be pretty accurate to me:

You now have a list of influential people from within your industry.  What next?

• Follow them
• Make a note of what they like to tweet about
• Check their personal websites for more info
• Look at what type of stuff they retweet
• Retweet their stuff
• Interact with them constructively
• Ask for their opinion on something

By doing all of these things, you are building a relationship with this person and finding out what it takes to get their attention.  You are also learning about what interests them and what type of content you need to create to get them to tweet about it.  You are also opening a channel of communication with them which you can use to push your own content when the time is right.  Once you have built up a rapport with this person, you are in a good position to send them a link to your content and ask for their opinion on it.

Find Local People

This is something that I’ve found to work very well when doing outreach.  If you’re fortunate enough to live quite close to someone who you can get a link from, mention it when you contact them.  This works very well if you are a small local business who is trying to get some attention and help from local people.  It can be a little difficult to find these type of people but here are a couple of ideas -

Search Twitter Local

You can find people who are tweeting about your topic within a certain number of miles of your location.  Just head over to Twitter Advanced Search and look for this section:

Local Directories

Dmoz has section dedicated to listing websites because they are based in a certain area.  For example, if I’d just launched a website which was for my music DJ service in Stratford-upon-Avon, I may want to contact a few people on this page to let them know about it.

There are literally tons of local directories where you can find people to contact, here is a UK list and here is a US list.  These lists were originally designed as places for you to get links from, but there is nothing to stop you getting creative and getting links from the places on these directories too!

Foursquare

Whilst you are following influential people on Twitter, you may notice that they are using Foursquare to check-in to various places.  If these places just happen to be in your local area, then there is the possibility of contacting them and seeing if they want to meet for a coffee.  This is probably more useful for finding business contacts and networking as it is for link building but it is worth mentioning as a method of finding people who are local to you.  Even if you don’t meet someone, you can still get an indicator of what area they are in and use this as a hook in your opening email or phone call.

Survey your Customers

I’m a big fan of getting your customers to help you with link building.  The idea in relation to this post is to find out from your customers who they follow in your industry and what sites they visit for information.

This is incredibly easy to setup and can provide you with real, actionable data.  If your website has a big Twitter following, you can even ask the question in a Tweet or send out an email to previous customers.  You only need to ask a couple of questions along the lines of -

• Are you active on Twitter?  If so, who do you follow for information about your topic here?
• Do you frequently visit blogs and websites on your topic here, if so which are your favorite?
• Are you a member of any forums on your topic here, if so which ones?

You can get all of the replies together and see which sites or tweeters or mentioned the most.  Then you have a quality, targeted list of people to go after to get links.

Forums

Noooo!  Forums are no good for link building I hear you shout.  For the record, they can be good for link building, but thats a discussion for another day   What we are interested in is what makes a forum active and who the key leaders and influencers are.  There are ways you can use this information to your advantage and get links from places outside of the forum.

First of all how to find the forums which are active.  We just use a couple of simple Google search tools:

All I’ve done is searched for my keyword which is link building, clicked on discussions on the left hand side, then selected from the past 24 hours.  Nice and simple and I’ve now ended up with 50k + results.

Now where this helps us for link building is being able to find which people on these forums are moderators and ones which are active contributors.  This is the equivalent of finding people who are influential on Twitter which I described above.  Most forums will have this easily accessible although you may need to register.  You are looking for a list of “Top Posters” or “Top Contributors”.

Once you have found these people, see if their profiles or footers contain links to their Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin or personal blog.  Then you can see if they may be interested in your website, hopefully they are which makes them a primary candidate to get a link from!

The one big advantage of this approach is that if they talk about you on their blog, its perfectly reasonable for you to ask them to mention it on the forum which means even more exposure (and links) for you.

Facebook

I love this one!  Using the Facebook Ads system, you can carry out research into the likes and interests of the gazillions (ok millions) of Facebook users.  So within a few minutes you can have a list of people who you know are interested in a certain topic.  From here, you have a couple of options -

• You could then start a PPC campaign on Facebook which aims to grab their details in exchange for some kind of incentive, for example you could try and target users who have their own blogs.  You can ask them to submit a story, blog about a topic, upload a picture, loads of stuff to try and capture this type of user
• Join the group with the other members and interact with them and the admins of the group.  This is a similar approach as you’d take in forums to try and work out who may be in a position to help you push your content on the group and external sites

Advanced Search Operators

We are getting more into “traditional” SEO here as opposed to market research but this is another favourite of mine but with a bit of a twist.  Firstly though I’d advise you to go take a look at the SEOmoz Guide on Advanced Search Operators.

Another great place to start is the SEOmoz Link Acquisition Assistant (PRO Only).  This tool does a lot of the hard work for you and can find lots of places to get links from as well as making you think a bit more about how you can tweak the operators to your own needs.

Here are a few of my personal favourites when it comes to advanced queries.

This will restrict results to only UK Universities which mention blogs.  If you are in the US, just swap out .ac.uk and put in .edu:

keyword here inurl:.ac.uk +blogs

Same as above but this will only show results with blogs in the URL:

keyword here inurl:.ac.uk inurl:blogs

This one is designed to help you find blogs which are active, therefore giving you a better chance of getting a link.  This query only shows me results which have published posts in July 2010.  This isn’t perfect as all blogs work differently but you will still get some good results.

keyword here inurl:2010/07

My best advice here is to just go and experiment and keep tweaking queries until they give you the results you need.  By doing this you are filtering out all the websites which are not right for you and therefore improving your efficiency and link building conversion rate.  Here is a useful reference guide for a ton of Google advanced operators.

The Twist…

Don’t do what everyone else does and start at page 1 of the search results.  These guys get link requests all day long!

Start at page 10 of results.  These guys are less likely to get link requests if they are not always at the top of Google, so you could have a better chance of getting their attention and getting the link you want.  The websites may be of a lower quality but as long as you use your due diligence and analysis, you will still get some good quality sites and valuable links.

Bonus Random Tip

I’m often asked about finding people who can guest blog for you on a particular subject.  This advanced search query may help a little to find these people.

keyword here inurl:author

Because of the way that some blogs work, they often put “author” in the URL of pages which contain all the posts by a writer as well as contact details.  Here is an example using Danny’s page at SEOmoz.

As always I welcome your feedback and additional ideas in the comments below.  I’ll do my best to reply to any questions.

This also seems like a good time to shamelessly plug the Distilled & SEOmoz Pro SEO Seminar in London.  I attended this event last year, before I joined Distilled.  Of the conferences I went to, it was one of the best in terms of actionable tips and quality of the talks.  I’d highly advise you to take a look if you are looking for some advanced SEO strategies.

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Using Excel for SEO – the Grand Collection of Tips

Syndicated From: Search Engine Journal http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/SearchEngineJournal/~3/uRgIv7pPkZg/

You probably know that I am a big Excel fanatic (though not an expert). To me, Excel has always been the ultimate SEO and productivity tool.

I’ve been collecting Excel tutorials for years and this post lists the most useful (yet, the least geeky) of them: no matter which SEO task you have come across, chances are you’ll find one of the following tutorials handy:

1. Export Any Data to Excel

Any well-known keyword research or traffic analytics tool has the “Export-to-CSV” feature and a CSV file is easy to open in Excel – so converting your data into Excel shouldn’t be a problem.

If you still you need some examples, I did a post quite some time ago listing many ways to export your backlink data to Excel; for instance:

• With Yahoo! SiteExplorer you can export results to TSV file and open it as Excel;
• With Google Analytics you can save the report of referring domains (enhanced with plenty of browsing data per each linking domain: bounce rate, time spent on site; pages per visit, etc).
• You can export any search results that provide RSS feed to Google Spreadsheets using =ImportFeed(“feed URL”) formula and then save as Excel:

2. Excel for Keyword Research: a Pivot Table and a (Conditional) Formatting

1. Create a Pivot Table to easily Re-Arrange the Keywords

This post by Richard Baxter on creating a pivot table and a beautiful chart using Excel offers a step-by-step tutorial on how to re-organize your data to run various types of analysis. In short, the steps are as follows:

• Collect your data and create a Master table (more often than not, so to create your master table, you just need to export the required range of data from the tool you are using and open the file using Excel).
  • If you are using several tools, you may want to combine the data in one table – this post on using VLOOKUP query will save your life!
• Create a Pivot Table on a new sheet: “Insert > PivotTable > PivotChart“ and choose your table to serve the basis of the Pivot table;
• Add axis fields, values, column labels and filters: The PivotTable Field List uses drag and drop functionality to enable you to populate those little white squares with values. As you add values, the table on the left begins to form.

A pivot table feature allows for plenty of data manipulation options that consequently offers a wide range of research types. Here’s another post giving a detailed tutorial on creating a pivot table and using it for keyword research – so if you still have any questions, refer to it to make things even clearer.

2. Use “Find and Replace” Feature to Visualize the Keyword Patterns

While a pivot table lets you re-arrange the data and create cool charts, conditional formatting allows you to visualize the data sets using different colors. I did a post once on finding your most frequent modifiers using Excel, and here are the steps:

• Use CTRL+F (“Find and Replace” feature);
• Click “Find and Replace” tab;
• Type the word you think may be frequently used with your core term,
• Click “Options” button;
• Choose to “replace with” format;
• Click “Patterns” tab;
• Choose the color you want to highlight the cell containing the word:
• Click OK and then “Replace All”;
• You should then see how many times the word was used, plus the cells containing it will be highlighted.

Conditional formatting works the similar way but it can be used to highlight the cells while you are creating the spreadsheet. For example, if you are using Excel to create and track your meta tags, conditional formatting can visualize meta tag character count. Simply use Red/Yellow/Green for good length and warning zones. This keeps you in a quick reference just out of the peripheral.

3. Use =VLOOKUP to compare and combine data exported from different sources:

This post on comparing Google Webmaster Tools Data with Google Analytics Data provides a detailed tutorial on how you can merge any type of statistics data: Keyword Rankings and Keyword Volume, Google Rankings data and Traffic data, Backlinks and Traffic Sources, etc:

3. Excel for Link Building: URL Manipulations

I use Excel for link building process tracking as well as for reporting. The basic “sorting” Excel feature (known by everyone, I guess) makes it much easier to re-arrange the data to find links on the same topic, with the same Google PR, etc.

This section looks at a bit more complex hacks: Excel formulas and tutorials for the URL manipulation.

1. Extract All URLs from the List of Linked Words

It happens very often that you have a list of linked words in Excel and you need to see the full address of each link. Extracting each address one by one is tedious. To automate the task, you will need to create a quick macro – don’t worry, here’s an instruction allowing even a very basic newbie to create one:

1. Open Visual Basic Editor (use ALT + F11 shortcut);
2. Navigate Insert -> Module to adds a module
3. Paste the code below
4. Close the Visual Basic Editor (use ALT + Q)

Sub ExtractHL()
Dim HL As Hyperlink
For Each HL In ActiveSheet.Hyperlinks
HL.Range.Offset(0, 1).Value = HL.Address
Next
End Sub

Now use the macro:

• Navigate Tools -> Macro -> Macros (or use ALT + F8 shortcut);
• Make sure “Extract HL” is chosen and click Run
• You are done! The macro will find each hyperlink in a worksheet, extract each one’s URL, and stick that URL in the cell directly to the right of the hyperlink.

2. Make the List of URLs Active

Another common case is: you export tons of data and end up with hundreds of unlinked URLs. You could go double-clicking on each to activate one by one but this will take too much time. Here’s a quick tutorial on how you can do that:

Repeat steps 1 to 4 from the above tip but use this code:

Sub MakeHyperlinks()
Dim cl As Range
For Each cl In Selection
cl.Hyperlinks.Add Anchor:=cl, Address:=cl.Text
Next cl
End Sub

Select the cells you want to turn into clickable links and Run the “MakeHyperlinks” macro (use the further tutorial from the above part).

Or just use this handy tool by SEOAtomatic: Activate Excel Links

Before:

After:

Any other Excel hacks you are using for SEO? Please share tem in the comments!

Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.

Using Excel for SEO – the Grand Collection of Tips

Read other posts by this Author: Ann Smarty

Evaluating the Lifetime Value of a Link

Syndicated From: Search Engine Journal http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/SearchEngineJournal/~3/jHgj_I99ltc/

Unfortunately, links fall off the link graph. Google loves freshness, and as such, it is in their best interest to eventually stop indexing pages and shifting a page that still exists from one that does pass value, to one that doesn’t.

As SEOs and webmasters, people who desire to have links that will continuously pass value to our pages, it’s in our best interest to get links that will pass value for a long period of time, not just for a few blips in the long timeline that will be the existence of the internet.

For pages that are static (most normally non-blogs), we only have to maintain control of the domain, occasionally update or make sure the person who does maintains the link to ensure that the value will persist. However, for those pages that are constantly changing, most often blogs, it is in our best interest to assess the future value of the links we may get from these pages.

How do we do this? The “site:” search command.

Blog Authority Assessment

When looking at a blog, take a frontline look at its architecture. How many posts seem likely to have been written since its inception? Is there an archive to help inform how old the domain is? How frequently does the blogger seem to be posting?

Create an approximation in your mind of what you might imagine what number of pages the site actually has. Sometimes, you’ll actually get a frontpage listing of the total posts the blogger has made.

Next, download Search Status and use the link report function to get the number of internal links on the page. If the number is 182, it’s a fair assumption that Google should, as a default, have somewhere around 182 pages indexed for a fairly reasonable domain.

Note this number – you’ll use it to compare against the domain’s “site:” results.

Then, go to Google and insert “site:http://www.URL.com”. In this example, I pulled a random mommy blogger, “Good Girl Gone Redneck”.

Good Girl Gone Redneck has a PR3, with 137 internal links on the homepage. So, compared against the “site:URL” results, it seems to have a good page indexation time. We can actually see from her archives that 389 pages have been posts that have been released. So, if we compare and contrast these two numbers, it’s safe to assume that this link will hang around for a long time, the site is indexed well, and more importantly, Google sees this blog as one of value. So, worth getting a link on!

This isn’t always the case, though. You’ll often times see blogs that are PR4 or better with a lot of posts, but when you check the “site:” function, they only have 300 or so pages indexed. This is a sign that there is a detachment from the believed PR value and the actual value of the site, and more importantly, the value of the page where your link will eventually sit.

If you get a link on a blog of this type, it is very likely that your post will quickly fall off the link graph. If you are of the belief that indexation depth is in close relation to domain strength (as I am), you can also use this valuation technique to assess the domain and page strength, even if your link is going on a static URL.

Better than PageRank

This technique is always an approximation, but often times, it offers a rather strong arrow towards properly assessing domain valuation, past the mythological PageRank number. Yahoo! Site Explorer’s backlinks is a decent gauge, but it’s not what Google uses – it’s what Yahoo does.

In my opinion, the “site:” command, used appropriately, is the best way to properly assess the current domain strength of a middle-level site (PR2-PR4) on Google.

Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.

Evaluating the Lifetime Value of a Link

Read other posts by this Author: Ross Hudgens

Top 7 Ways to Increase Link Popularity with Content on Your Site

Syndicated From: Search Engine Journal http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/SearchEngineJournal/~3/zrClaCZoWWs/

Building links is still a big topic with SEOs and site owners alike and we’re all a bit fed up with trying to get reciprocal links. While it may be more fun, using social media channels to build links take a lot of time and may not suit everyone. So it’s time to get creative and come up with some content you can put on your site that attracts more links to your site.

Here’s my Top 7 Ways to Increase Link Popularity with Content on Your Site:

1. Top 10 Lists (or Top 5, 25, 100 or maybe just 7)

From the FBI’s Most Wanted to Dave Letterman’s Top Ten, people love these lists! They also love to pass the information on to their circle of friends or colleagues.  Pick a topic that will be of interest to your target market and do a bit a research to come up with the definitive list for that topic.

http://www.askmen.com/microsites/top_10_cities/

This Top 10 webpage from 2008 still does well on search engines.  I like the way you see the info without scrolling and the advertising fits in well.

2. Videos

We all know YouTube is hot, a popular search engine in itself, but if you embed good videos on your own site, it will attract visitors and links to the page. If you have an interesting collection of videos others have done, people will be more likely to link to your page, rather than to the source video site.

You can embed other people’s videos on your site, making sure that they are relevant to your topic (and to get permission and provide attribution, etc.) but it’s not so difficult to produce your own videos.  Digital webcams have come down in price and are easy to use, but you could even just create a nice slideshow from images you have that will highlight your products, work you’ve done, etc.

http://g.sports.yahoo.com/soccer/world-cup/blog/dirty-tackle

Yahoo’s Dirty Tackle blog has been very popular during the World Cup, mainly for its regular posts with videos of highlights and funny moments in the sport.

3. Images

Not as dynamic as video, but people do like to look at ‘pretty pictures’. Whether you create them yourself or get permission to use others images, look for those related to your topic and reinforce the points you are trying to make.  Think beyond photographs – relevant diagrams and charts will also be of great interest.

http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/global/led-by-facebook-twitter-global-time-spent-on-social-media-sites-up-82-year-over-year/

Sites like Nielsen use charts and diagrams on a regular basis to provide an easy way for people to take in the stats provided.

4. Interview an Expert or Industry Leader

Don’t we all want to know what the experts think and how they do what they do?  You’d be surprised how willing most industry experts/leaders are to do a quick interview; whether it be in person or over the phone/Skype, etc.

Make sure you are prepared and professional. Agree on topics (try to find something that’s timely and hasn’t been covered a million times) and keep to the time allowed.  It’s a sure thing that the person interviewed will link to your interview, giving your site even more exposure.

http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/9624

Linux Journal’s Interview with pen source advocate Simon Pipps from 2007 still comes high in search results.

5. How To’s / Tutorials

These days the internet is a person’s main way to find out how to do things, whether via an article or a video.  You can easily write step by step tutorials or articles about an area that you are knowledgeable in. Even better, do a quick How To video, even if just a screencast.  Besides showing people that you know your business and providing helpful information for people, it’s very likely that people will then link to your page.

http://www.neckties.com/content/howtotieatie.html

Neckties.com includes an instructional animated video to help their customers, as well as draw prospective buyers to the site.

7. Free Downloads

People can’t resist free stuff!  Have you created (or commissioned) an app or a script that you can provide for free?  Less technical? Then you can you create helpful checklists or other articles as PDFs that people can download.

https://www.mynrma.com.au/cps/rde/xchg/mynrma/hs.xsl/free_used_car_checklist.htm

Australia’s NRMA provides a FREE Used Car Buying Guide Checklist for visitors to download as a PDF.

7. Commission a Study or Report

People love statistics! Do your own market research or commission an agency or university and put together a study or report that’s relevant to your industry.

http://mulley.ie/facebook/

Ireland’s Mulley Communications commissioned a Facebook Study by a division of the National College of Ireland, “made possible” with an “Innovation Voucher” funded by a government agency. (This is also a good example of providing a download and embedding a video!)

When deciding on content make sure you are focused on your target market and what will be of interest to them to ensure that it will also be something that they’d want to share by placing a link on their own sites.  What to consider:

1. Is my market more likely to link to content that’s funny, serious or informative – or a mix?
2. Is the content fresh and original?  Don’t just copy a list or article from someone else’s site, even if you give attribution.  If you don’t have original information on a topic, compile interesting information from a number of relevant sites and put it together in a new way, making it your own.  There may be times when it’s best to include a quote or excerpt from the original site, but be sure to give proper attribution and you may get a [link] friend for life!
3. Do I make it easy for people to link to my content? Are the URLs on your site not only SEO friendly, but people friendly?  Yes, it’s easy to copy and past a URL, but if your URL is particularly long and doesn’t reflect the content of the page it may put someone off from doing the link.
4. Does my overall site merit getting links from others?  Is it overloaded with AdWords?  Is the site user friendly? Does the site look professional?  Even if you have the most interesting article ever, people will be less likely to link to it if the rest of your site doesn’t live up to it.
5. Are you being generous with your link love?   As they say ‘give and ye shall receive’ and the same is true with links.  Just make sure the links you post are relevant for your visits and that the sites are high quality.
6. How do I get people to link to my page in an SEO friendly way? Short of telling people how to put the link, you can influence the link text people use in the link to your page. They are likely to use your keyphrase in your link text if you are using them properly on the page yourself. Some may still just put the URL as the link text, so if you are using keyphrases in your URL, that will help.  Some may use the title of the page, video, image, download, etc., so be sure to use your keyphrases in any of these areas as well.

As you build up the quality content on your site you will find that more people are linking to the homepage of your site, as well as the pages with specific content, as the site itself will be seen as a useful or interesting resource overall.

Rather than obsessing over what’s going to get you the most links; keep focused on providing good, interesting, relevant content for the visitors to your site and the links will follow.

Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.

Top 7 Ways to Increase Link Popularity with Content on Your Site

Read other posts by this Author: Ann Donnelly

The importance of building links to your website

The importance of building links to your website.

Where Is Your Link Army Hiding?

Syndicated From: Search Engine Journal http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/SearchEngineJournal/~3/h17htRK-f64/

If “content is king”, links are the king’s supporting army, quietly helping the kingdom grow in power and authority. Unfortunately, as with a physical army, as most links get older they – or rather their influence – begins to deteriorate. Why won’t a powerful link just stay a powerful link? Why can’t you just build a huge amount of links once, and then never again? A few reasons:

1. Search engines don’t just want links; they want fresh, quality links. If a website was linked to in the past, it indicates that the site was considered an authority – once. However, if a website is continually being linked to, it not only builds past authority higher, but also indicates that the site is still considered an authority.
2. Directory links gain more competition. You have competing websites for your keyword, right? Many of these competing businesses also know about link building. As time goes by, more links will end up on the directory page with yours; by the end of a year, you may have hundreds, or even thousands, of links with which your site now shares its “link juice”. Therefore, the quality of the link deteriorates.
3. Websites close. You have 1,000 sites linking to yours – at least, you did the last time you checked. However, the Internet fluxuates rapidly; sites rise and fall on a continual basis. How many of those 1,000 sites are still live? How many have closed down, effectively killing part of your link army?

Other possible reasons exist, but these are some of the most common. Once you know that links deteriorate, what do you do? Of course, the obvious answer is to go out and find more – but where are they hiding?

15 Ways to Find Your Link Army

When you begin building a linking campaign, you first want to decide what the purpose of the links will be. For example:

• Keyword ranking
• Higher PR
• Higher traffic

If you’re targeting all three purposes, you can find links based on each goal separately, or on all three at once. Finding links that meet all three goals is more time consuming and research intensive, but provides the most effective, high quality linking.

You’re saying, “Yes, yes, high quality links, but let’s get to the nitty gritty. Where do I find them?” Here are a few places, numbered but in no particular order:

1. Sites linking to your competitors
2. Sites relevant to your own, or to a specific page you have
3. Relevant blogging sites
4. Business directories: Note that this is “business” directories, not “site” directories. For example, young entrepreneurs may find a “young entrepreneurs” directory for B2B. Another example would be your local Merchant’s Circle.
5. Product review sites
6. Any partners you may have
7. Sites whose visitors might find your information useful
8. Search for sites that linked to recently expired competitive/relevant domains.
9. Sites with your chosen keyword in the URL – i.e. www.keyword.com
10. All about “keyword” sites
11. Scan relevant sites for broken links.
12. Make relevant, thoughtful comments on “do follow” sites.
13. Relevant publication sites
14. Create microsites dedicated to specific keywords.
15. Create relationships on social media platforms: Note – don’t just come out and ask for a link. This method is slow, and is really more about the relationship than the link. Eventually, once the relationship is built, the individual will most likely link to your site because they like it and you.

3 Email Examples

Develop a listing of these types of sites based on your linking purpose. For link building that requires it, contact the webmaster (preferably with firstname@email rather than info@email) with a personal email – NOT a generic email. Be straightforward, not whiny, begging or sneaky. A few examples:

Email Example #1

Dear [name],

I noticed that [link] on your site is broken. I’d like to suggest this link on my site [your link] as a substitution. Please use [key word or phrase] as the link text, and do let me know if your visitors could use any other type of information I might be able to provide.

Sincerely,

[your name]

Email Example #2

Dear [name],

I’ve been reading your blog and find it [insert adjective]. I’d love to contribute with a guest post. I’m knowledgeable in [industry] as you can see from my site [site address]. Do you have a specific topic you think your readers may be interested in or specific keywords you’re targeting? Please let me know what your requirements are for guest posts, and when a new post would be useful.

Thank you,

[your name]

Email Example #3

Dear [name],

I came across your site recently and find it [insert adjective]. I recently wrote an article that I feel would be useful to your readers, posted here [article address]. Please use the title to link to it, and don’t hesitate to let me know if you think you could use any other information available on my site.

Thank you,

[your name]

Does finding high quality links take time? You Betcha. Yes, it does. It takes time, dedication and research. However, the return on that time investment in terms of meeting your link purpose goals can be unbelievable. Now get out there and get to building your link army!

Post image by Frank Kovalchek

Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.

Where Is Your Link Army Hiding?

Read other posts by this Author: Gabriella Sannino

5 Dirty Words in Link Building

Syndicated From: Search Engine Journal http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/SearchEngineJournal/~3/l-3dahw7ksg/

There are a lot of bad words people use when talking about link building and link builders. Many of them involve expletives, and only the really creative ones are worth remembering. But the worst ones seem harmless, or even good. Some of these seemingly innocuous words make me feel like washing my own mouth out with soap. Don’t let their innocent little vowels and consonants fool you, because when the topic is link building, these words can be seriously misleading.

“Hundreds”

I don’t have an issue with numbers in general; I just think that the word hundreds, when used in conjunction with the word links, needs to be taken very carefully. When something is big news, or goes viral or there is a major, logical event that attracts a load of links all at once, there’s nothing wrong with that, that’s cool, that’s a party. But that’s also usually the result of plenty of time spent, researching creating and executing some sort of marketing plan that culminated in the news, launch or mega-viral super hit.

But if you’re talking about getting hundreds of links all at once by, say, buying them or signing up for a few hundred links on “book marking” sites or whatever other nonsense people are pushing, that’s weird. That’s not normal. Even if you’re getting singular, one-off links, you’d have to have one heck of a link army to get hundreds of links in a matter of weeks.

Every site is different, which means the circumstances and variables which could or might raise red flags will be different for everyone. A site with millions of links can probably acquire a couple of hundred without it being a blip on the giant radar. But, in most cases, there are 2 pretty standard truths about the mass influx of links. A. The sudden increase looks suspicious if the links aren’t natural. And B. Links you can get en masse tend to be of dubious value or strength. So, even a spike in back links can end in a rankings flat line.

“Exchange”

Let me clarify, I don’t hate reciprocal links. I think there’s nothing wrong with reciprocal linking, when it happens because two related websites recognize one another via links. There are plenty of intentional and accidental reciprocal linking situations which make perfect sense. What makes “exchange” a bad word, is the act that it implies. When two websites, actively agree to exchange links, it’s usually an unholy alliance. Especially when there is a links page” involved. I know that to most people, saying this is like announcing that Eli Whitney just mastered the Cotton Gin. But seeing as I still get a link exchange request from some automated program at least once a week, it still bears repeating. It’s also worth hammering home the distinction between “reciprocal links” and a “link exchange”. One is a sign of symbiotic respect the other is a sign of someone trying to cheat the system using a laughably out-dated methodology.

“Worthless”

This entry seems completely contrary to my building cynicism. I know. But in spite of condemning certain kinds of links that I believe carry little value; I don’t think that any link is completely worthless. Even the most seemingly inane, low-value links could, in some small way, serve a purpose.

I had a grandmother, who collected everything, sugar packets, plastic utensils; you name it, because she believed she might need it someday. Being a pack rat of things usually ends with a house full of stuff you will never use. Being a link pack rat means collecting some links, directories or article submissions maybe, that at first seem as valuable as empty Styrofoam cups. But someday those obscure little links might actually send you a visitor or two.

However, this is not a green light to surround yourself with garbage links like your name is Oscar and you live in a can. It’s still a bad idea to waste your link budget on marginal value or whatever easy links you can get your hands on. There are smart, highly effective ways to invest your time and money in link building, and there are cheap and deceptive ones. The good ones carry the most value and the most impact. I’m just saying never hate on the runt of the litter; because sometimes the weak, dormant links you wrote off yesterday, will surprise you tomorrow.

“Perfect”

Taking another 180 degree turn, try not to get dizzy, there’s no such thing as a perfect link. This is a notion I first had a long time ago, when I was still just learning about the entire scope of link building and had yet to really see their full power. Even after a few more years and a lot more perspective, I’m still convinced that nothing is ever perfect. There are great links I mean GREAT, cash bonus, do-a-little-dance worthy links. But are they perfect? Probably not. We could usually wish for a little more.

A few more page back links, a little better anchor text, it’s always easy to attach the words “I wish” to a link. Anyone who promises “perfect” links is perfectly full of crap. Good, better, strong, and useful are all totally reasonable words to describe the kinds of links that someone can get you. But perfect? I seriously doubt it. Half the time, the links you think are going to make an impact don’t even show up in your top back links in Yahoo!. Meanwhile that “worthless” blog comment you made, brings you traffic once a month. Simply put, there’s just no such thing as “perfect” in the link game.

“Guarantee”

For the same reason I take issue with the word “perfect” I’m wary of “guarantee”. There are really only a few kinds of links that can be “guaranteed” and some of those are scary.  Getting good links, real, strong links is pretty difficult to guarantee. Yes, it can be done but the question is; at what cost? See, I’ve seen monthly quotas hit consistently, I’ve seen the “guaranteed” number of links delivered.  I’ve also seen short-cuts, cut corners and quality sacrificed in order to meet those demands.

But my biggest problem with the word “guarantee” regarding link building is when links are “guaranteed” to work. Making that kind of guarantee is like promising to cause an earthquake. No one can make that promise, just like no one can promise rankings or even traffic as a result of links. That darn secret algorithm along with pesky free will makes those kinds of assurances misleading. And when those promises are broken, as they most often are, it does nothing but disparage the name of SEO in general and the good hard work of many honest link builders.

Just Put a Nickel in the Swear Jar

It’s not that none of these words should ever be used, but they should be handled with wisdom and care. Approach guarantees and perfection with skepticism, never underestimate the worthless and tell hundreds of would be exchangers to save their breath.

It’s not that no one should ever use dirty words, when you shoot yourself with a staple gun; the use of certain words is unavoidable. But, just like F-bombs should be dropped out of the earshot of little ones, some link building terms should be spoken with equal care and only in the right context.

Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.

5 Dirty Words in Link Building

Read other posts by this Author: Jennifer Van Iderstyne

Boy Do I Love Linkbuilding – And You Should Too

Syndicated From: SEOmoz Daily SEO Blog http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/4hf_IgxL_Hc/boy-do-i-love-linkbuilding-and-you-should-too

Posted by Seoteric

This post was originally in YOUmoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author’s views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc.

Link building is always a hot topic because it is really what makes an SEO campaign work.  Content is important, page and link structure are important, and the url is important, but for competitive search terms, great on-site optimization will only get you so far.  I have had a bit of a love/hate relationship with link building over the years, and I have really started to be a lot more analytical in how I go about building incoming links.

This love story begins at the beginning of 2006.  I was diagnosed with a terminal cancer, but prayerfully enough it turned out to be a large non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma tumor which was treatable. For over six months, I was stuck in a chair and didn’t have the energy to get up an do anything so I spent that time teaching myself about websites and marketing.  I started reading SEO blogs (like SEOmoz and others) to learn what I could.  I figured I might as well put the time to use, right?

Over the coming months, I started my first SEO campaign for my newly built car accessories website.  My target keywords were stupidly competitive – car accessories and aftermarket auto parts and a lot more keywords like them.  I figured if SEO really worked, then I could do it.  I could get ranked for some ridiculously competitive keywords.

I had a good understanding of on-site SEO such as titles, meta tags, content, URLs, and link structure so I built the site to be highly optimized for my keywords.  I found creative ways to get a lot of content on the homepage using ajax and javascript tabs but still keeping the website aesthetically pleasing.  Once the changes were indexed, I made sure that the content in the tabs was indexing properly.  After trying some long tail queries, I found my site’s tabbed content was indexed very well.

The on-site SEO bumped the rankings into the top 100 for car accessories.  It had previously been ranked around 350 or so.  With everything I had done to beef up the on-site SEO, it was still a long way from where I wanted it.  That’s when I started the link building process.  In 2006 I found a lot of info about directory submissions, article marketing, reciprocal linking, buying links, DMOZ, and blogging so I did a little bit of everything.  A little of everything turned into a lot of everything over the next six months, and slowly but surely the rankings began to rise.

The directory submission process was done with a combination of manual submissions, semi-automated submissions using software, and even some automated submissions.  I used a few directory submitters plus doing a simple Google search for relevant directories and submitted to any and all that didn’t require a payment.  During this process I also started writing how-to articles and submitting them to article directories, blogs, online magazines and journals.  After a few months, the site made it to the first page and traffic started coming in.

Not long after that I started getting reciprocal link requests, so I exchanged a few links along with way as well.  As traffic picked up, I started getting sales on the website for the first time and my attention was being directed towards sales and customer service instead of SEO.  For about a year, I didn’t do any marketing on the site except write a few articles and syndicate to whoever would publish them.  Sometime in 2008, I checked the rankings and found this.

It had climbed to #1 out of 92,100,000 results. I could not believe it.  Traffic was up over 1000%, and the site was getting literally thousands of unique visitors a month just from this keyword.  I checked the analytics and traffic was up and down and all over the place.  After monitoring this for a few days, I experienced the “Google Dance” with rankings ranging from #1 to #4.  Surprisingly, traffic amounts from positions 2-4 were not even HALF of the amount generated from position #1.

Jump ahead to June 2010.  The website is ranking between #2 and #5 from day to day for car accessories.  The surprising thing about this case study is that there hasn’t been any additional marketing done to the site since around November 2008.  Even with the low quality nature of directories, article directories, and even some reciprocal incoming links, the ranking has stayed top 5 for a really competitive keyword.   I did take the time to get the website listed in DMOZ, the Google Directory, and a lot of other “good” websites.  Some of the syndicated articles landed on sites like DIY, ehow.com, and other car enthusiasts websites generating some great inbound links.  The site doesn’t get credit for a lot of the low quality links that were acquired early on but I did do a few things right that had some great results.

I mentioned earlier that I am taking a more analytical approach to link building, and after reading a lot of articles, seeing this video about article marketing, and getting a better understanding of how much better Google is at identifying low quality links and websites, I have really changed the way I think about link building.  Much like in the world of content, quality is better than quantity when it comes to obtaining links.  After analyzing my own link building path from 2006 until the present, I came up with a list of best practices to guide my link building moving forward:

• It is well worth the time to write great content as opposed to lots of decent content.  Some of the best articles I wrote are the ones that attracted the most links and landed on good websites, and one or two were even highlighted in a breaking news story that brought a LOT of referral traffic while it was on the site’s homepage.
• If you figure out something cool or unique, like getting Pandora to play through a mono bluetooth headset, write about it and keep the content on your site and create a buzz using social media.  Links will surely come.
• Write content for your own site first.  As Rand points out, you will get the links pointing back at your site for having the original content.
• Here is one of my favorites – syndicate your RSS feed, not your article content.  This is a philosophical change to the approach I used to have in article marketing.  Instead of publishing your duplicate content everywhere, keep the content on your site and ping services like technorati, twitter, facebook, and anywhere you can publish your site’s feed. Get visitors on your site and then give them an opportunity to bookmark or share your content via social media.
• Quality directories are still valid.  I have still seen good success from getting listed in the top human-edited directories, especially local and regional ones.  Avoid the free-for-all sites and focus on the ones that add value to users.
• Guest Blogging is a new hot-topic which is also worth doing.  As Rand mentioned in this weeks WBF video, finding relevant websites to post content to is a good way to get quality inbound links and brand awareness.  In many cases, you can get content for your site as well if you establish a good partnership with a complementary website or blog.
• Patience is a virtue.  It is hard to not check rankings every day, but there are a lot of other things to do with your valuable time than checking rankings.  I schedule a time once a week to check up on how things are progressing. This keeps me from wasting time each day, and gives me a reason to measure results and dive into analytics at the end of the week.
• Reciprocal links are not all bad.  It is natural for complementary websites to link to one another, so the emphasis is on relevance.  I will exchange links with relevant and complementary websites, but not with just any site.  You want to make sure you are linking to reputable websites too.
• Don’t Spam.  Search engines (like Google) mostly update their algorithms to do one of two things: to increase the relevance of the search results and to battle spam in their index. If you keep things relevant and avoid spam tactics, your rankings should remain intact as long as their isn’t a fundamental shift in how websites and pages are ranked.  Up until the recent “May Day” update, all of our sites have actually improved over the past few years with Google updates (The May Day update gave us about a 14% drop in the number of indexed pages, much like with SEOmoz and others).

Four years later, I have a much different approach to marketing, a different approach to life, and a lot of sites doing well in the search results.  Marketing gives me an outlet for my competitive edge which is why I tend to climb the keyword mountains that I do.  I would like to hear how your link building tactics have changed over the years and see how far we have come.   I plan to keep a student’s approach SEO, which continues to prove itself as one of the most frustrating, rewarding, and elusive things in life.  It is (after all) a love story!

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Read other posts by this Author: Seoteric

Google Shares Its Viewpoint on Earning Quality Links

Syndicated From: WebProNews - SEO http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/SEO-News-WebProNews/~3/4nC5opgciy4/google-shares-its-viewpoint-on-earning-quality-links

SEO changes all the time as search engines make adjustments to their algorithms and user interfaces, users adopt new technologies, etc. Still some things never change, like Google’s view on spammy links.

Do you agree with Google’s philosophy on link-building? Share your thoughts here.

In a new post to the Google Webmaster Central blog, the company has expressed its most recent viewpoint on earning quality links.

The first piece of advice Google gives is to get involved with the community around your topic. If you were still not convinced that social media plays a very big role in search, consider this is coming straight from Google. Now the networks your community hangs out in may vary, but engaging with the community is simply a good way to get links and build credibility, which also will most likely lead to more links. Engaging is good for increasingly visibility outside of search anyway. Nothing new. Just reiterated by Google.

Sidenote: Listen to what Arnel Leyva of Covario has to say about search and social media from this recent interview WebProNews did with him at SMX Advanced:

More WebProNews Videos

Another tip Google suggests is to create content that solves problems for your users – things like tutorials, videos, and tools, surveys, research results, etc. Users who find helpful content are likely to pass it on.

Google notes that humor and other link-bait tactics can work for the short term, but does not recommend counting such tactics. “It’s important to clarify that any legitimate link building strategy is a long-term effort,” says Google Search Quality Strategist Kaspar Szymanski. “There are those who advocate for short-lived, often spammy methods, but these are not advisable if you care for your site’s reputation. Buying PageRank-passing links or randomly exchanging links are the worst ways of attempting to gather links and they’re likely to have no positive impact on your site’s performance over time. If your site’s visibility in the Google index is important to you it’s best to avoid them.” (emphasis added)

“Directory entries are often mentioned as another way to promote young sites in the Google index,” says Szymanski. “There are great, topical directories that add value to the Internet. But there are not many of them in proportion to those of lower quality. If you decide to submit your site to a directory, make sure it’s on topic, moderated, and well structured. Mass submissions, which are sometimes offered as a quick work-around SEO method, are mostly useless and not likely to serve your purposes.”

Szymanski also suggests looking to similar sites in other markets for inspiration – not to copy them, but to see the things that they have done to be successful and see if there is a way to apply that to your own site.

Finally, probably the most obvious tip offered here is to make it easy for people to share your content. Things like Facebook “likes” and Twitter retweets can go a long way in creating new links to your content. Granted these won’t necessarily boost you “pagerank” but they will boost your visibility, which can lead to more quality links, and simply traffic, which is ultimately the goal anyway right?

Have more link-building tips? Share them with WebProNews readers in the comments.

Read other posts by this Author: Chris Crum