Link Building
Webinar: Viral Marketing with Infographics
Click here to register: http://goo.gl/gDZai
We will cover the basics of infographic marketing and review a case study of one of our campaigns. This webinar will cover the following questions:
- What is an infographic?
- How can an infographic help my website?
- What is the process for design, development and distribution of an infographic?
Zemanta, EightFold Logic, Whitespark, and MyBlogGuest – 4 Great New Linkbuilding Services
Rand Fishkin over at SEOmoz really knows his stuff and he’s taken some time to highlight what he believes are four of the best new linkbuilding services around. In no particular order they are Zemanta, MyBlogGuest, Eightfold Logic and WhiteSpark.
There has been an influx of new services over the last few months that offer SEOs something beyond the traditional linkbuilding strategy of reverse engineering backlink profiles. Some are more service oriented while some acquire links and still others focus on visibility challenges.
Zemanta:
A unique concept, Zemanta allows users to submit content in the form of data or images and then displays the data in front of other bloggers while they write. The idea is that bloggers will be affected by the message and mention the brand in their posts, increasing brand awareness. Another thought is that direct links can be obtained as bloggers link to the content provided and still another theory is that the bloggers themselves make up a pool of direct traffickers who actually click on the links themselves.
Google’s given Zemanta the White Hat seal of approval and is now approved to appear in both WordPress and Blogger platforms. SEOmoz reported good results after using the still-being-upgraded service for the last year.
MyBlogGuest:
Ann Smarty, founder of MyBlogGuest started the service in an attempt to match up those looking to write or receive a guest blog post. It’s a simple concept but if it catches on even with a select number of powerful blogs, the number of backlinks could be tremendous.
Ann’s thought is that deep connections will emerge between users of the service and she’s so far created a simple and elegant interface. It’s hard not to be compelled, but the action items on the site are not as pared down as they could be. With a little more branding and marketing, MyBlogGuest could really take off.
EightFoldLogic:
The site’s Linker function aims to create one on one, private connections. Similar to MyBlogGuest, Linker is directed towards a broader audience and connect sites with the idea of partnership in mind. Linker’s role ends once the parties are connected, though, which leads the mind to wonder exactly how up and up the link connections are on the back end. Linkbuilding connection marketplaces are an interesting idea but like best seo hosting sites will hold little water until the sites obtain enough users to make the service valuable. On that note, Linker’s free for the first couple of months.
WhiteSpark:
WhiteSpark’s Local Citation Finder’s goal is to help identify sites that Google uses as “sources” for local map data or conversely reference several sites that rank in SERP results. As local continues to become more and more of a major player the competition for a service that provides useful data around the mysterious field will become fierce. In the future, it would be interesting to see more data about the listings provided and also some services that help SEOs manage multiple listings with a multiple host.
Thanks to Rand and Heather Hendrick for summarizing him here.
How to Invest in a Link Building Campaign
MikeCP’s first post over at SEOmoz is rich with information about building a successful link campaign and the cost associated. We’ve summarized it for you here, so leave feedback in the comments.
Free links just don’t exist. Some cost money, some cost opportunity lost and some just cost time, but it’s important to know how to valuate any given link, especially for a small business looking to create a link building portfolio. Hypothetically, let’s say we have $2000 and 60 hours to start our link building…
Budget Set
If your boss or firm has agreed to spend money on SEO or class c hosting upfront, you’re already ahead of the game. Many people don’t understand the value, so it’s hard to get over this first hurdle in some cases. It’s important to spend this investment well so you’re gifted with more to play with in the future.
How to Spend It
The way to spend the money greatly depends on what kind of business you’re working with and what the site’s existing link profile looks like. The following questions should be answered honestly before you go about creating any kind of new link campaign:
- What have we done in the past? Exactly what are our easy opportunities to go after?
- What’s the realistic goal? Increasing conversion or rankings in the SERP results?
- What does the competition look like? What will we have to do to outrank them?
Directory Submissions:
Wasting all $2000 on spammy directory submissions would not be smart, so weigh your options here. Invest in the big guys like Yahoo.com, Best of the Web, Business.com, and JoeAnt should all be submitted to as they actually pass juice and have value. Once this is done you’ll have only about $1200 left for the remainder of your initial efforts. You should submit here if you’re not already in any of the top directories, but make sure your site is top quality so it won’t be declined. Try to submit slowly so as not to set off a link spike alarm bell…
Asking for Links:
This method is inexpensive but costs time. Having interns call or email potential sites that may provide links is a good idea, but you’ll have to train them. Give them an SEO 101 lesson and teach them the difference between a good site and a spammy one. Costs can rise if you decide to offer samples or product, so be careful. Tracking this time and money is going to be fuzzy, so keep good calculations.
Buy Links:
Tricky, but worth it in the short term. It’s likely that purchasing a few, high quality links will garner higher search rankings at least in the short term so if you have the cash and the site equity, consider it. Long term, though, this is not a good strategy.
Viral Marketing:
Garnering links the natural way, through content that’s passed around for its value is the best way to get links, bar none. It’s only going to cost as much money as you spend to create the content, and the links will be wonderfully natural and long lasting. Remember to report your results when all is said and done in the initial stages of your linkbuilding campaign!
This is not Heather Hendrick’s first article, but she summarized it for us…
Make Your Own Linkbuilding Team
Rob Ousbey at SEOmoz has some thoughts about creating an internal linkbuilding team for your organization, and we’re happy to share them here with you.
Oftentimes, small to medium sized businesses rely on a very small team or even individual person to do all of their SEO work. Being on this team means part of the challenge is finding the time to linkbuild and manage a campaign effectively and often the solution is to draw from other resources within the organization rather than hire someone totally new.
People with different specialties can offer a lot to an SEO campaign, so learn how to manage their strengths in a way that benefits the goal – to build links and handle an increase in visitors to the site. In the example below, the business in question sells software to dentists’ offices and have a great deal of incoming traffic to the website.
Sales – Don’t forget that it’s possible to get links from satisfied customers and that word of mouth is some of the most effective marketing out there. Say the customer fills out a lead gen form, takes a product demo, then either buys the product or turns it down based on need or cost. Try to solicit the people who like the product but can’t buy now to put up a small review and link to the product on their company blog. Even if only 20% follow through, that’s a lot of valuable links!
Conferences – Try to get the people who attend the conferences to hear about your product (and others) to do a write up for you. Make it easier by creating a journalist and PR pack that has a wealth of information for these types of people as they often post high quality links on blogs or traditional media sites that go to your products.
PR – People in this team are already great at getting coverage so you’ll just need to teach them how to use this skill in the online arena. Have them reach out to influential sites in your industry with articles to publish or to bloggers who may want to write about your product themselves. These are high quality, natural links that do a great deal to bolster rankings.
Writers – People who write for your company are already a goldmine, so teach them the basics of SEO and set them loose. See what they can do in terms of linkbait…you may be pleasantly surprised!
HR – If you’re actively recruiting new people, include links to your site wherever you contact them. Even if they’re nofollowed, a great deal are clicked on which passes lots of linkjuice through SEO servers.
Design/Creative – If you’ve got a creative staff with time on their hands, see what they can do to create linkworthy content for you. After your company website is up to date, have them create templates to place on Design Float (with a link, of course) that could potentially be downloaded endlessly.
Outreach – If your company is involved in philanthropy or community efforts, get links where you can. If you donate to a cause, ask them to mention it and link to you on your site and likewise, if you’re hosting a charitable event, see how many links to can get from news sources reporting it.
Heather Hendrick, writer
Some things to know about Linkbuilding…
SEOmoz had some great advice for startups and seo hosting companies about linkbuilding the other day, and we thought we’d share their best points with you…
Linkbuilding literally makes the SEO world go round. Content is important as is navigation and crawlability, but onsite optimization is only half the battle. It’s important not to be afraid of linkbuilding but rather to be analytical in the way you go about it.
The author of the post describes how in his free time, he taught himself the basics of SEO then tried to market is auto parts website. He went after some really competitive keywords and learned a few things in the process. With good knowledge of how to optimize on site such as meta tags, Javascript, and keywords in content he built the site and actually found that it was indexed the way it should be, for the keywords he was after.
At first, the site ranked higher and broke into the top 100. Onsite optimization was working and over time, with a little bit of everything from directory submissions to software to automated submissions, the ranking slowly rose even more. The author also started writing How-To articles and submitting them to like blogs, and slowly the site rose to the first page and traffic really bumped up.
Focus switched to managing orders and SEO slacked off…little marketing was done for over a year and when the rankings were checked – #1 spot! Traffic was pouring in and after monitoring, the numbers ranged from #1 to #4 over the course of a few days, and traffic out of the #1 spot wasn’t even comparable.
Currently, the website is ranking between #2 and #5, even with the directory submissions, reciprocal links, etc. Here are a few best practices put together based on this case study…
- It’s worth it to write really great content that people are going to want to link to
- If you figure out something techie people will want to know, even if it’s unrelated, put it on the site and social media will pick it up
- When writing content, write for your own site first. Links pointing at you don’t matter if your site is awful
- Syndicate your RSS feed to make sure your article content is not duplicated. Allow people to use it and read it on social media sites
- Good directories are still good. Choose ones that offer value to customers
- Check your rankings weekly, not daily and spend your time doing more valuable linkbuilding
- Don’t discount reciprocal links, just focus on quality as it makes sense for relevant websites to link to each other
- Without spamming, your website should maintain its ranking even through the Google algorithm shifts
Never stop testing new theories and learning new things about SEO!
HHendrick summarized this article
No-Fail Ways to get Links from Bloggers
Danny Dover’s back at SEOmoz with another Whiteboard Friday where he gives advice to first time linkbuilders itching for blogger links, and we’ve shared the best parts here with you. There are 5 tips, in specific, Danny gives to readers.
- The first thing to do when you start seeking blog links is to decide on a niche. This means, if you’re running a site about baking, write a few articles or pieces that may speak to a specific niche blog, for example, an article about “Top 5 Best Bakeries in NY” for a New York Bakery blog. It’s got to be content they’ll want to publish, and don’t go after the biggest blog in the industry! Those types of sites hardly ever give out links, so think deeper and you’ll have more success.
- Do some interviews next. This works for two main reasons, the first of which is they give you something interesting to write about. What’s better for bloggers to link to than an actual interview with an industry expert? Secondly, once you interview someone prominent in your industry, they’ll have a better grasp of your site and brand and possibly come to you in the future.
- You’ve got to keep being social online. This works because it’s easy to do and people who are able to actually sitting in front of a computer. The three best options for staying social online are: Facebook, which can garner “likes” and brand awareness among your social network without being too salestastic, Twitter, which doesn’t really get you links but helps you spread your brand message over time, and blogs, on which you can find supporting evidence for your case and then site your own property.
- Make some real life contacts. This is a really great longterm strategy as bloggers will usually draw right from their own minds rather than going to the trouble of looking up a source. If you’re a personal friend or at least an acquaintance, your brand is going to be more likely to pop into their mind.
- The newest tactic out there is to send the bloggers links of things that include their blog. If you’ve got a game, an app, or an seo hosting website that does something unique, it’s a great idea to place their blog into a demo and shoot it over – this way, they can promote your product or site while at the same time promoting their own blog. Genius!
Thanks for summarizing, Heather Hendrick
6 Ways PRO Can Add Value in 15 Minutes
Posted by randfish
As many of you who read this blog know, I’m a terrible self-promoter. I actually feel guilty writing about, linking to and promoting the products and services that make payroll for the amazing SEOmoz staff and allow us to conduct cool research, produce awesome guides and build out spiffy office space. But, every few months, I manage to crawl out from under that shell. This time, it’s by request.
I’ve been hearing from a lot of our PRO members that they feel both overwhelmed and confused by all the offerings in PRO. I know it’s tough when there are 30+ pages on which unique types of PRO content exist and even the dashboard doesn’t link to all of them (that’s our fault for bad organization – I promise it’s getting better by the end of summer). Hence, this post is all about what to do in your first 15 minutes inside PRO to get lots of value that can actually move the needle on your SEO actions and search traffic.
Step 1: Find Your Big Missed Opportunities via Top Pages
When you run a report in Open Site Explorer, click to the “top pages” tab and browse through the list of the most-linked-to pages on your domain. You’re looking for two things – any troubling codes (302, 40x, 50x) and pages that have lots of links, but aren’t targeting competitive keywords for relevant search traffic. In the former instance, you want to get those pages up and pointing to the right place. In the latter case, you need to run that page through OSE, determine who’s linking to it and with what anchor text (there’s a tab for that, too), then see if you can put together good content to match the links & ranking ability. You can do all that, later – for now, just export the list to CSV, or make a note to revisit.
Elapsed time: 3 minutes
Step 2: Crawl 3,000 Pages on Your Site and ID Potential Errors
The new Custom Crawl Prototype will mimic a search engine spider and crawl up to 3,000 pages on any domain, then email you with a CSV of the results in 24 hours. It identifies duplicate content issues, HTTP headers, missing titles & meta descriptions, and many more potential SEO pitfalls. Get a report on a site or two and dig into the results tomorrow.
Elapsed time: 3 minutes 30 seconds
Step 3: Run Keyword Difficulty Reports for Your Top 5 Keyword Targets
How tough, relatively speaking, are the keywords you’re chasing and where might easy opportunities exist? Keyword Difficulty can help answer this question and provides a terrific CSV export of the top 25 sites/pages ranking for any query with metrics for each. Often just a report or two can help you identify keyword targets where small quantities of links or optimization effort can take you a long way. They’re also ideal for showing management/clients exactly how far you have to go to catch up with the competition.
Elapsed time: 7 minutes
Step 4: Uncover Some Easy Link Targets with Link Intersect
Tom Critchlow and I call the Link Intersect Tool “cheating,” because it’s just too easy to find good link opportunities. Plug in your site and at least 2 (up to 5) competing sites (or just sites that you think have relevant/acquirable links) and it spits back a list of sites, pages and metrics that link to 2+ of the competitors but don’t link to you. It’s like shooting links in a barrel! (that’s a thing, right?)
Elapsed time: 11 minutes
Step 5: Sign Up for a Webinar (or Download a Past Presentation)
I’ve personally run a dozen 60-90 minute webinars for our PRO members on topics ranging from “reverse engineering the SERPs” to “competitive link building” to “actionable analytics” and more. The feedback we get on these is overwhelming positive and we’re running two each month (one with a specific content focus and another reviewing members’ sites). The webinar archives contain video+audio downloads of the presentations plus a link to register for upcoming ones. If you like a more interactive/participatory learning environment, these are a great option.
Elapsed time: 12 minutes
Step 6: Track Rankings on a Few Dozen Key Terms/Phrases
My recommendation is to Track Rankings for 10-20 key terms you’re targeting, a handful of mid-range “nice-to-haves” and a healthy helping of long-tail keywords to help give a sense of how you’re performing across the keyword demand curve. When traffic fluctuates, it’s great to be able to see if rankings were the cause, or if other factors (demand, downtime, errors, analytics capture problems, etc.) could be the culprit. The best part about the current rank tracking system is the ability to choose between multiple engines on any TLD (and to select “entire subdomain” so it catches any page from your site in the top 50 results).
Elapsed time: 15 minutes
OK, your quarter-hour is up, but so are your chances for a lot more search traffic in the next few weeks and months. When you’re ready to devote some more time, you can install the mozbar, check if any deals in the Discount Store are relevant/useful, distribute some PRO Guides to your compatriots, give Trifecta a spin, watch some PRO Whiteboard Videos, ask a question in Q+A, review the hundreds of PRO Tips, leverage the Link Acquisition Assistant to find some sexy new link opportunities, dig around in Labs, well… you get the idea.
And, as a tease, here’s an early comp of what we’ve been busy with in 2010:
ETA: Late this summer 
Likes Mean Relevance in Facebook Search
Nick O’Neill at All Facebook reports that Facebook has confirmed that “all Open Graph-enabled web pages will show up in search when a user likes them.” He also calls this Facebook’s “war on Google.”
While utilizing likes and the open graph as a ranking factor in search should help Facebook improve its internal search, it doesn’t represent much of a threat to Google search. Google indexes the web. Facebook indexes activity from Facebook users. There’s a pretty big difference, regardless of how big Facebook is.
There is certainly something to be said for Facebook search, however. There’s no question that a lot lof people are using Facebook and spending a lot of time there, so having some kind of search strategy for Facebook is not a bad idea. Naturally, the Open Graph will play a huge role in this, and that means taking advantage of Facebook’s social plugins. As I’ve written about before, Facebook likes (as well as Twitter retweets) are like the new links in some ways.
Facebook is definitely making a lot of moves to keep users getting the info they want from within Facebook. Fan pages essentially turn Facebook into a news reader. They’re working on a Q&A product. They’re launching content destinations themselves (like this politics page). However, no matter how much information Facebook is able to give users, that amount will always be limited, and will not be able to deliver the web in the way Google can. Of course, that’s why they have Bing results for web search.
As far as search market share, it is probably Bing that stands to gain the most out of improved Facebook search. I don’t know how often people are going to go to Facebook for web searches, but the more people do search on Facebook, the more they are going to see those web results from Bing, when the actual (limited) Facebook results don’t deliver what they want. If Bing can deliver what they want in the top three results (the amount that is commonly displayed in Facebook search results), Bing only stands to gain.
Optimizing for Bing is very connected to optimizing for Facebook and soon optimizing for Yahoo.
Buying Links Works (Short term)
Scott Willoughby over at SEOmoz put out a Whiteboard recently about how he…bought links, and it worked! Check out the highlights here:
It should go without saying that this site does not necessarily condone linkbuying and Scott’s opinions are purely his own. Anyone worth their salt in SEO hosting knows that linkbuying is dangerous and can get a site penalized, fast.
The experiment begins when Rand Fishkin bought some paid links with highly optimized anchor text meant to minimize the confounding factors. The three tests are as follows.
Experiment One:
Rand bought a link with anchor text keyword difficulty of 30% and pointed it at an SEOmoz blog post. The term was in the body of the post, but not the title tag. The ranking before the link was bought was #458 – after 8 days, the ranking was #30. (Link was removed after changes observed)
Experiment Two:
The keyword difficulty score on this one was 36% and the term in question was at the end of the title tag on the page the link was pointed to. The ranking before the link was bought: #426, after four days, #58.
Experiment Three:
The three word anchor text had a keyword score of 26%. It was pointed at a brand new site with less than ten total links. The ranking before the link was near #200, and after 4 days it moved to #4!
That’s a whole lot of movement! There are a couple of things to point out: these were very short term links and Google didn’t have much time to sniff them out. Additionally, the rankings fell right back down to where they were after the links were pulled so if you’re renting, this can happen to you.
Now, a cautionary tale. One of SEOmoz’s friends in SEO recently bought 4 paid links. They’d enjoyed years in the top 2 and the money from those positions and seemingly overnight they vanished from Google SERPs. Vanished! Now the site can no longer rank for their business name or title tag. Bad news, so beware if you’re considering buying links for your site.
Thanks for the summary from Heather Hendrick
The Best Links In Life Are (Not) Free
Chris Crum wrote a post for WebProNews called Google Shares Its Viewpoint on Earning Quality Links.
We thought it was an excellent post and wanted to summarize the high points for our readers. If you want the full post, click on the link above.
I think the most important thing to focus on in his post, and link building in general, is the word “earn”. Despite what Luther and Janet might tell you the best things in life aren’t free. You have to put in some blood, sweat and tears. Getting great links to your site is no different. Working to add value in a community, writing great blog posts, and providing valuable tools to your visitors are all ways a little a sweat can turn into some face melting links.
Going after the “low hanging fruit”, aka mass directory submissions, still works to an extent. The problem is these links will continually drop in value as the search engines change their algorithms. Taking this singlar approach to earning links will not get you to the top.
Two great link building techniques are offered in the post. First, share your content everywhere. Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, newsletters, EVERYWHERE. The second is take a look at what your competitors, or other successful sites, are doing to find inspiration. I’ve always been a big fan of the CASE (Copy And Steak Everything) method.
Recent Comments