Nearly two years after its launch, Google is still dealing with people who question why they should bother with Google+. But in recent weeks, the company has released what it considers “game changing” features that it feels will better enlist both marketers and developers to embrace its platform.
“You’re now seeing us put out, on a constant drumbeat, tools and capabilities for developers and marketers that I think are game changing, that they may not get anywhere else,” said Seth Sternberg, product management director for the Google+ Platform, when meeting yesterday with a small group of reporters at the Google I/O conference.
I’d asked Sternberg about adoption because even in the middle of the biggest gathering of people who seemingly want to adopt anything Google pushes out, it was clear developers and others still don’t get what Google+ is supposed to be or why they should use it.
Making The Case, Because It Clearly Needs To Be Better Made
This came up in several of the sessions I attended at Google I/O, most notably in the fireside chat with the Google+ platform team yesterday. There, you had someone who represents celebrities asking for real numbers or stats that he could go back to prove the value to being on Google+, because his clients didn’t get it. They get Facebook. They get Twitter. They don’t get Google+.
As he put it, ”If I’m going to tell J.J. Abrams give me a million bucks for a hangout, he’s going to say what value do I get?” By the way, this person didn’t say he actually represents Abrams, just that he works with that type of client.
But Abrams is a great example. At Google I/O, Google talked about how cast members from the new Star Trek: Into Darkness movie by Abrams did a hangout on Google+. They did. But only because big Google+ user NASA arranged it. As far as Abrams, or at least the official Star Trek movie site is concerned, pointing people to Google+ doesn’t make the cut:
Icons for Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest are listed on the official site but not Google+. The movie does have an official Google+ page. It just doesn’t promote that page nor, apparently, can be bothered to update it to the fact that the movie has actually reached theaters:
Clearly, Google has a lot of work yet to do in showing the value of Google+ to big brands, as well as business of all sizes.
Rank Better On Google With Google+
Let me suggest the first value proposition Google needs to explain loudly and clearly about why you want to be on Google+, which is:
Being on Google+ means you’ll rank better on GoogleGoogle has generally underplayed this aspect. In fact, if you talk to the Google Search folks, they’re down right negative about the idea that Google+ provides any type of ranking boost.
But the Google Search people are talking about non-personalized search. When people are logged in — which more and more are these days — results are much more customized, personalized, tailored to who you are. And as I wrote in 2011, who you’re friends with on Google+ leads to better rankings.
You’d think this simple value proposition alone would cause people to get it, get why they need to pay attention to Google+. Everyone understand the value of ranking well on Google. That’s easy. And yet, this value gets lost.
I think Google’s finally getting it, however. In another session at Google I/O, Grow Your Audience With Google+, Google+ product marketing manager Amy Walgenbach repeatedly stressed the benefits Google+ brings to brands for Google Search.
SoundCloud joined and gained an entire area to the right of the regular search results that it wouldn’t have had before, an “incredible amount of real estate,” she said:
For generic searches — when people are searching not for a company by name but perhaps for a topic that the company might hope to appear for — Google+ can cause brands to appear when they wouldn’t have before:
In the example above, for a search on “summer cocktail,” the first three results are personalized — listings that have been boosted to the top of the page based on Walgenbach’s connections on Google+.
Without those, Martha Stewart would still rank tops, but the Food Network and Marie Claire wouldn’t show on the first page at all (as I can tell when I do the search logged out). FYI, for me, when logged in, I get a page from the Los Angeles Times in the top results because I follow them on Google+.
In addition, Walgenbach said even YouTube results are impacted. “The only reason this Ford video shows up on YouTube is because I follow them in Google+,” she said, when showing one example of the “Watch to Watch” feature:
Her presentation was probably the strongest I’ve ever heard Google overtly push the Google+ to increased Google Search visibility connection.
It’s something that search marketers themselves have understood and explained to others for ages. But Google’s shyness over the advantage might finally be easing off in the face of so many people still not being convinced about the social network.
Getting Interactive With Posts
Since increased search visibility hasn’t been convincing enough to date, what are those new game changing things Sternberg is talking about?
One is Google Interactive Posts, which allow people to drive actions beyond just clicking to read more. Sign-up! Download! Subscribe! Those are among the 100 actions that can be integrated with a post:
This was a big change. Did you catch it, when it came out last February? It sure got past us. Best I can tell, it got past all the major tech blogs. That’s largely because Google did a pretty poor job announcing it.
Ironically, I spotted it by seeing a great post last month by Mike Armesen of SwellPath on Google+ about it. Read his post below, as well our our follow-up one, to learn more about the feature:
Google+ Sign-In
Many did hear about the Google+ Sign-In launch that happened in February. That’s probably because the big news really was how Google — in my view — heavily positioned it as a “spam free” alternative to Facebook.
At Google I/O, Google was downplaying the spam-free aspect and touting how using its sign-in can better connect publishers and companies to their readers and users plus, in turn, have data that can flow out to help within Google Search.
There’s a lot to unbundle within Google+ Sign-In, because how you use it can vary so widely. App makers may understand how their most popular apps can appear in Google Search because Google talked about bringing “app activities” to search last month, as our story below covers more:
But if you’re a publisher, you might overlook the opportunity for Google+ Sign-In to understand what your readers like most and flow that out as top recommendations. I think Google has plenty of work to do here to better communicate this value, perhaps with more stories of how non-app developers are using it.
There was a publisher pavilion area at Google I/O area, but they looked mostly bored when I wandered through. Put them on stage!
There also remains another challenge. It’s also easy to show Facebook recommended posts on a publisher site. We do it right here, and there’s no “Facebook Sign-In” required to make it happen. You just need a Facebook page.
Google Content Recommendations
Did I say Google needs an easier way to do content recommendations? Hey, it’s got you covered. That’s another of the game changing features Sternberg sees out there, Google+ Content Recommendations that launched earlier this month.
These only work for mobile, for now (where mobile to Google means Android and iOS — Windows Phone, as usual, gets left out). But at Google I/O, Sternberg and others repeatedly stressed that mobile is where they are most needed, for now.
There’s a huge bounce rate on mobile content, Sternberg said. People read one article that they click to from email, Twitter, Facebook, Google+ or however they reach it, then move on. Google+ Content Recommendations have, in testing, greatly increased the chance they’ll stay on a site and read more.
Google Hangouts More Confusing?
Google also continued to tout the value of doing Hangouts. But are these now Hangouts On Air? Or Google+ Hangouts versus Google Hangouts? Because now we do have Google Hangouts, adding more confusion into a Google brand that’s already started with confusion when no one knows if its a social network or a “layer” much less how to handle punctuation after that damn plus symbol in Google+.
Google Hangouts, announced at Google I/O, is the new name to unify Google’s various messaging applications, as The Verge explains well in a story this week. Unified except for Google Voice, that is, which seems to be floating out in a messaging netherworld.
Before this, Google Hangouts was that thing you did on Google+ itself, video calling with individuals, and Google+ Hangouts On Air a way to broadcast to a larger audience.
It’s the “On Air” stuff that Google focuses so much attention on when promoting Google+, big brands or celebrities doing a video broadcast. But some were doing regular Google+ Hangouts before, where these weren’t livestreamed. With the messaging realignment, now just sending an instant message to someone you know is technically a Google Hangout.
That gives us a broad world of Google Hangouts, which in turn encompasses Google+ Hangouts, which in turn encompasses Google+ Hangouts On Air. Phew. And Google wonders why people might not understand what Google+ is?
What Is Google+?
That leads back to the “what is Google+?” question that repeatedly came up during the sessions I attended. A layer, a platform, a destination. Stuff we’ve all heard before, and stuff that’s all true — and stuff that still doesn’t answer the question.
Much of this confusion is down to legacy. When Google+ launched, Google was desperate not to be seen as launching a “me too” social network that would get compared to Facebook, plus it honestly had a vision of Google+ as being more than just a social network.
For me to explain it what Google+ is, let me rephrase the question. “What is Facebook?”
That’s an easier question to answer. Facebook is a social networking site, one that allows you to socially connect in various ways ranging from sharing articles, to posting pictures to friends, to sending messages, including some methods that happen off Facebook itself. Publishers and others understand there’s a large audience there and can visibility see the value in the traffic Facebook sends or brand lift it creates.
All of Facebook’s products that allow you to do this carry the Facebook name, are part of the Facebook brand. That’s also why reasonably, while Google’s been weird about its active user figures in the past, it can fairly argue that if people who use Gmail once per month on Google aren’t counted as “Google+ active users,” then why are people on Facebook who use Facebook to email maybe only once per month counted as active users there?
Google’s not just a social network. It’s really whatever it wants to be, a company that exhibits no real boundaries. But maybe it’s time for Google+ to be the specific Google social network name while Google-something-else becomes used as the name for the “social spine” or “layer” of Google stitching social into all of its products.
Consider in December that Google’s social chief Vic Gundotra told me that “Google+ is Google” but at the Google I/O keynote this week he said, ”We think we just put the Google into Google+.” Which is it? They’re not one-and-the-same.
There is a destination site, a hub of social activity where people do some very overt social things. Maybe that needs to be Google+, and there’s a value proposition to being on that.
As for the “layer” or “spine,” maybe there needs to be just Google — a Google Sign-In, for example, that works with Google+ but also elsewhere at Google, that when it carries the Google name rather than the Google+ name, perhaps isn’t as easily dismissed by some. A Google Account, rather than a Google+ Account — and you decide what that Google Account uses (which is actually how things work now).
Renewed Outreach
As for changing the social game, Sternberg — who came to Google when it acquired his company Meebo last June — says Google is also gearing up to do more to help brands going forward. The team from Meebo has given Google more people and experience to work with brand and developers, to get them going with the platform.
“This is all reasonably new. We want to reach out and engage our customers in our community, and we’ll really begin that in earnest the next few months, and we very much welcome people getting in touch asking how we can help.”
Related Topics: Channel: Social Media | Featured | Features & Analysis | Google: Google+ | Top News
Google was granted a patent this week that describes how web sites might be given quality ratings, based upon a model that looks at human ratings for a sample set of sites, and web site signals from those sites.
The patent tells us that the advantage of such an approach would be to:
- Provide greater user satisfaction with search engines
- Return sites having a higher quality rating than a certain threshold
- Ranking sites appearing in search results based upon quality
- Identifying quality sites without having a human view the site first
This patent was originally filed in 2008, and the use of quality signals sound similar to what Google has shared with us regarding the Panda Update. It’s more of a search quality “improvement” than a web spam penalty.
The patent uses blogs as a type of site that it can be applied to within its claims and description section. One of the inventors, Christopher C. Pennock was a Senior Software Engineer on Google Blog Search, according to an early 2009 SMX Session with him which discusses ranking signals in Blog Search.
One aspect of this ranking approach is to have human raters rate the quality of pages of a site (all pages), scoring each on a scale of 1 to 5, with 1 being low and 5 being high quality, and aggregating those together for the site as a whole. Those ratings are augmented with factors from the web site such as:
- Originality of the arguments or information on the site
- Amount of original content versus copied content
- Layout of the site
- Correctness of grammar and spelling of the text on the web pages
- Whether obscene or otherwise inappropriate material is presented
- Whether the websites have blank or incomplete pages
- Other factors that would affect the quality of the site
These signals are very similar to ones that were published in the Google Webmaster Central blog post, More Guidance on Building High-Quality Sites from May of 2011. The post was aimed at explaining “how Google searches for high-quality sites,” by providing 23 sets of questions that someone at Google might ask themselves as they attempt to “write algorithms that attempt to assess site quality.”
This patent definitely doesn’t explain exactly how Google’s Panda update works, but the concepts behind it are similar in a number of ways. As Google notes in that blog post:
Of course, we aren’t disclosing the actual ranking signals used in our algorithms because we don’t want folks to game our search results; but if you want to step into Google’s mindset, the questions below provide some guidance on how we’ve been looking at the issue
That might be the best way to approach this patent (and many other patents), enabling people to view the issue of presenting quality pages higher in search results from Google’s perspective. The patent is:
Website quality signal generation
Invented by Christopher C. Pennock. Jeremy Hylton, Corinna Cortes
Assigned to Google
United States Patent 8,442,984
Granted May 14, 2013
Filed March 31, 2008Abstract
Systems and methods relating to website quality rating are disclosed. Websites are rated, relationships between ratings and website signals are identified, models are generated and modeled ratings are assigned to unrated websites by applying the models to the website signals of the unrated websites.
Other Human Rater Actions
When human raters look at pages, they also perform some other actions other than rating pages from 1 – 5.
One of those is to skip over some sites completely when URLs on the site show objectionable content such as spam or pornography or because pages from the site don’t load. These sites might be determined to be “invalid” for rating. In part, this categorization as “invalid” by raters can filter some sites from the rating process because there might be a bias on the part of the rater to negatively rank pages they personally find objectionable.
Another is to select a viewing appeal for the websites.
Broad appeal – if the content of the site appeals to a broad segment of the population such as a website related to high profile national or world news events.
Niche appeal – if the content of the site appeals to a very narrow subset of the population such as a website dedicated to electromagnetism.
The viewing appeal might be used as a factor to rank or filter sites presented in response to a search request. (The patent doesn’t tell us if “viewing appeal” is a positive or negative ranking signal, though.)
Applying Quality Signals to Blogs
The patent claims section does call out blogs as the types of sites that would be covered by this patent, but with the removal of a couple of short sentences, those claims could easily be applied to any kind of web site.
It’s quite possible that there’s a very similar patent filed by Google as the USPTO that explores how quality signals could be applied to non-blog sites.
Google specifically points out things like click rate, blog subscription rate, and PageRank scores as web site signals that can be associated with a blog.
Click Rate - There might be two different click rates used here – the first involving how often a URL for the site was clicked upon when it appeared in general search engine results, and the second is the number of times a URL from the site was clicked upon in a blog search. The patent tells us:
The click rate is a blog popularity indicator and therefore a potential quality indicator.
Instead of a raw number of clicks, these click rates might be defined as a ration of the number of clicks a page receives as opposed to the number of times it’s shown in search results. Those may also be normalized based upon the position that the page was at in results since a page at the top of results will probably be clicked upon more than one at the bottoms of results.
Blog Subscription Rate – Funny to see Google Reader listed as one possible source of information like this, though the patent tells us that Google might extract information like that from other sources as well. The importance of this information is explained here:
Blog subscription rate is indicative of the quality of the blog because it is a measure of readership. A higher readership is indicative of a higher quality blog.
PageRank Score – This score is another signal that might be used for blogs, and it would likely play a very similar role in building a quality rating as it may in ranking other types of pages on the Web.
Take Aways
The patent provides more details on how human ratings and signals from a website might be used to create a model for quality rating that can help determine how pages are ranked in search results, using a machine learning approach to generate ratings for pages based upon the sample set of pages actually rated.
One thing I found really interesting was the patent’s description of when pages might be re-rated, or reclassified.
One possibility might be that pages would be re-rated on a periodic basis. That seems to have been what had been happening with Panda updates.
More interestingly though, is a different option, where re-rating a page or site might be triggered by some pre-defined change in web site signals:
For example, if the PageRank score associated with a website varies by a defined percentage (e.g., 10%) then the process can be triggered to update the model that characterizes the relationships between the website signals and the website quality rating.
With Panda updates in the past, Google was providing warnings of when data might be “refreshed,” presumably meaning that sites impacted might be re-classified based upon periodic updates. In March, Google stated that Panda updates would happen in an ongoing process instead.
Does Panda work like the process described in this patent for determining quality rankings for pages? Does this mean that those Panda updates may now be triggered by something like a certain level of improvement in a quality signal, like PageRank, that might set off an update for a site?
If so, a site that’s been negatively impacted from an upgrade such as Panda might have to improve in terms of quality signals such as PageRank above a certain threshold to be rated again in a way that might improve its quality rating.
302 Flares 302 Flares ×In November I asked a group of ~50 SEOs one simple question:
“What was the most creative way you, or someone you know, got a link?”
This was personally one of my favorite posts because there was so much awesome, actionable, and insightful responses. But it looks like I wasn’t alone – it’s now the #1 all time post on Inbound.org.
After it was published, I got a lot of SEOs wanting to contribute as well, but very few people actually noticed the updated additions. That’s why I decided it was time for round 2, just because each response is just as awesome as the ones in the original post.
However, there are a couple things you should know. (1) I’ll be merging this post with the original in the next week or two so all responses will be on one post, and you’ll be able to vote for your favorites (the top responses will float to the top). (2) If you want to contribute a response, see the end of this post!
So, even though there are only 28 responses in this round, they’re equally insightful as the first group’s!
Once upon a time, an affiliate program I was an affiliate for has
launched a translated version of one of their product sites but forgot
to register the ccTLD version of the domain name for that specific country/language. I registered that domain, then asked them if I can use it (since doing otherwise would be construed as brand infringement).The affiliate program advertised the product offline in that new country so people were searching for the product name and guess who was ranking for it, almost without links, even above the official site (which was just a subdomain of their main .com site)? This has taught the affiliate program a lesson though, and since then they always made sure to register a ccTLD before launching a translated version.OK since I cheated a bit and that story wasn’t really about links, here is another one, this time not about me but about somebody else who’s been very creative.
Imagine that you run a casino affiliate site. The typical idea of linkbuilding in that niche is either buying links en masse or spamming links en masse. So I found it totally hilarious when one day I came across a casino affiliate site that had a link off a major SEO conference site. How? – simple, as a blog partner The conference organisers now know about it as I showed it to them so this is not likely to be repeated by anyone again – but still, I am not naming the actual conference or site here for a number of reasons. Yet, I think this is still a great example of thinking outside the box.
Check the backlinks of Example.com. It probably has over a million
backlinks. The purpose of Example.com is to serve as a domain to be
used worldwide for the purpose of an example. See this: http://www.iana.org/domains/example. When someone posts example.com in a web page, whether intended to or not, it is often an actual hyperlink, even on a PR 9 site like W3C.org. The result is, with so many links being created daily there will be domain misspellings that are actual hyperlinks. So a misspelling variant of example.com becomes a link.On many SEO forums and blogs, as well as tutorials across the web, there are discussions of domains. Invariably those discussions touch on the topic of hyphens or keywords and are illustrated with the domain, keyword1-keyword2.com. Thus, thousands of links are created to that and similar domains. Those are two kinds of links that are created daily and at the time, nobody owned the domains.
Make sense?
A variant of the above approach was to spider large authoritative websites and find broken links, buy the domains and point them to affiliate sites. This method fell out of favor once Google started resetting the PageRank of domains. However there used to be a loophole for ccTLDs (country code top level domains), where the PageRank, at least on the Google Toolbar, persisted. I don’t know if this is still the case, haven’t tested it lately. As I mentioned previously, those are not sustainable link building techniques but they illustrate a way to capture authoritative link equity for sites that are difficult to build links to or for the purposes of tracking the algorithm.
Other than [broken link building], which has already been
mentioned in your post, the most fun link I ever built was when I
worked with a web design agency. I found a graphic design inspiration site that had a page where designers created a wallpaper using the site’s logo, and submissions were credited with a link. I really enjoyed creating the wallpaper and actually was really stoked my design was picked for their gallery (because I’m not an actual graphic designer). The domain was very topically relevant, and none of our usual competitors appeared on that page. Whee!I have another cool story about how my first marketing blog became #1 in Google for “social media blog” and #10 for the term “Social media” (in 2006/2007). Ironically, I knew nothing about social media at the time, and was invited to a meeting of the Social Media Club in my city. It was 2006, (pre-Oprah on Twitter) and there were not as many social media professionals, that’s for sure – after the meeting I launched a little free WordPress blog to discuss the topic of ethical use of social media for business. The guy who invited me to the unconference ended up adding my blog URL to a meme called the “Z List” that spread virally through hundreds of blogs – and even landed on Seth Godin’s blog! It definitely gave my new blog a huge jumpstart with zero effort on my part. Hundreds of links from pretty decent, topically relevant blogs.
Last year (2012), I met many search professionals at the different
search events in the UK and New York. I also went around Europe
interviewing SEOs in France, Austria, Germany, Italy, Sweden and France as a guest blogger for State of Search. Off the back of the tour, I became a regular blogger for this Best European Search Blog which I was really pleased about.I have since interviewed some of the people who I met in 2012 (for a post on my SEO blog) and they have then tweeted and shared it with their influencers and followers. They have also guest posted on one of my travel sites and I have written a couple of posts for them linking back to my travel blog.I focused more on building the relationships with others and the bonus was I was also able to have a link back to my sites.
Call it what you want (clever, shady, a tad unethical), but LinkedIn’s
“You’re in the Top 10% of most viewed profiles for 2012″ was creative.
It played into the basic thing that is tattooed on everyone’s forehead: Make Me Feel Important. They did, people talked, and damn did the blogs write about it. You’re doing the same thing with this post, right?Another: We’re working with an online fundraising website for people crowd sourcing funding for medical expenses, memorials, adoptions, etc. Instead of focusing on the service, we focus on the people they’re fundraising for by reaching out to the local media in their communities to let them know what’s going on and how much they raised.
Want 5 non-Nofollowed links from PR7 pages on USA.gov (a site
with a PR10 home page)? Sounds impossible doesn’t it? Well, it wasn’t
easy, but here is how we did it.We identified some pages on the site where USA.gov was linking to external (third party, non-government) resources (the “Outside Sites”) because the government did not have their own resources for that information. There were 5 such links on the PR7 page we found. Of course, we focused on pages that were relevant to the topic matter of the site we were working on.We went and built pages that were much higher quality than the information on the Outside Sites. Our pages were up to date, more in-depth, and more thoroughly fact checked. This was stage 1 of the effort.
We then worked hard to develop connections with the people responsible for the site. This was tricky and an involved process, but eventually what happened is that we learned about an internal government initiative called Webmaster University. We saw that they brought in outside speakers to present day long seminars to government webmasters. We obtained a great introduction and I pitched doing a presentation on SEO for them, and was accepted!
I flew to DC and was paid some money to do the training. This was OK compensation, but not great, BUT, my presence there and the effort I made to do a great job for them resulted in a different type of currency as a reward: TRUST.
Not long after the training I reached out and pointed out that the site I was involved in had much better resources than the Outside Sites they were currently linking to. About 1 month after I made that suggestion, we got the links. Our site receiving the links soared. We sold that business in 2010.
I would like to answer that we took a sack full of kittens and played
tennis with them at a Justin Beiber concert, and then created an
infographic of it and posted it to Reddit.But it wouldn’t be true.It was hamsters.
It’s an old joke and the pay off is thinking it’s over when it’s not.
Which brings me to creativity.
I cannot answer the question, which is the most creative. Because every idea that is implemented is creative, it’s just some work and some do not.
When starting out you find that most fail, but that’s ok as people don’t see the failures. Then after a certain point you realise that there is a process that is scalable and that you don’t have to be uber creative to deliver a formula that gets results.
Because it’s all about results, it’s not about being creative.
However, creativity drives the brain into testing, trying out and risking failure.
If you are not failing you are not being creative.
And I have to say, you get tired of failing, so you ease up a bit, increase the success rate, but it decreases the creativity and so become a little less edgy, the work becomes a little less interesting. Which is great for your bank balance, but not so for the creative soul.
My answer is this. (and by the way these type of questions drive me bonkers and I lie awake thinking about them). I don’t think I did any one thing that stands out as being creative.
However, I approached the whole problem of “how do I get people to link to my work” by being highly creative and letting go. Trusting that the skill set I had built up over the previous years would pay off.
As soon as I started to trust my inner, creative voice and speak with a voice I could own I got links. In fact, as soon as I decided to do that I got hammered with sackfuls of links from authority people straight away. It was a little odd, because before that it was Crapola City.
There is a lot more complexity to all this though as there are many variables. But it’s worth exploring as you too can find your inner link building fiend and set them loose.
In conclusion:
By applying a creative methodology that tapped certain skills and developing a system of deliberate practice where I would focus on the weak parts of my skill set I was about to climb up the link building mountain and enjoy the view.The most creative link building idea I’ve heard was from someone
in the “death” related products space – not one totally friendly to
attracting links. He was driving to work and heard about someone who was trying to pay for his loved ones funeral, and in exchange, was willing to pay for advertising space on their urn. Since it was being covered on the radio, he knew it had some press traction and decided to pay for advertising. He got is company’s name plastered on the urn, and boom, Gawker among a few other big pubs others covered the story of the unlikely urn advertising and got his funeral website a link from an amazing domain. As some would say, he “paid for a link without paying for a link”. Matt Cutts approved.I’ve leveraged the weather. When I was in South Florida, I had a
client that did new home construction. They had a reputation problem
in the form of one of those uncontested consumer complaint sites. We tried everything to suppress it, you know the one. The company did good work and from what I could tell, they did the customer right in the end. What they weren’t going to do was pay some bastard in Phoenix, AZ five figures to remove the complaint that they settled with the consumer.For anyone who has ever lived in Palm Beach County, they know how bad thunderstorms can get. They also know the devastation of hurricanes. Most everyone is a weather nut down there. I made a site for the construction company. On it, we put a lot of different hurricane prep and home care tips and one page had live radar feeds that tracked precipitation. We promoted that page on a few key local welcome sites and in senior communities for which we volunteered. The traffic was astounding, but even more so was the number of links to the page within a couple weeks. That was before we made it embed. That consumer site in the brand query SERP was a thing of the past after a few months.
Two of the best links I ever got to the SiteVisibility Websites were
from Seth Godin and Tim Ferriss, two people I’m a huge fan of. In both
cases the approach was very similar, I knew they both had books coming out that they needed to spread the word near and far, as I’d followed them both over a period of years I’d seen that typically they’d try and carpet bomb blogs with links the day their books were released so they could try and land a coveted New York Times best seller list place.So I knew they had something to promote and I knew when they exactly what day they wanted that big promotional approach, so a month out from their book release date I dropped them a line asking if they were planning a similar approach to launching their next book. In both cases they were, so I asked them if I could interview them for our podcast, and they both said yes. When they did a round up of all their interviews promoting the book we got included with all the big boys and a nice trusted link. If I’d asked for an interview another time they’d probably have been too busy and probably wouldn’t have rounded up all their coverage, so I wouldn’t have got the link.
The added bonus was in both cases these interviews were really popular with our podcast audience.
This works well for anyone, you need to know what your prospect is trying to achieve, then work your pitch into helping them do their job better. Also don’t underestimate the impact of timing, if you really understand the link prosper you’re going to know when is the time you’re out-reach is going to be most successful. It frames the conversation in a completely different way, rather than them doing you a favour, you are actually doing them a favour. The link might be your real intention but’s not the way you come across.
Heard you like embed boxes? So we put a textarea in your
textarea so you can embed while you embed.Recursive embed boxes. You know how people put embed boxes after infographics? Well they should put an embed box in the embed box, that way the person who then embeds the infographic will also have an embed box… with your details. Basically just acts as a force multiplier on the link potential. Now it gets a little tricky because to put a text area inside a text area you have to escape the second to last text area closing tag. It looks something like this:
Title of infographic – An infographic hosted at Your Brand name Embed this infographic on Your Site: Copy and Paste the Code Below Title of infographic – An infographic hosted at Your Brand name </textarea> A lot of people will edit out your embed box, but some wont because they are lazy and will think “oh snap ready made embed box I don’t even have to add one!”
Offline events are a massively under discussed and underfunded
tactic that gives a great ROI for link building. Last December I wrote
a YouMoz blog post on offline link building with a case study that my company had used for fashion bloggers. To summarise, offline events for SEO benefits is nothing new but the approach used by the majority is completely wrong for building links – too often are bloggers simply invited to an event and then just expected to write something and link back.What our company did that was different was to create an event that involved the bloggers rather than just having them act as spectators. As our industry is fashion orientated we let bloggers dress themselves up (or models) with extremely high end clothing from top designers, hired professional photographers and then took high quality images of their creations. We then created animated gifs from the photos and sent them to each blogger after the event so they could use them in blog posts. We followed this up with social competitions to see which “look” was the best that promoted the individual bloggers as well as our products.
Results were great; we got a large number of blog posts with links back to our website, a lot of them using the animated gifs we went them. The bonus of running this event was not only the immediate results we generated but the relationships with the bloggers that were established with seeing them face to face – out of 15 bloggers that linked to us immediately after the event, 9 of them then linked to us again a few months after on their own accord, some up to 4 separate occasions. SEO’s should have budget set aside for such events – it can work with any niche you just need to be creative.
I think that creativity comes not so much from sudden flashes of
inspiration, but in being able to see things that have always been
there, in a very different way.I was working on a project for an online plumbing supplies company, and after finishing a formal meeting with the CEO, we were chatting over coffee when he remarked that most of his customers were women. I asked him why and he said that he didn’t know.
This conversation eventually led to a story and a link from The Financial Times at FT.com. Here’s how.
An analysis of his customer list confirmed 70 percent of his customers were women. We sent out a customer survey to find out why: the reason was that women hated the teasing they suffered as they stood in line at a trade shop.
That was newsworthy already, but we went further.
We also asked women if they’d like to be interviewed as part of a follow up to the survey. Many agreed and from the follow up interviews we got 5 really good personal stories.
That gave us great content to publish, and a pretty good press release to send out. One of the best results was being covered and linked to by The Financial Times at FT.com.
I think there are 3 important principles here:
(1) The CEO knew that most of his customers were women – he just didn’t realize the potential story that could lead to. Most clients have potential stories hidden away, just waiting to be discovered. Part of a link builder’s job is to uncover them.
(2) Listening carefully to what clients say, especially in unguarded moments, can help you find these stories. To quote (Zino of Citium), “We’ve got two ears and one mouth and we should listen and speak in the same proportion.”
(3) Once you identify a good story, add color and interest to it by including quotes from customers who have something powerful to say. As Lewis Carroll said in the opening to Alice in Wonderland, “What’s the use of a story without pictures and conversations?”
Once you’re armed with a powerful, well-told story, the actual business of link building becomes so much easier.
Back in 2011 Google announced that all keywords from logged in
users would become (not provided.) An hour after Google made the
announcement, I purchased the domain name notprovided.com. It was meant to be tongue-in-cheek, as (not provided) was soon to become the biggest keyword in Google Analytics!A couple hours later I had a WordPress blog, a single article on how to deal with (not provided) keywords, and links to relevant resources. Then I shared it on Twitter.
Never once did I do any manual link building for the site, but it became a natural link target, gaining a healthy backlink profile along the way. A few months later I sold the domain for a tidy profit.
The lesson I learned is it pays to be first on the market with a resource. More often than not it pays to be the best, but sometimes it also pays to be first.
Hmmm, so many great memories. Let’s go to the archives for this
one. Perhaps one of my favorite link tactics I used about 5 years ago
was called BlogBacker. This was before the nofollow tag was announced and WordPress still automatically posted trackback links in its default install. I knew that getting links was possible, but how do I acquire a ton of trackback links from legitimate sites without appearing to be a spammer.The solution was elegant and simple. I created a “service” called BlogBacker. Essentially, it scraped content from WordPress RSS feeds from thousands of blogs and then reposted the first 50 words or so to BlogBacker’s website. The rest of the content pulled from the RSS feeds was stored in a database that could later be downloaded in its entirity as a .zip file if the blogger needed a backup of their site.
Bloggers saw the service as an archive.org with download feature, an automatic 3rd party backup of sorts. The service could actually be valuable if it were ever used, but in reality its primary purpose was to attract tens of thousands of trackback links to advertising laden content. And this is exactly what it did. It worked like a charm… until the nofollow tag.
You can actually see an example of one of these trackback links still on my website from years ago:
http://i.imgur.com/nKARfjH.jpg
http://www.thegooglecache.com/multichannel-marketing/social-media-slant-comparing-polls-to-web-20-coverage/Product reviews are a tactic that I’ve had a lot of success with. A lot
of people have. Offering a free product or a free trial is a great way to
get your outreach email read and responded to. Now, product reviews are a tricky business due to FTC regulations, so I definitely recommend to offer the product with little expected in return… except full disclosure if they do write about it.Anyways, with a few popular bloggers that had let me know they were going to write about the product, I asked them to mention “If you’re interested in trying these products email anthony@…” and let’s just say to phone started ringing off the hook. Instead of doing outreach, I was plowing through email pitches from bloggers sent to me.
I found this creative because it turned the tables on the traditional outreach dynamic and resulted in a lot of good connections with bloggers. You have to be careful with product reviews though, once your Company name gets out there you’ll start to get contacted heavily by the sites that do nothing but unrelated reviews and giveaways. Those are the sites I recommend staying away from, no matter how easy the link is.
One of the cooler ways a client of ours built links was through
supporting an employee’s passions. Of course, they weren’t thinking
“Link building” at the time, they were just being a really cool company – which (fluffy as it is) seems to be the best way to build links.The company produces extremely high precision GPS systems – the kind you use in your tank or UAV and not in your Prius. While a product was being finalized, one of their employees – an avid skydiver/wingsuit jumper – was thinking about ways he could use his company’s technology to train and verify speed records.
The company jumped to support him and over the coming days worked with him to apply the technology to his passion while also using it as a true test of their system’s accuracy and advantage over competitors. His wingsuit jumps and the resulting data were published in major media outlets and brought a lot of links to the company website – links competitors can’t duplicate.
I worked for a client in the fashion industry that had a huge
website with hundreds of products – getting deep links to individual
product pages was an ongoing challenge. We ended up partnering with several other fashion-oriented sites to create “get the look” pieces around popular TV characters, superheroines, characters from literature, and so on – then shopping them out as guest posts for women’s blogs, geek blogs, etc. Several of these turned into guest posting series with multiple links. It seems much less spammy when multiple products from multiple companies are highlighted – we’d even link to products from other companies to add value and trust – and we were able to re-surface older products and give them a second wind. The best part was that any time one of our products was featured in a magazine we had instant partners to create “how to wear this” content for our own and each others’ blogs as well.Never in the history of ever have I set out to build links for
my own blog. I have never asked for a link, paid for a link, exchanged
goods or services for a link nor attempted to acquire a link through any other means, nefarious or otherwise. It hasn’t been a priority. That doesn’t, however, mean that I haven’t obtained any links. Sometimes the best connections are made when we aren’t chasing them and this is a story of such a serendipitous occurrence.I was recently fortunate enough to make the acquaintance of a talented young blogger at an industry event. I knew she was a talented blogger because she told me she had recently been successful in a blogging contest, a set-to between aspiring writers in the field, so to speak. Although I retained that knowledge it was not something that informed any of my subsequent decisions or actions. No linkbuilding siren sounded in my mind and no link acquisition protocol was initiated. I had no plan to obtain a link.
Writing is in a blogger’s nature, of course. By simply being myself and making a new friend the circumstances were created that led directly to a link for my blog. Of course she was going to write about her experience. Of course she was, and linking to me was a natural part of that account because being in my company had been a natural part of her weekend. I suspect that wouldn’t have been so if the link, rather than the friend, had been my focus.
Naturally this kind of connection does not always lead directly to links, sometimes the value is seen in other ways entirely. Sometimes, though, it leads to links you could not possibly have anticipated.
One of my pet projects is a fan site for a popular sports team. There is a small, but passionate community there and I do what I can to help people out – I publish things they write, connect them to others, share information, and so on. Nothing exceptional. One young fan was particularly enthusiastic. I published a couple of things he had written and answered a bunch of his questions. Nothing exceptional. Around a year later he travelled to America to watch the team play live. He took with him a flag he had made with the name of my site on it and during his visit he was approached and interviewed by a journalist. Days later a report featuring a prominent, contextual link to my site appeared on the USA Today site (PA: 49, DA: 97).
Serendipity, arising from just being decent to people. Nothing exceptional.
I’ve been using this tactic for a long time for different niches, it brings in a lot of referral traffic and also a good mix of follow and no follow links on “relevant websites.”
You might have heard of scraper sites before. You know, those sites that scrape content from Press Release and news sites. Not really the ideal way of curating content but it works for them so what the heck. By the way, a good chunk of them are automated, while there are also people that manually add the copied content.
There are actually a lot of sites like those and they target different niches, not just press releases. From web 2.0 properties like Blogspot, Tumblr and WordPress.com to high PR/ DA/PA websites that already have traffic, you’ll can see that there’s good diversity already. You can even see forums that scrape content from other forums and blogs. There are multiple ways of exploiting this tactic but I’ll share a easiest one that is based mostly around Backlinks using Images & a little with the traditional Contextual Links.
These sites are pretty easy to find. If your niche is very popular, let’s say the topic is about “celebrities” then you probably already noticed by now that you see a LOT of the same news (and pictures) on hundreds and thousands of websites.
Step 1:
Find the Main Source of the Content (Main Source = Original Content Publisher)
- To check, you can simply use Google images and check if you can see the same picture over and over again. Check some sites with the same pictures. There’s a good chance they also have the same content and source.
- You can also grab the headline of a popular news or blog site about celebrities. Paste it in Google and you’ll see a bunch of scraper sites. Identify if the scraper sites copy the content fully, meaning, it copies the links in the body OR it posts and copies the image URL from the Main Source.Step 2:
Take note of the Main Source & work on a way to get your content on that source.
You want to get your link on these websites. It’s usually possible, too.Step 3:
Basic Optimization Stuff
- Make sure to add an Alt Tag.
- Contextual links are often removed by scraper sites but a lot still gets throughHow Do You Make Use Of This?
- Direct Links using images. Most of the time, I don’t gun for anchors. I just make sure the image is hosted on the domain I’m boosting OR hyperlinked to the target site.
- Linking back to the main site for very weak keywords. It’s usually enough to get you up there and make you stay put. I rarely use anchors unless I use it for….
- …increasing the value of my social properties or profiles/content hosted on strong domains (that link to my website). The anchor texts in the body will only point to your properties instead of your main website.Bonus Tip:
- Grab what “keywords” these scrapers use to scrape content. It’s usually visible in the titles of the posts they copy
- Create a site that revolves around those keywords and post relevant content like a normal website. Don’t forget to optimize images (Alt Tag, File Name, Title) and your post.
- Watch them scrape away and send you links and referral traffic.By simply getting mentioned on a popular website, you can easily get a good chunk of links and I don’t mean just ReTweets, Facebook Shares or Social Bookmarks.
I’ll show an example below that is about scrapers boosting a page automatically that had my social property link on it. Let’s call this “Tiered Linking.”
Live Example:
Ruth Burr (@ruthburr) does live tweeting on different conferences she goes to. A lot of us who respect her work and follow her on Twitter will probably see her barrage of tweets.
Me, being a million miles away and couldn’t go to most conferences, always appreciates what she does for the community. So during the LinkLove conference, in the middle of her live tweets, I just felt the need to say my thanks to her.
She replied back and that’s it. Less than a week later, she produced an article on SEOmoz about “How to Live Tweet Like a Pro” and the tweet was inserted there, I guess it was out of pity for my poor Twitter profile (yup, I only just joined Twitter recently but I’ve been doing SEO since 2007).
So I took this chance to set-up TalkWalker (@talkwalker & @J_Hong3) because Google Alerts sucks. I inserted my Twitter handle (@denseymour) there to track how far this post will go.
For over 5 days, I’ve received daily emails from Talkwalker and I’m pretty sure these aren’t the only sites out there that scraped the content.
The URL above is just one of the links that scraped the exact same content. Below are their stats from Open Site Explorer and CF & TF from Majestic SEO:
I showed this example to be on the safe side. My tweet getting links is basically not worth much but imagine all those SEOmoz profiles in there? How about the direct links mentioned in there?
To put it in a link builder’s lingo:
- You can get a direct link from an image
- You can get a direct or a Tier 1 link pointing to your site
- You get a Tier 2 link pointing to your Tier 1 Link (your profiles and properties)There’s really no way of stopping people from completely copying your content but you can at least be aware of how you can use it to your advantage as well as to protect yourself from it.
So this link building tactic isn’t our most creative, but it is one of
the easiest ways to build high-quality, editorial links on a consistent
basis at scale and for relatively no money (and one many have probably never thought of). We call it a “content swap,” and it starts by soliciting guest posts across all the sites we run. We optimize and link to the “become an author” pages on each site we run this on so the doc will rank for search operators in specific keyword verticals. This gets us a steady flow of guest posting inquiries. We offer to “swap content” with bloggers that want to guest post on our sites. If you’re unwilling to or can’t swap, we won’t publish your article.With the number of sites we run, we swap an average of about 100 articles per month. What I love about this tactic is the efficiency: link opportunities come to us versus us having to prospect for them. This really puts us in the drivers seat and means:
- We can insist on only swapping with sites that meet or exceed specific quality thresholds.
- We have total control over link placement within the article and aren’t restricted to a single author bio link.
- We’ve been able to build ongoing relationships with others who run portfolios of sites and swap with them on a pretty regular basis.What’s interesting here too is this tactic gives us a unique view into the range of outreach styles and approaches. Many guest post inquiries are super spammy, with fake “super hot chick” Gmail avatars. But a small percentage are really exceptional, and the really good ones we copy
And it’s helped us improve our own internal promotion process as well. Finally, you can outsource this whole thing on the cheap and task a virtual assistant with email inquiry management, content management on your sites and vetting the potential swap partner sites as well.
My buddy Chris Le doesn’t consider himself a marketer, but he is.
I stole this tactic from him, because he executed it flawlessly. Chris
created an amazing piece of software, the SEER SEO Toolbox, it’s all in JavaScript and it runs in a Google Doc, it’s been in the SEER arsenal for awhile.During his last week at SEER, Chris open sourced the whole project. He knew this was going to a big deal, so he created a blog post announcing the release and a landing page for readers to copy the tool/Google Doc, a link to the code on GitHub, and a reference guide.
Chris’s landing page was more informative than Github and showed the value of the tool through screenshots. Instead of letting Github get his links, Chris came up with a strategy that allowed him to get most of the publicity and social shares. Using A hrefs, the SEO Toolbox Landing page has 41 backlinks the blog post announcing the release has 17 linking root domains. The GitHub page that actually has the raw code only has 3 linking root domains.
This works for any type of code or app release, whether it’s GitHub, Google Play or the App Store – you can create a landing page and get links for your software and app releases, even if the app or code doesn’t live on your domain.
I have what I see as a pretty creative submission, I’ll explain it
below in the quotes…“We all know that visual content can be an excellent source of incoming links. That said, some of the tried and true methods out there (infographics) are just plain played out. Many webmasters see them as spam and are disinclined to post them.
The same thing can’t really be said about a compelling video on YouTube. That’s why, recently, I collaborated with a YouTube channel known as ASAPscience for my site Sparring Mind. We released a video on the ‘Science of Productivity’, and to date, it has received over 785,000+ views.
I let them keep full right to the video in exchange for a mention at the end and in the video description. After it was released, I emailed my newsletter (5-figure in size) for promotion and followed up with an incredibly important step: I set up a Google Alert for the video name.
Thus, most big mentions of the video hit my inbox so I could follow up with the original poster to make sure I got a link too. This helped me land features and links from places like Lifehacker, Laughing Squid, the CBC, and even the Discovery Channel blog!
Videos don’t have the stigma that infographics have, and doing a joint launch with an already established YouTube channel help the video trickle out to a wide variety of sites, ending with a great link-building for me!”
Creative Link Building Story 1: How I built over 350+ Root domain
links from 2 pieces of creative content.I am a strong believer in creative link building and a key element is having creative content to begin with. I am always on the lookout for creative content ideas for my own sites and clients sites, both via offline and online sources. I go to many networking events making numerous contacts in the market. I was lucky to meet an ex member of Matt Cutts’ search team at one of these networking events shortly after he had left Google. I was the first person to do a full length interview with him http://jamesnorquay.com/an-interview-ex-member-matt-cuttss-search-quality-team/ and it has yielded over 300+ root domain links to the article content itself (refer to graph below)
It is not just about getting picked up by over 300+ different websites and generating a large scale amount of links. The story was also cited on numerous news portals such as Search Engine Land, Search Engine Watch, Search Engine Round Table and many other large news websites.
Another tactic I usually do if a piece of content works really well is I do a follow up piece. I did another interview to answer further questions, this yielded in an additional 50+ root domain links (refer to below graph)
Creative Link Building Story 2: How I got a Backlink on Apple.com
Around 2 years ago I was working for a telecommunications company as their in house SEO lead.
I had been tracking competitors using Open Site Explorer and Majestic SEO and I noticed two competitors had made their way onto Apple.com from an internal page which was a (do follow) PR 7. The best thing about this page was that it ranked for a bunch of commercial terms and also was focused on buying. So it was not just a case of building links it was a case of selling products with a successful link acquisition.The problem this client faced is it was not one of the big players in the market and the client was owned by one of the bigger players. So I decided to develop a strategy to reel in Apple to acquire the link.
Step 1: Set up a dedicated Apple page on the website, similar to the competitors. My advice is to talk to legal at your company and develop the page based on what you can and cannot do.
Step 2: Set up a clients email example: Jono@telco.com
Step 3: Call yourself something like “Online Community Manager” I find that most tech people like this name better over “SEO Link Building” for example.
Step 4: Pull up who is data on the website: So pulling up the “who is” data for Apple.com showed some problems as it was not a real lead for any one.
Step 5: Use the onsite contact feature, I probably sent 3 emails via this but nothing worked.
Step 6: Find someone in the business who deals directly with Apple! So I probably should have started here first. I found someone who dealt directly with Apple and asked them if they could possibly send an email asking if we could obtain a link on this page, as we were highly relevant. Another thing I always do is make it easy for the webmaster, send them all the information the same as the competitors, such as images and what not.After probably 10 emails back and forth over the period of a month we were successful in obtaining a link. I have just checked this link and it is still live today after 2 years.
Moral of the story is, if you want high quality links you need to be prepared to hustle for them and try different plans of attack.One of my clients is an oyster farm on the Chesapeake Bay, who
raises oysters from about 2 millimeters in diameter up to market size.
It’s a really neat operation. One day we were contacted by a husband and wife out of DC who where interested in purchasing a few dozen oysters. They just so happened to be food bloggers, so naturally we were (or rather, I was) excited about having them as customers.The exchange went from placing a simple mail order to a weekend trip to the Bay for a first-hand look at the oyster farm. The couple came down one Saturday, and were able to see how oysters are grown, cleaned, and prepared for the market. We showed them around the waterfront, the equipment, gave a short lesson on the life-cycle of oysters, and even took them on a boat ride in the Bay to see where the oyster cages are.
The couple had a great time and wrote an entire post about their experience. Best of all, they included a few links to the company (at a time when the company’s inbound links were sparse). These links were particularly helpful for two reasons, firstly because they were from a moderately popular foodie blog, but also provided local relevancy. It’s always a nice experience to see where the products we buy come from, especially in regard to the food we consume. This model of relationship and experience nurturing is great for link as well as audience building. Today, the oyster company is considering making formal eco-tours a part of their business.
The best type of link building we do is when we tie in:
- target audience
- traffic
- Social
- OutreachFor one client, who competes in a very aggressive industry, we decided to create a bingo card based on popular TV shows and relevant to the target audience. We created bingo cards for the X factor and Big Brother etc…
We then pitched the idea to entertainment and showbiz bloggers, encouraging them to play along and tweet out/share on facebook.
So we had:
- Brand in front of and engaging with the target audience
- links from all the bingo cards distributed
- social noise from all those playing and discussing
- Automatically generated outreach list from everyone who shared and linked to itFor me, creative link building is not about a big WOW campaign, that’s an advertising responsibility. Creative link building is about creating campaigns that acquire links, but also serve multiple business purposes. Links placed that have nothing but SEO value, are typically the type of links that will land you in trouble.
One link building tactic we use often here at Switched on Media is
offer bloggers to interview the client we’re trying to get a link for.
With little creativity this can work well no matter what the topic or industry, as you can always tie bloggers’ interests with client expertise. Boring insurance client? “Ask the CEO of X when you should bother with travel insurance”. Dull real estate client? “Ask Head of Y the secrets to finding unadvertised apartments in the city”. The interview makes for a good blog post for the blogger, and a juicy link (and often referral traffic) for the client. Win-Win.Recently we were working on a company affiliated with a popular TV show, and got permission for bloggers to interview one of the characters from the show. Needless to say it was very easy to find bloggers willing to participate. But as I wrote, this can work for pretty much any client.
My previous job before I did my first work as an SEO was a college
philosophy professor. Ethics was instilled in me and I took the moral
route every day as a link builder. I was never pushy; I was helpful.Our link strategy was intertwined with our content strategy. Being a writer myself, any articles I’d publish, I’d have to have a link campaign attached to them. No article was left behind. And, I was a phone link builder. Many people didn’t know about the company and a lot my role was “educational” – when I was on the phone with folks, I’d explain what the site was about and what links I would be sending them. A few stories come to mind though I doubt this is highly groundbreaking.
My company had made marketing trifolds for many of our services, including a generic one. We’d bring them to events, but we had loads more in our supply room. The people I contacted for links weren’t always tech-savvy. I was on the phone with church receptionists, high school guidance counselors and the like. From a philosophical and a UX perspective, I always thought about the “other.” If people don’t know computers, what can I send them to gain awareness about the company? When I called folks about our content and seeing if they were comfortable with me emailing them for review, I would bring up these trifolds. I’d say “Oh, by the way, can I send you some trifolds about our company in case folks want to read hard-copies about what we’d do?” Most people were touched by the offer. I’d send out 100, 200, 50 – whatever number they wanted. When I mailed them, I always included a typed up letter from me that had the URLs to the pages I’d want linked. (I’m a big fan of snail mail so a personal note is something I always do!) These sentences would have a pleasant call to action. For example, “If you want to see our page dedicated for your town go to www.company.com/02767.”
It worked. I received many local links this way from organizations I had spoken with. I also received several calls when they ran out of trifolds and needed me to replenish the supply.
The second story deals with a campaign I was passionate about. My role as a link builder was to know the content better than anyone. I began to notice we had eight different articles all over the website on bullying. I decided if I’m going to link build for one, I will link build for all. I contacted guidance counselors nationwide and in my follow-up response, I sent the whole enchilada. All eight articles. My pitch was “Here are our articles on bullying. Feel free to pick and choose the ones most beneficial to your school community, even if it’s all of them.” I then did a quick two-sentence description about each one. I also separated them into two groups, noting which ones were about cyberbullying. Nine times out of ten, I got all eight articles linked. Some even copy and pasted my follow-up email! Occasionally, I got bonus links, mostly of our homepage or a local link. This campaign helped the company reorganize their content into these “clusters,” making it easier for folks to find the content they are looking for. As a result, we now have links those specific cluster topic pages.
Third story – I studied acting as a kid for a couple of summers and we’d do a lot of improv games to warm up. There’s this one game where you connect words. For example, if the word is kiss, you would think you could kiss a frog. Frog connects to tadpole. So your response for kiss would actually be tadpole. Anyways, we had this article about explaining divorce to kids. Everyone’s first thought was “parents and guidance counselors.” But I played the game. Who would read this article about divorce? Parents. Who do parents talk to? Divorce lawyers. Yup, I contacted divorce lawyers (which was risky) but we were able to get links from new domains. And of course, me being me, in the follow-up email I sent them two additional links. One to another article (fighting in front of your kids and why it needs to stop) and another to our local babysitter page. Why? “In case your clients need last minute child care if a court date is changed.”
Remember, be human. There were people who would push back with me, but I’d be human with them. I’d send them things (non-related to my company) that they were interested in. I’d check-in for feedback. I’d build relationships. A lot of my links came from fans. When one campaign worked well, we’d add more articles to the cluster. It gave me an excuse to reach out to them, get feedback, and get more links.
For a previous agency I worked at, we wanted to get some .ac.uk
links (the UK’s equivalent of .edu links) pointing to our own website.
Of course, getting .ac.uk links under most circumstances is extremely difficult – I once worked in-house where we did a campaign dedicated to getting links from universities and it flopped miserably.So I opted for the next best thing: second-degree .ac.uk links, in other words .ac.uk links pointing to a normal site (e.g. a .com) that then pointed to us. We’d already done a lot of work with a local initiative that tried to help graduates get jobs, which already had a lot of .ac.uk links pointing to its domain, so I wrote a guest blog post for them talking about how graduates can find job opportunities using social media. It was a hit. In addition to being shared on their Twitter to their thousands of followers, a number of university websites linked to the post directly, which of course then linked to us. It may not have been direct .ac.uk links, but it was a genuinely successful guest blog post that ended up becoming one of the agency’s strongest inbound links.
If you’re wanting to contribute your own creative link story, I encourage you to leave a comment with it and I’ll consider adding your response & company website if it’s good enough!
video by GoogleWebmasterHelp
Do internal website links with exact match keyword anchor text hurt a website? These links help our users navigate our website properly. Are too many internal links with the same anchor text likely to result in a ranking downgrade because of Penguin? Rob, Los Angeles, CA Have a question?
The Seattle office took the reins in the last DistilledLive video as Mike Pantoliano and Geoff Kenyon talked you through where to focus your e-commerce efforts in the coming months, as well as sending kudos to those brands already doing it well.
For the latest edition, we thought we’d take the opportunity to get a bit more technical - particularly following the news of our latest DistilledU module release; an interactive guide to meta information. So, without further ado, Distilled London consultant’s, Dave Sottimano and Tom Anthony get stuck into one of the key elements to consider when it comes to International SEO; the hreflang attribute.
Origins of Hreflang
Originally designed to avoid sending out duplicate content signals with content targeted at specific geo-locations, rel=”alternate’ hreflang=”X” is particularly useful mark-up for anyone running a site in multiple languages. However, the appropriate way to implement Hreflang is all circumstances is less than clear…
How the canonical tag can interfere with Hreflang settings and search results
When searching for the localised page, you’d expect to see the native language search page with a native URL but we’re often faced with the English result and the native URL. Why did Google recommend the canonical tag alongside this if we’re seeing this kind of interference?
In fact, Peter Handley delivers a great study on this through this sitemap implementation experiment detailing similar characteristics and issues. So, is there a reason to use the canonical tag? What problems can arise and how can you run tests to work out what’s best for your site and content?
As always, we’d love to throw this topic out for debate and will, as Dave mentions, be looking towards Pierre Far and John Mueller for more feedback. Get involved in the debate over at the Distilled blog or send a tweet along to us over on Twitter and let us know your thoughts.
Read on for a transcript of the above video:
Dave: Howdy SEOmoz fans. I’m Rand. No, just kidding. I’m Dave. I’m from Distilled. This is Tom. He’s also from Distilled.
Tom: Hey. We’re going to be talking about hreflang today. So first stop I’m going to give a really quick introduction of the theory. So it’s very simple. If you’ve got an established page in the English language – for example, here’s my site- this would be my search results for selling widgets. OK, so now I want to launch a German site. Forgive my bad German here! I want to benefit from the link juice, the Google juice, that I’ve already established by getting links to my English site. Well, I want to serve the German language version to German-native speakers. Hreflang is basically a method that allows me to do that.
However, we found that it interacts funny sometimes with rel=canonical tags. We’re going to be talking specifically about that in this video. Dave?
Dave: All right. This goes out to Pierre Farr. Thanks for helping me out earlier but I’ve got a lot more questions for you after this video. So, we’re talking about the origins of hreflang, and, of course, it started off with an implementation that consisted with the canonical tag. Back on Google Webmaster blog, they said, ”Okay, you can do this thing, use a canonical tag and everything will be happy.” Actually, it isn’t, and recently Google actually crossed that out from the documentation. Now they also say that you can still use it. However, you need to be careful of the effects, and you really need to understand what it’s doing. They’re absolutely right.
Let’s go with an example here. I’m going to try to go quickly, but hopefully you can follow along. We’ve got an English US version page, and we’ve got an English UK version page. You can see here I’m using isocodes. So, EN English. US is obviously the United States. Sorry. And GB . . .
Tom: He’s Canadian.
Dave: I’m Canadian. Sorry America. GB obviously UK. So what we’re doing here is we’re going to use the hreflang tag like Tom said. So you just signal. It’s like, oh we’ve got another alternate version of this page. It’s a duplicate copy, but this one is the UK version. Great. If we were going to do the canonical tag implementation, like Google said back in the day, we run into some funny stuff. So what we’re using the canonical tag for is to make sure that we’re consolidating the link juice. What we’re going to do here is we’re going to canonicalize the UK page to the American page. Now the behaviour is not what you would expect.
Here we are in Google.co.uk, and we’re searching for our keyword, which is “widgets.” Let’s just pretend for a second that nobody else is ranking for widgets. It’s an isolated experiment. So what happens with the search snippet? Because we’ve canonicalized the UK version to the American version, this page no longer appears in Google’s index at all. The only time that it appears is when we’re looking for it specifically in the country and the language of choice. Like I said, we’re in the UK here, Google.co.uk. We searched for widgets and we get our result.
What’s going to happen is we’re going to see the American title. We’re going to see the American meta description or the American content, except we’re going to see the UK URL. Hreflang is causing the display URL to become the UK version. It only fires the UK URL at search time. Typically, you would see the American version, but because we used hreflang, that’s why we’re getting the UK URL.
Tom: On the UK site of Google.
Dave: Of course. So we have to be in the UK to make sure that we see this. So, what happens? It’s not that bad. In this case, both these pages are identical. So they’re going to have the same title and widgets, which is great. The only thing that changes is that we’re bringing the user directly to the British page, sorry the UK page. That’s actually great. Where you run into problems is if this is no longer English and this becomes a French page. So we have FR-FR. And, of course, widgets is not going to be the same translated in French. Of course, the content on the page is not going to be French.
So now we know that if we canonicalize the French version to the English version, the French version is now lost. It’s no longer in the index. What happens if we were to go to Google.fr, there’s not much of a difference except for we see the American title. We see the American description. Instead of seeing obviously the UK page, we see the French URL. That’s not really a good result at all, because widgets is not going to be the same translated in French. Of course, that doesn’t appeal to a French searcher.
Tom: Yeah. So the equivalent is that we’d expecting to see, if it was French or German, the native language result like this. But what we’re actually seeing is the English language result, but with a native URL, and that’s really a poor result for users.
But the question becomes sometimes we need to use the canonical tag. Google gave it to us a few years ago, and it’s become an established part of SEO. So what do we do, Dave, when you need to use the canonical tag, but we’re seeing this sort of result, this sort of interference between hreflang and canonical? How do we handle that?
Dave: Pierre Farr watching this, can you please step in on the comments? I don’t know. Hreflang, in my opinion, was designed to eliminate duplicate content and to consolidate link authority across different pages. It was the one answer. The thing that confuses me is the first implementation they recommended using the canonical tag, which makes me think that hreflang was only a signal to indicate there is another version of this page in a different country in a different language. So why would we need to use the canonical tag as well?
So, in my mind, I think that okay Google recommended canonical tag because it doesn’t consolidate the page authority. Now they’ve taken that recommendation away. So we’re stuck wondering if hreflang actually does consolidate or not. So Peter Handley actually did a good experiment. He was one of the first people to publicly talk about the sitemap implementation, and he found that he had the same characteristics I did in some of my tests.
So remember this, right? This is what happened with the canonical tag. It inherited some of the traits of the canonical target. Funnily enough, Pete’s implementation with sitemap had similar effects. So that makes me think that the hreflang tag actually inherited some of the canonical powers. Do we know for sure? No. Is there a reason to use the canonical tag?Yes, you can still do it. But here’s a golden rule. Never, ever, ever do it across languages, or you get things like this happening. So you get English content with a French URL, and that’s not good for your searchers.
Tom: I think, at the end of the day, the main message we’re going to give away here is going to be that you got to test this. We run tests like crazy on other sites, but when you’ve got your own site or a client’s site, it is always hard to test. But you can take a small portion. So if this is product pages or category pages or whatever it is, you can take a small percentage of those, run your own tests, wee what your results are, and work out what the best implementation is. Make sure you give enough time between tests so that you know they’re interfering with one another. From there make an informed decision yourself.
I’m sorry, Pierre and John Mueller and all the guys at Google, but normally our advice is to take Google’s advice with a little pinch of salt and test it for yourselves. Chris Semturs is one of the other guys working at Google, who said himself, that they’re not finding that it behaves consistently at the moment. So even when Google saying that, then our advice is pinch of salt.
Dave: And Pierre Farr, we’re looking at you to provide some more answers.Yes, we’re pointing at you and John Mueller too. Thanks.
Tom: Thank you very much.
skip to main | skip to sidebar Webmaster Level: Intermediate to Advanced Including a rel=canonical link in your webpage is a strong hint to search engines your preferred version to index among duplicate pages on the web. It’s supported by several search engines, including Yahoo!, Bing, and Google. The rel=canonical link consolidates indexing properties from the duplicates, like their inbound links, as well as specifies which URL you’d like displayed in search results. However, rel=canonical can be a bit tricky because it’s not very obvious when there’s a misconfiguration. We recommend the following best practices for using rel=canonical:A large portion of the duplicate page’s content should be present on the canonical version.One test is to imagine you don’t understand the language of the content—if you placed the duplicate side-by-side with the canonical, does a very large percentage of the words of the duplicate page appear on the canonical page? If you need to speak the language to understand that the pages are similar; for example, if they’re only topically similar but not extremely close in exact words, the canonical designation might be disregarded by search engines.Double-check that your rel=canonical target exists (it’s not an error or “soft 404”) Verify the rel=canonical target doesn’t contain a noindex robots meta tagMake sure you’d prefer the rel=canonical URL to be displayed in search results (rather than the duplicate URL)Include the rel=canonical link in either the <head> of the page or the HTTP headerSpecify no more than one rel=canonical for a page. When more than one is specified, all rel=canonicals will be ignored.Mistake 1: rel=canonical to the first page of a paginated series Imagine that you have an article that spans several pages: example.com/article?story=cupcake-news&page=1example.com/article?story=cupcake-news&page=2and so on Specifying a rel=canonical from page 2 (or any later page) to page 1 is not correct use of rel=canonical, as these are not duplicate pages. Using rel=canonical in this instance would result in the content on pages 2 and beyond not being indexed at all. In cases of paginated content, we recommend either a rel=canonical from component pages to a single-page version of the article, or to use rel=”prev” and rel=”next” pagination markup. Mistake 2: Absolute URLs mistakenly written as relative URLs The <link> tag, like many HTML tags, accepts both relative and absolute URLs. Relative URLs include a path “relative” to the current page. For example, “images/cupcake.png” means “from the current directory go to the “images” subdirectory, then to cupcake.png.” Absolute URLs specify the full path—including the scheme like http://. Specifying <link rel=canonical href=“example.com/cupcake.html” /> (a relative URL since there’s no “http://”) implies that the desired canonical URL is http://example.com/example.com/cupcake.html even though that is almost certainly not what was intended. In these cases, our algorithms may ignore the specified rel=canonical. Ultimately this means that whatever you had hoped to accomplish with this rel=canonical will not come to fruition. Mistake 3: Unintended or multiple declarations of rel=canonical Occasionally, we see rel=canonical designations that we believe are unintentional. In very rare circumstances we see simple typos, but more commonly a busy webmaster copies a page template without thinking to change the target of the rel=canonical. Now the site owner’s pages specify a rel=canonical to the template author’s site. Another issue is when pages include multiple rel=canonical links to different URLs. This happens frequently in conjunction with SEO plugins that often insert a default rel=canonical link, possibly unbeknownst to the webmaster who installed the plugin. In cases of multiple declarations of rel=canonical, Google will likely ignore all the rel=canonical hints. Any benefit that a legitimate rel=canonical might have offered will be lost. In both these types of cases, double-checking the page’s source code will help correct the issue. Be sure to check the entire <head> section as the rel=canonical links may be spread apart. Mistake 4: Category or landing page specifies rel=canonical to a featured article Let’s say you run a site about desserts. Your dessert site has useful category pages like “pastry” and “gelato.” Each day the category pages feature a unique article. For instance, your pastry landing page might feature “red velvet cupcakes.” Because the “pastry” category page has nearly all the same content as the “red velvet cupcake” page, you add a rel=canonical from the category page to the featured individual article. If we were to accept this rel=canonical, then your pastry category page would not appear in search results. That’s because the rel=canonical signals that you would prefer search engines display the canonical URL in place of the duplicate. However, if you want users to be able to find both the category page and featured article, it’s best to only have a self-referential rel=canonical on the category page, or none at all. Mistake 5: rel=canonical in the <body> The rel=canonical link tag should only appear in the <head> of an HTML document. Additionally, to avoid HTML parsing issues, it’s good to include the rel=canonical as early as possible in the <head>. When we encounter a rel=canonical designation in the <body>, it’s disregarded. This is an easy mistake to correct. Simply double-check that your rel=canonical links are always in the <head> of your page, and as early as possible if you can. Conclusion To create valuable rel=canonical designations: Verify that most of the main text content of a duplicate page also appears in the canonical page. Check that rel=canonical is only specified once (if at all) and in the <head> of the page. Check that rel=canonical points to an existent URL with good content (i.e., not a 404, or worse, a soft 404).Avoid specifying rel=canonical from landing or category pages to featured articles as that will make the featured article the preferred URL in search results. And, as always, please ask any questions in our Webmaster Help forum. Written by Allan Scott, Software Engineer, Indexing Team The comments you read here belong only to the person who posted them. We do, however, reserve the right to remove off-topic comments.
If you're a small local business, having a Google+ Local profile is imperative to putting your brand – quite literally – on the map. Google Places was recently replaced with Google+ Local – a merging of Places and Plus that serves up your Google+ Local listing in Search and Maps results on mobile devices and traditional browsers. Whereas Places was a static listing, Local is dynamic and social.
A well-optimized Google+ Local page can benefit your digital marketing strategy in the following ways:
- Outrank your competitors in local search.
- Build the authority of your brand through +1's and user reviews.
- Drive traffic to your website.
- Convert more visitors into leads and clientele.
Quick stats about local mobile use:
- 50 percent of mobile search is local.
- 61 percent of local searches result in purchases.
- 50 percent of smartphone shoppers use a GPS/mapping app to find a retail location.
- Only 33 percent of advertisers have a mobile optimized website (Read more mobile statistics for local business).
With more than 1 billion smartphone users around the world, a number expected to reach 2 billion by 2015, it's no surprise that mobile search is quickly becoming the number one way users search. And, when people search with their smartphones, they're looking for something local.
How do you unlock the full potential of +Local? Follow these six steps to learn the dance.
Step 1: Claim Your Google+ Business Page
In order to set up your Google+ Local account, you need a Google+ Business Page. If you haven't yet claimed your Google+ Business page, I recommend John Haydon's short video tutorial on how to do it, here.
However, if you have a +Business Page which doesn't have a Local page category, unfortunately it can't be upgraded yet. (The new +Local Dashboard was recently rolled out, however only available in the U.S. for now).
If you already set up a Google+ Business page in the category Local Business, then you have the option to merge your business page with your Google+ local page. For a video tutorial on merging your Business and Local pages, check out Matthew Hunt's video here.
Now, it's time to populate your +Local Page.
Step 2: Update Your Google+ Local Page
The process for updating your Google+ Local page is pretty straightforward. On the left panel you have a series of icons (just like Google+). Hit the Profile icon and update your About section, cover photo, company photos, videos, etc.
The key is to build a strong local page that includes all pertinent business information (address, contact information, operating hours), engaging content (photos, positive reviews) and to keep it actively updated.
Step 3: Disseminate Structured and Unstructured Citations
Let's start by outlining the difference between a structured and unstructured citation. A structured citation is a mention of your business' NAP (business name, address, phone number) on an IYP (Internet Yellow Pages) or directory website (e.g., Yahoo Directory, ODP).
Generally, a structured citation has the schema.org mark-up, which allows the search engine spiders across Google, Bing and Yahoo to read the data. (To learn how to add schema location markup check out Carrie Hill's step-by-step article. )
An unstructured citation is more of a casual mention of your business' NAP that appears anywhere that's not an official directory provider, for example, a blog, social media profile, newspaper (online/print) etc.
Having a healthy mix of both structured and unstructured citations is really important for both SEO and conversions. Tools like Whitespark's local citation finder can help you to identify structured citation providers in your area.
Some ideas for getting unstructured mentions include:
- Event citations (local social event, meetups, seminars/workshops)
- Job boards (local job posting sites like elance, odesk, freelancer)
- Classified ads (Kijiji, Craigslist, Angie's list, eBay, Amazon etc.)
- Local newspaper classifieds
- Local realtor websites
- Discount sites (local coupon sites)
- Daily Deal websites (Groupon)
- Facebook Deals (Facebook Deals also have potential virality by inviting vetted Friends of Fans to participate in deals)
- Give away websites (Freecycle, Fiverr, mom blogs…)
Leveraging these structured and unstructured opportunities will definitely contribute to moving your rankings up and achieving your digital targets.
Step 4: Build Rank for Your Google+ Local Page
Google's previous local algorithm for Places was weighted on three main factors:
- Location
- Relevance
- Prominence
With the updated +Local, the algorithm has become as complex as Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson's relationship.
(Fun Fact: Ask.com's Top Question in 2012 was: Will Robert Pattinson & Kristen Stewart Get Back Together?)
But back to what really matters: What's affecting the positioning of a +Local listing on the SERP? The most up-to-date and comprehensive ranking factor analysis I've come across so far, is from the big wig of local search engine marketing, David Mihm. He's analyzed and written extensively about the top factors that affect the rank of your Google+ Local page. And he just did a Whiteboard Friday about the evolution of the local algorithm.
(Note: This analysis was performed in June 2012, just after the Places/Plus merge, so there may be some new factors that come into play – and others whose influence will increase or decrease when 2013's assessment is ready.)
Here's a very condensed breakdown of the top five factors that drive Google's local search algorithms:
1. +Local Page Criteria
- Physical address in city of search
- Proper business categories
- Proximity of address to city center (centroid)
- Local area code on +Local Page
2. On-site factors
- Domain Authority of website
- City/state/province in +Local landing page title
- HTML/schema NAP matches +Local page NAP
- Page Authority of landing page specified in +Local
- Product/service keyword in website URL
3. Off-site factors
- Quantity of structured citations (IYPs, data aggregators)
- Quality/authority of structured citations
- Quality/authority of unstructured citations
- Quality/authority of inbound links to domain
4. Review factors
- Quantity of native +Local reviews
- Product/service keywords in reviews
- Quantity of third-party reviews
- Keyword(s) location in reviews
- Velocity of native +Local reviews
(Note: velocity refers to the speed at which a local listing or a website accumulates outside references, such as links, citations, reviews, or check-ins.)
5. Social/Mobile factors
- Number of +1's on website
- Number of adds/shares on Google+
- Click-through rate from search results
- Authority of +1's on website
- Velocity of adds/shares on Google+
Now we know what performance indicators to put the bulk of our efforts into; it's time to find out what local region searchers are looking for.
Step 5: Perform a Local/Hyper-Local Keyword Research
Doing keyword research for local business is a challenging but high return activity. By tapping into what searchers are looking for in your local region, you open yourself to continuous discovery of quality, targeted keyword prospects, that will give your local business a competitive advantage.
You can use keyword tools such as AdWords, Wordtracker, WordStream and Übersuggest to generate an exhaustive list of as many possible relevant keywords. You can also use a fantastic local keyword tool that allows to you to include cities, state abbreviations and zip codes in your search.
Once you've analyzed and prioritized your keyword list, assigned them to the best pages (landing page, blog, mobile site, micro-site), you're ready to start building your first-class content.
Step 6: Create Value-Charged Local and Hyper-local Content
The ongoing sharing of valuable, relevant content that caters to the specific interests and intents of users on each platform you have a presence on, can have significant impact on the visibility and prominence of your brand.
It's a matter of "getting" your audience, and crafting meaningful copy that provides real value, answers questions and engages people to act. Author Rank is going to continue to give real estate to the content creators with a strong identities and that means it's more crucial than ever to build your following (Google+, +1s, reviews) and maintain your most important channels: your website, blog, social profiles, job profiles, forums, etc. with rich content including videos, images, social posts, that again, give searchers something to come back to.
Remember to keep your content cycle turning by revisiting and rejuvenating your most valuable local and hyperlocal content.
Local is “Where it's At”
The forward path of mobile search, increased local search, the influence of Google+, as well as user reviews, makes Google+ Local an invaluable platform for small businesses to utilize. Helping to drive relevant traffic and generate more qualified leads, now is the best time to do the "Localmotion" and capitalize on all the search that +Local has to offer.
To sum up, here are the key ways that will help you maximize the power of Google+ Local:
- Make sure you have a Google+ Business Page for entry into the Local space
- Once its claimed, merge your Business Page with your Google+ Local Page
- Update it with marked up business information + engaging content
- Build rank for your Google+ Local Page by optimizing the most important ranking factors (on-site/offsite factors, social media/mobile factors, reviews)
- Disseminate structured and unstructured citations (IYPs, directories, blog mentions etc.)
- Build the most comprehensive list of local/hyper-local keywords
- Consistently publish value-charged content and engage with your online communities
Mary Monserrat-Howlett of nvi contributed to this post.
Drummer image source: http://fark.com
Harnessing the $9+ Billion Social and Mobile Ad Potential
In partnership with Moontoast, ClickZ presents the "Ultimate Guide to Social Rich Media Advertising". Social rich media advertising offers a one-of-a-kind opportunity for brands and agencies to target consumers with interests that match the virtues and values of their products. Download your free guide today!
132 Flares 132 Flares ×This is a bit of a rant, but it’s important. Comments are welcomed below.
I wish I could see all the gasps from all the content purists looking at this headline.
But I just couldn’t hold back after the following quote from an article entitled ‘Why Content Marketing is the Only Link Building That Counts’ on Brafton:
“Content Marketing is marketing, link building is manipulation.”
So it seems as though link building is dead (again…), and that content marketing rules the Web.
The truth is, though, the “content marketing” fluff in this industry needs to have a reality check, not only for the sake of SEOs everywhere, but also because it’s doing small businesses an injustice.
From an industry blogging perspective
You’re right, I’m probably biased because I build links, and thus, all of my clients come to me wanting links, but from my point of view, links is still what it comes down to in SEO.
No, not as a business as a whole, but for SEO. We’re still SEOs writing about SEO on SEO blogs, so let’s stop avoiding what information the majority of readers (SEOs) want content written on: SEO.
No, not big budget, vaguely described content strategies that are there for the sole purpose of attracting those big budget clients, thus doing an injustice to 80%+ of their audience, but tips on how to rank in search engines. And if we honestly think “Google has it all figured out” and that “the days of building links are over”, then we’re not living in reality.
What people still pay for
Yes, a lot of people have bought into content marketing, but only because they want links out of it, because at the end of the day, links are still all that matter.
Yes, in SEO, links matter, not pretty content. Google is still an algorithmic machine, not a fleet of designers & bloggers meticulously judging different aspects of websites on a scale of 1 to 10. Google lets webmasters do that by giving them the signal of whether they linked or not.
At the end of the day, even the vast majority of those big budget clients that the content evangelists are trying to attract only care about links from an SEO perspective. Not social shares or those relationships you’ve now started to harness for a couple of tweets, but links. Links are still the foundation of Google, and SEO is still alive more than ever.
Why I don’t do much content marketing
As many people have realized, it’s not exactly a science of input & output; a lot of the content marketing we talk about provides difficult to measure results (if there ends up being any), and is nearly impossible with any audience (I’ve seen it done, but very rarely), yet so many have pounded into us that arbitrage is “what you get when you do great stuff.”
But for me, as both a consultant who needs to hit quality link goals (yep, and I love it) as well as making sure there’s ROI for my efforts on my own sites, it just doesn’t cut it.
Content marketing is what I do when I’ve done EVERYTHING else. There’s a time and place for it, but not for a small business owner with barely any links, no budget, and no audience. It doesn’t make any sense for them to do “content marketing” at that time for their business, but because all the experts are telling them that they have to do it, that’s where they turn to first.
They then get turned off to this SEO thing and end up paying a spammy company to take over.
I’m not saying telling everyone out there to do content marketing is on the same scale as the SEO companies ripping off their customers (and possibly doing more harm than good), but the point is a lot of what we recommend is misleading to business owners.
Rather, we need to be educating them on everything else that can be done to get the links they need before content marketing.
We should be talking more about making our websites look like legitimate businesses so when we conduct outreach to webmasters who curate relevant business or local listings, they’ll happily accept them and give us a link.
We should be talking more about doing meticulous competitor research so we can get every link we deserve & qualify for.
We should be talking more about how to help out webmasters in our industry that hold the power to link (i.e. broken link building).
We should be talking more about how to identify new link tactics & opportunities so we’re not playing by the same rules as the rest of their competition, who’s waiting head over heels for the next blog post to be written about “how to get links with tactic X”.
We should be talking more about things like fail-proof content (NOT known as content marketing) that makes sure any time spent creating content provides measurable returns ahead of time, allowing us to be smarter about the content we create that serves an SEO purpose.
Because the truth is, there’s so much low hanging fruit in SEO. We don’t have to jump on to the content marketing bandwagon because 7 experts told us it’s “the only way to get good links”.
Takeaway
As I said, there’s still a time & place for content marketing, but it should be a last linking resort.
So stop thinking the only way to get links is by “earning” them. Go out there and build them.
Small update: this post is another example of link building getting thrown under the bus. I encourage you to check out John-Henry‘s comment below it, as well as the responses to it.
Advanced SEO troubleshooting: Why isn’t this page indexed?UPDATED: APRIL 3RD 2013
Some of you seasoned pros will likely find this post of n00b status, but chances are that you’ve made a silly mistake at one point (or two) in your SEO career. This happened to me and a few of my esteemed colleagues, so I decided that it was time for a bit of a refresher, or a “basics” kick in the butt.
If a page isn’t indexed in 2013, we can blame it on one of the following:
- Specific directives
- Google’s almighty boot (algorithmic or manual)
- Site architecture issues (orphaning pages isn’t cool, give your pages a family)
In this post, we’re only going to go over the directives that can yank a page out of the index, or rather never let it appear in the first place. We’ll start with the blatantly obvious, and then work our way to sneakier stuff.
Just in case you don’t know how to check if a page is indexed:
- Copy URL
- Paste into Google search (any country)**
- The page should come up as the first result, visit the page to ensure it’s the same URL that you copy pasted in!
- If it’s not the exact URL, then you’ll need to start doing manual checks (see list below)
** – Ok ok, so there’s only one way that you wouldn’t see the URL in specific countries. If the URL you’re copy / pasting in is using HREFLANG + CANONICAL, then you might not see it in certain countries. There’s an example below in the honorouble mentions section.
1 ) Meta robots Noindex in <head>
- Difficulty to spot rating: It’s like getting slapped in the face
- Easiest way to spot it? Look in the source code of your browser, in the <head> section
- What does it look like? <META NAME=”ROBOTS” CONTENT=”NOINDEX”> and remember it’s in the head section.
- What does it do? Tells Google that you don’t want this page in Google’s index, ever. Example here: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/2013/02/
More information:
2 ) Rel canonical in <head>
- Difficulty to spot rating: A 50 metre ditch, 1 metre in front of you.
- Easiest way to spot it? Look in the source code of your browser, in the <head> section
- What does it look like? <link rel=”canonical” href=”http://www.canonical-target.com”/> in the <head> portion of the HTML.
- What does it do? Tells Google that the value (PageRank, link authority) of this page should be passed onto another page. It’s not a directive, but Google does honour the canonical suggestion we provide most of the time, which can pull this page out of the index while the canonical target (page) stays in the index.
More information:
3 ) NOINDEX in robots.txt
- Difficulty to spot rating: Like trying to pick out Phil Nottingham amongst a L’Oreal model.
- Easiest way to spot it? Check in Robots.txt
- What does it look like? Noindex: /folder/ Special note here, my all caps test (NOINDEX) doesn’t work. However, it de-index a page if you only capitalize the N in Noindex:. Thanks to Richard Falconer for the heads up and his working example here.
- What does it do? Same as the regular noindex tag, but this is a weird robots.txt implementation .
More information:
4 ) Noindex in the HTTP header (or None in HTTP header)
- Difficulty to spot rating: Finding an American penny in a pile of English pence
- Easiest way to spot it? Check HTTP headers with Chrome or something like this HTTP viewer
- What does it look like? X-Robots-Tag: noindex in the <head> portion of the HTML. Also look for rel=”prev”.
- What does it do? It’s the same meta=”robots” content=”noindex” you’re used to, except it’s delivered in the HTTP header. You can see a live example here. Hat tip to Ian Macfarlane for pointing out that “none” also means noindex in the X-robots directive.
More information:
5 ) Rel canonical in the HTTP header
- Difficulty to spot rating: Spotting a penny in a pool without goggles.
- Easiest way to spot it? Check HTTP headers with Chrome or something like this HTTP viewer
- What does it look like? Google says to do it like this: Link: <http://www.davidsottimano.com>; rel=”canonical” you can see a working example here: http://www.davidsottimano.com/http-canonical-example.php
- What does it do? Same thing as the regular canonical tag (in the <head>).
More information:
6 ) Meta refresh with delay > 0 (example: 5)
- Difficulty to spot rating: Being slapped 5 times in 5 seconds
- Easiest way to spot it? Go to the page, and watch for any redirects OR just look in the source code
- What does it look like? <meta http-equiv=”Refresh” content=”5;url=http://soliddelivery.co.uk/finsdanishpack.html”> in the <head> portion of the HTML.
- What does it do? Waits for the specified amount of time, then sends your browser on a road trip. Google only indexed the destination when there’s a time delay greater than 0, not sure why, but now you know. Here’s a live test: http://soliddelivery.co.uk/feratsodaman.html (copy paste that into search and also visit that URL to see what happens or just click here)
7 ) Parameter canonicalization in GWMT (Google webmaster tools)
More information:
- http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1235687
- BONUS ROUND! If you’re reading this, then I’ll give you a little tip. If you need to canonicalize a page and you don’t want anyone to easily find out, tack on a fake parameter to the URL and add the custom parameter to WMT. That’s all I’m telling you, and you shouldn’t use it for naughty purposes.
8 ) URL removal request in WMT
More information:
Honourable mentions
- Just repeating it, but blocking in Robots.txt doesn’t prevent indexation!
- Originally, I had rel=”next” / “prev” in as a potential cause of de-indexation (because of its likeness to canonical), but I can’t list it without a public example.
- 301 redirects will likely only show the destination target, but not always, and not forever. I’ve left this out because the tests are always flaky – but if you can back this up, please do.
- 302s (test here, example here) and meta refresh 0 delay (test here, example here) will show the URL in search with the content of the target
- .
- Similar to the behaviour of the 302s and meta refresh 0, Hreflang + canonical might cause a page to disappear OR reappear depending on what country you search in (also dependent on hreflang alternates)
Did I miss anything?
If I did, and you can prove it, I’ll add it to the post and happily credit you.
David Sottimano comes from a varied background in Corporate Marketing and Professional Sales. His love affair between the internet and marketing has finally found the perfect balance at Distilled, where he *almost* always shares insider secrets.
Squidoo, a huge user generated content web site founded by Seth Godin, announced they are now nofollowing all outbound links.
I am surprised it took so long. It was founded in 2005 and has been used by SEOs for years for getting links or content into Google. I believe Squidoo was hit hard after Panda.
That being said, Squidoo said:
Based on the successful implementations of other authoritative sites, like Wikipedia, Squidoo will now apply “nofollow” markup to all outbound links. This means that any link shared on a lens will work exactly as it always has for you and for people visiting Squidoo, but search engines will no longer use it as a signal for ranking.In 2010, Squidoo had 1.5 million hand-built "lenses" or pages.
There is forum reaction from SEOs at a couple forums including SEOmoz and Warrior Forums, here is one comment:
Not a big surprise. Made me money, served it's purpose, one tool in an arsenal that now is less effective, oh well right?Forum discussion at SEOmoz and Warrior Forums.
The humble Title tag.
One of the starting points of any on page SEO work.
Maybe calling it humble is actually a little unfair, after all, this is arguably one of the most powerful on page elements a site can have.
SEO and online marketing changes all the time, but the Title tag is an element that continues to play a huge part in any campaign.
Because of its longevity as an important factor I sometimes get the feeling that it can become over looked, almost taken for granted, yet so much can ride on the Title tag alone:
- Highlighting to the search engines your relevance to a term or product
- Helping you to stand out from the crowd
- Enticing in potential clients or customers
- One of many important ranking factors
Getting your Title tag right will make a difference in so many areas.
What is a Title Tag?
Ok, let’s go back to basics because not everyone has this knowledge.
The Title tag is the line of information that is displayed within the SERP’s (Search Engine Result Pages) above the description.
This is the stand out statement that you are putting out there to entice potential visitors into your site.
The code for this tag sits within the section of your sites source code. The tag should already be in place, even if you have never touched it.
Almost all sites have this tag included within the code as standard. The code looks like this:
<title>This Is Your Title</title>
To edit it, simply add the text you wish to include within the opening and closing commands.
Each page of your site should have a unique Title tag. Don’t edit your Home page and think that is job done. Each page needs to be optimized and relevant to the content or product of the individual page.
Guidelines
The recommended length of any Title tag is a maximum of 70 characters. Anything longer and you run the risk of having the dreaded “…” at the end of your Title tag.
Aim for around 60 characters, sometimes this isn’t possible and you need those extra characters. Having license to use up to 70 doesn’t mean you have to.
It is worth pointing out that there is no evidence that proves text after the 70 character mark is ignored by Google.
Personally I see any text that isn’t displayed as a waste – so why include it?
Creating the Perfect Title Tag
Here’s the thing, there is no exact formula. No “one size fits all”. Every website is different. How you put your message across depends on the audience you are looking to target. In truth any Title tag that does its job is perfect.
Let’s look at some scenarios.
I want to buy a Dog Mat so I carry out that exact search: ‘Dog Mats’
The results show a variety of different ways you can create your Title tags.
Our first example gets straight to the point:
Here we see a good amount of information in only 43 characters:
- The targeted key term
- The make of the dog mat
- The price
This is simplistic and manages to cover a lot of ground. It’s neat without giving too much information.
What about an alternative?
Our next example is slightly different:
Here we again have:
- The targeted key term
- The make
- Descriptive text
However this time we have the addition of the word “durable”.
This adds a different form of information. The other mats may be sold at a good price but if someone is looking for more than just a good price then including that their mats are durable may be the selling point.
Again this is a nice mid length Title tag. At only 48 characters in length, they could have actually included the price as well (if competitive) to have given it yet another dimension.
What if the potential customer was looking for a local store?
The inclusion of your destination not only helps you in your Local SEO campaign (you do have one right?) but also provides that further bit of information that could bring in the sale.
What other information could have been included?
Dog Mats are a pretty generic product.
If this was a product such as Men’s Running Trainers, then there are other snippets of information you may want to think about:
• The product name
• The product code
• The color
• The size
• The priceIf someone is looking for a pair of running trainers, size 8 in blue for around £50 then you can cover that in one simple Title tag:
Men’s (brand name) Running Trainers | Blue and Silver | Size 8 | £55
By including more relevant information as opposed to the generic version “Men’s Running Trainers | Buy Online” you can capture the searcher at the time of purchase.
You are also including information the search engines will find relevant.
Including your company name?
Everyone has their own thoughts on this one.
Basically it is up to you and your personal preference.
This is valuable retail space and adding your company name to each Title obviously takes up characters.
Think about the value including your company name may bring. Are you well known? Does including your company name actually add to the value of the product or service you are trying to promote?
If your company name is synonymous to the brand then including it is obviously a very good idea.
For example it would be hard to sell a pair of Nike trainers without mentioning Nike.
So think about the relevance of your company name or brand name and the value it adds.
You may wish to test this to see what gets the best results. Start by excluding your company name within the title on a page and seeing what Click through Rate (CTR) you obtain before including it a month later and monitoring the same data.
It doesn’t end there
All of the above options are affective and if tailored into a way that truly sells your page, it will serve you well.
What about blog posts?
This is where your focus should change. More often than not blog posts or articles address an opinion; therefore you need a more natural Title tag to truly describe the page.
You may have written a post in reply to a frequently asked question. As a result the Title tag should be the question you are addressing. This is what people will be searching for so this is what you want to be found for.
If you are writing an opinion piece in reaction to something that has happened in your industry then try and include the important element from the original story.
In Summary
There really is no ultimate solution.
There is no formula that fits all Title tags.
Make sure all the relevant information is included.
Stand out.
Do you address the search query that has been entered?
If not it’s time to get to work.
If you have any thoughts on Title tags and suggestions for the readers of Search Engine Journal, please feel free to share them in the comments below.
The newly appointed head of Google Local Product Manager Brian Fitzpatrick today announced the rollout of a completely revamped local product to replace the Places dashboard. As written about in the Wall Street Journal in June, 2012 the product is called “The Business Builder”. With the rollout of the Business Builder Google Local is announcing a totally rebuilt local product that offers the best of local and social as well as easy to use self provisioning of sophisticated Couponing, Adwords, Offers and other paid options.
National multi-store brands as well as single storefront businesses will be able to take advantage of this new functionality with the free local and social products as well as the easy to deploy paid products for their locations. Local analytics have been totally revamped as well. With the rollout of the new couponing product Google will be able to offer search to sale tracking analytics in an easy to use reporting format that can grow in sophistication with the business user and use cases.
Fitzpatrick, a dynamic multi skilled developer in the world of Maps, noted “It was a great relief to finally get the merged and updated product out the door. The reason for its long delay was our commitment to make the product bug free the first time and not have to push weekly updates and bug fixes. We think we have met that milestone. The days of lost reviews, lost listings and unfounded closings are behind us.”
“More importantly we will be holding public monthly briefings going forward laying out upcoming developments in our local products. This will allow for businesses, big and small, that depend on our Business Builder products to better plan their SEO and SEM activities in Local.”
Brian Fitzpatrick is a the newly merged head of the Local & Maps division within the web search team. His duties, roughly akin to those of Marissa Mayer who left for Yahoo last July, had previously been filled by a troika of individuals.
Please consider leaving a comment as your input will help me (& everyone else) better understand and learn about local.
Google is a strong advocate for responsive design. Mashable named 2013 “The Year of Responsive Design,” but is responsive web design actually the answer to boosting mobile conversions?
2012 was a milestone year in the consumer devices market. For the first time since 2001, PC sales were lower than they were the previous year, and tablet sales are expected to top laptop PC sales for the first time in 2013. In addition, Nielsen reports that 55% of U.S. mobile subscribers own smartphones, and 2 out of 3 Americans opt for a smartphone instead of a feature phone when purchasing a new mobile.
Mobile telephone usage is increasing and translating into a growing percentage of mobile visitors. If businesses operating online want to benefit from this trend, they need to optimize the mobile experience for their website visitors.
Shopping on mobile devices can be a pain
The process of trying to buy something from a desktop design site with a smartphone can be summed up with one word – pain. On top of navigating and zooming a computer monitor-sized site on a three-inch screen to find relevant content, internet retailers assume that you are a screen-tapping ninja that understands the relevance of their lengthy forms and “Terms and Conditions”. All of these obstacles make it an unexpected challenge to reach the checkout page. It’s no wonder that 61% of mobile visitors move on to competitors’ sites after encountering a frustrating mobile browsing experience.
Meanwhile, mobile visitors are becoming more comfortable in taking action with their mobile phones, when it’s convenient. Nielsen reports that 29% of smartphone owners have used their device for online shopping. The percentage will surely increase as businesses improve the mobile browsing experience on their sites. Companies that have already acknowledged the buying potential, and have invested in improving the mobile experience, are reaping the benefits.
A good example of a company who is successfully converting mobile traffic is Webundies.com, a family-owned retailer of underwear, sleepwear and lounge-wear. Webundies.com announced 2012 mobile commerce sales of $168,000, accounting for 5.4% of total sales. For Webundies.com, mobile sales in 2012 increased a whopping 169.2% from 2011. The company is implementing both a responsive design and a tablet-optimized catalog to boost their mobile and tablet conversions, and clearly it’s paying dividends. Who wouldn’t want to enjoy the same success?
A business with a desktop design website that would like to enhance the mobile browsing experience and boost conversions has three options in general:
- Build a website using responsive design.
- Build a dedicated mobile web.
- Build a mobile app.
Responsive web design
Is a flexible, liquid layout that adapts to fit various screen sizes, resolutions and devices. It allows websites to automatically change layouts according to the visitor’s screen resolution, whether on a desktop, tablet, or smartphone, creating a user-friendly interface when visitors browse websites.
If you’re viewing this blog post on a desktop browser, you can test responsive design in action. Try making your browser window smaller and you’ll notice the images and content column shrink to fit your screen.
A good example of responsive design, in action, is the The Boston Globe website. Notice how the same content adapts to fit the various devices.
Responsive design has gained a lot of advocates due to its benefits compared to alternative solutions:
- One website to build and manage: A strong advantage for businesses who update their content often, as it is no longer necessary to ensure content parity in various locations.This advantage also pays dividends in conversion optimization – for example in A/B testing, as there is only one body to conduct tests on. In addition, visitors encounter a cohesive brand experience regardless of whether they’re using a laptop, smartphone or tablet.
- Search engine optimization: All links and bookmarks point to one URL. No wonder Google recommends responsive design.
- Social Media: With responsive design, the URL’s visitors’ encounters are the same regardless of whether they’re browsing with a laptop, tablet or smartphone. That makes sharing content through social media foolproof, as it’s guaranteed that the recipients will also be able to browse the content in the most optimal view.
- Analytics: One complete view of all the traffic.
- Future-friendly: Whatever the new trend-setting device might be, responsive design has it covered by shrinking content to fit the resolution of the device.
The effect of responsive design on mobile conversions
Let’s take a look at some examples of how implementing responsive design has boosted mobile conversions. All of the following companies have gone from a desktop site to responsive design:
O`Neill Clothing
The popular e-commerce store O´Neill Clothing racked up some impressive results after implementing responsive design. O`Neill monitored conversions, transactions and revenue for three weeks prior to going responsive. Then, after deploying the responsive conditions to the already live site, they monitored the same metrics for another three weeks. The results are staggering:
For iPhone/iPod:
- Conversions increased by 65.71%
- Transactions increased by 112.50%
- Revenue increased by 101.25%
For Android devices:
- Conversions increased by 407.32%
- Transactions went up by 333.33%
- Revenue increased by a whopping 591.42%
Think Thank Photo
Think Thank Photo (TTP) is a company that produces equipment and accessories for photographers. After witnessing their mobile visitors triple in a year to 13% of their overall website traffic, TTP made the to decision to rebuild the site using responsive design.
As a result of the new responsive layout and other optimization efforts, TTP achieved a 188% increase in revenue from Black Friday through Cyber Monday compared to 2012. Transactions from users on smartphones and tablets increased more than 96% and pageviews among mobile users increased by 224%.
Skinny Ties
A family-run company that has been designing and producing neckties since 1971, Skinny Ties decided to reinvent the brand’s identity and build a platform that would be future-friendly. Bearing in mind the increasing penetration of smartphones and tablets, the company opted for responsive design. The site launched in October 2012 and within a couple of weeks Skinny Ties experienced massive improvements in sales metrics compared to the previous three months:
- Revenue from iPhone grew a staggering 377.6%
- iPhone conversion rate increased 71.9%
- Revenue from all devices went up 42.4%
- Overall Conversion rate increased by 13.6%
- Bounce rate dropped 23.2%
Maxatec
Maxatec is a company that offers POS & EPOS systems, mobile and bar code products. Similarly to the previous examples, Maxatec saw an increase in mobile visitors and decided to the improve the user experience of tablet and smartphone visitors and boost conversions in that segment.
The results: mobile visitor goal conversion rate went up by 12% and the average time to complete a task decreased by 50%.
Conclusion
As predicted, the described case studies unambiguously show that responsive design is far superior to desktop design in converting mobile visitors. Businesses who attract mobile visitors to a desktop design are missing out on a large chunk of potential conversions and revenue, and as smartphone penetration is increases, having a desktop design could turn out to be expensive (in terms of lost conversions and revenue).
Dedicated mobile website
A business may also opt for building a dedicated mobile site to enhance the browsing experience of mobile visitors. A dedicated site lies separately (separate URL) from the desktop site and it’s sole purpose is to host mobile visitors.
An example of dedicated mobile website: Amazon
The advantages of a dedicated mobile site:
- Mobile Behavior: Dedicated mobile sites optimize for both mobile behavior and resolution, while responsive optimizes for only resolution.
- Faster load times: When Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center wanted to improve their site’s mobile experience, BlueTrain Mobile made an example of how one page of their website would have looked if they had adopted responsive design and how the page would have looked in a dedicated mobile site. In the same mobile network, it took 15 seconds for the page in responsive design to load while the dedicated mobile page loaded in just 2 seconds.
- Optimization: Easier to optimize for mobile conversions. Dedicated mobile sites focus solely on mobile visitors, while with responsive keeps in mind laptops, tablets and smartphones.
The disadvantages of dedicated mobile sites are basically the same as the advantages for responsive design:
- Two bodies of content to manage
- Separate URLs: if you’re using content marketing to attract visitors, this is a huge disadvantage as link sharing in social media is problematic.
Mobile app
Building a mobile app to enhance the browsing experience of mobile visitors is a good idea if you have a unique social or interactive platform OR when your site is your product. If you’re not Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube – build a dedicated mobile site or use responsive design.
Just think about it. When your site is not your product, can you think of any realistic reason of why anyone should download your app from an app-store, install it and use it just to visit your site? No? Thought so.
The additional disadvantages of apps are that they have a restricted amount of content and functionality, plus they’re operation system specific. Most probably you’ll need need to build for both Android and iOS to optimize for your mobile visitors.
Responsive vs. Dedicated Mobile: which one should you choose?
Responsive has a lot of advocates for a reason. When comparing the two alternatives, responsive design is more future-friendly, has one body of content to manage (assures content parity), provides a constant brand experience and is social media friendly.
Dedicated mobile sites have basically one advantage – faster load times. But with the improvement of mobile networks and faster downloading speeds, the loading time differences between responsive design and dedicated mobile will lessen.
From a conversion optimization standpoint, the fact is that with both alternatives you’d need to follow the same route – constant improvements, A/B testing and multivariate analysis. Therefore, it would be wise to go with the alternative that provides the most advantages – responsive web design.
5 things to keep in mind when optimizing responsive design for mobile conversions
1. Focus on the important
When optimizing for mobile visitors, it’s important to remember that the most annoying thing for mobile visitors is going through a sea of plain text. If mobile visitors can’t find what they’re looking for quickly, they’re gone.
Critically review your content and keep everything that helps mobile visitors to find what they’re looking for quickly. Get rid of anything that may lead to visitors clicking away.
Make sure that the first thing your mobile visitors see is your value proposition (VP). A value proposition is a clear statement that explains how your product solves customers problems, delivers specific benefits and why the customer should buy from you and not from the competition. For more information about building a viable value proposition, read this blog post.
Fork, an open-source CMS, is a good example of a responsive web that has a highly visible value proposition for mobile visitors. When browsing the site, a mobile visitor will immediately know what Fork is and its benefits. The questionable part of the VP “will rock your world”, which really communicates nothing. Replacing it with a statement that says who Fork is aimed at (eg “small businesses”) would be much more informative.
Although a dedicated mobile site, Kumon is a very good example of a business that is correctly communicating its value proposition. At a glance of the site, you have a clear understanding of what the service is and who it is designed for.
In addition to making your value proposition visible, statements developed for boosting conversions, for example free shipping and money-back guarantees, should also stand out from the rest of the content.
2. Make your CTA-s stand out and in accordance with mobile behavior
Make your call-to-action buttons so large that they take up the entire width of the mobile screen. This ensures that mobile visitors don’t need to zoom to focus in on the CTA button.
Also, put your CTAs in accordance with mobile behavior. A 15-page white paper may be a conversion hit on a desktop site, but it’s highly unlikely that a mobile visitor will be interested in going through the trouble of downloading the paper and then reading it on a tiny mobile screen. “Sign up for Our Newsletter” or “Like Us on Facebook” are better call-to-actions for a mobile visitor who are on-the-go.
A clever idea is to implement mobile specific call-to-actions under contact information, such as “Call Now” or “Get Directions”. The mentioned CTAs will start a phone call or open a map application, resulting in a more targeted mobile browsing experience.
Audi has a highly visible CTA on their mobile landing page. Though not responsive design, it’s a great example of a well placed CTA, leaving mobile visitors with no confusion on what to do next.
3. Make use of photographs and videos
Reading plain text on a mobile phone is tiresome and difficult, especially when you consider that most of mobile browsing happens on the fly with texting and apps interfering. Photographs and videos on the other hand are great for capturing the attention of mobile visitors and communicating your marketing messages.
A great example of a responsive design site that uses photographs to capture mobile-visitor attention is Food Sense, a food recipe blog. When on the hunt for recipes for delicious meals, it’s highly likely that you’ll stop on a site which uses remarkable pictures to develop a craving for food.
Another company that is effectively using images to capture mobile-visitor attention and communicate its brand values is Starbucks:
With creatives, keep in mind that more photographs and videos translate into a longer page load time. A study found that 67% of people expect a mobile site to load in under 4 seconds. Also, never use flash as it’s not supported on some mobile devices, for example iOS.
4. Cut down your forms
Long forms are conversion killers on desktop sites. They’re even worse for mobile visitors. Filling out forms with a smartphone is time consuming and uncomfortable. To boost mobile conversions, keep your forms short.
Review forms with the view of “Is this field absolutely necessary?” If the answer is no, delete it. You can ask for additional information after the actual conversion with a follow up e-mail or call.
5-6 fields are the maximum recommended amount of fields in a form when optimizing for mobile visitors. In addition use vertical-align labels (top) instead of left-aligned labels.
A good example of a business who has made filling out forms as easy as possible is Hertz, a car rental company. You can get a quote on a rental car by filling out four information fields. No name, address or contact information needed – they’re irrelevant when requesting a quote and can be gathered later, when the customer has made the actual purchase decision. Well done Hertz!
5. Use expandable content or tabs to avoid mobile scrolling
When running an e-commerce business, try implementing expendable content or tabs on your product pages. The point of tabs is to structure information based on categories so that mobile users can find what they’re looking for quicker.
For example, instead of scrolling through waves of content to find product reviews, a mobile visitors just clicks on the “Review” tab of the product page and ‘voila’ – he has the needed social proof to make the transaction.
Tria offers a good learning example with their desktop product site and the same page as a mobile landing page. Notice how all the content on the bottom half of the desktop site is placed as expandable content on the mobile landing page.
In addition, Tria gets credit for the CTA, which is highly visible and well-placed. Also notice how “Free Shipping” has been made more visible compared to the desktop site. “Reviews” have been altered in the same manner to provide social proof to mobile visitors.
Conclusions
- An increasing amount of website visits are performed on smartphones and tablets, meaning that businesses who want to benefit from this trend must enhance the browsing experience for these devices.
- Responsive web design allows websites to automatically change layouts according to the visitor’s screen resolution whether on a desktop, tablet or smartphone; thus creating a user-friendly interface when visitors browse websites.
- Companies that have invested in improving the browsing experience of mobile visitors, and have gone from a desktop design to responsive design, have seen increases in mobile conversions.
- When optimizing responsive design for mobile conversions, make sure your VP and other conversion boosting elements are highly visible. Use images and videos instead of plain text, and make your forms as short as possible.
If tech media coverage frequency were to serve as a barometer of the relative utility of the digital channels available to marketers, one could be forgiven for concluding that search's value pales in comparison to the much-covered social media.
An analysis of "SEO" vs. "social media" coverage on the top two major tech blogs, while not the most scientific study ever done, shows that social media was covered 4x more frequently on TechCrunch and 58x more frequently on Mashable.
This matters because, as any first year poly-sci. student knows, media coverage impacts public opinion. In this case, that means impacting marketer's organizational decision-making such as budget and resource investment. And, as many a frustrated SEO practitioner knows, even if you yourself have things straight, the VP or CMO at the top of the food chain who likely controls the purse strings is often the most susceptible to the tech media's influence.
Media Saturation of Social Dominates Mindshare and Budgets
To add to the "how much" coverage factor, the "what is being said" is another variable influencing public opinion. To a certain extent, the tech media has touted social media as a magic bullet, promising it will change the very fabric of how we market online. When it comes to online retail in particular, we have been told that social will change the way people shop, presumably because recommendations from friends carry more weight than results from a search engine.
Given these dual factors putting downward pressure on public opinion, now is a good time to check in on where social should, in fact, be positioned in the marketer's toolbox.
We know that measurement of the current traffic social media drives to websites isn't a definitive indicator about its future utility. But it gives us a finger-in-the-wind check as to where social stands relative to other drivers of inbound traffic.
With that, let's look at some data.
Data: Social Drives Far Less Traffic than Search
First, from Adobe's analysis of "…billions of visits from 500 retail websites during the holiday season": only 2 percent of visits come from social, while 34 percent come from search:
And, a study from Monetate shows similar findings with social hovering at around 2 percent:
It would seem clear, therefore, that from a traffic perspective, social is driving only a small percentage of visits to retailers. A Conductor study suggested that may be in part because users overwhelmingly turn to search as a discovery platform versus social when it comes to online shopping.
People Use Search and Social Differently
Jay Taylor wrote an article on Search Engine Watch last month titled "5 Reasons SMBs Should Focus on Search, Not Social for Customer Acquisition". He made a number of good points about re-positioning social when it comes to customer acquisition.
But he must have struck one heck of a cord with one particular aspect of his observations on social because I noticed a phenomenon I had never seen before on my Twitter stream. No less than five people I follow tweeted a link to his article with the same article snippet (or close variation) preceding the link: "People use social media to, well, socialize. People use search engines when they want to find something."
Facebook and Twitter are hoping to change that, particularly when it comes to commerce (see: Facebook Graph Search and Twitter enabling instant commerce with American Express), but for now the data says that Taylor is right.
In the survey mentioned earlier, users showed that they want to use social for, well, socializing, while turning to search universally across all information retrieval scenarios:
Let's Reposition Social Where it Belongs
There's no question that social has a place in the modern marketer's toolbox, both as a brand development and customer service listening platform. But can we agree that it's time we return it, at least for now, where it rightly belongs: a place for socializing.
Become an Expert Digital Marketer at SES New York
March 25-28, 2013: With dozens of sessions on Search, Social, Local and Mobile, you'll leave SES with everything you need to know. Register for SES today!
Ever had a massive, life-changing epiphany?
Me neither.
However, I’ve slowly reached the conclusion that we’re doing SEO all wrong. Not in the do-real-marketing sense, or the we-need-to-change-the-name sense. More in the wow-did-we-ever-screw-the-pooch-this-time sense.
After 17+ years of beating my head against walls like IT departments, branding teams and disbelieving CFOs, I’ve figured out why: SEO isn’t an activity, or a tactic, or a strategy. Good SEO is the outcome of a disciplined, coherent marketing & technology strategy.
SEO isn’t a tactic
In marketing, a tactic is a single, atomic thing you do to reach a goal: Direct mail isn’t a tactic, it’s a channel. Link building isn’t a tactic, it’s a result. Using Followerwonk to find influencers is a tactic.
SEO is not a marketing tactic. I had that wrong. SEO is a collection of tactics: Writing. Server performance tuning. Site performance tuning. Code cleanup. Canonicalization. Online PR/social media/whatever current trendy term.
Most SEO tactics influence other parts of marketing: A faster site means better conversion rates. Better writing does, too. A better UX means happier visitors, which is always good. A mention on a well-known blog is a great business boost.
SEO isn’t a strategy
It’s not a strategy, either. You can’t have an SEO strategy, any more than you can have a dental hygiene strategy. You execute on details, one detail at a time: You brush. You floss. You don’t gargle maple syrup.
For SEO, you target. You streamline. You make sure stuff is visible. You use the words your audience uses. You don’t build slow, lousy web sites.
Getting those details right isn’t “a strategy,” unless you want to call “Don’t be a dolt” a strategy. It’s just the stuff you gotta do right.
Strategy is an approach that includes all roles in an organization. All of the components of SEO should be part of an organization’s growth strategy.
We (almost) ruined it
Remember the meta keywords tag? Why did search engines stop using it? Probably because we stuffed keywords tags with all manner of ridiculousness. We ruined it.
Remember link building? Yep. We ruined that, too.
Remember this? Yeah, so do all your clients.
We tried to turn SEO into a discipline, with specific, unique tactics for manipulating rankings. That includes all of us smug white-hat SEOs, by the way.
By doing that, we pulled SEO off into its own distinct job description. For a long time, that was good. We got offices with windows. The Wall Street Journal called to talk to us. We were pioneers, dammit!
We also made SEO something that had to be justified as an end in itself. We unwittingly pitted it against other corporate goals, like branding, architecture and infrastructure development. And, we gave ourselves zero room for error. If you twist the leadership team’s collective arm until they decree changes designed ‘to get higher rankings,’ and then they don’t see higher rankings, you’ve lost all credibility.
On the other hand, if you get the leadership team to make some little shifts that help all aspects of marketing, including search traffic, you’ll be a hero.
That’s how we fix all of this: Don’t treat SEO as a department, or even a goal. Treat it as one benefit of a truly smart marketing strategy.
It’s not dead
My brief, sputtering flash of insight shouldn’t lead to some huge shakeup in our industry. If you write an “SEO is Dead” article because of this post, I’m going to slap you. SEO is just fine.
I’m not ‘killing’ SEO. Most companies don’t have “Conversion Rate” departments. But they hire conversion rate optimization experts. They don’t generally have oh-crap-our-yoga-pants-are-transparent departments, either. They hire PR agencies.
Companies shouldn’t have “SEO” departments, either. They should have experts that help all departments accomplish the best practices that add up to SEO.
SEO is what it always was: The result of doing a lot of little things right. A fantastic driver of revenue and value. A way to make oodles of money. None of that’s changed.
What about the rankings?
I know: As long as there are rankings, companies will want to rank, and they’ll ask us how to do it. Great! Tell them! Get paid for it! Get paid lots!
Just prioritize a little differently:
What needs to change
Five things we have to change:
- Treat SEO as a multi-team goal, like loss reduction, risk management or communications policy. Everyone has a role to play.
- Stop pushing companies and clients to create an ‘SEO department’ or team. Start pushing companies to apply the tactics that lead to good SEO across all departments and teams.
- Stop talking about specific tactics strictly in terms of rankings or traffic. For example: Point out the parallel benefits of a faster site. If there are no parallel benefits, think carefully before you make that recommendation.
- Constantly remind yourself and your clients/bosses where SEO fits into the paid/earned/owned media world. You’re a marketer who knows a lot about SEO. You’re not “an SEO” any more than you could’ve been a “column inch” in the 1970s. But hopefully you know the rest of marketing, too. If not, introduce yourself. Audience analysis? PR? Paid media? Nice to meet you.
- Always discuss SEO in context. If possible, restrict the ‘oh my god your SEO sucks’ moments to a single meeting. Then immediately broaden the discussion to include all areas impacted by, and impacting, SEO. For example: Meet with the branding/UX team and talk about how particular phrases in the navigation might improve clickthru, as well as search traffic and sales. Show you’re not that SEO pest who keeps screwing up their drive for a Webby Award.
What will change
If we can make this happen, we’ll become a lot more valuable. We’ll have more credibility. We’ll have a little more room for error, where right now we have none. We’ll also become less of a headache and more of an all-around benefit to any organization. And our industry (which will always be marketing, right?) will continue to thrive.
Large numbers of people believe that the majority of mobile search activity happens “on the go.” However, according to an extensive new study from Google and Nielsen, the overwhelming majority (77 percent) of mobile search happens at home or work — even when there’s a PC nearby and readily available.
These people are choosing to search on their smartphones rather than PCs because of speed and convenience. And most of these users take some sort of near-immediate, follow-up action. In fact, the study found, 55 percent of mobile-search influenced conversions take place within one hour.
This finding closely mirrors a now-famous statistic published by Microsoft in 2010: 70 percent of mobile search activity begins and ends – in other words, a decision is made or the objective achieved – within one hour.
The new Google-Nielsen study, which focused only on smartphones, offers extensive insights into mobile search behavior and generally goes deeper than most of the research that predates it. It serves to provide additional nuance and color to what we already know about mobile user behavior. However, the “big takeaway” is that mobile is perhaps the most critical channel for search marketers.
The study was conducted in Q4 2012 and involved a mix of methodologies. They included user diaries, search query logging and online follow-up surveys. Here’s how Google describes the study methodology in its blog post:
We asked participants to log their mobile searches over two weeks in a diary smartphone app — logging more than 6,000 mobile searches in total. We followed up to ask them what actions resulted from those searches, helping us draw more precise, measurable connections between mobile searches and the conversions that they drive online and offline.There’s a great deal of data in the report. Below are some of the high-level findings:
- 73 percent of mobile searches trigger follow-up actions
- 63 percent of mobile search-triggered actions occur within 1 hour of the initial search
- 45 percent of mobile searches “are conducted to help make a decision” (in a store, that number goes up to 66 percent)
- 28 percent of mobile searches result in conversions
There is also much more about when and where mobile searches occur (time of day, user context), as well as vertical categories where mobile searches are concentrated. In addition, the report explores specific outcomes resulting from mobile searches: calls, online purchases, offline store visit, subsequent research and so on.
A very interesting set of data surround the elapsed time between search and subsequent (often offline) action. The stats cited and the graphic above show how, in many cases, people will act almost immediately following a mobile search.
There were also a variety of findings about the impact, recall and effectiveness of mobile search advertising. During “goal-oriented” queries, for example, mobile users are most inclined to notice mobile ads and find them relevant and helpful. Overall, 65 percent of participants in the study noticed mobile search ads.
Mobile search-ad recall was found to be highest when people are engaged in commercial-intent searching — in stores. In other words, commercial queries tied to products are going to be extremely valuable to search marketers and retailers because they indicate an immediate buying intent, as well as the ability to influence a near-term purchase outcome.
As I’ve indicated, there’s much more information in the report. All search marketers should take a look at it — and use it to argue for more budget for mobile advertising. You can obtain a copy of the full report here (.pdf).
Related Topics: Google: AdWords | Google: Maps & Local | Google: Mobile | Google: Web Search | Stats: NetRatings | Stats: Search Behavior | Top News
Two weeks ago, Greg Sterling and I published “YQ,” a study on the state of location data for Yext, where we discovered (surprise!) that the state of business location data on the Web is pretty messy. The study provided us with the opportunity to look at patterns among thousands of Yext’s customers, and I thought it would be of interest to share some more detail on what we saw in that data.
In the December 2012 YQ Survey, we found that consumers regularly encounter incorrect location data for businesses. It’s clearly a big problem, not only for consumers, but also for marketers.
Given that this is such a critical issue to getting your business found, we decided to see what kinds of issues were most common among Yext customers. After all, it’s hard to solve the problem until you know what the problem is.
We looked at 40,000 U.S. business listings, the majority of which are for multi-location businesses. Not surprisingly, the data shows that location data for these businesses has a large amount of inaccuracies and omissions:
Across 40,000 Yext customer listings, 43% had at least one incorrect or missing address on the 50+ local directory sites in Yext’s network. Approximately 37% had at least one incorrect or missing name on a listing.
When we looked at the numbers by business category; we noticed the following trends across Yext’s top customer categories: Insurance Agents and Real Estate Agents were the most likely types of businesses to have missing listings in Yext’s network.
This makes sense, given that there are a number of independent operators in these niches, and these agents often move around from company to company. Many of these agents may use their home as locations, which makes it less likely that these listings would show up in traditional business listing data sources.
Insurance Agents and Real Estate Agents also were the top categories with missing or incorrect business names on their local directory listings, along with Hospitality businesses. Each of these categories had over 50% of their locations with incorrect name data. For Real Estate and Insurance, this is also likely due to the difficulty of dealing with independent agents.
For Hospitality, this may be an issue where a corporation and its local representative use different names for the same business. For example, Hilton may call a hotel the Hilton Express at SFO, while the local hotel might use SFO Hilton Express. This discrepancy would show up as an error when comparing the two.
Many of the top categories had a relatively high degree of missing or incorrect address information for their business locations. Over 40% of listing addresses checked for the top five categories had this problem.
Finance/Banking showed the highest likelihood to have bad data for location phone numbers with 41% of listings showing a problem. This is likely due to these institutions using both toll-free and local numbers in their listings data. Inconsistent use of phone numbers can cause both SEO problems and consumer confusion.
While missing or incorrect phone numbers is probably the most egregious error when it comes to displaying business location information; in 2013, not providing a link to your website is almost as bad.
While local directories can do a pretty good job of providing key information about your business, allowing consumers to do a deeper dive by visiting your website can be a strong driver of conversions – assuming your website is set up to convert.
Your website can also be helpful in creating more of a connection with potential customers by providing them with more info on your services and making it easy to find your social media profiles where you share additional information. Again, the categories that are biased toward local independent operators were the most problematic with almost one-quarter of their listings missing website links. Surprisingly, Retail was also one of the top categories here, missing out on a critical component of connecting online and offline sales.
In some ways, this data is no surprise. Local business data on the Web has always been a mess, suffering from a combination of marrying conflicting information from multiple sources and lack of awareness by the businesses themselves. But with so many tools now available for businesses to control this information, it is surprising that the data consistency problem is still so common.
Disclosure: The author has a consulting relationship with Yext.
Opinions expressed in the article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land.
Related Topics: Local Search
When it comes to prospecting for awesome guest posts, don’t type in your head terms. That is going to give you a bunch of sites that get spammed on a daily basis because they rank for really generic seo guest post terms – In order to find great guest posts you need to get creative and specific with your advanced queries/Link Prospector Research Phrases. To find something a bit more up my alley and tailored to my interests, I went with these research phrases:
These research phrases are all pretty niche and specific. They are way more likely to find a site that I would actually be interested in contributing to.
Once the LP reports are done running, export the paths:
Step 1) Open the export in excel and save the file as .xlsx instead of .csv, .csvs don’t support tables or pivot tables.
Step 2) Copy all URLs from the LP export and in a new excel sheet, paste all URLs into column A.
Step 3) In the data tab in excel, select text to columns > delimited > and under other: put the forward slash.
Step 4) Adding the root domain column to your data
Now column A in excel is just your root domains, add a new column to the link prospector export data in excel and paste in the root domains.
Your data should look like this:
Step 5) Turn all this data into a table
you can now filter EVERY. SINGLE. COLUMN.
Step 6) Start Filterin’
Personally, I only want to guest post on sites that are .com, .net, .org. and .co.uk – and I also don’t want to guest post on anything below a PR 3.
Note: below the page rank 9 option in the filter, there is one below it called (blanks), these domains have n/a tool bar page rank, so make sure to deselect them so they don’t show up in your final data set.
Step 7) Prospect Evalutation
Now that you only have data that’s worth evaluating by hand, sort your root domains alphabetically and then sort your domain PR column from largest to smallest.
Now all the domains are grouped together and sorted by page rank.
Step 8) Delete Forums
Step 9) Delete domains that are irrelevant or out of reach.
Just do a quick visual scan and delete sites that aren’t a fit. TLC SEO isn’t super established yet, and I don’t think I have enough social proof/readership to swing a guest post on Search Engine Land, Search Engine Watch, Hubspot or Kiss Metrics, so I deleted them from the data set. These would be highly involved guest posts and I am going for strictly quick wins.Don’t spend to much time on this step, just delete what is obviously not a good fit – you will have time for more in depth evaluation later on.
Optional Protip: Hyper Qualify for Guest Posts
If you want to be efficient and only look at sites that are practically guaranteed to accept guest posts, filter the title tag column for the word “guest” or even more extreme would be “guest post”:
Note: the download at the end of this post does not include the hyper qualified guest post option.
Step 10) Copy all of the data in your data set into a new sheet
If you try and turn the current data into a pivot table, it will include the filtered data that is not currently showing – so you NEED to paste it into a new sheet.
Step 11) Turn this data into a pivot table
I know pivot tables freak some people out, but trust me, they aren’t so bad – and they are actually super handy!
Step 12) Set up your pivot table
Instead of doing this step by step, I am just going to show the final set up of in the pivot table field list, which should be easy enough to replicate on your own even with limited excel experience:
Note: Values automatically go in as sums, so you will need to go into the “Value Field Settings” menu for Page Rank )by right clicking on “Sum of Domain PR” and change it to Average.
This is what you should see:
Step 13) Sort by Page Rank
Now you have a fully set up Link Prospecting Pivot Table. When you go through the table, check out the title tags and meta descriptions. If they don’t seem like a fit, minimize the root domain and never look at that prospect again:
The goal of this isn’t to find every single guest post opportunity in your vertical, it’s to find quick wins and move on. When you find a good guest post opportunity, throw it into BuzzStream and let that software find the webmaster contact info for you, check out their last few posts via the Buzzstream RSS option and see if your content would be a strong fit.
This Link Prospecting Pivot Table is meant to be a living document that you can go back to again and again during an SEO campaign. When you need a guest post, just open it up and find the highest PR site (or AC Rank if you want to do a Majestic bulk look up and add it to the data set)
Download: Pivot tables can be confusing, so I’ve made the example Link Prospecting Pivot Table from this post available for download.
HOWEVER, by downloading this excel file, you solemnly swear that you wont spam any of these sites with crappy guest post outreach – some of these prospects are top tier sites in our industry, if you hit one of them up for a guest post – please make sure you have something worth their time.
BONUS!!Because Chris Dyson (of Triple SEO) is a generous and awesome bloke, he created a Link Prospecting Macro, that automates most of this process. Just make sure you have Marcos enabled in Excel, here’s how to use the Macro:
1. Import you data from link prospector into the rawdata sheet
2. Apply your advanced filters in the table on the filters sheet
3. Hit the Get Data buttonMake sure to thank and follow Chris for this awesome Macro!
Matt reached out to me last week with interesting data on the relative value of video snippets vs author photos in search results. This work compliments the research done on lawyer author photos and how consumers find a specialty lawyer last year. The research has implications for local as we have have seen pinned results in the wild that include them. Obviously the relative merits there have not yet been tested.
About the authors: This survey and corresponding write-up were
executed by SEO strategists Matt Green (@MChuckGreen) and John Van Bockern (@JohnEVanBockern) from Ethical SEO Consulting.**********
The Reeves Law Group has invested heavily in video creation for their website, and have seen a measurable rise in conversation rates as a result. Although the videos have a positive effect on users once they are on the site, the stakeholders at the firm were skeptical that the presence of video snippets in search results would in fact have a similarly positive impact on click though rates (so, actually getting the user onto the site). Accordingly, they commissioned our team to answer this question:What is the true impact of video snippets on click through rates in searches for specialty lawyers?
Answering this question would allow the firm to make an informed decision on whether or not to implement structured mark-up on their site (which causes the video snippets to be displayed along-side their listings in search results) rather than simply assuming the snippets would have a positive effect, possibly to the determent of CTR’s. Our assumption was that they would increase click through rates, in a similar way that authorship images have.
To that end, we conducted a survey with the intention of discerning the sway that video snippets hold over users searching for local specialty lawyers. The results from the test that we conducted through Usability Hub, which provided an effective survey interface, rendered a glimpse into the impact of these snippets in the highly competitive specialty lawyer market.
The Survey
We wanted to maintain the look and feel of a Google search result page as much as possible in the test, and then let the familiar process of searching guide the survey taker to make their own choice. This way, the design enabled us to keep as close as possible to the look of a search results page in order to most accurately represent click through rates. There were three separate images presented to a total of 300 respondents.
Any media snippet used was placed in the third search result, and only in the third search result, in order to discern the impact of a media rich snippet as compared to a standard, non-media search result.
First, a survey taker was given a brief introduction to the test:
Next, the question appeared that prompted the survey taker to click. (The question remained the same for each of the three separate search results images that we provided):
You need to find a car accident lawyer in New York. You Google search “New York Car Accident Lawyer”. Which result do you click first?
Then, the top four results of a Google search page appeared. The first set of 100 respondents saw results that included no media snippet and looked like this:
People who participated in this survey clicked on the image in the following way as indicated by the heat map below that recounts the concentrations of clicks:
As you can see, in this, our control test, the findings are as one would expect. The most likely result to be chosen: the first result. Proving again the efficacy of ranking at the top of search results.
The second set of 100 different respondents were given the same introduction to the click test, and also prompted by the same question, but the image they received contained an authorship snippet in the third search result:
The authorship snippet redistributed the clicks on this image as shown here in the heat map indicating the clicks on the image:
The breakdown of the data shows the positive value of having an authorship image in search results of a specialty lawyer search:
Before we made any actionable conclusions, we collected the data from the third set of 100 respondents who participated after being introduced and prompted in the same manner as the two previous tests, but were then shown this image:
The respondents clicked on this image in a manner telling of the efficacy of placing a video in the snippet:
The data collected from the participation of this survey prompts some questions. Why was there the highest number of clicks on the fourth result of all three tests on the page with the video snippet? Why is there not a similar increased amount of clicks on the third result as seen with the authorship snippet?
What does it all mean!?
The benefit of authorship in lawyer specific search results cannot be denied. Whether you attribute its effectiveness to the eye-catching ability of the media rich snippet, or that someone searching for legal representation in this specific instance wants to know a little more about the face of that representation is irrelevant. Either possible cause resulted in differing click through percentages.
Media-rich snippets in results generally do have a positive effect on click through rates, but there is more benefit to using an authorship snippet rather than a video snippet in the personal injury lawyer vertical.
The results of this survey indicate that the presence of video snippets is much less effective in driving clicks in specialty lawyer searches than the simple authorship snippet. Why is this the case? Here is our take:
Searchers are getting more sophisticated. The internet is full of distractions, useless information, and time wasters, and they are developing an intuition for filtering through the noise. Now more true than ever, people are not going to click on a video result if they don’t believe it will provide them with the information they want, how they want it.
Providing relevancy has never been so valuable. People demand information as quickly as possible, and there is just not much more you are going convey in a picture of a personal injury lawyer, than you would in a video. The accolades that such a lawyer can boast are much more efficiently conveyed textually. People can skim text for their personally relevant keywords in less time than it would take to watch (and pay attention to!) a whole video made by a personal injury lawyer. Typical personality based catchy-phrase television commercials are useful for personal injury lawyers on that medium, but not online. Relevant, on-site ease of use aides retention, and that prowess has indicators in search results. People searching know that now. Position yourself accordingly.
What to take away:
Authorship snippets have a greater positive impact on CTR’s for specialty lawyer searches than video snippets.
Video snippets have a greater positive impact on CTR’s for specialty lawyer searches than having no media snippet, but less of a positive impact than authorship snippets
View the raw data here.
Variables to consider:
The Usability Hub interface, although very useful for this experiment, presents some limiting factors as well. The people taking these surveys are using this interface to conduct their own surveys. That means they may be more web savvy than the typical user, and that characteristic should be noted.
The survey also relies on the image of a search result , and is not an actual search result. Although, it may be as close as viably possible for data collection, it is not actually a search by a potential client.
Please consider leaving a comment as your input will help me (& everyone else) better understand and learn about local.
A couple months ago I was so fortunate to be noticed by Matthew Hunt over at @smbusinesscoach and included in a MasterMind group of Local SEOs (thanks Matt) that chat daily about everything going on in Google Places.
One of my favorite individuals in this group is Nyagoslav at @optilocal. Young like me, but WAY ahead of the curve in his understanding of Google Places. He’s great because he doesn’t just know the fluffy white side of Google Places. Like me, he is also very tuned in to what is happening on the darker side, giving me the rare opportunity of having someone to bounce such things off of him, without risk of judgement. But I digress…
With Google finally stepping up with Google Places support, I thought FINALLY I can get rid of some of these duplicates. While we and Nyagoslav both took shots at how to kill duplicate listings in our respective blog posts, I found there were many I still couldn’t kill for various reasons. In any event, in walks Google Places support – I go through the steps, and find while they provide a lot of great information and how to’s, BUT my duplicates need Google’s firmer hand. Instead however, I find and have found with a variety of issues, Google sends me down these maze like passages, coming out empty handed more times than not.
FORTUNATELY, Nyagoslav provided the MasterMind group with My Favorite Link ever. I knew somewhere down one of Google Places support’s dark passages, there was a field where one could submit their duplicate to Google – much like the “Report a Problem” button on the place page, except they actually do something. Sorry Google, helping me 3+ months down the road doesn’t help. By then my client has walked. Sweet. So here it is, my favorite link of all time: http://support.google.com/places/bin/static.py?hl=en&ts=1386120&page=ts.cs
You will find that Google gives you a few options – the first and the third being those options that result in a solution. Thus far I have found that they turn around a PERSONAL response in about 24-48 hours, and take action by the end of this time if all details are made clear to them. One thing to note, while the dupe itself doesn’t leave the SERPs right away, it seems the consequence of said dupe is zapped and I’ve found quite quickly, one’s deserving rank is restored.
So far I have zapped about 10 dupes, with another 5-10 on the way.
Update: just noticed this link was posted in Darren Shaw’s recent post on Mike Blumenthal’s blog & Nyagoslav also posted it on SEP. Oh well
Related posts:
Squidoo isn’t just a Web 2.0 site; it’s an experience. With it’s own terminology, point system, and tremendous authority, it’s an Internet force to be reckoned with. Are you interested in taking advantage of the endless opportunities that Squidoo offers?
In this guide, we will teach how you to conceptualize your lens, name it, create it, and promote it. We will teach you how to earn points on Squidoo and how to improve the lensrank of your lenses. Most importantly, we will teach you how to create lenses that RANK well in Google, maximizing Squidoo’s Domain Authority to generate traffic and sales.
1. Keyword Selection is KEY When Optimizing Your Lenses
The keyword terms you target will make or break your lens. If you choose words that are too competitive, your lenses will be buried in Antarctica and won’t have a chance of competing against other, more authoritative domains.
Let’s start by using Google’s keyword tool to identify terms with high volume but low competition. This is where most people end their research, and if you do too, you will fail.
The key is to go beyond basic numbers and perform competitive research. For all of the keywords that you are considering, look at the sites ranking in the top 10. What is their domain and page authority? How many links from unique C classes? What is the domain age?
Also, if the keyword is transactional, it is possible that you will be competing against giants like Amazon, Walmart, Lowes, and Target. If the query is informational, you might have a greater chance for ranking with a Squidoo lens.
By performing detailed competitive research, going even further and analyzing link velocity trends and social share numbers, you will be able to select long-tail terms where you have a genuine chance of ranking.
When choosing keywords, think laterally. Go beyond what’s in front of you in Google’s keyword tool. Step into the shoes of the target audience and think of how those people would search. Then figure out relevant terms to target.
TrafficTravis and MarketSamurai are excellent tools to use for competitive and keyword research.
Now let me give you an example. Let’s say you are promoting a site in the educational niche. Perhaps it’s a university that offers online courses or a career college. Within the educational category, you could search out niches with keywords that have high monthly searches, low competition, and low CPC value.
In this case, I typed in the keyword “Waldorf” and got results that included Montessori, another popular educational approach.
Montessori training has 4,400 searches, but an average CPC of 0.40. When I evaluated the competition, I found many domains with low Domain Authority:
This would be a keyword worth trying to rank for in Squidoo.
If the lens ranks well and gets traffic, I would then build a section into my lenses talking about you early education molds children and prepares them for advanced education. I would then search for and share statistics about Montessori educated children’s performance in higher-level programs. This could create a nice tie in to my theme.
In this case, the objective of this lens would’ve been to create a high-profile, high-traffic pages that would link to your target site. As the traffic is untargeted, you wouldn’t expect high click throughs. It could, however, be a valuable link recognized by Google that helps your university site rank better in Google.
Tip: Go to Twitter.com and look for trending topics. Use those trending topics to come up with new keyword ideas to use with your Squidoo lenses. Use other discovery engines to identify trending topics. You can find more in this list.
2. How to Monetize Your Lenses
What you write, and how you structure it, will be affected by your objective for that lens. There are a few alternatives for monetizing Squidoo lenses:
Affiliate Sales
You can join affiliate programs on Clickbank or Shareasale and write content around products sold in these programs. Link your images and links to these products so you can use Squidoo as a way to generate traffic and leads to your affiliate products and accounts.
Link Value
Some lenses, such as the one in the example above, can be used to create a powerful inbound link to your site, which in turn helps your site’s SEO and rankings.
Amazon Sales
Using Squidoo’s modules, link to products on Amazon so you can earn commissions.
Selling Your Own Products
Use Squidoo to target long-tail terms and to write about your products or services. Depending on the sales funnel of your product/service, you can add a link to the product purchase page or use Squidoo as a step in your sales funnel leading them to a landing page on your site. This is great for etsy, shopify, or other stores.
Trending Topics
Keep an eye out for trends. Are people talking about a new social network? Do they have an affiliate program? Sign up, create a lens, promote it, and stay ahead of the curve!
Create “Best of” Lists
Identify popular products and topics where people have difficulty selecting one product. Then research long-tail terms related to those products. Create a “best of” list, giving people the best choices and helping them go through the investigation process. They will appreciate your research and buy through your links.
Squidoo Payouts
Squidoo pays based on the popularity of their lenses.
How to earn money on Squidoo? Squidoo has a variety of paths you can follow to earn money.
Money-Earning Module
These include eBay, Squidoo’s Amazon, and Cafepress. Here you have an opportunity to earn 50 percent of the commission since Squidoo is an affiliate of Amazon, eBay, and Cafepress.
Squidoo’s Tier Payouts
Squidoo’s payouts are a bit complicated and are limited to lenses in the top tiers. Lenses are paid based on their average performance for the month. The best performing 2,000 lenses receive a payout of up to $80, the next 8,000 lenses earn around $10, and the next 75,000 lenses earn about 50 cents. Payouts are calculated based on ad revenue, so they do fluctuate from month to month.
You can choose to donate your earnings to charity, or you can use Squidoo to earn extra cash for yourself. Payments occur two months after the pay period closes. To be eligible for payout for a given month, the lens must be published for that entire month.
3. Create the Best Possible Lens
Use MindMapping to Develop a Lens Creation Strategy
Create a Squidoo strategy BEFORE you start creating lenses. Go back to your keywords and see how many lenses you can write while staying unique. Then consider creating a strategy where one lens picks up where the other left off.
Use mind-mapping to create a lens creation strategy, so you can maximize the benefits of each and interlink them together without being spammy.
For example, if I were to use squidoo to promote Gryffin Media’s guest blogging services, I would start by creating keyword “buckets,” and then adding terms under each bucket, as seen in the example above.
This would grow exponentially as you dig deeper and discover new keywords to focus on.
Elements for an AMAZING lens
Add your Keyword Phrase to:
- Lens Title
- Lens URL
- Module Titles: These are H2 tags.
- Primary tag
- Text Boxes (at least 3-4 times)
- Link Lists
- Videos
As you are adding in keywords, remember to use synonyms in order to appear more natural.
- Your intro should be at least 200 characters and include your keywords.
- A great image is worth a million words! Use beautiful, interesting images. Strong images can also be shared on Pinterest and generate social engagement, so spend the extra time to create or find the right images—it’ll be worth it!
- Hyperlink your images, especially if you are promoting an affiliate product. This will improve your clickout.
- Use square images, at least 250 x 250 pixels.
- Make sure the images you choose have the permission to be used commercially. Also, credit them properly.
- Use Squidoo tags. Tags help Squidoo categorize your content. Additionally, your tags can help Squidoo select other relevant lenses to be displayed on the sidebar of your lenses. Picking the right tags also helps your lenses appear on other people’s lenses, giving you greater exposure.
- If your lens is on a new topic, create a new tag for that lens. If you write other lenses, use that tag to support it.
- Place your most relevant tag first as this is considered your “Primary Tag” by Squidoo and will be used to categorize your lens in Squidoo’s search.
- Make sure you add at least 10 tags, and if you can, you may consider adding the maximum amount of 40 tags.
- Use long-tail terms and questions as tags.
- Use Google suggest to find new terms for your tags
Tip: Use the the Squidoo Workshop Add-on from SquidUtils.com to improve how your tags are displayed. It will also help you select and speed up the process of adding new tags.
- Choose the right category. Pick the most relevant category with the fewest sites to compete. If you can get your lens into the top 100 of a category, sub category, or sub sub category, you will gain a valuable link and extra exposure. Here’s a list of Squidoo’s Categories.
- Add a table of content. This helps people navigate your lens and enhances the appearance and readability.
- Add lists to your Lenses. Based on your topic, find a “How To” concept that you can discuss. Then create a list within the lens linking to tutorials on this topic. Here’s an example: http://www.squidoo.com/origamicat.
- Use tables to organize information. It’s important to make the information easy to read. Here’s an example: http://www.squidoo.com/blackhawks.
Writing Your Lenses
- Don’t Copy Content! It’s very important for all of your lenses to be uniquely written.
- Focus on benefits for your visitors. Don’t babble on about features, just figure out the problems your visitors have and how the information found in your lens can help them solve that problem.
- Don’t write boring copy! If you are creating a lens about a boring subject, find a way to make it fun and interesting. Add funny cat images, a video, anything to make your lens more interesting. There’s simply too much content out there for people to read, and they won’t stick around if the content you are presenting is simply dull and uninspiring.
- Be brief. Social media has shortened people’s attention span even further, so keep it short and sweet!
- Be trustworthy! Be truthful in your lenses and don’t be overly “salesy.” People will recognize your honesty. Gaining their trust will increase the potential for engagement.
- Proofread, and then get someone ELSE to proofread your lenses. It’s easy to miss grammar errors. Do your best to write with impeccable grammar, this will help you to appear professional and knowledgeable on the subject matter you are writing about.
Enhancing Your Lenses
- Add at least five modules for each lens. Modules are great for engagement and will help increase the prominence of each lens. The following are powerful modules to add:
- Polls
- Comments
- Quizzes
- Add an RSS feed widget. If you own a blog that publishes relevant content, connect it to your blog. Otherwise, you can create RSS feeds out of scoop.it curated lists or paper.li curated lists in order to pull in relevant news and content.
- Featured Lens Widget. Link widgets together using the Featured Lens Widget. If you have published other relevant lenses, this is a way to improve the links to each of your lenses, plus to generate more traffic.
- Update your lenses frequently. Updating your lenses gives a “fresh” signal to Squidoo and Google. Even if you do minor tweaks, log in and update regularly. Consider republishing your lenses every few weeks. This will help to keep them fresh.
- Cross-link your lenses and content assets. If you write an article on your blog and have a relevant Squidoo lens, link to it! If you are submitting a guest post, include a link to your relevant lens. Build on other Web 2.0 platforms like Hubpages and cross-promote.
- Use Amazon Spotlight. If you are trying to monetize your lenses, use the Amazon spotlight module, not the regular Amazon module. The spotlight module is favorable for search engines because it is crawled by their bots.
- Use Event Tracking on your links. Once you’ve connected Squidoo with Google Analytics, use event tracking so you can gain an idea of user engagement on your lenses. Here are events you can track:
- Clickouts: clicks on links to other websites
- Lenses: clicks to other lenses
- Widgets
- Social Icons
- Guestbook: comments and guest book loads
- Connect your lenses with Google Analytics for improved data and tracking. Learn how to do this in this lens.
- Connect your Lenses with your Google Plus account. Setting up Google Authorship will give your lens a boost in Google. Additionally, having a picture connected with your URL will improve the clickthrough rate from Google. You will gain additional traffic as more people click on your link.
- Participate in the community. Not only will you earn points, you will also make connections with new people and create reasons for others to engage with your lenses.
- Search through SquidUtils.com and Squidtools.com to find tools to improve your lenses. My favorites SquidUtils.com tools are:
- Lens Health-Check: This tool will analyze your lenses and give you suggestions to improve them.
- Table Generator: Organize your data and display it in Squidoo so it looks more appealing.
4. Anatomy of an Excellent Lens
Study well-ranking lenses with high engagement to gain ideas of how to create your own lenses. Below are examples of fantastic lenses with high rankings and engagement:
For a collection of excellent commercial lenses, visit the following Lensmasters:
Here’s a VERY rough outline of how an informational lens could be formatted.
5. Promote Your Lens
Build Links to Your Lenses
Now that you have created some lenses, you have to build links to each of your lenses. These links will help your lens gain popularity in Google. Ranking well in Google will help your lens gain traffic, engagement and social votes, which will in turn increase the lensrank. Win-win!
When building links to your lenses you have to follow Google’s guidelines and avoid building low-quality links as these can result in penalties. Here are some key elements to consider:
- Don’t use anchor-text over optimization. When linking to your lens, use the following:
- Keyword
- Synonyms of your keyword
- Long Tail variation of your keywords
- Brand Name
- “Empty” terms like “click here”
- Don’t buy links. Google’s Penguin algorithm is focused on identifying and penalizing sites for buying links.
- Don’t include links in Duplicate Content. Make sure all of your links are within content that is 100 percent unique. Submitting one article to 100 article marketing sites, with a link to your lens, will not help your lens rank better.
- Automated Software. You can find any number of sites selling you 5,000 wiki links and 1,000 edu links. RUN THE OTHER WAY! Those links are created by using automated software that leaves a very detectable footprint. Avoid all those links and focus on building manual links based on content.
Now I’ve told you what NOT to do. Below, I will share some safe methods to build links to your lenses.
Places to Submit Your Lens
Vary the Ratios
Try to create a natural looking backlink profile to your lenses. Think of the way content spreads naturally on the Web as you are building links. What would happen if you weren’t actively building but people found your lens and naturally linked to it? How would they link to it?
You would find a variety of follow/nofollow links. You would find links in the body of a page and as a blogroll. People would mention you on their social media profiles.
Think and build natural!
Social Media
Promote your lenses on all of your social media profiles. Social votes is a great way to gain popularity and traffic. Share every at least on the major social media sites:
- LinkedIn (if it’s business oriented)
- Google Plus
Guest Blogging
Identify websites in your niche and submit guest blogging requests. If accepted, include a link to your Squidoo lens preferably in the body of the post. If this isn’t allowed, then include the link in your Author Bio.
Multimedia Sites
Repurpose your content! If you create a fabulous lens, make it into a video. Then take the basic points and create a PowerPoint Presentation. Upload your videos and presentations on the sites below:
- Youtube
- Vimeo
- Scribd
- SlideShare
Squidoo Directories
Forums
Add your squidoo lens in your signature, find relevant forums, and join into the conversation! The more you post, the more links you generate.
Don’t focus all of your energy on just one forum. Google includes “Links from Unique C class domains” as part of their algorithm. If all of your links are generated from one site, Google will only give value to that link once.
So join various communities and participate. Since you will be building many lenses, you can keep going back and posting in the same communities, but using a different signature each time.
Here’s a great lens about Using Forum Promotion to build Backlinks and Sales.
Blog Commenting
Find sites that are discussing topics relevant to your lens. Then jump into the conversation! Include your lens URL as your website when you leave the comment. Please don’t spam blogs with inane “Great post” type comments. Add value to the thread by posting something insightful and relevant. Most importantly, don’t abuse this strategy.
Article Marketing Sites
Social Bookmarking
General Directory
Tip: Identify a category on Dmoz that doesn’t have many entries. Then create a lens specifically targeted to that category. That valuable DMOZ listing can be a great link to build from.
Here’s an example of a link building strategy for your Lenses.
Create links to each of your lenses from the following:
- Write unique articles and submit to three article marketing sites
- If you have active accounts on WordPress, Blogger, and Tumblr, write unique articles on each and link to your lenses
- Four Guest Posts (long tail as anchors)
- Social Bookmarking to all URL’s
- Ping all URL’s (you can use the SquidUtils.com tool for pinging).
These, plus other links from the section above, will give you a strong link building strategy to build high Page Authority to each of your lenses. Squidoo already has a high Domain Authority, so if your Page Authority is strong, your lenses will stand a great chance of ranking.
6. Improving Your LensRank
Your lensrank determines whether you receive a payout from Squidoo and how your lens performs on the Squidoo site and community.
Lensrank compares the performance of each lens against that of all other lenses. Calculating the lensrank takes into consideration factors such as traffic, sales, freshness, Squidlikes, and Blessings.
To improve your lensrank, you need to gain traffic. You can gain traffic from ranking well in Google, or you can run advertising campaigns to draw in traffic, and engagement, to your lenses.
Once you build traffic, your goal is to encourage engagement. Make it easy for users to participate! Add multiple polls and comment modules to each lens. For example, break your lenses up into sub topics. After each topic, add a poll and a comments section. Quizzes are another fantastic way of increasing your lensrank.
Write compelling content that encourages people to click on your links. Clickouts are a huge factor for improving lensrank. Don’t just link to your own sites. Find helpful relevant resources, fun stuff, and great images and videos to include.
Focus on interesting, easy to read content that generates engagement in the form of clicks, participating in polls, quizzes, and comments, and with the adequate number of visitors, watch your lensrank increase!
7. Going Up the SquidLevels
Using a gaming approach, Squidoo has an experience points system.
The goal is to build community and get people involved in finding quality content and lensmasters. As a lensmaster, you earn points by participating in actions such liking other lenses, taking polls, leaving comments, and more.
Every time you level up, you will gain access to new modules and goodies. Each item you unlock is an opportunity for the growth of your lenses and lensmaster account. You don’t just earn levels, you can also earn trophies, quests, and labels such as Squid Angel.
Here’s a list of ways to earn points:
Participation
- Squidlike Lenses
- Comment on other lenses
- Social Vote for lenses you like (Retweet, Like on Facebook, Pin it on Pinterest)
- Take polls and quizzes
- Participate in the Squidoo forum
Publishing
- Publish lots of lenses!
- Add an intro photo to your lenses
- Using popular modules
- Completing quests
As you earn points you also earn trophies, which in turn gives you bonus points. The amount of points you earn by activity is not consistent and has a very large range. For example, you may earn 100 points after commenting on other lenses one day, and 10 points the next. Squidoo uses algorithmic variety to prevent coordinated attempts at gaming the system.
There are many more that will be revealed once you are familiar with the system. If you make informative lenses, encourage interaction, and interact with others, you will have a winning formula to level up!
Tip: Take lots of quizzes! These will help you earn tons of points, and there are lenses dedicated to sharing quizzes.
What do you gain as you level up?
As you level up you gain tools to improve your presence in the Squidoo platform. New lens themes, quests, and sidebar widgets are just examples of what you gain as you increase. With these tools you can enhance your lenses and increase their potential for popularity and exposure. The highest level attainable is level 82.
Set 82 as your target goal, and stop reading and go like and comment on some lenses (just kidding, don’t stop reading just yet)!
1. Don’t Use Copyrighted Images
Only use images you have permission to place on your lens and credit them with a link back to your source. You don’t want to have your lens locked for Copyright Infringement. Plus, this will increase the likelihood of receiving awards like the Lens Of The Day and being Blessed by Squid Angels.
There are many free images available online with a Creative Commons license which can be used. Check sites like Flickr.com and Pixabay.com and make sure they have a commercial use license.
2. Justify Your Text
Using a simple html code <p style=”text-align: justify;”>TEXT HERE </p> will make the text on your lens easier to read and appear much more professional.
3. Be Personal
Explain to your readers why they should buy the products on your lens from your point of view. Why is it truly the “best”? What are the advantages to using this versus the competition? How do you use the product? What are some things you would change? An honest, unbiased article is necessary when you are looking to gain your readers trust.
4. Follow the “Three U’s”
Provide Useful, Updated, and Unique content. Seth Godin, a co-founder of Squidoo, wrote in his Ebook:
“None of these tactics work without the three U’s that are covered in this book”—and this is true with the tips listed here. If you are not writing content that is original and beneficial to the reader and up-to-date, you won’t see very good results.
5. Abide by Squidoo’s TOS
This is, in my opinion, the most important tip of all. Read through the Terms of service and make sure you are following it to a tee. Failure to follow them could result in your whole account being locked and all of your hard work will be for nothing. Some key items are:
- Don’t buy Squidlikes, comments, or traffic.
- Don’t promote spammy products.
- No copying or spinning articles from other sites to use on your lens.
They are a free platform so, while they aren’t too strict, they do have some rules to protect the integrity of their site. Squidoo wants to remain in the good graces of the search engines and rules are how they achieve this goal. These rules protect the lensmasters and the site which is good for everyone.
Now jump in and start leveling up!
If you follow the seven simple steps detailed above, you will have a successful strategy to take advantage of the phenomenal opportunity that Squidoo offers.
With a little bit of time and dedication, you can use Squidoo to pick up on highly targeted traffic at the bottom of the sales funnel, ready to convert. If you choose the right keywords and promote the lenses properly, you can have lenses ranking in Google within weeks or days. What a great way to quickly create revenue sources for yourself while waiting for your primary site to break into the top of Google!
Now go forth and multiply!
Search Engine Optimisation is not the same game it was two years ago and evolves at rapid pace. Without the knowledge, skills and drive to keep informed and up-to-date, SEO’s can quickly become behind with the times.
Arguably one of the biggest changes we’ve seen in SEO is the way we build links. In fact, the very idea of “building links” is becoming out of date as Google crashes down on unnatural link profiles. Think about it; if you’ve built a link, it is unlikely to be a “natural” backlink. However, there are ways we can actively improve link profiles with quality backlinks and still fall within Google guidelines by using creative link building techniques.
In this post I will discuss creative ways to build high quality, natural backlinks as part of a sustainable link building strategy.
Monitor Brand Mentions
With Google Trends and other similar tools, you can easily monitor each time you brand name is mentioned across the web. You can also set up email or browser notifications to find out whenever your chosen keyword (in this instance, your brand) is mentioned and when you find a new mention, go and check it out.
If the site is discussing your brand and has a good PageRank, check whether they link to you somewhere on the page. More often than not you will find that they already are which is great and you can try and build a strong relationship with them in the future for further links. You can also review the anchor text and see if it could be improved. If they’re not linking to you, contact the site owners and politely request that they make your brand name an anchor to your site or suggest they link to a piece of your content that further builds on their article.
Internal Broken Link Building
Fixing broken links on your site is an essential part of site maintenance but can also be a great technique for regaining lost backlinks.
Start by analysing your backlink profile using a link analysis tool such as Majestic SEO, Screaming Frog or Open Site Explorer. Using tools like these and with a bit of manual exporting, filtering and analysis you can find links to broken pages on your site. You’re looking for pages with a 404 or similar error. Be sure to check any broken links manually though: no tool is 100% accurate 100% of the time.
When you have a definitive list of backlinks which point to old broken pages, you have a number of options to resolve. You may just need to fix the broken page if it isn’t meant to be broken, or 301 the broken page to a relevant live page, however ensure that the link will still be relevant if doing so. Alternatively if the links come from other website, you can contact the sites linking back to you and request that they change their link to the relevant live page. Whichever way you resolve the issue, you will end up with an old link revitalised and current once more.
This technique can take time and doesn’t usually provide a wealth of new link juice, but is a great way of keeping your link profile current and clean, as well as identifying issues with your pages that you may not have otherwise been aware of.
External Broken Link Building
This variation on “broken link building” involves looking for broken links to your competitors’ sites or other sites in your industry. In the same way as internal broken link building, you can look for these opportunities by running your chosen relevant sites through link analysis tools and looking for broken links. You can also use the Broken Link Checker plugin for Chrome and carry out some basic checks on-page.
Once you have identified a potential opportunity, contact the site owner to let them know they have a broken link. Sites generally want to know if they have broken links as it is in their interest to resolve them, which means you can get their attention and are offering them something beneficial to them. This is also a good chance to suggest a page on your website that might be relevant to their website and worth a link.
You won’t always get a link through this technique, sometimes the site owners will just fix the link and be done with you, but if you can get a link out of it you will likely also build a relationship with the site owner, meaning more potential opportunities in the future.
Get Interviewed
One great way to get a natural backlink is to find someone to interview you or provide a quote for a blog post or news article on a relevant industry site. This might sound difficult to achieve, but in reality you are an expert in what you do (or should be) and your opinion is valuable to the right person.
To begin this process, look for high quality sites which discuss topics relevant to your business. See what sort of content they have written before, looking at style, quality and target audience.
When you identify a potential interview opportunity, send the site a polite email or message and pitch the idea. If you get a positive response, find out what sort of questions they want to ask and you can begin compiling some responses.
When you provide your answers or quote for the interviewer, make sure you remain neutral and unbiased. Avoid talking about your company or brand (unless it’s directly relevant to the post) and concentrate on providing genuinely interesting or useful insight. No-one wants to read your opinion on how wonderful your company is, but they may be interested in what you have to say on a relevant topic.
Run Competitions
Competitions are a proven technique for increasing social engagement and followers, but they can also be good for generating quality links. With the right promotion and a great incentive to enter, competitions are often linked from other sites across the web. Gaz Copeland (@stokedseo) put together a great post on the topic here.
Refresh Old Content
Sometimes, great content on the web that is still read and ranks well is actually several years old and may even be mildly out of date in terms of content. Equally, sometimes great content becomes so out of date that it is no longer read or listed in rankings and no-one rewrites it.
If you can find content like this that is relevant to your industry it provides you with a fantastic opportunity to recreate the content, pitch your idea to the original site and supply them with a link to your site.
The best way to find this sort of content is to search Google for terms related to your business and add words like “definitive guide”, “complete guide” or “whitepaper”. Browse through the results and look for old or out-of-date content. Then think about how you could improve it.
When you’ve got a target site and idea, contact the site owner with your proposition. If the original page has a lot of backlinks and/or good search engine ranking, you could really win big with a high-quality link.
Embeddable Resources = Link Bait
Spending the time and/or money into creating a quality, shareable resource can be a worthwhile investment. However, by adding embed code at the bottom you can transform a quality resource from interesting and potentially shareable to solid gold* link bait.
The perfect example of a site doing this well is YouTube. With embed codes on every single video and people all over the world embedding videos on their own sites daily, their link profile will never stop growing.
There are many different types of resource which can be embedded, including:
- Infographics
- Videos
- Photos
- Widgets
Remember to include a call-to-action with your embed code as well as social share buttons to encourage engagement. For more information, see this great guide to creating viral linkbait and infographics from Distilled.
* Please note: adding embed code does not generate solid gold. You need some kind of mine for that I hear.
Guest Blogging
This technique in particular is nothing new, but the benefits of guest blogging are often significantly underestimated. In addition, there is a hidden benefit to guest blogging; relationships. The process of placing guest blog posts naturally allows you to build personal relationships with site owners and if your first blog post is successful there will likely be opportunity for you to do so again in the future.
The process of guest blogging is really quite a simple one, only it takes a little time and manual effort to be successful. However the rewards are well worth it, as a well-placed blog post not only gives your site a quality backlink but also potential referral traffic and brand awareness. With a bit of reach, strong outreach and quality content, a guest blog post can pour in traffic.
George Musson (@GeoMusson) wrote a guest blog for Koozai last year on how to find blogs for guest blog posting which is a great place to start if you need some tips and tricks for guest blogging.
Your Ideas
Got any more creative or innovative link building techniques that work in a post-penguin world? Share them in the comments below! Later this year I intend to write another post on new sustainable link building techniques and would happily cite you and your comments below if you have useful and unique ideas.
Link Building Image from Bigstock
Interview Image from Bigstock
Posted 05 March 2013 11:21am by Graham Charlton with 19 comments
Google Analytics's standard reports can be limited, so a little customisation is necessary to improve the quality of insight you can gain.
If like me, you're a relative amateur with Google Analytics, ready-made custom reports can save you a lot of time.
There are various reports here, some useful for publishers, some for ecommerce sites, and some for SEO analysis.
Just log in to your Google Analytics account and click the links to add these to your custom reports list...
Track the effect of (not provided)
Google's decision to encrypt search referral data means that many sites now have a lot less to work with when tracking SEO keywords, and Econsultancy is no different.
In fact, as with other IT and tech related sites, we have been hit harder than others, to the extent that more than 40% of our organic search referrals are (not provided).
The rise of (not provided) on Econsultancy.
With this encryption spreading to Firefox and iOS6, this trend is set to continue.
Thanks to Avinash Kaushik's custom report, you can moan about the impact to other marketers, backed up by accurate data.
Time of day report
This one comes from Dan Barker, who answered my Twitter question about tracking posts by publish time with a fully formed custom report, thus saving me loads of time.
Using this you can see which days of the week are most popular, and use the data to experiment with your publishing schedule:
Time of day report for ecommerce
This one also comes from Dan Barker, and does much the same as the previous custom report, but is aimed at ecommerce sites.
It shows transaction metrics on top of the traffic stats by time of day and day of week.
Better AdWords
This report was suggested by Brian Clifton in the Google+ discussion on this post. I've added this to replace the Google Images traffic report, which doesn't work.
This combines Adwords acquisition data with revenue data under one roof, and saves you going back and forth between different reports.
Keyword analysis
This report looks at your most popular keywords (minus the ones that Google isn't telling you about) and shows visitor metrics, conversion rates, goal completions and page load time.
Other tabs also show engagement and revenue metrics.
Non-branded keywords
This report strips out the branded keywords and shows visits, goal completions and revenue.
You'll need to go in and edit the report to exclude your own branded keywords. In this case, I've excluded 'econsultancy' but I should also remove the various spellings and hyphenated versions:
Browser report
This report shows how different browsers are working for your site in terms of visits, revenue, bounce rates and purchases.
It's also a good way of picking up potential problems. If bounce rates are especially high for one kind of browser there may be an issue with the way your site looks in Internet Explorer, Safari etc.
Should I go mobile?
This one is from Lens 10, and aims to answer the question above.
You can judge from metrics such as pages per visit and goal completion rate and decide whether a mobile site is ready. The answer is very probably yes for most sites.
Referring sites report
Thanks to Anna Lewis from Koozai for this one, which shows referring sites alongside goal completions and conversion rates.
Link analysis report
This one, from SEObook, helps you to see which of your inbound links are sending the most valuable traffic, showing visits, goal completions and more.
Do you have any other useful custom reports to share? Please let us know below...
SES Singapore – Link Building Tools and Tactics
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Link building started for me when I was working on my own sites, having absolutely no understanding that what I was doing had any real bearing on rankings and search traffic. All I wanted to achieve was editorial reviews (online and off) and gain as many mentions as I could possible get. Looking back at these projects many years later it’s nice to see that I managed to get some amazing links from some very strong sites – all by not being caught up with too many rules and focusing 100% on getting my site and ‘brand’ in-front of as many people as possible.
For this presentation I wanted to explore how starting off looking at the business and forgetting about links might influence what you end up doing when it eventually comes round to producing new content. How should being clued into things such as branding, messaging, style and so on help us attract better links for our sites? I’ve published the slide deck below which includes some of the tools and techniques I’m currently using to help bring the ‘business’ back into link building. Hope you enjoy!
I’d also like to say a huge thank you to Bernice and everyone at SES for having me. Singapore is truly an amazing city and it was a real pleasure spending a week there at such a great conference making some brilliant new friends. It would be wrong not to pop in a few pictures to show what a cool and exciting place Singapore is. See you soon!
The coolest bar in the world?
The best overpriced beer of my life…
SES Singapore – Link Building Tools and Tactics, 4.0 out of 5 based on 1 rating
In the past, link building was less about bringing people straight to your site and more about making sure Google rank your site as high as possible.
These days, many link building methods focus on tactics that bring people straight to your site as well as helping Google understand that you should rank well for related terms. So, following on from Julie Joyce’s post on 3 Ways to Measure Link Building ROI, I’d like expand on ways that you can use Google Analytics to measure link building.
This post will assume that the link building you're doing is the type that has the potential to generate traffic directly from the links, rather than only through improving rankings. I’m not going to go in to detail about any of these techniques; there are plenty of great resources on this blog and others to help you with that.
Google Analytics is all about traffic – where it came from, what it led to on site and how much value this generated. The main focus for analyzing link building will be referral traffic data. You build a link, people use it to get to your site, you measure the value of this. But there is a lot more to it than just looking at this basic data.
This post will cover how to use Advanced Segments to your advantage, Multi-Channel Funnels for improved attribution figures, campaign tagging for easier analysis, a free custom report and how to easily use the API for exporting and combining data.
Basic Analysis
Firstly, let’s head to the Referrals data in Google Analytics.
Here we can see how many visits external websites brought to the site. Alongside this is interaction data such as pages per visit and time on site to help you understand the type of users coming from the site. By clicking the goal and ecommerce buttons above the graph you can also see how well these sites have performed with regards to conversions.
I’ve created a Custom Report to help you analyze these metrics, just sign in to Google Analytics, click this link, and choose which profile to apply the report to and enjoy the data:
All of this information can help you reach a decision as to whether the effort you went to for each link was worth it. However, you are like to wonder how much of the referral traffic can be attributed to link building, links gained naturally and social media.
You will need to decide at this stage whether you count traffic from naturally gained links and from social media as link building or whether you separate these out. You could argue the case either way, so it may be best to break it down based on whether you have separate marketing budgets for social, link building off site and creating link worthy content on site.
If there are three different budgets you will want to break them down, if it’s all under the same roof then you can analyze everything together. To break the three sections down we will use Advanced Segments.
Advanced Segments
Advanced segments enable data to be shown based on a set of instructions, be it, ‘traffic from Twitter’, ‘visits with more than 1 conversion’ or ‘visits from users in London’.
We have the following three sections to break down:
- Social media
- Natural links
- Link building
Of these, natural links is the hardest to identify and know which referring sites belong in this category. However, logic dictates that if we set up a filter to include all known social media sites, and another to include all known link building sites, we can then exclude these from the third advanced segment to leave only the natural links.
Link Building Advanced Segment
To create a segment that will only show traffic from the sites that you have targeted through link building follow these steps:
- Click Advanced Segments
- + New Custom Segment
- Name it
- Select Include
- Choose Source in the green box
- Change Containing to Matching RegExp
- Fill box with all link building domains, putting a pipe between each and a backslash infront of any dot or hyphen, like so:
Searchenginewatch\.com|bbc\.co\.uk|other\-link\-building\-website\.com
The pipe means ‘or’ and the backslash means leave this as a standard character rather than matching a regular expression character.
Once this is set up and applied to the relevant Google Analytics profile, you will have filtered all data shown throughout all reports to only show data that included visits from your link building sites.
Social Media Advanced Segment
To create a social media only segment follow the steps above, but instead of filling it with link building sites we need to be using social media sites here. Like so:
facebook\.com|twitter\.com|linkedin|del\.icio\.us|delicious\.com|technorati|digg\.com|hootsuite|stumbleupon|
netvibes|bloglines|faves\.com|aim\.com|friendfeed|blinklist|fark|furl|msplinks|myspace|bit\.ly|tr\.im|cli\.gs|
zi\.ma|poprl|tinyurl|ow\.ly|reddit|plus\.url\.google\.com|^t\.co|m\.facebook\.com|tweetdeck|youtube|
ycombinator|flickr|popurls|myspace|pinterest\.comOr, as I’ve already built it, you can apply this segment to your chosen profile just by clicking this link.
You may want to edit the sites in this profile, just remember to cancel out any characters with a backslash and you may need to start very short URLs with a carat (^) to prevent them matching other sites that end with the same text (see t.co for details!).
Natural Link Advanced Segment
So now that we have those two set up we can copy out the text used in each and then use these as excludes in another new segment, as shown in this image:
These three segments can all be applied together to help you compare the different results or individually to help you focus in on the performance of each method. Try applying them to different reports throughout Google Analytics for different insights.
For example, the Ecommerce report will show you the money you are generating from each segment, the location and language reports might show that you’re attracting a more diverse demographic than you expected.
If this method appeals to you and you want to take it further, later on you'll discover how to create custom channel groupings in Multi Channel Funnel reports.
Campaign Tagging
If you don’t have referral data that is easy to break down you may want to consider using custom tagging on links that you build; adding information to help you identify them in Google Analytics. This would be done through the use of the URL Builder Tool which allows you to choose the campaign name, source, medium and other information for your URLs before you use them in link building or other campaigns.
The URL builder is a way to put together the campaign tracking data in the format that Google can use it. You would take the URL:
http://www.mysite.com/awesome-infographic
and make it relevant to the site you are promoting it on:
http://www.mysite.com/awesome-infographic?utm_source=www.link-building-site.com&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=link-building
You might be familiar with this method from tracking other campaigns, but why shouldn’t it also be applied to link building? Obviously there is a limit to how much you can add tracking to and I’ve not investigated whether it has an impact on the quality of the link, but if it can help you evaluate the investment in resources and budget then it’s got a high chance of being useful!
Multi Channel Funnels
* Images in this section have been edited to protect actual data
In order to understand the bigger picture of your link building it can be beneficial to know how links have assisted conversions that they have not been attributed to it. Google Analytics uses first click attribution; this means that if a user has come to your site having searched for your product organically, then is encouraged to come back and make a purchase following a link you have built, the conversion is shown as organic.
So does your link building assist conversions at all?
The best way to find out is to take your link building advanced segment from before and use the regular expression to create custom channel groupings, like so:
- Navigate to Top Conversion Report
- Above the data click Other
- Select Copy Basic Channel Grouping, rename
- Edit ‘Referral’ to be link building sites
- Add a new rule for your natural links (excluding the same data as above)
To reverse this and show the natural links you need to exclude the link building sources and ensure that remaining referral data is caught:
It may also be good to keep the social analysis consistent by editing the default social segment to include the sites you identified for your advanced segment.
So after a few short tweaks you will now have a report looking something like this:
Now, I like the path analysis for showing you the journey that users take, but if your site has many different journeys (as is common) the Assisted Conversions report will be better for you. The custom channel grouping that you just created can be applied to this report and will show you results like so:
This separated out the data for both assisted and last interaction conversions, both of which would never be understood if you relied only on the standard reports in Google Analytics.
API Export Fun
When working on a link building campaign, you will want to know both the traffic generated and how strong the promoted page of your site becomes. To do this you can export your traffic data from Google Analytics and combine it alongside link and social metrics.
If you haven't used the Google analytics API before, start by using SEO Tools for Excel, which makes it simple to export from Google Analytics as well as Majestic SEO and other tools.
Using this tool has created the following report to help analyze the full picture surrounding content marketing within a link building project:
This kind of analysis helps you bring everything together and understand not just the value of the traffic but the benefit that your link building has had in strengthening the link profile and social visibility of your pages.
Concluding Thoughts
As with many aspects of SEO, there is no single method that answers everything. There are different routes that you can take to analyze the value of link building and each project will require its own approach.
The ideas above are here to help you dig a bit deeper next time someone asks you what value the link building has brought, on top of the methods that Julie identified.
Title image source: jkfid/Flickr
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A bit of warning. This is not for you if you have been awesome doing all that is good and great in SEO for your clients. This post is meant for all those who have been experiencing (even until now!) the wrath of Google’s Panda/Penguin algorithm. This article is written for those who are still clueless not seeing the “light” yet, in spite of all their efforts to resuscitate their websites.
One of the hardest challenges in being an SEO is to be approached by a client whose website is penalized by either algorithmic (Panda/Penguin) or manual reasons. But I tell you, it is a rewarding job being a practitioner of the craft especially when you’re able to bring a business back on track. Your client will thank you for saving his/her company.
Here is a TRUE story.
Below is the revenue of the client during penalty and after it was lifted. From $14,750/mo to $60,000/mo and it’s still growing to this date.
The story began when…
1. We Signed-up with a Penalized Client
We’ve already suspected from our initial audit that the client we were about to sign-up was penalized by Panda and Penguin due to its gradual decrease in traffic among other things. But still, we took the client even though it seemed to be doomed, thinking that we may still have time to revive it. However, two days after the contract signing, the dreaded Google Webmaster Tools message came. See below.
We have not lifted our fingers yet, so to speak, and we were already in a perfect storm situation. We now have a manual penalty and the algorithmic Panda & Penguin at work. A triple whammy!
See the sudden drop in traffic?!
2. Laser-like Backlinks Audit
So, we grabbed all the backlinks we can get from the client’s website using Google Webmaster Tools, Majestic SEO and Open Site Explorer. Paying attention to those anchor texts that were unusually high in backlinks causing over-optimization, we used John Doherty’s method in assessing Penguin Penalty.
We’ve asked all past SEO reports from the client in order to speed up audit of its SEO activities. The good thing was that he kept a bunch of reports from his past agency but they were all link sellers. Using Link Detox by LinkResearchTools helped us too in uncovering more potentially toxic links.
Take note, the client’s SEO activity for the past 5 years were technically considered by Google now as low quality, unnatural and deserving of a penalty.
3. The Road to Link Cleansing is Daunting
It took us more than 4 months to email site owners requesting removal of our client’s links. I guarantee you this activity is the nastiest of all in bringing back a penalized website but we are glad that Boomerang for Gmail came in handy. We made sure all emails and follow-ups we’ve made were all recorded via Google Docs. This included rejected and approved requests.
PRO Tip: You need to document all of your activities in reaching out to webmasters for your link removal requests whether they are successful or not because the Google Web Spam QA Team reviews your efforts based on your documentation and it is an important factor for your manual penalty to be lifted or not.
4. Be Not Afraid to use the Google Disavow Tool
There will certainly be webmasters out there who will strip you down to the bone asking for money in exchange of link removals. These are the most soulless snake oil salesmen on earth. We’ve documented and submitted their replies to Google too. You can also include all those rejected link removal requests and bounced emails due to misinformation on email addresses used by other webmasters via WHOIS.
We’ve included all those sites that we failed to remove links from to the Google Disavow Tool text file. I’ve curated articles about the Google Disavow Tool and posted it for your reference.
See below a snake oil salesman haggling for bucks!
(Click to enlarge image)
Pro Tip: Never give in to webmasters asking for money in order to remove your links. Your reply saying a simple “No” is already fair enough to tell the Google Webspam QA Team that you are serious with what you are doing in helping them “cleaning the web”.
5. The Google Reconsideration RequestWe’ve submitted our first Google reconsideration request and guess what, we failed. See Google’s reply below.
However; we did not lose hope with their reply. Instead, we continued on what we have been doing in removing links and improving the client’s website in terms of user experience, page speed and applying all those best practices for on-page optimization.
Pro Tip: While you are doing your link removal activities, it is best that you are also working on creating linkable assets, improving web user experience, social outreach and content marketing in order to have your base quality link sources already being built to replenish the lost ones.
Here was the reply from Google on our second try. See below.
Google’s reply stated that there are still traces of inorganic links to our client’s site but we were not worried because we knew that we’ve already done a decent job on link cleansing (which we are still doing until now) and the Google Disavow Tool submission we’ve made will handle the negative algorithmic effect of those inorganic links.
6. Out from the Saddle and a Sudden Slap (again!)
One week or so after Google replied, the traffic started to increase. However, our “feeling good” moment was interrupted by a sudden drop on the traffic again! See figure below.
What went wrong? The culprit was a single 301 redirect we’ve made from an old page (with too many inbound spammy links we’ve removed during our cleansing activity). For whatever stupid reason, we redirected it to another page and boom! the drop happened. True enough, the negative effect from spammy links can really cause damage to a website. We have been reading and hearing it from others but our first hand experience, validated it. So, we removed the 301 redirect and the awesomeness resumed!
My Personal Take:
Recovering a business like what I’ve cited creates a lasting impact not only to the client but also to the team involved in the entire process. For the client, he vowed not to do anything about spading the spade anymore. It taught the client the importance of investing on real world marketing (RCS as Wil Reynolds may call it). This is what I call, “providing REAL value to customers”.
We just saved another business. Aren’t we heroes in our own little way? =P
This is one of the reasons why I love SEO.
Just under three years ago, we reported that 301 redirects don’t pass full PageRank and that you should try to link through a normal link versus using 301 redirects.
The truth is, a 301 redirect and a link pass the same amount of PageRank. There is no more dilution of PageRank with a 301 redirect when compared to using a normal link.
Matt Cutts squashed this myth that I believe many SEOs thought to be true, today in a video:
He said:
The amount of PageRank that dissipates through a 301 is currently identical to the amount of PageRank that dissipates through a link.So the myth that you should not use 301 redirects because it will dissipate more PageRank than using a normal link is not valid.
Related Topics: Google: SEO | Link Building: General | Top News
Links will always be important in digital marketing (and will definitely remain as an important element of the web). It won’t ever be devalued as a mean to market a website, because links simply move people across places over the web.
There are so many methods that can be used to build links, but there are only a few that can really make an impact and help brands achieve their business goals (awareness and/or revenue more often than not).
Links that really matter these days are links that can hit businesses’ bottom line, as very well explained by Paddy on his recent post on SEOmoz.
It’s imperative to be smart when it comes to link acquisition campaigns to really add value to your client’s business and to truly take more steps ahead of their competitors.
And in order to accomplish that, you’ll need to start focusing on high-value tactics to get maximum results. Because at the end of the day, results will always be more important than the volume of links you have acquired for your client.
So how would you do that? Try applying the 80/20 principle in choosing the strategies you implement. Think and aim higher for the links you try to acquire, for them to meet what your client actually needs.
Links that are intended for traffic generation, sales/conversions and branding serve as strong signals that search engines can use to reward you with better search rankings.
Great results will always be existent if you embrace that principle and approach link building with that mindset.
So in this post, I’ll be covering the kinds of links that are capable of touching all these 4 points (traffic, conversions, branding and rankings) and the marketing activities and processes that will help you get them.
Contextual and Editorial Links
I’ve written a post 2 weeks ago about how to get contextual links (and 2 years ago about getting editorial links), which explain why they are so powerful.
Links placed within the body of a content benefits sites in so many ways, given that it’s one of the strongest signals around that search engines use to assess sites’ topical relevance, popularity and authority.
Notable advantages of having been featured on other publications/blogs’ content are:
- It can send qualified traffic, since the link is highly perceptible to readers.
- Passes higher amount of link value and helps improve domain authority, which in turn can influence the site’s overall search rankings.
- Brand impression, which also affect or help increase conversions, especially if your brand has been cited by trusted content publishers.
How to get them:
- Creating useful content is just the start (whether its text, interactive or tools), as the process of getting natural in-content links relies on your content promotion strategies (using outreach, social media and link marketing).
- Invest on developing evergreen content assets that are specifically tailored for researchers and customers. This type of content often performs well in search results, especially for competitive terms, which allows the content to continuously attract more possible linkers to it.
- Branding through providing exceptional products/services and exemplifying expertise through the brand’s content marketing efforts to build mind share.
- Build relationships with your readers and with other content publishers in your online space. This can extremely help improve the sharing process of your content and in attracting more linkers to your site.
- Bring more traffic to your content. The more visitors you get, the higher chances of getting potential linkers to your content. Check out these 50 traffic tips for content from Informly.
Links from Ranking Webpages
Getting links from pages that are already ranking on search results for both short and long tail queries matter a lot for so many reasons. But the first reason that really comes into mind is because, in a way, they are already considered as trusted sources by Google.
Why these linking pages matter?:
- They are able to get constant traffic (through search), which means it will also continuously send traffic to the pages they are linking to.
- The topical relevance of the content, based on the keywords they are ranking for, adds more value to the link. And thus may help in improving the linked pages’ search ranking.
- Content relevance will also be a key factor in attracting potential leads to the link’s destination, which means the link can help drive conversions as well.
- Scalable branding, given that you’re getting continuous brand impressions from the new visitors that the page is constantly generating.
How to get them:
Join popular discussions in your online space (popular blog posts, forum threads, discussions on Q&A sites like Quora and/or online communities like News Hacker, Reddit and Inbound.org).
Popular discussions are more apt to be more visible on search results (especially for long-tails), since they contain most of the signals that search engines look for when ranking pages.
Adding value to these discussions and making sure that your contribution will standout will help you entice more of their incoming visitors to check out your site.
Seed content on high authority UGC and document sharing sites (like Slideshare, Youtube, Pinterest, etc…). These sites have strong search share, which means your content hosted on these sites have better chances of ranking for your targeted industry terms.
You’ll be able to absorb continual traffic and build brand awareness, as your content on these sites get search-driven traffic.
Guest blog on authority sites in your field. Use some of your targeted keywords when contributing content on other publications in your industry, to get long-term value from your guest posts.
Get links from resources and/links pages that are already ranking for industry terms using the broken link building technique.
Basically, there are 2 ways to get links from pages that have good search rankings:
- Add value to already existing pages with high potentials of ranking better (or sustaining its rankings) on search results.
- Create pages on other authoritative domains with links to your site that will gain its own search rankings.
Links from Authentic Reviews
Links from positive online reviews are definitely one of the most sought after marketing opportunities by any business that offers products/services.
Why does it matter?
- Online reviews can send new customers.
- Authentic reviews from users/consumers help strengthen a business’ brand. It can also help maintain the site’s reputation on its branded search results.
- They can help improve the site’s overall search rankings, based on the sentiments and volume of positive feedbacks that the site/brand is receiving from other websites/blogs.
How to get them:
- Blogger outreach on a personal level – to actually get experiential reviews. Dan Cristo wrote an excellent post on how to get more reviews of your products 2 years ago, and you might want to check that one out.
- Create an affiliate program or a referral commission system to attract more bloggers in reviewing your product or services. Offer this as a value proposition when reaching out to bloggers (give higher commission rates to authority bloggers in your industry).
- Provide great products and services, or be exceptionally great with customer service (think Zappos). This can extremely help you get voluntary online reviews of your products/services. You can also offer freebies (promo codes, discounts, etc…) to customers who own blogs or have strong following on social networks. That might also increase the chances of getting links from them.
Links from Strong Social Brand Pages
Integrating content strategy with social media is a very effective approach in link building. Many people discover great content through social sharing, and that’s why it’s very vital to have strong social brand pages on social platforms where your target audience is.
Why does it matter?
- Brand pages on social platforms – like Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Pinterest and many more –allow you to generate traffic every time you promote both new and old content from your site.
- It’s an efficient channel where you can build relationships with your audience/followers, which can also result to more link opportunities, social shares and traffic.
Reading: How to Increase Search Traffic through Keyword Audit on Google Analytics | Kaiserthesage – problo.gr/XaAerB
— Darren Rowse (@problogger) February 7, 2013
- Sends out massive brand signals to both users and search engines – through the amount of followers, activity and interactions.
- Search engines use these external brand pages as signals to determine authority, which may also add weight to your site’s search rankings.
How to build a strong following base for your social brand pages:
- Let content drive your social media campaigns, by pushing out useful content on a regular basis and promoting them on social networks.
- Interact with the people who are sharing your content to get them to follow you.
- Share other influencers’ works to engage as well as to attract them in seeing your own works. Sharing useful stuff created by other brands/blogs is also a great way to nurture your followers.
- Make your social sharing buttons very visible on your site’s content to enhance their sharing rate.
- Promote your social media profiles on your site to encourage your visitors/readers to follow you. You can also cross promote your brand pages using the social networks where you already have built a strong following base.
Interview Links
Interviews can be very powerful as a marketing arsenal. I’ve received ton of client inquiries over the past years just because of this marketing method, wherein many have found my business through these interviews (even from group interviews/crowdsourced content).
Why does it matter?
How to get them:
- Pitch yourself or your client to be interviewed by bloggers who host interviews on their blogs (use Google Search – ex. “interview + someone in your niche”).
- Create a Press page to let your visitors/readers know that you’re open for interviews.
- Be active in content marketing. Because the more you push out useful and expertly made content, the more people will want to know more about you and with what you can share to them.
Newsletter Links
One of my blog posts last month got featured on SEOmoz’s newsletter 2 weeks ago.
Knowing that their Moz Top 10 newsletter series has thousands of subscribers, getting viral traffic was almost certain. My blog received 7,000+ hits through that single link.
Why does it matter?
- Traffic and more brand impressions, obviously.
- The post that was featured also acquired lots of natural links from some of their subscribers (so it did become a successful link bait).
- Conversions. I received 15+ client inquiries after.
How to get them:
- Great content and a solid content promotion strategy are the key elements to get your content out there (and be perhaps fetched by other blogs that have huge email newsletter subscribers).
- Find blogs that have huge email lists, and pitch to have your content be featured on their newsletter (can be paid placement or reciprocate by featuring them as well on your newsletter).
- Grow your own list to create a replicable process in driving huge traffic to your site. Here’s a great guide on building an email list.
Recurring Links from regular contributions (columns)
I strongly believe that this method is the future of scalable and effective link building, content marketing and online branding, which I will be explaining why shortly.
But before that, I’ll first give an example. Julie Joyce is one of the most respected link builders in the industry. She’s also a regular contributor/columnist on these sites:
Why does it matter?
- Branding. It’s easier to demonstrate expertise when you’re regularly seen on high-traffic publications.
- You can almost always send many qualified traffic to your site, when you regularly publish content on high authority sites (like the ones mentioned above).
- It passes trust signals and high link value down back to your site, which can help improve your site’s domain authority and ability to convert traffic.
- Having a solid author portfolio on trusted publications will eventually boost your Author Rank.
How to get them:
- Search for your industry’s top online publications (that have high traffic and high domain authority). Apply to become a regular contributor on their site. It’s important to make yourself known first by providing high quality content on your site that are relevant to their audience.
- If you’ve been into guest blogging, track the sites that have sent good traffic and conversions to your site. Send more content to their site/blog and become a stable content partner for them.
- Implement authorship markups on your content contributions (if in case they aren’t implementing it yet, start suggesting it).
Constantly creating useful content on your site and promoting them effectively can also lead to getting invitations to become a contributor on larger sites. For instance, I was invited before to become a columnist on Technorati for that very reason.
.Edu and .Gov links
Links from .edu and .gov sites are known to be authoritative, since these domains are highly trusted by search engines.
Why do they matter?
- These links pass authority and trust, and can influence your site’s ability to rank on SERPs.
How to get them:
- Nick Bernard from Portent wrote an extensive post last year that details 7 different ways to get .edu links – from sponsorships, posting job openings, offering scholarships and 4 other more. I highly recommend reading that post.
- Using the broken link building method through .edu and .gov resources pages can also be a viable technique to get links from them. But it’s important to really offer a resourceful content worth linking to, especially for them, to make that acquisition happen.
- I’m currently testing this method (and I’ll definitely share the results in the next few weeks). Interview professors and publish it on your blog. Choose topics that have high potentials of getting referenced to by their sites/students/faculty.
Press Coverage
Press mentions are definitely a powerful way to make a brand look more amazing to its target audience. It’s also a great way for a brand or a product to be discovered by people.
Coverage like that – can simply result to this:
That’s why having a great product and a good marketing strategy is a force to reckon with.
Why does it matter?
- Getting featured on popular news sites can generate viral traffic.
- The surge in traffic can lead to user sign ups, sales and/or conversions.
- Getting viral through press mentions can also result to more link opportunities, as other news sites and blogs may also start writing about your brand.
- It will also be easier for you to pitch on other publications for coverage, since you’ve already been featured on an authority news site.
- The link acquired offers high SEO value, based on trust, authority and context of the link source.
- Definitely good for branding.
How to get them:
Don’t be afraid to pitch, if you have something that’s really newsworthy.
Natural Links from Online Discussions
This is quite similar with how you can get contextual links. The only difference is that they are placed within the discussions (comment threads).
Why does it matter?
- Elevates your brand, as you are being endorsed by other people (which may also lead to better conversions).
- Can draw in click-through traffic to your site.
- Sends trust signals, which is a factor that can slightly impact your search rankings.
How to get them:
- Be active with your content marketing activities. Keep on publishing content that people can use as a resource. Because your readers will use them sooner or later when conversing with other people in your online community.
- Build relationships with your readers, especially with those who actively participate on other popular blogs’ discussions or industry forums/communities.
- Focus on providing solutions to common problems in your industry. Your readers/followers/peers will always refer you when they encounter questions related to the solutions you’re offering.
Bonus: How to Earn Visibility and Links
I just want to share this awesome slide presentation by Kevin Gibbons on using content marketing to get higher visibility and more links.
If you liked this post, you can subscribe to my feed and you can follow me on Twitter @jasonacidre.
Tagged as: Advanced SEO, Link Building, SEO Strategies
Posted by Dan Cristo on Jun 15, 2011 in Blog, Links, SEO |
Most veteran SEO’s agree we are long past the golden years of meta tags and reciprocal links, and we’ve firmly entered into the Age of Frustration, where the best link building tactics are either devalued or labeled black hat.
SEO’s are a resilient group though. Like hackers, the more loopholes they close the more exploits we create. We evolve, we create new tools, we capitalize on change and today I’m discussing an emerging trend that’s ripe with opportunity to build links… Experience Reviews.
Standard Product Reviews
Product reviews have been a staple of link building for a while now. Ask your client for some product, track down bloggers who review similar products and see if they’ll agree to do a review. Seems like a win/win, right? Bloggers get free product, their audience gets a nice review and the company get exposure and links.
The problem is in the process
1. Ask the client for some sample products to give away
2. Wait two weeks for the product to arrive
3. Scour the Internet for bloggers who write about similar products
4. Track down their contact info
5. Send an unsolicited email to each – hearing back from 10%
6. Send product and wait two weeks for all the blogger to receive
7. Wait two weeks for the blogger to review
8. The post is up! Report a single backlinkBetween product costs, shipping costs and hours spent coordinating and communicating you’re looking at a painfully low return on investment for a single link, and that’s IF they give you a link pointing to the right site with the right anchor text.
A Better Way
The key to improving the traditional “blogger review” tactic is to understand that bloggers don’t blog about products, they blog about experiences. So if you’re able to create a new experience for a blogger, they will write about it, even if they’ve never reviewed a product in their life.
Here is what I mean…
Bloggers love just about anything that gives them “social proof”. Social proof is anything that allows a blogger to say, “Look, tons of people agree that I’m doing something right”. This could a high number of blog comments, RSS subscribers, Twitter followers, FB fans, PageRank, Alexa scoring, etc.
The newest form of social proof is the “Influencer Score”, an all-in-one scoring of how influential you are online measured by companies like Klout. Now what’s fascinating about Klout is their new program called, “Klout Perks”; an ingenious way of rewarding users who have a high Klout score. Klout Perks come in the form of free products, rewards or exclusive access to a company’s services.What’s in it for the Company?
Well, the companies giving away these free goodies think it’s a good idea to make these social influencers brand ambassadors, and it seems that everyone wins: Users get free product, companies get positive word of mouth and Klout connects the two making a shiny nickel to boot.
The opportunity here is that users who receive these perks are fascinated that a big brand thinks them enough of an influencer to give them something. This makes them feel good, and the no strings attached setup makes for an experience worth bragging writing about.
And the process?
Now that social scoring technology exists, we can transform this manual one-to-one product review campaign to a one-to-many experience review campaign. The process looks like the following…
1. Ask the client for some sample products to give away
2. Wait two weeks for the product to arrive
3. Create a campaign with a social scoring company
a. They identify the influencers
b. They communicate the opt-in program
c. They provide you the contact information
4. Send product and wait two weeks for all the bloggers to receive
5. The posts are up! Report multiple backlinksYou see, by identifying all the influencers at the same time you can send all the products out at the same time. No need for back and forth communication, no need the blogger to actually use the product. They are writing about how awesome it is to be considered an influencer, and that post is going to talk about how great your brand is with details about the product they received as well.
A word of Caution
Don’t go cheap. These people are going to talk about the experience you give them. Your goal is to show these influencers how much they mean to your company, not offload product. Do it right and you’ve got the multi-benefit of great word of mouth, a new brand ambassador and a potent link to your product. Do it wrong and you’ve got yourself a lot of negative attention.
That being said, you’re giving away something for free. It’s going to take a lot of missteps for someone to write a hate post about a company they just received something free from
What do you think?
Are we looking at a new link building tactic on the rise? Have you tried doing this already, if so, what was your experience like?
Don't worry, we won't post anything.
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