Does anyone else find it surprising that so many site owners are reluctant to provide outgoing links on their website. Somehow they have come to believe that providing relevant outgoing links from their site can be harmful to their results in the search engines.
When you send your visitors to a relevant resource, this is not a bad thing. This is a good thing.
Relevant sites does NOT mean competitive sites.
Definitions of Relevant on the Web:
Having a bearing on or connection with the subject at issue; “the scientist corresponds with colleagues in order to learn about matters relevant to her own research” wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn
Evidence or information that has enough value to prove something significant to a case.http://www.attorneykennugent.com/library/r.html
If you write an article and would like to provide evidence of what you are saying, you should provide your resources within the article. Those MUST be credible resources. For example, if I write an article about website credibility, the site I point to in order to back up what I am saying must be an EXPERT on the topic, such as the Stanford Guidelines for Website Credibility. This method (used properly) gives your pages MORE value, not less. It also adds to the relevance of your page to the topic.
Incoming and outgoing links are not just about making pages filled with links. It is something that can be blended into your website in multiple ways, as it pertains to the specific page.
Think about the common interests of your target visitors and you will have no trouble deciding if a link is relevant to your site.
Wolfram Alpha is a search service being released this month that some feel is a Google killer. The jury is still out, however,it does hint at the possible future direction of search services. Wolfram Alpha hasn’t been launched as of yet. The major difference between Wolfram Alpha and existing search services is that it answers questions, as opposed to returning a list of pages.
Last weekend, Wolfram Alpha, unveiled a new “computational knowledge engine” based on the work of Stephen Wolfram. Some have dubbed Alpha a “Google killer,” but, in reality, it is very different from the standard search engines that we are all familiar with today.
Here is a public demo Wolfram gave earlier this week.
Link Building or water boarding, which is the least amount of torture?
Anyone worth their salt in SEO has asked, “Is there a better way to build the back links you need to rank highly in Search Engines’? Before I tell you that water boarding is in fact an easier and softer way to torture let me tell you this; link building can pay off huge benefits. However, you will have to endure a bit of mind-boggling tedious tasks. Here are some ways to get going and some things to consider.
WEB DIRECTORIES
Web Directories are the obvious first step; at least here you don’t need to grovel to others to get linked. The following link is to the page we in fact go to. Listed are all the general directories on the internet in which you get a valid link for the search engines.
We only listed those directories that are free and which do not require a reciprocal link to be listed. We think we know what webmasters want; we are certainly open to being corrected here.
Please ladies and gentleman please excuse the sloppy page, we did not put this page up to display our design skills, we in fact put it up only for an in-house place for our people to use for, you guessed it, link building. This reference to this page is the first public reference to it, we trust it will help.
A word of caution about this subject, Outside of DMOZ and the Yahoo! Directory, the value of a single directory link is usually not very great. Directories add value after you list in a number of them, especially if you are listing in high-quality ones next to other sites that are in your same vertical. Additionally directories rarely provide much direct traffic. Typically the bulk of the value of a directory listing is in how search engines evaluate the links. Occasionally, you may find a niche directory that does provide good traffic—but most directories do not. Exchanging Reciprocal Links
Over the last few years, Google has given no weight or negative weight to low value link exchanges. Typically for most marketers the time wasted on link exchange programs would be better spent creating useful, original, link-worthy content. Let me stress this one point, CONTENT is still King and will get you link backs.
I spend a lot of time managing client expectations than anything. As fast and furious as the Internet can be immediate gratification just doesn’t exist here. When I was a young commodities trader an old timer once told me if I wanted excitement to “jump out of airplanes”, his point was to not act out my needs for excitement in the markets. The same advice holds true here, solid work with an eye on patience will pay off.
Link exchanging just doesn’t work the way it used to. Many people who created SEO software, or information products that sold themselves as experts, found that their Google rankings dropped because link exchanges are not all they were once cracked up to be. Some kept selling their bogus link exchange services even after they stopped offering value because they are greedy and are lacking in business ethics. Also, if you link to off-topic resources, quality sites might be less likely to link to your site. Don’t waste your time trading hundreds of links with low quality sites.
Smart Link Building
The following is easier said than done and if you hire some SEO company to do it for you can cost a princely sum. This is a definition of a Smart Link Building strategy as described by one of our tech people.
Are one-way to your site.
Are permanent.
Are embedded in text in the middle of the page.
Come from relevant pages.
Have variations on the anchor text.
Are from clean pages, no link to bad neighborhood.
Points to your home page as well as your internal pages with the right anchors.
Come from pages with texts only. No directories, link lists or any kind of FFA.
Does not have any kind of paid footprints around them or any patter.
Also gives you juice (Page Rank).
Does not have any kind of duplicate content.
Are hosted on different C-class IPs.
Are on pages with maximum only 10 links on them (only yours).
Also gives you some relevant traffic! (best sign of legit links.)
These are just a few ways to build links and if you are reading I am sure you know this is not an easy task. This can be sub-contracted, however, you need to stiff through mounds and mounds of scams on this very subject. The best way to start is try to get a referral from a past happy client. In our next post we will explore subjects like link buying or renting, link quality and some free link sources. Happy linking!
I couldn’t help myself I had to post this, I would also love to tell you this is my original thought. However, it is from Aaron Wall’s blog at SEObook.com Take this guys advice, it will save you a load of time and energy trying to find the “secret” when it just might be right under your nose. As soon as I stopped looking behind the smoke and mirrors I began to have success to this already saturated marketplace…enjoy!
Essential SEO Advice
Most SEO advice you’ll see boils down a variation on the following:
Focus your efforts on keyword terms that relate to your market segment
Make sure a spider can crawl the content
Build content that people will link to
Actively pursue links
Of course, there are various how-to’s on how to achieve those four points, and for that you should buy the book
Once these aspects are covered, there is marginal return in arcane trickery for most people. Your time is almost certainly better spent focusing on business fundamentals & holistic marketing strategy, because you have a lot of control over these areas, and if the business fundamentals are wrong, SEO trickery won’t help. People may arrive on a site, but then what? Do you provide something others want? Does it cost less to provide that something that the price you can charge for it? Is your offering better than your competition?
Someone who has asked those questions and satisfactorily answered them will always be a step ahead of those who haven’t.
When I was new to SEO, I wish someone had told me how it really was. It would have saved me a lot of time and effort. I got sites ranking that didn’t have sound business models, and they rightly failed. We’ve all been there, I’m sure.
So, for those new to SEO, make sure you cover the basics of both SEO and business.
If you want to see your money fly away try these more than common mistakes in PPC. These mistakes will give your money wings faster than a Redbull, you want to get really stupid with it add Vodka. Pay per click advertising can be a quick way to get targeted traffic and GEO targeted for that matter. Plug in a list of keywords, write an ad, set a daily budget and let it rock.
If you can get a listing towards the top of page one, you can potentially get hundreds if not thousand of visitors. However, you can also get your butt handed to you. Here is couple of pay per click (PPC) adventures gone wild. Hopefully you can avoid these very fundamental mistakes.
I had this product all ready to go and was determined to use pay per click advertising. The product was great, I felt that there was no way it wouldn’t sell. So I lined it all up, set a daily budget, got a list of keywords, wrote a couple of ads to do an A/B split test and let the campaign go live.
That month, I ended up spending well over $1,500 and all of 4 sales made. Losing money is not one of my favorite things to do. Well, after some examination and a course in SEO and PPC I realized I made 2 very simple mistakes, critical yet simple. The first was that I didn’t restrict the ads to justthe US and Canada or English speaking countries for that matter. I had them going all over the world and getting loads of traffic, however, to places that couldn’t possibly want my product. The other blunder was, I ran the ads on content sites where the CTR is notoriously high and conversions horribly low. The combination smoked me out on this product very quickly.
The other fundamental mistake I made, and BTW, I only made these mistakes once. I didn’t set the cost per click to a max amount and set my daily budget to some astronomical figure. I won’t even go into how much money I lost on that one until I realized what the heck I did. My journey in this sector of Internet marketing has been a nightmare even though it didn’t need to be. I have learned a great deal from Aaron Wall’s course SEObook.com, the money I spent with him has been saved many times over.
Pay per click advertising can be extremely effective, but you MUST know what you’re doing. Two things I will leave you with here;
1) “Do not try this at home” – hire a pro or learn from a pro!
2) My Dad used to say, “Don’t go to a Dentist to get your haircut”, I think you get my point.
Maybe a good attitude adjustment, don’t let me bore you with statistics. I hope I can bore you with excitement, an oxymoron? Maybe! It has become self evident that the Cost per Sales Lead has come down by as much as 61% according to many studies. A recent study by hubspot.com uncovered 3 major findings;
#1 – Inbound marketing channels deliver a dramatically lower cost-per-sales lead than outbound channels.
Respondents that spent more than 50% of their marketing budget on inbound marketing consistently reported a lower cost-per-sales lead than those that spent 50% or more on outbound marketing. In fact, inbound marketing-dominated organizations experience a 61% lower cost-per-lead than outbound marketing-dominated organizations.
Businesses are responding by allocating a greater portion of their budget to inbound marketing. Currently, 37% of business’ lead-generation budget is dedicated to inbound marketing, whereas 30% is dedicated to outbound marketing efforts. We expect this gap to widen significantly over time.
#2 – Blogs lead other social media categories in terms of importance to business.
Blogs are frequently cited as the most useful type of social media marketing, with 75% of those familiar with their business’ blogging efforts saying they are ‘useful,’ ‘important,’ or ‘critical’ to their business. MySpace finished last in terms of importanceMySpace finished last in terms of importance of those that use the service for business purposes.
#3 – Small businesses are most aggressively allocating lead generation budgets to blogging, social media and search engine optimization.
Realizing that inbound marketing techniques ‘level the playing field’ with the bigger budgets of larger competitors, small businesses are spending a 180% greater portion of their budgets on blogging/social media and 36% greater portion of their budgets on search engine optimization than businesses with 50 employees or more.
That ladies and gentleman is excitement; stats can be boring, profits are certainly not. There are 3 areas that I contend used together can be very powerful and therefor need to be are very significant part of any businesses budget; big or small business. PPC, SEO, and a well crafted Social Media Marketing (SMM) campaign. There are many ways to spend that hard earned budget; Telemarketing. Email marketing, tradeshows, direct mail just to name the most obvious, I contend that given the information above the 50% or more needs to be spent on SEO, PPC and SMM. Let me further support this with:
… Individual businesses that focus more on inbound expenditures reported a dramatically lower cost-per-lead than their outbound counterparts. Of respondents that self-reported their cost/lead, those that spend 50% or more of their lead generation budget on inbound marketing averaged $84, whereas businesses spending 50% or more on outbound marketing averaged $220 cost/lead.
— Hubspot.com
This is significant enough to get any business owners attention, it certainly got mine. Let’s get to the meat and potatoes of what you do next.
PAY PER CLICK (PPC)
PPC, all your efforts should begin here. PPC can bring you the closest to immediate gratification and what I mean by that is have the correct expectations going in. Although PPC can give you immediate and measurable results the result isn’t always what you wanted. A well planned PPC campaign includes what Tony Robbins calls CANI (Constant and Never-ending Improvement). This alone I think you’ll agree is one of the beauties of the Internet, plan, do and review on a way faster plane than in the entire history of advertising.
Start out by building your campaign around on keyword or one keyword phrase and exploring the long tail keyword phrases and modifiers that are getting and search volume and again, plan, do and review.
SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION (SEO)
Right from day one each and every page on you site needs to be optimized. Please appreciate I know that this isn’t a one day project but an ongoing process. The SEO process is much like the PPC process in as much as it’s a CANI approach. When done well and the results start to flow the natural traffic gained here can be the big payoff. One word of caution, “Do not try this at home”. Somewhat tongue in cheek I say this, however, do seek out a professional: either in-house or hire a project manager.
SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING (SMM)
SMM includes either putting up a company blog or reinventing the one you have now. At a minimum a blog can and needs to be optimized on its own and this is not done the same way a website is done.
Here is where all the insanity is, the Social Media sector is all over the place and the average person even with an above average intellect is left with, “how do I manage all this”. This approach at times may feel like you are racking the forest with bullets to bag some big prey. Why, because that is pretty much what you are doing. As I speak there was over 20 help wanted ads nationwide looking for Social Media Mangers in-house on craigslist, BTW I stopped after looking at about 6 different cities.
It is self evident that SEO/PPC/SMM only can be a full time job, one that can payoff big if you manage a “net conversation” around your brand, product or service correctly. There are at least 40 SM sites that I could chock you with right here, however let me drop you a few worthy of a look/see; Facebook.com, twitter.com, myspace.com, ning.com, linkedin.com, I’m already out of breath. You get my point.
CONCLUSION
I’ll leave you with the good news and the bad news. The bad news first, SEP, PPC and SMM can be a monumental effort. The good news is, look at what sort of effort you may have put into that last trade show, direct mail campaign or other advertising initiatives and look at the result. The numbers never lie, bringing down you’re average cost per lead is always something your organization can rally behind. Lastly, I don’t recommend you abandon all you do and go head first into Cyberspace, I do as the title suggests, susgget you do a Budget Ratio Adjustment (BRA) with an emphasis on the obvious.
Sometimes schedules are so busy and there just isn’t the time to write another post even though you have great info to share. Lo and behold this was in my email box, I wish I could take credit for writing it, however, it was written by Aaron Wall from SEObook.com on the3 subject of Social Integration, this following information held true well before the Internet and well after it, if there if is a well after it… with out further ado…
“As many business models continue to get commoditized by fierce worldwide competition, the only things that separate winners from losers are: relationships, social status, trust, attention, market timing, and packaging. In an idea economy, the winner is not just up to who comes up with ideas, but who expresses them most clearly and who can spread them further faster.
Having an editorial component to your site that people pay attention to builds content and gives people more reasons and ways to find you and talk about you. Publishing a blog with an RSS feed that notifies hundreds or thousands of people when you have new information to share is a big advantage against newer competitors or companies that fail to see the value of building social relationships and giving away information.
It can take weeks, months, or years to gain attention and trust. The more reasons you give people to trust you the more it builds on itself. Eventually, if your operation is exceptionally efficient you can start owning ideas and building self reinforcing market positions. At some point winning new ideas gets easier and easier.
There are also lots of other hidden benefits to having lots of friends and contacts
- you can help them promote their best work in exchange for them offering you feedback and helping you promote your best work
- you can do coordinated launches of your best content where many friends mention it at the same time such that you flood the marketplace with your best ideas
- you can ask friends for links and get a near 100% success rate getting quality links from them (though you may have to return the favor at some point)
Participating in the conversation, linking out to other like-minded webmasters, and creating community oriented projects with the input of other members in your community help get you noticed quickly.
If you have a new blog or new website reinvest in your website and market your own content instead of placing many ads on your site.
The deeper we get into bulbwired and our mission of helping businesses succeed on the Internet the deeper we get into sharing, just today we got a RT (Retweet, on twitter.com, this is simply Reposting a comment from me and a link to me) from another SEO guy, flattering yes and humbling. We trust that it all come around full circle and on that subject I can’t say enough thanks to Aaron Wall for his course SEObook.com. This has really re-directed what we do.
For a limited time bulbwired.com is offering our “10 Point SEO Spring Cleaning” for an amazing $500 and we can show you how you can get that for free, no kidding absolutely free. Contact us below and we will tell you how.
Spring Cleaning needed on your site? Need your site to scream out to the Search Engines?
It takes proper planing to launch or even a redesign a website. With months of time invested, and hundreds (or thousands) of man hours on the line — you need to make sure your new endeavor is ready to produce from day one.
It is a common belief that a well designed web site is one that lacks optimization. While many times that fact can be true, it does not have to be. With essential communication between design and marketing, your designers can produce both great looking and functional web sites that do not compromise your ability to optimize, This is where Design needs to meet Marketing. Sometimes a great approach can be the use of a Project Manager.
Here are ten quick tips to pass along to your designers, your writers and your developers to help them create the best site from the beginning…
Code Validity is Key
Be sure that the final code of your pages can fully validate according to W3C standards. Failure to validate could create accessibility issues — and the engines simply dislike that. They want to push their users out to complete sites that work for everyone. It works if you work it. clear and simple
Avoid Duplicate Content
This is pretty self explanatory, and it’s an SEO principal that has been hammered home many times. Why keep on hammering? Because it’s that important! Be sure that you don’t get lazy and copy content from one page to the next. Each page should specifically target one major idea, and the text needs to reflect that. Think you’re at risk? Try something like this free tool allows you to determine the percentage of similarity between any two pages
Browsable Navigation Links
Encapsulating links to internal pages in Flash or JavaScript is dangerous. While some engines can often find links from inside of these coding blocks, it is not guaranteed. Therefore, it is wise to always have an HTML compliant navigational structure. Examples include footer text links, a DHTML menu, etc.
Use a Structured Content Hierarchy
A theme based approach to optimization is the most successful one. Imagine all of the content on your web site to mimic a family tree. Each layer down, there’s more content that fits the overall theme. By nature, the further you drill down — the more specific your content becomes. Bottom line.
Move JavaScript and CSS Off Page
Moving CSS and JS files off the page does two things. First, it creates cleaner code that is more easily managed. More importantly though, it frees up space that engines consider to be prime real estate. Let’s say a spider lends preferential treatment to content that appears in the first 20KB of a document. If 15KB at the start of your document is verbose JavaScript and CSS coding, you have created an uphill battle from the start…
Limit Flash Usage
Putting all of your content in a Flash file creates a difficult platform from which to optimize. While it can be done, the results will not come as easily as if Flash was used as a compliment to the rest of the page. Thankfully, with CSS streamlined video on the ‘net, Flash is no longer a necessity. Remember, if you have to use Flash — cut down how much information is in there and fine alternative ways to deliver the content.
Natural Keyword Integration
Do not stuff pages with keywords! Some web sites that would be great if not for their blatant use of keyword stuffing. Keyword density and repetition is a thing of the past. Engines are more about off page SEO now, and you need to write clear and concise content that addresses the user. Engines are keen to what makes sense contextual.
Local Information Integration
Sounds all technical and precise, but it’s quite simple. If you sell plumbing supplies in Somerville, Massachusetts Florida, then include that in your site. How? List (in HTML formatted text of course) where you are located. Include a link to Google (or Yahoo) Maps to help hammer home the point. Search is become more focused on users at a local level. Therefore, building sites with this in mind should be a given.
Launch With the Proper Foundation
Is your new site equipped with a robots.txt file? An XML sitemap? RSS Feeds? Before you launch any new web site you need to run a full QA test to ensure that…
• all pages load properly
• no browser compatibility issues exist
• SEO elements (titles, meta tags, alt tags, etc.) are in place
• spiders can discover all pages
• robots.txt validates
• sitemap.xml(.gz) works
Doing this right out of the gate will save you time and monmey, and will put you in a position for maximum ROI.
If you want to see your money fly away try these more than common mistakes in PPC. These mistakes will give your money wings faster than a Redbull, you want to get really stupid with it add Vodka. Pay per click advertising can be a quick way to get targeted traffic and GEO targeted for that matter. Plug in a list of keywords, write an ad, set a daily budget and let it rock.
