Search Engine Optimization

In this article you will learn some tricks on how to manage your outsourced links. First of all, never outsource all your link building, especially to one company. Links are so important, you will be gambling your entire company search rankings if you do that. If you have to outsource, then use several companies and maintain good relationship with them. Preferably, outsource to several companies, and use internal resources for link building.

How To Manage Link Building Companies

Once you find a company that you like to engage, place a trial order for 10 – 20 links. See what they give you. Keep in mind that the price directly relates to the quality, so if you’re cheap you will get cheap links (they work too). Once the reports come, check their work link by link, see the last cache date of the pages, and inbound link profile to each page. Also keep in mind the IP. You do not want all the links to come from the same IP class, which can hurt.

Factors to look for:

• Quality of work. Don’t trash lower quality link builders, as you might need them for secondary properties that support the main one.
• Turn around time. Measure how fast link builders can do their work. Use the fast ones when you really need to defend positions, and use slower ones for non-urgent keywords
• Pricing. You will find that some companies offer lower prices for the same type of work. They don’t do it worse, they just charge less, so always do the trials and talk to link builders. You’ll save money long term.

Once you give a project, push them to send you a report once a week / 2 weeks, so you can see the progress. Also request to pay for work done or pay in portions for segments of the project. This way you will never risk entire budget and I guarantee you will run into bad apples. Always communicate which types of links you would like to see more and less, and direct link builders.

Mike Wilson, the SEO guru in charge of SEO Internet Marketing Inc (www.searchengineoptimizationcompany.ca or SEO Expert) always says “walk before you run”. This precisely applies to link campaigns you should be deploying. Don’t go for “mortgage”, but start out by dominating 3 – 4 word keywords. Then move up into the 2, and only then go for the 1. Obviously if your link building is continuous, then constantly drip feed that 1 golden key phrase, but do not hope to get it before you get lower search volume phrases.

Lets take mortgages as an example and assume “mortgage” is the golden phrase you want to go after. Everybody wants to get it, and it is possible, but prepare for some heavy investment in links, content, conversion optimization, and a lot of time and effort put into SEO.

We’ll pretend you already have a decent site, with a good design, that converts well, and has… 250 pages in total. Seems like an average well maintained site on the internet. We’ll assume there was no SEO work done on the website, and we are starting from scratch.

So where do we go? How do we do it the smart way? Remember, the keyword we’re after is mortgage.

First, install Google webmaster tools and check the keywords you’re already showing up for. You might find there are some good positions for some of the keywords. If that is the case, then find exact search volume for those phrases, and do some targeting. For instance, if the keyword is “fixed rate mortgage costs” do a query in the Google keyword tool to find out the volume. If the volume is low, then check how you are doing for 3 word phrase “fixed rate mortgage. What you might find is that you simply need to tweak the titles, add in some content and fix internal links to move up in the results (don’t hope for that thought and always think of link building in perspective, especially in competitive field like mortgage).

Find all the keywords like that in Google Webmaster tools. Cross check current rankings on Google. Write them down or put it on a spreadsheet. Then do the same with analytics, thought you might find that for the most part it is long tail.

Once you have some general idea where you site falls, go ahead and do the onsite SEO.

Doing the onsite SEO and Planning Linking Strategy

Having established some of the pages that rank for good keywords somewhere in search results (does not have to be first page), it is time to heavily target them. Select pages that are going to go after those words, and put keywords in the title. Tweak H1, H2, H3 titles with different instances and variations of the keyword. Put the keyword (or a set of keywords related to main targeted one) in the content. Put links from internal pages the with targeted anchor text to that page.

Do this for all of the pages on your website, including a homepage. Once done, it is a waiting game for Google to spider all the changes (internal pages take longer then index), and then put them into the index. You might want to start with the linking efforts right away, and apply approximate number of links to each page, for each of the keywords, or you can wait to see the actual changes on search results.

If you do choose to proceed with link building right away, then use the following as a benchmark:

• the more competitive a keyword is, the more links you will need for it.
• the higher your page is in search results for a particular keyword, the less links you will need for it

Correlate those 2 together and map out your link strategy. It may look something like this:

There is no need to be precise here, since this is the first set of the lins, it will help you get a feel of how things move, which keywords are easy, and which ones will need more effort. Place linka as planned for each of keywords, to targeted pages, and wait for results. Once results kick in, check where you are for each of the keywords, and record to keep a log of the progress.

SEO industry is big. There are news portals dedicated to search engines. There are thousands of companies that offer SEO, link building, social media promotion, etc. In this article I would like to talk about blogs and about SEO content.

Industry is obsessed with Google gods. All the blogs recycle the same thing, thousands of times, adding more duplicate ideas to the internet (I am guilty as well). It is hard to find real communities where the real expert sit and crack the Google box, without the regard for Google itself. What happened is, Google set out SEO standards for entire industry, and bloggers have just extrapolated on what Google told them.

Everyday thousands of articles are added that add nothing to the web, followed by 10 comments saying how useful the blog was, and how much people liked it. How about some real talk and opinions outside of the accepted norms? It seems like the SEO field has become like politics. If you dare to say that the government could sacrifice its people for political reasons (or money, which are the same), you instantly labeled as a nut. If you dare to go against Google approved ways of SEO, you’re out outside of the approved good-SEO norms.

There are few blogs that talk about real stuff that works, but the real discussions by real professionals are either hidden in private forums, or don’t take place at all. Where’s the turf? The stuff that is not necessarily God approved? What small biz owners don’t realize is the big brands buy links, spam the web and do other things, all the while small biz sites are fed a lot of well intended BS!

Anyway, those are just my thoughts on the subject. There’s more to say, but this isn’t the right place.

This image about corporate “news” machine is starting to remind me of SEO blog space.

In order to rank in Google Local 10 box, you must be physically located in the city you’re targeting. The further you are from the perceived city center (Google decides that), the harder it is to rank.

We had two clients in the same industry, competing for similar keywords. One of them is located close to the centroid (client A), while the other one is another city (client B). Client B has a lot more links than A, and of way higher quality, yet it never shows up in the 10 box, and even struggles in organic search, with a more powerful backlink profile.

This is my guess, but the address and local citation factor has been incorporated into the regular search, at least to some extent, whereby location close to the centroid will not only help you rank in Google 10 box, but in regular search results for keywords that include city name. This was just my observation.

It is contradicted by another project I am working on, where a website outright dominates Google for “keyword city name”, even though it does not have an office, or even a phone number in that city. The site has over a 100 top listings for different Canadian and American cities.

So what is right? Is location an important factor in ranking for “keyword + city”. Yes and no. The website that dominates its keyword in every city has over 500,000 inbound links, where the smaller site (client B), only has 300 – 500 links. So based on their link data we can make the conclusions:

• Physical location in the city is an important factor for websites with relatively low domain power.
• Physical location is not a factor for highly authoritative websites with hundreds of thousands links.

If you are a small website owner located outside of the city, then try the following:

• rent UPS box
• rent a phone line from a business somewhere downtown

The small expense should help you rank on search results, and cover itself with additional business you will get from that ranking.

Affiliate program can be a great SEO tool. It offers value to the webmasters, gives you a link and makes you money! I can’t think of any other link building tool that can achieve this!

A disclaimer: many will say that the affiliate program should not be viewed as the link building tool, yet I disagree. It all depends on how you look at it. If you’re an affiliate who makes money with affiliate programs you might despise people like me, but if you’re doing link building, then you totally understand where I am coming from. Now you tell me, how else can you get people to link to you from high quality sites, and get paid for it! It’s brilliant!

Amazon affiliate program is a great example. They outright dominate many keywords due to their affiliate links, which are implemented in an SEO friendly manner. In this article I will show you how to set affiliate program straight for the SEO juice.

Affiliate Links

First of all – run from CJ, and other third party systems. The reason is, the affiliate link first goes to commission junction and only then redirects to your website. This means that all the juice goes to CJ, and you get nothing. Not good. CJ and other programs that require a redirect to their domain first fall off the charts. If you’re worried that affiliates won’t find you – don’t worry. The best affiliates always find best programs (assuming you have a good one).

Links with affiliate ID like www.site.com/aff?ClickID=34325345 also go off the radar, because they create duplicate content (different links pointing to the same page is considered duplicate content). Though Google can figure out which site is the root, those links pass only a portion of the SEO juice (which is better then no juice at all).

To get full credit for the links, use a 301 redirect. Links will look like this: site.com/landing-page.html, 100% natural and organic, yet when a visitor clicks, a cookie goes into the browser, putting in affiliate code. It’s that easy!

Now you know how to get a lot of links, at no cost!

Content is a necessary part of the link building evil. It satisfies both the new content by the search engines, and helps to get deep links, which must be there if you are to back engineer an authoritative site (think Wikipedia). So what is the strategy?

Here are some content strategy thoughts, which you can apply at your own discretion:

1. Write several articles targeting some of the longer tail keywords.
2. Place a link from the homepage to those articles in order to have a faster crawl
3. Place some deep links directly to those articles (the tricky part).

In order to place deep links to the articles you must have content that is worth linking – obvious. But what if you do not? What do you do then? Though the advice by professionals and experts in the industry is to put in time / money into the content, but you know that is not always a reality, you are not always passionate about the topic you’re in. Prove me wrong, but that is the case with many people. That’s when the black / gray hat starts to look good, since it provides the road to results with non – conventional ways (the Google recommended and industry accepted ways). Though the advice here is in no way black hat, it somewhat goes for the content that you haven’t really put your soul into, and don’t have a passion for. As someone in the SEO industry, you know you have to deal with it, either because that what you have on hands is not the best, or simply because you’re into the niche only because of cash.

So what to do?

The graph is pretty common sense. Create an article. Link to it from your pages, Submit to social media / articles directories with back links to the original source / home page /other pages. Build links to the actual submissions to third party service. A few will do.

Links are the fuel of search engine optimization, and are 70% of the whole process. In order to rank for highly competitive 1, 2 and 3 word phrases, site must have a large inbound link portfolio.

Ranking for a key phrase, is one part of the equation. Once rankings are achieved, one must guard them against the competition. There are several ways to do that:

• Continue building links at a natural rate (whether natural or not)
• Continue adding content

Both are requirements for maintaining leading spots on search results. Content addition is pretty straight forward, though there are some strategies to go with it, which we will discuss in the next article. In this article we will focus on link building, and maintaining that constant flow of links to the pages that dominate your niche / industry.

Important and Authoritative Site Constantly Get Links

This is why your site must constantly get a “shot” of links, whether it is natural or through your link building efforts. As a proof of this, register on Google alerts for “link:www.domain.com” and Google will email you new links it finds for that website. You will see that the authoritative websites always get new links, and have a flow. That flow does not necessarily has to be flat, or equal each month/week, but it has to be there.

Also keep in mind that Google has Google Trends, which is in my opinion just a sneak peak to what’s under the hood. Google trends can track stories, their popularity on the web, coverage, queries related to the story and links. Links is bolded in order to show that Google can correlate link spikes to events covered online, and unnatural spikes without correlation to any events can set off red flags. Aaron Wall has been talking about this for a long time now.

Keeping the flow of links to your pages, is an expense, that must be worked into your monthly SEO budget. Whether you outsource, do in house or both, make sure to keep the links flowing, and you are sure to dominate your niche / industry.

This is a second part of the article “Must Have SEO and Link Building Tools in Your Arsenal”. Here we cover: hub finder, link harvester, linkscape.

Hub finder Tool from SEO book

Hub finder takes data from Yahoo through the API, and looks at co-occuring links for a set of websites. Co-occuring links from one page to several sites in your keyword space may indicate a hub, therefore it is beneficial to obtain those links. In order to get the widest range of hub results, specify up to 10 competitors, excluding your website.

The tool used to be free but is now only available to SEO book members. Here is a free mirror for this tool. Set of results may vary from a dozen, to few hundred “hubs”. The only thing you have to do is filter out low quality websites, which is not hard to do at all.

Link Harvester From SEO Book

Link harvester is a great tool from SEO book that shows domains linking to a website, C block IPs, and .edu, .gov, .mil domains, which may have larger impact on search engine rankings. It includes links to archive.org, WHOIS, and other information.

SEO Moz Linkscape

This tool is similar to Majestic SEO in functionality, but I find it is very limiting. First of all its index is at least 10 times smaller then Majestic SEO. Second, it limits the number of links you can see for any domain to 2000. Third, it costs more than Majestic SEO. The tool is loosing to Majestic SEO in everything, yet SEO Moz is charging an arm and a leg it. Why?

Rand Fishkin has been accused of lying about the source of data for Linkscape. First he said they have a spider, then it was revealed they have a spider + they use Yahoo and other data providers.

Give it a try: http://www.seomoz.org/linkscape

There are 54 billion URLs, in contrast Majestic SEO has 1 trillion.

A good set of link building tools is essential. From the tools you will get insight into competition, find out good sources to get links from, and compare your link profile to other websites. We already reviewed Majestic SEO, which is a must have in your arsenal, lets look further.

SEO Toolbar

SEO Toolbar combines new toolbar from SEO book, and 2 other tools, SEO for Firefox and Rank Checker. SEO for Firefox combines useful information such as the toolbar pagerank, number of incoming links according to Yahoo, number of .edu and .gov links (according to Yahoo as well), whois info, DMOZ listing, Yahoo directory listing and more.

The toolbar itself provides wealth of info as well for each page you are visiting. In an instant see incoming links to page / domain (yahoo, majestic), view archive.org, highlight keywords and more.

http://tools.seobook.com/seo-toolbar/

Link Diagnosis

Link diagnosis is a web based firefox plugin tool, that tries to filter out the most authoritative links for a website. It provides the most widely used anchor texts, and tries to create a list of the most popular pages on the domain.

My personal experience with this tool is below satisfactory, since the number of results was so limited, I would have been greatly misled if I trusted it. For a website with almost 1.5 million links, the tool only showed 35! How in the world. Maybe you will have a better experience. Give it a try.

http://www.linkdiagnosis.com/

Xenu Link Sleuth

Link Sleuth is all about internal link analysis. This tool acts as a search engine, checks your website for broken links, and shows all the data in an accessible format. It will give you an idea of all internal incoming links to all your pages, as well as the anchor texts and titles. If an important page is located deep inside and only has one internal reference, then you know that you did something wrong.

It also shows 404s, and links that point to the dead 404 pages. Also use link sleuth to run reports on the site from you which you want to get links from. If you see dead links, it can be an opening for you.

http://home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html

I would like to start with the best and coolest link analysis tool available to anybody – Majestic SEO. Started as a project for an community build search engine, it has transformed into link analysis tool to support the cause and make some money. Majestic SEO is the second company after Google to publicly announce discovery of 1 trillion pages on the web.

From their website:

Index stats:

With this tool you can find links that point to any domain, be it you or your competition. Majestic SEO is free for your own domain. All you have to do is verify it, similarly to Google Webmaster tools. It’s great way to test the product. Once you try it you will fall in love with it, as there’s no better tool for link analysis than majestic SEO. One of the pitfalls of Majestic – it has so much information in can confuse the life out of you.

• Filter by anchor text or most popular pages (the ones that have the most links).
• Show all links pointing to a domain filtered by TLD (.ca; co.uk; .au; .ru; etc), or even filter by country.
• Show all links to any domain sorted by C-class IP address. Having different C-class IP addresses is essential. If you take analogy of neighborhoods, cities, states, and countries, C-class address is the city, and if all the links come from one city (same C class address), it may look suspicious to the algorithm.
• Show image links, nofollow links, redirects, links in frames and more.

Another great feature of Majestic SEO is link domain history tool, which will show you visual link discovery for up to five websites. The tool is extremely useful to keep track of spikes in your link building efforts, but more importantly to keep an eye on competition. Spy on where they get the links, how often and in what quantities. Obviously data differs from Google, and you will see links as Majestic SEO discovers them, not Google. Nevertheless, this is the best thing we have for now.

Having established some of the pages that rank for good keywords somewhere in search results (does not have to be first page), it is time to heavily target them. Select pages that are going to go after those words, and put keywords in the title. Tweak H1, H2, H3 titles with different instances and variations of the keyword. Put the keyword (or a set of keywords related to main targeted one) in the content. Put links from internal pages the with targeted anchor text to that page.

Do this for all of the pages on your website, including a homepage. Once done, it is a waiting game for Google to spider all the changes (internal pages take longer then index), and then put them into the index. You might want to start with the linking efforts right away, and apply approximate number of links to each page, for each of the keywords, or you can wait to see the actual changes on search results.

If you do choose to proceed with link building right away, then use the following as a benchmark:

• the more competitive a keyword is, the more links you will need for it.
• the higher your page is in search results for a particular keyword, the less links you will need for it

Correlate those 2 together and map out your link strategy. It may look something like this:

There is no need to be precise here, since this is the first set of the lins, it will help you get a feel of how things move, which keywords are easy, and which ones will need more effort. Place linka as planned for each of keywords, to targeted pages, and wait for results. Once results kick in, check where you are for each of the keywords, and record to keep a log of the progress.

I was going through Seth’s blog today, and found a post titled Trolls. Here it is

Lots of things about work are hard. Dealing with trolls is one of them. Trolls are critics who gain perverse pleasure in relentlessly tearing you and your ideas down. Here’s the thing(s):

1. trolls will always be trolling

4. professionals (that’s you) get paid to ignore them. It’s part of your job.

“Can’t please everyone,” isn’t just an aphorism, it’s the secret of being remarkable.

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2009/10/trolls.html

Trolls are extremely hard to communicate with, can suck the soul out of you, and kill ambition. In order to spot and avoid one, you have to have known a troll. The experience will simply cue you into the patterns, and let you detect a troll. Sometime it can be harder, since some of the trolls do not start their trolling until verifying that the territory is safe for their wrong doings, after which they show their true nature. Having to work with them, or worse have them as a friend, or even worse as a soul mate is extremely bad for your energy and ambitions. After knowing several trolls I’ve realized if you ever get into circumstance where you see one on daily basis (or almost), it is best to keep all of your dreams, plans and ambitions to yourself, and only share them with closest people who you trust. When the time is right, let the troll go.

In the professional environment things are different, and I cannot say how they are.

In the book Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill (which applies not only to money but to everything else), states that you must completely surround yourself with harmonious people, and do things that bring you joy as much as possible. Obviously, sometimes you have to do what have to do, but if you got a few spare hours, don’t waste them watching TV or YouTube. Do something you really enjoy. Going back to the Trolls, you have to separate yourself from them and completely shut off your mind, so their negativity and blood sucking activity does not impact you.

PS

Add Seth to your read. His posts are insightful, inspiring and come from the heart.

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/

Links are currency of the web. Links get exchanged, get asked for, earned and bought with money. Webmasters are willing to spend hours of their time getting links with the right anchor text, from different websites, which in turn gets higher rankings, more traffic and more money.

The relationship between money and links is somewhat mysterious to a new comer but it becomes clear. Money gets links, and links get money. Links get money in several ways:

• You sell links and get paid for it
• You get links, improve rankings, get more traffic and get more money
• You build links with different methods and get paid for it.

So working with currency of the web keep 2 important things in mind: 1. you get what you pay for; 2. you must have leverage to get the best types of links.

You get what you pay for is straight forward, the more money you put into it, the better quality links you get (whatever it is you put money into).

Let me explain the leverage.

Eric from Wiep.net did a nice comparison. Getting links is like getting laid. Imagine walking into a club, and standing at the bar. All of a sudden all other guys start talking about you – you’re getting links. Girls get curious: “who is this guy” and its way easier to get laid, since now you have “links” from other guys, which makes girls curious.

In order to make other guys talk about you, you have to have leverage. Why should they talk about you? If you’re another average joe (another average site), why will they talk about you? No reason. The reason for someone to talk about you, which in turn gets you links, is the leverage I am talking about. It something you can use, if not instantly make other link, but ask them more successfully to do so.

Once you have that, its way easier to succeed on search. But it costs time, money and ideas to get it.

So work starts from the site first.