Archive for the ‘Link Building’ Category
Tuesday, September 16th, 2008 |
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While site stumbling today I came across a web page that offered fun 30 second diversion, that is what StumbleUpon is for, by the way.
The page was titled: How Long Could You Survive Chained to a Bunk Bed with a Velociraptor? Silly? Yes. Smart? Even more so. After I took the test (I could survive 60 seconds, btw), and I looked at the URL, I could see it was a site promoting bunk beds and is selling advertising for kids’ furniture.
To my point, I was very impressed with the creativity of the page and applaud BunkBeds.net for a great linkbait idea. Imaginative, fun, viral and themed well for the target audience of children. So, take a visit and see how you would do against a Raptor and even more important let this be a good example in creative link building.
Posted in Link Building, SEO Strategies | 16 Comments »
Thursday, September 11th, 2008 |
Ever Googled your name and wished you where in the top search results? Ever wondered what people see when they Google you? Considering the fact that the second most popular search criterion on the web is searching for a person’s professional background (Pew Internet American Life Project) – it may get some people thinking that it’s time to create a web presence for themselves.
It doesn’t take long to conclude that creating a web presence for yourself is something of necessity to ensure your professional growth, your business success, and taking action to represent yourself accurately on the web. The challenge is to find something unique and innovative the tackles all of the following issues:
• You want people to find you when they search your name on the web
• You want to manage the information people see about you
• You want to create a strong and professional online presence for your name
The people at LookupPage came out with the idea of developing an easy-to-use tool for people to create, enhance and manage their online presence. LookupPage is not a social network like LinkedIn, and focuses on getting your name on Google. Using the following simple rules, they are usually able to present better results than others for your name search:
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Posted in Link Building, SEO Strategies, Social Media Optimization | 14 Comments »
Thursday, September 4th, 2008 |
Many of you may know about LinkedIn. If you don’t, then let me enlighten. Linkedin is a social networking site that targets business professionals. It is helpful in setting up relationships for business opportunities and partnerships. It also has a more social aspect that is gaining in popularity. You can read more about LinkedIn here: What is LinkedIn?
And while the business networking aspect is great, I’m writing to tell you it can be useful for your SEO efforts too, specifically link building. You may not know this, but LinkedIn does not employ the nofollow attribute on its links, like most other social networking sites. So that means we can use LinkedIn responsibly to build some nice one-way links to our sites and blogs. Even better your employees can use this to build some SEO-friendly links to your company site.
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Posted in Link Building, SEO Tools, Social Media Optimization | 31 Comments »
Tuesday, September 2nd, 2008 |
It’s faddish these days to walk around saying, “Directory links are worthless,” or “Directory links aren’t that effective for SEO anymore.” I don’t know where the people who seeded this myth (or the parrots who repeat it in lockstep) came from, but I know how to make them flip their opinion straight away. By using logic.
Recently a colleague of mine was looking at a client’s backlinks in Google webmaster tools and noticed that about 20 of them were coming from a single directory submission to directory name removed to preserve its effectiveness*. I had included about 20 tags when I did the directory submission, and Google had indexed and cached each page that was created in the directory via tagging. The fact that Google spiders this directory often and felt it was important enough to show as 20 backlinks to a site in webmaster tools would indicate to a rational person that Google trusts this directory a great deal.
Yet there are still people who like to make the generalization that directory link building is dead. Why? Well, the generalization seemed to begin after it became clear that Google was on a crusade to torture directories that sold links. When Google feels like it, it will go to a random directory that sells links, knock down its PageRank, decache half its pages, and make sure it doesn’t rank for its own name.
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Posted in Link Building, Search Engine Optimization | 16 Comments »
Thursday, August 28th, 2008 |
Okay, I fully admit I got this from Search Engine Journal. It was written by Loren Baker, Editor. So be sure to read the original list there with full content. Thank you, Loren.
I put the list I here so I would always know where to find it, since it is our company blog. I did abbreviate the content and I plan on adding more. I hope if any readers find better blog directories, that are particularly excellent, they will add them by commenting below. If they are really good I’ll add them to this list officially.
- Best of the Web Blog Search La Crem de la Crem, Best of the Web’s Blog Directory is very selective and only lists aged and valuable blogs.
- EatonWeb Blog Directory is a real jewel with many aged inbound links and a blog rating system.
- Blog Hub offers a drop down category and member blog list.
- Upon visiting Bloggernity, you find a crisp, clean, and easy to navigate site.
- Blogarama has an impressive listing of over 65,000 blogs.
- Blog Search Engine is owned by Performancing’s parent company and serves search results powered by IceRocket.
- Blog Catalog features a vast directory of categories, from academic to writing, while offering the ability to search by country, language, or user.
- Globe of Blogs has too many features to list. In order to be listed on the site, the blog must not be commercial.
- Blog Universe is the perfect place to promote your video or podcast themed blog.
- Bigger Blogs is a relatively new blog directory with only a few blogs registered. The blog is intertwined with a business directory.
- Bloggeries has the best categories and subcategories home page on the internet
- Bloggapedia has an interesting and eye catching homepage.
- Spillbean is a well-designed blog directory site with categories such as health, society, internet, and personal.
- Blogging Fusion is a blog with over sixty categories.
- Blogflux is not only a tool for bloggers, but a directory that has the listings in alphabetic order.
- Bloglisting are fun, colourful, and catch the attention of the reader.
- Blogio may be a small blog directory with few listings, but it worthy of a submission.
- Blog Explosion claims to be the largest blog promoter on the internet.
- Super Blog Directory is a great site that offers tools to posters that others do not.
Posted in Blogging, Link Building, SEO Tools | 9 Comments »
Wednesday, August 27th, 2008 |
We’ve all met that person (or, maybe, we’re secretly guilty of being this person). You know the person — the one who won’t share.
Yup, there, I said it, I’m on to all of you people. Didn’t you learn anything in kindergarten? Seriously, share and share alike. How do you expect to make friends when you never share anything?
By this point, you’re probably wondering, “That’s fine and all, but what does this have to do with linking out to other people’s websites?”
Let me put it very simply — do it. Don’t be afraid to share, put that link out there.
Linking Out Excuse 1: If I Link Out, People Won’t Stay on My Site
Here’s the thing about the Internet, it’s designed (on purpose, mind you) as a way of sharing knowledge. If you’re writing about something and happen to know a reputable resource on the subject, link to it!
This will have various added benefits for you. Your users will think, “Wow, this person is providing a great resource, I’ll come back to them in the future because they’ve really helped me out.” Honestly, do you remember the Boston Tea Party because of the book you read it in, or do you remember it because of your 7th grade teacher who pointed you to the book?
Linking out also tells Google the neighborhood where your site lives. When you’re connected to a bunch of authority sites on fishing through outbound links, and you’re a fishing site, it’ll make sense for Google to rank you higher for fishing. Why? Easy, you’re all in the same neighborhood of fishing authority sites! When you link to other authority sites, it makes Google and the other search engines perceive you as an authority site.
And, seriously now, if you never put an outbound link on your site because you think it’ll keep people on your site, do you really think they don’t know how to work the back button? Or, know how to look for a more authoritative site than yours?
Linking Out Excuse 2: Linking Out Will Lose Link Juice
Alright, let’s ignore the whole neighborhood and authority site status (really, that should be enough to stop you from being scared to link out). Now you’re worried about your link juice. Rightly so, I mean, if PageRank flows from page to page via links, when you link out, it’ll spill onto someone else’s page right?
Here’s the deal: yeah, some of your link juice will flow over there, but that’s not the whole story. When a website gets a link to it, the webmaster will notice. This person will then come over to your site and check you out. If you get a link from a site, you check out the site linking to you, right?
This is the point of SEO, getting people to your site because you have great information. By linking out you have successfully had one more person check out your site! However, the story doesn’t stop there. The webmaster comes to your site, sees that you have a lot of great information and then they might just link over to you themselves, from a post they wrote about a great site they found! Now you’re an authority for them!
Link Out and Reap the Rewards
Remember this when you’re linking out — who you link out to matters! Link out to high quality sites that are relevant to yours. Since you control the outbound links, if you link to trash, your users won’t like it and the search engines won’t like it. Though, when you know of a great site, and have found a great resource, link to it and get ready for the benefits!
Don’t want to take my word for it? Well then, check out what the experts are saying on linking out for yourself!
Posted in Link Building, SEO Mistakes, SEO Strategies | 9 Comments »
Thursday, May 8th, 2008 |
This SEO question is from Joel Cohen, RestaurantMarketing.com
SEO Question:
If I have a furniture store website in a first page position on Google for “home furniture Houston” and I decide to do a separate website for my “kids furniture division” and it gets a top position for “kids furniture Houston” and I do two more separate sites for (example) outdoor furniture and recreation room furniture and they all get top positions on Google, AND they all link to each other, does Google discourage this? It’s like building my own linking network.
SEO Answer:
This sounds like a sound business practice. Too often in the Internet world we base on decisions on what Google would want. Google, in fact, says to market your site as if the search engines weren’t involved. Straight from Google’s Guidelines, “Does this help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn’t exist?” I personally would say this is a solid idea and focusing on product lines on each website can be a seen as a clever business decision. Interlinkng between them is would also be encouraged. Why would it be considered bad to link to your similar themed sites? If you owned more than one brick and mortar store you would certainly point visitors to it, so why should the web be any different.
You should make sure you don’t have duplicate content on your sites. If you are going to break out your outdoor furniture from your “main” furniture site, be sure you aren’t showing the same products with the same descriptions. Interlinking should be done strategically and with an eye towards marketing. Just don’t place a link in the footer, create a page that talks about the other site and its line of products and place multiple links to the other site. You want to drive targeted traffic that is well-informed of its link destination.
In summary, creating topically focused product sites isn’t a bad thing, it is a business decision that should be thought out. There will be more work and stores to admin, of course and cross-site linking won’t encourage visitors to view other related products as much as everything being on the same site. Pros and cons to each, as with most things in life. Just don’t let Google control your business decisions, after all, controlling the search results is enough power, don’t you agree?
If you have a question you would like us to answer, please send to contact[at]bigoakinc.com.
Due to time constraints and the fact we run an SEO business we may not answer all questions.
Posted in Google, Link Building, SEO Questions & Answers | 17 Comments »
Monday, May 5th, 2008 |
This month’s Ranked Hard, SEO Comic deals with the touchy subject of overseas outsourcing in the SEO industry with a humorous twist of course. Take a look at Outsourcing Reservations, leave some feedback and laugh a little.
Posted in Link Building, Ranked Hard - SEO Comic | 2 Comments »
Tuesday, April 29th, 2008 |
Even though Wikipedia added nofollow tags in early 2007, backlinks you manage to snag there will still help you from an SEO standpoint. Why? One simple reason: content scrapers. Wikipedia is believed to be the most heavily scraped site in the history of the Internet.
Let’s take this example. Say you were able to secure an external link on the Wikipedia page about cats, here. Congratulations. You just snagged a dofollow link on a PR 4 page, here. Answers.com is one of the many legitimate sites that scrapes content from Wikipedia, and it’s an authority one at that. They were nice enough to keep the content they scrape from Wikipedia dofollow. So how many backlinks will you pick up in the future from that one Wikipedia link? Too many to list, provided your link stays on Wikipedia for any length of time.
If you’re paranoid that having your link appear on a black hat scraper site will hurt you from an SEO standpoint, don’t be. The odds are against that happening in this situation. Google should be able to figure out that the only reason your link was involved with a bad neighborhood was because it appeared in content scraped from Wikipedia.
The other common opinion is that if you manage to pickup an external link on a popular or semi-popular Wikipedia page, many people will see your link and naturally create backlinks to it. Wikipedia pages do tend to get loads of Google traffic. This isn’t April 2007, so Wikipedia doesn’t rank number 1 for everything anymore, but I’m sure you’ve noticed it’s still fairly popular in the Google SERPS. And by “fairly” I mean “extraordinarily.” I’m digressing, but Wikipedia is the classic example of a site who’s success was truly driven off the back of Google. In fact, I would venture to say that if it wasn’t for Google, Wikipedia never would have entered into the mainstream.
Back on topic, finding sites that scrape Wikipedia is easy. Infinitely harder is getting external links to stick on Wikipedia. Here are two methods:
- Fill in missing citation gaps. Wikipedia will occasionally have sentences with a “citation needed” link after them. Create content on your site that revolves around that missing citation. If its quality is high enough, Wikipedia may let that pass as the citation.
- Manufacture a Wikipedia page that has high relevancy to an existing page. Link to that new page from an existing Wikipedia page. Add an external link to the new page as a reference. This has a higher probability of sticking since the page is fresh and needs sources.
Don’t let the fact that Wikipedia added nofollow tags stop you from using it in your link building endeavors.
Posted in Link Building, Search Engine Optimization, SEO Strategies | 38 Comments »
Wednesday, April 23rd, 2008 |
When it comes to SEO, many small to medium players can get discouraged by the bigger players. They have more resources, so why should the smaller businesses even put forth the effort with SEO? Simple – because they can actually compete with the larger companies. Here’s why.
Brand Recognition
One thing to remember is that the big guys have resources, but because of that they often focus on the more traditional avenues for gaining traffic to their sites and stores. Take the diamond engagement ring business for instance. While any number of us can probably name a dozen national chains off the top of our heads (DeBeers, Zales, Kay Jewelers, and Jared to name a few), not a single one of them shows up in the top 50 for the term “diamond engagement rings”. In fact, only Kay is in the top 100 and Jared isn’t in the top 500. Why? Because they don’t have to be thanks to brand recognition. How does this help you?
Because they rely so much on brand recognition, most of your larger companies never bother to engage in SEO. For example, the #5 result for “diamond engagement rings” is Danforth Diamond, who’s home page title has the words “diamond engagement rings” in it, where as Jared and Zales both have only their company name in the title. Probably why Danforth Diamond is ranked #5 and Jared and Zales are both outside the top 50.
Red Tape
When it comes to writing copy for your website, you usually have one, maybe two writers, and yourself to answer to. When a big corporation decides to write copy for their website, they have to have one of their writers come up with copy that is SEO friendly, then that copy has to be worked over by the marketing people to make sure it works with the brand message, then it has to go to the legal department to make sure that they aren’t making any claims that can’t be substantiated, then it can go back to the writers for more edits, then back to…well I think you get the picture.
Smaller companies have the advantage of not having to deal with the same red tape that larger corporations do when deciding to make changes to their website. While you only answer to yourself, larger companies have to answer to their CEO’s, board of advisors, stockholders, and anybody else that has a corner office with a view.
Site Maintenance
SEO takes work, especially on your website. Between changing titles, adding products, adding content, installing a shopping cart, there’s a lot going on with your website. While smaller companies can handle having systems that are SEO friendly and perhaps take a little longer to make changes on, larger companies need changes made over night, and that typically means a content management system (CMS) that is less than SEO friendly.
Because the larger companies use CMS that aren’t SEO friendly, many of them don’t bother engaging in SEO and instead rely on brand awareness (which I mentioned earlier) to help drive traffic to their sites. Going hand in hand with this is the fact that since the larger companies don’t engage in SEO, when you do find them you’ll find their home page and have to search through their site for what you’re looking for, whereas with smaller sites you can have focus on internal pages to take customer to exactly what they’re looking for. This helps conversion rates, which ultimately means more profits for the little guy.
Reporting to Everybody
As I mentioned when talking about red tape, larger companies aren’t just answering to themselves. Zales might do a lot of business, but they have to report to their shareholders, board of trustees, and everybody else. When the little jewelry store down the street has a good quarter, the only person they’re answering to is themselves.
Because of having to answer to shareholders, larger companies need to be able to quantify their numbers into something that is easily understood, and that usually means time, energy, and resources channeled into producing these reports, as well as a system in place on the website that can easily produce the numbers needed. Those systems are often not SEO friendly. So while Zales might be able to tell their shareholders how much money they sold in the 3rd quarter of 2005, the small jewelry store down the street can figure out how much money they made, how many of each product they sold, and still rank in the top 10 for their big keywords.
Keep on Fighting
Sure, it can be discouraging to look at big companies and the money they can spend, but in this digital age with more and more people finding the products and services they want online through search engines, smaller companies can compete with larger ones through quality SEO and user-friendly websites. With a little work your company can get more internet exposure than those that spend millions of dollars on commercials, radio spots, and billboards. That’s the beauty of quality SEO.
Posted in Link Building, Search Engine Optimization, SEO Strategies | 11 Comments »
Wednesday, February 27th, 2008 |
Many were enraged last week when Flickr added nofollow tags to comments and picture captions. Why people would be enraged is beyond me because even my dead pet octopus could have predicted that Flickr’s sad fate was rapidly approaching. And the more that SEO’s kept blogging about how great Flickr was as an SEO tool, the faster the digits on the time bomb moved.
So the days of parsing links onto high PageRank Flickr pages are over. Or are they? No. Let’s examine why in list form. Let’s examine how you can use the remaining scraps of link juice from Flickr in your SEO campaigns.
1.) Flickr has not added nofollow to discussion boards. For those of you who liked to scout out high PageRank pages and just drop your link as a comment to the photo, which could be accomplished easily if you owned a link-laundering website, you can still do this in the Flickr group discussion boards. Flickr has not yet added nofollow tags to those, and given the preponderance of discussions that revolve around people sharing photos, you can just as easily drop relevant external links in the discussion and reap link juice benefits.
2.) Flickr has not added nofollow to personal profile pages. If you have a personal profile page, you can place targeted anchor text on it, point links at it, and receive full SEO benefit as it gains PageRank.
3.) Flickr has not added nofollow to group pages. If you own a Flickr group, you can still put as many links as you wish on the main group page without fear of them being turned into nofollow.
Many Flickr personal profile and group pages gain toolbar PR just by having the link spread around in-house, so it’s not that hard to make those pages accumulate PR. Google seems to be very generous in that regard. There’s a lot of PR to be passed around through Flickr apparently.
So, the glory days of Flickr SEO may be over (unless Yahoo does the improbable and flips the switch back), but Rome didn’t burn to rubble in a day, so we might as well make the most of Flickr before it completely collapses.
Posted in Link Building, SEO Strategies, Social Media Optimization | 25 Comments »
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