Big Oak SEO Blog » Deep Linking

Use LinkedIn for Link Building

Shell Harris — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 16:24:25 +0000

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.

Lets look at the easy steps to do this.

1. Of course the first step is to get a LinkedIn account, if you don’t have one already join today.

2. Go to your profile page and click the link at the top right, “Edit Public Profile Settings”.

3. You can edit “Your Public Profile URL” and choose either your name or your company name. I used my name. Company owners may be better off using the company name for branding purposes. Some of you more SEO-minded people can use keywords in your URL, but I don’t believe spamming your url with keywords is the best option. When you have decided, set the address.

4.Choose “Full View recommended” as your option so search engines can see your links.

5. Be sure to check the “Websites” check box so they are showing on your public profile. You don’t want to hide from the search engine spiders. If you don’t have any sites, go add them (see step 6)

6. Add your websites, if you haven’t already. Be sure to use descriptive keywords in your link text. LinkedIn will give you the default text of “My Website” and “My Blog”, but I’m betting you can do better. I used SEO Company and SEO Blog. And try use all three website options, deep link to one site if you don’t have three sites. Be sure to choose “Other” when editing the website or you can’t enter your custom text.

7. To make these links have more authority, you will need to link to your public profile page. Put it on your own site, on your blog, in your comments on other blogs and so forth. Oh, and of course make connections with LinkedIn.Tthat is why you joined, right?

You have just created up to three one-way links on a high-ranking, high-authority site…for free.

Feel free to request a connection with me at http://www.linkedin.com/in/shellharris. My email is shell [@] bigoakinc.com.

Squidoo for Traffic – Link Building

Shell Harris — Sun, 12 Aug 2007 22:19:53 +0000

Update October 29, 2007: Well, after a brief few months my first Squidoo pages have achieved PR values of 5 and 4. My Jean Grey Squidoo Lens is a PR5. So as a high PR link building service Squidoo works quite well.

As an search engine optimization consultant I sometimes have a hard time deciding what is the best use of my time. Research, link building, writing or what have you. Well, this week I did more research than usual and found a site that I had heard about, but had yet to fully explore: Squidoo. What is Squidoo? Well, to put it simply, it is a collection of web pages that users can build on any topic, and I mean any topic that you can imagine. And if you can’t find it, you can create a new page on Squidoo yourself. Squidoo says you can do it in under 5 minutes, but you’ll want to take longer to build a respectable page, or “lens” as they call it.Once you do you can add modules that let you make money from affiliate sales to online stores such as Amazon and Overstock. I don’t know how much of a money making opportunity it is and I would dare say you can’t make a lot of money with Squidoo, but it did give me some ideas on how to use it for SEO purposes. As a business owner and website owner, you can use Squidoo for two important tasks to help your website: link building and visitor traffic.Testing SquidooI decided to test this out and I built two lenses for fun. I like smoothies, so I tried my hand at creating a smoothie drink lens to support my personal smoothie recipe blog. It was simple to build and I followed the advice for getting the word out and then spent the next 4 days investing a few spare moments here and there, adding new content and pulling information from my smoothie recipe blog and now I have a fairly large lens, compared to most. As of today (8/12/2007) there were over 213,000 lenses on Squidoo. My smoothie lens was ranked #132 and at times has been as high as 128 with less than 8 hours of work total over one week. The second lens is for a favorite comic book character, Jean Grey (Phoenix) from the X-men and has done for pure entertainment and even that has achieved a rank as high as #376. The lenses were fun to build and I enjoyed both immensely.

Getting Traffic from Squidoo

Okay, big deal on my “success” within Squidoo, it hasn’t earned a single cent yet and might not ever. I have many links on my smoothie lens pointing to my smoothie blog and the good news is that these links have driven more traffic to my smoothie blog in the last week than all other incoming site traffic combined. The reason it has been successful is the fact that the Squidoo lens I created is already showing up in the search results, after less than a week, for terms related to smoothie recipes. (See results.) So it is driving traffic to my smoothie blog and could be doing the same for your business. If you sell toys you may want to create a Squidoo lens one of your products like yo-yos. The idea is to create a lens about something specific so your lens can rank for it and then link to your site. Which brings me to my other reason for creating a lens. My SEO heart practically skips a beat.

Link Building with Squidoo

As any SEO company can tell you, link building is the most time-consuming and hardest part of our jobs. Everything come down to link building. That is what increases your rankings, helps people find you and so forth. If you have an SEO company working for you now and they aren’t putting forth a majority of their time finding and placing links for you, it is time to move on. With Squidoo you get an awesome link building resource where you control the anchor text in the link, where the link points to, where it lives on the page and what is written around it. It also comes from a high PR site. It is almost the exact definition of my idea of the perfect link. If you look at my smoothie lens you can see dozens of links pointing to my smoothie blog. And not links just to the homepage, but deep linking to internal pages which are important links very difficult to get usually. Well, with Squidoo you can make many deep links which will help your site’s search engine visibility and increase rankings to those deep pages. One-way, keyword-rich, high-quality links are all made easy with Squidoo. If you spend a little time with your lens you may soon see it increase to a PR 4 or PR 5 webpage on its own and we know how hard PR 4 and 5 links can be to get on our own.

Google & Squidoo

Of course, with all good things there come people who look to ruin it by misuse. Well, the same can be said of Squidoo. Many spammers have tried and are trying to create a glut of spammy pages on Squidoo for the purposes of SEO. Google saw this and minimized the importance of Squidoo but in return Squidoo has made spamming harder and set the bar higher for a Squidoo lens in hopes of getting more quality lenses. It looks as though Squidoo may have weathered the fury of Google and for the time I would recommend highly creating a quality Squidoo lens to help your own site. Heck, create more than one if you need it, but be good stewards if you do and create lenses that have weight of their own and are not a pure marketing ploy. Those lenses will be the most effective in the long run and help Squidoo remain a useful tool in your marketing tool belt.

Final Thoughts on Squidoo

Give it a try, it will only take an hour or so, despite the 5 minute promise from Squidoo, and then see what you think. We will be including it as part of our work for our clients, as we do with all new strategies that can help. Of course, Google could decide they don’t appreciate the work being done by Squidoo members, Squidoo could decide to make all links not SEO-friendly (nofollow or redirects) or any number of SEO killing decisions, but until then I personally think it is a good use of a few hours.

YouTube Video about Squidoo Marketing

You can find many videos on how to use Squidoo and here is one of the better ones I watched. If the video isn’t playing, you can go right to youtube.com and watch the video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HiR5BIX-_RQ

SEO for Interior Webpages – SEO Tip Week 20

Shell Harris — Fri, 18 May 2007 18:45:15 +0000

Most websites focus on their home page which is of course a good idea. It is the most important page of your site whether you are looking at search engine optimization, internet marketing or customer conversion. Making sure you homepage is optimized and marketed should be of primary importance, but be sure not to forget your interior pages.

Often the arm chair optimizer will make the mistake of only trying to rank their home age. By this I mean they will only build links to the home page or make sure it is titled with the most important keywords and so on. And while the home page should get the most SEO love, it is also important to your online marketing success that you show your interior pages some SEO attention. Do you interior pages that aren’t ranking well, but should be? Not every keyword can be crammed on to your home page, although I’ve seen it attempted. A car dealer has tried this approach.

Supporting the Home Page

While marketing the home page is a monthly focus for us here at Big Oak, we are also aware of the power interior pages have for converting visitors into clients. We think of the home page as a lobby that helps direct you to the page that will provide the information or product you are searching for. If we can skip the lobby altogether and get the user directly to the page that would be better. That is unlikely to happen without providing deep linking to your interior pages.

Marketing Interior Pages

I like providing examples so here are some real world examples from our own clients. Our client ExhibitDeal provides trade show displays and accessories. Their number #1 term is “trade show displays” and as of today May 18, 2007 they are ranked #1 in Google (Trade Show Displays Ranking). They also rank #1 in Google for the term “trade show flooring (Trade Show Flooring Ranking Screen Shot). If you click the links to view the screen shots you will notice the #1 ranking for trade show flooring is an interior page of ExhibitDeal.

Trying to rank the home page for trade show flooring would have been impossible. So we marketing both keyword phrases for their respective pages and achieved high ranking rankings for both. Currently the trade show flooring page has 89 backlinks according to Yahoo. Not an extremely large amount but decent amount when a targeted strategy is applied to a single interior page. Of course it helps that the site has 4,374 links overall, but only 3,009 links are pointing to the home page.

Obviously it works for ExhibiDeal. Leading searchers to a page about trade show flooring when the search matches will increase sales.

Choosing Interior Pages for SEO

Decide on a a few interior pages that can help your conversion efforts. If placing a user directly on an interior page, bypassing the home page, would help the sale or get them calling wouldn’t you want that? After you have decided which pages might help your business if they ranked well, maybe 2 or 3, start optimizing them and then start link building.

Providing deep linking to these pages will allow your site to have increased value overall and not just on your home page and the search engines like to see a site with popularity throughout on just on the home page. This can increase you authority and your ranking for your entire site.

Sound link a lot of work? It can be, but the rewards will be a website with much higher search engine visibility. If you need help, Big Oak SEO is available.

Deep Linking – SEO Tip Week 4

Shell Harris — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 07:37:29 +0000

While linking is key to success in the SEO game, deep linking is what will set you apart from your competitors.

Be sure to acquire links to all your important pages, not just your home page. It looks odd to the search engines when they notice so many links all pointing to your home page – it isn’t natural. Besides you want visitors coming to the page that will most likely convert them from a visitor to a customer and usually the home page isn’t the best page to accomplish this.
You will have the added benefit of having two pages show in the rankings which always attracts more attention and aids your click through rates. Here is an example. Notice how Big Oak is the shown in the first two listings and the indented listing is more targeted on the search term “seo richmond”. Here is a screen shot in case the link no longer shows the same results.

Deep linking also alerts the search engines to the fact that you probably have good, targeted content if people are linking to your interior or sub-pages. It gives your site a vote of confidence to the search engines to have links pointing throughout your site. If all your links come to your home page it might give the impression your site has little value or its rankings are being inflated unnaturally.
While it is tempting to concentrate links to your home page, you will have many more visitors if you spread the links around. Linking to sub-pages will help those pages rank well, giving your visitors a better chance on finding what they were looking for with one click.

Find a new SEO Tip Every Friday.

Deep Linking and Hosted Marketing Pages

Shell Harris — Fri, 10 Nov 2006 17:00:07 +0000

What a great idea, and one that we have been trying out ourselves. Creating entire pages to swap links in and supplying content to other sites to link to you are wonderful ideas. As link marketing becomes more competitive we shall see how things change in the SEO world.

The problem with Search Engine Optimization is that every body does it. Whenever a new technique gets into the public domain, it soon becomes overused. As the SE industry is itself becomes more and more competitive, increasing the pressure to deliver relevant, quality results, the search engines quickly devalue it for their algorithms, in order to maintain the credibility and usability of their search results.

Linking is a case in point. A central factor to “relevancy”, inward/outward links contribute significant weight to page rank and overall search ranking. However, as linking is now both hackneyed and abused, the SE’s are damping or reducing the weighting attached to certain types of links. As they become more sophisticated, the SE’s are able to differentiate between links for their relevance both to the page they are on and the page they point to.

This has in turn led to a renewed emphasis on quality content – useful, unique, timely, fresh – and links that fit into this new paradigm are given more weighting than those that don’t. Not only are link farms out, but links on so-called resource pages, even when properly categorized and sparingly placed (not more than 100 per page) are being penalized. The SE’s, unable to fully differentiate between organic link building, and software-enabled, cookie-cutter link spamming have tweaked their algorithms to consider the context in which the link is placed. The factors being considered are:

The number of links on a single page – for “quality links” not more than 5.
The link to text ratio – the fewer links per quantity of text, the higher the link quality.
The link relevance – both to the content of the page the link is hosted on, and the page it points to.
The keyword focus – this should be as narrow as possible both to channel maximum ranking weight to the links, as well make for a readable, useful page.

This brings up the meat of the issue. In order to benefit from inbound links, it is becoming necessary to alter the way in which they are obtained and placed. Two alternative methods are coming into vogue, and now is the time to take advantage of them before everyone gets on to the bandwagon.

One of them is a variation on the reciprocal linking theme – “Deep Linking”; the other is a form of article syndication – “Hosted Marketing Pages”.

Deep Linking

Deep linking is where you as Webmaster, link to another site directly from an article or relevant webpage, rather than from a typical link
directory or “resource page”. You then request a reciprocal link in exchange, back to that specific page, or any other that you nominate, specifying your required anchor text.

To give effect to this strategy, carefully peruse the targeted sites, and establish the pages to which you would like a reciprocating link. They should be relevant and complementary to your own page. If necessary, compose new articles/pages just for this purpose, but many site owners will have in archive many pages/articles that can be dusted off and re-used.

This strategy will have the following benefits:

Improves the chances of a successful link swap because you are not hiding the reciprocating link in a rarely visited “resources page”.
As a variation on the general link-swapping theme, it proves that you indeed have carefully assessed the target site for right fit with your own, getting the reciprocating Webmaster more eager to link with you. You are then much more likely to get a positive response to your link request.
Allows you some influence on where and how your own link will be placed, unlike in traditional link exchange, because you will have “optimized” the reciprocating link favorably to the linking partner, and established on which specific pages you want a link from, and the anchor text for the link.
Ironically, because you can reduce the number of links on your traditional links page by moving many of them to your deeply linked article pages, it boosts the link popularity of the remaining links. This increases the value, and credibility of these links as honest recommendations from you, generating traffic from them to the link partners.
This type of link is much more targeted, as it is directly relevant both to the page it is displayed on, and the one it points to. Properly optimized the traffic it obtains will be predisposed to the subject matter, enhancing site conversion for both linking partners.
You are able to build page rank for pages other than your index page.

Hosted Marketing Pages

Hosted Marketing Pages are nothing new in and of themselves. Essentially they are highly optimized articles on specific topics that contain equally optimized links pointing back to the relevant page on your own site. They may contain sales material for your own products and services, or they may be of a more general nature.

What is new is that you apply to have these pages/articles hosted on another, highly ranked web site, in return for a fee. This is essentially Search Engine-friendly text-link. It is SE-friendly because the links are contained in a highly optimized and relevant page, and therefore get around the link damping that search engines are currently engaged in, due to link purchasing.

The following benefits accrue to you:

Such pages/articles will serve as a magnet for targeted traffic pre-qualified traffic, as they are optimized for your keywords. They thus serve to boost your site conversion ratios.
Since the links they contain are also highly optimized, and wrapped around keyword-themed content, those links will be categorized as “quality links” thus boosting the link popularity of the pages they point to (your own). This in turn gives a fillip to your search rankings.

Hosted Marketing Pages are also termed Pre-selling Pages or Content Hosting because they are very similar to affiliate pages/sites in that they serve to pre-sell your site’s services or products. You retain much more control on content than in an affiliate situation; there is no qualifying action necessary to trigger your payment for the hosting of the article, and of course affiliates, typically, will not have done the high level, tightly focused optimization that such a page entails.

The two approaches are fairly similar in that they are both about an article-embedded, optimized-links strategy. They differ in that Deep Linking is reciprocal linking or link exchange and is therefore free, while Hosted Marketing Pages is a service you would have to pay for. It however offers the advantage of giving you greater control over your web copy, as you would retain the copyright to your own material. Because a fee is involved, you are much more likely to find sites willing to engage ihttp://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gifn this kind of link trading.

Hosted Marketing Pages also offer more valuable one-way links, while deep linking is a link swap whose value for search engines is lower.

Whichever method suits you, backlinks are too valuable a traffic generation and site promotion technique to leave to the vagaries of search engine changing algorithms. Jump in and be one of the early adopters, and gain valuable exposure before the rest of the web catches on.

For more details on these two revolutionary linking and traffic-generation methods read Jack Humphrey’s“Power Linking 2: Evolution”