Friday, December 14th, 2007
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Well, I’m almost done with my 52 SEO tips, only 3 more to go so I’m trying to finish strong. And since going green is the theme lately, I’m following the trend. Recycling links can be an important part of your link building campaign.
We often overlook the links we already have or links we didn’t actively build ourselves. Your site may already have links pointing to it, but if those links aren’t keyword-rich links then you are missing out on potential SEO benefits.
Let me give you a great example of a missed opportunity. SnagAJob.com is a leading job search website and the have thousands of links pointing to their site. A large number of links is a good thing, but the majority of their links have the link text ‘Snagajob’ in the anchor text. Many of these links are on EDU sites which pass along wonderful link popularity but so much is wasted when the anchor text is your domain name, or worse, your website address (www.snagajob.com).
As part of our strategy for SnagAJob we have been contacting sites with SEO-unfriendly links asking the anchor text to be changed to keyword terms they are trying to rank for such as part-time jobs, jobs, job search, etc. Our success rate is much higher than seeking out new links. And keyword-rich links that have age is a great combination for moving up in the search results.
Do a backlink check with MSN for your site. MSN allows you to search for anchor text too which you can see how to do in my MSN backlink check post. Look for links that could be improved such as those using just your domain name and start contacting those sites linking to you. Requesting changes to your anchor text is a worthwhile investment of your time that could reap better rankings in the search engines.
‘Going Green’ never felt so good and your site may thank you with an influx of new traffic.
Posted in 52 SEO Tips, Link Building, Live Search (MSN), SEO Strategies, SEO Tools | 9 Comments »
Tuesday, December 11th, 2007
Social Bookmarking is in fashion and many people are submitting web pages to digg.com, stumbleupon.com and delicious.com. I have written about the advantages to bookmarking your own web pages with these social sites and how your traffic can increase (see StumbleUpon Shark Surfaces). But what do you do if you have nothing worth bookmarking at the moment but want to get involved and build links at the same time? Try intelligently commenting on other bookmarked pages. I’ll use Digg as an example since they follow commented links and are the giant in social bookmarking.
Take some time and search through Digg for a article that has been “dugg” and is related to your site’s content and make a comment on it. Usually there are relatively few quality comments and as long as you are genuine and thoughtful you stand a good chance of keeping your comment and your link. The key is to make sure the link to your site is related to the dugg subject matter. While this can be done easily, what else can be done to utilize Digg’s popularity?
Try following the link to the dugg web page see if that allows comments. If the content is on a blog you can probably comment on it there as well. That page will have many links coming to it, especially if it was popular on Digg, so placing a comment with a link to your related web page will benefit from the Digg popularity.
Maybe this is perceived as an around about way to get a link, especially since it may be a no-follow link, but the traffic will usually be more targeted traffic with a higher chance of converting once the visitors reach your site.
Posted in 52 SEO Tips, Link Building, Social Media Optimization | 3 Comments »
Friday, November 2nd, 2007
Link exchanging has certainly lost favor and some SEO consultants don’t do link exchanges period. I am also of the mind that link exchanges don’t count for much, but I also know that link exchanges can be part of a SEO strategy. Two of our largest clients are still employing targeted link exchanges and are ranked highly for very competitive terms.
So, if we can all overlook the great swell of negativity for link swaps lets take a look at how to find good exchanges. There is an excellent tool from SEOChat.com: Page Rank Search Tool. If you visit this page you can type in your keyword and then a phrase with “exchange links” or “add links” and it will find the strongest ranking page with those terms. A real world example: “diamonds” exchange links
With some modifications, you can also use it for non-reciprocal link building and article placement. Be creative!
Posted in 52 SEO Tips, Link Building, SEO Strategies | 6 Comments »
Monday, October 29th, 2007
Rarely would I ever give advice that included putting material on an external site rather than your own site. But when considering videos I have to say that making sure it is branded correctly and posted to YouTube.com is critical. YouTube.com gives small businesses the possiblity to have national exposure, possibly even more than a a network advertising campaign. It would require an extremely viral video but it has been done by many companies as well as individuals.
There are just too many viewer on YouTube.com to pridefully say you are going to post your video on your site and wait for the video linkbait to catch on. With YouTube.com this can happen overnight with the right video and your traffic would be derived from the grass roots marketing of your video on YouTube.com.
Once the video is posted on YouTube.com you can post it on your site and YouTube.com will pick up the link to your site. It will be tagged with NoFollow, so no link juice, but it will provide traffic through the link. You will also want to brand the video with your web address.
Posted in 52 SEO Tips, Link Building, Out on a Limb, SEO Strategies, Social Media Optimization | 7 Comments »
Thursday, October 18th, 2007
As any SEO company will tell you, link building is the backbone of a successful SEO campaign so many of my posts revolve around methods of building links without actively searching out links. If you can create buzz and get links naturally just by having creative and helpful content you will increase your chances of higher rankings.
One of our clients, F. Curtis Barry & Company, a warehouse consulting firm, has done an incredible job writing on their multichannel company blog. They have done so well that their blog actually has a higher PR value than their company blog. The blog acquires links more naturally and therefore has the opportunity to drive traffic to their company site, so having the blog rank well is good thing; it is a online sales tool that is at work 24 hours a day.
In our experience with writing and managing blogs for our clients we have discovered that writing about other blog posts can sometimes have a side affect of a link pointing back to the post from the outside blog post. For F. Curtis Barry this backlink came from the Wall Street Journal. The post on the F. Curtis Barry Blog commented on an article (and linked to it) by the Wall Street Journal and a few days later traffic was coming from an automated link back on the WSJ artilce. It is good thing to get traffic and links from WSJ.com…and we didn’t even have to ask.
Be careful though, writing about other comments and posts is a good strategy but only when done with sincerity. It can show that you are only writing about other articles for pure marketing results if you aren’t careful. Have a valid and well-thought out opinion if you do try this. Also realize that you may not receive a link back or that the link may have a no follow attribute negating any link juice (We DoFollow links). So be sure your post is valid on its own merits.
Comments and linking to blog posts on this site are always welcome. We check out links to our content all the time and will comment on other posts about us frequently. Have anything to add? Please add a comment or post on your own blog.
Posted in 52 SEO Tips, Blogging, Link Building | 1 Comment »
Friday, October 5th, 2007
Posted in Google, Out on a Limb, SEO Mistakes | 1 Comment »
Tuesday, October 2nd, 2007
As a senior member of a successful SEO company I’m always on the lookout for ways to make my job easier. Usually my job consist of defining an SEO strategy that will help our clients achieve high rankings in the search engines. High Rankings are supported by high-quality links, so how do we find high-quality links without doing a lot of work?
Hello, Google Alerts.
Google Alerts is a nifty tool that will monitor Google results with predefined search terms and then email you those results. They will send the email to you once a day, as it happens or once a week. You can insert any topic or query that you wish to keep tabs on.
For example, you can type in a competitor’s business name and/or his web address as an search term alert. Every time Google finds the search term they will send an email detailing where it was found in an email. It is like having a paid researcher always on call for free.
How best to use this for SEO you ask? Easy, here are just a few ideas. Let’s assume you have written an article or press release. You submit it through your normal channels but then you set up Google Alerts to notify you everytime it finds the exact title of your article. Be sure to put the search term in quotes so it looks for an exact match (“My Article Title”). Now you can track in real-time where you article gets picked up and then contact any of the sites that have placed your article or press release and contact them directly about a partnership. Maybe the next article you write can be given more prominence on their site or you can provide the webmaster original content with embedded links to your site.
Or you can track competitors by their name and URL find websites where that information has been posted and follow the same strategy by offering original content of your own. If you find a blog that has posted about you or your industry maybe you can become a contributor.
You can track a product name or service you want to sell or any word or phrase that will help you market your site to the search engines. And since Google is providing the information, you have a good shot at Google finding your link the next time they visit the site you have partnered with.
As with most SEO strategies you need to be creative with this idea and strike while the iron is hot. Constant alerts can keep you motivated and attentive to the market within your industry as well helping you keep a vigilant eye on your competition.
Has anyone employed this strategy for link building? I’d love to hear success stories.
Posted in 52 SEO Tips, Google, Link Building, SEO Strategies | 6 Comments »
Tuesday, September 25th, 2007
When submitting press releases as part of our SEO services we are often asked why we chose PRweb.com as our vehicle for submission rather than PRNewswire. When compared across our big three parameters PRWeb is the better service for our purposes. PRNewswire seems more like something large companies use to get out news because they send your release more to journalists and less to Web outlets. This summarized it nicely: “Services such as PRNewswire and Newswire provide a far more targeted channel to specific demographics than the cheaper alternatives, however unless you’re willing to pay top-rates, the SEO benefit (on a keyword level) is less.”
Pricing
PRWeb.com is more affordable, which our clients certainly appreciate.
| PRWeb |
PRNewswire |
| No membership fee. Their “average” press release costs is $80 with the SEO Visibility option being $200. |
Membership based with annual fee of $150. From their site: “The cost of distributing your news release is determined by the newsline you select and the length of your news release. Each newsline covers a specific geographical area ranging from local, regional, national and international. Prices start at $180 for a city/metro or statewide distribution. A national distribution starts at $680.”PRNewswire Toolkit |
Reach
The reach appear to be better on the web, which is our focus.
| PRWeb |
PRNewswire |
| “Gets picked up in leading online news sites like Yahoo! News, Google News, Ask.com, and Topix. Additionally, your press release is distributed through a host of other online news sites including our own PRWeb.com and eMediaWire.com, which deliver over 50 million page views each month.” |
“Your message will reach mainstream and industry trade media, thousands of web outlets and PR Newswire for Journalists, a digital media channel serving more than 85,000 registered journalists across the globe.” No mention of Google News ” among 3,600 of the world’s most widely accessed Web sites” |
Cached Pages
Of course this is just one example, but Google may index PRWeb better as well.
PRWeb: August 28 press release – Cached – PR3 value.
PRNewswire: August 28 release – Not cached – Page has been cached but no PR value.
Both sites have their advantages, but for SEO, it would appear the PRWeb.com is still the best choices for helping your rankings.
Posted in 52 SEO Tips, Link Building, SEO Strategies | 13 Comments »
Sunday, August 19th, 2007
If you read my post about Squidoo last week you know I got addicted to it just a little bit. Our SEO company has started using Squidoo as a tool and sometimes one tool can lead you to another. This discovery was totally serendipitous. As I was trying to market my own Squidoo pages (lenses as Squidoo calls them) I had a thought on how to use Flickr to build links. (Flickr is an online photo management, photo sharing web 2.0 site.) I had been placing some images on Flickr so I could then link to them from my Squidoo page. Once all the images were in place I went back to Flickr to start naming them and adding descriptions. Then I thought, “Can I place text links in the descriptions?” And you what, I could and you can too. Flickr allows you to place links in the photo descriptions and they are real HTML links that are followed by the search engines.
I’m sure you can see the uses for this. Does you site sell products? Can you place the photos on Flickr? If so, you should add your product photos and each photo should have a title, description and link to that product. These links meet many of my perfect link criteria especially since you control the anchor text of this one-way link. Of course you should always make sure the link makes since. If you are selling a bike, take a picture of the bike put it on your Flickr account and then link to that bike on your site.
Flickr images are returned in search results and Google currently has 26 million pages cached so Flickr has good search engine visibility.
To further prove this works, do a search in Google for ‘dark phoenix costumes‘. I’m a bit of an X-men fan and so I posted some artwork of the Phoenix character which is the subject of my Squidoo page. As of August 19, 2007 you should notice that the #9 search result is my Flickr page I created and the #6 result is for my Phoenix Squidoo page. The Flickr Dark Phoenix Costume page only took one week to be cached by Google and now a one-way link has been cached with keyword rich anchor text.
Please don’t abuse or spam this technique but instead try to provide information for your customers with the photo. I’m sure Flickr would have no problem turning all the links to redirects or nofollow links such as Wikipedia. Don’t abuse, just use.
Let me know if you have tried this already or what success you have had with this strategy.
Posted in 52 SEO Tips, Link Building, Social Media Optimization | 15 Comments »
Sunday, August 12th, 2007
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
Posted in 52 SEO Tips, Link Building, SEO Tools, Social Media Optimization | 69 Comments »
Friday, July 27th, 2007
SEO companies have two major functions when working with their clients: optimize the site content and finding quality, relevant links. So please forgive me if you already know this simple yet effective SEO tip, I’m sure those new to the SEO game will find it helpful. This tip on link building will help you find link opportunities but it will be up to you to acquire link placement.
I am posting this tip in response to a question I receive on a continuing basis from perspective clients.
How do you find links?
We have many methods but the simplest way to find links, that aren’t paid links, is to search for them. Searching with the right terms will increase your efficiency and success in securing the maximum number of links in the shortest time. What are these terms? I’ve listed some of the search terms we use to find good linking sources. Of course there are many others to try but this list should get you started.
Search Terms to be used with your keyword or phrase:
- Add URL
- Links
- Resources
- Related sites
- Related urls
- Submit a link
- Submit a site
- Submit URL
- Suggest a link
- Suggest a site
- Suggest URL
- Suggest an URL
- Directory
- Recommended Sites
- Add Profile
- Add Site
- Article
For example, if you are trying to find quality links to help market your website which is selling pet turtles (We bought two, Bear and Grylls, while on vacation last week.) you would type into the Google search box something like this: “add url” + pet turtles. It would give you these results Links for Pet Turtles. The page shows five promising link opportunities that are already in the Google index. From here you can try more of the search phrases and then try different keywords and phrases to match with them.
There are also free tools that will help in finding backlinks. Some that I like are:
http://www.webconfs.com/backlink-builder.php
http://tools.seobook.com/general/link-suggest/
If you have any other tips on finding links, please share by commenting, we are always looking for new and better ways to do our jobs.
Posted in 52 SEO Tips, Link Building | 9 Comments »
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