Links: Visibility & #'s

There are 2 approaches to link building, quality visibility and sheer numbers. Both are helpful to the web site, but which is best for the stage of the SEO campaign you are currently in. Separating your campaign into stages, or surges is important for building an effective SEO strategy.

I like to start my SEO campaigns with an increase in sheer numbers. A large quantity of links will help a web site establish its weight in the SERPs, but will rely heavily on the user finding the site. The best place to start amassing links is with directory submissions. Sit down and start a spreadsheet of all the directories you can find and start submitting your butt off. Directories are still a big part of SEO, but they are, sadly, mainly for link purposes rather than for the users. A directory may have a high PR that will show up higher than the site for specific keywords. When you submit to directories, make sure and use effective key words in the submission and you may be able to beat a high ranking site with this "piggy back" to the top. By gaining a high volume of links you are establishing the web site's presence on the web, but they may come from irrelevant places, therefore, becoming just numbers. When choosing directories to submit to, I choose them all, if you are too irrelevant, they will deny your submission, oh well. Remember to make clear titles that are keyword rich and that draw attention to the listing.

Set up a reciprocal link script on your site and start writing some link bait. Make sure you advertise that yo offer free reciprocal links on your site so other SEOs can find it. Just watch who you are link in to, stay away from "bad neighbors" and link farms. Contact web-masters that put your link on pages with more than 100 links on them and tell them to please move it to another page.

For more links you can start a site in your particular niche and do some "link laundering". I have said this term before, and I will get into laundering in another post, but I am sure you can find some information about it on the web.

Now that you have your troops behind you, it's time to give them tanks. Relevant, quality , traffic building links are the big guns to your SEO campaign. These will be links that may not help you in the SERPs, but will bring quality traffic to the site, after all we are trying to build traffic, not just good rankings. This is where your email writing skills come in, you have to ask for links in order to get them. Write a few press releases and articles with links to the site and submit them to syndication sites. Pay a little extra and have your press release on Google news and submit everything you do to the social bookmarking sites.

My idea of SEO is to get my clients away from PPC and into the SERPs. It is also my job to drive quality traffic to the site, which doesn't mean they have to be on the first page, just an increase of customers that spend money on the site. This approach will achieve both results. Build your easy numbers first, then send the buyers to the site.

Landing pages

Michael Martinez at SEO Theory wrote a great post today about "landing pages". I have always stressed the importance of landing pages, and optimized the pages of my site to rank for particular keywords. The key to landing pages is discovering what are the most important pages of your site that you want customers to find. I hate "about us" pages, and I believe the "about" information should be a blip on the home page, and the "home page" is probably the least important page of any website, unless it is a blog.

Each page on your web site should be optimized for 4 or 5 key phrases, every page targets different search terms. This will give your 5 page site the chance to rank for 20 or 25 different terms. Sales and product pages have to have optimized content on them, not just pictures and prices. Sometimes it is hard to get the client to go for so much text and you may have to do a bit of research and use more creativity, but it will payoff in the end.

Link building should be done site wide, I usually don't try to get many links to my home pages. Switch up your anchor text in comments and link exchanges to accommodate the key words for the target page. Really examine the content on the page your link will be from and choose the page on your web site that would benefit most from the link. If you do gain a lot of links to one page on your web site, make sure you direct some anchor text on that page to a weaker page on the site, don't keep all that juice on one page, optimizing your internal linking structure can dramatically improve your rankings.

Pages with good CTAs are great for landing pages, they bring the user to your site and tell them where to go next. If you bring all of your traffic to your home page, you are relying on the user finding their way to your sales pages, and that is unreliable. I am not saying that your clientele is dumb or lazy, but that it is your job to direct traffic to where you want it most.

As an SEO, it is your job to direct the most qualified traffic to the best page for it, and the 9 out of 10 times the home page is the last place you want someone to start looking to buy something. So optimize your landing pages and watch your sales increase.

Big blogs and there no follow tags

Today Dave Naylor announced he has removed the no follow tags from his blog and replaced them with strict moderation. His blog is one of my favorite sources for SEO news and updates and this is a big deal because so many "authority" blogs wrap their links up tight and keep all their juice to themselves. If this becomes a trend across the board, you may begin to see more quality discussions on these blogs. By his statement alone he should at least triple his traffic from curious SEOs. www.davidnaylor.co.uk is a great source for information, but the best parts of some blogs are the discussions that follow the posts, blogs are meant to be interactive, and I believe he is simply encouraging more user participation.

They say that Web 3.0 will be completely user generated content, and by current blogs encouraging such interaction and participation, this maybe the perfect segway into the next development of the internet. Blogs with only a few pages could soon become giant sites with hundreds of pages of user generated content and quality discussion.

Strict moderation is the key, I have never been one for spammy comments. I much rather participate in the discussion and try to learn something while I gather my links. If you are serious about SEO and link building you should try to become a regular contributer on quality blogs. Genuine, intelligent comments could lead to so much more than just a link from a page that has 50 outbound links.

Thanks Dave.

SEO: The second 6 months of a SEO contract

My last post was about what you should do in the first 6 months of a SEO contract. The first 6 months is the time when you establish your rankings, you should be able to achieve some decent goals within this time and be on the 1st or second page of the SERPs. If the niche is competitive, the second 6 months is when you start taking on the big guys in the top positions, this is where you need to get creative and even more diligent.

In the first 6 months you established a routine for regular updates, blog posts and content changes. These changes are based on keyword research that you have conducted regularly and use this research to adapt the web site to search trends. You should continue to monitor trends, make blog posts and change the content throughout the second 6 months. I am also a firm believer in redesigning your web site once a year, which is solely for the users, but this is not the job of a SEO.

Quality Link Building
Now that your onsite SEO is well on track and is proving results, you need to worry about gathering quality links to the site. You will need to do a bit of research and gain links from vendors, clients, business partners, other related sites, general directories, specific directories. Write articles regularly about the business the site is in and create press releases about the site, the business and niche news, and submit them to syndication sites. These links will help you with relevancy and will generate more qualified traffic.

Quantity Link Building
Now that you have your quality links it is time to get the sheer numbers you need to stabilize your positions. Quantity links are less reliable because many of them will be temporary, but they will establish the sites rankings once you get the ball rolling.

Social Media Sites: Use sites like Digg and StumbleUpon to develop a large basis of social media links. Submit everything you write to them and become active in their communities, this activity will create more links than anything as long as you work the groups and contribute to things other than your particular niche.
RSS: Develop a strong writing style and stay on top of blog posts to gain subscribers and make sure to syndicate your RSS.
Reciprocal Links: Find a simple reciprocal link code and put it on your site, these can draw links from many different markets, but we are just worried about numbers at this point.
Comment Tags: Become active on other blogs and forums within the nice and put a link to the site in your comments. Remember not to make spammy posts, becoming a valued contributer can lead to bigger things in the future.
Guest Posting: Become a guest poster on the blogs you read, this is your time to shine and double your traffic.

The second six months may sound much simpler than the first, but this is where all the work comes in. If you do wind up in a 6 month contract, you need to multitask an watch your analytics closely to see what is working and what is not, don't waste time on things that don't work.

Once you get the links rolling in you should be set for a stable next few months and you should have reached the positions you wanted. Always remember, don't stop, persistence is the most important aspect of SEO. This strategy should take you throughout the end of the contract and generate satisfying results for both you and your client.

Keyword Research: The Competition

One of the most important thing to know when going into a SEO campaign is how much work is going to be involved. I would never advise anyone not to partake in a good fight, it could be fun, but you should always know if you will need to pack a lunch. When you research your keywords and have a good list of what you are going to use, check out the competition for the phrases.

First thing you need to do is check out the keyword density of the competing site. Look at the amount of text, meta tags and alt tags. You should take serious notes about every page and apply these numbers to your site. You have to beat them in this category, no questions. This research will give you a serious, temporary advantage. The key to maintaining top positions is keeping track of what the competition is doing to catch up.

Search for the keywords you have in mind and check out the top sites. Look at how many pages they have indexed (site:www.sitename.com), if they have 300 pages to their site and you only have 12, you will need to either strap in for a long one, or put it on the back burner. The size of the site matters in terms of relevant internal links. You should also check out the page rank of those pages.

Next, look at the amount and quality of inbound links the competition has. The link:www.sitename.com method will show you the links that Google has indexed, and some people say only inks with a PR<4 show up. Download a good SEO browser plugin for your favorite open source browser, they tend to show you the inbound links recognized by all the major search engines. Taking note of how many inbound links the site has will help you evaluate how much effort you need to put into link building. If the competition has thousands of quality inbound links, you may want to hold off on that keyword for a bit, until you have enough momentum to gain big links. If the competition has only a few links, you may be able to get by with a few blog comments and a reciprocal exchange.

Lastly, watch the site for a while. Do they make regular updates? If the competition is a stagnant web site, then the search engines may reward you for frequent updates. Fresh content that is chock-full of keywords may be all it takes to push you over the competition.

Giant sites that are as old as the internet itself are not impossible to topple, and if you are like me, you will love the fight. The proper amount of knowledge about the competitions site can go a long way. Just remember, when you do reach the top, don't stop and relax. Your new goal is ensuring your site maintains it's position. SEO is more like a marathon, than a sprint, but there is no finish line. And of course I only encourage whitehat methods, no dirty stuff.

Add to: | del.cio.us | digg

Relevant Links- Social Bookmarks, Reciprocals & RSS

Over the past few years of studying search engine optimization I have read and been told that my sites need to concentrate on building "relevant" links. I understand the issues with relevant links and trust ranking and avoiding link farms. I also understand that if most of the information on the page is centered around the subject matter of my sites it will help with keyword relevance to the page, but I started thinking about the trends of Social Bookmarks.

"Just when I thought I had it all figured out, I go and start thinking." -Murry Daniels, 2007

I recently added a page to Goatsmilktavern Studios web site that allows people to add their links to my links page, provided they add a reciprocal link on their web site. The system works fine and dandy, but I am linked to sites about everything from vinyl siding to tourism in Turkey. Will this really hurt me under the new algorithm? After all if I submit this post to Digg, will only SEO web sites link to it? I doubt it.

Social bookmarking is a great way to gain a lot of links fast, but how many of them are relevant? I have spent the past week weeding out the irrelevant sites that link to mine, but should I really do that? I mean, some of the sites that are linking to me have some pretty good page rank. If someone with a PR 7 web site picks up my RSS and displays it on their home page about industrial mayonnaise will some of that link juice slide down to my site, or will Google say, "web design & SEO≠industrial mayonnaise" and ignore the link from a powerful site? I am able to control what sites I link out to, but I have no control over who links to me…Can one bad link undo all of my hard work for quality links? I have read on many blackhat blogs that linking to porn and gambling sites can have a negative effect on your PR, but will a link from "Tourism in Turkey" really bring my PR down?

I don't rely on links from social bookmarking or RSS feeds, but they help temporarily. I was just wondering if the algorithm has changed dramatically, or were we wrong for all those years? Will a link to Goatsmilktavern Studios on the front page of Digg kill my page rank if the rest of the diggs are about Paris Hilton and Top Chef? If not, then why are we so worried about relevant links?

Any input would be much appreciated because my freakin' brain hurts when I try to remember the rules of SEO.

Add to: | del.cio.us | digg

nofollow tags?

As part of your job as an SEO specialist it is your job to test the limitations of the search engines. I will be performing a series of "experiments" this weekend with websites and blogs that have nofollow tags to see if Google is following them. I have been reading on blogs like Dave Naylor's and Matt Cutts' about how some link juice trickles through the nofollow tags found on some blogs and websites like Wiki. If the nofollow tags don't work this could lead to a few changes in how people SEO their websites. I have always used blog and forum post to get indexed, but never used them as a link building strategy. I should have a report by the middle of next week.

New Orleans Web Design and SEO

Food for Thought.

I came across a post at Dave Naylor's website that got me thinking. It seems the W3C website is not using nofollow tags on their "registered members" page, so is this considered a paid link?

W3C is transferring a lot of link juice to the companies that "register" with them, including Google. According to their new "law", will they penalize these "members" for a paid link?

Read more HERE.