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The powerful capabilities of organic search engine optimization (SEO) are now a highly sought after marketing tool by many companies that want to alert customers to their products or services by focusing on certain keyphrases that highlight these offerings. And though SEO has embarked on a meteoric rise in the past few years, other non-traditional forms of marketing are now gaining a great deal of well-deserved credibility as well. More and more marketers are using paid ads to hone in on a potentially profitable client base, while other more traditional channels, such as PR and print ads, appear to be becoming somewhat less effective.
In a recent study (1), Forrester Research found that interactive marketing spending will reach nearly $55 billion by 2014, representing 21% of all marketing spend. And the fact of the matter is that marketers are continuing to place more stock in newer forms of marketing and social media, leaving many higher-ups to wonder if it is time for them to include these channels in their own marketing mixes. And with the help of your search engine optimization company, it’s possible to achieve outstanding rankings and results!
What follows are some common considerations that should be analyzed prior to the launch of an SEO campaign so that you will know what you are getting into, what you will need from your own team and your prospective search engine optimization company, and how to most effectively pursue this particular form of marketing.
Achieving Buy-in
Search engine optimization is unlike many traditional forms of marketing in that several departments must be involved in order for the SEO campaign to be successful. Apart from the obvious need to get buy-in from upper management (unless, of course, you are upper management), you will also need to get buy-in from your sales department and, very importantly, your IT department before pursuing the powerful capabilities your search engine optimization company can bring to the table.
Upper Management
While a well thought out, highly targeted SEO campaign is becoming an increasingly popular marketing tool, many “old school” bigwigs are uncomfortable pursuing something that is completely foreign to them. This is not an indictment of the individual – keep in mind that the traditional marketing methods that the company has likely relied upon (trade shows, direct mail, print advertising, etc.) have been relatively unchanged for decades.
While these traditional marketing channels may have remained relatively stagnant, the allocation of spend for them has not. According to a 2008 SEMPO report, more marketers are shifting their budgets to search rather than spending it on the more traditional channels of the past. Nearly 26% of advertisers shifted budget for print magazines to search; 23% from direct mail; 18% from print newspaper; 15% from website development; and 7% from email marketing.
One of the reasons for this is obviously the effectiveness of the channel. In the same study, SEMPO found that respondents viewed online marketing efforts as their strongest tactic or best ROI. 63% of respondents saw paid search as the best return on investment in terms of marketing or advertising efforts; 49% for organic SEO; 43% for email marketing; 12% for conferences and exhibitions; 11% for public relations; and 6% for print magazines.
Another reason for the shift in marketing dollars, which can be used as ammunition when you are trying to convince your higher-ups to go with a search engine optimization company, is the ultimate accountability that goes along with online marketing: the data that indicates success or failure of your SEO campaign is of the black-or-white variety.
When describing the effectiveness of a company’s marketing strategy, there is often an old sentiment tossed around – “I know that half of my marketing is not working, just not which half.” Because of the analytics involved in search engine optimization, your company higher-ups can take comfort in the fact that this is not another marketing initiative that will self-perpetuate indefinitely – the metrics involved in your SEO campaign will demonstrate that it is working, justifying the continued expenditure.
When trying to get buy-in from upper management, you also have a formidable weapon in the actions, or inaction, of your competitors. If your hated rivals are actively embracing the tools offered by a search engine optimization company, there will be a tendency among upper management not to want to let them get too far ahead. If none of your top competitors appear to be actively pursuing this channel, your company can gain traction before your rivals do and thus gain the competitive edge. Whichever the case, it is now much easier to present a compelling argument to pursue an SEO campaign.
Sales Department
There is often a mutual suspicion and distrust between sales and marketing, but in order for your SEO campaign initiative to be as successful as possible, you should involve sales in the process of selecting a search engine optimization company as early as possible. Achieving buy-in from the salespeople is critical in making certain that the leads that are generated from the website are followed up on as diligently as they should be. By asking sales to assist in important areas of the SEO campaign, like creating an ideal prospect profile and helping to identify targeted keyphrases (after all, they talk to your prospects more often than anyone), you should be able to ensure that when the leads start coming in, your sales team will believe that leads from the website are high-quality and worthy of their immediate attention. After all, without increased revenues, the SEO campaign is not a success – and your salespeople will play a crucial role in determining this.
IT Department
This can be your most difficult challenge. Unlike most other forms of marketing, search engine optimization is a mixture of marketing and technology. Without achieving buy-in, or at least acceptance, from the IT team prior to the launch of an SEO campaign, you are likely to run into problems. IT teams can be particularly protective of their “turf” and may be reluctant to hand over information to your prospective search engine optimization company. This is not inherently bad (it obviously shows dedication to the job), but it can make things difficult when your search engine optimization company is requesting that changes be made to the company website or that analytics platforms be introduced (to name only two likely scenarios).
If you are not used to dealing with your IT department, it would probably serve you well to involve your prospective search engine optimization company in the process of achieving buy-in with them. After all, the vendor should have years of experience in approaching these situations without ruffling feathers. If you choose to approach IT yourself, make it a point to let them know that they will receive a fair share of credit for the success of the initiative and involve them in how you are defining success. This may be enough to win them over to your side.
Leveraging Your Assets
Search engine optimization is not something that should be done in a vacuum if you wish to achieve optimal results, nor is it a discipline in which it is necessary to start from scratch. Many of the pieces necessary for a successful SEO campaign are already in place - it is simply a matter of identifying them and using them (and your search engine optimization company) to their full potential.
Your People
While your search engine optimization company should take the time to understand everything that it possibly can about your business before embarking on your SEO campaign, nobody will ever understand your business better than you and your colleagues. This is why it is important for your search engine optimization company to help you to utilize key people that are vital to the success of the initiative, including people outside the marketing department.
Sales
Salespeople are the front line of your organization - the people who know how to talk to your prospects and understand what is involved in their decision making processes. When it comes to collaborating with your search engine optimization company on keyphrase selection (finding the phrases that will bring highly-motivated prospects to your site), your sales staff can be invaluable. Many companies have names for products or services that are very popular internally but very rarely used on the street, so targeting these phrases during your SEO campaign will not bring you the type of traffic that you seek. Your salespeople (at least the good ones) know how your prospects speak in the real world. A good search engine optimization company will help you to utilize your sales staff - and ensure they feel involved and enthusiastic about the SEO campaign in the process.
Customers
Customers can also be invaluable when it comes to selecting the keyphrases to target for your SEO campaign. Many companies are surprised when they enlist the help of a search engine optimization company to begin a campaign only to discover that their customers do not speak the same language that they do. This is common across just about every industry - most people are very intimately involved in their industries and use proprietary names, acronyms, and other verbiage that is, at the least, confusing to an outsider. Anyone who has ever been dragged along to a work function by a spouse can attest to this - it often sounds as though the employees are speaking animatedly in a foreign language, leaving the reluctant spouse to fend for him or herself. In short, talk to your best customers. Ask them what they would type into a search engine if they were looking for a company that provided what you offer. You will almost certainly be surprised by the responses.
Company Experts
Almost every company can boast that it has industry experts on staff - the ones who design products and services, the ones who implement them, etc. Yet very few companies take advantage of these experts to promote the company as a leader in their respective fields. Since search engines place a premium on valuable, educational content, leveraging your company experts to create articles and whitepapers for your SEO campaign is an excellent way to attain search engine rankings while also providing something of value to your site visitors. Adding this type of content throughout your SEO campaign also allows you the luxury of educating your prospects online so that they will be further down the line in the sales cycle when they eventually decide to make contact.
Your Content
Now that you have learned how to effectively make the best use out of your colleagues, it’s time to take an inventory of the content that is available to you for your SEO campaign initiatives. As mentioned previously, valuable content is held in high regard by engines and visitors alike. Often, however, much of this content never finds its way to the company website for whatever reason. Your search engine optimization company should help you to identify this content, which can include the following:
Whitepapers
Does your company have whitepapers that are used during presentations, at tradeshows, and in other areas but that are not available on your website? If so, you are missing out on a great opportunity to promote your expertise, educate your prospects, and impress the search engines. Most of these whitepapers can be optimized during the SEO campaign for maximum search engine benefit with minimal changes. Even older whitepapers can usually be dusted off by your search engine optimization company and brought up to date at a fraction of the effort that would be involved in creating a new one.
Articles
Similar to whitepapers but typically shorter, articles written by your company experts can be just as beneficial as whitepapers when added to the company site and for the same reason. Unless you have signed away the rights to any articles to the original publishing entity, there is no reason why your search engine optimization company cannot use them on your website for marketing purposes. Older articles, like older whitepapers, can typically be updated with minimal effort.
Press Releases
Your company press releases can also be optimized and utilized on your website. In fact, optimizing press releases prior to their distribution on the newswires is also a good idea. Unlike whitepapers and expert articles, it is usually unnecessary for your search engine optimization company to go back and update press releases during the SEO campaign, since they are historical in nature.
Offline Marketing
Almost every organization has offline marketing materials that are used at trade shows, in sales presentations, or in direct mail. Since this material has (usually) already been vetted by the marketing department, it is usually fit for consumption by the general public. Often, however, these materials are left to rot once they have served their offline purpose, when they could easily be repurposed by your search engine optimization company and used to great effect on the website. Of course, there may be good reasons for this - you may not want to give away your best sales pitch to your competitors by making it public.
Unique Challenges
Although it is wise to make the most out of your existing assets when you are launching an SEO campaign, you should also be aware of some of the unique challenges that are inherent to the online arena. Keeping these challenges in mind as you begin your SEO campaign can make a large difference in your results down the road.
Understanding Searcher Behavior
In marketing, it is accepted that one must grab the prospect’s attention with a compelling message in order to maintain his or her interest. On the Internet, this is paramount. People who are using search engines are, by definition, in a “searching” mode. While this is of course obvious, it is also important to remember that in no other form of marketing is it easier for the searcher to abandon your attempts to attract his or her attention and look elsewhere. Your competitors are a simple click of the ‘back’ button away. In fact, a recent study shows that the average visitor to a website stays for less than three minutes - hardly enough time for him or her to be sold.
Searchers have been conditioned, by the sheer amount of information available, to be impatient when they do not immediately find what it is they are seeking. What does this mean? It means that your pages should offer immediate insight on the common problems that your customers face. If you cannot communicate, within a few seconds, how you understand your prospect and how you are different from the myriad of other firms out there, you have lost them, perhaps forever. With help from your search engine optimization company, take a close look at every page of your website. Do you focus on the user, or do you focus on your company? Do you immediately engage your prospects with your knowledge of what particular business challenges they are facing? If not, it may be time to rethink the most prominent marketing message on your individual pages and devise a new action plan for your SEO campaign.
Redefining “Competition”
Almost every company has a list of four or five companies that it considers to be its primary competitors. These are generally the companies that it believes offer products and services most similar to its own. Often these companies steal employees from one another, and they seem forever concerned with what the other is doing.
On a search engine, however, your definition of competition should be broader. It should include any company that offers the same products or services as your company that outranks you for important terms. Whether or not these companies are on your immediate radar is immaterial - a searcher will not know the difference, nor will he or she care. The Internet is, by and large, a vast and level playing field. There are quite possibly companies that you have never heard of using the Internet almost exclusively to promote their brands. It is important to watch out for these competitors as well as the ones you and your search engine optimization company currently track.
The Role of Patience
Unlike with most marketing channels, search engine optimization has many variables that will be outside of your control and the benefits will not be immediate. Simply put, it takes time to properly optimize a website for optimal search engine performance, and there are no guarantees as to when the engines will re-visit your site and reward you for the efforts of your SEO campaign (although, if you select the right search engine optimization company and play your cards right, it will happen).
The obvious downside is that an SEO campaign can take time before you begin to see your ROI, and unlike most other forms of traditional marketing, the timing can vary greatly. The upside, which people who successfully engage in an SEO campaign realize, is that the ROI is typically much greater than other forms of marketing. It is also important to remember that working with a search engine optimization company is a longer-term investment, which, like other longer-term investments, takes time to mature. If you spend marketing dollars on a print ad, that ad will only be effective for as long as the publication is in the public eye. If you buy banner ads or use pay-per-click advertising, your presence will decline once you stop paying. But a website that’s been properly optimized by a competent, knowledgeable search engine optimization company will likely bring you traffic for years to come.
Works Cited
1. U.S. Interactive Marketing Forecast, 2009 – 2014
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Your Website’s Missing Ingredient
“My mechanic told me, ‘He couldn’t repair my brakes, so he made my horn louder.’” - Comedian, Steven Wright
We all want our websites to be more effective, and if you’re like mo t business people you are constantly searching the Web for anything that will help. What you find is a cabal of experts armed with statistics, analysis, charts and graphs all pointing to how they can get you high-up on the search engines and drive more traffic to your site. The problem is that like Steven Wright’s mechanic these guys are adjusting your horn when it’s your brakes that need fixing.
There is little point in attracting more visitors to your site if your site has little of interest to say. Even if your site is jammed packed with useful products, services and solutions if it doesn’t connect with your audience, they will never invest the time necessary for you to make your case.
When websites fail it’s most often because they do not function effectively as your primary communication tool. The Web is overcrowded with options and unless you’re prepared to deliver a compelling differentiating presentation you will be quickly dismissed as irrelevant. Let’s face it; business is tough, probably tougher than it’s ever been before.
Something is Missing
You’ve done all the technical tweaks and responded to all the research and analytics. You’re blogging, micro-blogging, social networking, and search optimizing, but still something is not quite right, something is missing. What’s the missing ingredient? You know it’s out there, but you can’t for the life of you figure out what it is.
You know the Web offers the potential to access new markets, find new customers, and reach new heights, but with all that opportunity, the results always seem just out of reach. If research and analytics were the answer you’d already be rich. Of course it was an over-reliance on research that brought us the Edsel, New Coke, and that wonderful Wall Street goody called Derivatives, one of the greatest investment boondoggles of our time.
There is something artificially comforting about putting your faith in seemingly logical yet unfathomable solutions based on indecipherable scientific modeling and over-hyped research analysis, all brought to you by computer scientists and mathematicians who never ran a marketing department or launched a new product or business.
Business leaders have adopted the attitude that, “It must be right, because I sure as heck don’t understand it.” And when it all goes wrong, or results are anemic, well, “What are you going to do? It’s not my fault, it all looked good on paper.” Ad agencies and Wall Street have been getting away with this kind of bunkum for decades, and look at the mess they’ve made of things.
What’s It All About, Alfie?
Business success is all about your ability to engage your audience with a message that compels them to action. Simply put, your business relies on your ability to communicate. Eureka!
And your website is the best communication vehicle you have. The question is how do you use your website to communicate your marketing message in the most engaging, compelling, and memorable manner? What is the missing ingredient that will turn your scientifically sterile online cookie-cutter presentation into something that cuts through the massive sameness of Internet clutter, and makes a statement that your audience will respond to?
Finding Your Emotional and Psychological Value Proposition
One of the hardest things for tough-minded business people to accept is that sales and marketing success is based on the subconscious emotional and psychological appeal of a brand. That’s the reason, reliance on feature selling rarely works, and only tends to commoditize a product or service - the guy with the most bells and whistles for the least amount of money wins, and why would you want to play that game?
Even the most casual market observer must recognize that all leading brands have one thing in common, no matter what they sell: the promise of their brand is based on a concept that is established through an emotional or psychological appeal. Apple is about thinking and acting creatively without the worry of technical issues; Starbucks is about reconnecting to the original coffee break ideal of a relaxing oasis away from the hustle bustle of everyday life; and Ikea is about stylish living on a budget. Each concept appeals to the deep-seated desires of the targeted audience. It is this singular concept that makes each of these companies special and different from their competition; it is the message that all their marketing, advertising, and promotion is based upon, and it is the true value they offer their audience that attracts interest, holds attention, and delivers promise.
Implementing Your Emotional and Psychological Value Proposition
In order to implement a company’s emotional and psychological value proposition, we use a process called the ConceptCreator. It starts with various sales’ points that need to be covered. Based on the supplied information, we develop a focused marketing concept using the Law of Dissatisfaction that enables us to discover the experiential human subtext of why people will want what you sell. The presentation concept is boiled-down to a movie-style logline that states the brand story to be presented in the Web Video campaign.
How Much Is A Concept Worth?
“Wait a minute - did he say a movie-style logline? That sure doesn’t sound business-like, and I never heard any corporate CEO or MBA talk about movie loglines.” Maybe so, but think about it. Hollywood studios spend enormous sums of money to produce a movie with the potential of making hundreds of millions of dollars, and each financial investment starts with someone coming up with a clever logline that captures the imagination. Television commercials can cost ten thousand dollars a second to produce and without a guiding conceptual premise they become DOA when implemented. So why wouldn’t you start your Web Video campaign using the same proven formula.
The logline, mission statement, or elevator pitch if you prefer needs to state the characters, goals, obstacles, differentiating factors, and resolution within the context of a story scenario.
For Instance…
If it works for the movie industry will it work for the advertising and marketing industry? Let’s take a look at one of the most successful last number of years, The MAC versus PC campaign.
Example Logline Concept: A stylish, pleasant, mild-mannered young man verbally spars with his geeky competitive opposite (characters) in a series of humorous, relatable incidents (story scenario) that illustrate the people-friendly advantages (resolution) of the brand compared to its rigid, unbending competitor (differentiating factor) whose sheer size dominates the market (obstacle) in an effort to win the hearts and minds of the computer buying audience (goal). - The MAC Versus PC Ad Campaign.
“The Time Has Come The Walrus Said…”
- Lewis Carroll from ‘Through the Looking Glass and What Alice
Found There,’ 1892
The time has come to realize that Web Video is the best communication tactic available to deliver your marketing message to a worldwide audience; an audience that craves answers and resolution to their every need, concern and desire. It is not good enough to list a bunch of features and hackneyed bulleted points or even to dump pages and pages of search engine optimized hard-to-read text, especially when it’s aimed at an audience raised on television, movies, music and video games. We must learn to speak the language of the audience, and use the appropriate communication tools they can understand in a way that connects on a human level.
It all starts with finding the emotional and psychological value proposition your product or service promises. In a world of frustrated, cranky, attention deficit consumers, the onus is on you to present what you offer in a way that relates to the human elements that make your brand relevant.
Keyword Fundamentals Will Determine Your Website Success
posted by admin @ 11:37 AM
Thursday, September 24, 2009
Successful sports teams have engrained in their heads the fundamentals of their sports. Business leaders and coaches alike who dwell on the fundamentals usually have the most successful outcomes. Failure is almost always rooted in a deviation from the fundamentals. So if your website is not delivering clients, perhaps you’re missing the fundamentals.
Part of the answer is nobody actually taught you the fundamentals of website success. Most businesses understand the need for a website, few understand the fundamentals. Getting your website to deliver clients is an exercise in
Fundamentals. First and foremost is a back to basics, grass roots understanding of your market, website style.
Keyword research is the first thing every website owner should have done but most didn’t. With respect to your online business, keyword research equals market research. The coolest thing about being online is that you can absolutely KNOW your market, understand their interests and create an online business and marketing plan relative to your market and their needs.
There are probably hundreds of keyword research tools online that can help you do your own research. Our advice is to seek out an expert. Getting the data is one thing. Knowing what to do with it is quite a different thing.
Relative to keyword research, here’s what we can find via search engine tools: keywords and keyword phrases, search volumes, total web pages using those keywords, web pages optimized for those keywords, keywords in hypertext (called anchor text) linking to other sites and pages. We can even look at any specific website and determine what keywords they are at least trying to rank for. And of course, type the keyword phrase into a search box will list the top ten sites ranking for that term. The result of such a search is referred to as the SERPS or the Search Engine Results Pages.
The best keywords to use are ones that will generate reasonable traffic AND have very little competition. One of the parameters we seek in our keyword research is to determine the competitiveness of the keyword phrases. Google will tell us how many web pages are indexed for the search term. Just run a search and notice in the upper right of the results that Google will tell you how many pages are indexed with your search keywords. Without getting too technical here, Google and the other major search engines will also tell you how many web pages use those keywords in the page title, an indication that those pages specifically cover the topic of your search. Having keywords in the page title is one of the key ways to optimize a webpage for the keyword. Knowing how many pages are doing this gives you a better idea of how many pages are intentionally using the keywords you’re researching.
The first thing that has to go is the ego of the site and/or business owner. Unless you show up in the first page of the search engine results, you’re NOBODY! Worse, you can’t push your way through the crowd to get to the top of the SERPS. You can get there by Google sponsored ads - AdWords guarantee your visibility on the SERPS. But still the point is, you’ll pay.
Let’s consider three strategies for beating your competition relative to the search engine results.
DIRECT STRATEGY
Choose the same keywords that your competition is ranking for and go head to head. If they are doing pay-per-click, you do it too. In this scenario, you’ll end up spending a lot of money to achieve and maintain top SERPS positions. If your competition is ranking on good, high traffic terms, plan on spending time, money and resources to get to the same position it may have taken them years to achieve. A direct strategy can get bloody. Ultimately, it is the most obvious choice, the least creative and the stupidest!
INDIRECT STRATEGY
Choose keywords that your competitors didn’t even think of! An indirect strategy is often associated with cross marketing and selling through an indirect channel. If you sell a service or product that your competitors don’t have, you channel your efforts through that market knowing there’s some pull-through relative to your other products and services. Very often you could be sucking business right out from under your competition’s nose and they don’t even see it!
DIVISIONAL STRATEGY
Find out what keywords your competition is NOT ranking for in the same keyword set and go after them. The divisional strategy is the primary online marketing method of niche marketers. Most business owners will equate the word “niche” with the word “small”. On the web, niche site owners are millionaires! Get rid of your pre-conceptions. The web is huge.
We use a two step process for choosing keywords. First, you have to take your direct competition into account. The second part is to look specifically at the search engine optimization parameters to determine which keywords make sense for you to specifically go after.
The leverage a website carries is in part determined by its page rank. Page rank is in large part determined by how many other sites on the web link to yours. Your exposure in the SERPS is in turn affected by your page rank. The reason you need to know this is if the top ten websites all out rank you in terms of page rank, you’re better off choosing another keyword.
Fundamental lesson: Small Fish eat smaller fish to grow bigger.
Build Backlinks & Rank Higher: The Five Most Effective Strategies
posted by admin @ 8:28 AM
Friday, September 18, 2009
As the online market place continues to warm up to the idea of SEO, link building has become center stage as it tends to be the most time consuming and crucial part of any internet marketing strategy. Link building services are the most commonly outsourced aspect of SEO. This process involves finding qualified and thematically relevant one-way linking partners who will link back to your website.
At first glance this sounds easy and there are hundreds of automated products out there that claim to add thousands of back links overnight. The truth is there are no short cuts in cultivating authoritative back links for a site. Link building companies spend many hours link building by hand in order to get the best results. Spammy automated products often never cultivate valuable links and tend to do more harm than good. Here are a couple quick suggestions to help you get started.
1. Know What Keywords You’re Targeting
Link building strategies are an extension of your current SEO practice. You’ll want to reference the list of keywords you have selected to optimize your site. Make sure that the anchor text of the link has the keyword you are targeting. For example, if you’re targeting the keyword “baby names” you’ll want to place that keyword in the anchor text of the link. I’ve seen many companies go after links by using their company name. Although this does increase link popularity it fails to pass popularity for a specific keyword and can be seen as a failed attempt.
2. Develop a Link Building Strategy
There are many strategies link building companies use to source qualified back links to their clients. The most tedious but often most rewarding method is manual linking requests also known as “cherry picking”. This method allows you to obtain exceptionally qualified links which can really help boost your position in the search engine results page (SERPS). A good place to start with manual link building is to look at your suppliers, vendors, clients, related organizations associations and more.
Besides manual link requests other well known tactics include:
1. directory submission (Dmoz, Yahoo Directory, Joe Ant)
2. article submission (ezinearticles.com, goarticles.com)
3. optimized press releases (PRWeb.com)
4. social media outlets (FaceBook, Linked In)
5. bookmarking sites (Digg, Reddit, Furl)
6. Blogs (niche blogs)
7. Forums (niche forums)
8. Classifieds (niche classifieds)
3. Identify Thematically Relevant and Authoritative Linking Sources
Search engines see links as votes of confidence for your site. The more relevant and authoritative the site, the more consideration is given to the link and the subsequent keyword in the anchor text. It really pays off to focus on the quality of your links rather than the quantity. It is also important for your link building to look natural and not an attempt to deceive search engine spiders in search of links. Try looking for sites within your industry rather than general, unrelated sites to get links from.
A good example of this would be content creation and distribution. Try creating content on a relevant subject of which you can speak authoritatively. An example of this would be a SEO company writing a short article on 5 simple ways companies can start link building and placing it on an authoritative, industry relevant site like this one. Remember, before placing a link on a site (or making a request), ask yourself three questions:
1. Does a link to my website belong here (does it look natural)?
2. Is this site relevant and authoritative?
3. Is there any benefit to my potential customers?
4. Look for the onsite attributes of the linking site
4. Determine Where Your Link Will Reside
Once you’ve nailed down a potential linking partner that represents the overall quality and thematic authority that your site deserves you’ll need to see where your link will reside. Here are a couple guidelines that I look for when placing links on a site. I try to get my links no more than a few clicks away from the homepage. The page must be thematically relevant and recently cached by Google’s search engine (this lets me know that the page has been indexed by Google). I also take a look at the number of external (outbound) links leaving that page. I try to keep the number of external links below 50 as it will dilute the effect of the page. Lastly, I look at the page the link will be placed on. For some sites this is harder to control, but if you have the option you should know where the most valuable locations are. I always try to get my links in line with thematically relevant content, like an article or blog post. I’ve found this produces some of the best results. Try to avoid placing your links on a “sponsored” or advertisers section that runs throughout the entire site. Also avoid footer links as rumor has it Google has devalued links buried in the footer of the site. Links placed at the top of the page or inserted into the site’s navigation also tend to do quite well. Bottom line is that your links need to look like they belong and provide value to the user and the site it is published on.
5. Be Aware of “No-Follow” Links
Within the last 5 years Google developed the concept of the “no-follow” link. The “no-follow” code is inserted into your link and instructs the Google spider to ignore it. The “no-follow” link can be seen used most commonly in blog comments and forum posts. This initiative was set forth to combat spam and automated linking mechanisms that would throw links automatically on blog comments and forum posts.
There are a lot of SEO professionals that will only place a link if it is a “do-follow” link, meaning it doesn’t have the “no-follow” attribute. I tend to disagree with this notion especially when the link in question is on a highly trafficked authority site. If it makes sense for the link to be there, then add your link. Even though Google won’t give you any credit for it, it will be seen by thousands of people who may visit your site and link to you themselves because your site is highly relevant. I call this concept indirect link building. You are influencing and promoting your site to potential linking partners.
Link Building is a very time consuming process and link building companies spend a lot of time researching, testing and improving their techniques. Link building services are available for companies that don’t have the time to invest in manual link building. The bottom line is that with a little help anyone can link build and move their site up the SERPS.
Link Web Services Opens New Channel on YouTube!
posted by LinkWebServices.com @ 9:54 AM
Sunday, May 31, 2009
LinkWebServices.com has opened a new channel on YouTube!
View all of our customer’s videos at http://www.YouTube.com/LinkWebServices
Don’t forget to Subscribe to our Channel; we will let you know whenever we upload a fresh video!
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