Archive for the ‘Link Building’ category
The Dirty Little Wiki Secret
Wiki’s are basically like online encyclopedias that are publicly edited. It’s a collective knowledge tool. You’ve probably heard of the most famous once, Wikipedia. If you can get your business listed in Wikipedia, then that is very, very helpful. But it’s also very difficult to get a listing devoted to a business unless you are a big, nationwide company.
However, Wikipedia is only one wiki-style website. There are LOTS of those things. If you research your competitions’ back links and notice that they have lots of wiki links, then chances are they are working with an internet marketing company that is setting up wiki’s as a source of links. Many of these wiki’s are open, meaning anyone can edit them. So you know what you can do? You can change those links to point to your website. In cases where a marketing company is setting up lots of those things for links, they are probably not going to bother ever working on them again. Chances of your link staying intact are quite good.
This is somewhat of a borderline tactic because we’re not dealing with real high quality link sources in most cases. But if you see that these links are helping drive up your competition’s rankings, and they are open wiki’s, you have an opportunity to literally steal links from your competition.
Don’t spend all your time trying to hunt down these types of links. I’m really talking about a very specific situation where your competitors are driving up their ranking by using low quality wiki’s as a source of links. These sites really aren’t benefiting society at large, so you’re not hurting anyone…except your competition.
SEO Ain’t What It Used to Be
Search engine optimization ain’t what it used to be. Back in the good old days (pre-Google) all you had to do was use your keywords in your meta-tags, title and copy. You had a very good chance of ranking in search engines for the keywords. Then Google came along the with the idea that the number and quality of links pointing to your website, as well as the text content of those links, was a good indicator of your websites relevance. And thus was born the linking campaign. Now, it’s a lot more difficult than that.
Google remains the leader in the search engine race, still owning a large percentage of all search engine traffic. So it makes the most sense to optimize for Google, and work down from there. So what is Google looking at these days? Increasingly, Google is taking social media into consideration. In a way, they are sort-of forcing your hand into using Google Plus. Although other social media platforms certainly come into play as well.
Google is now looking for links to websites or social media profiles contained in social media accounts. Want to have your website appear highly ranked to your prospects? Then become social media friends with them. This will increase the likelihood that those individual see your website prominently in Google.
And ultimately, aren’t you most concerned with your website being found by those most likely to purchase your products or service?
And putting aside the idea of improving your visibility to your social media friends, it is very likely that this process will improve your rankings to anyone. If Google sees that lots of people promote your website in their social media accounts, then that will likely have a similar effect to having lots of external links from other websites.
So now you need to think of SEO in a couple of areas. Certainly, you still need to continue the process of optimizing your website in the traditional way. In other words, make sure that your web pages use your keywords in the correct way. And make sure that you have a catalog of high quality external links pointing to your website, especially links that contain your primary keywords.
A much newer area of optimization is concerned with the visibility of your website in the local portion of Google search results. This is called local SEO. I’m not going to go into the details, but there are a number of things you need to do to improve the chances of your website appearing prominently to those searching for your business in your market area.
And of course the newest area involves using social media to influence search results. Regardless of your opinion on the effectiveness of social media as a lead or sales generation tool, it cannot be denied because of its effect on your search rankings.
So regardless of your comfort level being social online, it now must be a part of your overall Internet marketing strategy
Need some help? Work media would be glad to assist with this process. It is time consuming and not necessarily all that intuitive. Call us today at 615-375-8793. Or e-mail us at info@workmedia.net.
Blog Comment Linking: Good or Bad?
Recently, in its Google Webmaster blog (http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com), Google posted about spam links in blog comments, and how using these links will damage your positioning. This is a strategy that Work Media sometimes employs, so we wanted to address this subject.
First off, you have to take these things with a grain of salt. Google likes to keep things secretive, and we believe it often does and says things just to create confusion about how its algorithm works. And the Web is built on links. Google uses links to find web sites and as a measure of a site’s worth in assigning it a ranking. So, in general, you still have to get links to your site if you want high search engine rankings.
For another thing, we don’t think it really makes sense to PUNISH sites for having links to it. That’s not to say Google doesn’t do it, and it seems to have done it in the past, but think about this: if Google is going to punish a web site for having links to it contained in blog comments, why wouldn’t I use this against my competitors? What is to stop me from going around to blogs and submitting spammy comments with links to my competitors’ web sites?
Google says this: “…it’s useless to think of harming your competitor’s ranking by spamming comments with their name, since it usually won’t affect their ranking if their sites are complying with Google Webmaster Guidelines.”
Ah, there’s the rub. If you do things the right way, you will be fine. Here is our approach to blog commenting:
1. Use a keyword for the name field.
2. Type a URL in the appropriate field.
3. Type out a well-written, well-thought-out comment that relates directly to the content of the blog post.
The difference between this approach and what Google is talking about is that we are making legitimate comments, while also taking advantage of the opportunity to get the link.
Here’s another thing: don’t rely solely on this or any other SEO strategy to get links. Mix it up. And be credible.
Here’s another thing that we find odd: one of Google’s suggestions is that a way to prevent this is to set comment links in your blog to no follow. However, it was recently revealed that doing that reduces the value of your own internal-pointing or other do follow links. The reason is that PageRank leaks out of your page from the no follow links, even though the pages the links point to do not get credited with the PageRank. So setting your links to no follow is now damaging to your own SEO efforts.
So what should you do? Don’t worry about it. Do your blog commenting like we suggest above and you will be fine.
Getting Down and Dirty with Link Swapping
Don’t tell me about search engine marketing. I have been doing this for years. I have hundreds of articles and blog posts all over the Web. I have two books in print. I have many satisfied clients. I know SEO.
So I feel qualified to tell you that, without a doubt, link swapping still works. My firm will continue engaging in link swapping on behalf of our clients until we see that it no longer works.
Yet this continues to be a practice that we are questioned about over and over. Look, the purpose of link swapping is not to provide your visitors with other web sites they might want to visit. Not at all. It is only for the purpose of improving search engine rankings.
I’m not at all implying that you should rely on link swapping is your only strategy for getting links. You need lots of links from lots of different places. One way links are preferable to swapped links, and you should take steps to get those kinds of links as well. But link swapping is one important component of your overall online marketing campaign.
If you’re going to use this strategy, do it right. To begin with, have mo more than 50 links on a link swap page. So you will probably need to have multiple pages. You also need to supply your link partners with very specific verbiage and HTML to use for their links to you. And remember, this does not have to be a page that is featured prominently on your site. You just need a small text link somewhere on your home page for search engine spiders to follow. That will be good enough for search engines to find.
This is a great way to begin the process of building a catalog of links to your site if you are just getting started.
So don’t be a snob. Set up a link swaps page or directory on your site and begin the process of swapping links with other relevant web sites. Over time, it will improve your search engine rankings.
By the way, if you promote a law firm, you have to check out the Law Firm Internet Marketing site.
In Search of the Perfect Article Marketing Solution
Jerry Work here. I do a lot of article marketing. For a while, I got heavy into video, but it is more difficult to produce video for third-party clients than it is to produce my own. So ultimately, text content creation and distribution is still the most effective strategy for generating links for myself and my clients. It gives you the widest distribution of your marketing message and greatest leverage on your time.
I am always looking for tools to help me do a better job with article marketing or do it more efficiently. For nearly a year, I used Article Marketer, an online service that is probably the top article distribution service. It gets your articles listed on many article directories in a short period, and then continues with a steady stream of submissions over time.
Unfortunately, I had to stop using Article Marketer. They have their own quality control program and are quite strict about what articles they allow. There were many occasions where I tried to argue my case about why a particular article should be allowed, but there never seemed to be any way to have a dialogue with Article Marketer staff.
In addition, there were times when it literally took weeks to get articles approved and into the distribution queue. I am a professional, aggressive search engine marketer. I service quite a few clients, and I do my own marketing. I write high quality content, and I write it fast. I can’t have my business slowed down waiting on approval by other people, and I can’t have my articles sitting in a queue.
I also need the flexibility to post articles under different names for my clients. Article Marketer requires you to have multiple accounts to do this, which can be quite expensive and difficult to manage. I need a single program that lets me distribute content under different names.
So…it seems what I need is an automated solution. I started trying out something called Jet Submitter, but the problem with it is that it only submits to directories set up using a particular script. Plus, after joining, I read all kinds of horrible reviews based on the company’s terrible customer service. You just can’t feel all that confident about a software solution in those circumstances.
I have also used SENuke, which has a very nice built-in article spinning feature. Unfortunately, SENuke is not of great value for article marketing because it lacks one critical feature…it doesn’t actually submit to article directories! It is a social networking tool used to set up pages on sites like WetPaint and Tumblr. This process is certainly valuable, and is one component of a well-rounded search marketing campaign, but it doesn’t replace mass article distribution.
My dream solution has the following features: 1. it distributes to all of the major article directories; 2. it requires no input on my part (works completely automatically); 3. submits very different versions of a core article; and 4. with those alternate versions being well-written and professional.
I think the software I want doesn’t exist. I’m not sure if I trust the automated solutions that are on the market. The next best alternative is a semi-automated solution, which is software that rotates from one directory to another, but still requires some input on a per-directory basis. I will keep you informed of what I discover while I try out some more options.
If optimized content creation and distribution is something you struggle with, Work Media can help! Contact us at 615-263-2811 or email Info@WorkMedia.net.
Return to Squidoo
I logged into Squidoo yesterday to build a new lens (“lens” being Squidoospeak for a web page) for a client. It had been a while since I had logged in, which isn’t good but isn’t necessarily bad either. One of the great things about Squidoo is all of the modules it provides for building your lenses that update themselves automatically. So you can build a lens that will continue to show new content every day even if you don’t do anything to it for months or years.
Anyway…I logged in to build a new lens and noticed some major changes to the Squidoo interface that make it much quicker to add modules and align modules on your page. Last year, I spent a couple of weeks setting up Squidoo lenses and it was very slow process because of what was required to add and re-order modules. Now that that process is much quicker, Squidoo is much better.
So why should you set up pages in Squidoo? It’s been a while since we’ve talked about it, so here is a super quick refresher. Squidoo is a social networking site founded by Seth Godin that Google really loves. Often, a page on Squidoo that pertains to your subject area will rank quicker and higher than your own web site. So links from Squidoo carry a lot of weight.
You should incorporate Squidoo as part of your social networking/content distribution campaign. If you publish a blog, you should use the RSS module to stream your blog posts to your Squidoo lenses. And use some of the news publishing modules to automatically keep them updated with news about your industry.
The Squidoo teams seems to be trying to make the site easier to use, so if you haven’t checked it out yet, now is a great time.
Building Out Your Information Hub with RSS
In a recent post, we talked about building your own information hub for search engine marketing purposes. This provides two major benefits: first, sites that are very heavy in content that changes often tend to rank highly; and second, an information hub provides you with a way to guide search engine spiders to web pages you want them to find, which will generally link back to your main site.
But who has time to build and maintain TWO web sites?
There is a technology that can make maintaining an information hub much easier: RSS. RSS, which is generally understood to mean “Real Simple Syndication,” is an XML file that contains information about web pages that can be streamed to your web site. Any web site can publish an RSS file, and most sites that feature articles or blog posts do so. So this means you can “borrow” material from other web sites to feature on your web site. That is how you can build an information hub without actually creating all the content yourself.
So how do you use RSS? You are going to have to write some code for your web pages that can retrieve an RSS file and then get the information out of the file for use on your site. There are a lot of different ways to do this, partly depending on what server runs your site.
Following is some code that you can plug into an ASP site (which will generally run on a Windows/IIS server):
Set xmlHttp = Server.CreateObject(“MSXML2.XMLHTTP.3.0″)xmlHttp.Open “Get”, WebSiteURL, falsexmlHttp.Send()
RSSXML = xmlHttp.ResponseText
‘The above code retrieves an RSS file from the supplied URL (“WebSiteIRL”) into an XML object.
Set xmlDOM = Server.CreateObject(“MSXML2.DomDocument.3.0″)xmlDOM.async = falsexmlDOM.LoadXml(RSSXML)
‘The above code loads the XML data into a DomDocument object.
Set xmlHttp = Nothing
‘ clear HTTP object
Set RSSItems = xmlDOM.getElementsByTagName(“entry”)
‘ collect all “items” from downloaded RSS
Set xmlDOM = Nothing ‘ clear XMLRSSItemsCount = RSSItems.Length-1
‘The above code gets the “entry” elements in the XML file into an array of items.
For i = 0 to RSSItemsCount
For each child in RSSItem.childNodes
‘Do something with each child node
‘For example, if there are nodes called “title”, you might have a line like:
if lcase(child.nodeName) = “title” then response.write (child.text)end if
Next
The above code loops through the items in the array and does something with each piece of data. This is where you display the information on your screen.
I cannot take credit for writing the above code. I found it online somewhere a long time ago and have used it on many web sites. It works great. If you don’t understand this, any decent web developer should be able to implement something like this for you.
Guide the Search Engine Spiders with Your Own Information Hub
You should consider building a new web site separate from your main site that functions as an information hub for your industry. You can use RSS feeds to dynamically create much of the content for the site, which will save you the effort of trying to manually updating it with new links or articles. So why would you want to take the time to do such a thing?
There are a few good reasons, but the one we are most interested in is this: to have a means to guide search engine spiders to other web sites that rank to your main site, without linking directly to them from your main site.
The reason you would want to guide search engine spiders in this way is so that you do not end up with nothing but two-way links, but you also want to make sure that other web pages that contain links to your site are found. There is certainly a good chance that Google (or whoever) will find all those links on its own, but why not make it easy and point right to them?
To really take this strategy to the next level, you should give your new site, the information hub, its own IP address so that there is nothing tying the sites together. But even if you don’t do that, it is still a good strategy because it eliminates cross-linking between other sites and your site.
Another big advantage is that the information hub gives you another opportunity to get your marketing message across. But avoid the temptation to make it just an extension of your web site for purposes of selling your services. It needs to stand on its own as a valuable source of impartial information.
Here are a couple of links with more link building strategies:
http://link-building-strategies.tumblr.com/post/56579067/link-building-strategies-that-really-work
http://www.zimbio.com/link-building-strategies/articles/2/Link+Building+Strategies+Work
Five Squidoo Lens Tips
Today’s Squidoo lens is about what to look for in an internet advertising agency.
For a couple of weeks now, we’ve been building Squidoo lenses on a variety of topics. We hope to achieve “Giant Squid” status because that will give us better leverage of Squidoo for marketing purposes. To achieve that, you have to have 50 active lenses that people actually visit. So we’re building lenses on all kinds of topics, not just Internet marketing. Anyway, following are some tips for making the most of your Squidoo lenses that we have gleaned from our own experiences so far and advice we have read from others.
1. Use your keywords in links to your main web site. This is the most basic SEO use of your Squidoo lenses. If you build a good lens, it only makes sense to place a prominent keyword link on the page that links to your site for the SEO boost.
2. Link your Squidoo lenses to each other. Help visitors find their way to your various Squidoo lenses by placing a list of links to those lenses in each one.
3. Spend some time on your lenses. This one seems obvious, but you may be tempted to throw up a bunch of half-constructed lenses. For a Squidoo strategy to work, your lenses really do need to be high quality. Fortunately, using the Squidoo modules, it is very easy to build a lens that updates itself. You just have to take the time to set up the modules properly.
4. Help search engines find your lenses. Link to your lenses in your blog posts or your main web site.
5. Tag your lenses. Do your keyword research (we suggest using Google’s external keyword tool) and use a combination of high traffic and long-tail keywords for your Squidoo lens tags.
Follow these tips and you will be on your way to building a series of strong Squidoo lenses that will help your search engine marketing campaign. If you could use some help with these types of advanced link building strategies, contact Work Media at www.workmedia.net or 888-299-4837.
Guiding the Search Engines
Today’s Squidoo lens is about advertising copywriting. Strong copywriting can make a profound impact on your business performance. The advertising / copywriting Squidoo lens reveals the top five copywriters whose work you should study to learn how to write powerful advertising copy.
We recently published a new article on our site about a concept called “PageRank reflection,” which, in a nutshell, is the process of linking to high PageRank sites that have links back to your site in order to help search engine spiders find the link back to your site. It is similar in concept to link swapping, only rather than having a link placed on the other site via a link swap, you take advantage of social networking or bookmarking sites that let you have control over the link placement. The example we hit on in the article was using Squidoo. To read more about the details of using Squidoo to accomodate PageRank reflection, read the article (no reason to re-write it here).
The general idea is to guide search engine spiders to pages you want them to find so that they will find the links back to your site. This concept applies to any web site where you have a link back to your site. It applies not only to social networking type sites but directories, blogs, and any other kind of web site. If there are blog posts where you have a link
(via a comment or whatever), you should link to the blog in order to let search engine spiders find that link back to your site.
One strategy you might consider is creating a web page specifically for the purpose of displaying links back to your site. There should naturally be some kind of common theme to those links (for example, most links to our site are located on other web sites that deal with Internet marketing), so it will resemble sort-of a mini-directory, which is a perfectly legitimate purpose for a web site. If you create such a site, register a new domain name for it and link to it from your main site. This will allow search engine spiders to easily find your links directory and begin following those links. Those links will all link to pages that link back to your main site. It’s all just one big circle.
This process does take some time, but it is time well spent. Eventually, the search engines will probably find most of your links anyway, but the faster and easier you make it, the quicker you will climb the search engine rankings.
Contact Work Media at 888-299-4837 or info@workmedia.net for help with your link building campaign. We can take over the burden of building a broad, well-constructed catalog of links to your site, so you can focus on managing the leads that come through.