Re-Thinking Link Building

Posted By Sage Lewis on 16 July 09

I've yet to meet anyone who loves to chase down links. In my office, it's often who got "stuck" doing links.

Some people outright refuse to do it. It's boring, tedious, and doesn't provide a great deal of intellectual fulfillment.

Getting somebody to do your link building for you would be a big relief. And if you could get somebody else to do your link building cheaply, that would simply be amazing.

According to this survey of 120 respondents, 62 percent of them used interns for their link building. That's a lot of link building by people that don't know your business very well, and are likely to have never done any link building before.

One alternative that appears to be growing in popularity is outsourcing link building to India. A guy at work is experimenting with it on his personal site. And we all get a lot of spammy e-mail about outsourced link building as well.

According to the Google keyword tool, these are the top 10 most-searched phrases containing the phrase "link building":

• link building (90,500)
• link building services (12,100)
• link building service (5,400)
• seo link building (4,400)
• link building india (3,600)
• link building company (2,400)
• link building strategies (1,600)
• link building software (1,300)
• link popularity building (1,300)
• link building campaign (1,300)

The numbers in that list represent "Global Monthly Search Volume." "Link building India" is the fifth most-searched phrase in this set. Clearly, there's a lot of interest in this.

The spam I've been getting has been promoting an offer of $5 per link. The entry-level package is 75 links for $550, which is over $7 per link. You have to buy the 200 link package for $995 to get the $5 per link rate. That's still pretty reasonable. Filling out the form by itself is probably worth $7.

With 3,600 searches in Google for the phrase "link building India" and 62 percent of people surveyed passing off link building to interns, this leads me to believe that getting links is classified as a menial task. It's considered a necessary evil that anyone can do.

What's the True Value of Link Building?

I have mixed thoughts about all of this.

First, I'm a link building idealist. Link building should be built around something worth linking to. You first have content, a tool, or something that makes your site unique. Then you go out and ask people to link to it.

If you have a three-page brochure site, you probably don't deserve the links. The outsourced link builders in India aren't concerned with your content at all. You can have the worst site ever created, and they'll still be more than happy to get you 200 links for $995.

Second, I also have a realist bone somewhere in my body. Sites often do better in the search engines after implementing campaigns such as these.

As long as the links are mildly related to what you do, aren't put across an entire Web site (site-wide links), and are one way -- pointing to your site without you having to link to them -- then they often help. They might not be the greatest links, but they seem to help get things rolling, especially for new sites.

Re-Thinking Link Building

Ultimately, the problem begins in the vocabulary: link building. We're building links. There is no other goal other than that. Just build, build, build. And then build some more.

If 10 are good, 1,000 must be amazing. The phrase implies quantity over quality.

"Link builders" should start thinking of themselves as public relations experts. After a company posts a news story on their Web site, then these online public relations experts try to get the story posted on appropriate Web sites, with a link back to the news.

I wish we could drop this whole "link building" phrase. It's becoming counterproductive for everyone.

Google hates link builders. And link builders think so little of their craft that they're willing to outsource it to an intern or someone whose primary language isn't their own. How can that person ever get a decent link?

Resources: http://searchenginewatch.com/3634424

Link exchanges: The poor man's SEO

Posted by Tom Krazit on 14 July 09

Large Internet companies spend millions on consultants and technology trying to get their sites to rank among the highest results on Google. Everyone else has to rely on the poor man's search-engine optimization: the link exchange.

If you've ever hung up your own shingle on the Web, you've probably gotten an e-mail to this effect at some point: "Dear So-and-so, I believe your site and mine could benefit from exchanging links." We probably get eight to 10 a week in the CNET News general mailbox, mostly from technology-related companies but occasionally from auto-parts suppliers and watch retailers who either have no idea what we do or few moral qualms about spam.

The idea is that if you can coax a link out of a large site like CNET, Google and other search engines will record that link as a vote of confidence in your site's worthiness and improve your ranking in searches for certain topics, thereby boosting traffic to your site. The technique is quite old, dating back even before Google and its PageRank system emerged as the Web's dominant search engine.

But does it still work? And at what point do two or three sites struggling to get off the ground veer off the road from mutual assistance to a full-blown spam operation designed to game the system?

Evan Duffield, for one, thinks it still works. He contacted us trying to get CNET to exchange links with WarpedAI.com, a site he has launched to promote stock-trading tools for day traders, and says he has been able to slowly build up the PageRank of another site he owns using techniques that don't run afoul of Google's Webmaster guidelines.

"It's kind of a vicious circle," he said. "To start a new business you need PageRank, but to get PageRank you need links to your service. You have to get the ball rolling."

PageRank is the currency of the Web. Google's novel approach to site indexing way back when was to evaluate the worthiness of a site based on how many other sites were linking to it, also taking into account the worthiness of the sites passing along the links. This meant, and still does mean, that a link from a site with a high PageRank counts for way more than a link from a site with low PageRank.

But how do you get a link from one of those sites? Google's official advice: "The best way to get other sites to create relevant links to yours is to create unique, relevant content that can quickly gain popularity in the Internet community." That, of course, sounds like something your mother would say.

In a Web as vast as this one, getting attention for a new site, even one with superb content, is a very difficult undertaking. Bloggers can discuss each other's work and help each other build up a following, but if you're selling a product or service it can be much more difficult to climb the ranks of search results for things like "day-trading software" when you're starting from scratch.

So Webmasters like Duffield turn to solicitations for links. Danny Sullivan, who writes about search-engine optimization for Search Engine Land, says "if you're a new site, absolutely you want to be doing link building. But you need to be doing that in a smart fashion."

Duffield says he's very careful to only solicit links from sites that are related to his product: his pitch for exchanging links that somehow wound up at our doorstep was addressed to computer-go@computer-go.org, a mailing list for hobbyists trying to tackle the difficult chore of building a computer AI system for the ancient game of go.

That was a mistake, he said; the result of prematurely hitting send on an e-mail template. Duffield compiles his targets by searching for sites that are related to finance and stock trading, and attempts to contact a general e-mail address to pass along his site's information and offer a link exchange.

"It's not about the actual links so much as it is optimizing search queries," Duffield said. "When I figure out a query I want from Google, I can see the top three positions have this much page rank and this many positions, and try to beat that out."

As long as people like Duffield are exchanging links without offering payment, or crossing obvious lines such as breaking captchas and posting spam links in guestbooks or comment forums, they're following the spirit of Google's Webmaster guidelines.

"Where it tends to get into tricky issues is where people are doing it primarily for payment," Sullivan said. "Search engines would see links as votes. Google does not like that people would simply be buying links to do better.

While paid links are clearly off-limits, Google appears to ban link exchanges in general, saying it does not allow "excessive link exchanging" but failing to define exactly what constitutes "excessive." Other practices that are verboten include links to "bad neighborhoods" on the Web and complicated networks of several Web sites with little content but pages and pages of links amongst themselves that Google can usually identify.

For the most part, however, the practice is rampant enough that only the most egregious violations get snagged. "If you start thinking too much about not getting caught, you're probably doing things you shouldn't be doing," Sullivan said.

In an era where SEO is a budding industry unto itself, link exchanges are perhaps the most basic approach. Far below the realm of those dithering over Google's search index are those like Duffield trying to make something out of literally nothing.

While he needs to build PageRank equity to get started, Duffield acknowledges that at a certain point that Google is right: a site will live or die on its content. Link exchanges only work to get one's name out there: the real boost needed to turn a Web site into a business comes when real people start discussing and linking to a service on blogs, message forums, and social-networking sites.

That's when your search ranking (and therefore traffic) really starts to grow, he said. "If you can make Google see that something is being talked about all over the Internet, what choice do they have?"

Resources: http://news.cnet.com/8301-17939_109-10285606-2.html

Should You Still Use Nofollow?

Posted by Eric Enge on 14 July 2009

From: searchenginewatch

Recent changes in the processing of the nofollow attribute have caused consternation and concern among many publishers. Let's talk about what has happened, and how you should adapt your SEO strategy accordingly.

A Little History

PageRank sculpting has been a hot topic since 2007. This was the idea that you could control, at a granular level, the flow of link juice in your Web site through the use of the nofollow attribute. The concept can be illustrated by this chart:

In our example, Link 1 has the nofollow attribute on the link, and Link 2 and Link 3 don't. Google's stated position in 2007 (you can see it detailed here and here) was that this would result in Link 1 not passing (or consuming) any PageRank, and that PageRank getting redistributed through the other links in the page.

This is represented in our diagram by the percentage figures shown after the arrow. Link 1 passes no link juice, and links 2 and 3 pass half the passable link juice of the page each.

This touched off an era where many SEOs recommended PageRank sculpting, and lots of sites did it. Data pulled from Linkscape in March 2009 indicated that 3 percent of the links on the Web were nofollowed.

How This All Changed

At SMX Advanced 2009, Matt Cutts made statements about how this had been changed, and which he then clarified in his June 15 "PageRank Sculpting" post. Basically, Google's position appears to be that this is the impact of using nofollow on selected links:

In this revised world, Link 1 still doesn't pass link juice, but the link juice it chooses not to pass is simply discarded. The juice passed through Links 2 and 3 isn't affected by whether you nofollow Link 1.

Impact of the Change

Based on this, it may make sense to remove any onsite nofollows you have. For example, if you nofollow all the links to your "About Us" page, the link juice in those links is discarded. If you let the links pass juice, your About Us page will be able to pass some of that juice back into the site through the links contained on it.

If you want to be cautious about this, carefully check out the results of removing the nofollows. Monitoring the impact of every SEO change you make is always a good idea.

While I believe that Google is serious about their new stance, theory (or position) and practice don't always align in the world of search. Also, while Google announced a new policy, Yahoo and Microsoft haven't commented on this.

More aggressive publishers will continue to sculpt by using older techniques for it. For example, you can use JavaScript that encodes the link so it isn't recognizable as a link by the search engines. Done aggressively, this will behave much the same way that nofollow did back in 2007 (because the search engine won't recognize the link as a link so no link juice is wasted on it).

This is pretty aggressive stuff though. It's a bit like hanging a flag on your site and saying "I am aggressively optimizing for search engines." It might fit well for smaller sites that believe their overall visibility is low (I still wouldn't recommend it for those sites), but sites that have a fair amount of public visibility should stay away from it.

Instead, use the natural link structure of your site to flow link juice (and your site visitors) where you want them to go. Creating the best possible user experience on your site is the best way for you to spend your time, as it will also make your site more attractive to potential linkers.

Get To The Top of Google in Five Easy Steps

Posted by Haydn O'Meagher on 3 July 09

From: http://www.sys-con.com/

Here's the five steps the pro's take:

1. Choose your keywords

2. Make sure you're in the search engines index

3. Get Ranked

4. Get clicked

5. Convert on your site

1. Choose you keywords

You've chosen or know your target market, now you have to get inside their heads and think about the types of keywords they might type in to a search to find your product/service.

Remember, there are several stages in the searchers path to a sale. They may start with trying to find some information on the subject, then once they know a bit more they may move into a mind set of trying to find the best deal on the category they've decided on, then they may move into a buying mind set.

What words would your target use when they're looking for information in your field, what about when they're looking to choose between providers? Do you have a specific model no: or something they may type in when looking to buy?

Don't choose keywords that are 'Too Hot' or 'Too Cold'. Choose keywords that are 'Just Right'.

Too Hot...

The keywords 'love' gets about 80,000,000 hits a month so it would be a great one to be at the top of right? Wrong.

It's to ambiguous and too broad. People may be looking up 'Love Love Me Do', ''does he love me?', 'love advertising' or any other thing to do with 'love'. Now if you're trying to sell a 'love seat', what do all these other searches have to do with that? Nothing at all.

So a keyword that is too hot is a waste of time and effort.

Too Cold...

These are keywords that no one is searching for. It may be very easy to get to the top on Google for 'technology for ducks and geese', but if no one is looking for it, there's no use in it.

Just right...

Keywords that have at least some people looking them up, are fairly specific are just right. Focus on these.

Make a list of all possible keywords in each step and whittle them down until you're happy.

2. Make sure you're in the search engines index
There's no use in doing anything unless your website and it's pages are in the search engines index. It's a lot easier than you may think. The search engines spiders are very advanced. Here's what Google say:

"Inclusion in Google's search results is free and easy; you don't even need to submit your site to Google. Google is a fully automated search engine that uses software known as 'spiders' to crawl the web on a regular basis and find sites to add to our index. In fact, the vast majority of sites listed in our results aren't manually submitted for inclusion, but found and added automatically when our spiders crawl the web."

All you need to do to check if your page has spidered is do a search and see if it comes up. Just type in the full url. If it isn't, then make a link from one of your pages that is spidered and it will be found.

3. Get ranked
Now you've chosen your keywords and you're in the search engines index, you want to get placed high within that index for those keywords. Very high.

First...Optimize landing pages for keywords... There was a time that you could just put the keyword in your web pages copy a million times and you would get a high rank. Those days are gone thankfully. Now the optimum level is having the keyword you've chosen appear about 7% of the time in that page.

And, the words are ranked in importance in this order...title, headline, sub head, first part of copy and then the 'sign off at the end.'
So sprinkle the keyword in there at about 7%, and make sure it's in the title and headline.

Next...Get links
Get as many links as you can, but not all links are created equally. The more prominent and respected the source the better. A link from a mates page that has no real standing is almost of no use but a link from CNN is of great use.

Here are a few thought starters...Get in directories, they're good links. Yahoo Directory, Open Directory/Mozilla and all others. Basically you have to think "Why would someone want to link to mysite?" Then create content that will make them want to.

And make sure the links have the keywords that your targeting in them.

4. Get clicked
Make sure your titles and snippets match the searchers query. You can check what your title and snippet says by typing the page you want to look at into Google. You want your keywords in both parts.

5. Convert on your website
Create a great site with distinct call to actions. Depending on the goals of your website you may have different calls to action. Maybe your goal is to buy a product online, then the call to action is simply to 'Buy Now'. For more information on this please have a look at Direct Response Website Design.

Firms 'should be careful over Bing SEO'

Posted on 13 July 09
From: directnews

Marketers have been warned that investing in search engine optimisation (SEO) specifically for the Bing service might not be the best strategy at the moment.

Figures from Nielsen Online suggest that the search engine is doing well at building up a user base in the first few weeks of its availability, but it is still small fish when compared with Google and Yahoo!, SmartCompany.com.au suggested.

Speaking to the website, David Markus of IT services company Combo said that online marketing executives would do well to monitor the search market for longer before making any firm decisions regarding SEO.

He warned that allocating funds to SEO for Bing now may result in little return on investment should the search engine fail to capitalise on its early growth.

However, Mr Markus added: "When and if Bing gets to the point where it challenges Google, you want to be in on the action ... You have to be careful with how you go about dealing with it."

Bing accounted for 2.36 per cent of all UK searches in the four weeks ending June 27th, according to Hitwise.

Meaning-Making in Landing Page Optimization

Posted by Tim Ash on Jul 8, 2009

From: searchenginewatch

If I hear another person talk about "learnings" from their landing page test, I'll have to scream.

We all want to create "meaning" and see the larger patterns in our tests that can apply to other circumstances. This is natural and can serve as a shortcut that can be used instead of thinking in the future, and applied to similar situations. But the world is very complex, and trying to generalize universal truths from a single landing page test result is often a horrible idea.

Unless you're running a very simple head-to-head split test, and you change only a single tactical and self-contained page element, such as a headline or button color, any "learnings" are likely to be very dubious indeed.

The reason for this is known in science as "false causality." As a common scientific saying goes, "Correlation does not imply causation."

The phrase above doesn't use the word "imply" in its common sense (i.e., to suggest). The scientific sense of implies (taken from formal logic) can be better translated as requires.

The phrase refers to a common error that people make. They assume that because two effects are related or occur together, one causes the other. This isn't necessarily the case. There may be a third, previously unrecognized, lurking variable (also called a confounding variable, or confounding factor) that causes the other two.

For example, if I told you that half of auto accidents occur within five miles of your home, you might conclude that there's something inherently dangerous about driving in your neighborhood. You might theorize (as some have done) that perhaps you're more absent-minded, hurried, or on autopilot during short errands and trips near your home.

This seems reasonable on its face. However, it's dead wrong.

What If I told you that half of our driving occurs within five miles of the home? Now a very different picture emerges. The accident rate per mile is the same -- we just happen to be near our homes more of the time.

The confounding variable of miles-driven was ignored, and led to an erroneous conclusion that driving close to home was inherently more risky. We then used this false conclusion to generate all kinds of spurious explanations for the observation.

In landing page optimization, many people also insist on extracting so-called "learnings" from their test results. Hindsight is used to rationalize why a particular landing page version had a higher conversion rate.

For example, I may test two call-to-action buttons: orange and green. If the green one performs better, I may be tempted to conclude that my audience likes the color green more than orange.

However, there may be another explanation: the contrast of the button color with the main color theme of the page. If my page were predominantly orange-themed, the orange call-to-action button would seem muted and may get lost in a scene composed of similar colors. The green button color may stick out and seem more prominent because of its contrast, and not the actual color used.

Trying to rationalize results after the test is a dangerous activity, because it may cause you to inappropriately fixate on elements of your design that had nothing to do with the performance improvement.

Try to restrain yourself from engaging in this kind of after-the-fact myth construction. Instead, focus on coming up with diverse and interesting ideas for every one of your landing page tests.

Retesting things that you already "know" is definitely in order. Otherwise, you're simply working based on assumptions. And as they say: When you "assume" you make an "ass" of "u" and "me."

Keep an open "beginner's mind" and continue to see each test as a new experience.

Three Link Attributes You Might Find Useful

Posted by Nick Stamoulis on July 12, 2009

From: searchengineoptimizationjournal

I’m not one for advocating the use of frivolous tags and attributes at every turn. Many tags that I still see in the source code of websites just aren’t necessary. Meta author, for instance, copyright dates, and such. I mean, why? How about putting such information on your web pages for human visitors to see?But there are a few tags and attributes, though not necessary, that can be helpful. Here are three attributes that you can append to your links to give them a little boost or to aid you in your on site optimization efforts:

• The first and most basic attribute is the title attribute. Just as it sounds, you give your link a title. It looks like this < href="”domain">title=”keyword phrase”>text The title attribute is just another way to slip your keyword in there and it works. I wouldn’t use it for every link. It’s best when used in moderation and works really well when your anchor text is a variation of your primary keyword; you can then make your title attribute your primary keyword so that the search engines know that the two are related. Even when you use anchor text that is not related to the on-page SEO at all, but is still relevant for that link, you can use the title attribute to draw the connection. Very useful
• The canonical url attribute is a new attribute introduced by Google earlier in the year. It looks like this rel=”canonical” and you place the attribute in the same place you put your title attribute. Use this attribute when you are linking to an URL that is a duplicate of another page on your site. It tells the search engines that the URL being linked to is the page you prefer to have indexed for that content.
• Rel=”me” is a useful link attribute when you are linking from one property you own to another or when you are linking from a social media profile to your main website or secondary website. It tells the search engines that the content on those pages are related or that the person behind the creation of those content pages are the same person. This attribute can serve to increase the search engine rankings of the pages about you that you want to rank well for your name or other reputation factors.

These three link attributes are very useful and my bet is every webmaster can use these three at some point, not necessarily on every page you create, but at least once on most websites you build.