Negative SEO: A Dark and Evil Force

While watching the latest Whiteboard Friday on seomoz.org, Rand Fishkin introduced me to a new term in SEO, negative SEO. Negative SEO is the practice of trying to destroy your competitor’s SERPs rankings by pointing hundreds and thousands of spammy links back to your site using a competing keyword.  It’s a scary realization that others can affect your rankings with bad links.

Another scary realization, there are actually sites that exist that can be hired to purposely, as they put it “destroy your competitor”. That is the actual tagline of the site negativeseo.me . Tactics such as spam blasts, splogs, paid links, etc. are used to point bad links back to your site and make your rankings drop. Totally unethical and complete black hat spammy SEO stuff. People are essentially hijacking other sites rankings.

I was pointed to the Traffic Planet Forum where a case study was done to test whether or not it was possible for a site to rank negatively due to outsider influences. Between March and April they decided to spam blast two sites, one being Dan Thies’ site seofaststart.com and the second site being the site that promotes this tactic, negativeseo.me . After a month of negative SEO tactics directed at these two sites, the results are as follows:

seofaststart.com
dan thies – number 1 (still number 1)
seo – not in top 1000 (down from number 11)
seo service – not in top 1000 (down from number 34)
seo book – number 34 (down from number 3)

negativeseo.me
negative seo – number 6 (down from number 2)
destroy your competitiors – number 13 (down from number 1)

What Does It Mean?

Looking at the results from the case study, it seems that negative SEO is very probable and could destroy an earnest company’s website in less than a month, that is if a small amount of not so white hat links already exist.  However, Fishkin has some doubt over whether a wholly clean site can be taken down by these negative efforts. So he has challenged negative SEO guru’s to try and employ their tactics on either his personal blog or the seomoz.org site so that he can bring to light the plausibility of clean sites being hit.

The Red Flag

One of the leading indications that this might be happening to you is if you have backlinks that are unaccounted for from paid link sites and very spammy looking pages. However, what about the folks that do not have access to Webmaster Tools or some other software to show your backlinks? Well… it seems like they can wave goodbye to their virtual presence on Google. Destroying a small business can take as little as a month. Bigger companies may take a few months to a year to see the negative affects in their rankings.

The moral of this story:

Watch your backlinks! If something seems off and looks spammy, report it to Google Webmaster. In Google’s eyes, you are guilty until you prove yourself innocent. But the proof is in the pudding, or the case study, negative SEO is real and it is happening. So my shout out to Google and Matt Cutts, start focusing your efforts to figure out how to combat this rising issue of negative SEO.

Is Google’s Penguin Update Turning SEO Upside Down…Again?

For those of you that do not know, Google announced recently that they would be going after over aggressive SEO tactics. On April 24th Google officially rolled up the Penguin update. This is by far one of the most aggressive stances on SEO we have seen. Forums and blogs have been alive with chatter from website owners who have been getting nasty emails from Google in their Webmaster tools accounts. Many are seeing their website traffic shrink by 50% threatening their very existence.

Now ask any seasoned SEOs and they will tell you that Google has been making these threats for years now with very little action. This has changed dramatically in the last couple years as the web spam team at Google has been hard at work adding ton’s of updates meant to clean up low quality sites and content farms. The web has been ablaze recommendations of how to avoid getting dinged with the over-optimization penalty. After last week it became painfully clear that nobody is safe from these changes after Seer Interactive received a penalty. These guys are a top-notch firm and their owner (Will Reynolds) is a constant speaker on SEO in conferences across the country. These guys are the definition of ethical SEO. Seer’s recent blog post was very humble in sharing their experiences with the rest of the SEO community. SEO professionals banded together to create awareness of the erroneous penalty and it was reversed within a day.

Although nobody can say for sure what exactly qualifies for an “over optimization penalty” several SEOs have stepped forward and proved some guidelines to follow. There are supposedly hundreds of factors that can trigger this penalty but here are a few things to look out for:

Excessive keyword usage

This is very commonly found in both title tags, meta descriptions and body content alike. Each page should target around 2-3 keywords tops and used be used appropriately throughout your website in conjunction with quality content. Write for people, not search engines and it’s important that understand that first page rankings are nothing without quality engaging content behind it.

Overused HTML elements

Overusing H1 tags as well as alt tags are an easy way for search engines to gauge over excessive tactics. Think is a how newspapers use heading on their stories. There is only one main heading used to describe the content. It should entice people to read through the article. Smaller heading attributes like H2 and H3 headings can be used sparingly to keep interest and attribute to the natural flow of the content.

Duplicate or weak content

Pulling in content from other sites, or respinning existing content is something that is pretty easy for Google to spot. Make sure your content is written to engage and convert your site visitors. Give your website a value proposition by offering unique content that gives the users something useful. Consider adding other forms of content such as video, whitepapers or visual aids like infographics. Please, Please, Please – Don’t dump a bulleting list of keywords on your page just to try and obtain a presence for these keywords. How does this help anybody?

Overaggressive internal linking structures

I see this all the time and it is so easy to avoid. Overaggressive internal linking schemes can include a singular anchor text throughout your site linking to your home page. Site-wide footer links targeting specific keywords are also a considered spammy and pretty useless to the end user. Internally link your content where it makes sense and avoid linking multiple links on a page to the same page targeting the same anchor text.

Excessive or “un-natural” backlink profile

Phew! Where do I start? Let’s start with bluntly obvious – Stay away from Paid links, links from spammy sites, blog networks, automated linking programs, link farms, reciprocal linking schemes and completely irrelevant sites. I always tell clients that link building should look like we were never there. Nothing stands out more that a backlink profile that goes from 100 links to 1000000 links in 6 months and then stops. Make link building a part of your overall web marketing campaign. Put your PR and social outlets to work for you cultivating valuable backlinks and social signals. This is the new SEO and it’s time to face the facts.

It’s important as search changes that you evaluate your SEO strategies to change with the times. Make sure you keep one eye open to the news in the industry and know when to adjust. There is also something to be said for a holistic, sustainable approach to SEO that is more about user experience and quality over cheap tricks and spammy tactics. Every situation is different and my only advise is to make sure you have a seasoned guide to walk you through the jungle that is modern SEO.

Did Home Depot Just Try to Pull A Fast One on Google?

Yes they sure did, but they got busted! The world’s largest home improvement specialty retailer recently was caught trying to solicit links from their network of nearly 2,000 service providers. However, this wasn’t another typical paid link situation like the JCPenney and Overstock cases. Home Depot deliberately provided false information to their vendors and demanded links from their sites.

 Home Depot sent out an email to their vendors who they recommend for installation projects. The email, written by a Home Depot Representative, suggested that the service partner place a link to a particular page with specific anchor text in order to “support” the Home Depot Company. Of course as the email spread, it was picked up by a few SEO experts such as Bill Hartzer and thanks to him, we have the email.

From: The Home Depot – Home Services

Sent: Monday, April 9, 2012 PM

To: [email address removed] xxxxxx

Subject: Online advertising for Installation Services

SERVICE PROVIDER COMMUNICATION

Date: April 9, 2012

To: All US Service Providers

From: Home Services Operations

Re: Online advertising for Installation Services

SUMMARY 

The Home Depot is in the process improving our online advertising efforts for our installation services. We are using our brand authority and marketing power to increase traffic to our site and convert customers. We would like to extend this benefit to all of our business partners and are requesting that you add a link on your site to relative key words that will aid our related installation page authority. Please note that the hyperlink does not have to be visually indicated.

Linking to The Home Depot website will benefit our business partners by increasing the page authority of your website.  Page Authority predicts the likelihood of a single page to rank well in search results.  Ranking high in search results will assist with driving more relevant traffic to your website.

We look forward to working with you on this mutually beneficial marketing endeavor. Please refer to “Action Required” for next steps and instructions on implementation.

ACTION REQUIRED 

*Create the link using the following format:

[Link Text]

URL:http://www.homedepot.com/webapp/wcs/stores/ servlet/ContentView?pn=SV_HS_Home_Insulation

Link Text: “Carpet Installation” or your preferred text.  Please request the Keyword List spreadsheet for a larger sample of keywords to use for your preferred text. Below is a sample of preferred text to use for flooring:

Carpet flooring

Carpet install

Carpet installation

Below is an example of the HTML Code necessary in order for the link to appear properly on your web page:

Carpet installation 

*Ensure that the link is displayed in the correct format and located on the appropriate page related to The Home Depot’s corresponding installation category. Provide us with the URL of the page where the link will be once it is live on your site.

*Please send a confirmation email to xxxxxx at xxxxxx@homedepot.com once you have implemented the link on the appropriate page that includes the URL.

“On this mutually beneficial marketing endeavor,” yeah, I don’t think so. As you can see in the letter, Home Depot requires their vendors to place a link on their page that leads back to the Home Depot site. The company makes their vendors believe it is to their benefit by stating that they are making an effort to increase the Page Authority of all their vendors’ sites. As we know, it doesn’t work that way! If anything, Home Depot’s Page Authority would go up, not theirs. And then to say that the link doesn’t necessarily have to be visible…oh, here is where the Black Hat SEO occurs. Sneaky, sneaky!

After hearing of the situation, Google began investigating Home Depot and here’s what Google had to say…

“It’s simply untrue to tell vendors that linking to a specific page will automatically increase the vendors’ page authority. Likewise, encouraging websites to make hidden links to a website can lead to violations of our quality guidelines that result in demotion or removal of pages from our index. We will be monitoring this situation closely and taking appropriate action.”

Experts aren’t completely sure if Google will ban Home Depot from their indexes. It actually depends on whether or not the vendors implemented the links in the way Home Depot had requested. Google penalizes for hidden links, but Home Depot claims to have spoken with Google to rectify the situation and ensures that a follow-up email will be sent out to those service providers to correct the errors from the previous email. As you can see, you don’t want to try to pull a fast one on Google because sooner or later, they’ll find out. Stick to proper SEO tactics and if you want to make sure your site follows Google Webmaster Guidelines and never gets banned, hire a trustworthy search marketing firm.

PPC Presentation – Lancaster SEO Meetup Group

Search Quality Has Improved: Google Makes 40 Updates in February 2012

Google is always tweaking their processes to bring forth better search results for users and they recently announced in a blog post that 40 search updates were implemented for the month of February. That’s right, 40 in one month! This marks a new record for Google for their monthly series on search quality.

Google claims to be continuously trying to make small improvements to every aspect of their systems including related searches, autocomplete, sitelinks, indexing, synonyms, UI elements, and much more. “Each individual change is subtle and important, and over time they add up to a radically improved search engine,” says Google. You can see the complete list of Google’s updates on their blog, but here are some that caught my attention.

Link Evaluation

Google claims to have changed the way in which they evaluate links by turning off a method of link analysis they’ve been using for several years. Sad, but true, and I believe they just broke the hearts of every search marketing firm in the world. Just when we got close, they switch things around! Google claims it was necessary to re-architect certain parts of their scoring in order to maintain a clean and understandable system. Google won’t give specifics on any new link evaluation signals or any more information on the one they turned off, but that’s okay Google, we’ll recover!

Local Search Rankings

Along with the link evaluation signal, Google’s post says local results are being improved because of a “new system to find results from a user’s city more reliably.” Google has improved the triggering of Local Universal results by relying more on the ranking of their main search results as a signal. They’re now more capable of detecting when both queries and documents are local to the user.

More Local Relevant Predictions in YouTube

When it comes to the ranking for predictions in YouTube, Google wants to provide more locally relevant queries. In Google’s blog post, they use Lady Gaga as an example. The query “Lady Gaga in” would typically generate a variety of different predictions. Now, if that query is entered on the US version of YouTube, Google may predict “Lady Gaga in Times Square,” but if the query is performed on the Indian version of YouTube, you may see “Lady Gaga in India.” Don’t worry little monsters, Google will still bring you Gaga videos, only they’ll be from a town near you!

Now I know you don’t have all day, so here are some other updates you may want to know about…
“Site:” Query Update: Google improves the ranking for queries that use the “site:” operator by increasing the diversity of results.

Expanding the Size of Image Index in Universal Search: Google expanded the collection of image results that are shown in Universal Search.

International Launch of Shopping Rich Snippets: These snippets help users identify shopping sites that have the most relevant products according to the user’s needs. They typically display product prices, availability, reviews and ratings, etc. and for a while were only available in the United States, Germany and Japan. Google has changed that and shopping rich snippets have gone global!

In addition to these 40 updates, Google has also confirmed the Panda 3.3 update. Google isn’t saying much about the update, other than it refreshes data in the Panda system, making it more accurate and more sensitive to recent changes on the web.

As you can see, Google has been very busy this past month and with all of these updates at once, I’m sure some discussion will occur. Share your thoughts with Web Talent Marketing on Facebook or Tweet us @socialmediafirm.

Web Talent Does LA

The Beverly Web-billies. Web-deo Drive. Webbywood.

There is no doubt that Web Talent Marketing is a team full of high-flying, low-brow, rankings butt-kickers, and dang proud too. On a recent excursion to the city of angels Mike, Oliver & Miki uncovered many treasures, great and small, but none more valuable than a gold-mine known as Sire’s Crown Eyewear.

Take what you think you know about sunglasses and toss it out the window (or, if you are Mike, you drop it off the side of a boat). Sire’s cant really even be considered sunglasses. They are much better than such a commonly used title. They are better known as Eco Wood Eyewear. Hand-carved wooden frames made from a wide assortment of exotic woods from across the globe, including Koa from Hawaii, makes for one light-weight, durable, and flexible pair of peepers.

*drool*

The gents who run this crafty enterprise are a rag-tag team of 20-something entrepreneurs doing their best to kick down the doors of LA’s creative industry and get their foot in the door of some pretty amazing brick-and-mortar businesses across the world, such as Harrod’s in London.

The coolest part of the buying experience was getting to walk through their Downtown Los Angeles studio space overlooking the entire city and the historic KRKD radio towers, which ran over the airwaves from 1932-1975.

And, while the price point is well beyond what you would find at the carts in your local shopping mall, according to co-owner/optician Chris Erven, they come with a “getting laid satisfaction guarantee”. These babies, therefore, are worth their weight in gold.

"Oh, hey ladies..."

So, if you are from the Golden State or get a day to spend out there, take a walk on the wild side and head downtown to the Sire’s Crown showroom. Luckily, they have concrete floors making it all the easier to clean up after this eyewear blows your mind.

While we had an amazingly good time in LA, its really great to be back home again. First day back at work, this is what we are greeted with:

hi mom.

Followerwonk – The Social Analytics Tool for Twitter

I came across a really cool social tool the other day that I can’t believe more people are not using. It’s called Followerwonk and is a miracle tool for cultivating influential bloggers, guest blogging opportunities, and socially authoritative websites. The tool has both a free and paid version based on usage and can be accessed by using your twitter account. The tool has four main purposes and allows you to export your findings to a CSV file and saves your recent searches.

One of my very favorite parts of this tool is the ability to search for twitter users by keyword and compare them based on different metrics (influence, followers, following, age, etc). In practice, if you were looking to connect with authoritative social media bloggers to  promote your content, this tool will let your search, sort, and download them based on the keywords you selected. You can also follow them on Twitter right from the application. Followerwonk also shows you if your account is following the selected twitter profiles or if they are following you.

Once you have selected a short-list of highly authoritative and relevant bloggers, or websites, you can dive deeper into their twitter statistics and then start to analyze their followers (or whom they are following) to help narrow down cream of the crop. There are a ton of metrics to take into account such as the average age, language of their followers, and how active and authoritative they are.

Lastly, Followerwonk offers user twitter analytics to help monitor the progress (or struggles) of your growing, authoritative followers. Using this feature within the tool can provide a closer look at your twitter account’s followers. It can also identify your most influential followers which is a vital aspect to any social media campaign since they are your lowest hanging fruit. You can also identify followers that are recent additions or recent loses. My suggestion would be to periodically pull up your followers that have chosen to unfollow you, identify authoritative users, and then attempt to retain.

For a social media consultant like me, Followerwonk is a great addition to the social media tools we are currently usiong at Web Talent Marketing. Of course no tool has ever created a winning social media campaign. A custom stratagy and solid reporting metrics often work hand in hand to help acheive long term success within social media – but tools like this help out a whole lot!

Infographics: If You Build It, Will They Come?

An Exploration of the Purpose and Value of an Infographic

By Lorianna Sprague, SEO Specialist

Information graphics have been around far longer than search engine optimization, or even the web. Maps, graphs, charts and histograms are all examples of information conveyed in a graphical format – and early maps first showed up around 7500 BCE. So, needless to say, this is not a new concept – it is simply an old concept re-purposed for current times.

On one hand, an information graphic (infographic for short) is just what the name implies – a graphical representation of information. Generally this information is highly complex, and the use of graphics to convey that information allows viewers to assimilate the data on multiple levels – making it easier to digest and understand.

On the other hand, infographics have become a newly touted way to engage people online, with goals like increasing site traffic, increasing inbound site links, and increasing discussion of a brand through viral link-bait.

Historically speaking, infographics were used to convey data in societies where reading and writing was the domain of the wealthy and the clergy. Today, while basic literacy is more common, especially for internet users, infographics still help people understand data by using visuals to represent things such as relationships, changes in size or quantity; by using colors to show changes in temperature, volume, weight, and to express good/bad or positive/negative values, etc.

But what kind of data are we talking about, and how do we know that people want to assimilate it? Research is a first and vital step in the creation of any infographic. If someone already made an infographic on your topic of choice, then chances are high that no one is going to care about any infographic that you create unless it can do something new, insightful, and do it in a way that gets your audience past the initial “I’ve seen this before” reaction. Say you do your research, and no one has made an infographic about your particular topic yet – awesome. Now it’s time to figure out how big your audience is. If there are only 10 people who care about what you want to create, then word is not going to travel very far. An infographic needs an audience, and it has to fill a need/serve a purpose. But what elements make one infographic more successful than another? And, assuming you can get your infographic to go viral – what does that mean and what are you really getting as a result?

Why Some Perform Better than Others

I tried to compare infographics of similar topics to illustrate that it is not just the aesthetic-aspect of the data that drives its share-ability. The infographics that performed the worst tried to make interesting graphics out of topics like piracy and life insurance. Why didn’t this work? Was it because no one cares about piracy or life insurance? No. The first life insurance infographic was created by a Flickr user who appears to be searching for research opportunities. The data was pulled from 321 surveyed people, a response-volume that surprised the artist/creator behind the infographic, and seemed to make that individual think the infographic was worth creating. It used legos and displayed the data in visually semi-interesting ways, but there is no hook, and too much text. It’s hard to figure out the point of the infographic at a glance, and no easier once you read it.

How did this Life Insurance infographic do with links and social sharing?

• 17 links
• 2 Facebook shares

If an agency created this for a client, the resultant links and social validation would be an epic fail.

The other life insurance infographic approached its rather dry topic from an amusing perspective – Can You Afford to Die? Apparently some people found this entertaining and decided to share it with others by linking to it, or by sharing it on social media sites:

• 112 links
• 17 Facebook shares
• 6 Facebook likes

I would call this a good return on a client’s investment. Not every topic will go viral. This point is well illustrated by Mark from Distilled SEO in a post where he explores how many links an infographic should get. The gist? Of the 953 infographics posted by Mint.com in 2010, only about 1% exceeded 50 links. So, really amazing viral results are the exception – not the rule, no matter how amazing an infographic might be.

What Infographics Can Do that Link Building Cannot

Software Piracy

When a client buys link building hours, the links acquired in that block of time are it. They don’t spontaneously create new links on their own after creation. Something infographics have in common with social content, is that they have the potential to generate ongoing links. One of the infographics I found was about the history of software piracy, it used pirate-themes to help convey the data, and made it helpful, funny and interesting. When Starmedia promoted this infographic, they targeted the appropriate audience, and delivered it in the right medium for that audience’s consumption. This infographic didn’t attempt to point fingers or place blame for software piracy – it just gave data.

The resultant sharing took the infographic from 244 links on Starmedia’s site to a total of:

• 1318 links
• 81 Facebook shares
• 124 Facebook likes
• 107 Tweets
• 104 G+

A Snapshot of the Effects of Social Sharing

This is the power of engaging real human beings and giving them something they want, need or will enjoy. Being able to deliver means understanding your audience.

A New Twist: The Infographic-Article Power Combo

Most infographics are part of a blog post that includes thoughts, or observations or the like in regard to the infographic. Some of them don’t even have this much. Interestingly enough, the two most successful infographics in the bunch were coupled with well-written articles – the articles explained, and further-fleshed-out aspects of the infographic that required more explanation. The sharing of these articles and infographics far surpassed any of the others. One of the things we keep hearing about content generation is that we need to give people something they want, something informative (and humorous) if we want it to matter. That is what these articles do. They have taken the infographics from being something you look at once to something that is of real value, that you will go back to again and again. If it’s that useful, don’t you think people will want to talk about it? I, personally, found this super helpful. Now I can hang the infographics up, and use them for at-a-glance reference. I. Love. It.

Infographic Social, SEO and Link Building Value

This blog post was spawned from an effort to answer the question, “What are the SEO/Social Media/Link Building values of infographics?” Based on the results, there are some commonalities among the ones that did well versus the ones that did poorly. Of the twenty infographics, one, the n00b Guide to Online Marketing, which was published by Unbounce.com in February of 2011, took the cake for the return-on-time-spent investment. That infographic alone generated upwards of 2000 links, 268 Facebook shares, 451 Facebook Likes, and 1311 Tweets. Those results are amazing!

But the infographic was not published alone, it was the icing to a very long online marketing guide-YouMoz post by Oli Gardner (of Unbounce.com), which generated:

• roughly 4000 links
• 421 Facebook shares
• 313 Facebook likes
• 1722 Tweets
  

  N00b Guide to Online Marketing

All of which pointed people back to the infographic itself and the Unbounce website. Genius. For me, personally, to generate 6000+ links it would take upwards of 600 hours. That does not include hours spent to increase social media interactions and engagement. Not to mention, the social validation aspect of this scenario and its impact on natural SEO (we already know that Google and Bing take social links into account in their algorithms):

• Brand Awareness – links created naturally by people who were engaged with your company = more value than links designed for Google’s spiders
• Customer Reach – these people know your name, your company, and respect what you have created enough to pass it on to their followers and to follow you
• Customer Acquisition – each of these people has now become a prospect, or an industry peer who respects your knowledge and shares it!
• Improved SEO – Social links improve search rankings
• Take away? Real Human Value

Is this what we can all expect when we sit down to think of the next amazing Chicken Production Equipment infographic for a client? Uh, probably not – but who knows! These are the averages for the infographics analyzed – the first group was analyzed without the data from the two infographics from Unbounce, which got a few thousand links a piece, and without the data for the “life” of the History of Software Piracy infographic, which accumulated over 1300 links through sharing and re-sharing:

Average w/o Unbounce and Piracy “History”

Infographic-Only Analysis

• 70 links
• 53 Facebook shares
• 8 Facebook likes
• 35 Tweets
• 3 G+

Analysis of All 20 Infographics

Average of all 20 Infographics

• 588 links
• 87 Facebook shares
• 53 Facebook likes
• 221 Tweets
• 8 G+

But these are averages – some of the infographics pulled in 100+ links or 1000+ links and some pulled in less than 20. Now, you should probably take into consideration that some of the infographics analyzed were created two or three years ago, and don’t appear to have been promoted at all following their creation.

What this means in terms of value: Considering a successful infographic can be worth hundreds of hours of link building AND social media, the links are generated by a highly-targeted audience of warm leads at worst, and the social validation is going to increase search rankings? Priceless.

How to Get Your Website to Rank on Bing

There are hundreds of billions of web pages out there. It’s hard to imagine, but robots (affectionately named spiders by search engines) crawl all of these sites to build a list of pages that most closely relate to your search. They can crawl about 100 pages per second…so how do you prove to the spiders that your site is relevant? Search engine optimizers are constantly trying to figure out how the spiders for sites like Bing and Yahoo rank their search results. Its what we do here at Web Talent every single day—and now Bing has released a list of the 18 most essential things that you need to know about SEO. We’ve elaborated on 10 that we think are the most helpful to get your website to the top.

1. Make sure your site is crawlable by using an XML sitemap, a robots.txt file, and well-structured on-site navigation.

Your site should be easy for users to navigate so that your potential customers and clients can find what they need quickly and effortlessly. Not only does a sitemap that is well-structured help organize your web page for users, but it also makes your website easy to read by the spiders. A logical and clear organization of your pages will yield more identifiable pages to the spiders, one of which may match a search term better than your homepage does.

2. Improve your site structure by using an HTML sitemap and linking to trusted sources both within your site and outside of it.

Once again, we see how important a well-structured sitemap is. Additionally, internal linking to pages within your site helps tie all of your content together. Lets say you sell bicycles—on the pages that highlight the bikes you sell, it would also make sense to have a link to bike accessories as well. This practice needs to be applied to each and every page that you have within your website. External links are important too, because it shows that you care to inform and educate your readers about what your specific area of interest. On a page explaining what types of bikes you sell, you could link externally to the specific retailers who provide you with each item.

3. Create a solid content hierarchy by doing basic keyword research and avoiding placement of your content in rich media such as Silverlight and Flash.

Keyword Research—its imperative. If you want traffic to your site, you need to know what people search for in order to find a site like yours. After we find out what keywords are most relevant to your services or what you sell, we put the most competitive words in the more authoritative pages of your site, like your homepage. From there, we infiltrate the rest of the keywords into your sub-pages, and the sub-pages of those pages. This creates a hierarchy within your site of terms that most closely match what a user would search when trying to find a site like yours. Lastly, avoid putting these terms behind media such as Silverlight and Flash because this deters spiders.

4. Use a short meta title that has fewer than 65 characters and that’s unique to each page, and try to include the targeted keyword toward the beginning of that title.

Your meta title tags define what your pages are about. The meta title is one of the first thing a spider goes through to determine what type of content you talk about on your page. The closer your keyword is to the beginning of this title the better; push the name of your company to the end if at all possible. Although that may sound like we are telling you not to advertise your brand, remember that people don’t know the name of your brand if they’re searching for your service. They won’t search for your name, but they will search for your services. The meta title is a small summary of your page, and you need to make it unique and rich in keywords. Spiders also look negatively on extra-long keyword-packed meta titles, so don’t overdo it. Describe what your page discusses as succinctly as possible.

5. Use a unique meta description tag.

You’ve been your entire life about the importance of individuality. Take that notion and apply it to the infinite World Wide Web, and you can imagine how hard it is to stand out. There are tons of pages out there that may rank for the exact same thing that you will rank for, and a spider will recognize your title if they’ve crawled the exact same description 100 times before. Make it short and sweet, descriptive to what you offer, and easy to read by users and crawlers.

6. Create quality content (following the guidelines Bing provided earlier).

You knew this one already. Content, good content, sets you apart from not only poorly optimized sites, but your competition as well. If you offer an incredible service, sell it and sell it well. Write clearly so users and spiders can understand your page easily—the faster a spider can crawl your page, the better. And it goes without saying that it’s always important for users to be able to comprehend what exactly it is that you do.

7. When you build links, focus on keyword-relevant anchor tags that link back to quality content on your page.

Link building to create quality back links to your site is important, but people often forget that you’re link building for search engines. The words that people search in Google, Bing or Yahoo need to be the text or anchor tag for your link, rather than just your url. What someone out there is typing into the search box to find a service that you offer should be your anchor tags. Spiders crawl your anchor tags on blog posts, directories and social bookmarks, and when they recognize that your anchor tag is relevant to a search, they’re directed right to your homepage.

8. Don’t buy links.

Who needs to buy them when you can get quality, authoritative links for free? See our latest blog post for more info on this one. You’ll find that there are tons of free directories out there, and working a little bit harder to get a wide array of the free ones appears more organic to the crawlers then paying for only a handful.

9. Encourage social sharing with the use of social buttons.

At this stage of the internet game, not integrating social media buttons and widgets into your website is not only harmful to your potential business because prospective clients can’t connect with you, but it also shows users and spiders that you are behind in the rapidly progressive times. A spider may attribute your lack of social media integration as a sign that your site is not frequently updated with fresh content, or that your content is not up-to-date. If social media isn’t your thing, remind yourself that it doesn’t matter if you like it or not. It’s the future and its here to stay. Might as well prove to your potential clients that you’re with it, and avoid risking a spider crawling your site and ignoring the rest of your content because you aren’t connected to the rest of the social world.

10. Create a user interface that prioritizes the user experiences; the search perspective on things like page load time aren’t as important as how the user responds.

Spiders and users are greatly different (one is a robot…one is not). On the other hand, people and spiders are similar in that in order to stay interested they need to find relevant content in an organized manner. If your site is organized logically, it’s also important to take into consideration the user interaction on your site. Is your e-commerce store turning out a lot of orders? Do users come to your site, get confused by your product’s description or navigation, and leave? Clicks through your page show you have content that’s interesting. Keeping your potential customers interested and clicking through your site is a factor that spiders take into account when they’re crawling. No search engine wants to provide their searchers with results that cant give them what they want. Make the time a person spends on your site and experience. And make it a memorable one!

Other tips that Bing provided are:

11. Use schema.org markup.
12. Create an RSS feed.
13. Don’t cloak your website.
14. Don’t use link farms.
15. Don’t engage in three-way linking.
16. Don’t duplicate content.
17. Don’t use auto-following on the social front.
18. Don’t use thin content.

See the original article here.

“Link to my page, please & thank you…”

The Struggle and Success of Attaining Powerfully Relevant Links for Your Company’s Website

It’s not easy. Getting authoritative links to your site can have a much greater impact on your search rankings if the link is from a topically significant and powerful site rather than an overwhelmed directory or extraneous blog comment. If it were easy, informational sites would become flooded with a copious amount of spammy links, which in turn bring down the appearance and authority of these sites, making them less valuable to web users. So here is the problem at hand: how do you get powerful links from an authoritative site when your own site is still in its infancy?

 You give your competition and powerful sites in your industry the incentive to link to your page.

Let’s say you own concrete business. The topic of concrete is one that would interest few outside of your industry. You’ve got this great optimized website, so now you want higher rankings and to increase your visibility to those in your industry. Regardless of the industry, the Internet is a competitive market, and there are a lot of marketing strategies that many businesses would employ that just simply don’t make sense for a concrete company. We can assume that our concrete competitors aren’t pouring hours and hours of time into a strong social media presence. Small construction company’s gain most of their business through loyal customers and word of mouth, so their online presence is focused more on reeling in the prospective customers that have already heard their name thrown around a few times. The next step is to think of what motivates concrete contractors, the issues that they face on a daily basis, what kind of information they want to know more of.

Remember that there is always a need for free information. The next step that I’m going to propose may not be right for every type of business, but creating a resource center that any internet user can access for free could be a very useful tactic in gaining powerful links to your site. Putting an informational resource center somewhere within your site gives people an incentive to go to your site for information that they would have had to pay for before. An information center with 10-20 pages filled with what people in your industry want to see and read will attract links from your competition and topically relevant sites with a lot of link power.

Consider the content you would incorporate on the resource center. If we actually take time to research the concrete industry, we learn about the effect that wet concrete has on workers’ boots and clothes, and how this issue costs many concrete businesses a lot of money. If clothes are easily ruined in this industry, why not give them out for free in return for a link? Think incentive: “Reprint this article or content or give a link to our resource center on your site and we will send your employees free t-shirts!”—that’s a sure way to gain a few links!

A promotion like this, one that is relative to an industry’s problems, is not only a way to give the subject attention but also a way to gain a ton of publicity. Put your logo on the shirt, but also think of putting something else on there that would make a competitor want to wear the shirt, like a funny saying or quote that relates to the industry. This is a very different approach to link building, but we’ve seen that after a few months, this is a sure way to gain one-way inbound links from topically relevant pages.

Link building is necessary to get to the top of the search ranking results; however, not all links are created equal. Staying simple and focused on your industry may be your company’s best route for link building.

Original article: http://www.linkspiel.com/2011/07/get-over-yourself-and-give-me-a-link-please/