Archive for the ‘link building’ Category

The most underused tool in the marketing toolbox – Linking?

August 26th, 2010 by Rand Schulman

Sometimes I don’t understand things - including the inner workings of marketing professionals. Yet I’ve tried to tackle this challenge and have been building and selling marketing applications for marketing folk for decades. I know that working complex web analytics products can be daunting. Marketing automation even more so. How does one create and allocate lead scoring and attribution? What is the LTV of a customer?

But linking?  Gosh, don’t we all know the value of inbound links? Don’t we know how search engines work, for God’s sake? Well, apparently no. This knowledge is not as universal as one would think (Hope! Assume!).

A few months ago we released Linker which, in short, is a dating site for sharing and creating links. A Match.com for SEO link building. The good news? We’ve had thousands of people start to take advantage of the service. The bad news? Only five percent of them have ANY links on their site! This data floored me.

So we took matters into our own hands and today released our findings as well as made our link building tool FREE . We understand that linking takes time, which could explain the incredible low rate, but with our Linker product it should be much easier. At least that’s our hope. So, world, let’s get found. Let’s use the product and link away. I would be happy to hear from any of you!

Posted in Inbound Marketing, Link Strategies, Linker, Marketing, SEO, Uncategorized, link building, search marketing | 5 Comments »

Should You Consider “Author Authority”?

August 6th, 2010 by Richard Zwicky

Search marketers are familiar with signals. One of the truisms is the logic: if no one links to your site, it can’t be considered important, therefore why should it appear in the search results? The more quality links referencing your website or web pages, the better.

A lot of signals or factors behind links can affect the quality, relevance, and value of these citations. Perhaps there’s another signal to consider: Author.

If you’re interested in learning more, earlier today Search Engine Watch published an article I submitted on the topic of Author Authority. The idea came to me while reading a recent patent which was issued and assigned to Google. I’d love to get your thoughts and feedback!

Thanks!

Richard / @rzwicky

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Posted in Commentary, Google, Inbound Marketing, Link Strategies, SEO, SMM, Search Engines, link building, search marketing, social marketing | No Comments »

Observations from the Receiving End - Surprising Results in Poll Lists

August 4th, 2010 by Richard Zwicky


It’s been quite interesting watching the response to the lists about online marketers that I started published two weeks ago. . There have been over 3,000 voter submissions in the last week. That’s a lot more than I ever expected. Additionally, I’ve received many text messages, voicemails, DM’s, blog comments, and emails with suggestions of who else could be included on the lists; I appreciate all these notes.

Some people also chose to send me their own names for inclusion. One person appears to have submitted their name for inclusion ~50 times! Fortunately for you, I’m not publishing your name, but if you’re reading this, you know who you are. You’re claiming to be an Internet Marketer of some skill: Do you honestly not know that it’s easy to determine if traffic repeatedly originates from the same places or computers?

Other than the notes from a couple of manic individuals repeatedly suggesting themselves, lots of people sent me some great suggestions. I’ve been trying to follow-up on them by reading things by and about these contributors. There are some valuable resources I’m discovering, or re-discovering. Thank-you! Some of the useful suggestions are found in the blog comments of the appropriate posts.

The suggestions I’ve received go to the point of the series. It’s not been about who gets the most votes, but, that said, I will publish lists thereof. The attention seeking has been for all these valuable contributors whom I wanted to recognize via this forum. Some of the people on the lists are already well known, and justifiably so. Others are not well known yet, but they provide great information about different facets of online marketing, and should be a resource that anyone with any level of interest in the space can turn to for insights.

I do appreciate all the attention that these lists have generated, and hope that people will share the results widely – that only goes to accomplish the goal of providing these people recognition.

As for the voting; it’s been really interesting to see whose inputs are heavily valued, despite their not being common industry names. It’s also been extremely interesting to observe which channels have been driving the most traffic via social media, and other sources, as well as observing which channel’s traffic has the best user behavior once they visit the site. I’ll likely have a few posts coming out reporting on user behavior trends. Quite interesting really! For instance, as it stands right now, the day of the social media experts tweets drove the lowest RT and clickthrough activity per post or mention. Perhaps that’ll change before the lists close…

Finally, there have been two individuals who received no votes. (Bet you want to know who, eh?) I was shocked at who they were, and presume it’s because their communities did not overlap as heavily with the search or social marketplace community represented here. Hopefully they’ll learn about these lists before I close them.

In the meantime, if you haven’t checked out the lists of great contributors (or voted), please do so now at:

Search Engine Optimization Professionals
Pay-Per-Click Marketing Experts
Social Media Marketing Specialists
Link Building Masters
Amazing Cross-Channel Online Marketing Contributors

I’ll hopefully start publishing results next week.

Richard / @rzwicky

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Posted in Commentary, Inbound Marketing, Link Strategies, Marketing, Poll, SEO, SMM, link building, ppc, social marketing | No Comments »

This Week in Links - Week Ending July 30

July 31st, 2010 by Anthony Young

Is Google Planning to Kill SEO?
Bravo to Econsultancy for winning link-baiter of the week with this story.  Econsultancy claims that “If a recent patent comes to fruition, it seems the big G may have plans to undo all your hard work in favour of their own know-how.”  Back in 2004, Google filed a patent, which was recently granted, for something called ‘Enhanced Document Browser with Auto-generated Linkage.’  It seemed to me a rather broad description with multiple applications so I followed the link to the USPTO website to read the abstract.

The abstract states:  “Additional documents are automatically located that are relevant to an original document, such as a document being read by a user, and also potentially relevant to personal information of the user. The additional documents may be located based on descriptive information that includes personal information of the user and content information of the document being read. The additional documents, or links to the additional documents, may be incorporated into the document being read. In some implementations, the additional documents may be presented in-line with the document being read, such as through an in-link link or text snippet. The user can thus be efficiently presented with additional information that is relevant to the original document being read.”

Huh?  Kill SEO?  My less histrionic interpretation would bet on Google implementing this in a way that would show users an overlay of related personalized content and information similar to what Google Maps does with local business information today.   Or Google Adsense… Then again, that’s one possibility and only one personal interpretation.  Remember, just because the patent was recently granted doesn’t mean Google hasn’t already implemented the technology described therein.

Near the end of the article the writer says:  “On the other hand, it {could be} a dynamically generated, personalized link builder that works based on personal user preference, surely the Holy Grail of SEO.”  Ahhh, so the shoe drops.  Maybe SEO will live to see another day…

So what have we learned?  This is a great example of how link-baiting can quickly build a large number of inbound links to your site (although I’m unsure of the success of this particular story).  Just take care not to take too much liberty with the plot line.


Google Dynamic Linking
David Harry from SEO Dojo offers a more reasoned analysis of the newly awarded patent to Google on dynamically generated links.


Phase One Link Building Strategies
Greg Shuey writes an encouraging article for budding link builders on where to find that low-hanging fruit.  He outlines five easy steps that range from internal linking of resources to directories and link reclamation (404 pages).


4 Ways Link Builders Should Use Twitter
Interesting article on using Twitter as an alternative to traditional link building activities.  Not only can social media sites like Twitter help you find link building opportunities but also help identify hot trends and what’s going on in your particular niche in the online world.  With a large enough following and the potential of retweets, site owners can garner significant traffic from links on Twitter even though they are nofollow.

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Posted in Inbound Marketing, Link Strategies, Linker, Uncategorized, link building | 4 Comments »

List of Amazing Cross Channel Contributors

July 28th, 2010 by Richard Zwicky

Over the last few days I’ve been publishing lists of people I read or whose online marketing comments I find useful / interesting.  I hope you’ll add all these individuals to your bookmark list of people to turn to when you need advice across various search and online marketing disciplines. 

The challenge with putting together any of these lists is to make sure that you don’t forget anyone.  I have missed some along the way, and once I realized the error I added them to the appropriate list after publication.

There’s also some great contributors I wanted to note who write scant amounts themselves, but rather highlight great resources for others to read. Finally, there are some individuals who mainly contribute via public speaking engagements; they’re perhaps the most difficult to reference, as it’s hard for non-attendees to understand the context of the contributions.

On each of the earlier lists, I’ve had comments from people about why “XYZ” wasn’t on the list.  In some cases it was an obvious error, in others, it’s because they fit on so many lists that I was saving them for this final one. The most obvious name in this category was Danny Sullivan. As I wrote in my first post, he really should be on everyone’s reading list!  He contributes across so many areas, I could have included him throughout, so instead of listing him five times, I saved him for this list.

Today’s final list in this series is about amazing cross-channel contributors; I’ve tried to include mostly people who didn’t fit the other lists. Being on any of these lists reflects a very broad range of contributions to the industry.  This list in particular is of people who have made contributions spanning multiple areas of online marketing.  These people write authoritatively, OR, they provide commentary about areas of interest and point their listeners or readers in the direction of great, meaningful content.  In the latter case, they’re like great filters for all of us, pointing people to the essential nuggets they should keep track of, but sometimes miss.

As this is the last list in the series, I’ll be closing voting on all the lists within a week, and then getting around to publishing some interesting results, with links to the places to find the best contributor’s content.

If you have any questions, feel free to email me: Richard Zwicky - zwicky@, tweet me @rzwicky, or leave a comment below.

If you’ve missed them, please read further down the blog for the prior lists of great online marketing contributors across SEO, PPC, SMM, and link-building!

Thanks again for participating!

Richard Zwicky

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Posted in Commentary, Inbound Marketing, Link Strategies, Marketing, Poll, SEO, SMM, link building, ppc, search marketing, social marketing, twitter | 9 Comments »

Whose Advice Works Best for Link Building?

July 27th, 2010 by Richard Zwicky

Over the last four work days, I’ve been publishing lists of people, broken out by online marketing disciplines.  These are individuals whose writings or commentaries I recommend that people should read to keep abreast of the industry.  I’ve broken them into areas of expertise as I saw fit - SEO thought-leaders, PPC experts, and strategic and tactical SMM thinkers.  I have two more groups I want to reference in this series: 1) Link-Building masters, and; 2) Cross-Channel contributors. Then I will start compiling the data for publication.

Today, it’s the link-builder’s turn.  These are all people I’ve read, and whose work I recommend you look at for link-building advice.  Some is tactical, some strategic, but it all has its place.  Presuming you already look at some, I’d like to know which 5 are the ones you reference the most often?

If you haven’t looked at the earlier lists, I’d suggest you look at them now.  For the Search Engine Optimization Experts list: SEO; For the list of PPC Experts, PPC; and for the list of top Social Media Marketers, SMM.

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Posted in Commentary, Inbound Marketing, Link Strategies, SEO, SMM, Search Engines, link building, search marketing, social marketing | 3 Comments »

This Week in Links - Week Ending July 16

July 18th, 2010 by Anthony Young

An Inside Look at Competitors Backlinks with Open Site Explorer
Competitive analysis is one of the first steps undertaken when embarking on any new seo link building campaign.  Of course, segmenting your own linkgraph and understanding how you stack up against the competition is also a vital component to any strategy.  This article provides valuable tips and insight on how to get the most out of Open Site Explorer when evaluating your competitors back links (as well as your own).  There’s also great information on nine commonly used link building strategies and how you can apply them to your own efforts.

The Death of Natural Linking
A loud and growing chorus of voices in the SEO industry of late have been debating the efficacy of Google’s claim that if you build great content then attracting natural links will happen automatically.  Serious webmasters understand that developing great content is still a necessary component to a successful business.  However, obtaining natural links has become a multi-faceted problem that goes beyond simply building great content.  Eric Enge advises site owners to invest in a mix of link building and social media as he believes social citations will carry more weight in the future.

Evaluating the Lifetime Value of a Link
How can webmasters maximize the value of a link building campaign?  Assessing whether or not a potential link will stick around and continue to pass value (well into the future) is another important variable to consider when maintaining your inbound link graph.  Link building is a notoriously time-consuming part of SEO and coupled with the high churn rate of new sites replacing old sites, the web is in a constant state of renewal.  Identifying potential links with longevity will maximize the value of resources invested into building links according to Ross Hudgens.

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Posted in Link Strategies, Linker, link building | No Comments »

Changes in Natural Linking - Death, Rebirth, or a Return to the Roots?

July 15th, 2010 by Richard Zwicky

When contemplating link-building strategies you need to take the user experience into account.  They should look at your citations (links) as references to substantiating or relevant documents. Search engines will use these signals to define your site.  Consider the user experience when focusing on building contextually relevant links for your business, and you will be rewarded with higher amounts of relevant direct referrals and relevant search engine placement.

There’s been some excellent articles recently focused on this issue, including changes in natural linking by Eric Enge, Editorial Citation by Rand Fishkin and natural link building strategies by Michael Gray.

Michael’s analysis was interesting in that he took Google’s guidelines at face value, created great content, and spent only 10% of his time building links manually.  After six months of blogging, Google represented just over 0.5% of his referral traffic.  That’s a pathetic amount, considering how popular the posts were in StumbleUpon, Digg, and other social networks. In fact, when he analyzed his traffic, he discovered that the blog didn’t perform in the top 100 for even the simplest keywords.  The exception was one post for which Michael did a little link building.  Apart from this limited effort, certain posts which received over 30,000 views from social marketing generated almost no natural inbound links.

Now, Michael isn’t advocating that content doesn’t matter.  It does, as it engages readers and entices them to return.  His article restates a point everyone in the industry has been making for years: If you build it, they don’t just come, or in this case, the links don’t just happen, and the engines won’t just refer anyone your way. As Ian Lurie wrote: “content alone is not going to boost you into the top 10 for any even remotely relevant phrase”

Of particular interest to me in juxtaposition to the pieces by Ian and Michael were the articles by Eric Enge and Rand Fishkin.  Rand hypothesizes that 20% of the web’s links exist to influence the search engines.  That’s a lot of noise, but that also means 80% are not there just to influence search engines. Eric makes the point that 80% leaves lots of meat to work with and links are still a big factor, but he also estimates that you need to spend 30% of marketing energy into social media, which is interesting in the context of Michael’s lack of success with organic link building from social networks.

There’s an interesting question in Eric’s article, which every site operator should ask themselves: “If you aren’t good enough to be worth linking to, then what do you have anyway?” The answer is of course, you need to build better content.  But, a hint to the broader correct answer can actually be found in the title of Rand’s article: Editorial Citation.

Rand notes this in his reference to three periods of linking:  1) early web; links were editorial like footnotes and citations, helping people navigate the web; 2) The engines incorporate web page links as a value metric in ranking algorithms (Google / Alltheweb/ Teoma); 3) non-webpage citations.  Google’s recent patent publication which was reviewed by Eric Ward, supports this last point - see Eric’s point #5.

However, another point in the patent leads us in towards additional context: user interaction with links may determine their value, and may go a long way to resolving the dichotomy between the points these articles circle, but also may point search marketers towards clues around link building strategies going forward.

Links from different areas of the document will have different value, and will pass different amounts of link juice flow.  Obviously, a link from one site to the next where the link is located in the main body content and is relevant to both the origin and destination will end up scoring higher than an irrelevant link, or links within footers, template side navs and the like.  Which really is the point: links as citations are the oldest form of linking, and still carry the most value.


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Posted in Google, Link Strategies, Linker, Search Engines, Search Metrics, link building | 1 Comment »