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Archive for the ‘link building’ Category
Sunday, August 29th, 2010
After all has been said and done about link building campaigns and the importance of driving inbound links to your company’s website, many small business owners and marketers are still confused by link building. But is it really as hard as they’re making it out to be?
To be sure, there are a lot of things to think about when building links.
- Should I request reciprocal links?
- What makes a link relevant?
- Quantity vs. quality
- What exactly is a quality link anyway?
- Do directory submissions really help?
- Is article marketing still effective?
- Does blogging build good links?
- Link age
- Domain age
- Anchor text
- Title attribute
- Surrounding text
- Are image links effective?
- Forum links vs. blog comments
- Social media profile links
- Is social bookmarking really link building?
- Do press releases build quality links?
I could go on and on. There are hundreds more questions and concerns that could be brought up in the discussion of link building and many of them don’t have any real definitive answers. So I can understand how confusing it can be for someone just getting started.
It is sometimes better to think about link building in terms of the negatives – that is, what you should not do versus what you should.
- You don’t want to place your links on pages with thousands of other links.
- You don’t want links on websites associated with warez, malware or other evil creatures of the Web.
- Stay away from iframe links and nefarious redirects.
- Don’t pay people to link to you.
- Don’t do too much link building too fast (although, as a caveat, it’s fairly difficult for a small business to break this rule as “too much too fast” often means thousands of links in a short time frame such as days or weeks).
- Don’t engage in questionable link building tactics.
If you have any questions or concerns about proper link building techniques, read the search engine guidelines – particularly Google and Bing. If they say it’s OK then it’s OK; if they say it’s not then it isn’t.
Link building isn’t hard, but it isn’t exactly easy either. It is important. If you feel like a fish out of water when you try it then you might want to find someone you trust to help you with building solid links with benefits that last a long time.
Tags: link building, online marketing, small business
Posted in link building | 8 Comments »
Friday, June 4th, 2010
I got an e-mail solicitation a day or so ago from someone wanting to buy a link from this blog. There were several things wrong with the request, but I’m just going to mention two of them.
- No. 1, the company requesting the link was a commercial cleaning company. Since I don’t write a commercial cleaning blog I couldn’t see any way for the link, in the form of a blog post, to benefit the company, me or my blog readers. It just wouldn’t have made sense.
- Besides relevance, selling a link on a blog is dangerous business, especially if the link is not related to your content. It will stick out like a sore thumb and likely will be detected as a sold link. That would surely result in my blog getting de-listed in Google.
But the link request did get me thinking and I think I’ve figure out a safer alternative. Even two safer alternatives.
Safe alternative #1 – Squidoo is a website where anyone can open an account for free and start posting web pages around a single topic. I consider this a safe link selling alternative because you can set up an account at Squidoo and make as many lenses as you want on any number of topics. You can then sell links to people in those niche topics and those links will be relevant links from a high PR site. Plus, there’s no way for the search engines to know those links are paid for links if you don’t associate the lenses with any web properties you own.
Safe alternative #2 – Start a Blogspot blog on your topic and write a few blog posts, linking to your web properties. Blogspot is another high PR website and your blog will be relevant to your topic and provide relevant links. But you don’t want too many so just write a few blog posts and then leave it.
I don’t recommend selling links and I haven’t tried either of these two methods, but I don’t think your websites would be injured if you got caught selling links in this manner. You could effectively sell links without being penalized because the links you sell would not be associated with any web properties you own.
Tags: link selling, Squidoo
Posted in link building | 1 Comment »
Sunday, May 23rd, 2010
You hear it almost every day now. Reciprocal links are no good. Google penalizes reciprocal links. They’ll kill your SEO. They’ll murder your website. You’ll get de-listed. Yada yada yada. None of it’s true.
First, Google’s mantra has always been make your links natural. Period.
So this is where you have to ask, “Are reciprocal links natural?” Sometimes, yes. Sometimes no.
So when it is natural to link reciprocally? Well, let’s say you own a body shop in Wayzata Michigan and you have a friend who does detail work down the road. Off line you’ve agreed to send each other business for non-competing services. As a gesture of friendship you link to each other’s websites stating that those services where you do not compete are available at the other guy’s shop.
When you create such a “reciprocal” link you don’t have to discuss anchor text, link-to specific pages, link-from specific pages, etc. You’re both just linking out to a like business in the same geographic area. That’s a natural link.
An unnatural link, and one that might draw red flags, is when you say to your detailing friend, “I’ll link to your painting page using the anchor text ‘paint your car’ and you link to my bumper page with the anchor text ‘fix your bumper’. And by the way, we’re agreeing to link from the page on our site with the highest PR. These kinds of links are usually detected as unnatural. It becomes obvious that you are trying to increase each other’s PR and search rankings and that rarely works.
Reciprocal linking isn’t bad. It’s how you do it that makes it bad.
Tags: link building, reciprocal links
Posted in link building | No Comments »
Tuesday, May 18th, 2010
There has been a lot of emphasis by Google to include inbound links in its ranking algorithms. But little is ever said of outbound linking. Is it beneficial?
To read Aaron Wall, you wouldn’t think so. But I think it does benefit. Maybe not as much as those coveted one-way inbound links, but they benefit.
I think the problem that Aaron has with the link graph is that the linking game tends to benefit big players with a lot of money more than small business owners like you and me. That just means that we have to get a little bit more creative in how we promote our websites. Truthfully, there’s no shame in getting the lion’s share of your traffic from Bing or Yahoo!
Too many webmasters are chasing after Google like a jock after the prom queen. But Google is just one source of traffic, albeit an important one.
When it comes to outbound links, does Google reward websites for doing it? I think so. I believe it’s included in the ranking algorithm, though I can’t say how much the reward is. I do know that if you link out to authority sites that are relevant and that have no big issues (like warez, spam, etc.) then you’ll be doing yourself a favor to let Google know you associate with those authorities by linking to them. That will work in your favor if these conditions are met:
- You don’t do it too often;
- You don’t do in a spammy sort of way (which isn’t necessarily too often); and
- You link to the right sites with the right anchor text.
Are outbound links as important as one-way inbound links? No. But they can help you in certain ways if you do it well.
Tags: link building, links
Posted in link building | No Comments »
Saturday, May 1st, 2010
WebProNews has an article that doesn’t exactly paint a bleak picture of link building, but it doesn’t exactly flatter it either. The last paragraph is super telling:
The point of all of this is, it’s not just about getting links anymore. Links will always be of use, but social interactions may equal them in importance, and in some cases may be of greater use to your visibility, and ultimately getting people to your site, your content, your store, or your shopping cart.
In other words, the back link strategy that Google made such an important part of website ranking may not be the most important metric any more (was it ever?). Rather, the social graph may actually dominate the landscape of Internet marketing for the next decade. I think this will be an exciting decade.
The truth is, the Web has always been social. Forums and article directories – yes, and even website directories as early as 1994 – were social in nature, albeit in a different format. Remember those old web rings? They were social, weren’t they? And guest books – them too, right?
The Web, like life, is by nature a social institution. So it makes sense that social media will grow more useful as people grow more comfortable using it. By extension, the more people come to rely on social media for business, the less they will come to rely on traditional traffic generators like links and search engines.
Tags: link building, Social Media
Posted in link building | No Comments »
Wednesday, April 7th, 2010
Link attrition, or link atrophy, is the strange phenomenon of losing link popularity or link value from the inbound links to a specific page of your website. In other words, your links are disappearing.
Why does that happen?
There are a number of reasons why your link atrophy is high. Here are a few off the top of my head:
- You have a lot of inbound links from the same domain disproportionate to other domains
- You have a lot of inbound links coming from press releases, which tend to be temporary links
- Website, or web pages, linking to you are being taken off line or the owners are not renewing their domain registrations
- You have made changes to your website and failed to provide the proper redirects
Those are just a few of the reasons your links could be disappearing, but I think those are the major reasons why. If you have an interest in testing your link atrophy, and I think you should periodically, here’s a cool tool to do just that.
Tags: inbound links, link atrophy
Posted in link building | No Comments »
Wednesday, March 17th, 2010
Internet marketers have been discussing link building for a long time. For a while that was the most important Internet marketing strategy of all, at least in the minds of many SEOs and Internet marketers. However, the tide is starting to turn and for many online marketers, social media marketing is taking the No. 1 spot as most important strategy. But is it?
There are pros and cons to both strategies, of course. I’d say that both are important, but there are pitfalls to look out for in each.
For instance, link building is good if you want to develop inbound links that provide you with strong anchor text and increase your search engine rankings. However, do it wrong and it can backfire. You could even hurt your site more than help it if you hire the wrong company or using spammy techniques. To perform a really good link building campaign you have to really plan it out and don’t take unnecessary risks.
With social media marketing, one of the biggest drawbacks is time and expense. To do it well you have to spend time planning and put some money into your campaigns. You can’t do it pass/fail.
There really is no either/or equation when it comes to Internet marketing strategies. You have to plan and implement your plan knowing what benefits you fully expect to receive before you start. Both social media marketing and link building have their place. Your job is to know what that is.
Tags: internet marketing, link building, social media marketing
Posted in Social Media, link building | 3 Comments »
Monday, February 15th, 2010
When it comes website promotion, and link building in particular, doing it the natural way trumps all the SEO in the world. I hear small business people all the time, after they’ve learned a little bit about SEO – and that can sometimes be more dangerous than knowing nothing at all – say something like “I need 100 do-follow links in a hurry,” or “I only want links from PR5 sites and higher.” Folks, if you’re going to build links then you better do it the natural way.
So what is the natural way?
The natural way to build links is the way that people do it if the search engines weren’t watching. In fact, if you didn’t get any SEO benefit from it at all then the best way to link is the way you would link so that it benefits your site visitors.
In other words, how would you do it if there was nothing to be gained from doing it at all?
Traffic. Link for your traffic. Build links from small sites and large sites within your niche and from which out niche just as you would if you were busy going about your natural business. Just be yourself.
Tags: link building, natural website promotion, SEO
Posted in link building | No Comments »
Sunday, January 31st, 2010
It seems that some media companies don’t like people linking to them. They want to charge to be linked to. The history of the Web is such that website owners have always linked to content on other pages – ones they don’t own – without needing permission or paying for the privilege to do so. The Web is the public square.
That does not mean that the Web is public domain. You can’t steal or appropriate whatever you want for your own purposes just because it’s out there. Intellectual property rights still apply online.
But where is the line?
I think the line is clearly intent. Are you being helpful and does your link benefit the site you are linking to without detracting or impinging on their right to profit from their own content? If so then I’d say you are good for your link.
Linking has always been seen as a form of payment. When you link to another website you are essentially benefiting them in the search engines because that link could be counted by Google, or another search engine, in its search ranking algorithm and could potentially benefit the other site by pushing it up in search rankings. But you are benefiting the other site as well in another way. Traffic.
If you send traffic to another website because you link to it then that’s payment. That new traffic could very well purchase something.
So I really don’t understand these media companies that are complaining about being linked to. And, remember, if it’s true that you are benefiting those websites you link to then it’s true that sites linking to you are providing you with unpaid benefits as well. Why complain?
Tags: linking, search engine optimization, website promotion
Posted in link building | 3 Comments »
Tuesday, January 19th, 2010
A few years ago, if you’d have received a link from a .edu or .gov website you’d been told those were “high value” links – worth more than your average .com or .net link. But what about today? Andy Beal questions whether that is true based on a video by Matt Cutts.
Personally, I’ve always wondered. Most small business owners really don’t have a hope of obtaining these links. I mean, a .edu link is a link from a university. What would it take to get a university to link to you. You’d have to have some pretty valuable content for a university to link to you. Maybe that was the thinking behind the theory that those links are higher value links than your run-of-the-mill .coms.
I suppose the same would go for .gov links. But is it true?
I really don’t think it matters. I think the most important thing to remember about links is that if you get a link from a relevant site with a lot of traffic then that is going to benefit you. I really don’t know what other kind of link you’d want.
Tags: .edu, .gov, link building, links
Posted in link building | 4 Comments »
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