Buying Links is Getting Expensive

The Google AdSense program (which pays publishers for placing contextual links on their websites) and automated spammy "can I buy a link on your site" emails have made virtually every important online publisher aware of the value of links.

In mid 2007 Google began editing toolbar PageRank scores and rankings for many sites that were selling links. It is getting harder and more expensive to buy your way to the top through link rentals.

At the same time, more and more people are writing online. Setting up a blog only takes a few minutes. There are hundreds or thousands of people talking about every topic imaginable, so if you create something remarkable and capture the attention of a few thought leaders who like it, you are going to get links. But how do you create content that people will like?

Passion = Market Knowledge = Links

One of the easiest (and most effective) ways to predict a future and to predict what people like is to immerse yourself in your topic. If you are passionate about a topic, know more about it than anyone else, and openly share information, then eventually people will notice and link to you. If you know what people are interested in, rather than asking them to link to what you have, create something that they would be interested in linking at. Express your world view and your bias in a way that matches their world view.

Become a Platform

Each of us is the most relevant thing in our own lives. It sounds selfish but it is true. If you promote other people they will be more likely to promote you. Popular bloggers search to see what people are saying about them. If you want someone’s attention linking at them from a blog post on your site is an easy way to get them to notice you. This article about Paris Hilton explains how the concept works in the real world.

Though she hired a publicist to get her on Page 6 She never really talked about herself. She talked about other people. She would mention the designers of her clothes, the club she was going to, who made the sweater for her dog, all without any guarantee of any return. She just threw out links.

It didn’t take long for designers and club owners to realize that Paris Hilton was a walking billboard. So they embraced her. She paid attention to them, so they paid attention to her.

The most valuable commodity today is attention.

The Web is a Social Network

Social interaction of any type leads to links.

• Speak at a conference? Someone will likely blog about it.
• Want to get thought leaders to promote your site? Create a community project or contest and ask them to participate. Or give out awards.
• Lack the budget needed to go to conferences? Moderate forums, comment on related blogs, and build social relationships online.
• Track hot news in your space and try to get out in front of important trends.
  • As an example, when Google did a big update that promoted some big brand websites we were one of the first websites to analyze it.
  • Our blog post about that topic earned over 1,000 inbound links and brought in thousands of dollars in subscriber revenues.

Be Credible

But for people to take you credibly you need to make sure your website adheres to good web credibility standards.

• Is your domain name memorable?
• Does your design complement your copy?
• Is your content interesting and conceptually unique?
• Does your site have an editorial component and voice, or is it a boring low-value thin product database?
• Is your about page memorable?
• Is your site easy to use and understand?
• Do you have a brand people care about?

You do not need to "have it all" to get started, but the more credible you look the faster you will gain momentum.

Build on Your Success

Work to improve your site every day. Over the course of the year fixing or creating one thing a day will lead to a large advantage. Building up a leading market position can take years, but once you get at the top those years are the barrier to entry which prevent others from being able to replicate what you built up.

Markets Are Conversations

The Cluetrain Manifesto stated that markets are conversations. Blogs are the leading medium upon which those conversations happen online. If you are a blogger, read the Blogger’s Guide to SEO to get the most out of your blog.

Even if you are not a blogger, the Blogger’s Guide to SEO can help you understand the mind set of bloggers and why blogs quickly became a foundational part of the web. If you know a lot about blogs then getting links is a piece of cake.

Cheers

Prior to creating the SEO Book training program I conducted a survey of SEO Book members. One of the questions was, "What is the biggest thing stopping you from improving your website rankings and traffic?"

The most common answer to that question was "link building". If links are so important how do you build them? Here are some great techniques for providing content that people will actually WANT to link to:

Quality Links You Can Build Today

One of the easiest was to start building links is to submit your site to leading general web directories and directories in your niche.

Don’t just think of directories as being places that accept websites. Some of the best directories represent business partnerships and exist on sites like manufacturers you sell for, local government sites, or your local chamber of commerce. For example, Google lists some of the most popular Google Checkout business partners
http://www.google.com/checkout/m.html

• Would some of your business partners be willing to link to your site?
• Are there any trade organizations or local business organizations you can join?
• If there are no relevant organizations, could/should you create one?

Web Directories

This video covers directory submission.

Here is a list of some of the most well trusted online web directories

• Business.com – $299 per year for commercial listings.
• Yahoo! Directory – $299 per year for commercial listings. Free for non-commercial listings.
• BOTW – one time $299 fee (SEO Book subscribers get a 35% discount coupon)
• JoeAnt – one time $40 fee
• DMOZ – also referred to as the Open Directory Project or ODP. Free submission, but it may take a long time to get listed as it is ran by volunteers.

Here is a link to a $50 off promotional code for Business.com

SEO Book subscribers also have access to a list of a dozen more top web directories.

How to Influence Link Anchor Text

Link quality is one important factor, but another important factor is link anchor text. In this interview Google’s Adam Lasnik highlighted the importance of using descriptive anchor text:

Useful descriptive Anchor text can be great, not only for the user who gets a better idea what he or she is going to be clicking through to, but helpful for Google to better understand what that page is likely about.

You can’t always control how other people will link at you, but you can guide them. Most people refer to things by their official name. If your domain name is ChicagoDentists.com, and you are aggressive at marketing your site, then many people who mention your site are going to link at your site with Chicago Dentists as the anchor text.

Beyond your domain name you can also guide anchor text with the names you give articles, tools, and other content published on your site. If you want people to reference something on your site using a specific set of words then make sure those words are in the page title, file name, and in the product name. Creating a product logo helps influence anchor text even more.

Tons of Link Building Ideas

Beyond directories, there are many blogs and other websites that discuss your topic. Are there ways you can appeal to their editorial interests?

We made a list of 101 different link building ideas. Rather than publish them again here, we figured it would be best to give you a link to the list. As you can see from the list, many of the ideas are creative, others are weird, and some are downright profitable!

Tomorrow, we discuss easy ways to create content that others will spontaneously link to — to save you from having to do loads of legwork requesting links from other websites.

Killer Link Building Tools

Hub Finder

One of the research papers we referenced yesterday (Authoritative Sources in a Hyperlinked Environment [PDF]) discusses topical hubs and authorities. We created a premium SEO tool for subscribers named Hub Finder, which helps you locate sites that link at many top ranking competing websites. The theory behind this is that these pages are often industry resources, and if they link at many competing websites there is a good chance they will be willing to link to your site as well.

LocalRank Tool

One of the research papers we referenced yesterday was a patent from Google about re-ranking search results based on how they interlink (LocalRank: Ranking search results by reranking the results based on local inter-connectivity). We created a premium SEO tool for subscribers named Local Rank, which helps you understand how the top ranked sites in Google cross link, in an attempt to help you estimate how competitive your target keywords are, and what sort of promotional strategies competitors are using.

Cheers

Yesterday we covered on page optimization, and mentioned how some people are too aggressive with keyword density. Of course copy that is dense with keywords likely sounds dense, and will not convert site visitors into buyers. But some automated content generation programs create content that is better than some page copy that people write.

Some major corporations, like Thomson Financial, publicly admit that they generate news reports using robots to write the content.

Thomson Financial has been using automatic computer programs to generate news stories for almost six months. The machines can spit out wire-ready copy based on financial reports a mere 0.3 seconds after receiving the data. Thomson management likes its reporter robots so much that it has decided to expand the fleet.

The cost of creating content for the sake of it has dropped to ~ $0. In a market dominated by outsourcing and automated content generation, a search engine has to look beyond what we say about ourselves if they want to stay relevant.

Links as Votes

Part of what allowed Google to grow so influential so fast is that they use elegant link analysis in their relevancy algorithms.

Not all votes are counted equally. The more quality websites that link at a given website, the more that website is trusted when it links out to other websites. Google’s PageRank algorithm is designed such that links from the homepage of a leading university are trusted more than a link from a low quality website that links to other low quality websites.

In the image to the right, you can see that the top page passes 50 units of link weight, whereas the bottom page only passes 3 units of link weight. Both links are still worth getting, but the top one counts much more.

Link Anchor Text as a Relevancy Aid

If another site links to you saying that your site is about Chicago dentists then that link is interpreted as a vote of trust for your site in general, and it counts much more for the words in the link anchor text. Such a link would help you rank better for Chicago dentists and closely related topics.

Search Engines Follow People

Search engines only trust us if others trust us too. Search engines follow people.

Tomorrow we will cover an easy way to get great links.

Cheers

Here’s a simple tip that could easily save you 12 months of work:

Setting up an effective SEO campaign in a competitive market can be a long drawn out and expensive process. Worse yet, if you are focused on the wrong keywords, you might need to start over again after you find out that your site is not producing the results you want.

An easy way to avoid needing to start over is to test the value of keywords before you heavily commit to your SEO strategy. Buying pay-per-click ads (PPC) from search engines like Google (AdWords), Yahoo (Search Marketing), and Microsoft (adCenter) allow you to see what keywords have the ability to drive traffic to your site.

Learning The Hard Way

When I was new to the search game a client of mine told me that he wanted to rank for a list of fairly broad keywords. We were slowly moving up the search rankings, but he was not seeing much return. SEO is an investment game and it takes time and capital to build momentum. He had a rather low budget though, so it was taking months to see little response.

I could tell that things were not working out as well as either of us planned, and suggested we shift his budget over to AdWords to see what keywords are most valuable for his business. It turns out that the keywords he told me he wanted to rank for had very little value to his business. If I bid more than 15 cents a click for any of them we lost money. But there was a line of products he sold that had some related keywords which people converted on at a great rate. We could afford to pay $2 a click for some of these keywords and still make profit.

In late 2004 we adjusted his SEO strategy to match what worked well on the pay per click ads. When the economic downturn happened in 2008 and 2009 many competing businesses went out of business. Had we not used AdWords to test his keyword strategy his business would have likely went under as well. But he still ranks at the top of the search results because his SEO strategy was focused on what keywords worked well for his website.

Test a Variety of Keywords

Not every keyword you try will be profitable. But if you try a variety of keywords tightly related to your business you are far more likely to succeed than if you only bid on 1 keyword. Most businesses should test at least 5 to 10 different keywords, while retail oriented businesses should test a much larger set of keywords, driving traffic to the most relevant page whenever possible.

Some tools, like keyword list generator, make it quite easy to quickly create a list of related keywords by entering locations in one box and core keywords in the next.

Track Conversions

All the major PPC ad networks have built in conversion tracking tools which show you what keywords and ad groups convert well. You can also pass the conversion value through to these tools to know exactly how much business came from each ad campaign and each keyword.

In the above groups I used obtuse campaign names to prevent you from knowing what site this data is associated with, but note that

• the highest volume keywords (listed as "core") were associated with most of the transactions, but they also had relatively high conversion costs (since they were the most obvious keywords to target)
• the keywords that we bid much less on (listed as "cheap") still were not very "cheap" once you factor in the cost per conversion (the traffic was available at a discount rate only because the keywords were worth less)
• the longtail keywords (listed as "individual") did not create a ton of sales volume, but they were cheaper clicks and they tended to have a fairly high conversion rate when compared against the core industry keywords (using a keyword list generator like the above and mapping keywords out against URLs helps pick up a lot of this under-priced traffic)
• the ad group with ad copy catering toward big spenders (listed as "custom quote") on the surface looks more expensive per conversion, but…
  • the average order size of these customers (not shown) was much larger than the average order size of other customers, yielding far greater profit per conversion
  • some additional orders were taken over the phone (so the cost is even less than what was shown)

If tracking conversions is hard, you can place a link to a coupon (or some other free offer) on your landing page and view a click on that coupon page as a proxy for conversion and user intent. Some more sophisticated strategies involve setting up different 1(800) phone numbers based on the marketing channel or keyword.

Where to Start Testing With Pay Per Click Ads

For most businesses the best way to start pay per click advertising is to test your ideas on Google AdWords and then carry the best results over to Yahoo! and Microsoft. You can find coupons for bonus credits on Yahoo! Search Marketing and sign up to create advertiser accounts on all 3 major search engines on this page.

There are a lot of smaller ad networks that sell traffic as well, but most of them have low traffic quality, so they don’t help you save money and they do not offer representative market feedback. For most advertisers the smaller ad networks are a complete waste of time.

This training module is a free primer to help you get started with pay per click marketing effectively

Apply AdWords Data to Inform Your SEO Strategy

Find out which keywords have value for your business, and set up your site structure based on the top performing keywords. Our member’s area offers an example spreadsheet on how to structure a website

Tomorrow we discuss “on-page optimization” — how to use your keywords on your webpages.

Cheers

Yesterday we discussed the precise targeting offered by keywords. But even if a keyword is valuable, it might not be valuable to your business. For example, if you are a dentist in Chicago, it is not worth the effort to try to rank for the word dentist. Why? 99% of the people searching for that phrase do not live near Chicago, and are irrelevant prospects. What you would want to rank for, if you were a Chicago dentist, would be things like

• Chicago dentist
• Chicago dentists
• dentist in Chicago

Understanding Searcher Intent

Even within a niche like dental work, there are more specific types of dentists people search for, like implant dentist and cosmetic dentist. If you offer these types of services you would want to rank for keywords like

• Chicago implant dentist
• cosmetic dentist in Chicago
• etc.

Free Keyword Tools

There is a wide array of free keyword tools on the market. My favorite keyword tool is the SEO Book keyword tool – it is fast and free, powered by Wordtracker, and allows you to quickly export your keyword data.

Every keyword tool has some data errors or anomalies. Don’t expect the tools to give you exact numbers, just rough ranges. If you are in doubt as to the accuracy of one keyword tool you can compare it against other keyword tools. And you can use an AdWords ad campaign to test keywords – a topic we will discuss tomorrow.

Here are some additional cool keyword tools

• Google’s Search-Based Keyword Tool
• Google’s Traffic Estimator
• Google’s AdWords Keyword Tool
• Microsoft’s Ad Intelligence (which is a plug-in for Microsoft Excel)

Gather More Keyword Ideas

• Anything people would likely search for to want to buy your services is a potential keyword.
• You can look at emails from customers or customer questions as potential keywords.
• If you have been publishing a site for a while and have analytics data you can use the analytics data to find keywords.
• You can analyze competing sites looking for keywords.
• There are literally hundreds of ways to come up with keyword ideas.

Group Similar Keywords

After you get a list of keywords start grouping related keywords together…

• You should be able to target related phrases like ‘Chicago dentist’ and ‘dentist in Chicago’ using a single page.
• Chicago cosmetic dental work is a different concept than ‘Chicago dentist’ is, so you should create a separate page targeting that that term and why prospects would want to buy that service.
• You can use Microsoft Excel, Open Office, or Google Docs to start aligning keywords and related modifiers with your URLs. We have an example spreadsheet in our member’s area here

Tomorrow, we cover how to use PPC ads (such as AdWords) to discover the value of keywords to your business.

Cheers

Have you ever wondered why Google is worth over a hundred billions of dollars? Or why a single click from Google can go for as high as $50? The reason is the precise targeting offered by search engine marketing.

How Most Advertising is Broken

Most ads try to club you over the head and beat you into submission. Search engine marketing is a completely different form of advertising because rather than trying to tell you what to do, the searcher requests to see the ads and views them as relevant to their wants, needs, and goals. Advertisers bid to show up where they are relevant – when they are irrelevant. If they bid for irrelevant keywords they lose money on every click.

2 Approaches to Marketing

Ads on websites with no targeting can have little to no value. Search traffic, which is laser targeted, is worth over 30x as much. [1]

For display advertising, Credit Suisse estimated that in 2009 the average CPM will be $2.39, down from $2.46 in 2008.
…
As for paid search, JPMorgan projected that for every 1,000 searches, $75.33 would be generated from ads in 2009.

Would you rather hunt for customers, or make yourself available to customers hunting for you? SEO allows you to tap the value of search, with your customers finding your business when they need your products & services!

Research the Market Value of Any Keyword

The cool thing about search engine marketing is not only is it so targeted, but it benefits search engines to share valuable keywords with prospective advertisers. This means you get to spy on the relative search volumes of different keywords, and how much your competitors are willing to pay for keywords.

Using the Google Traffic Estimator Sandbox you can view how much Google’s estimate the of keyword value at

For example, here is the estimated value for credit card and credit cards

Notice how there are 3 different listings for each keyword. They are based on Google’s AdWords ad match types, and can be used to help you know the relative search volumes between different types of searches.

1. [credit card] represents searchers who searched specifically for the keyword credit card with no other modifiers in it.
2. "credit card" represents all searchers in the above group, and searchers who searched for a keyword that contained credit card in it, including people who search for keywords like best credit card.
3. credit card represents all searchers in the above group, and searchers who searched for any keyword that contained the words credit and card somewhere in their search string, including people who search for obscure keywords like payment card without any credit.

Enter some of your keywords here and see what Google thinks they are worth.
https://adwords.google.com/select/TrafficEstimatorSandbox

1. list down 5 important keywords to your business
2. enter in all 3 match types for your keyword
3. pick your language & markets
4. do not enter a bid price (this way Google assumes you are willing to pay the market rate)
5. hit enter & get your results

The above tool estimates the value of traffic to a single paid Google AdWords ad, but most searchers click on the free search results, so the keyword value to your business may even be higher than estimated by the above tool.

Tomorrow we cover other useful keyword tools as well as the keyword research and discovery process.

Cheers,

Plugin #1: FeedBurner FeedSmith

This probably won’t directly affect your seo on site, but the better reach your blog posts have, the more chance someone has to read it, and link to it if they were inspired by what you say. So you have to write good content first, and then this plugin becomes 100% more effective at building links.

Plugin #2: Dagon Design Sitemap Generator

A must have for every website, XML sitemaps should be generated on the fly and updated whenever you add a new page or write a new post. This is not just another XML sitemap plugin, but rather a true sitemap generator which is highly customizable from its own options page in the WordPress admin panel. Some of its features include: support for multi-level categories and pages, category/page exclusion, multiple-page generation with navigation, permalink support, choose what to display, what order to list items in, show comment counts and/or post dates, and much more.

Plugin #3: Friend Connect Commenting Plugin

You can now allow visitors to log in with their FriendConnect ID, and leave a comment with that same ID. This means that your visitors can log in with their Google, Yahoo!, AIM or OpenID account, by just clicking a button

Plugin #4: Google Analytics

The interfaces are fancy, and the fine grained stats and AdSense integration make it a particularly powerful tool when you’re seeking to push a product online using AdSense.

Plugin #5: Platinum SEO Pack

If you are already using All In One SEO Pack, this plugin will automatically import all the settings, that you have defined using All in one SEO plugin. You just need to verify the options, through Setting->Platinum SEO page of your wordpress blog. Platinum SEO Pack is also compatible with earlier versions of wordpress, though I recommend you to upgrade to the latest version of wordpress.

Plugin #6: Search Excerpt

It extracts out the search keywords, scans the content of matched post entries, and displays document snippets around the keyword, with that specific keyword highlighted. It adds a filter in get_the_excerpt() function so no modification needs to be done to WordPress’ 1.5/2.x theme. For other themes, make sure during “the loop” in search.php, it calls the_excerpt() to display the post entries.

Plugin #7: SRG Clean Archives

This plugin is designed to display your archive listings in a clean and uniform fashion that’s search engine friendly on a dedicated page or in your sidebar.

Plugin Features: It lists the Month / Year, shows total post count for the month (enabled by default), the day of the month the article was published, the title of the article (permalink to article) and the number of comments (enabled by default) that have been made on each article.

Plugin #8: WordPress Database Backup

WordPress database backup creates backups of your core WordPress tables as well as other tables of your choice in the same database.