Moderator:
Christine Churchill – Key Relevence

Speakers:
Patrick Altoft – Branded 3
Rob Millard – Distilled
Kelvin Newman – Site visibility
Pete Wailes – Strategy Internet marketing

This session was about the age old topic of link building and various panellist’s tips and experiences.

Patrick Altoft – Branded 3

In their experience page rank from social sites does NOT flow throughout the linked-to site and will not carry trust, etc to the rest of the site. The great thing about twitter is many people syndicate their tweets on their websites and sidebars so your link is not only on twitter but also on many other sites. This is great for getting multiple IP’s and TLD’s. In this way you can get loads more links and traffic than you could ever get from dig or delicious.

When it comes to dishing out top SEO tips, few are more important than advising on the correct use and implementation of internal linking. So many companies and individuals out there are so pre-occupied with getting quality links into their sites from reputable sites (which isn’t a bad thing) that they completely forget about the impact that good internal linking can have on a website. This article takes a look at why internal linking is so important and contains some top SEO tips on how to implement these links effectively.

SEO Tips: Why bother with internal linking?

An extremely valuable SEO tip that you need always bear in mind, is the three main effects that internal linking has on a website. Each effect has a different weight as far as its actual SEO value is concerned, however you can’t afford not to think about each when implementing internal links:

With all the various articles on how “SEO is evil” or “SEO doesn’t work” etc etc news that crop up occasionally (especially Jill Whalen’s “Most of SEO is boondoggle” article) I’ve had the urge to rip apart the monthly promotional/link building tactics some  SEO companies still pitch to clients, especially when they make a big fuss about these crap stupid “outdated” link building techniques, which mislead clients (looking at a competitor’s proposal to a client right now and shaking my head) and any newbies entering  the SEM market.

For example:

Google goals

Google is going to analyse your surfing behaviour in order to derive more relevance to use in serving you personalised search results, for example:

Have you created a personalised Google homepage with feeds? Do you use iGoogle? What have you been searching for? Do you click through results and click back or actually spend time reading? Are there recurring topics or trends emerging from your surfing activities and choice of sites you spend time on?

Reading this, I raise my own question: is Google looking only to show you pages that are similar and related to pages you’ve seen before and are located near you, or do they intend to discover deeper levels of patterns regarding how people find what they need, or perhaps a mix of both?

In a New York Times post, Miguel Helft quotes Google CEO Eric Schmidt:

One of the common SEO link building techniques is commenting on blogs. This may be a bit time consuming, especially when you want to earn lots of incoming links to your site. But is it really helpful? The answer is yes. By generating incoming links to your site, you create a good reputation among other bloggers. Your replies and arguments in blog discussions show that you are interested in the subject; you also attract other bloggers and end-users to visit your site and see what you can offer – which means more organic traffic for you. Try commenting on 2 to3 blogs per day and see what happens.

You may say that excellent content sells itself, but I say that well-written words are just not useful enough, especially if your client is selling non-tech, non-business and non-entertainment based products. One pagers of content distributed on e-zine and review sites are a shot in the dark for high volumes of traffic. Perhaps you can think of a viral idea that`s going to make a local hockey team fly out of the water. But can you think of ideas for window glazing, au pair services, locksmiths and Czech translation services, while you`re at? You may say I`m dreaming, and to that I say: you`re just asleep.

When dodging the slavering jaws of the spambots, it`s best if your site looks like a lousy supper. That means reducing the rewards of getting the spam message onto the site. Even if spammers make the necessary code changes to help their spambots navigate the web, they may simply decide that it`s not worth the extra work and maintenance if the incentives are too low. My assumption is that spammers are in the hunt for a good Google PageRank score; it`s about boosting their results in search engines. The rel=”nofollow” tag when added to links tells Google and other search engines not to index the link. Admittedly the pace of spam has only increased since the rel=”nofollow” tag was introduced by Google and a group of blog software makers a couple of years ago. My optimistic hunch is that new apps that support this tag from the get-go won`t be as big a target. We`ll see.

“Link Value is the perceived value another site will derive from linking to you. The more value they see, the more likely they will be to link.” – Ken McGaffin

Reciprocal links seem to be the order of the day, but very rarely offer significant value to either of the parties involved. Many feel reciprocal links offer the most immediate value to most sites.

One-way links are (obviously) much more productive. One-way links are links created when a webmaster likes your site and wants to encourage his/her site visitors to have a look at your site, for whichever reason that may be. One-way links are really difficult to obtain and need many hours of creativity, hard work, and effort. However, the returns in the areas of site traffic, qualified prospects and sales could be fairly large.