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.

As an agency we need to be able to guarantee our links i.e. Defensible links. Google is getting better at removing value from links that appear as paid so we need to get better at making all links look natural.

• A good source of links is to be a provider images so as to get citations and credits. It looks natural when an image is used and credited elsewhere.
• Linkbuilding via widgets. You can change the XML feed to the widget which allows you to dynamically change link text. At the bottom of the widget you can put text “Click here to get this widget” which encourages it to be spread and also makes it look like it spreads naturally. The initial placements of the widget may be paid but then it spreads.
• Infographics. All linkbait has been done before – you need to do it better. We need to be able to guarantee coverage and that is done via incentives (Is that paid links?) Ring them up “What can we do for you to make you publish this infographic?”
• Pre write content Send out a press release and write the story for 30-40 sites to

Rob Millard – Distilled

Rob suggested to forgo the traditional link building via email in favour of blogger outreach. Emails contact often results in you making the link request without trying to build the relationship first. Twitter rocks for outreach. Where as email is seen as a burden that needs to be responded to tweeps love to be contacted through @ and DM. It is also good as the target tweep can look you up and see your credentials. Also really easy to find people because people want to get followers so they publish their @tweep.

There are also various tools that allow you to be selective and find prospective people to contact. www.followerwonk.com is a tool to find tweeps based on keywords. You can also use www.wefollow.com. The downfall is that you don’t know the quality of the potential links so you need to evaluate the sites: This is easily done by pulling the data into a spreadsheet and tabulating the website PR, the number of tweets and the number of follower that your “target” has.

When contacting potential people be nice!

• Flatter your target. You can use public lists to find targets e.g. Followfriday
• Otherwise create a private list – stalk your prey and see what they are up to. Then engage with them.
• Or use Hashtags & Search “guest post” + {keyword} or “Guest blog” + {keyword} or #haro + {keyword}
• Use Linkedin to find peoples twitter id and contact them that way.
• Using the phone for outreach is very effective.
• Go offline – Go to meetups. Check attendees list – perhaps tweet them beforehand to make sure you meet them.
• Quora – many ceo’s hang out there – opportunity to find people.
• Blog commenting – when commenting perhaps link to your twitter profile instead of a useless web link. People can quickly see who you are.

Takeaways from this session:

• Know who you targeting
• Find people by using tools
• Be creative how you search
• Build relationships

Kelvin Newman – Site visibility

What has made a difference to us?

Three things influence out decisions –

1. Our gut feel
2. Habit – carry on with what we have always done
3. What Rand tells us to do! J

We have ignored:

Psychology: Subliminal messages – people do pick up on subtle clues. The words you choose will influence people. E.g. Ask for a favour rather than a link.

Behaviour Economist: Try these three books for a great read. Freakonomics, Nudge (Richard H Thaler) Predictably Irrational (Dan Ariely) also look up Dan on TED video

PR Guru: There are loads of surveys out there. If you do some god surveys you should be able to get links from that. Try “survey + {Keyword}” in Google. First consider “What would be a great survey to write about?”

Session Takeaways:

Surveys work – www.Toluna.com is a great website to get surveys done cheaply. £35 can survey 250 people. It is really fast – you can get this in 30 min.

Pete Wailes – Strategy Internet marketing

4C & CBEL = Creative Compelling Content Creation & Content Based Engagement Links

You need to be engaging the community to be in the game in the future.

Think Broad to understand what all is affected and then bring it back down to specific resources to find info e.g. Linked in Delicious, Flickr, etc. You will get an idea on what people talk about in that industry. This data mining stage is imperative so you can go about answering questions that people typically need answering. Will the community be interested in this info? What has worked and what has not worked. Then execute.

Go see benthebodyguard.com People shared the site even without being in the industry because the idea is good.

Go after a community that are passionately engaged already. Effectively outsource the link building.

Be remarkable and people will talk about you. The execution needs to be remarkable

Go have a look at Hackernews – remarkable for sparking ideas. Pete got 40,000 words back from the community because he asked a passionate question “What’s wrong with Microsoft?”

Also we have found the # of Facebook shares is the highest correlated metric with higher Google rankings. Not because of Facebook but because of the viral links it generates.

Related posts:

1. SMX London coverage: SEO 2011 What’s Working and What’s not.
2. What is Link Value and does your site offer it?
3. SMX London Coverage: Speaking In Tongues: Mastering Multinational Search

London SMX coverage: Link Alchemy: Creative Ways Of Conjuring SEO Gold

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:

3 reasons why Search marketing specialists say internal linking is so important:

1. It increases individual page rank.
2. It builds the relevancy and weight of specific keywords to a particular page.
3. It assists in getting all pages on your site spidered by search engines.

1. SEO Tips: How does internal linking increase page rank?

Just as it is with inbound links from external pages, internal linking also carries weight in increasing the relevancy of any page. The homepage of most websites generally has the best page rank in search engines which is often referred to as “SEO juice”. One of the best SEO tips I can provide you with is to identify some of the key phrases/keywords for your site and use those phrases to link to important pages on your site from your homepage. Each link from your homepage to sub pages filters some of the homepage’s SEO Juice down to those sub pages, thereby increasing their ranking and relevance. Take a look at the graphic below:

As you can see, the juice from the homepage filters down to the sub pages, thereby giving them more juice and making them more visible and better ranked in search engines.

Bonus page rank SEO tip: Notice too that by having too many layers or levels in your site, you can severely damage a page’s page rank. Try to make each page on your site accessible by no more than 3 or 4 clicks from the homepage.

2. SEO Tips: How does internal linking increase the relevancy of a page to a specific keyword?

One of the top SEO tips everyone should know, is that when you start optimizing a website, you need to indentify key phrases within your industry that you wish to target with your site. In order to improve the keyword relevancy of any page on your site, you need to use that EXACT keyword phrase to link to that exact page. By doing this, every time you link to your page using a specific keyword, search engines are able to identify that the page is clearly relevant to that keyword. The higher the PR of the page that links to your target page, the better. This is why, as mentioned in the free SEO tip above, linking to a page from your homepage is ideal. Obviously you can’t link to EVERY page on your site from your homepage, however, you can target your most important pages. The text surrounding the link phrase is also important as this gives search engines and idea of the content of the page linking in to your page. All of which are factors which increase your page’s relevancy to a specific keyword.

Bonus keyword relevancy SEO tip: A good way of linking to multiple pages from your homepage is by using a footer menu!

3. SEO Tips: How does internal linking help get pages spidered by search engines?

It is important that EVERY SINGLE page on your site is linked to from somewhere on your site. You might think this occurs naturally, but if for example you have a terms and conditions page that is not referenced from anywhere on your site, there is no way a search engine can find this page. Search engine spiders enter your site from the homepage and follow through to the sub pages via text links. If the only way to link to your sub pages is via a big fancy flash menu that does not get spidered, none of the sub pages, and their subsequent sub pages will be indexed, thus giving a search engine the impression that your entire site is made up of a homepage only. Obviously, this does not bode well for your site’s ranking. The more pages you have indexed with relevant links, the better your site will rank. See the graphic below to see how search engines spider websites:

Bonus spidering SEO Tip: If you make use of a flash menu or any other menu that does not get crawled, then ensure that you have another text menu on the site, possible a left hand navigation menu, or as mentioned before, a footer menu that links to sub pages.

Just by considering these top SEO tips, you can SIGNIFICANTLY increase the visibility of your site as a whole, but more importantly, the relevance and ranking of individual pages. Take some time today to analyze your internal links to see if you are make optimal use of internal linking!

Related posts:

1. Internal structure tips
2. Sometimes internal links are enough, sometimes not
3. Web analytics tips – SES New York style

SEO Tips: Internal Linking 101!

For example:

Search Engine Submissions

Firstly, we cannot really call this a link building technique; I’m not sure what to call this activity at all besides completely outdated and useless. We have 4 (perhaps 3 soon) top search engines in our market, excluding the likes of Baidu in China (and a few others in foreign markets), so why on earth would anyone need to submit a website to any other search engines when the overall market share is dominated by currently 4 search engines? Any SEM worth his or her salt knows there is no need for this (please do a little bit of research into how the search engines crawl and index web pages). If you are still promoting this kind of activity as part of your service or to clients, let’s meet outside in 10 minutes, I’ll be bringing a spade to knock some sense into you.

Article Distribution

I’m specifically referring to the mass submission of the same content piece to a large number of ezine article sites. Have you ever really seen an increase in rankings for your targeted phrases that you can isolate as resulting from ezine submissions (and be truly honest with yourself)? Have you ever spent time working on a well thought out author bio instead of just whacking in the links? I need to add a bit of clarification here as well, mass submissions don’t work. If you’re using submissions with the intent of achieving rankings, you’re barking up the wrong tree. But if you’re getting some traffic off a unique article that’s served with a bit of creative flair you may be onto something.

Reciprocal Links

Oh boy, where to start? How many high quality, authority websites do we see nowadays that have a “links” page with an insane amount of links, ranging from fairly relevant to ‘what were you smoking when you decided  those sites were relevant’. There has been a dramatic decrease in the number of websites that still participate in reciprocal link exchanges. We know the value of this type of exchange is less than sourcing  one-way relevant links (and I’m not referring to 3-way link exchanges here The quality of  links from reciprocal linking is just plain terrible and the sheer volume needed to achieve any form of ranking to drive traffic is insane. You keep your 10 000 low quality reciprocal links; I’ll keep my 5 or so high quality one-way links.

Directory Submissions

There are a few directories (paid directories that is) that can play a role in your link building strategy; however, submitting to any directory you find in the hopes of gaining links to help with rankings is a lost cause. Not sure what I’m on about? In 2007 SEOmoz did a great write up on directory links and penalties. Don’t forget the role of anchor text in your link work, and then take a few minutes to let that sink in before you jump back into your directory submissions.

There are so many new and creative ways of sourcing links for websites. Those still stuck in the past with outdated tactics really need to take a step back and rethink their approach and the value they are actually offering clients. Each time these “link building techniques” get pitched to clients, SEO’s are not educating clients but misinforming them, and contributing to the SEO industry’s lingering bad rep.

There are many other “outdated” link tactics out there, so leave a comment with your point of view or just rant. For those members of the mob with the pitchforks and torches my home address is…. Sorry, my mobile battery is running low… not sure if you got all that

Related posts:

1. Some thoughts on link building
2. What is Link Value and does your site offer it?
3. The link condom

Cra… pardon, “outdated” Link Building techniques

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:

“Over the next year, Google is planning to use information it has about the connections between its users, something techies call the “social graph,” to improve searches and other Google services.”

Helft also states:

“There have also been reports that Google will not only use its social graph information for its own services but will also create a system for other companies to use the same data — in other words, to out-open Facebook.”

The practical side for marketers

Eric Ward says that in link building for personalised search, one should focus more than ever on optimising your strategy to maximise the effect of local search – list with Google Maps and Google Local. Also, make sure your content is ready for Google Bookmarks, as this is another route Google might take in serving you more tailored and relevant results.

I checked out Bookmarks for the first time after reading Eric Wards interview, and so far found that it would be quite useful to me as my own personal tool, but from a marketers perspective, it seems to offer no way of reading what other bookmarkers are bookmarking. I would have thought they’d have allowed you to search through other people’s bookmarks, like Delicious do, but no such luck.

So, Google is going to use every bit of data they have about you to show you results that are more useful to you than anyone else? I suppose this makes sense, but this should still be just one element of your strategy, and not a basket to put all your eggs in. Since you want qualified visitors, this is one way of narrowing them down, and as such is quite effective and probably worth devoting some time to – after all, Google’s member base (members not searchers) must be quite massive by now.

When pondering whether personalised search is going to improve search on the whole, or lessen that certain “random” factor to my search experience, I cannot really draw a conclusion. One thing I’d like to see is services no longer using the same old common high level categories to serve you relevant pages (movies, music, fashion etc), like last year’s Personalised search did. If anyone is capable of doing that, it’s Google.

Related posts:

1. “SEO Resistant Search” – does the Social Graph hold the future of Search?
2. Bing Social Search gets Personal
3. Focus on site search

Search: should personalised mean pessimistic?

I researched and listed a few ideas tips for commenting on blogs:
• Post comments on blogs that belong to your niche and/or to related ones. Try to become a loyal reader and an active commenter, although bloggers are wary of those who comment purely for the sake of links – don`t be trolls! Aim to leave a number of comments on blogs that you`ve personally selected, and keep it up for several months.
• Don`t comment on every single post a blogger publishes, unless you really have something to say. Don`t comment for the sake of commenting.
• Avoid sounding like a know-it-all type. Don`t try to look wiser than the bloggers and their other readers.
• Always be polite, respectful and friendly.
• Keep your site or blog updated and watch your content`s quality. You want to make sure that the visitors earned via blog comments will be glad that they clicked on your name.
• Speaking of your name, this is what you must link to when you leave comments on any blog. Do not link to your site`s name, or to a keyword; otherwise, most people will regard you as a spammer.

I did read on how Yahoo! counts your back links to gauge the price of a link advertisement found on your website. The more back links Yahoo! counts, the more monetary value added to your site. Hmmmmm! I`m yet to find out just how this really works? But my point is that back links also help increase your website`s page strength, thus a simple blog commenting campaign can raise the negotiating value of your site. A good strategy for your blog commenting campaign is to identify which blogs use search engine friendly plugins, such as the do-follow plugin, as well as the top commentator plugin. While you can use these widgets on your site to monitor your most frequent visitors via the backlinks you posted on other blogs, these widgets can also work in your favour- especially when you know which blogs use them.

Find the blogs that use these widgets and leave your comments there. Blogs that use the top commentator plugin track the number of your comments and your link will appear on the sidebar if you`re among the top commentator for that particular blog. It is also recommended that you comment on blogs that use the do-follow plugin, rather than randomly visiting and commenting on a long list of blog sites. The do-follow plugin generally values the comment you leave on these blogs as a valid backlink, unlike those that use the standard feature in WordPress blogs use the no-follow plugin. This would save you the time and effort in posting comments, and at the same time, strengthen your site. You should be able to see an instant change in your site`s traffic by using this technique.

Remember that link building is a by-product of commenting on blogs, and that blogs to do not exist only for their link value. As a reliable link building strategy, commenting on blogs brings the benefits of industry networking with it. And my last words of advice will be that comment campaigns may be time-consuming, but if you do them the right way, you`ll thank yourself afterwards. The relationships built, the branding benefits and the free backlinks will justify your efforts.

Related posts:

1. How to use action words
2. Keyword research – remember “stop words”
3. Google Q&A: Panda Power and Mango Mishaps

The Power in Words

I think social media have great potential for spreading content. I also think that the net`s hinges are creaking and groaning under the strain of sub-standard and ill-placed content that social media add to the heap each day. And it`s harder and harder to spin gold from hay or get a simple piece up on Digg`s front page because of it. In addition, social media class their submitters and audiences, and operate on a trust factor, often giving preference to names that are well known and have established their credit via intelligent commenting and frequent interaction with other submitters. It`s a boys` club, if you like. They`re playing a game, interacting with an organism, following playground rules. This is not a marketing endeavour. Ever seen an SEO-based article up on Digg?

Where does this leave marketers and content writers? Take heart. As Cameron Olthuis from Search Engine Land, says, the keyword here is “resource”. Let`s create intelligent content that really addresses the most important sector of our clients` interests. Do they specialise in something that is an unsung topic on the net? Let`s write a 10-page guide that really digs into the ins and outs of the subject, rather than submitting 20 fluffy and disconnected articles that garner minimal links.

Let`s find a subject that is popular in the news and also applies directly to the client. Take alternative power. Create a practical rundown of all the inventions that people can use in their homes and offices, including costs, practicality, environmental effects and more. Let`s make graphs and back ourselves up with in-depth research. Let`s give the people searching on this topic more than just a 4 paragraph article about growing organic tomatoes. Who says content distribution is hypodermic? Include contact details for reader replies, or get the client to start a discussion thread in response to your guide. What about a mini site?

Let`s go a step further and do a cursory keyword dig on the subject matter, and do a light keyword insertion, so that people searching for information will be able to find this credible and useful resource. This is better and far more linkworthy than triple the amount of single pages on unconnected subjects – even if they`re well written. It`s time for a linkbait renaissance, are you with me?

Related posts:

1. Are your social media monitoring tools giving you the information you need?
2. The Emergence of SocialMobile
3. Dont fake it!

Linkbait renaissance

Does it really work? Is this the method of protection we ought to use online? Introduced by Google in 2005 and initially intended to prevent blog and forum comment spam, the rel=nofolow tag is used to instruct search engines that a link should not influence the link target`s ranking in the search engine`s index. Most blog software like WordPress and some forums use the “nofollow” attribute on links that readers submit

The motivation for this proposal is the problem of blog spammers: automatic programs that post comments and links on blogs in order to manipulate PageRank into assigning a high rank to certain websites. Google proposes that blogging tools convert the links found in comments posted by all users by adding the rel=”nofollow” attribute to the corresponding a tag. The rationale is that links appearing in comments to blog posts are not created by the owner of the blog and therefore should not improve the rank of the linked page by drawing upon the rank or importance of the blogger. The rel=”nofollow” attribute instructs search engines not to consider the link as an expression of the opinion of the author of linking page. Thus, it is similar to rel=”vote-abstain” in Vote Links but has received greater recognition because of Google’s position as the most popular search engine on the web. A drawback is that it does not allow the user to express a negative preference for a link.

My opinion? I don`t like “noFollow” tags and I totally agree with Jeremy Zawodny. I think it amounts to trying to get a free ride by benefiting from links without paying the cost for them. Also the abuse of the “nofollow” tag itself. Often webmasters try to hide reciprocated links, so that search engines think the link popularity is all one-way. Directory owners trying to preserve PageRank by crippling content links and Webmasters hiding links in RSS feeds they publish, thus gaining content without search engines being able to attribute it to source just to mention a few. Who knows? What might work for you will not necessarily work for the next person! Give it a thought.

Related posts:

1. What is Link Value and does your site offer it?
2. Link bait is OK. What are the SERP police waiting for?
3. Cra… pardon, “outdated” Link Building techniques

The link condom

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.

In order to convince other sites to offer you a one-way link, your site’s link value needs to be optimised. The more value they see in your site, the more likely they are to link to you. In order to “sell” your site to them, you need to ask yourself these 3 questions:
- What value is the linking site getting from your site?
- What value do you offer the linking site’s readers?
- What value does the associated traffic bring to your business?

To add link value to your site, the following steps can be taken:
- Content value and the value it offers potential site visitors cannot be forgotten. Constant review of content is important. You might be able to re-package this content into special reports or guides. The idea is to make the reports address specific client needs.
- Fresh material addressing client needs is a good ploy, especially in the form of articles, hints, tips, and reports. This material should be specifically aimed at your target market. Having link-worthy material for each target market is also important.
- Creating interactive, attention grabbing functions takes a fair investment of time and resources. However, the long-term rewards in increased profile and increased traffic to your site will make it all worth while.

The importance of link value cannot be underestimated. Thru understanding and building the link value of your site, you will notice that your link requests will succeed more and that other sites will link to you without question.

Depending on the quality of your site, obtaining one-way links should not prove to be a problem. Needless to say, your PageRank also enjoys significant increases associated with more unique site visits. But for the small, start-up site with a page rank of 0 or 1, finding one-way links may prove difficult or impossible to do. In that case, the unfavoured reciprocal link becomes an asset, and possibly the only stepping stone towards one-way link stardom.

So I ask: are reciprocal links possibly as important, if not more important, than one-way links?

Related posts:

1. Respect from your peers brings you Authority Site status
2. Cra… pardon, “outdated” Link Building techniques
3. Some thoughts on link building

What is Link Value and does your site offer it?

In a post I read from Seroundtable, it is said that the footer links wont actually be penalised if your links are relevant and kept under a certain limit. I fully agree with this. If you have over 100 links with all different anchor text, Google might crawl your site and lose what the true content in your site covers. Whereas if your footer links are all relevant, and there are not a lot of them, it might work to your advantage. Relevance to the content would be the key to remember when creating footer links.

In addition to lowering the number of links in the footer, another thing they say you should avoid is having many repetitions of keywords or anchor text on a page, because that might hurt your site’s ranking.

Many users employ the footer links as a quicker way to move around any website, instead of going through a menu on the top of the page, and clicking through a number of times before reaching your destination. That does not mean you have to go out and put a link to every page on your site in your footer but rather add links to important pages that your visitors would want to see or those that you want your visitors to see. You could also add some links to related authority sites.

No user likes to look through a whole lot of links cramped into a tiny space at the bottom of the page with font size 6, that you have to strain your eyes just to see the anchor text. Think about your visitors next time you want to design your website with all those footer links.

Related posts:

1. Google’s crackdown on Paid Links
2. Sometimes internal links are enough, sometimes not
3. What links do I need for my website?

Footer links penalised by Google?

Sites that publicly sell links have been penalised by Google on Search engine results pages and on PageRank passing ability.

Nearly all major search engines use links as editorial votes given by choice to the website. If sites buy links to increase their standing on search engine results pages, websites that naturally attract links to rank are at a disadvantage.

It seems evident that Google is getting better at detecting paid links and penalising sites that publicly sell them.

This is great news for Webmasters and users alike because once paid links are removed from the equation, Google can assign trust based on links gained over the past year with much more confidence than before. This results in higher quality with more relevant search results.

Now those with smaller budgets have a better chance of attaining the top results on organic listings, and those with bigger budgets actually have to work on attracting naturally links and can`t just buy their way to the top.

For those Webmasters that need or want to use paid links without being penalised, they can use the nofollow tag, which is a machine-readable way to specify that a link doesn`t have to be counted as a vote.

Do all search engines see paid links as a bad thing? Apparently so, although Yahoo`s Jeremy Zawodny uses paid links on his personal blog…

Related posts:

1. The battle between Search Engines and paid links, will it ever end?
2. KNOL links could give you a major nitrous boost to the top
3. Footer links penalised by Google?

Google’s crackdown on Paid Links