Tag Archives: Link Building

Watch Out for Long Title Tags

Here is the all-true story of some intriguing events that have transpired at the MozPlex in the last couple of weeks.

It all started when Jamie wanted to look up his fantastic post from last year, “Custom Reporting Using Google Analytics and Google Docs – The Ultimate Analytics Mashup.” Not having the URL committed to memory, he did what any of us might do: he Googled it.

Imagine his surprise (and my consternation) when instead of a useful, keyword-rich, call-to-actiony title, he saw this:

URL displaying in title tag

For some reason, Google was displaying the text from the unique part of the post URL, rather than the title. A quick survey of Mozzers found that several of us had seen similar results when Googling old blog posts:

wrong title tag text

But it definitely was NOT happening on all blog posts!

I’m gonna be honest with you guys: I could NOT figure this out. I checked various factors for correlation. Could rel=author be causing this? Was something happening with the way title tags were being generated on the back end of the blog? Nothing seemed to match up.

One factor that I considered, but almost dismissed, was a change in how titles are truncated. The Google Inside Search blog had just released their monthly list of algorithmic tweaks for May, including these 3 that specifically had to do with how titles display:

  • “Trigger alt title when HTML title is truncated. [launch codename "tomwaits", project codename "Snippets"] We have algorithms designed to present the best possible result titles. This change will show a more succinct title for results where the current title is so long that it gets truncated. We’ll only do this when the new, shorter title is just as accurate as the old

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    Article source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/fbbTiKeNZDg/long-title-tags

Building a Good Link Profile: Measure Twice, Cut Once

A prospect calls up and asks you to “do this search engine optimization thing” for their website. After checking their website against identified keywords and the competition, you check their link profile, only to find no links (or very few of them).

For whatever reason – whether it’s due to the website being brand new or having never been marketed – these guys are starting from scratch. But they want rankings now and SEO is the hot topic for the CEO/owner/whoever.

Sound familiar?

The best advice you can give these people is to slow down and be prudent.

What is a Link Profile?

It’s important to understand that search engines are trying to rank the best results that they can for their users. In this process, Google – especially – has put quite a bit of emphasis on trying to rank “big brand” websites. There’s a lot of debate on how this is determined, exactly, but one major factor is a website’s link profile.

A link profile is made up of:

The types of links to your website (sources such as directories, forums, news articles, press releases, social, etc.).

How these links were acquired (all at once, or slowly/steadily over time).

The anchor text (words used) in those links (perhaps the most important piece).

Building a Link Foundation: Getting Started

For any website just beginning to build its link profile – sites with no/few backlinks – it’s important to establish a sound foundation of links.

To start, reach out to partners/vendors, trade associations, local Chambers of Commerce, Better Business Bureau, business.com, and other “good” directories. Another way to get things off the ground is to send press releases with links to their website and use their company name in the anchor text of these links.

Above all, especially for a new website, it’s important to create great content that is link worthy,

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Article source: http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2169465/Building-a-Good-Link-Profile-Measure-Twice-Cut-Once

The Noob Guide to Link Building

NOOB GUIDE TO LINK BUILDING

The Noob Guide to Online Marketing is arguably the greatest single post of all time. If you don’t agree, well, it’s at least my favorite. Oli Gardner (of Unbounce) displayed a playful writing style mixed with pixel perfect graphic design, and a GPS of a roadmap to take your site from mile marker zero to one hundred in six months. It’s nothing short of amazing.

While savvy content marketers realize that many of Oli’s tactics will naturally attract links, fledgling link builders got to the 63rd page and were still wondering what to do. With this companion piece, it is my goal to grab the baton from Oli and outline a six-month link building action plan for your brand or client’s new web property. Even if the website isn’t brand spanking new, that’s fine, what I really mean is that this is the link building plan for the less savvy looking to do dive into off page optimization. Marketers with long existing sites and more link building experience will be better served downloading the Complete Six-month Off Page SEO Gameplan from iAcquire.

Following this guide in concert with Oli’s you will identify your audience, build a list of prospects, plan and execute four successful pieces of content and convince influencers to create content for your site.

Download both Link Building Guides

Since we last spoke I left Publicis Modem to become the Director of Inbound Marketing at iAcquire which is a technology-focused off page seo agency. I encourage you to read the “Quantifying Outreach” study that I released at LinkLove London wherein I examined nearly 300k outreach emails from both our own iRank platform and Buzzstream’s CRM software. The study will help you optimize

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Article source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/FRXnvFwvi0M/the-noob-guide-to-link-building

The End of Link Building as We’ve Known and Loved it

The process has already started, and as a publisher you need to make sure you are adapting your marketing strategy to line up, or get left behind.

Google made the link building algorithm popular in the late 1990s and early 2000s. It was a revolution in its time because it provided search engines with a method for identifying the most important web pages for a given topic. However, as has been well documented, spammers have assaulted the algorithm with a wide variety of methods for buying links or creating them in other ways that don’t work for the algorithms.

Even if you generate all your links in a pure white hat way, through reaching out to site owners and requesting them without compensation, or are doing high quality guest posts, you aren’t necessarily generating the best possible signal for search engines. Certainly this type of link building done properly would not be a violation of the Webmaster Guidelines, but from the perspective of the search engines it also doesn’t represent a groundswell of opinion raving about your product. It still means something, but it is brute force driven through your efforts, rather than resulting from the enthusiasm of your audience.

I don’t believe that search engines will penalize people who link build this way, but I think they will value the link profile that is manually built less than one that obtains unsolicited endorsements from the web.

Prior to the emergence of Google, links weren’t a ranking factor in a significant search engine. At that time, any unpaid links were implemented solely based on merit, because the publisher had no other reason to link to someone else’s page. Even paid ads were based on the advertiser valuing the traffic from the target site enough to be willing to pay for it, since there was

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Article source: http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2137556/The-End-of-Link-Building-as-Weve-Known-and-Loved-it

The Power of Using Lists for Link Building

I used to spend a lot of my time plowing through Google to find potential link targets for client websites. I still do this a lot but I’ve changed my approach a lot of the last 12-18 months to try and become a bit more efficient. I’ve changed my approach so that the first point of call when looking for link targets is lists.

Lists are awesome for link building because someone else has already done some of the hard work for you. If you can find good quality, curated lists of websites, then you can be reasonably sure that you have found sites that are good ones to get links from. You still want to run your own analysis and due diligence, but the end output is probably going to be a higher majority of quality sites than you would have gotten from pulling lists straight from Google SERPs.

I like to put link building techniques into processes which makes them easier to follow and easier to scale if you need to automate parts of it. The process I use can be broken down into the following -

  1. Find your lists
  2. Scrape together your master list
  3. Filter and prioritize

I’ll go through each of these in more detail to explain the steps for each one.

1. Find your Lists

There are multiple ways of doing this and there are probably more places to find them than you think. To make things a bit clearer, let’s think about these “types” of lists, they are roughly in order of personal preference -

  • Curated lists found on other websites
  • Top x type lists found on other websites
  • Public Twitter lists
  • Good quality directories

There are more, but just these ones alone with give you enough link targets to keep you busy for a long time!

Curated lists found on other websites

For me, these are the best

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Article source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/nusOHy_h1ak/the-power-of-using-lists-for-link-building

How to Develop Link Marketing Ideas

chess-winFrom SearchEngineWatch.com

Coming up with an idea to get people to link to your site can be challenging, whether you’re looking for a story idea, developing an online tool, or wanting to do something humorous. Yet there are strategies to find new ideas on a regular basis.

The trick with many of these techniques is to approach it with a very open mind, and creatively. If that’s not your strength – consider having someone else assist.

Let’s explore some strategies.

Keyword Trends

One method to find ideas is to look at recent trends, and take advantage of them. You can find trends with Yahoo Buzz, Google Trends, and other such tools. Here you really have to keep your mind open. It also helps if you’re willing to have fun with an idea.

One way to benefit from trends is with humor. Let’s say gas prices start going up quickly and it’s a breakout trend on Yahoo Buzz. Have someone create a funny T-shirt about it. Then run a contest to give 20 of those T-shirts away. Use your audience on your blog, Facebook, and Twitter to promote the contest. Make it easy to enter by asking for a simple “Like” or tweet.

The added benefit of this is all the social media engagement you will gain.

Discussion Forums

Another strategy is online forums. They’re full of ideas for someone will to invest the time. Have someone read through the popular threads for common problems people are talking about. Then develop something to assist with the problem. This could be anything from an online tool to a iPhone app to a how to guide.

The other way to use forums is to post a carefully constructed questions. Perhaps you’re in the travel industry, and want to do a posting of the best places to eat. With forums you can find out from the locals where they like to eat, and get quotes to use at the same time.

Consumer Review Sites

Like forums these are filled with sources of ideas. Have someone go through them looking for common complaints. Then find a way to offer a solution to the problem, or perhaps turn it into a source of ideas for a cartoon series. Sticking with the travel example. One could start a cartoon series about funny travel experiences abroad.

Don’t limit yourself to reviews for your industry. Look at reviews in neighboring industries with the same demographics as yours.

Keyword Research

Use your favorite keyword research tool to find link building ideas. Look for a problem, or something that could be turned into humor. Put in your keywords with phrases like “problem”, “fix”, “tips”, and “how to”. That way you can see the demand for the phrase. Creating something people are actively searching for will increase your chances of success with links.

Here’s a tip. It’s logical to go after the phrases with the highest search volume. At the same time it will be easier to get less competitive phrased top rankings quickly. Once it has top rankings it will naturally obtain new links on an ongoing basis since it will get more exposure. Think of it as a dividend link.

With these strategies, your company can come up with new link building ideas on a recurring basis. Just remember to keep an open mind, and be creative.

Learn tactics for extending your search marketing initiatives to display, mobile, and social media in time for the upcoming holiday e-commerce season. Register for this free ClickZ webcast, which takes place 1 PM ET/10 AM PT Tuesday Oct. 25.

Free Online SEO Tool to Grade your Website

HubSpot’s Website Grader

This free online SEO tool helps you figure out how to get your website better ranked.

It covers the basic SEO ranking factors and provides you a score for your website. The SEO Tools will even e-mail you a link to the report.  Plus there are many more features if you wish to sign up for them.

As you correct things that the reports points out, you can increase your scores as the items are changed.

So give it a try and follow the instructions.

Hubspot Website Grader

Free Online Website Grader for SEO

http://websitegrader.com/

Happy Holidays

What is SEO?

SEO is a process. A carefully planned process.

SEO is not something you bang out in one day.  It grows over time, if implemented correctly.

SEO is not something that can be applied to all categories of business.  A business like an insurance company requires a different process then an auto repair company. Understanding the business process also helps in the optimization process.

SEO requires that you follow a series of steps to make the optimization process  truly effective to achieve the best possible search engine ranking results.

The process actual begins before the website is ever built. The domain selection is extremely important.

The web hosting you select to house your website needs to be robust and offering excellent support. You want your website to display the pages in a fast manner – not sluggish.

The website needs to be designed with three main thoughts – Original Content, Ease of use and minimal code (as best as can be done to accomplish the desired appearance). The menu system needs to make sense as well as provide easy access across the website. I would also suggest the use of breadcrums and  properly named web pages with keywords.

Once the site is built,  the final phase of optimization can be performed.  Titles, Descriptions and numerous small tweaks to make the web page more attractive for  the search engines.

I always setup Google Analytics so I can track all our efforts and to determine what is working and drawing traffic.

Once this website is completed, I check the W3C compliance and correct the code until it is clean! Why spend so much time doing this?

  • First, each web browser can present the web page differently if the web page is not compliant.
  • Secondly, some web page coding can prevent the search engine spiders from fully indexing your web site.

If the website is compliant, it’s time for the main submission to the search engines to commence. I do the major search engines and a few key directories carefully by hand. Choosing the information to submit in more of a marketing manner.

Be sure to submit to the local business sections of the search engines.

Then I wait a month to start a monthly link building process – under 40 links per month, blogging articles, press releases, directory listings, etc. Less submission are better. Finding good solid sites to submit to can be a daunting task, but you can use a wide array of software products to help.

The process sounds simple, but most people do not have the time to do this correctly. There is plenty to understand and more techniques to use to make the optimization of a website a successful activity. I probably use about 75 additional techniques that can aid in a website ranking.

If you need help doing Search Engine Optimization for your website, contact us. We offer cost effective solutions for marketing your website.

Good Luck in your Website Marketing

Why do you need Link Building?

Link Building is the corner stone of  marketing your website, by increasing the number of incoming links – you can increase your website’s popularity.

Search engines usually reward popularity from quality incoming links from other web sites with higher rankings.

If you increase the incoming number of links correctly, this will help increase traffic to the web site.

That increased traffic should result in increased leads and sales.

Why choose us?
The answer is simple! We provide very quality link building service. It’s not the same as what most SEO companies do:

We hand submit all our linking requests.

Top 16 Benefits of Our Link Building Service:

  1. Securing “unidirectional” or only-Incoming (non-reciprocal) links
  2. Links with relevant “Keywords” in the Anchor Text
  3. Links from industry-relevant pages
  4. Links from avergage to well ranked web sites
  5. Links to your site should not be through a “redirect” script
  6. No JavaScript links
  7. No links from “framed” pages
  8. No “flash” embedded links
  9. No paid links
  10. No email spam used to solicit links.
  11. No links from Link Farms
  12. No links from FFA (Free-For-All) link networks
  13. No links from pornographic and other sites containing offensive content
  14. Full report of links created at the end of each month
  15. All links that were attempted are included in the report
  16. No “no follow” links

You will receive a monthly Link Building Report containing all submitted links, with submitted information including date and url

During your Link Building Campaign, you’ll always be able easily track the progress of your campaign with our ranking reports and optional Google Analytics Reporting

Our link building services are very simple and affordable.

Contact us today.

Smitty’s Holdings, Inc.
(954) 423-2785