Somebody said “what is permanent is change”, and yes, “change” indeed is permanent and it is equally true for the SEO techniques. If you’re still stuck with the old and conventional methods for optimizing your e-Commerce site, then it is time to change it all! Below you’ll find some very essential tips to follow.
Simply follow them to make your e-Commerce site perform well. If you aren’t doing it yourself and have chosen an Australian Search Engine Optimization company for the task, then simply ask the SEO experts you’ve appointed for the work to follow these tips for better online success.
Here are 10 Easy to Follow Essential E-Commerce Site Search Engine Optimization Tips
1. Work out a Really Exhaustive Keyword Research Report
You can’t play around the keywords the way you did a few years back, it simply doesn’t work that way anymore. You’ll now have to do a lot of brainstorming. On the basis of your business type, products or services type, brand, industry, demography of your targeted customers you’ll have to choose specific search terms and phrases and test them on Keyword tools, Google Keyword Tools is one such reliable tool you can use.
Your report should also have a list of the keywords for which your competitors are ranking high. Having a clearer idea of your competitor’s keyword strategy will give you a better idea of what keywords you should be choosing.
2. Check your Site’s Structure. Make sure it is Easy to Use.
One simple thing about your audiences, when they land up on your e-commerce site, they are here to shop and not in a museum to appreciate your art. Remember this always that the structure of your site needs to be user friendly, i.e. it should be easily navigable for your customers and not a difficult art piece like David chiseled out of marble to awe the audiences.
3. Basic On-Site SEO needs to be Handled Well
Leaving out conventionalism from SEO doesn’t mean neglecting the basic On-Page tactics that still serve as the life and blood of your website’s visibility and SERP position. Make sure your optimiser handles the Title Tags, Meta Descriptions, structure of the URL, various Links on the site, Alt Attributes and Rich Snippets, etc in the most appropriate manner.
4. Create Blog on your Site which is frequently updated.
Some online sellers have a tendency to avoid having a blog integrated to their eCommerce site. They don’t find it useful and consider it to be a thing for information and service providing clans. If you also think the same, sad to say that you’re absolutely wrong. A frequently updated blog is a must for every site as it lets Google Bot believe that something new is happening on your site which needs indexing.
5. Check your Site for Proper Social Media Integration for Product Sharing.
Wondering how on earth will this help you? Who out there will ever share a product on the social media? Well, it really works and people do share products on the social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Google+ and so on.
Social media sharing has become an essential part of SEO and interestingly enough, it gives better authority to your site and the products on it.
6. Respond to your Reviews for Customer Satisfaction and Reputation Management
The reputation of your site is an important factor for influencing the buyers to buy things from your site. Negative reviews can hurt your reputation, but handling the negative reviews in harsh or undiplomatic manner or being completely indifferent towards them can have a more devastating effect. Respond to every review diplomatically and make your customers happy!
7. Make your Site Multi Device Optimally Designed
Surely you’ve heard about mobile SEO, i.e. optimising the mobile version of the site, right? This alone doesn’t work anymore, as people now-a-days own multiple devices and handhelds. There are people with smart phones, tablets, notebooks, laptops, and, of course, the age old desktops. If you think people hardly shop through these newly added devices, then you’re wrong.
The designing of your site should be such that it can be opened and navigated easily on any of the devices and the SEO part also needs to be done while keeping the different devices in mind.
8. Get Attractive Content Marketing
Don’t just sell through your content marketing articles, offer something more. Let your audiences learn something new. Wondering how can you do this with an eCommerce site in mind? It’s possible; just keep your product niche in mind. Now, if you sell apparels, then you can help people make their fabric look new! 9. Get Authority Links Only
This is really important. Whether you offer information or sell your own stuffs or it is an eCommerce site that you own, links to your site should always be from authority sites only. Never try getting links from spammy sites, as it will kill your site forever.
10. Create Relevant Social Media Channels for Better Visibility
Don’t ignore an incredible looking Facebook Page, a smashing YouTube channel, a slick and smart Twitter page talking about your site and the products that you offer; this will surely get you better visibility and more targeted audience who convert much better.
The primary question Matt asked and answered was, “What should we expect in the next few months in terms of SEO for Google?”
Matt addressed 10 points, all summarized at the end as helping improve the search results by awarding the good sites and hurting the spammers and black hats in the search results. Here are the 10 points Matt addressed in his video, followed by the video itself:
1. Penguin Updates
The next generation Penguin update, Penguin 4 (AKA Penguin 2.0), which is expected to launch in the next few weeks, will go deeper and have more of an impact than the first version of that Penguin update. So expect that we will hear more of an outcry from the SEO community when this does launch.
2. Advertorials
Earlier this year, Google went after some websites for using advertorials as a means to artificially inflate their link profile. Matt Cutts said Google will soon take a stronger stance against those using advertorials in a means that violates their webmaster guidelines.
3. Spammy Queries
While queries that tend to be spammy in nature, such as [pay day loans] or some pornographic related queries, were somewhat less likely to be a target for Google’s search spam team – Matt Cutts said Google is more likely to look at this area in the near future. He made it sound like these requests are coming from outside of Google and thus Google wants to address those concerns with these types of queries.
4. Going Upstream
Matt Cutts said they want to go more “upstream” to deter link spammers and the value of the links they are acquiring from the sources. This seems to imply to me that Google will go after more link networks, like they’ve done in the past.
5. Sophisticated Link Analysis
Matt promises that Google is going to get even better at their link analysis. Google’s head of search spam explained that Google is in the early stages of this much more “sophisticated” link analysis software but when it is released, they will be much better at understanding links.
6. Improvements On Hacked Sites
Google has done a lot of work with hacked sites and their index, specifically labeling the search results of potentially hacked sites, removing those sites and also warnings webmasters about the hack. Matt said Google is working on rolling out a new feature to better detect hacked sites in the upcoming months. Cutts also added they plan on improving webmaster communication in regards to hacked sites.
7. Authority Boost
Google hopes to give sites that are an authority in a specific industry, community or space a ranking boost. So if you are an authority in the medical or travel spaces, Google hopes that related queries will return your site above less authoritative web sites.
8. Panda Sympathy
While many sites have been impacted by the Google Panda update, Matt Cutts said that many of those impacted are borderline cases. Google is looking for ways to “soften” that impact by looking at other quality metrics to move those on the line to not be impacted by the Panda algorithm.
9. Domain Clusters In SERPs
The number of clusters of the same domain name showing on the first page of Google’s search results should lessen this year. Google’s Matt Cutts said they want to make the search results on the first page even more diverse, but when you click to the second results page, you may be more likely to see clustered results from the same domain name. Google is constantly tweaking how many search results from the same domain name show up on a single page of search results.
10. Improved Webmaster Communication
As always, Google is always saying they want to improve their communication with webmasters. Matt Cutts said to expect even more detailed examples within webmaster notifications received within Google Webmaster Tools. Toward the end of this video, Matt Cutts explains the purpose of all
these changes is to reduce the number of webmasters doing black hat spam
tactics from showing up, while giving smaller businesses that are more
white hat the chances to rank better.
If you own an online business, or work in the world of search engine optimization (SEO), then you probably know by now that SEO is not an exact science. Unlike chemistry, there is no formula that guarantees success. It does not suffice to mix the right ingredients together in order to get a substance which will be the same every time. The web changes, it changes a lot, and you need to constantly adapt to what is happening out there. Very few people stick to a single system their whole life, and instead the successful marketers will constantly do experiments and tests in order to see what works, and what no longer does. Here is a list of 31 such experiments, things that were attempted, and whether they turned out to be successful or not.
1. Plain text URLs with no link
The experiment: In this experiment, a group of marketers from the academic sector noticed something fairly interesting in some of the web sites and pages in university and college domains. A lot of the times, when a scientific paper or other academic text would be produced, the convention said that links would be spelled out, written out on the page without having a link. For example, they would write http://example.com instead of having a keyword with a link. So they wanted to know what difference that made for search engines and for discovery.
The result: Unfortunately, the test yielded no positive result. It seems like people were not going to the new URL in any more number than if the plain text URL was not there. One thing they did note however is that Google does discover plain text URLs even if they have no link associated to the.
The experiment: When Google introduced the real time search results, it meant that suddenly, tweets were part of the results. That meant anything someone would tweet out was now visible in search results. But shortly after, the company deprecated that result. So do tweets still influence search results? This experiment centered around a single tweet linking to an unindexed URL.
What quickly became clear is that while Google appears to no longer have access to the Twitter fire hose, there are enough scrappers and aggregator sites that the tweet still makes it to the search results, albeit a bit slower. But Google+ saw a much faster transition from social to search, with these results showing up in minutes.
The result: There was no question from this experiment that both a tweet and a Google+ post would influence search results, although Google+ seems to have a much more immediate effect.
The experiment: The question here was whether or not the number of outgoing links on an authoritative site affected how much gain one site could get from a backlink, in terms of PageRank changes. So in order to find out, the experiment used two brand new sites, and added a single backlink on two popular sites. The first one was a site that had a moderate number of links already, while the second site had thousands. The purpose here was to see whether Google penalized backlinks on sites that already had too many links.
The result: What this test showed is that there seemed to be no impact on the number of existing backlinks present. Both sites ranked up in a similar fashion, and remained that way for months.
The experiment: A small financial firm with an online site was watching its traffic numbers being completely flat for months. One day however, they received the necessary funds and goahead for an online marketing campaign. What they wanted to test was whether using regular posts, combined with social media, could increase their search traffic in the long term. They blogged for 100 days in a row, taking Twitter questions from their customers and making videos to drive traffic to their site.
The result: Because their traffic numbers had been flat for so long, they had a nice baseline to compare against. When they started blogging, they right away saw their traffic numbers come up. But more than that, they were able to track long tail keywords as well, showing that the traffic was going up. There was no doubt that in this experiment, an increase in content meant better SEO.
The experiment: As part of its algorithm, Google has a rule that duplicate content will not be displayed in its results. This means that if a second site copies a page from a first site, and posts it, then that copy will not show up in Google. However, it is possible for the second site to hijack that content, appearing in search results, and making the legitimate site stop showing up. The way Google decides which site will show up is whichever has the highest PR. So all the copying site has to do is make sure they get more backlinks.
The result: The experiment showed that it is indeed possible for a brand new site to hijack content away from a legitimate site. However, there are some defenses that can help prevent this. One is by using the canonical tag, and the other is by having a Google+ profile with an authorship markup.
The experiment: If you do a keyword search for a specific phrase and try both lowercase and capital letters, you will quickly see that the number of hits are different. This would indicate that Google does make a distinction between lowercase and uppercase letters. So an experiment was conducted to see whether capital letters would help a post rank higher or not.
The result: The result showed that titles had no effect on the ranking. Whether a post title was all lowercase or using capital letters, the ranking speed was the same. So what accounts for the difference in the amount of hits? It turns out that the URL does. If a page name has capital letters, there will likely be more results than if it is all lowercase. If this holds true for all niches, then whether or not you use capital letters in your post’s URL would seem to matter.
The experiment: Last year, Google introduced their Search Plus My World feature, which they said meant Google+ would be important for search results. But what is the worth of a single +1 hit on your page? If people click on that button, does it influence your ranking? The experiment used brand new pages and tested whether clicking on the +1 button changed anything for their Google rankings. The result: The result of a couple of +1 clicks was insignificant. There seemed to be no difference in ranking, at least from a typical, anonymous user. However, Google+ turned out to be important for other reasons. Whenever someone likes your page on Google+, all of their friends suddenly see that page come up on top. So the social part is very important to SEO.
The experiment: If you have been working with SEO for a while, you probably know about Google’s infamous updates, how the company constantly revises its algorithm to try and remove spam sites. There was the Panda update in particular that made a lot of legitimate sites lose ranking. Sometimes, the reason behind this deranking can be hard to find, but if you do find it, how hard it is to recover? By analyzing data before and after such a change, a group of marketers watched their analytics software to find out just how long it took for them to rise back in PageRank.
The result: It turns out that recovering after such a penalty is hard and it takes a while. But if you do fix the problem, it is possible to recover your ranking completely. The experiment showed that you can come back to the previous ranking that you used to have over time.
The experiment: Online marketers are always quick to tell us how we should stick with white hat techniques, always use methods that are allowed by Google, and avoid using shortcuts which may seem appealing, but apparently can cause our site to lose ranking if found out. But are these warnings really true? Do negative SEO techniques lead to a loss of rank? To test this, a site which ranked in 3rd position for a specific keyword was taken and a lot of spam links were added. In total, 7,000 forum links, 45,000 blog comments and 4,000 sidebar links.
The result: While tracking the ranking, right away the experiment showed a loss of ranking. Within less than a month, the site had taken the 14th position for that same keyword.
The experiment: With the Penguin update, Google has made it much harder for smaller sites to rank. Instead, the algorithm focuses on large authoritative sites with a lot of history and backlinks. So is it still possible for a new site to rank quickly for a keyword? The experiment followed a new site with a specific keyword, along with a series of backlinks being placed on authoritative sites. The linking strategy was to place not only the keyword itself but similar phrases as well, and to spread those links on multiple sites.
The result: Less than two months after the experiment started, the site managed to reach the 4th position for the keyword. This proves that even after these updates, it is still possible for a small, brand new site, to rank well when the proper SEO is used.
The experiment: If you use SEO tools, many of them allow you to see the number of links that go to remote pages. But using just Google Webmaster Tools, you can only see data for your own web site. However, an experiment showed that it is actually possible to view these links for sites you do not own. All you need to do is take the page that you want to analyze, and then copy its content on your own site. Google will then merge the content and show you the links to both pages.
The result: Because your own duplicate has no inbound links, what you are left with is a list of links to the other site. This is easy to do, and takes just a few days for these links to populate in your own interface.
The experiment: When you build a web page, one of the most important parts of the page is the title tag. We know that when the search results appear, that title is the text which will be shown to the user as the text for the link. But did you know that in some cases, Google can replace that title? It is called non-informative titles. To test this, a new page was created and the title was simply filled with keywords. Not long after, a warning message appeared in the Google Webmaster Tools saying that the title was non-informative.
The result: Searching for the name of the page, or rather what should be the correct title, actually worked. And when the page was shown in the results, the keywords were replaced by the name that the user looked for, but that name was in brackets, to show that it had been replaced.
The experiment: While it is known that whether a phrase is capitalized or not may affect the number of hits that are returned, how does it affect the results? The experiment here is to take a specific key phrase, and create two pages, one with the words capitalized and the other all in lowercase. Then, searches are conducted with both phrases.
The result: The results found is that both pages are findable with either search queries. There is no visible difference in how the title is capitalized.
The experiment: This experiment deals on whether a like such as someone clicking a Facebook like button, reshare, or +1, has an impact on ranking. To test this, pages were created and then buttons were clicked by various social media accounts. Then the results were checked against the rankings of these pages before the social media blitz, to see if those numbers changed.
The result: The pages did change in some cases. Social media does have an impact on SEO, although it is a small impact. While that may scale with multiple likes, even a single one can still affect a page’s ranking in some cases.
The experiment: No one wants to see a Google update or a mistake they did derank their site. This still happens a lot, and is something you may want to plan for. But how easy is it to recover after being deranked? This experiment tested whether the ranking can be fixed after a site has lost considerable rankings for a specific keyword. After being deranked by deliberately using spammy links, they were removed and an appeal was submitted.
The result: After the appeal, it took many weeks for the site to start gaining ranks again. But even though the process is slow, the experiment showed that with good SEO, it is possible to gain your position again.
The experiment: The hreflang tag has been available for some time now and is aimed at sites who have multiple domain names for multiple countries, and may have duplicate content before of that, such as for English UK and English US. Google allows you to use these tags to specify these things do you do not get penalized for duplicate content. The experiment used this tag, along with the canonical tag, to test whether this indeed can improve your rankings.
The result: In the end, the results showed that both tags can indeed be useful. Sites that were tested without the tags did worse than those with. Also, by using both tags you increase your chances even more, making them both useful.
17. Influencing rankings with different anchor text
The experiment: The Penguin update from Google affected a lot of sites, including those which may use a lot of links using the exact keyword as the anchor text. So the experiment checked whether rankings could be improved by using text that was slightly different. By using a brand new sites, various backlinks were made, all of which with phrases that relate to the main keyword.
The result: Ranking for that site actually went up from these indirect anchor links. By using backlinks with words similar to the keyword wanted, it did affect the ranking for the main keyword.
The experiment: When adding backlinks, one key concept that every SEO marketer knows is that you should aim for normal links, not those with the nofollow tag, because those are ignored by Google. But are those links really useless for ranking? The experiment to verify this took several new sites, and started adding nofollow links over a five week period.
The result: Amazingly enough, over that period, the ranking was seen as increasing proportionally with the number of backlinks. Even though they all had the nofollow tag, and most likely played a much smaller role than real backlinks, they did influence the ranking of the sites.
The experiment: When dealing with Google Search, but few people spend a lot of time investigating Google Image Search. In this experiment, a brand new folder was shared on a site with a number of images in numerical order, all of which simply showed their file name in the image. After the crawler found the images, Google Image Search was used to see in which order they would be shown.
The result: Interestingly enough, the images did not show up in alphabetical order, or even order of being discovered. Instead, at every search, it seemed like the images would be in a random order. It seems like either the Google servers retrieved the results randomly based on network latency between the various servers, or Google uses a deliberate randomizer function to do this.
The experiment: One of the worse message to get from Google is the warning that tells you too many spammy links are pointing to your site. This means your site is now delisted or penalized. Thankfully, the company introduced the Disavow tool in cases where you do not control these backlinks. The experiment looked at whether this tool was useful to disavow thousands of bad links.
The result: In the end, 96% of the bad links were successfully removed using the link, which makes it a lot faster and more efficient than simply trying to remove them manually. After an appeal, the site was then reinstated.
The experiment: The way the anchor text is set up will impact your ranking, but what about the surrounding elements? Would a page get better rankings if you place links within a paragraph of text, next to an image, or by itself on a blank page? The experiment took several new domains and added backlinks with these various options.
The result: From looking at the different rankings, all for exactly the same keyword but with different links, it does seem like anchor text proximity matters. Those links by themselves ranked poorly, while links as part of text ranked better, and image tags ranked best.
The experiment: The canonical tag is useful to specify which site is genuine, and which may be a duplicate. But can the canonical tag be used for other things? This experiment looked at what happens if the tag is used for non-existing pages, or if it is used at the wrong location in the page, such as within the body.
The result: Canonical does have a significant impact, but it has to be used correctly. It should be inside of the head tag and point to a valid page. Google did not trust a tag pointing to a fake page, or if it was added as part of a comment, social button or otherwise outside of the head area.
The experiment: Trying to rank for common keywords like ‘SEO copywriter’ can be impossibly difficult. But one particular blogger decided to add some emotions to the task. Instead of focusing on just those keywords, she also tries to add feelings like ‘best’ and ‘worse’ to her blog posts, in order to try and help rank for the main keyword.
The result: Amazingly enough it worked, not only for ‘best SEO copywriter’ but also ‘worse’ as well. Still, because most people would typically look for the best one, it does not matter, and can prove to be very useful.
The experiment: Since the latest Google update, a site map is important to any site. Having broken links can be a problem, and should be fixed. But finding and fixing these links can be a pain. So in order to fix them, a plugin called Broken Link Checker for WordPress was used.
The result: This plugin found and fixed all of the broken link. The result in ranking was minimal, and the site as a whole did not change rank, however links to broken pages would no longer be accessible.
The experiment: Sending out press releases can be very important, because they can be picked up by the media, and many people can view your news items. But some people also add many links in those press releases, while others say those do not count for ranking. The experiment looked at two press releases to two pages which had no other backlink, one with links and the other without.
The result: More than just traffic from users who saw the press release, the results showed that Google rankings were affected by those links.
The experiment: Rumors say that Google only count the very first link to a site. This would mean that if a page has a backlink to your site, there is no point in linking it again. Also, if the first link uses the wrong keywords, then adding a second link with the right one is useless. Worse, some think that adding more links can remove the usefulness of the first one. To check this out, tests were conducted using an unranked site and links using various keywords.
The result: The experiment showed that all links are used by Google. Even if they are not bringing in a lot of ranking for the site, the keywords are all used, and they all factor into the results.
The experiment: Google has a presence in almost every country, and the site responds differently based on the country the user is in. But does that apply to sites as well? An experiment was done to see if a site could be filtered or penalized on a country basis. By using nofollow links, a site was linked from an Israeli host.
The result: By looking at various analytics of the traffic, it quickly became clear that some automatic filters are applied in a country specific manner by Google. This applies not only to the .IL Google site, but also google.com for visitors from an Israeli IP.
The experiment: Building links is not very hard, all you need to do is local sites that are in your particular niche. If you want to create backlinks for an electronics store, then finding sites that talk about electronics is trivial to do in Google. However, if you try to focus on local marketing, this may be much harder. Thankfully, phone numbers are unique by areas. The experiment was to take phone numbers of competing businesses, then use them to find links in Google. Then, taking these links, it would give a list of sites that offer backlinks to local businesses.
The result: In this particular experiment, a series of sites were found with backlinks to many of the competing stores. This allowed the finding of local review sites, business listings, and so on.
The experiment: As Google constantly adjusts its algorithms, some say that the era of cheap SEO is over, and only large firms can handle this new landscape. Without dedicated people to spend a lot of time on building your backlinks and your SEO, you have no chance of ranking. To test this, various sites were created and contracted out to various SEO firms, to see whether the results would go along with the price.
The result: Just like in many other industries, it turns out that the cost does not always equate to the quality of the work. Instead, the results turned out to be more based on what was done than how much was paid. Links remain the main activity which brings in traffic.
30. How proper on-site SEO can increase search traffic
The experiment: Any site that grows too large is bound to start having some issues which leaves it with less SEO power than it otherwise would. For example, a site can have duplicate content, which can be found with Google Webmaster Tools, proper indexing needs to be done as well, which can be done by submitting a sitemap, and tags should content keywords such as the title and various header tags.
The result: These changes were done on a popular news site, and traffic increased by 30% as a result, showing that even well known, popular sites can get a good boost in traffic if SEO methods are constantly followed.
The experiment: It used to be that meta tags, along with all other tags in a page, had to be filled with keywords. But now there is a sense that most of those tags are not seen by search engines anymore, to avoid exactly this type of tag stuffing. An experiment was made to see which tag could influence rankings.
The result: For the most part, the important tags are the title, headings, link anchors and ALT tags. Note that only Google see the ALT tag, not Yahoo or Microsoft.
Google’s
fourth Penguin update — what the company is calling Penguin 2.0 — hit
last night, and less than 24 hours later we’re already getting a first
chance to look at what sites might be considered “losers” in terms of
search visibility.
In a nutshell, the list includes: porn sites, game sites and big brands like Dish.com, the Salvation Army, CheapOair and Educational Testing Service (yes, ETS, the company that makes a lot of those standardized tests you probably took as a child).
The SEO software company, SearchMetrics, has just shared its initial look at what sites have been affected the most by the latest Penguin update. As always, SearchMetrics is using its “SEO Visibility” benchmark, which looks at the visibility of a company’s web pages as they appear (or don’t appear) across a wide range of keywords in Google’s search results.
Here’s their initial list of the 25 biggest Penguin 2.0 losers:
There are eight porn sites on the list of 25, and four game-related sites. Of those game sites, three are listed in the top 10. (You have to merge the porn sites listed at the bottom with the sites above them to get the actual order of impact.)
There are also several well-known brands, like Dish.com, the Salvation Army, ETS, and CheapOair. REEDS jewelers has been around since 1946 and has stores in 18 states. DailyDot.com, also on the list, is a respected online news site.
The column on the far right shows how much “SEO Visibility” each website has lost — at least for the keywords that SearchMetrics tracks. This doesn’t necessarily mean that these websites are all seeing dramatic traffic losses, because they might still have high visibility for keywords that aren’t being tracked. That said, in the couple years that we’ve been reporting on the Penguin and Panda updates, lists from SearchMetrics and a couple other SEO software companies have generally been considered mostly accurate.
In his blog post, SearchMetrics founder Marcus Tober says the impact from this latest Penguin update is smaller than he expected.
You are offered a position with a great company that pays well, has a fantastic health plan, incredible bonuses and personal time options, and it’s conveniently located close to home so you don’t have to suffer through long commutes in crowded traffic. The only catch is that you have to promote a Website without links. In fact, you are expected to bring in 1,000,000+ visitors a month without using links.
“Links” is defined as “any hypertext link that would normally be used by a search engine to find and rank content within its index for one or more queries.”
Do you take the job?
A Strategy Uses All Necessary Resources
I define link building as the practice of placing links yourself that point to whatever Website you are promoting. Hence, writing “link bait” articles is not link building because all the links that the articles attract are placed by other people. If you’re going to talk about link building strategies for 2013 then you need to leave out all passive linking acquisition ideas, because that is not “link building”.
Furthermore, you need to present strategic advice, not bland space-wasting generalizations. A common flaw among SEO bloggers’ “link strategy” articles is that they usually leave out the strategy. A strategic plan outlines a set of steps you take to accomplish a specific goal. In the example I provide above, the goal is to bring in 1,000,000+ monthly visitors without using links that pass anchor text or PageRank-like value in search indexes like Bing and Google’s.
You’re not likely to get those 1,000,000+ visitors by using Scrapebox or some similar tool to drop links in forum profiles and blog comments. Hence, link spamming software is not necessary or even helping for productive link building.
The first step in developing a productive link building strategy is to identify the kinds of links that you yourself can create in sufficient volume to have a reasonable chance to hit your target. Success is determined by only one metric: the number of visitors you drive toward a Website with your links. High Visibility Link Building Strategies
You know, there are Websites out there which already receive millions of visitors per month. One option in your strategic arsenal is to buy links from those Websites. Since these links are not allowed to play in the search indexes you are only buying links that use “rel=’nofollow’”. The factors you need to consider for this plan are:
Location on the page
Format/style of the link (image? text? widget?)
Call to action (brand name? consumer-oriented? non-descript URL?)
Inventory (sitewide link? homepage link? deep content link? multiple pages?)
Cost (what are you willing/able to pay?)
Disclosure (not required by US law but other jurisdictions may apply)
You should be able to write up several different strategic plans of this type. You may be able to use advertising brokers, link brokers, or go directly to Website sales associates.
Of course, Google’s crackdown on paid links has all but ensured that many people have gone looking for different jobs. You may find it difficult to obtain good paid links. A few services now exist that sell/broker links on blogs and news sites through widgets the search engines either do not see or do not follow. There is room for growth in this market. Low Visibility Link Building Strategies
Guest posting is fast becoming another Web spam practice. The best guest posts create value for the blogs that publish them. This is the secret ingredient for creating a successful guest posting strategy (that relies on non-search link traffic). The factors you need to consider for this plan are:
The frequency/regularity of contribution to each partner site The depth and detail of information you share compared to that of the blog owner(s) How much your content will help the blog increase its natural traffic Being featured in any prominent sitewide or external promotions
Your end-game is to earn as many regular visitors from each site that accepts your content as possible. If you have to bring in 1,000,000+ visitors a month through non-search links you don’t want to fool around with lonely articles placed on low-traffic blogs. You want to help truly useful blogs become so popular that they send your site thousands of visitors a month.
If you cannot build up a reflective channel that sends you 10,000 visitors a month you have a problem. You’re not creating sufficient value.
Guest posting that eschews links-for-search is a powerful reflective marketing practice. But you have to create an audience expectation that you will fulfill on a regular, frequent basis: that they will find a new article from you they want to read.
Social Media Link Building Strategies
We can’t all be Justin Bieber or Ashton Kutcher. We’re not all going to build up hundreds of thousands or millions of friends/followers/fans. You can surely inflate your social media audience by friending/following/circling random strangers or buying fans/followers but inflated social media audiences don’t click on links. You’re not trying to impress anyone, you’re working for clicks from real people.
Factors to consider for this plan are:
How much you differentiate your social media outreach from everyone else’s (by providing distinctive, positive value) How much you support others involved in social media communities (versus simply publishing links for people to click on) How active you will be in a positive, supporting function
Your goal with a social media link building strategy is to be the “go-to” person in your niche. You want people to click on your links so they have to believe you will only provide them with helpful links. They’ll forgive the occasional misfire but they won’t forgive a self-promotional shmuck.
Social media link building that has no impact on search is the ultimate reflective marketing channel on the Internet. I say “ultimate” because it’s really hard to build large volumes of regular visitors this way.
Mobile App Link Building
If you can create an app that will so intrigue people they click through to your Website from their mobile devices (without you tricking or coercing them into doing so) you should be able do well with this reflective marketing tactic.
Think of the app as a micro Website. It is a publishing channel on a special branch of the Internet.
If you cannot create the app then create a mobile-friendly Website that is so useful and helpful in the mobile environment that people won’t mind navigating to it through their mobile browsers/RSS readers/etc.
Factors to consider for this plan are:
Multiple platform appeal/usability (smart phones vs tablets)
How much you can promote the app/mobile site to the right audience
Amount of work required to publish/update the app/mobile site (static content probably won’t work in most cases)
Designing a call to action (the “link”) that fits with the mobile presentation
So, Is SEO Link Building Dead?
No, you can still engage in all sorts of search-influencing link building. The risks involved in this kind of linking have increased, as have the severity of the consequences of being identified as a manipulative linker. The consequences have been severe enough that many marketing agencies no longer want anything to do with “SEO link building”.
Some of the fakery that has recently become popular in this market includes:
Varying the anchor text on your links
Distributing infographics
Harassing journalists who use Help A Reporter Out
Giving away swag
Links can still influence search results. The search engines don’t want to give up on links; they just want to ignore manipulative links. Yes, Virginia, you can still find ways to engage in manipulative linking but you have to ask yourself how much risk you’re willing to take on — and what consequences you are willing to live with.
Every SEO who helps clients attract links through a “white hat” strategy is essentially selling links because those links would not come into existence without the SEO’s intervention. However, if the links are only placed due to editorial decision-making that doesn’t take search indexes into consideration, then the search engines are more likely to tolerate the linking services.
Marketing agencies don’t have to run away in fear when SEOs come knocking with their link acquisition services. The marketers just need to lay down the law and say, “We’ll accept THESE kinds of links and not THOSE kinds.”
Substituting guest posts and infographics for paid links is just asking for trouble because, frankly, these are manipulative linking practices that have already drawn scrutiny and will continue to draw critical review. If you’re trying to be a “content marketer” with the intention of influencing search results you’re just link spamming by a different name.
Some people are comfortable with link spam. I see their attempts to register profiles in my forums and leave links on my blogs all the time. But if the only difference between search spam and productive linking is the use of “rel=’nofollow’” then a lot of people are ignoring a potentially great source of revenue: good, old-fashioned HTML links placed on Websites.
Link building isn’t dead. It’s just waking up and shaking off the bad dream that was imposed upon it by lazy search engine optimization snake oil salespeople who didn’t have the foresight to see that they had created a huge problem for their customers.
The next generation of link builders will include plenty of spammers — I have no doubt about that. Some people are just dedicated to leading miserable marketing lives. But there is a lot of newly opened-up opportunity for innovative, creative people to step into the void and produce some high-value link placement services.
Just keep the search engines out of the mix and don’t try to fool anyone about what you are doing.
Although the recent Penguin update wasn’t quite the “game changer”
that many SEOs believed it would be, the fact that the entire digital
marketing community believed that major changes were on the way is proof
enough that old school SEO is out for good.
And if we can’t rely on traditional link building techniques or
on-page optimization tactics to secure high search engine rankings any
longer, where can we turn to improve natural search performance? In fact, the answer to this SEO question might come from a separate
promotional strategy that’s been receiving plenty of attention in the
online marketing world. That solution is content marketing.
Content marketing
is an inbound marketing tactic that relies on producing and
distributing high value content in order to bring about a number of
different results. As an example, content marketing is an extremely
powerful brand recognition building tool. At the same time, it’s a
great way to drive website traffic through the dissemination of content
pieces on popular social websites.
However, it’s also important to note that – when done well – content
marketing can play a role in proper website SEO. The following are just
a few of the different ways that SEO and content marketing intersect:
Keyword-optimized blog posts
Blog posts represent the cornerstone of any good content marketing
strategy. While the never garner the social numbers or shares that
“flashier” content pieces – like infographics or video clips – can
obtain, they tend to be viewed more consistently by your regular website
visitors.
Of course, when it comes to both SEO and content marketing, there’s a big difference between good blog posts and bad blog posts!
Good blog posts tend to have all of the following attributes in common:
They’re meaty, consisting of 1,000 words a piece or more
They’re authoritative, providing information that hasn’t been rehashed again and again online
They’re published regularly, giving repeat visitors new content to engage with
They’re engaging, relying on well-known post formats to attract attention
Writing these types of posts alone is enough to improve your site’s
SEO, as the search engines have placed (or at least, claim to have
placed) a priority on high quality, unique content that provides
valuable information to website visitors. Even if their algorithms
aren’t yet sophisticated enough to put the best content at the top of
the SERPs 100% of the time, you can bet that day is coming.
But beyond this SEO benefit, you can take things a step further by
optimizing all or some of the blog posts you publish to an individual
keyword you’re targeting. Use the Yoast SEO plugin on WordPress sites to ensure that your keyword is placed in all of the following areas:
Your blog post title
Your blog post URL
Your blog post body content
Your blog post meta description
Don’t over-optimize your posts, and don’t compromise readability to
stuff in another instance of your keyword. But by following these
simple steps, you’ll help the search engines to effectively determine
what your posts are about, leading to better SERPs performance down the
road.
Viral-style “linkbait” content pieces
One of the biggest challenges facing all digital marketers and
website owners these days is link building – specifically, how to carry
out this vital activity in a post-Penguin world.
Because the search engines have demonstrated their intent to clean up
spam links and penalize sites that rely on them to manipulate the
rankings, many former popular link building methods are now off the
table. Using automated link building programs or blog networks, for
example, are an incredibly bad idea, given Google’s growing knowledge
about legitimate link graphs.
The new name of the link building game is “natural” – and there’s almost no better way to do that than with content marketing.
In addition to the regular publication of blog posts, the most
successful content marketing campaigns make use of “outreach” content
pieces that can be distributed across social sites and shared
person-to-person. These content pieces tend to be larger in scope than
individual blog posts and use formats that encourage viral sharing. A
few examples of these types of content include:
Infographic or instructographic images
Humorous or educational video clips
Downloadable guides or reports
White papers
There’s a reason that these types of content pieces are termed “linkbait.” When distributed appropriately, they tend to create tons of links naturally, without any effort on the part of their owners.
As an example, suppose you develop a killer infographic image and
publish it to your site with the relevant embed code. You post the
infographic to directories like Visual.ly,
which creates an initial round of backlinks to your site. Then, you
share your infographic across social properties, which results in dozens
of other websites embedding your graphic on their pages.
For very little effort outside of the initial infographic creation,
you’ve created tons of the kinds of natural backlinks that the search
engines will always value – making this strategy an important part of
both SEO and content marketing.
Content marketing social promotions
These days, the general consensus is that social signals do have an
impact on SEO – even if the exact mechanisms by which this occurs aren’t
yet clear.
According to an infographic
created by WhiteFire SEO and distributed through Social Media Today,
social media performance has all of the following effects on SEO:
Helps content get indexed faster
Increases rankings for terms in social shares
Increases rankings for social connections
Increases domain’s ability to rank
However, the thing about proper social promotions is that you need good content to back them up! Yes, you can engage your followers with witty status updates or by
sharing content from other peoples’ social profiles, but for the best
results, you need to be sharing your own content as well. Promoting
your own content helps your social followers to see you as an authority
and increases the amount of referral traffic your website receives from
your social promotions (as long as your site’s backlink remains intact).
If you’ve been following along with steps #1 and #2 of this process,
you should already have this valuable content ready in the form of high
value blog posts and engaging linkbait pieces. The final key to
optimizing your content marketing efforts for SEO success is to share
this content on your social profiles.
For best results, do some investigative research using tools like Tweriod to determine when your followers are most active. Then, use well-established social media marketing techniques
to release updates on your optimized schedule in order to capture as
much user attention as possible. Be careful not to be too
self-promotional – share your own content alongside other pieces that
will provide your followers with the best possible information.
Essentially, think of the intersection of SEO and content marketing
as giving you the opportunity to kill two birds with one stone. By
implementing an effective content marketing campaign on your website,
you’ll be able to meet plenty of important SEO benchmarks without any
extra effort on your part. It’s a win-win scenario for busy webmasters
and digital marketers!
How’s everyone doing post Penguin 2.0? This update only affected 2.3% of search queries, yet some of our users said the following about the new update:
“It is working..now i can see lots of variations in ranking.” “I just checked my ranking. some sites are down and some sites are up. “I have seen drastic changes in our websites SERP rankings. “This has got to stop. Google cannot continue to play God with the internet.” Others in the industry believe Google released the update to increase
their profitability. In this official video by Matt Cutts, we learn
quite the opposite:
Other things mentioned by Matt Cutts were
1. What will most SEOs not understand?
The difference between an algorithm update and a data refresh.
Penguin update 2.0 is an algorithm update
Another thing that most SEOs won’t understand is that Google actually
decreased their revenues from the new updates. You realize that the new
updates actually improve the quality of the internet experience. In the
long run, such a move increases trust and brand equity. This is what
keeps people coming back to Google and using them for their primary
search engine.
2. Where are SEOs spending too much time?
SEOs are spending too much time on linkbuilding still. They need to
embrace the grand picture. This includes compelling content and user
experience. Matt specifically mentions two areas of experience that we
need to focus on: design and speed.
Conclusion
Let’s make sure we aren’t whining, but evolving with the Google
updates, learning the proper terminology so we can understand what Matt
Cutts is saying to us, and spend time in the areas that actually matter
(User experience).
