Because I’m a link builder, I haven’t paid too much attention to the whole mobile marketing thing, there’s no algorithmic value there so I’ve simply ignored the space. 

Silly me. 

For a marketer, ignoring anything people are doing en mass isn’t smart.  Mobile links may not have any algorithmic value but there sure as hell is value in mass messaging. 

People want promotional offers sent to their phones.  Of 160 people surveyed in North Carolina, Ohio, Illinois and Kansas, 18% said they wanted special offers texted to them.  It may not be a big number (the survey wasn’t huge) but it’s potentially significant  if you consider people want  the messages, and the propensity most texters have for pushing fun/promotional content along is pretty strong.  Can you say mobile linkbait?

So how can any of this help with link building?  For starters…

1.  Consider adding an opt-in for cell phone numbers on all sign up forms

2.  Create alerts, text customers when new content has been added to your site

3.  Text new coupons/discount offers and then…

4.  Sweeten the offer by texting a second time saying you’ll double the discount if they link to you!

Anything you snail or email you can text.  (just make it shorter)    Use all communication streams to ask for links and promote content, take advantage of anything that may drive link juice and revenues.   If you’ve been asleep at the text wheel, it’s time to jump in and start using this popular communication vehicle to promote your website and ask for links.

The following is an excerpt from a thread on theSEOBook Community forum*, it’s a good one and indicative of the type of information being shared. 

 The post was part of  an ongoing discussion on content aggregator widgets and their effectiveness as a link building tool. (*this is a members only forum so unless you’re a member, you won’t see the thread)

A forum member asked this question: 

“The links are coming from people writing about the widget and posting links to the widget download page, or the link is embedded in the widget? Any special tactics for attracting the downloads, or is it generally emailing industry relevant bloggers?” 

Aaron answered the guy first with a detailed response and suggested you can embed a link or two in the widget, then I came along and said this: 

Seeing examples always helps – let’s take a look here:

IMO, SaneBull has done an awesome job creating many types of widgets, they’re listed here: http://www.sanebull.com/widgets

Click on the link “Currency Converter” and you’re taken to a download page that includes a description of the widget and the benefits of using it. It’s important you tell people why the widget would be a benefit to host, don’t leave it to them to figure out. (I highlighted the verbiage in yellow to give you an idea of what to say)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I use Widgetbox.com for a number of the widgets we make, they have free (ad supported) and paid options and take the ”technical” hassle out of making widgets. Honestly, if I can do it, anyone can, check out their  gallery

 

Regarding content widgets, here’s an example of the type of thing we’ve had luck using:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

People love love love to see themselves in print so I make sure the widgets we set up run the URLs of the sites we’re targeting. For example, if I’m working in the coffee niche and I build a widget, I’ll fill it with feeds from authority/well-ranked/groovy coffee blogs and then hit up those blog owners with the widget promotion. The vast majority of the time the blogger bites and we land the widget. 

 

A handful of promotion ideas to get your widgets out there, after all they do no good sitting on your site:

 

1.  Submit to the widget directories.  They’re not highly visible so it’s best not to rely on them as a distribution outlet but you’ll pick up some downloads. 

2.  In-house promotion.  Email your client/customer/associate list and offer the widget before it goes public.  Tie the announcement in with a contest or similar promotion such as “be one of the first 25 to download the widget and we’ll give you $100 credit toward your next purchase”.

3.  Issue press release.  Consider offering a promotion here but with a smaller credit.  ($25 credit vs. $100 you gave to customers)

IMO, widget linking is one of the best  link building tactics out there because it’s topically targeted (people  in your niche will host the widgets) it’s viral, it provides value to the host site and you get a quality link that stays in place for a long long time.

So why share this?  Two reasons:   1.  The widget link building tactic outlined works and 2.  being part of a forum, paid or free is worth your time and money.  I have no financial, personal, cultural, or spiritual interest in any of the paid forums but I believe in the quality of their content and the people behind them.  I’ve listed the free forums in the past, but here’s the three membership forums I’ve had experience with and recommend:

SEOBook Community forum  and sister site
PPCBlog Training & Community

SEO Training Dojo**

WebmasterWorld members area

 **  SEODojo is offering 25% off any subscription until July 30, 2010.  Promotion code:  debrarocks .  Thanks to Dave and Terry for the discount! 

-

When it comes to talking about links and link marketing, I like to think I know a thing or three but when it comes to pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns well, not so much. As a matter-of-fact, I have a hard time spelling PPC never mind understanding all the various components involved so when my dear friend Aaron Wall showed me the new PPC Training and Community Forum he was developing, I was thrilled! Finally I had a place to learn PPC from top to bottom at my own pace from people I knew and trusted.

Aaron teamed with noted PPC expert Geordie Carswell who was the founding CEO of the RevenueWire software affiliate network & Safecart payment processing platform, a start-up that went from zero to $51 million in PPC-driven sales in less than 18 months. Geordie has hands-on experience managing PPC accounts at high volume levels across multiple platforms, he wrote the killer 50 (that’s right 50!!) training modules and moderates the PPC Community forum.

In addition to the 50 training modules, the training program gives you access to 11 PPC tools:

• Google Adwords Mass Campaign Builder New!
• Keyword List Comparison Tool New!
• Competitive Research Tool New!
• Keyword List Generator.
• Keyword List Cleaner & Number Stripper
• Typo Generator
• Keyword Match Type Wrapper
• PPC Mass Ad Generator
• A/B Split Test Validation Calculator
• PPC ROI Calculator
• RoAS Calulator (Return on Impressions)

If you’re like me, you learn best by doing and being able to ask questions as you go.  The PPC Training program allows you to do just that, you can read and implement the modules at your pace and ask questions (ask Geordie directly!) in the Community forum.  I moderate the linking forum on the SEO Book Community Forum and share what I learn/experience/implement daily, we don’t hold anything back and neither will Geordie or Aaron.

Bottom line?  If you want to learn PPC from the ground up from knowledgable and respected PPC masters, head over to the PPC Training center and sign up today.

(Obligatory Debra disclaimer:  I was not paid to do this. I do not have a financial stake in the PPC or SEOBook Training programs.  I do it because the programs are good.)

Do you favor one search engine over another when building links? I have a favorite for general searching, but when it comes to link building, I don’t use just one. Ask, Bing, Google and Yahoo! each offers a unique set of search options, I use all of them for a wide range of results. Here’s a handful of linking techniques from each engine I’ve had luck using!   I’m going to use the term “CFL light bulbs” in all my examples, let’s start with Ask…

Ask.com

After doing a general search, take a look at the “Related Questions” listed on the right side of the results page.  The questions listed  provide great ideas for new content topics and resources in submitting content. Take a look at what they’re showing for “CFL light bulbs”:

Since people are actively asking these questions, creating content in response and posting it on your site is great link bait and smart marketing. 

For the rest of the article, please visit  http://searchengineland.com/four-engines-four-ways-to-generate-links-44711  And if you like it, Sphinn it here!

 Both Read Write Web and Nicholas Carr’s Rough Type Blog  featured articles today on the pros and cons of on page linking.  Read Write Web asked if links were

     a net negative for readers online

and wondered if 

      Placing links at the end of articles is more respectful of a person’s intentions and concentration. 

Hmmm.  Nicholas Carr was a bit more entertaining  and explained his views on why links shouldn’t be in content:

Links are wonderful conveniences, as we all know (from clicking on them compulsively day in and day out). But they’re also distractions. Sometimes, they’re big distractions – we click on a link, then another, then another, and pretty soon we’ve forgotten what we’d started out to do or to read. Other times, they’re tiny distractions, little textual gnats buzzing around your head. Even if you don’t click on a link, your eyes notice it, and your frontal cortex has to fire up a bunch of neurons to decide whether to click or not. You may not notice the little extra cognitive load placed on your brain, but it’s there and it matters. People who read hypertext comprehend and learn less, studies show, than those who read the same material in printed form. The more links in a piece of writing, the bigger the hit on comprehension.

Bold mine for emphasis.  In case you can’t comprehend what he’s saying, there’s a study out there saying your concentration is diminished when you click a link because you’ve clicked a link.  We’ll have to take his word for it since he didn’t offer us the study link and I can’t figure out which one it is from the list he left at the bottom of his post. 

Read Write Web offers multiple takes on why you should leave links in content.  They say:

I like to add links out to other sources at every opportunity in order to enrich what I’m writing, to broaden the conversation, and frankly because I think linking to other blogs is a good faith way to encourage other blogs to link to us. To act as if our blog is the only place online to learn about what’s important is the height of arrogance and a real disservice to readers. Internal linking is good business practice, but I think a balance is best

Bold is mine ‘cuz I like the arrogance angle but…then they have to go and mess things up with this:

Search indexing is largely powered by links, and the words linked inline are key. That’s a tough one. Links between documents are the foundation of much of the most innovative analysis being done online, but maybe those links could just be placed well away from a body of text.

Shades of 1999!!!  I’m not really sure what “innovative analysis”  is since there’s no link or description to help educate poor-confused-me  but I do know webpages rank based on the concept of link popularity which has been around since the dawn of the engines and uses both links and content in it’s calculations.   Hope that’s clear and you’ve not lost your train of thought.

If you think all this sounds a little far fetched, don’t.  There’s a number of people who feel putting links at the end of the page is a better way to do it, check out my link and the comments on the ReadWriteWeb article.  I’m thinking they’ll be early adopters of a warning label like this one:

SURGEON GENERAL LINK BUILDER WARNING:  Outbound links can cause confusion, loss of comprehension and may complicate your pregnancy and life”

Here at the Link Spiel we’re going to stick with linking out from the body of the copy, we know our readers can handle clicking, reading, and returning to our blog.    We feel the whole link clicking thing is akin to walking and talking or eating and reading, it’s possible to do it without getting distracted.   Hopefully we’re in the majority with this line of thinking, I’d hate to see people change what’s natural, helpful and algorthimally efficient.  Nobody puts our link baby in a corner.  

Power to the people and links!

Confession time: I’m headed to Seattle next week for SMX Advanced, and I still haven’t started my slide deck. I’m not a procrastinator by nature, but when it comes to slides – well, I’d rather get a root canal than do slides.

Well, maybe not a root canal, but I have managed to find lots of things that must be done before I can start on my deck. So far I’ve cleaned out my desk, purged files, cleaned the office refrigerator and carpets. I figure  I owe it to myself to be fully organized in a clean setting before jumping into the arduous task of creating new slides. Heaven forbid if I needed to find a quote stashed in my filing cabinet after walking across the room to get a cold Diet Coke.

Getting started on anything is hard whether it’s a term paper, link building campaign or slide deck. It’s doubly hard when you don’t fully buy into the idea around the presentation which in my case involves showcasing linking tactics at a conference designed to follow an “advanced” track.  That’s right, I said it – I don’t think there’s any such thing as “advanced linking tactics”….  Read the rest on Link Week/Search Engine Land

Over the last couple of months I’ve noticed a step-up in sales pitches, ebooks and free guides covering just about any topic related to SEO, SEM and social media.    How people make their living is no concern of mine and I get that our industry has gotten crowded making it necessary for people to be creative in their advertising efforts but – I do raise an eyebrow when I see things being pitched as the ” Ultimate Handbook”
or the “Definitive Guide” and some of the information in the so-called guide is blatantly wrong.

Recently an email hit my inbox from someone shilling an “Ultimate Traffic Blueprint” that’s supposed to be a “  …step by step guide to server crushing traffic“.  I want to stress the  ”server crushing traffic“  part,  this piece was being pitched as a traffic guide, not a link building resource.  It  starts by outlining some basic and very well known ways to get traffic by various methods – blogging, press releases, video,  and article marketing.  In the info, two comments/issues caught my eye.  The first one was about  the effects of article marketing:

…”however, it was a bit of a victim of its own success, and people started to abuse article marketing – spamming article directories with crappy nonsense articles just for the links and search engine rankings. As you might imagine, Google frowns upon such things and suddenly links from article directories had little value” 

Huh?  Google is a bot, not a human, it doesn’t pass judgement or frown on  how you market your content.   One of the prime reasons article directories don’t pass a lot of link juice is because of the structure of the directory, not because Google doesn’t like them.  Article directories are a lot like general directories,  they don’t draw a lot of natural (editorial)  inbound links, their internal structures are heavy and not always well linked and they have a ton of new content/pages being made daily.   When’s the last time you’ve seen an authority source (or something other than a bookmark site or comment drop) point to content on a regular ole’ article directory?  Anyone?  Bueller?

But the advice given on directory submissions is what really got me going and I believe  is blatantly wrong.   The segement starts by recommending webmastasers add their sites to the Yahoo! Directory and DMOZ and goes to this:

Does anyone see something wrong with that “directory” list?  For starters, Zeal.com was offline for a very long time  (since 2006?) and just recently came back  but isn’t taking new sites.  (click the submit link at the bottom of page).  Looksmart used to be a directory but is now a PPC network,  so no directory submission there.   A couple others are algorithmically weak with minimal traffic making them not worth your time or money to submit to.

Keep in mind the purpose of this so called “report” is to tell people how to drive traffic, not build links.  If it were a linking guide then I’d shrug about the directories, they’re algorithmically piss poor but a link from them would count.  But to list several of them as significant traffic sources in a guide promising to show you how  ‘To Get Thousands Of FREE Visitors To Your Website” ??  That’s just not accurate.   

I’m not dropping this thread to be ugly or as a rally cry for standards or for any other reason save one:   this report and other’s like it are a prime example of the garbage floating around by people who obviously don’t do their homework and are looking for a quick buck or a way to siphon off your email for the real sales pitch.  Again, I have no issues with the way people conduct their business or email funnels as long as they’re pimping good info and not taking advantage of people.  But when it’s dead wrong or pitches ridiculous statements like this: 

“I can show you… The two most powerful links you can get – so powerful that a link from these two sites can vault you into the top 10 of Google”…

then it’s fair game to be poked at.

Before you invest time or money with any program, check it out and the people behind it. Any reputable company creating a source guide will disclose authorship and how it came to the conclusions presented in the guide.   If you’re not sure about the content or wonder about grandiose claims like the one above, go to industry flagships and start reading.   Spend time on forums, read sites like Sphinn,  Small Biz Trends, Search Engine Book, Search Engine Journal, Search Engine Watch, Search Engine Land and Search Engine Roundtable.  Industry leaders, news sources and top bloggers contribute to these sites, they explain their viewpoints and provide reference links so you won’t find crappy, out-of-date-and-plain-wrong information there.  If it sounds too good to be true or you haven’t seen it printed elsewhere, well…  hello… there is probably a good reason for it.

Here’s a list of places I recommend you get involved with, they’ll keep you update-to-date with what’s working/not/hot/liked a lot in SEM/SEO.    In no particular order:

 1.  SEOBook Forum (membership required)

 2.  Webmaster World

 3.  High Rankings Forum

 4.  SEO Refugee

 5.  Cre8asite Forum

 6.  Search Engine Roundtable

 7.  Search Engine Journal

 8.  Sphinn

 9.  Search Engine Land

10.  Search Engine Watch

11.  Search Engine Guide

12. SEO DoJo (membership)

13.  UK SEO Forum

14.  V7N Forum

15.  BlackHat Forum  ( yep!)

16.  Wicked Fire

17.  Small Business Trends

Yeah, I know… it’s a bunch of reading but if you want to stay up on what’s happening,  it’s necessary.  If you know of a flagship site (a site with multiple writers and presents news as well as opinion) or industry forum I’ve left off, drop it in comments and I’ll add  to the list.

 
Recently, on the SEOBook Community Forum*, this question was asked:

I built too many incoming links too quickly and tripped a filter sending me from about #17 to #95. Whoops! Not being much of a link builder historically, this has never happened to me before. Is it possible I could just wait it out? I will have some natural links coming in over time to sort of balance things out … it might not kill me since #17 wasn’t too great to begin with. 

Great question!  The topic of tripping filters comes up all the time, let’s take a look at it.

You have a website, it’s been around a while, has a good number of pages in the index and ranks decently for your primary keywords.  You did a little optimization and link building when you launched it so it has a handful of links plus a couple you picked up while you’ve been online.  Other than that, you’ve done almost nothing to the site and things have been OK ranking wise. 

Now life is good until one day you notice your little site with its handful of inbound links has slipped in the search results.  You also notice your competitors are actively marketing their sites and moving up in the rankings  while  you’re moving down.  Life goes from good to crap in a link heartbeat! 

So you decide to quickly fight back by aquiring a large number of one-way links all pointing to your home page.   Then you sit back, rub your hands together gleefully and wait to see your little site climb back up in the serps.

And you wait.  And wait.  And wait some more.  

Then this happens:   

“sending me from about #17 to #95″

Oh crap.

What the heck is happening?  Was I slapped with some +99 , over optimization, under-the-radar, anti-brand, bad neighborhood, they don’t like my hair penalty?  The bad hair thing aside, probably not.  You just tripped a link pop filter and have been tweaked for too many links too fast. 

Search engine algorithms are mathematical equations, you can’t add new numbers to the mix without another part of the equation being affected.   The little site had a history of being a little site with a handful of links so when big changes happened, red flags go up.   All of a sudden the numerical equation behind the  site changed dramatically which caused the site to tank.   When you add a lot of inbound links quickly and nothing else changes in and around your historically quiet site,  you should expect to see either no-or-downward movement.  That type of link growth isn’t natural unless you’re doing something  promotionally to build  links. 

But you’re not doing anything to the site except adding links.   There’s no new content, no increase in search queries, no media mentions (media = social and traditional),  no nothing.  Hoards of people don’t just give away links to a single site/page unless they’ve been asked/paid to do so,  so the engine assumes the links haven’t been acquired editorially and either ignore them or slaps you down. 

Ouch.

At some point time passes and you either add content/traffic/media or the time filter wears off and you see a little improvement in your ranking. Or maybe you don’t because you weren’t smart enough to figure out what was going on when you added those links to begin with so you kept adding MORE. 

The concept of link popularity is simple.  Link quantity, quality, anchor text and relevance all factor into the equation, change one of them dramatically without balancing the rest and the single biggest component of the ranking algorithm will start to scream and throw up flags.  Keep in mind link popularity is also balanced  by 199 additional ranking factors some of which include content, domain age, load rates and search referral traffic.  ALL of these things need to be considered when adding links to a web page/site.

Even for big/branded/competitive sites.   They “get away” with being able to add more links because what they do have established (their reputation, content, traffic, links, involvement in the media) continues to work for them.  Small sites lack that insulation so they need to be careful and remember balancing content, traffic, and links is key.

*The SEOBook Community Forum is  a paid membership platform and part of the SEOBook Training program. 

    Have fun this holiday season!

The search engines have been publishing their “Top Searches” lists for 2009, so far I’ve collected lists from   Bing , Yahoo!, and Google. Other sites posting “top” searches are  ESPN,  Snopes, and my favorite, Yahoo’s Top Video’s (warning: time killer!). I  set my alerts to catch these lists because they spark ideas for link bait and content development we can use to attract links.

All of the lists are valuable but IMO, the best list comes from Ask.com. Why? Because they list the top questions people used as search queries on  Ask.com. The list is divided  by category and includes the top ten questions asked. Here’s an example of one of the categories:

This kind of information is priceless when it comes to SEO and link building for a couple of reasons:  …. (read the rest of the article here on Link Week/Search Engine Land)