A 4-legged approach to link building.
March 21, 2008
The algorithms of search engines are constantly changing. The big 3 (Google, Yahoo and MSN) may love your links today and devalue them tomorrow. I think the largest evidence of this is what happened to reciprocal links. At one time they were all you needed to rank very well in Google. Now, though, they have a tiny fraction of their previous value.
The sudden, drastic change in reciprocal linking is evidence that you need to vary your link gathering methods. Putting all of your links in one basket will work for a while, but when it stops working every site you have will suffer greatly.
That's why I recommend a four-legged approach to link building:
- Automated link building.
- Links from article distribution, press releases and blog comments.
- Social bookmarking.
- "Natural" links resulting from great site content.
Let's go over each one of these methods in a little more detail.
Automated Link Building
To stay ahead of your biggest competition, many of whom often have a full time staff working to build links, you need to consider a proven automated linking method. Whether you use a semi-automated approach (such as SEO Elite), or a fully automated method (like 3WayLinks.net, you need to think seriously about the efficiency of automated link building. It helps you to keep pace with those who have a staff, especially if you're a one man (or woman) show.
Links From Article Distribution, Press Releases and Blog Comments
I'm grouping these three methods together because they're all part of what I consider "in-content linking" — where your links are surrounded by content related to your link and the subjects that you want to rank for. Since all three accomplish this in a similar way, I've put them all together under one "leg."
Gaining backlinks from articles will never go out of style. People have been building their brand and generating sales from article syndication for many, many years. Now, in the age of the Internet, in addition to the direct traffic generated from the links in the articles, you also help your ranking in the search engines.
Articles do more than help boost your ranking through link building. They also build your personal brand, establishing you as a knowledgeable authority in your subject area, and that builds trust that works to drive sales.
Now that articles are also used for search engine optimization, though, it's important that you understand the ins and outs of how best to write articles that are both informative and educational, while also being effective at drawing people to your site without sacrificing their SEO value. A great report that outlines a number of "best practice" methods from a proven article marketer is Josh Spaulding's Article Marketing Domination.
Press releases are less for building authority and more for generating buzz, but they still give you a great way to get a lot of low-cost links into your sites. Have a new product or service available? Create a great new concept or idea? Then write a press release and submit it to the top sites for quick traffic and link building.
Blog comments are a third great way to get high-quality links to your site from pages of content related to your site. Of course, spam commenting won't do. You want to make sure that you read the blog posts that you're going to comment on, and write a thoughtful comment that adds to the post.
A great way to automate your efforts is by using Fast Blog Finder. Click here to download and install the free version. The free version limits how many blogs it will find related to the keywords you provide, but it is not crippled beyond that. If you feel it's as great as I feel it is, you can go to the Help menu and buy the full version that has no limitations.
Social Bookmarking
If I need to get a site crawled and indexed fast, I usually post a few social bookmarks to it. The search engines quickly follow, and within a few days or a week, the site is almost always fully indexed.
But social bookmarking is also great for building backlinks. For automation, I like to use Social Bookmarking Demon. It makes it easy to submit to dozens of social bookmarking sites. Keep in mind, though, that if you submit to a lot of these sites at one time, and your site is pretty new, then Google will probably drop your ranking after a few days. Your ranking will stay down for a week to two weeks before those new links are calculated into Google's algorithm. When that happens, though, I always see a significant boost up from my original ranking.
So for new sites, social bookmarking is a definite must-have on your list of linking techniques.
"Natural" Links Resulting From Great Site Content
I use the word "natural" in quotes because I'm not completely in line with Google's notion of what constitutes a "natural" link — but that's a post for another day.
Regardless, though, if you want to have an army of people adding links to your pages without you having to pay them a salary to do so, then you need to have outstanding content on your web sites. Outstanding content is link bait! People will link to it like crazy and tout how wonderful your site is to other people, encouraging them to visit.
This works well for you in terms of direct traffic from those pages as well as increasing your link popularity and, thereby, your ranking in the search engines. However, because "natural" links don't always follow Google's prescribed method of including the keywords you want to rank for in the anchor text, it often takes a lot more of these kinds of links to rank well.
Four Legs Makes a Table Sturdy
Using multiple link building techniques can be likened to building a table. You can get a table with one leg to stand up if you're really careful, but any little bump or movement and it'll fall over. Two legs will hold up a little easier, but still, it's precarious. Three legs isn't bad. In fact, many a table is built with three legs. But four legs is by far the most sturdy, able to withstand all kinds of bumps, shoves and movement without falling over.
The same holds true with link building. Today the search engines may value automated links more than links from articles or press releases, or vice versa, but tomorrow that formula may change (and, based on past experience, it's likely to). So if you have your links spread out across many possible categories, your rankings are much more likely to survive the ebb and flow of search engine algorithms.
An added benefit of using techniques such as article writing and press releases is that they have their own innate traffic value. So even if your site disappeared from the rankings completely, if you have thousands content-based links in articles and press releases spread across the web, you won't lose all of your traffic. In fact, I've got one site that I worked hard to get quality links to from related niche sites that actually received 70-75% of its traffic from those links (to the tune of 15,000 visitors per month). Keep that in mind when planning your link building strategy as well.
Please post your thoughts and comments below.
Position your business for today AND tomorrow.
February 19, 2008
A little boy was at the street trying to sell lemonade. His stand was well built, and he had distributed flyers across the neighborhood to let everyone know that if they wanted a refreshing glass of lemonade, his house was the place to get it. It was mid-afternoon now, and the boy had been manning his stand since early that morning, but made no sales.
A few minutes later a neighbor came by, walking his dog. The neighbor was wrapped up in a heavy coat, pulling it tightly to him. Even his dog had a sweater on. The neighbor saw the boy with his lemonade stand and was shocked.
"What are you doing?" the neighbor asked the boy. "It's below freezing!"
"That's true," the young entrepreneur replied, "but in a few months it will be warm, and I'm planning for the future!"
I can't tell you how many webmasters I've heard from who are trying to sell lemonade in the middle of winter. By that I mean that they are trying to out-think Google and build their sites around what Google may or may not do in the future instead of what is known to bring results right now.
Don't get me wrong — you need a long term plan. Without long term goals your business has no direction for growth. But countless webmasters are sacrificing the short term profits that will help them achieve their long term goals by ignoring what works today.
One big example is link building. After my Search Engine Myths Exposed report was launched I read a few blog posts from people saying, basically, 'It might work to get off-theme links now, but at some point Google is going to stop counting them.' Their point was that because Google might take some action in the future, you should ignore the benefits gained from receiving off-theme links today.
It's beside the point that I completely disagree with those who claim that Google will one day ignore off-theme links. The point is that those folks are encouraging people not to do what will help their bottom line today, because they think it won't work tomorrow. Meanwhile, their competition is out-ranking them in Google by getting off-theme links.
Look at it this way: if the creators of the VHS video tape knew that one day the DVD format would come along and blow them out of the water, would it have been a wise decision never to go forward with VHS? Hardly! VHS was the format of choice for well over a decade. Billions of dollars were made with that format before DVD finally did come along as the wave of the future.
Let's extend that even further: Sony's Blu-Ray has officially won the war against Toshiba's HD DVD format. If Blu-Ray eventually replaces DVD, would the creation of the DVD have been a bad idea from the get-go? Of course not! Again, billions of dollars later, it was hardly a bad idea just because the future may turn a different way.
The same thing applies to your business. You want to have long term goals that take into consideration the winds of change, both with search engines and other traffic generation techniques. But you should also have short term goals that exercise the methods known that work right now.
The key word here is "balance." Don't put all of your time into your long term goals and miss out on today's profits, but don't focus so completely on short term methods that, if they ever do stop working, you're dead in the water. Put time into both. This, of course, is much easier once you are at a point where you can outsource the daily grunt work tasks.
You see, the problem with the winds of change is that they are by nature very unpredictable. Who can foresee precisely what will or will not happen next month, or next year, or five years from now? There are far too many variables. Weather forecasters have long since demonstrated that the more variables there are, the less accurate your prognostication will be.
So the best thing you can do as a business is to have more general long term goals: "I want to achieve one million visitors per month to my web site in the next 3 years," or "I want to create a new product in my market each year over the next 5 years." As you get closer and closer to those deadlines, you mold and craft your goals to fit more closely to the actual climate and environment of the time you're in. Meanwhile, the profits from your short term goals are helping to make those long term goals a reality.
Yes, the boy with the lemonade stand would have been better off selling hot chocolate during those cold winter days, and in the evening working to perfect his lemonade recipe, or improve the design of the flyer he intended to use come summer. Had he been selling hot chocolate, he would have had the money he needed to really launch his lemonade business when the time was right. As it is, he'll have exactly what you would expect a person selling lemonade in freezing weather to have: nothing at all.
Please leave your thoughts and comments below.
Is it worth ranking for single-term keywords?
February 6, 2008
In examining the sites in my three way links network, I've noticed quite a few folks targeting single keyword search terms (i.e. "puppies" or "networking" or "apparels"). It's a small minority of all keywords, to be sure, but still enough that I felt the need to write about whether or not it makes sense to target single terms.
To get right to the point, most of the time it does not make sense to target single keyword search terms. There are exceptions, of course, which I'll discuss in a minute, but first let's go over the 3 reasons why it usually does not make sense:
1. Untargeted Traffic
In most cases, it's impossible to know precisely what a searcher is after when they put in a single search term. For example, somebody searching for "puppies" might be looking to buy a puppy, or perhaps they're wanting to find information about how to care for puppies, or maybe they just want to see pictures of cute and cuddly puppies. There's no way to know for sure based on a single keyword.
2. Low Conversion Rates
Because the traffic is so untargeted, and it's very difficult to know what a searcher is after, your conversion rate from a single keyword search term is inevitably going to be very low. In keeping with our previous example, if somebody is searching for "yorkshire terrier puppies for sale" you know exactly what to have on the page that you rank for those keywords. You know what the searcher wants, and can hone in on that desire and fulfill the need.
If you rely on AdSense or another pay-per-click program for income, the low "conversion rate" means a low click-through rate. AdSense, as good as it is about targeting ads to a page, will have a difficult time knowing what ads to show on a page that is very generic in nature. But for a page like "yorkshire terrier puppies for sale", AdSense will usually be spot-on.
With a single keyword search term you can only hope that what you have on the page appeals to some of the visitors who find your page. You can, of course, provide a variety of choices on the page (puppies for sale, puppy pictures, puppy care, etc.) but keep in mind that too many choices is not a good thing for improving conversion rates. Too many choices on a page leads to a visitor being overwhelmed and less inclined to act in the manner which you would like them to.
Keep in mind, too, that somebody searching for a single keyword is less likely to know what they want to begin with. If somebody is unsure of what they're looking for, they'll be equally unsure about buying from you. Again, this leads to lower conversion rates.
3. Too Much Work For Too Little Return
Despite the lower conversion rates for single keyword terms, they are notoriously difficult to rank for in most situations. That's because many deep-pocketed companies still see the volume of traffic they receive as being at least as important as the return on their investment to get that traffic. "Long tail" keywords (keywords with 3+ search terms) are generally much easier to rank for because the competition is a lot less fierce.
Very large companies are looking to brand themselves as much as they are looking to actually sell something from the potential customer's first visit to their web site. They want to get their name out in front of as many people as possible, with the understanding that if they consistently do this, when the time comes for the individual to actually need what they provide, their name will pop into the customer's head. It's basic psychology, and it works very well.
But smaller businesses can't afford to wait years before they see a return on their investment. They need to have a solid conversion rate from the get-go to warrant the constant effort and expense it takes to maintain their search engine rankings. If you're in that crowd, then ranking for single-term keywords probably isn't the right goal for you.
Exceptions to Every Rule
There are, of course, exceptions to every rule. Some single-term keywords are much more narrow in definition, and therefore more likely to be worth ranking for.
For example, anyone searching for the acronym "SEO" is quite likely looking to increase their search engine ranking, so it's not hard to design a page around that need if you rank for that term. There are many terms which are also narrowly defined enough to be quite targeted, though they are, of course, in the strict minority.
Also, if your site relies on a CPM advertising model (where you're paid by the number of ad impressions, rather than the number of ad clicks), ranking for a single term keyword can be quite lucrative. Because those same companies that want to build brand awareness are also happy to pour money into advertising for that same purpose. It's not the number of clicks they care about so much as the number of eyeballs that get the company's logo burned into their brains that matters.
From My Own Experience
I realized the truth about single keyword rankings a couple of years ago when I got a site ranked in the top 10 for the term "veterinarian". I was sure that with all the traffic I would receive that my site would be a big earner — but it wasn't. The traffic was there, but the term just wasn't targeted enough to get a high click-through rate from AdSense or to be able to convert into any kind of real sales. I finally stopped working to maintain the ranking since it was not giving me nearly the return I had expected.
So when you're sitting down to determine what keywords you want to rank for, keep in mind that, unless you're looking to brand your site or to earn from a CPM model, single keyword terms are usually not worth the effort.
Please leave your thoughts in a comment below.
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Jonathan Leger has been earning his living online full-time since the fall of 2004. He regularly posts advice about search engine optimization (his current passion), AdSense and Internet Marketing. 
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