All Entries in the "Link Strategy" Category

New Web Business Guide Chapter 8 – Website Promotion Part 3 – Links and Advertising

The New Web Business Guide Introduction can be found here. The previous chapter, PPC vs Organic Traffic can be found here.

How do I build links to my website?

There are dozens of different ways to increase your link popularity. But what is the difference between building link popularity and getting links that actually send you traffic and makes you sales? That is the important distinction to make.

Every seo company will talk to you about link building and why link popularity is important. Obviously link popularity is one of the factors in determining how well your website ranks in the search engines, but are the search engines the only source of traffic you want?

Some link building should be done based on the fact that the website linking to you might send you some quality traffic that might buy your products and services. So there are two different types of link building strategies.

Link Building for Link Popularity

This is where you are working to get a lot of one-way inbound links to your website to improve your search engine listings. You can submit to web directories, get other related websites to link to you, build forum profiles, participate in forums and on blogs, do social bookmarking, and other methods to get these links.

Reciprocal Links

These are dead as far as helping your website rank better in the search engines, however, if you believe the visitors of another website would also be interested in clicking over to your website, then reciprocal links are still valuable. This is link building to increase the number of traffic sources for your website.

Buying Links

Again, almost dead for building link popularity for the search engines, but buying a link on a related website to attract their visitors to your website has value. It becomes another source of traffic to your website. Make sure the place that sells you the link uses a no follow tag to link to you so google doesn’t think you are trying to buy link popularity.

Buying Advertising

This is a buyer beware situation. There are a lot of websites that are real proud of the value of ads on their website. What I mean by that is many people overcharge for advertising.

Example: You have a real estate website and sell real estate in Georgia.

There is a web directory for real estate websites that is broken down by state.

They tell you that it will cost you $300 per month to be added to the Georgia real estate section.

Then they tell you they get 10,000 unique visitors every day and they have proof!

Wow! 10,000 people will see my listing? Nope.

Ask them how many unique visitors they get to the exact page your listing will appear on and ask for proof of that. Then ask them how many people click listing on that page daily.

Let’s say of the 10,000 people that visit that site, 200 actually get to the page with your listing on it. Of those 200, 20 actually click links. Now consider how many other georgia real estate websites are listed on that page. Let’s say there are 20 including yours. That means that likely this website listing will get you 1 click through to your website daily. Are you willing to pay $300 per month for 30 visitors? That’s $10 per visitor.

This was just an example of how you need to analyze the website you plan to buy advertising on before you spend the money. Negotiate once you analyze the data. If it doesn’t seem worth it, don’t buy it.

If you think the stats look good, put in a unique identifier on the link. Like; www.yourwebsite.net?adsite.org

Everything after the ? mark will not affect where the link goes, but in your stats, when you look at pages visited, you can see how many people visited www.yourwebsite.net?adsite.org vs how many visited www.yourwebsite.net.

Do not let it discourage you from advertising though. Advertising can help you build your brand on the web and can bring in some very good traffic to improve your sales. Just buy smart.

New Web Business Guide Chapter 8 – Website Promotion – I Need Traffic!

The New Web Business Guide Introduction can be found here.

Now that your website is built and you are sure it’s ready to receive traffic and convert sales, you are ready to go out and get some people to come visit your new website.

How Do I Get Traffic To My Website?

That is the most asked question on the web. Everyone wants more traffic and there are a lot of different ways to get that traffic. Some of it depends on your monthly budget for promoting your website, (You do have one I hope), and some of it depends on how well you followed the earlier steps in the New Web Business Guide when planning and building your website.

Where Will My Visitors Come From?

Search Engines

The number one source of traffic for your website is from the search engines. Notice I used the plural, search engineS. Do not think that just because google is the biggest search engine that you should only focus your attention on google. All of the search engines can send you traffic that will convert to sales.

Many people say that msn and yahoo traffic convert at a higher rate than google. That may or may not be true depending on your business and what you sell. There are also other smaller search engines you will want to get traffic from.

Search Engine Submissions

To submit or not submit, that is the question. Different people tell you different things about submitting your website to the search engines. It used to be very important to do so, but I have found that having the major search engines find you is better.

How do they find you? Easy, you need a link from a website that is already established and already gets crawled often by google. It can be as simple as making some comments on the right forums or blogs with a link back to your website. Provided they do not use nofollow tags. That is why I said plural blogs and forums. Don’t stop at one.

The search engines will crawl those sites and find the link to your site an follow that link. When the spider gets to your website, it will follow all of the links that go to your other pages if you have done a good job on your website’s navigation or internal linking.

If you find that your website is still not getting crawled after a couple of weeks, then by all means go ahead and submit it to yahoo, google, and msn.com.

I do submit to the smaller search engines for listings because they are not as sophisticated as google, yahoo, msn, aol, and ask.com. You can type search engine submissions into google and find a lot of free search engine submission sites. These will hit a lot of the smaller search engine for you.

ORGANIC SEO is an seo term you should know. This is where the search engines compare the content on your webpage to see if it is relevant to what a user has typed in as a search term.

The more relevant you are to what the user typed in, the higher the search engine will rank you. That is a little over-simplified because your relevancy to the search term is only one of the things that the search engines use to determine how high you rank for a particular key phrase. However, your content is the most important factor in determining how you rank for a particular keyword or phrase. (some seo gurus may not agree. )

Link Popularity is also very important to how well you rank in the search engines for the keywords you target with your content. You need other websites, blogs, and directories also linking to you. Each link is like someone voting for your website.

Link popularity is not about quantity over quality. It is not about websites with high google page rank linking to you. It’s about websites, blogs, and directories with subjects that are relevant to your topic that matters.

If you own a website that is all about getting people to sign up for your gardening newsletter and a bicycle parts website with a pr6 links to you, it is not as valuable as a pr3 link from a lawn care website or probably even a real estate or home improvement website.

The added value to those links is that you are not just getting those links to help your search engine ranking, you are hoping to get people who visit those websites to also visit your website. They are likely the same type of audience you want to attract.

So be smart about link building. Don’t buy into link building schemes that offer to build your link popularity overnight. Don’t buy into reciprocal linking or even three way link schemes. If anything you read looks like it was designed to fool the search engines, it will likely hurt you in the long run.

To get great organic listings in the search engines, put great content into your website and get relevant sites to link to you.

Web Directories

Link Farms There are a lot of web directories out there and not all of them will help you get better search engine placement. Some are what we call link farms where they list just about everyone who submits a link to them. They have no content and they are not related to your website in any way. So links from these link farms are not going to help you.

Free Web Directory Listings can be good places to start. Free does not mean they are a bad place to get a link. Look for web directories that are well-made and maintained and those that are related to your niche or at least have categories that are related to what you offer visitors.

Paid Web Directory Listings does not necessarily mean they are a good place to get links just like free does not equal bad. Look for how much actual content they have in their directory besides just links. Consider the page rank of the actual page your link will appear on and not the page rank of their main page.

Don’t take their word for how many visitors they get daily unless they can prove it. And it doesn’t matter to you how much traffic they get. It matters how much traffic the page your link will be on gets and where your link will appear. Ask for statistics that show you the traffic for that page and if they have anything on how many people actually click links to visit sites they link to.

They may not have all of the information you want, but it does not hurt to ask. If they just refuse to provide any statistics, then buy a link elsewhere. Ask exactly where your link will appear on which page. Don’t just use the auto buy button and hope they give you good placement. If you don’t ask for it they can assume you don’t care.

In the next chapter of the new web business guide, I will be going over pay per click advertising and organic search engine optimization.

Bicycle Parts – Random SEO Website Review

I want to give you a glimpse of how we review a website to see what needs to be done to optimize it for the search engines and how we can help improve sales. I chose bicycle parts as a search term.

The first website I find is BikeUSA.com. Go ahead and click it to open a new window.

Now they are number 1 in google for bicycle parts. But I also leaned right away that the link in the google search results page is to http://bikeusa.com instead of http://www.bikeusa.com. Why do we care right? After all they are number 1 for the search term, so what’s the big deal?

By going to MarketLeap.com and checking link popularity with and without the www before the domain name we find that their link popularity is split between the two. A good link strategy would include making sure all of the links out there are to the www.yourdomainname.com instead of without.

Something else we find curious. If link popularity is so important, why does bikeusa.com without the www have 0 link popularity in google while it ranks as number 1 for bicycle parts in google? Now, www.bikeparts.com has only 34 link popularity in google. So how does the site rank so well?

There are many factors that help you rank well in the search engines. Only one of those is link popularity. The problem is that it shows a weakness in the optimization plan that can be exploited by a competitor.

A competitor who devised their strategy for the phrase bicycle parts might build a website that is similar or even better than this one. Then if they build a lot more links than this site has and maybe add more relevant content, they might overcome the number one spot from bikeusa.com.

I’m simplifying things a little here because the full explanation would be way more than a blog post and might bore you to tears. There are other things that a competitor could do to compete with them for that number 1 spot.

Website Analysis

We analyze a site the way a competitor might because we need to turn your weaknesses into strengths. Just because you have a high ranking for your search terms does not mean you do not need an SEO Professional to keep you there.

Title Tags

The title tags on the pages got my attention right away. Title Tags are important.

The main page title tag is Bike USA – Offering over 10,000 bicycle parts and related products, including bikes, clothing, parts of parts.

Then I clicked a link that says backpacks and the title is Expanded Special Order Catalog – Bike USA – “Your Online bicycle, bicycle parts, and bike accessory source”

So they have basically used the title tags like a file hierachy. That’s great for the designer so they can keep track of where a page they are working on goes when they finish, but terrible for seo purposes.

On the main page it is ok and even good branding to put your company name in the title tag, IF you believe that people do search for your company name. On the main page it is also ok to use more than one phrase in the title tag as you are not going to optimize the main page for just one search term.

Interior pages are much much different however. You want to narrow the focus of each page to target one or two key phrases. And only two if they are very very similar search terms. I personally would rather optimize each page for one search term, using that one search term in the title tag. There will be similar phrases in the page’s content and the search engine will find the page very relevant for the main search term as a result.

I went to an interior page where they sell bags and seat bags according to the link that got me there and the title is Expanded Special Order Catalog – Bike USA – “Your Online bicycle, bicycle parts, and bike accessory source”

Take a look at this search in google for the term Expanded Special Order Catalog

You will see several bike part websites are using the same system to pull the links to those parts from and our guinea pig bikeusa.com is about 5th for that search term. It’s pulling all of that from a database they share with other bicycle parts websites. Nothing wrong with that per say, but what does that tell us?

First it tells us that if we created a better system we could beat many of these bicycle parts websites because of them using that system.

Second it tells us that the first phrase in their title is what they are ranking well for on that page. The last phrase in that long title, bike accessory, they don’t make the front page. That page also does not rank for the other phrases and I’m not sure why they put them in quotes. Not sure if that hurts or helps but I wouldn’t do it.

Going back to the anchor text on the link that took me to that page, bags and seat bags, you would think that was the phrase they should target in the title as well but they chose not to even include it. I would have titled that page Bike Bags and Bicycle Seat Bags or better yet, Bike Bags by itself or Bicycle Seat Bags which would also be relevant for Bike Bags, Bicycle Bags, etc.

Now that page was mostly a links page to narrow down what you are search for to a more specific term. That’s where I found the link that said backpacks and the title is Expanded Special Order Catalog – Bike USA – “Your Online bicycle, bicycle parts, and bike accessory source”

Again that page does not mention backpacks at all. Could have used a title like Backpacks or even Bicycle Backpacks to stay with the whole bike parts theme. You want to use a hierarchy, fine. Use the title Bicycle Parts Bags Backpacks and that would even be an improvement.

Summary

There are a lot of other issues like the filenames for the pages, alt tags for the photos, descriptions, keywords metatag, etc. that I could explore if I had the time, but I don’t and you likely don’t have time to read more either, so I’m not going to go any further with this because it would turn into a book.

In just a few minutes, only examining a couple of issues, I’ve found that if a client came to me and wanted to capture the phrase bicycle parts and other associated key phrases, it would not be that difficult to do so. I know I can find a lot of other weaknesses as I dig through the website that can be strengths for my client.

Real Estate Systems are like this as well. They all have the same content basically and use the same system. Someone who exploits the weaknesses of the system and does a better job for their client can beat almost any real estate website using a system they bought from some real estate guru.

If you would like me to review your website to see what we can do for you, call 786-317-8774 or email us at info@seoserviceprovider.com

SEO, Content, and Link Building Strategies that work