You might want to start by defining what your niche is. Say you’re a plant nursery or gardening store. You focus on the home gardener. These are people who enjoy gardening and making things grow as their hobby. If they have a good season, maybe they like to give away the proceeds of their garden as gifts to friends. Some of them might even be ambitious enough to make a little money on the side from the fruits (and vegetables and other plants) of their labors.

So you can link to other nurseries. But where else can you look for links? Nick Stamoulis at Search Engine Guide offers up a number of useful suggestions. First, consider what other products your customers shop for. You specialize in plants; what else do people who garden need? Gardening tools? Bricks to build borders? Outdoor water fountains and statuary?

You probably don’t carry some of the things that your customers want need for their gardens, but that doesn’t mean that you’re losing business if someone buys that item from someone else. A customer who buys a wheel barrow from someone else isn’t going to NOT buy plants from you. “A great link building opportunity is to partner with relevant companies and pool your combined resources to help both companies succeed,” Stamoulis points out. So you can talk with a company in a related business about both of you being listed on each other’s websites as preferred partners. Or maybe you can take out ads in each other’s newsletters, or contribute to each other’s blogs. Get creative and think beyond a simple link.

Another place you can look to for building links is within your own community – and in this case, I’m not talking about the online community. Maybe you can help the local school raise money with a plant sale, donating plants for the sale and sharing your expertise with free gardening advice. You could give away a coupon for 15 percent off the buyer’s next purchase at your nursery. And that’s just the beginning of your networking and customer-building opportunities. But wait, this was about links, right? “Not only are local events a great way to introduce  your brand to local customers (which is especially important if you have a physical store location you’re trying to drive traffic to), you can also get listed as a sponsor on the organization’s site, as well as a mention in any press coverage of the event in local, online newspapers,” Stamoulis explained. In other words, this kind of activity brings with it fresh, relevant, useful links, if you take advantage of it appropriately.

I’ve saved one of the potentially coolest ideas for link building for last. You might need to build up a little courage to do this right – or if you’ve been in the industry for a long time and know a lot of people, it might not even occur to you, since all of these people are just your friends. What I’m talking about is doing interviews with leading people in the industry, and then posting them on your website.

You don’t need to go for the celebrities who are so popular they need a social secretary to manage their time; in this case, it’s the expertise your readers will want to bask in. Of course, if you can get someone who is well-known, by all means go for it! Just make sure, as you’re thinking about who you might interview, that they fit into a niche that connects with yours.

So what kind of industry voice would work here? A local landscape designer might work. Or you could dream big and try for someone like Mel Bartholomew, the originator of square foot gardening. Is there a botanical garden in your area? Perhaps you can get an interview with someone there.

Doing this kind of interview not only builds content for your site and teaches you more about your own field, but “Chances are the expert is going to help you promote that piece of content because it helps with their own personal branding and link-building,” Stamoulis noted. “But every time they share your interview it’s your site that gets a link and the social signals!” And the better-known the expert you get to interview, the stronger their social network is likely to be. Imagine the reach of the links you’d get from this!

Let me leave you with one more thought from Stamoulis which is the entire key to building links outside your niche: make sure the people and organizations to which you’re reaching out are relevant. In other words, “there needs to be a clear and reasonable relationship between your site and theirs. Look for sites that target the same audience as you and help solve similar problems,” Stamoulis explained. Both your business and your link partner’s business will grow when you work together to fulfill your customers’ needs. Good luck!

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Terri

The post Link Building Outside Your Niche appeared first on SEO Chat.

It’s inevitable, I suppose, that those who’ve just discovered SEO – or even those who’ve been at it for a while – will wonder what’s wrong with paid links. They’ll even ask about it in our SEO Chat forums, as you can see at the link. The first point that comes to mind, of course, is that paid links purchased in order to manipulate your standing in Google’s SERPs are explicitly against the search engine’s terms of service. Period.

If you want to pay for a link on a website just because its traffic might be interested in what you have to offer, that’s different. Say you restore and sell muscle cars and you’d like to get your link on a social site catering to classic and antique auto lovers. Go ahead and purchase the link; just make sure that it’s a no-follow link. Then it’s not manipulation; it’s advertising. Google can tell the difference. And since it IS advertising, you shouldn’t just have your link there; you should contact the website owner’s advertising department about a nice image and text and do a real ad.

Respected SEO Chat forum member Gazzahk gave a list of five things that are wrong with paid links: they cost money; often, the payment is recurring; they do not necessarily help you; they can get devalued after you’ve paid your money, so you’ve lost that investment; and you risk a penalty from Google if your paid links are identified. Not only that, but as Matt Cutts wrote recently in his blog, those who sell links lose page rank when Google finds out, so a transaction like that is bad for both the buyer and the seller of do-follow links.

So if we’re completely clear on this idea that you should never buy links, why would I title this article “All Links Cost Something”? You may pay for a link, but not in money – and you may never even be aware that you paid for it. That’s the kind of link that Google won’t recognize as a paid link, either. And it’s the best kind.

Say you’re an enthusiastic knitter or crocheter. You’ve been doing it for so many years, you’ve started designing your own patterns. You hang out on Ravelry because that’s THE social website for knitters and crocheters; it even has extra features that help you show off your latest projects and sell your patterns. But you still maintain your own website, on which you blog regularly. One day, with some help from a photographer friend, you put together a post that provides a really good explanation for beginners on how to photograph your finished projects.

Since you’ve been on Ravelry for years, helping people, asking questions, and in general being a real person and not a spammer or trying to explicitly solicit sales, nobody minds when you mention in passing in one of the forum groups that you belong to that you put up a new post on this topic. You bother to mention it because you know (again, from your time on the forum) that lots of people want to know how to photograph their pieces properly. You may include a link, which you know will be no-follow on this forum.

So what happens? A bunch of other crafters check out your blog entry. They promptly try out your advice with one of their projects, find out it works, and delightedly blog about it on THEIR blogs. They link back to yours, of course, and those links are do-follow links. Some of them go deeper into your blog, find other entries that they like, and bookmark them. Several even bookmark your home page and set up an RSS feed. Three or four buy some of your patterns. One lady is so impressed by an adorable birthday cake amigurumi you made six months ago for your birthday that she links to it on her Facebook status because this month it’s HER birthday. Of course, this leads to more people checking out your website…

So what just happened? Your website got you a whole bunch of links for which you did not pay any cash. But you DID pay for those links – with a whole bunch of your time and experience. In a sense, you started paying for those links when you started learning to crochet, and fell in love with it – even if that was way before the Internet came to be. All links cost something! By the way, the best part of this is that you got all this traffic, and all of these links, without even once worrying about your Google ranking.

My little story illustrates another point. It’s somewhat peripheral, but it shows one of the ways that links “purchased” like this are superior to links that you pay for in the hopes of manipulating your Google ranking. The crocheter who wrote the blog entry and mentioned it on Ravelry put the link there because she KNEW her fellow fiber enthusiasts were interested in that topic and would benefit from the post. She therefore avoided the typical problem that long-time respected SEO Chat forum member Test-ok observed: “Most people look at links in the wrong light.” He noted that one needs to look at links through the end users’ eyes and not through the search engine’s eyes.

So when you’re thinking about placing a link somewhere, ask yourself: will those who see the link, and especially those who click through to the web page, actually gain something that they will value? If not, then there’s no reason for you to place the link. After all, all links cost something; why should you waste your investment? Good luck!

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Terri

The post All Links Cost Something appeared first on SEO Chat.

The latest scammer worthy of note may not have hit the newspapers with the force that JC Penney’s mistake did early last year, but it seems to have caused a lot more pain on a personal level for those who were taken in. The short version of this story, like Penney’s, is all about link building, with one big difference: the guy collecting the money for the service never came through – and he mostly didn’t give refunds to angry customers, either.

The story came up for discussion on our SEO Chat forums. Understand, though, that the scammer himself DIDN’T appear on our forums. As one of our fearless moderators notes, “He would never get away with that BS here.” The dodgy character showed up on a completely different forum (which shall remain nameless) as a new member. He offered a link building service that, as described and for the amount of money being asked, was “too good to be true” to anyone who knows anything about SEO.

I won’t link to the thread on the other forum here, or use that business’s name (or the name of the scammer’s business). I will only say that the other forum has been established long enough to really make you wonder how this could have happened; one would think there were enough experienced people around as members there to read the red flags a lot sooner. (Buyer beware!).

The scammer’s offer on the other forum kicks off a 17-page thread that starts June 10 – when the scammer himself had just joined the forum the previous month. The scammer asks for half the money in advance, the remaining half when the work is done, and promises top results for keywords in Google. The price quoted for the work is under $150 – ridiculously low for this kind of service, especially since he’s claiming to be totally white hat and promising results within four to eight weeks. Besides, nobody can guarantee their clients the top spot in Google.

Nevertheless, the scammer gets some interest and sign-ups. By the third page of the thread, some are asking for proof of the scammer’s work and want to know what kind of link building he does. He apparently sends proof in private messages, and addresses other questions. By page seven, though, there are signs of discontent. We’re now up to July 4, and one of his earliest customers is asking if their report has been sent out yet. The scammer reminds users to be patient; reports are monthly, and it hasn’t quite been a month yet.

By page eight of the thread – around July 11, or about a month in — the scammer’s customers are definitely starting to get restless. Several note that they haven’t seen any movement or results for their websites, and are wondering if anyone else has. Yet some are still buying the package he’s offering. On page nine, just a day or two later, with lots of people asking for a report, the scammer seems to have gone silent, at least temporarily.

By this time, almost everyone is noticing little or no movement on the keywords for which they signed up – and what little movement they do see could be due to efforts other than the scammer’s. An example post: “Now, only 2 of my 20 keywords are in the top 1000 (not 100, 1000). Meanwhile, keywords that I have been working on myself have made good moves into the top 100 in the same period of time (similar competitiveness too).”

So the scammer begins his stalling and delaying tactics, trying to avoid sending out any reports. On page ten of the thread, one of the posters notes that he did research on the company before signing up, and found a YouTube testimonial for the services. He was reassured – until he found the person who did the testimonial on Fiverr. Fiverr, in case you aren’t familiar with it, is an Israeli-based company that offers an online marketplace where users can sell their services for $5, sometimes with add-ons. Often, the service involves producing a short video and sending it to the buyer. The Fiverr gig for the person who gave the scammer a YouTube testimonial was…doing a video testimonial. Yeah, that’s at least a little suspicious.

Next, one forum poster notes that the scammer hasn’t even optimized his own website to appear in the top 10 pages of Google for the keyword “SEO.” The forum’s members are starting to notice other discrepancies between the scammer’s claims and what they’ve been able to find out about him publicly, as well – such as his claim of 10 years of SEO experience, and the fact that his business website was registered in May of 2012 (coincidentally, the same month he registered as a member for that forum). Still, the scammer manages to explain these discrepancies away.

By page 11 – July 23 – forum members are asking for refunds. In fact, some members have been asking for refunds for a week and haven’t gotten them yet. Also, another fake testimonial from a different Fiverr user got posted and identified.

By page 12 – July 28 — the scammer is starting to send a few refunds here and there. Some of them are in the form of echecks that supposedly take three to five days to clear. On this page, one of the forum members notes his experience with echecks: “an echeck refund is used as a refund because there is no money in a seller’s PayPal account (been withdrawn), or it’s used to buy time.” And in fact, echecks are not clearing in this situation.

By the bottom of this page, forum members are starting to hunt down information about the scammer and noting discrepancies in his PayPal account and his Whois for his business website. By August 1 (page 13), it’s become obvious to everyone that this was a scam. One poster reports that the scammer has even taken down his own website, and his e-mail doesn’t work anymore. By the bottom of page 13, someone has found a post related to the scammer on another forum; apparently, he’s been conning people since 2009 at least.

But wait, it gets better. By August 2, someone turns up an article about the scammer pleading guilty to four counts of extortion and receiving a suspended sentence. And eventually, it appears that he returns to the forum – under a different name, with a different offer.

What can you learn from this? Thoroughly investigate any claims or offers. Don’t just listen to testimonials; get references. Be very suspicious if and when the information you’re getting doesn’t hold together. And for any deal, not just SEO, if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is just that. Good luck!

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Terri

The post Beware of SEO Scammers appeared first on SEO Chat.

This topic came up in SEO Chat’s forums recently; you can check out the thread yourself. Feel free to join the conversation, too. The original poster understands why one would want to get back links, but seemed unclear as to why any website would want to GIVE them. He understands that the most valuable back links come from quality websites in the same field – those with lots of good link, traffic, and content. But why, he wondered, would such a website link to a possibly lower-quality website – especially if they’re in the same field, and therefore likely to be competitors?

Fortunately Belfast, one of our newer but fairly experienced members, was able to offer some enlightenment. The trick is to not think in shallow terms when it comes to SEO. You need to put yourself in the shoes of the other website owner and think about what they might need. How does what you sell, or the information on your website, fill their needs?

Say you’ve built an awesome website, “with a great feature/tool/picture/diagram/authority type info,” Belfast observes. Visitors to the website from which you hope to win a link would probably be glad to give it, because “it would potentially help provide their users with a better experience – they get all they want from one ‘hub.’”

If you hope to win a link from such a comprehensive website, and yours isn’t quite as complete, see if you have something that fills in some gaps for them. To use another example from Belfast, say you’re an ice cream manufacturer in England. Would an ice cream manufacturer in Ireland be willing to link to your website? Sure, if there’s a need for it – perhaps to answer a frequently-asked question about shipping or supplying ice cream elsewhere.

Somewhat related to this point, it helps to consider the geographic location of the business. Just because a company has a website doesn’t mean they’re absolutely trying to serve a global business. If you have a lawn care business on the east coast of the United States, you’re not really competing with lawn care businesses on the west coast, even though you’re in the same field. This presents you with another possibility for earning back links.

Also, it’s entirely possible to get links from websites Google would consider to be in the same field as yours, but that aren’t directly competing with you. Belfast used an example in the motorcycle business. Say you run a business that sells new motorcycles, and you’re looking for a back link. Belfast suggested that you consider looking for sites that sell motorcycle spares (or perhaps other motorcycle parts). You might also consider businesses that repair motorcycles or do custom paint jobs for the vehicles.

Fundamentally, though, as Belfast points out, “there has to be a ‘need’ for them to link.” Maybe you have the best or most entertaining “something” that they want to share with their audience, or you have the authority and information that supports their message, or any one of a number of reasons. You know best what you can offer; if you want to earn back links, you need to find websites that need what you can offer to them and their visitors. So put yourself in THEIR shoes, think like THEIR customers, and then make your pitch. Good luck!

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Terri

The post Why Should I Give You a Link? appeared first on SEO Chat.

Yes, it’s still possible to build effective links, but you can’t use the old techniques and expect to see lasting results. Link builders need a stronger knowledge base. Julie Joyce wrote an incredibly detailed article for Search Engine Land detailing more than 50 things that every link builder needs to know. I can’t list all of them here, so I recommend that you check it out. I’ll touch on some of the highlights here.

Perhaps the simplest thing a link builder should know is why links matter in the first place. Yes, there’s the old explanation of how a link equals a vote in Google’s eyes, but nowadays it’s much more complicated. Not all links are created equal; not all links will give you the kind of “link juice” you’re looking for. A link builder needs to understand these subtleties.

Speaking of “link juice,” a link builder needs to understand how it works. Link juice is the term used for the flow of link value passed along from one web page to the page to which it’s linking. All other things being equal, a page with fewer outgoing links passes more link juice per link than a page with more outgoing links. Online, of course, all other things are rarely equal; some web pages may start with more value to pass along, while some pages nofollow certain links, and so forth.

That’s another thing every link builder needs to know: what “nofollow” means, and how to spot a “nofollowed” link. A “nofollowed” link is a link with a little extra code attached to it that Google reads, telling the search engine that that particular link should not count as a “vote” for the site to which it’s linking. Nofollowed links earn no link juice for the web page to which they point. Joyce notes that there are plug-ins that highlight nofollowed links, but adds that “You can also just look at the code.” If you see a rel=”nofollow” on a link, it’s nofollowed.

Another thing every link builder needs to know how to do is use and understand an analytics program. Google offers one for free; you can find many other packages as well. A good analytics program will give you lots of useful information, such as where your traffic is coming from. This can help you determine which of your links are helping you most.

Closely related to this point, if you build links, you need to know how to use Google’s Webmaster Tools. That’s especially true if you get any traffic from Google. Joyce recommends it as your first stop for troubleshooting. “They alert you to problems with your site, allow you to run crawl checks, see your new links, look at your queries, and do about a ton of other things,” she explained.

I hope to cover more important things you should know if you’re building links in another post. What do you think every link builder should know or understand? Feel free to include it in the comments.  

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Terri

The post Link Building: What You Should Know appeared first on SEO Chat.

I found these and other amazing ideas for link building on Search Engine Journal. I’d like to tip my hat to Sujan Patel, who has come up with one of the most comprehensive lists of link building tips I’ve ever seen – and after well over a decade covering the Internet, I’ve seen a lot of these lists. If you ever find yourself at a loss as to how you can get more links to your website, just go through this list; you’re bound to find something you haven’t tried yet.

Patel wrote the list in response to complaints he kept hearing that link building has gotten so hard now. Well, yeah, with Penguin on the prowl, perhaps you can’t build links the way you used to. But that doesn’t mean it’s actually gotten hard to do. In fact, in this piece I’m only going to focus on the first set of techniques he mentions, all of which you can do without really leaving your own website.

So you feel odd getting on social sites to share your blog posts. No problem. Why not get your readers to do it for you? Just add social sharing tools to your blog posts. Make it easy for your readers, and they’ll happily oblige. You can even make this easy on yourself by using a plug-in, such as Digg Digg or TweetMEME.

Once you’ve added those social sharing tools, you can take things one step further. In addition to the gentle nudge of putting the tools in place, go ahead and directly ask your readers to share your post, with a call to action at the end. Patel notes that this is an easy way to significantly boost social sharing. It could be as simple as writing “Did you like what you’ve read? Tell your friends about it!”

If you write for a loyal audience that keeps coming back (or would like to build one), you should launch an RSS feed. Your readers will appreciate being informed whenever you publish a new post. Set it up right, and your readers will be even more likely to share your posts with their friends on social networks, thus building more links to your site.

Once you’ve set up that RSS feed, you might want to encourage more sign-ups. But how? You’ll need to venture off your site just long enough to find a directory – not just any directory, mind you, but a respected one that covers your industry. Once you do, you can submit the link for your feed to that directory. Doing this may not only boost your ranking in Google; it can get you a wider audience.

Here’s a simple link building tip that’s way too easy to forget: linking internally to other pages on your website. If your blog post focuses on a certain topic, chances are you’ve written other posts that focus on the same or related topics. (See what I did there?) Link to those other posts within your current one, and you give your readers a reason to stay on your website and keep interacting with your content.

If you’re already publishing regular content on your website (or even if you’re not), have you considered creating an email newsletter? Readers will share newsletters with their friends, as long as they feature helpful content. I know I don’t need to tell you to include links back to your website in the newsletter! As readers share the newsletter, you’ll gain even more links back to your site.

My final two tips are so website-based and simple, at least in principle, that it’s amazing more sites don’t do them. Make sure the search engines can easily crawl and navigate your website! That may mean reverting to text-based navigation links rather than using graphic navigation elements. At the very least, if there are issues with your site’s navigation when a search engine looks at it, you need to get them resolved. As Patel notes, “Resolving these problems automatically results in more backlinks.”

In order for a search engine to index your site’s pages, they must be able to crawl and navigate your website’s links – which brings me to my last tip. Make sure ALL of your site links can be spidered, not just the ones used for navigation on your site menus. Patel explained that “on-page issues (including the improper use of JavaScript scrips or Flash files) can limit the search engines’ ability to index your links.” Fix these problems to improve your site’s link equity.

Link building doesn’t need to be painful or a major struggle. You’ll probably want to use many more techniques, but these should get you off to a good start. So put your site’s best foot forward and get busy. Good luck!

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Terri

The post Link Building For Introverts appeared first on SEO Chat.

Let’s start by considering why reciprocal links got a bad reputation. Way back before Google’s algorithm became so sophisticated, it only considered a site’s incoming links from other sites in rating quality and relevance. A link to another site was a “vote” for that site. When SEOs and site owners realized that they could simply “trade” votes with reciprocal links and improve each other’s standing in the SERPs, reciprocal links became very common.

Not long after that, such links began to be abused. Link farms started cropping up. Some black hat SEOs even built three-way link schemes to hide the quantity of reciprocal links they used to game the system. It didn’t take too long for Google to get wise, of course, and now reciprocal links as a rule don’t count much, if at all, in the way of raising your site’s ranking.

Given this background, you probably should not use reciprocal links just for raising your Google rank. It’s a waste of time. Some SEOs even seem to think that Google’s algorithms include some kind of percentage trigger that warns them a site is spammy if its link profile includes a lot of reciprocal links (more on that in a moment). This doesn’t mean that such links are useless, however.

Yeah, I know; I thought there was no point to reciprocal links myself, and that they could even be dangerous, until I read Eric Ward’s article on the subject. Granted, it’s a two-year-old piece, but I believe he makes valid points that hold up well even today. At the root of his argument is the implication that there are reasons other than sheer ranking to use reciprocal links – and that Google understands this.

Ward’s example will drive you batty – literally. He holds up a website that ranks quite high in its niche, the Southeastern Bat Diversity Network. Their goal is to “conserve bats and their habitats in southeastern North America through collaborative research, education, and management.” With what I’ve read about white-nose syndrome, this seems especially urgent, and not just because Halloween is right around the corner. It’s not the bats he wants you to look at, however (even though they’re kind of cute); it’s the site’s link profile.

“If you take a look at other top sites within this subject area,” Ward explains, “you start to notice…[they] have a tendency to link back and forth to all the other sites devoted to bats…The reciprocal linking percentage across the top five sites is over 80%, and for the top three, it’s 100%.” This must sound like an incredible contradiction to those SEOs who think reciprocal linking is either worthless or actually harmful to your search engine ranking! What is going on here?

Bats, it turns out, are a niche subject. Just ask any vampire. Seriously, though, because of the nature of the topic, any visitor to a website about bats is likely to be interested in any other website about bats. Bat lovers aren’t looking to buy bats; they want information. As Ward notes, “this reciprocity percentage is perfectly natural, believable, and in no way an attempt to fool any algorithm or improve rank. These sites link to each other because they share the same passion for a very specific topic and want to make sure those people visiting and reading their content find other sites about the same topic.”

That last point bears repeating. These sites are not using reciprocal links to fool the algorithm and attempt to gain a higher ranking in Google. They’re linking to each other because they know their visitors would benefit from seeing other sites that cover the same topic! And Google seems to understand this, since the SBDN and other sites Ward named don’t seem to be getting penalized for their reciprocal links.

So where did the idea that Google might be using reciprocal links as an indicator for spammy websites come from? Well, what is normal behavior for a niche-focused, content-based website isn’t exactly normal for a more broadly focused e-commerce website. Ward uses websites that sell NFL jerseys for his example in this case. In that category, literally hundreds of sites fight for the top spots, and the same reciprocal link profile that looks normal for the bat sites looks extremely spammy for the NFL jersey sites. In fact, he’d consider 80% reciprocal links among several website with this focus to strongly indicate that they were all owned by the same person.

Please note that the key difference between the bat sites and the NFL jersey sites in the examples are their subject matter. That’s what makes one link profile normal and natural and the other suspicious. You just wouldn’t expect a set of websites devoted to selling NFL jerseys to reciprocally link to each other to that degree UNLESS they were all owned by the same person.

A reader of Ward’s article weighed in with a comment wondering whether Googlebot can “consistently and accurately tell the difference between…a ‘perfectly normal’ high reciprocity ratio site” and one where a high percentage of reciprocal links indicates something more suspicious. I imagine Google handles this the way they handle most things: with special algorithms backed up by human eyes in certain cases. To oversimplify, I’d think simply counting the number of sites or hits that are relevant for “bats” (the animal) as opposed to “NFL jerseys” might give them a clue. Believe it or not, despite “bats” being one word and “NFL jerseys” being two words, Google delivers nearly twice as many hits for the latter as for the former. If someone who put relatively little thought into how to tell the difference between a niche topic and one with broader appeal could figure that much out, imagine how sophisticated Google’s approach to this must be by now.    

What does all this mean for you? If you’re trying to use reciprocal links in any kind of unnatural way to raise your rankings, you should stop. Don’t even consider it; Google will probably catch you. But if reciprocal links happen to make sense in your case – if your niche is such that your visitors will truly benefit from  knowing about the other websites with which you’re exchanging links – you don’t need to fear that Google will smear your site with the spam brush. Good luck!

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Terri

The post When to Use Reciprocal Links appeared first on SEO Chat.

Julie Joyce, writing for Search Engine Journal, offered a couple of scenarios to illustrate this point. Say you’re going on vacation and looking for a bed-and-breakfast in which to stay. If you’re as sophisticated as most searchers today, you’ve learned that the first listing you hit didn’t necessarily get there because it’s the best of the lot. So you click around for some reviews, perhaps at sites such as Yelp. You find a place with mostly positive reviews and relatively few negative reviews, so you book your stay.

In our example, you thoroughly enjoy yourself. The food is yummy, your room is comfortable and home-like, the service is friendly and efficient, and the owner points you to some sightseeing gems you might have missed otherwise. You’re so delighted that you write a glowing review in your blog, and link to the bed-and-breakfast’s web page from your post.

What just happened? The business certainly didn’t ask you for a link, but you gave it one anyway. As Joyce puts it, “They’ve done nothing but provide good service in order to get positive mentions, which led me to them, which led them to a link.”

There’s a deeper message here. You will probably get links of one kind or another whether you want them or not, based on the kinds of relationships you have with your customers. You want those links to reflect positive relationships. After all, when was the last time you decided to patronize a business because you saw that it had more NEGATIVE reviews than positive ones?

But what can you do if you get negative reviews? Well, if you hear about them, you can actually become proactive and fix whatever problems the customer raised. You’ll be surprised at how effective this can be. I’ll talk about that more in a bit, but first, let’s look at how you can get more active online.

You probably have profiles on several social networks. If you are going to use social media, you need to be willing to keep your pages updated regularly. If a visitor shows up and sees that you haven’t posted for months, they may not take you or your business seriously. So be prepared to put in a little time.

That said, Joyce recommends listing your business on six social media sites, at least as you’re starting to build your online presence. These are Google Places, Bing Local, Foursquare, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Give yourself some time to get a handle on how the sites work, how much activity each site typically expects (they’re all different), and so forth.

So that’s the first step to building your company’s social presence online. The second step is to actually see what people are saying about your business, and respond to it. Fortunately, that’s not as hard as it sounds. You don’t need to track down every blog and review site that mentions your company; there are automated tools that will do that for you. Google Alerts is just one example, but there are others.

Now, how do you respond to what people say about your company? If it’s negative, start by taking a few deep breaths. Don’t get defensive. You can actually turn a negative review around if you treat the poster with respect. Ask what happened, listen, find out what you can do to make amends, and then do it. This can go a long way.

Don’t believe me? Check out this survey summary. It explains that one-third of those surveyed who received a reply from a retailer after a negative holiday shopping experience actually took the negative review down and posted a positive one. How’s that for turning a frown upside down?

Don’t neglect to respond to positive reviews, either. A positive review is like a gift – and didn’t your mother teach you to respond to gifts with thank-you notes? They’re not outdated; in fact, in the age of the Internet, they can help build customer loyalty.

I’ve hardly mentioned link building in this entire piece, so you’re probably wondering where that comes in. It’s happening with everything you’re doing online. You’re not asking for links; you’re earning them. You’re not building links; you’re building relationships. The links are a natural side effect. This, rather than link dropping on someone’s blog, is the way you’re supposed to build links online.

Is it a lot of work? It can be. But it’s not optional any longer. How would you feel if a negative review of your business came up as one of the top ten results in Google for your name? At the very least, you’d be concerned about the customers you’re losing. And if you don’t address a negative review, it could start showing up in several places.

For example, Joyce mentioned posting a negative review of her former pediatrician in early December last year. “As of today, no one from the office has responded to my review. It’s the first one that pops up for them on Yelp, and it’s in the top 10 in Google for their name,” she observed. Furthermore, “They also have a Yellow Pages review ranked at number one in Google with both positive and negative reviews. Again, no responses to the reviews. Their Google Places listing is pulling in the Yellow Pages reviews, also. Bottom line: they’ve lost several chances to respond to both positive and negative input, which will get them nowhere with today’s focus on customer service and feedback.”
 
EGOL, one of the most respected members in the SEO Chat forums, regularly notes that behind every link is a person. If you want to build that link, you need to build a relationship with that person. At its best, that is what social media really is all about. Good luck!

Author information

Terri

The post Link Building is Relationship Building appeared first on SEO Chat.

Every copy writer dreams of those magic headlines, and the Internet is full of articles on how to achieve them. Rather than get deeply into the theory of what motivates us, I’m going to talk about a few things that seem to reliably pique a reader’s interest. You can use these ideas singly or in combination to really grab an audience.

Before you do, however, you need to keep two things in mind. First, when you write a headline, you’re making a promise. By the end of the article, you need to have delivered on that promise. If you haven’t, you’ve cheated your reader, and they won’t share your link – unless it’s to hold you up as an example of what NOT to do. It’s not a bad idea to write your article or at least an outline before you create your headline. For instance, I’m writing with an outline in front of me; my headline promised eleven tips for creating headlines that will make readers want to link to your headline, and you will have all eleven before I’m done. Simple, right?

Second, if you’ve read SEO Chat for a while, you know that I advocate maintaining your site’s focus and writing articles that are relevant to your niche (http://www.seochat.com/c/a/Website-Promotion-Help/Promote-Your-Website-in-the-Right-Niche/). Some of the ideas I’m going to mention might not seem particularly applicable to your niche. You can choose to not use that idea, or if you’re creative and don’t mind doing a little research, you can work on finding the tie-in to your niche.

Say you run a craft-focused website and you want to tie your headline (and article) into a celebrity. You don’t have to stick with Martha Stewart! Vanna White crochets, and has lent her name to several crochet books. But she’s just one example; there are many others, you’ll just have to work a little to find them. Got it? Good. Now with those details out of the way, let’s dive into some creative headline ideas.

Include a number. You clicked on this headline, right? More seriously, though, some sites take this trick to incredible levels. If you’ve ever visited Cracked.com, you’ll know exactly what I mean. (And if you haven’t, don’t do it while you’re working). “The 14 Most Unintentionally Terrifying Statues in the World.” “The Six Creepiest Things Hiding in Your DNA.” “The Six Weirdest Dangers of Space Travel.” Yep, those are all Cracked.com headlines. They’ve increased the impact by adding intensifiers: most, creepiest, weirdest, etc. Heck, these headlines are so compelling I may go back and read the articles after I finish writing this one.

Why does this technique work so well? Our minds seem to like lists; they help us classify, categorize, and group our knowledge so it’s organized and easy for us to remember. Personally, I think part of the attraction is that you know how much of a commitment you’re making before you start reading the article. I once read that the optimum number for this kind of headline is seven, but I’m not sure how much stock I put in that. You can try different numbers for various articles and track their performance if you like.

Make it surprising. One amazingly cool Cracked headline promised five amazing  things invented by Donald Duck. It delivered, too. Did you know that Danish inventor Karl Kroyer’s application for a patent on a method for raising a sunken ship was denied by the Dutch patent office because it appeared in a Donald Duck comic book 15 years before Kroyer’s application? True!

It’s pretty easy to see why this technique is so compelling. A reader’s immediate reaction is “You’ve got to be kidding,” quickly followed by “I’ve got to see this!” Keep in mind what I said earlier about a headline being a promise to your reader, and make sure you deliver. That point is especially important when you use this technique. If you do deliver, though, you can bet your reader will share the link. I first heard about the Donald Duck story from a friend on Facebook who linked to it.

Make it funny. Everyone likes to laugh, but comedy can be tricky, especially these days. You can go for something as simple as a play on words. For example, craft satire site Regretsy introduced one post with the headline “Little ‘Shop of Horrors.” It was about a vendor on Etsy selling digitally altered old-time photos. She used Photoshop to substitute purchasers’ faces into the photos – and she was particularly bad at it, at least for someone who was charging $35 a pop.

If you’ve heard of the musical “Little Shop of Horrors,” the headline is funny – and even if you haven’t, well, some of the images from the seller certainly evoked a shop full of horrors!

Make it controversial. A controversial headline pulls a reader in by grabbing them in the same way as a surprising one. “I can’t believe he just said that!” Of course, the reader has to click through to make sure you’re not kidding. If you’re serious about your headline – and stirring up a little controversy – then you’d better make sure you deliver on this promise. In other words, by the end of your article, your explanation of the “crazy” idea you stated in the headline needs to be enough to make the average reader give you the benefit of the doubt. You don’t need to have completely persuaded him or her, but you do need them to see that your viewpoint is reasonable.

If you follow SEO blogs, Michael Martinez, with his SEO Theory and Analysis blog, is a master of this form. When everyone was screaming about Google’s Panda, which supposedly caused many content farms to drop in the search engine’s rankings, Martinez wrote “Dear Google…THAT was a Content Farm Update?” And who could resist reading an article with that headline?

Make it urgent. Give the impression that your reader needs to know or do something right away, and they’ll almost HAVE to click through. Over on Web Hosters this week, we ran an article with the headline “New York Case Shows Dangers of Unprotected Wi-Fi.” It’s a decent headline, in that anyone who doesn’t use a password to protect their wireless network will probably feel a prickle on the back of his neck and click through just to find out what he’s risking.

You can do better than that, though. Say you’re writing an article on hurricane preparedness, and want to emphasize the need to put together supplies now rather than rushing out at the last minute. Here’s one possible headline: “Ten Things to Buy Now to Be Ready for Hurricane Season.” As you can see, this headline also uses a number. There’s no reason you can’t combine multiple techniques in one headline; The Onion does it all the time.

Make it useful. Show your readers how to do something, and they’ll come back for more as long as you steer them right. What they find useful will very much depend on the kind of website you’re running and the niche you’ve staked out for yourself. It could be anything, as long as the article delivers on the promise you made in the headline. These headlines often start with the phrase “how to.”

As one example of this, ASP.Free ran an article this week with the headline “How to Install Silverlight for Windows Phone.” It’s aimed squarely at Silverlight developers who want to create applications for the Windows Phone 7 platform. That’s a growing group these days.

Tie it to current events. You can write a headline that ties into local, national, or even international events, as long as your target audience actually cares about the topic. If your target audience is senior citizens living in your area, you probably shouldn’t be writing an article about the new skateboard park opening up three states over. Okay, that may be an oversimplification, but you get my point.

A word of warning: writing about current events, and creating a good headline, can be as touchy as writing good comedy or good controversy. This is especially true when you’re writing about a disaster or tragedy. You don’t want to look insensitive or as if you’re profiting from someone else’s misfortune. In this case, you might want to aim at your audience’s natural desire to help. For example, if you do the proper research for an article with the headline “Ten Ways You Can Help the Disaster Victims in Japan” that also includes links and contact information for all of the proper organizations, you’re in the clear – as long as your own organization won’t be directly making a profit from any of the ways you mention.

Tie it to an important anniversary. Google does this regularly with its Google Doodles. You can do it with your headlines. It can even be a good way to add somewhat evergreen content. For example, if your website celebrates inventors and tinkerers, you could schedule an article on Thomas Edison to run on February 11, his birthday – or on October 22, the anniversary of his first successful light bulb trial.

With this kind of headline, you just need to mention the event you’re celebrating, though you can be clever if you’ll still get the point across. “Thomas Edison Enlightened the World 232 Years Ago Today” could work, for example.

Tie it to a holiday. In some sense, this is a variation of the tip I mentioned above. Make sure you know the holiday well and how your target audience observes it, as these can be a sensitive issue. I grew up non-observant Jewish, so you won’t see me writing about Ramadan without a lot of research beforehand (which would include talking to some Muslim friends). Even so, you can go a little against the obvious emotional approach if it fits the actual reason for the holiday.

For example, here in the U.S., Memorial Day is celebrated as the unofficial start of summer, with picnics, barbecues, parades, and more. It’s a day off from work. But it’s called Memorial Day because it was set aside to remember the brave men and women who gave their lives for us in wartime. “Remember Their Sacrifices on Memorial Day” may sound like a bit of a cliché as a headline, but with the right piece, it could work.

Tie it to a celebrity. People seem to love reading about celebrities. It hardly makes a difference if they’re doing something wonderful (like the royal wedding in the UK) or making fools of themselves (like Charlie Sheen). In fact, sometimes the more crazy stuff they do, the more people want to read about them, at least within certain limits.

All you need to do is find a way to tie the celebrity into your website’s niche. I did it for SEO Chat with Charlie Sheen (http://www.seochat.com/c/a/Search-Engine-Optimization-Help/Beat-Charlie-Sheen-at-SEO/). To be honest, I was hardly the only person who used Sheen’s outrageous behavior to illustrate what you should and shouldn’t do to promote your website. Think about your niche, do a little celebrity research, and you’ll find your own connection around which to build an article and a headline.

Make it personal. To use this technique, you really need to know your audience, and hit them where they live. In some cases, your best bet is to combine it with other techniques. Consider how Martinez combines the personal and the controversial in this headline: “Why Your Quality Content Sucks.” It’s a challenge, and it’s personal; he didn’t say “Why Most Internet Content Sucks.” Instead, he aimed it directly at the reader. You feel almost compelled to click through, just to see what he’s talking about and whether it’s really aimed at you.

You can make it personal without offending your readers if you want. How about an article titled “Why You’re at Risk for a Stroke – and What You Can Do About it” is a good headline for a medical or wellness website, especially one aimed at seniors. Know what matters to your readers, write to it in a way they can relate to, add a compelling headline, and the links will follow. Good luck! 

Author information

Terri

The post Eleven Link Building Tips for Headlines appeared first on SEO Chat.

The most common solution for website owners in regard to link building is to hire either an SEO company or a link builder to do the job. This approach might work, provided the techniques and methods implemented are in accordance with Google search quality guidelines. Those techniques will also work provided the links built count not only on the basis of quantity, but quality and relevance as well.

The down side is that hiring SEO companies and link builders can be a very expensive investment for a beginning webmaster who does not yet have a positive return on the online business. It can also be risky, because a lot of SEOs and link builders practice techniques which are in violation of Google quality guidelines. As a result, your site can be penalized if it gets involved in one of these link schemes (http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=66356).

This article will list the best practices for “do-it-yourself” link building techniques, which can help your site rankings in the search engines (particularly in Google). This way, you will not only learn to build links yourself, but be actively involved in the online community/niche where your website belongs.

Remember that success using these techniques is highly dependent upon what you are doing on your website. You cannot expect a link from a reputable website with authority if all they find on your website is crappy content and cluttered ads. Remember: content is still king. Let’s get started.

Link Building Tip #1: Let Them Know That You Have Quality Content to Offer

If your site is extremely new and getting only a few visitors, it would not make sense to rely on link baiting techniques. This technique is only effective if your website already receives a lot of visitors coming from other sources.

What would make sense is to let your community know that you have quality content to offer. Why? Even sites with authority that are trusted by Google are not complete; they still need improvement, particularly when it comes to content. To do this, follow the steps below.

1. Wait until you have at least 30 or more pieces of content. Fifty high quality/originally written articles is a good start to exposing your site to your related niche. The content must meet the following specifications:

• Substantial and detailed. You need to impress upon them that you have the details, and not just content with one or two paragraphs.
  
• Useful tutorials and guides that are rare to find in authority websites. You can search websites that are related to your niche which have authority and high rankings in Google. Examine these website thoroughly for portions (i.e. topics) that are in need of content and details.

2. Show your background and history in your website’s “about” page. It helps your visitors to get to know you better and begin to trust you sooner. Show your pictures and biography. If your website is about car repairs and you are a certified car technician by profession, you can say this in your bio and provide a link to the organizations that grant your certifications.

3. Make sure that your website is easy to navigate and professional-looking. Avoid cluttering your website with too many ads; it is a big turn-off, and has an adverse impact on your professionalism. I recommend you hold off on ads until the later stages, when you are already earning a lot of links and receiving a lot of visitors. For now, I recommend you turn them off.

4. Avoid having a link page with links pointing to nonsense, spammy and unrelated websites. It is much better to have no link page at all. You need to convey a professional image to other website owners in your related niche, which you will invite to your website later.

5. Include your contact information. Some people might be willing to contact you in person. So a phone number, contact form or even an email address on your website will be useful. Avoid listing just the email address and no official business address. They need to know that you are for real.

6. Get a list of reputable, related and authoritative websites in your niche. You can use the following tools:

• Google search engine – Try searching for your targeted keyword, or even the most relevant keyword that describes your website content. Get the domain names and contact information for the top 20 websites.
  
• DMOZ – Try searching for your targeted keyword in the DMOZ search box. Select only those websites that are updated, and include both contact information and quality content. Sometimes DMOZ is not updated at all, and has a tendency to list dead sites.
  
• Technorati – If your site is a blog, you can use the Technorati blog directory (http://technorati.com/blogs/directory/)to look for relevant blogs with high authority.

7. Now that you have a list, it is time to do your homework. Go through each website and look for opportunities for them to link to you.

Case Example 1: Suppose you are a software engineer developing an open source tool for testing printed circuit boards. Your software only runs in Ubuntu/Linux. This means your website is highly relevant to Ubuntu applications. You look for linking opportunities in Ubuntu.com and find this page: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/UbuntuEngineering. You then contact the editor in charge of that documentation and request that your application be added. Of course, your site will be added right away, because you worked hard for your website content and explained your developed software that will run on Ubuntu in a detailed manner.

Case Example 2: Codex-m developed a useful piece of website traffic monitoring software in MS Excel that will help webmasters detect out-of-control situations in their website traffic using Google Analytics data. The application is released as open source, and everybody can use it.

Codex-m decides to contact the official Google Analytics website and suggests adding the application and making it available to its users. The application is then added to its gallery, as shown here: http://www.google.com/analytics/apps/about?app_id=1080001

Case Example 3: You are an expert in Adobe Photoshop and you decide to write all your tips in a blog. You then decide to go to the Adobe Photoshop official website and examine it for linking opportunities. You land on their community page, http://www.adobe.com/community/publishing/download.html, where they allow users to submit tips. You decide to write a guest post and ad a link to your blog, like the one shown here: http://kb2.adobe.com/community/publishing/895/cpsid_89560.html

You might notice that if your website has no value or less value to offer, you will find it hard to execute this tip to get some links. Ensure that your site has some value to offer before you ask reputable websites to link to you.

Clever Reciprocal Link Exchanges

This does not mean you will trick users or search engines. Reciprocal link exchange is not always bad at all; it is “excessive” reciprocal link exchanges which are not advisable. Here is a scenario where you can cleverly take advantage of reciprocal link exchange. In one of your quality posts, you have explained something in detail, but not as well as it is explained on site X, so you decide to just put a link to website X, as it is much better explained in detail.

You then proceed to finish your content and publish it. Next, you contact the owner of website X and thank him/her for a much better explanation in one of the articles on that site, which you linked to. Both of you are experts in your niche, so invite him to check out your blog; maybe he can also link to you. Gratitude begets generosity, so it is highly possible that he/she will link to you also.

Link Building Tip #2: Get Attention from New Products or Services by Doing an Expert Review

One of the easiest ways to get links yourself is to simply search for new products or services released on the Internet and take the opportunity to write a detailed review of the services. Of course, you need to impress them, so make sure you only publish reviews of products that you find yourself happy using.  Here is how you do it.

Say that your website is about mathematics, and you publish your own mathematical proofs of numerous theorems, which users look for as references in their academic studies. At first, you find it very difficult to write mathematical formulas, because they’re not properly rendered on the web page. You search the Internet and you find a newly released product about writing mathematical formulas that is 100% compatible with HTML.

You then decide to purchase it and use it for an entire week. You are happy with the product, because it helps make your job easier and very productive. You then write a review about the product in detail. You discuss the functionality offered and how the product helped you save a lot of time writing difficult formulas. You also mention the price (perhaps comparing it to other products in the niche and whether it is a good value). Of course  you talk about what "edge" the product has over other products  you have tested. 

When you publish it, leave it for a while. Ninety percent of the time the marketing departments of the company that manufactured the product are searching for happy users; with the use of Google, they might discover your review.

What happens next? Most of the time, they will thank you for the review and decide to publish it on their company home page or other prominent pages of their website, linking back to your site. Or even better,  they may make you their expert user, which allows you to submit some guest posts containing tips on how to use their product. You can always put a link to your website whenever you need to substantiate that your website content has the answer. When it is edited by them, they always allow your links because it is useful in a relevant context; therefore, the link will be editorially given.

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CodexM

The post Link Building Tips and Tricks appeared first on SEO Chat.