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By Kalena Jordan in Featured

link building strategies

This is a summary of the presentation given by Ian McAnerin, CEO of McAnerin International Inc. at SMX Melbourne earlier this month about how to design a bullet proof link building campaign.

Link History

Twelve years ago, pre-Gooogle, search engines just analyzed content in order to rank sites, says Ian. Linking wasn’t part of the ranking algorithm. Google put paid to that by making links part of the equation. Suddenly, SEO became a lot more difficult.

Ian explained Term Vector Analysis (TVA)  and Citation Analysis and how they influenced the concept of links. TVA is how keywords appear on a page (relevance). Citation Analysis is the influence of keywords on a page (authority). Google was built by students who were using citation analysis on a daily basis.  Keyword density isn’t used by search engines. However, it is kinda similar to term vector analysis, which IS used by search engines.

Every web page stored in Google has a term profile containing number of times a keyword is used, density, proximity, position etc. Google then looks for clusters of terms that appear in proximity to the search phrase and finds the Representative Average to display in the SERPs. The process of TVA is excellent at figuring out informational pages such as Wikipedia pages.

The problem is that TVA can’t give search engines the entire picture – it’s difficult for them to tell the difference between spam and awesomeness.  This is how search engines worked up until Google. Then Google came along and threw links into the equation. The more links you had to the page, the higher rank you would have in the SERPs.

Typically, the better writing, the worse the SEO, because good writers use flowery, descriptive language.

Types of Links

Now, to rank, you need three kinds of links:

1) Authority (aged)

2) Relevance (current)

3) Buzz (social)

So you need a combination of old and new links. Therefore you need to be constantly building links!

Stinking Linking – reference to articles by Mike Grehan about the prob with aged domains and links.

Link Quality

Link page quality is measured by:

  • PageRank of the page
  • cached
  • nofollow
  • number of other links on page
  • topic

Remember that it’s the PR of the PAGE that’s important, not the PR of the domain or main site. So if someone is offering you a link and bragging about having a PR4 on their home page, but your link is going to go on a inner page that has PR0, there’s no value there.

Page sculpting is not as influential now. No point no-following all your links on a page as they all leak PR anyway.

Sources of Links:

  • Seeds – Yahoo, DMOZ
  • Directories and connections
  • competitors (meet then beat)
  • articles and blog posts
  • widgets
  • reviews
  • case studies
  • contests and publicity
  • profiles
  • social media
  • internal linking campaign
  • link reclamation
  • pick up the phone!

Ian suggests starting any link campaign with your own site. Make sure you are cross linking internal pages. Then go and do link reclamation – check your 404s in Webmaster Tools to see if anyone is linking in to pages that no longer exist and ask them to update.

As an idea to attract links, Ian suggests holding a contest e.g. school laptop giveaway – put the rules of the contest on your web site and then the school / parents etc link to your web page for the rules.

Anchor text is virtual content. Rule of thumb is, if you wouldn’t spam your web site with the same keyword phrase, don’t do the same with your link building. Mix and match the anchor text linking to your pages and ask people linking to you to do the same.

Deep links are the best links. Don’t ask everyone to link to your home page! You’ll get better crawls and better rankings and your audience gets a higher quality experience if you inner pages are well-linked. Plus the crawler starts at inner pages that it might have missed before.

Tools for Link Building:

Link Don’ts:

  • Use Free For All (FFA) links
  • Off topic links
  • Non-editorial
  • Obviously purchased links

By Enzo F. Cesario in Featured

twitterTwitter’s strengths as a messaging service come from the fact that the messages are short, and the service is easy to use. If someone can type within the character limit and handle a few basic concepts, Twitter is actually easier to use than many instant-messaging clients, and doesn’t even require an install on a computer.

An example of these basic concepts is the retweet, which is sending a tweet one likes or approves of to her list of followers. Retweets account for a lot of Twitter traffic, and form a major part of the site’s ability to promote viral content. If a retweet gathers enough steam, it can make the rounds of the entire web in a matter of minutes.

So how exactly does this work? The answer lies in the concept of overlapping spheres. Consider a Venn diagram, where two or more circles represent certain spheres of influence, and the overlap describes a mutual sphere. In this case, the overlap is the retweet, and the spheres represent the followers of the re-tweeter, and the followers of his followers.

Different Interests and Common Ground

The idea takes advantage of the sheer diversity of interests on the web. The idea of the polymath or Renaissance man – which is to say the person who displays interest and skills in many fields – is returning to the world now that people can rapidly research all manner of topics.

By Sue Schlaiffer in Featured

emailmktgToday’s Internet marketing atmosphere is plagued with email spam that doesn’t seem to stop as unethical spammers just hammer our email boxes with multiple offers for prescription drugs and other more intimate products.

Although spam attacks are annoying, it is important to keep your marketing reputation intact with quality email content sent only to your subscribers after receiving a double opt-in consent for your information.

Your focus is definitely to build a loyal, responsive list of subscribers willing to receive your emails and the safest way to build that list is with the double opt-in process.

In your rush to get your Internet marketing business going without a list, you might mistakenly try some shortcuts that will get you branded as a spammer.

Buying a list, gathering email addresses from forums and social networking profiles or using email addresses your friend uses is a definite No-No. Even when those email addresses are effectively public knowledge, you do not have permission to invade their email with your message.

Building your list without being branded a spammer requires some specific processes that start with the double opt-in on your website or blog. When you offer your visitors something of value to them, like a short report with information or step-by-step instructions they need, they will give you their email address and name in order to download it, which builds your list.

If you’ve correctly set up your site, that email sign-up will automatically go to your autoresponder and initiate a sequence of emails that will require a click on a link to verify both the email address and the permission to market to them.

When that happens, your new subscriber is added to your database on the autoresponder and a link to download the product is sent to your new member, along with a welcome email.

Even if you have permission to send emails to your subscribers, do not forget your manners. Send welcome emails and ones thanking your subscribers for anything they do, like provide information to you or buy one of your products.

The double opt-in gets you permission to send marketing emails, but it will not keep your subscribers happy if you treat them as strangers. An unsubscribe click is all it takes to lose them forever.

To keep your subscribers happy why not use the holidays and send out an email with offers of a special, free gift and it’s download link. No hoops to jump through. Just a gift from you to them. Make sure it is valuable to both them and to your marketing campaign. Include genuine holiday wishes in the email.

Email campaigns where permission is first sought are very successful, and most successful Internet marketers have built lucrative businesses with it. Make all marketing methods work for you, and these could include offline methods too, by printing your webpage link on everything you distribute. It does not have to be a large advertisement, just a simple link to your site and maybe one line of text offering something free.

Your best asset when you are building your list is patience. It takes time to build a responsive list and shortcuts will not benefit you. Never send unsolicited emails, instead use the double opt-in process and you will be more successful.

For tons more list building tips and tricks to build your own SUPER TARGETED list of subscribers send for a free copy of my 8 part mini course, available at www.list-profits-formula.com Check it out now and get your free mini course today!

By Julie Ann Ross in Featured

geolocationOnline marketing works best in partnership with buzz worthy social promotions. The partnership between geolocation and social networking have had a positive impact on online marketing over the last couple years.

As search engines began to realize that a lot of search is local, sites like Google started focusing on local businesses. This has helped local business owners achieve higher rankings in search engines when users are in the same area as those businesses. Now social networks are taking their cue, and are focusing on geolocation, which helps local businesses boost their online marketing even more.

Location-based networks, such as Foursquare and Gowalla, are the leaders in this new online marketing social movement. Users “check in” to a location, telling their friends where they are. Businesses are taking advantage of geolocation by offering rewards programs to first-time visitors and loyal customers. Whether it’s freebies, giveaways, or discounts, the businesses who include geolocation in their online marketing are seeing a payoff.

Geolocation apps like Foursquare use GPS technology that has been built into our smartphones – iPhone, Android, Blackberry – and will allow users to check in to a location just by clicking a button, rather than entering the entire address by hand.

The great thing about geolocation is that it works for the typical customer, on the tool they carry with them everywhere. And as silly as it may seem, customers are eating it up, and enjoying the fun of geolocation. If they think it’s fun, they’ll participate. And if they participate, they’ll participate at your restaurant, store, or location.

Foursquare and Yelp, a restaurant review site, have even upped the ante by giving titles – mayor, duke, duchess – for repeat visitors. People go back to their favorite locations to earn that title. Imagine people coming to your restaurant again and again, just to earn a title someone else created.

Most recently, Facebook got into the act, offering Facebook Places as a tool to compete with Foursquare and Gowalla. Now, the largest social network in the world makes it possible for your customers to tell all their friends where they are, doing your online marketing for you.

Now, for good or bad, your online marketing is being taken out of your hands, and put into the hands of your customers. And because your customers’ friends trust them more than they trust any marketing you could ever do, the friends will want to try the places they keep hearing about – the places your customers keep visiting over and over, in order to win titles and rewards.

The net result of this new online marketing tool is lower marketing costs and higher profits. But only if you take advantage of it. Unique ideas on how you can launch social media marketing strategy for your company can be found here.

Rostin Ventures online marketing services include social media marketing, search engine optimization, and online reputation management. Local SEO services of geolocation marketing through social media, provides for higher search engine ranking within local search of business listings. Get listed in local search and found by consumers looking for your product and services at www.rostinventures.com.

By Shirley Crichton in Featured

mojoEvery internet marketer has them, those times (days even) when things just aren’t flowing the way you would like them to and you get to the point of wondering whatever possessed you to think that you could create a successful online marketing business?

How can it be that a simple task on your computer, which yesterday you did easily, without thinking twice about it, today just doesn’t work?

Or times like this morning when I sat down to do an apparently straightforward task which I thought would take about ten minutes. An hour later, it still wasn’t finished.

The little gremlin that disrupts my system had come out to play. I followed the stated procedure and then instead of everything being uploaded as I expected it to be, I was taken to a completely different page which had nothing to do with the process.

Thinking that, perhaps I had missed something in the instructions, I repeated the process a few times. Do you do that as well, think you’ve done it wrong when you don’t get the result you were expecting, but do it again anyway? Then I remembered Einstein’s definition of insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

Time to change tactics.

A new word, ‘mojo’, seems to have crept into our language recently. I first heard it when one of the X Factor judges told a contestant how great it was that he’d got his mojo back. Puzzled, I turned to Wikipedia and learned that it originally referred to a voodoo charm, but these days is used to mean a person’s self-confidence.

So when you’re feeling really frustrated with your computer because it keeps doing things you don’t want it to,or when you just can’t think of a word to write for the wonderful internet marketing article you were planning to create today, or you simply start convincing yourself that this whole online marketing business is obviously far too difficult for you, etc, etc, what can you do to get your mojo back?

Well, before succumbing to that increasing desire to lob your laptop out through the window, the first thing to do is to remove yourself from the offending equipment. Get up, walk about, do a few stretches, put the kettle on and make a drink. This will get your energy moving and change your focus.

Once you have done this, is the time to deliberately focus on why you actually did decide to start your online marketing business and remember what it is that you want your business to provide you with. Maybe it’s a new car, a holiday, treats for the family, an income to supplement your pension, the freedom of being your own boss or something else that really excites you.

It may be any or all of these or many other things and what is really helpful is to find pictures to represent these symbols of your internet marketing business success. Cut them out of magazines or download them from your computer. Then collect them together on a ‘vision board’, preferably for your office wall.

A pinboard is perfect for this and you can add to it whenever you find a picture of something that inspires you and you really want to have in your life. Looking at these images will constantly remind you of all the good things your business will create for you.

Focusing on these things and the benefits they can bring you, will quickly get you back into a more relaxed and productive state. You can then get back to work with renewed enthusiasm

Recently I came across a quote by Paul McCartney about how he and John Lennon used to write songs. Forget any fanciful notions about muses or messages for the world. What he said was “John and I literally used to sit down and say, ‘Now, let’s write a swimming pool.”

I’m just looking at the picture of a luxury cruise ship.

When I reach my next business target I’m going to book a cruise to Alaska on this ship. I am so excited at the prospect of viewing the spectacular scenery from our private balcony, trekking on glaciers and all the other delights on offer…….

What are you looking at?

Shirley Crichton is a UK information marketer, passionate about sharing what she has learned with people new to this often confusing and overwhelming business. .Do you want to learn more about getting your internet marketing business started and profitable? Claim your free 95-page report ‘Online Marketing Made Easy’ from www.ShirleysOnlineMarketing.com to give yourself a head start today.

By Tyrell Gray in Featured

marketingMorning is always my favorite part of the day. The world is just starting to wake up. The sun peeks through the windows and floods the home or office with rich warm light. The world is relaxed and the hustle and bustle of the day has yet to begin. These are the times I love to sit back and catch up on the news. I always told my friends they would know I had it made when I had the milk and the newspaper delivered to my home. The milk comes every Wednesday but the paper never shows up on my porch, its on my phone.

The advent of the newspaper was the beginning of a billion dollar industry that created some of the first millionaires in the United States, but those days are disappearing. Depending on the source it appears newspaper readership is down 25-40%! Almost all newspapers are losing clients except the Wall Street Journal who saw a small uptick to a little over 2 million viewers. The main reason the Wall Street Journal increased was due to the simple fact that they are one of the few papers charging for their online news publications. They now have over 400k online viewers (I am one of them).

The writing is on the wall and that the newspaper will soon be an item only viewed in museums. The advantages of the News Paper were numerous, but perhaps the biggest advantage they brought to their clients was the fact that they were literally going into customers’ homes everyday!

Think of the power you could have if you could get in front of millions of people everyday. The exciting news is: you can! With the advent of social media you have the ability to talk to your prospective clients every day. The main reason newspaper readership is down is because there is no need to buy a paper and read about news that happened 24 hours ago, or longer, when you can get real time news on multiple websites and social media platforms across the Internet. The world has evolved to the point that the faster you can get information the better off you are. Thus enters the RSS feed. RSS stands for Rich Site Summary. Although the development of RSS Feeds has had a somewhat troubled and often contentious start (see wikipedia for a detailed history), RSS Feeds have given people the opportunity to get information they desire delivered directly to them almost instantly.

An RSS Feed is simply a way for people to get access to any content you post without those people having to go to your site everyday. This gives people the ability to request information from multiple sites and have it all delivered to one convenient location via a Feed Reader or Feed Aggregate. There are multiple Feed Readers on the market.

You can go to http://bit.ly/lXvG6 for more detail about the options available to you. Typically it is simple to start getting RSS Feeds. All you have to do is click on the Orange box with the radio waves in it (this has become the universal symbol for RSS Feeds). Choose which reader you would like to use. I prefer NetNewsWire just because I like the format and the ability to comment on blogs without leaving the feed reader.

Interestingly, one of the largest Feed Readers, Bloglines which is a subsidiary of Ask.com, will be discontinuing their reader service as of November 1, 2010. As they said “The Internet has undergone a major evolution. The real-time information RSS was so astute at delivering (primarily, blog feeds) is now gained through conversations, and consuming this information has become a social experience. As Steve Gillmor pointed out in TechCrunch last year, being locked in an RSS reader makes less and less sense to people as Twitter and Facebook dominate real-time information flow. Today RSS is the enabling technology – the infrastructure, the delivery system. RSS is a means to an end, not a consumer experience in and of itself. As a result, RSS aggregate usage has slowed significantly, and Bloglines isn’t the only service to feel the impact.. “The writing is on the wall.”

Does this mean that RSS Feeds are dead? Absolutely not.

This is a fantastic way to stay in front of your clients daily, but Ask.com does bring up a good point. We are in a social world. Is your content being published socially?

We all want the best effect we can get from our marketing but the simple fact is times have changed. If you want the most out of your marketing you need to change with the times.

For this and other articles by Tyrell Gray, Chief Evangelist and Founder of MyMark, please go to www.mymark.com/articles . MyMark, LLC is a media rich professional social networking website that gives you the tools to use social media optimization to enhance your search engine optimization and generate revenue.

By Debralee in Featured

editor2This recent addition to the SiteProNews Blogs, the Editor’s Corner will feature guest blogs from many of the most prominent and relevant industry leaders on the web, exclusive articles from our pool of SPN authors, highlights of recent industry developments and events, plus other noteworthy tidbits and info we would like to bring to our readers’ attention.

What’s New

We’ve added a Call or Writers – Article Submissions tab on the website to streamline the process for submitting general articles and Exclusive to SiteProNews articles. Featured exclusive articles by authors will be given additional press on our Facebook page and Twitter account – plus the additional exposure on our website and newsletter.

Guest Bloggers

If you have ideas or suggestions on an industry guest blogger, please let me know. You can leave a comment or contact me at editor@sitepronews.com.

As always…thank you for your support. We appreciate our readership base and strive to provide current and relevant Webmaster, Technology, and Headline News & Resources.

Regards,

Debralee
Editor, SiteProNews

By Coleen Bennett in Featured

googlelogoIt’s no secret that satisfied customers bring you more sales, while unhappy customers can prevent sales. People who feel strongly about a service they received or a product they purchased are likely to tell others about their experience.

Before the internet, this effect was limited to word of mouth. A customer could tell his family, friends and co-workers about his great or terrible experience with your company. It took some effort on the customer’s part to get the word out, though, and many of them wouldn’t take the time. Very few of them took the time to write a letter to the business or even tell friends about it more than a few days after their interaction with a business. Only if they were extremely pleased or displeased would the word get out.

The growth of the internet has made it much easier to praise or complain about a company in a public place. There are many online directories that allow anyone to post a comment about a business. Not only does this allow a customer to make their opinion of your products and services known to many more people, it also opens the door to abuse. Business owners pretending to be customers can post positive reviews. Disgruntled employees can post negative reviews. There is no verification that the information posted is true.

All of those reviews are about to become ten times more visible to potential customers who are looking for a local business. Google Places, formerly Google Local Business Listings, has displayed reviews entered by users on their site and a number of other directories. Now Google is integrating information from the Google Places listing into the organic search. That’s right. You’ve worked hard to make sure that you are one of the first few listings that shows up when customers are looking for the services you offer in your area. Now, right next to the organic listing is a link to customer reviews. Immediately below your URL is your address and phone number from your Google Places listing. Often a snippet of a review is there too. If this happens to be a negative review, the potential customer will almost certainly click on a different listing. It’s the online equivalent of someone standing in front of your business with a sign telling people not to shop there.

By Kalena Jordan in Featured

QuestionDear Kalena

You’ve mentioned on your blog about the importance of using resources to locate regional search engines for link building purposes. Could you explain a little further how one would use a regional search engine, and could you give a concrete example of finding one?

Thanks a lot.

Terry

————————————–

Hello Terry

The reasons you might want to locate regional search engines include:

1) Your / your client’s web site contains information limited to a particular region / country.
2) Your / your client’s business owns multiple web sites with different TLD e.g. widgets.com, widgets.com.au, widgets.co.nz.
3) Your / your client has multiple country target markets they wish to reach via search engines.

The situations above mean that you need to have the web sites listed in the relevant regional search engines so they can be found by the specific target markets. This is all part of the vital link building process – having your site listed in as many relevant locations on the web as possible. This is especially important now with Google placing more emphasis on local search.

Some regional search engines may find your site automatically using their crawler (e.g. Google.com.au, etc.) but others, such as niche search engines and hand-edited directories, may require you to submit the site/s manually. This is why you need to have a list of regional sites handy so you can check them all for the existence of your site/s and submit them if needed.

A couple of sources you can use to find regional search engines worldwide include:

These sites list different sub categories of search engines for various countries and regions. So, for example, if you were looking for a list of search engines and directories specific to Australia, you would click on the relevant country category and be taken to the Australian list. You could also simply type a search into Google for *list of Australian search engines* and find other lists.

You should do this for every country market that your / your client web site targets.

Kalena

————————————–

Got a Reader Rescue question of your own? Post it in the comments and you might see it featured here on the blog.

By Eric Haaranen in Featured

videoAlmost every frustrated website owner I talk to struggles with one or more components of what I call the Online Success Formula. Very briefly the formula looks like this: Traffic x Conversion x Life Time Value = Revenue.

Traffic is the number of people that visit your website.

Because of increasing competition and lack of online marketing expertise or budget, the vast majority of small business websites lack traffic. Looking at the equation, the greater the traffic figure the higher the revenue. Fortunately, there are hundreds of ways to resolve traffic issues.

Life Time Value (LTV) is how much an average customer is worth to your business from the time she begins working with you to the time the relationship ends. You can raise LTV by increasing your prices, reducing your overhead or variable costs per sale or you can simply find ways to sell more to each of your customers. Again, as LTV increases so does your revenue.

The third component and the one that we’re going to talk about here is website conversion. Every website exists for some reason. It could be to sell revenue, sell products or generate sales leads for your business. For the majority of small business owners, the primary purpose of a website is to share information, build trust and get prospective customers to contact you when they’re ready to discuss business. In other words, to generate sales leads for your business.

Conversion is calculated in many different ways depending on the purpose of your website. Let’s assume that you’re looking to generate sales leads. In this case, you’ll calculate your conversion rate by dividing the number of sales leads your receive (either phone calls, subscribers or completed contact forms) by the number of visitors to your site. Again, the higher your conversion rate, the higher your revenue figure in the equation above.

Traffic gets all the attention but conversion is interesting too. Since most websites convert very poorly a small increase in conversion can have a massive increase in revenue. A jump from 1% conversion to 2% means a two-fold increase in your online marketing results.

So finally we get to the million dollar question and the point of this article. How can you increase the conversion (results) of your website? Easy.

Add video to it.

Most websites don’t convert well because visitors are lazy. They get to your site and are faced with a plethora of options. Rather than make a decision and pick one, they get confused and hit the back button. But when you add a video to your site telling them exactly what you want them to do it grabs their attention and greatly improves the odds of them actually following your instructions. And with video, lazy people don’t have to read as much. This is also important.

The other factor that may be hurting your website conversion is the fact that the Internet is loaded with scammers and scumbags. As a result, all of us (your prospects included) are skeptical to say the least when reaching any new website. However, when they see a video of a real person on your site speaking to them they immediately become more trusting. That person in the video can be you or it can be a professional actor but either way, it will build visitor confidence and you should see significant improvements in your website’s conversion rates.

The use of video on your site has many other benefits but the two above are the two biggies. Test it out yourself and see if adding a short video to your site doesn’t help your conversion.

Eric Haaranen is the author of Nice People Can Sell and the owner of Vancouver Video Promotion. For more insider tips to improving your online marketing results pick up Eric’s latest free booklet at videopromotion.ca

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