Building backlinks? You need to have the right strategy.

Ah, the biggest challenge of them all: earning high quality links. How can you do it? What makes a difference? How do you know that your organization is earning the links that it NEEDS – not just what’s easy to get.

The first step in trying to obtain quality links is to produce great content that people will want to actually link to. Now, content marketing strategy is a whole other topic of conversation, so it’s important to have a good strategy in place, whether it’s done in-house or contracted out. The goal with any content that you create is to offer value. Whether it’s an expert opinion, a how-to, or a topic of interest that can get your key stakeholders buzzing, the content you create is the key to unlocking strong links.

Okay, so you have great content – now what? Next, think about ways to get your content in front of more eyeballs. That means cross promotion through social media, email marketing, or other communications channels you have with you customers, clients, employees, etc. The more channels you have to distribute the information, the more touch points are created for your brand, which means more exposure and a greater chance for interaction, plus the opportunity to build more backlinks.

Also known as “link bait”, quality content has the potential to be shared through infinite channels. The first step is to put it out through your own. From there, it’s a matter of trusting and encouraging your audience to further distribute the information, whether it’s through forwarding one of your blog posts in an email to a friend or tweeting about your most recent infographic. The initial contact needs to be there – if you build it, you need to send it out before they come.

These are the best types of links you can earn, as it gives your organization authority, both in user perception and in the search engines. However, it’s tough. Sometimes you create something great, but it doesn’t stick. Other times, something that you’re only sort of happy with goes viral. It can be hit or miss. The goal is to spend time evaluating what works and what doesn’t and formulating your strategy from there. Again, content strategy is a whole topic on its own, but it needs to be recognized: you need to know what type of content you’re creating, who it’s for, why it’s being created, how it’s being promoted, and how you’re going to measure its success. From there, its’ easier to develop content that your audience wants, needs, and appreciates.

Outside of creating great content, there are some other methods of gaining high quality links, for example, you can volunteer to write guest blog posts and articles on other blogs or industry-related sites. You can also earn links through multiple types of media, such as giving a quote in a newspaper or magazine article (usually online editions of print publications feature links back to the source), creating freebies that are meant to be taken and shared (e.g. badges, freebies, templates), or participating in something offline that’s newsworthy. These links occur organically, much like creating great content, but it’s just another method for you to assert your authority, relevance, and value as an organization.

It’s always best to try ethical options, like these, instead of risking your site’s reputation with link schemes.

Does It All Really Matter?

Link building is extremely important for your site’s reputation.  As you know, gaining quality links boosts your search engine rankings, bring visitors to your site, attract more quality links (yes, good links often correlates with the potential to build even more good ones!), and ultimately connects you with people. It’s important to remember that when you receive a link from another person, you’re encouraging a relationship of mutual benefit. You create content that’s valuable, they put their trust in your knowledge. Strengthening your organizations network, both online and offline, through link building is an excellent way to help your business prosper and grow. It truly is just another example of how we are a connected culture.

Question

What type of link building have you tried for your organization? What worked and what didn’t? What types are you curious to try or want more information about? Share your experiences and questions with us in the comments!

Finding the right site? That’s the tricky part.

Essentially, every link that a site manages to gain can help strengthen the core strength of your site. However, it’s best to try and obtain links that are of a higher quality, and by that, we mean links that meet some or all of the following criteria:

• Sites that have well-written, relevant content to your industry (Relevancy is king in all marketing, not just SEO.)
• Sites that have a loyal and large subscriber base (An active email list is worth its weight in gold.)
• Sites that have an active social media presence (Do they share content through social channels? Do they interact with the social stream?)
• Sites that have a passionate, engaged community (hint: look through the site’s comments to see the quality of the conversation. If it’s good, you’ve found a good site to work with.)
• Sites that make their relationships outside influences known (i.e. choose sites that are transparent. The worst thing you could do is go with a site that hides the fact that it accepts paid submissions or uses affiliate links.)
• Sites that have a good reputation (Are they written by a real person/real people? Are they known for being a source of information about a particular subject?)
• Sites that look professional (most site visitors DO judge a book by its cover.)

To put it simply, you want to build sites with the potential to influence, not only just future customers, but also organizational stakeholders. Having your link appear on an industry authority’s website places even more trust in your overall brand and reflects positively on your organization. In this case, the medium is part of the message.

These are the types of links that pass along meaningful value, not just for engines but also for public perception. According to a survey results from 2012 by Burst Media, nearly two-thirds of consumers who visit or read blogs say that their purchasing decisions are influenced by brand mentions or promotions within the blog’s content. Having your organization linked to on an industry-related or customer-specific blog can persuade as well as give your brand additional visibility. Sites that are linking to you help provide context about your own site and help indicate quality and popularity. However, not all links can be perfect.

Unfortunately, no organization has complete control over its link profile. Unnatural or damaging links will occur in the wild and for most organizations, it’s not a problem. However, excessive link exchanging, links to and from unrelated sites, building partner pages for cross-linking, and using automated programs are. These are the types of links targeted by Google’s most recent algorithmic changes and with good reasons. Sites that employ these tactics are usually lazy when it comes to offering value to users.

The main goal of any search engine is to provide searchers with value. If a site that’s spamming the engines ranks high, it diminishes the value of the results page overall. Search engines continue to put in more safeguards to prevent irrelevant sites from ranking well, but there are occasions when a link spamming scraper site slips through the cracks. But the overall goal is to NOT become one of those sites.

No matter how valuable you may feel your organization’s content is, it still comes down to quality at every touch point with your brand. Having great content but poor links may not hurt you, but it won’t help you either. It’s tempting to go the easy route to build links quickly as opposed to waiting for earned links, but the signals a get links quick scheme sends to stakeholders, customers, and search engines speaks negatively of your brand. Bad links, bad reputation, ala DecorMyEyes and JC Penney.

However, there are special cases when you don’t have control and something goes wrong. Suddenly, you see a ton of incoming links (hint: to see your backlinks, check out tools like Majestic SEO and Open Site Explorer) and they’re mostly spam. They come from bad neighborhoods. They smear your brand’s reputation. Negative SEO campaigns have unfortunately become more prevalent in recent years and there are ways that you can fight it should you come into contact with one.

First off, do your research to see where the links are coming from (you may need to ask the help of an SEO specialist to investigate). Usually, you’ll find that a competitor is the root cause. Contact them directly to try to get them to take down the bad links.

If you believe your site’s reputation and ranking are being harmed by low quality links that you have no control over (i.e. you can’t find the cause or get the competitor to take them down), you can simply ask Google to not consider them when assessing your site using Google’s Disavow tool. Using the Disavow tool can be tricky, so again, you may need to consider the help of an SEO professional before you start disallowing links.

Once the link profile is cleaned up, you’ll want to focus on building high quality links back to the site, which we’ll dive into the specifics of in our next post.

Linking: It’s more than just pointing the user in the right direction.

When it comes to links, it’s best to think of them as a form of online currency that has the power to network between interconnecting sites. Much like currency, the more links you have, the better position you’ll find yourself in. Quality links have the ability to boost your search engine rankings, allowing your site to reach a wider audience.  Link building is extremely important to SEO, and an effective way of driving targeted traffic from sources other than search engines. But more than that, it’s a vote of confidence in your site. When you earn more unique backlinks, it tells search engines, “Hey, this site is relevant and trustworthy.” From there, it’s easier to assign a good ranking to it. After all, links are one of the most important signals a search engine uses to order its results page.

But beyond the search signal, link building also acts as an overall extension of your brand. Where you appear, or rather, where your links appear, says a lot about your organization. You want to make sure that your links are coming from safe neighborhoods on the web and accurately reflect your organization. So – how exactly do you do that?

In the next series of posts, we’ll be diving into what makes a link quality, how to build a strong link profile, and considerations to keep in mind as you develop your brand and its presence in the link ecosystem. Not all links are created equal.

Social Media, SEO, and Email: Consistency is Key!

If you were to ask your marketing team what the most important part of a successful SEO, email marketing, or social media strategy was, what do you think their responses would be?

• Is it solid design?
• Compelling copy?
• Engagement, engagement, engagement?

What would surprise you is that while all of these responses contribute to a successful campaign, they’re not the actual foundation. So what is it? The answer lies in your calendar.

Take a look at your marketing calendar. Are there a rhythm and a pattern for communication? Do you plan out your messaging in advance? Is there a finite task list to have work completed at regular intervals? Scheduled promotions? An overarching strategy to guide it all? If you answered “yes”, then you’re already on the right path. If not, you’re lacking the secret ingredient to a successful online marketing campaign: consistency.

Consistency, while not as flashy or exciting as the design elements that usually bring a campaign to life is critical to any communications effort. When you’re consistent, your audience can not only become accustomed to receiving communication from you, but it also invites trust and even an expectation of receiving your message. Just think about that – your customers EXPECT to hear from you. This is huge.

Much like the relationship you have with your marketing team, your customers – once they opt in to receive your messaging – come to depend on regular communication to motivate them to action. They actively seek deals or coupons, they check their inbox before shopping, or they do a quick search of your site, social media channels, and Google to see if there’s a new item or a new deal to be taken advantage of. When you establish a regular rhythm of communication, a comfortable relationship can form, which is the ultimate goal for any marketer – a long-standing, trusting, and mutually beneficial relationship.

But let’s look a little bit deeper. What other value does consistency bring to the table?

On Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Instagram, or whatever flavor of social media your organization prefers, consistency allows for conversations to occur. If users can expect your updates at certain times, that opens the door for engagement. They’ll know that they can ask a question, tweet a response, or give feedback and there’ll be someone there to respond. That engagement is what makes or breaks a brand’s reputation, not to mention, enhances the overall communication and customer service process. If you give your audience a chance to get your message and respond, you can build that relationship you’re looking for. (Plus, having an active social media presence often correlates with higher search rankings and improved online visibility). You should also note that consistent messaging in tone and type can help you build a brand persona, which can further facilitate trust and authority.

Consistency also means producing regular, fresh content for indexation and for search engines, the freshness factor matters. In fact, it’s baked right into the algorithm so that content that is new, timely, and valuable tends to get preference in rankings – even if it’s only for a short period of time. That short period of higher ranking may be just enough to get the notice you’re looking for. Additionally, consistency in optimization approach (meaning that you have a consistent format for UX, navigation, meta tags, content structure, code, etc.) can make your SEO process more organized and even more impactful.

Tracking results is also easier when you have a consistent calendar to go from. Utilizing data from your social media management tools, Google Analytics, URL tracking systems, or other sources can help you evaluate what works and what doesn’t in your timing, approach, or audience segment. It’s easier to report success when you have a consistent pattern to work from. The more sporadic your messaging, the more difficult it can become to assess what’s working and what isn’t. Track EVERYTHING. The time something is sent, the duration of the conversation, the day of the week, the time of the month or year, the channel, the audience segment targeted. The more data you have on these key metrics, the easier it’ll be to make decisions on your overall online marketing strategy.  Plus, this gives you the edge of being able to make soft predictions of what will happen in future marketing efforts.

Google PageRank is a number system from 0 to 10 that Google assigns to each page on the internet that is based on how powerful the site is in relation to the number of quality links it has. However, the number Google displays may not be an accurate measure of a site’s ability to rank highly in search engine results.

In the beginning, PageRank was used as a way to increase profit for people selling links, the higher the rank, the more money was made. Google was unsatisfied with this practice and began to delay updated data in the toolbar, giving a PageRank a 6 month or longer delay of your actual public PageRank. When Google first started using PageRank, it was an important variable in their algorithm to order web pages.  Google has removed PageRank from their webmaster tools and issued an explanation of why PageRank might not actually matter at all. Read an official Google statement Here.

Does PageRank Really Matter?

PageRank does play a small role in where a site ranks in search engine results, but in the grand scheme of SEO there are more important variables at play. PageRank is a metric that can’t accurately be tracked, as the actual results are delayed. Your ranking may not be updated for up to 9 months making your rank a useless metric, as it isn’t entirely accurate. Many websites with a PageRank of 0 are still gaining organic rankings and search traffic. It’s more important to focus on other metrics such as analytics, conversion rates, returns on investment, relevancy and other metrics that benefit meaningful gains for your website or business.

Another reason why PageRank may be a useless metric is that it has no relevancy toward social media results. Social media engagement, status updates and other social content are making their way into search results. However, a tweet or status update that is ranked 0, still shows up in search results. Google has also made it clear that sites with strong social networking profiles are gaining increased preferences. Ideally, the most important way to gain SEO benefits is to keep creating strong content, and optimizing the content for search. The utilization of SEO in social media is a great way to promote your content and turn visitors into potential customers.

Low PageRank? Don’t Worry

Google PageRank is a great way to “show off” your site if it has a high ranking, but it is entirely useless in SERPS. Having a PageRank of 0 doesn’t reflect your sites reputation. Newer websites may be ranked extremely low because they are new. Newer websites may also receive a low PageRank because of their lack of backlinks, however these sites still have the potential to rank incredibly high in search engine results. When all is said and done, the best way to get your site ranked is to concentrate on the content you are writing. Content is still king, regardless of your PageRank number. Stop worrying about PageRank and start focusing on actionable metrics. A low PageRank is in no way the be-all and end-all of your site’s ranking potential.

Question:

What do you think about PageRank? Do you think it has any significance in your sites reputation?

When Facebook produced numbers for its 2011 ad revenue as part of regulatory filing on Feb 1^st of this year (2012), they showed $3.15 billion in ad revenue.  According to an article in MediaPost, Pivotal Research Analyst Brian Wieser predicts that ad revenue for Facebook will continue to surge forward in 2012, will grow by 32% this year, and should hit $12.6 billion by 2017.

Impressive numbers that say a lot about social media marketing efforts, but that was before General Motors did an about-face in May that resulted in the company pulling their $10 million ad campaign right before Facebook’s IPO.  This caused a massive stir in the ad industry and left a lot of businesses wondering if they should follow suit – and just what was the actual cause of GM’s departure.

Despite that withdrawal, Facebook continues to show rising ad spending from users’ social media marketing efforts and a continued demand in Facebook advertising models.  Driving those increases is an aggressive string of ad opportunities to help Facebook capture more revenue and put new social media marketing tools in the hands of business owners.

Mashable recently posted a timeline for Ad Changes in this article. Here’s the lowdown on that timeline:

The 2012 Timeline for Ad Changes

• Feb 29 – Facebook starts selling large-format log-out ads.  Users log-out of Facebook and land smack on the full-page ad of a brand.  Like Subway pushing delicious Avocados.
• May 23 – Facebook creates a self-service platform allowing business owners to purchase new premium ads.  No more Facebook sales-reps.
• June 5 – Facebook reveals its mobile-only sponsored-story ad placement so that every single advertiser (not just the major brands) can get some play on mobile Sponsored Stories
• June 13 – Facebook now allows real-time ad exchange that applies targeting to ads based on the browser data of Facebook users.
• June 19 – Facebook and e-commerce platform Payvment integrates transaction-based data to provide ad targeting based on how people interconnect around products.  Dubs it “taste graph”
• July 6 – Wall Street Journal reports that Facebook plans to integrate ad targeting based on the apps use on their mobile devices, which is tracked based on the “Facebook Connect” feature.  Facebook and Yahoo also announce integration of their networks to distribute ads to other digital platforms.
• July 13 – Facebook announces automation of purchases for news feed ads (right side of the news feed), where these ads can now be purchased directly through Facebook.

With all of these changes, and ad revenue growing steadily for Facebook, you want to get your business into the game now before your competitors start benefiting from the growth and functionality of the ad network.  But how?

Social Fresh’s new 2012 Facebook Ad Report provides some helpful insights from their polls with analysis and tips from a variety of industry experts.  Here are some of the most relevant to adapt to the new changes and grow your social media marketing.

1. Take advantage of Gender Targeting – just 34 percent of marketers target by gender “always” or “often”, making it the ninth most used criteria.  That seems like an opportunity for your business to move in and zero in on your target audience.

2. Improve Click Through Rates with Sponsored Stories – Content enjoys a higher response than ads any day of the week, and when you sponsor stories through Facebook you’ll see a lot more user engagement and attention from your social media marketing.

3. Don’t Forget the Analytics – With all the extra activity, you need to use some third-party analytics to measure what happens after the user clicks.  A lot of businesses struggle with the ROI of social marketing and paid ads on Facebook.  Make sure you’re not one of them by using additional metrics and analytics tools to stay on top of your campaign performance.

4. Try CPM Pricing for Smaller Audiences – There’s no reason a small business or corporation needs to pay out a lot from their budget just to compete in social media marketing.  CPM is a smart model if you’re segregating a portion of your audience and it’s likely to be under 1000 – as CPM is a cost-per-thousand-view.

5. Direct users within Facebook to save – On average, those who directed users outside of the Facebook domain to their own site saw an average cost-per-click of 50% higher.

Respondents were, on average, 34 years old, with over 8 years marketing experience. They had been managing Facebook ads for an average of two years, with 42 percent working in-house for brands and 58 percent coming from agencies or vendors.

Question:

What changes are you making in your Facebook Advertising or did you about-face like General Motors?

Twitter Launches Geotargeting for Promoted Tweets

Late in July, Twitter formally announced theywere promoting a new tool that would allow marketers to target tweets to specifics users of the social network, allowing them to fine-tune their social marketing efforts.

The new feature allows advertisers to tweet at a user based on their geographic location -or- whether they access the service via mobile or desktop solutions.

“Today we’re introducing targeted Tweets, an enhancement that enables brands to reach specific audiences on Twitter without first sending a Tweet to all followers,” Twitter product manager Kevin Weil stated in a blog post. “Until today, it’s been impractical to send these kinds of highly tailored Tweets, since there was no way to reach people in New York without also reaching followers in Norway, Nebraska and Nigeria who can’t take advantage of your offer.”

This offers a major bonus for brands that do segmented product launches among their audiences – particularly global brands.  Imagine being able to set a launch date for several countries with tailored tweets going out at set times for users in each country?

Thus far Twitter has tested the new service with major brands including Coca-Cola and British Airways.  Now that testing has completed, advertisers around the world can use the newly enhanced tweet box at ads.twitter.com

Twitter Goes for the Gold

If you think there’s still apprehension around Twitter for many big brands due to its financial viability, think again.  One only has to turn to the flood of tweets around the Olympics and major brands in recent days to measure the popular appeal of Twitter.  Twitter has become a major player in social and big brand advertising.

“We can service the very biggest brands in the marketplace,” Adam Bain, the company’s president of revenue and key advertising strategist, said in a recent interview. “The conversation that’s happening on TV, or happening live is also happening on Twitter. That’s very valuable.”

Social Media – Where The Giants Roam

Ad giants have said their early experiments with Twitter have proven invaluable.  For example, Pepsi partnered closely with Twitter for a rebranding campaign.  Once launched, the promoted tweets of Pepsi garnered 68 million impressions in a single day.  24% of users who saw those paid tweets clicked, replied or helped broadcast through retweets.

“We saw some phenomenal results with those ad products,” said Shiv Singh, the global head of digital marketing for Pepsi Beverages. Singh said it was “extremely likely” that Pepsi will ramp up its spending on Twitter.

With the new geotargeting, we can expect to see a lot more brands – especially local main street business owners – getting into the social marketing game.

Question:

What has been your experience with Twitter Advertising?

We’ve seen a number of updates come down the pipe from Google as they continue to advance their algorithm and its ability to sniff out people who are out to manipulate search results.  From the Panda update to the Penguin/over-optimization update, a lot of business owners who thought they were in the right as they gained steam in search found otherwise when their rank slipped not by a few spots… but by as much as dozens of pages.

These kinds of results have scared some small business owners who don’t have the budget to keep attacking competitors with expensive campaigns, and they’re even more concerned about SEO.

Mainly “how do I know what I’m doing now won’t hurt me later, and how do I know what’s too much?!”

Countless marketing directors have asked me how many links they should be building each month, or how many they should expect an SEO company to build for them.

The problem is there’s no hard and fast answer here.  SEO is more about best practices and general guidelines than strict rules regarding numbers.  That’s unfortunate for savvy marketing directors who want a quantifiable way to figure out how their campaigns are performing (especially when they’re paying a provider to get results).

Building Links is Bad, So Start Building Links

It’s almost a contradiction when you warn organizations that paying for links can get you in trouble, and then every SEM company out there takes an approach of building links under a paid service agreement.  Not a single provider offers a limit on how many they think is appropriate – this goes back to no real hard limit.

It’s impossible to give an exact number, and I hate not being able to provide marketing directors with an answer when they ask this question.  Obviously if you generate a few thousand links for a website overnight that had virtually nothing the day before then you’re going to raise flags.

…But what if you launch a piece of content that goes viral and generate millions of links in the span of a few hours.

It’s impossible to control how many people share it, and you certainly don’t want to kick the cord out of the wall in a frenzy if content you produced suddenly opens the flood gates. For an example of viral content, checkout this connected culture video.

Understanding the Variables in Assessing Link Quality & Relevancy

When the algorithm is looking at your links, it’s not a black and white comparison of “there’s new links” or “there’s too many links”.  There are a lot of variables, and the new algorithm updates constantly add new variables to consider including:

• Anchor text
• No anchor text
• Authority of the link provider
• Other outbound links from the link provider
• Quality of the other sites the link provider links to
• Frequency of links
• Links from the same provider vs. different providers
• Link relevancy vs. surrounding content

And that’s just to name a few.  Because of these variables, it doesn’t really come down to how many links you need to build to make an impact, and how many are too much.

It’s also impossible to say how many links you can expect from a broad digital marketing campaign.  For example – you publish a press release through PRWeb with 2 anchored links that point to your new site or new landing page.  That press release might get syndicated to 70 digital networks (totally 140 links), or it might only get picked up by 8 (16 links).

On the flip side, your product launch and press release could get the attention of a major media source, be picked up by a major news site and as a result be syndicated to hundreds of other sites (with links pointing back on each).

If you’re concerned about link building and over-optimization, stop.  Your core focus with your digital marketing strategy should remain focused on content and creating something of real value to your audience.  As you create compelling stuff that people naturally want to share, you’ll see links begin to appear among various networks while content spreads.

As the algorithm follows those links back and indexes your content, a natural relevancy will be established.  You don’t have to worry about building too many links to fast when your focus isn’t on link building – your audience will do that for you. Your focus will always be on creating smart content. Here’s 7 tips to get you started.

The 7 Elements of Smart Content

Question:

What has been your experience with link building?

By 2020 almost half of America’s workforce will be made up of the digital generation ( CONNECTED CULTURE ). Soon, people who grew up with technology and have no idea what life was like without a smartphone will be running the United States. Are you prepared?

Thanks to UNC’s Kenan-Flagler Business School and the YEC for creating this awesome infographic!

Discover the driving force behind today’s CONNECTED CULTURE

The first email was sent in 1971.  Since then we have experienced a digital revolution that connects us like we’ve never been connected before.

A single email has transformed into more than 2.5 million text messages per day, trillions of web searches on Google alone and more than 40 billion collective hours spent in digital media each month.

This video reveals staggering numbers about today’s CONNECTED CULTURE, showing us how the use of digital media impacts our everyday lives.  How much are you contributing to these mind blowing numbers?

Question:

In your opinion, what is the most impressive stat in the video? Leave a comment below.