How’s that for a spamtastic title! This is going to be a fun post about how I accidental built 9000 links from over 400 domains with virtually no work. You probably won’t want to do it for yourself but you might just learn something.

About a year ago in the early stages of setting up my first blog network I built a little article directory site. The idea was to use it as a sort of private ezine articles. Anyway I must have got sidetracked or forgotten about the domain because I never touched it again until about a month ago when I started getting emails from cpanel telling me I was running out of bandwidth on the server this thing was setup on. Strange I thought given its a site with no content and I presumed no traffic. So I checked out the site and to my surprise I did have content – 150,000 pages of it in fact…

As you’ve probably guessed I hadn’t made the registration private on the article directory script and the bots had been busy submitting thousands of articles to my directory on autopilot on all sorts of fascinating subjects like…

“Why it’s possible to Discover out Males Ebel 1911 Discovery Chronograph Rubber”

Now that’s what I call a headline! Fair play to them. What interested me more than the content though was the sort of links the site had “attracted”. According to SEOmoz 8988 links from 436 domains at the last count.

Now as much as I’d like to think the quality bot spun articles about herbal penis enlargement treatments had attracted those links naturally, actually what’s going on here is the bots are shooting a bunch of links back to the articles they’ve posted on my site from other article sites, xrumer powered forum profiles, blog comments, hacked sites and so on to get the articles on my site indexed. Think of it like a “link wheel” on bot steroids. While most SEO folk only started talking about link wheels in the last 20 minutes the black hats have been using the same methodology for years and as with most of these things I reckon if you’re able to automate and scale it enough its probably still going to work to an extent.

So what’s the lesson here? Well there’s a few. Firstly if you want a shit load of free content and links then all you’ve got to do is setup an article script and get yourself on an article demon directory list and the links will come to you! They won’t be great links but some links are usually better than no links (not always), so you might be able to do something with that.

But more importantly what this little anecdote tells me is you really have to take with a liberal pinch of salt what you see at a glance in your link research tools. I mean, how many link builders out there would take a glance at a link profile like this and think.

Yeah, ok, that’s not too bad a site. I’ll shoot them a link request/ pay for a link/ submit a guest post over there.

We’ve got lots of links from sites with decent domain MozRank….

Not great page authority but not the worst I’ve seen…

A nice mix of themes…

Even a scattering of good old fashioned PageRank. Not a lot, but better than many legitimate blogs I look at.

Actually the only at a glance metric which flags that there’s something not quite right about this link profile is the Majestic ACRank score…

I don’t usually pay much attention to this metric but in this case its linear counting system actually gives the best insight into the true state of this truly horrible backlink profile.

So here’s a few takeaways:

• Content and links are not as hard to come by as you may think
• But not all content and links are created equal
• Link research tools can’t detect spam
• So when doing link analysis look at as many data points as possible
• ACRank can be useful
• Before you even think about approaching a site for a link, actually check out their backlinks by visiting the pages which link to them
• Bear in mind that most link brokers will just look at the raw metrics and won’t do these checks so if you’re buying links or outsourcing link building make sure you’re doing due diligence
• If you just trust what you see in your toolbar you could end up getting a load of links from sites like my little article directory experiment, which probably won’t help you rank that much!

One of the points I suggested in my post on SEO theories which I can’t prove was that

“Internal links are more important than external links”

In this post I’m going to show you how to get much more value out of your internal linking using a simple technique, but first let me put some flesh on the bones of that statement above.

A site cannot function or rank without internal links. Don’t believe me? Try removing all your internal links from your site and just see what happens to your rankings. That’s why I say internal links are more important than external links- remove all the external links to a site and Google can still find and index your pages. Remove the internal links and Google will only index the pages which have external links pointing to them.

Moreover internal links are more important than external links because you have complete control over them. In SEO you need to play to your strengths and make the very most of the factors which are within your control- technical stuff, content, onpage ranking factors and internal links all fall within this. That’s not to underplay the importance of external factors, its just that you’ve got to get the basics right first. So unlike external links with internal links:

• You control the anchor text
• You control the target pages
• You can change either of the above at any time

Despite these powerful opportunities which fall well within your control most sites don’t make optimum use of their internal anchor text. In this post I’m going to show you just one way you can make better use of your internal anchors. I’ll explain how you can do it very easily in wordpress, but the theory behind it can just as easily be applied to any site.

Creating optimised internal link sets

I’ve discussed before the idea of targeting a cluster of related, “mid-tail” keywords on a single page rather than just going after one big fat head term. To make this approach work you don’t just need to be using those different keyword variations on the page but also need to vary your link anchor text to use all the different keyword combinations you want to target. Now there’s other reasons to vary your anchor text strategy when building links from external sources but most sites will have the majority of their internal links to key pages using the same anchor text because of the way content management systems and menu navigation works.

Take the example above of the Expedia navigation. Because the same menu is at the top of all of their millions of pages their hotels page is going to have millions of links with the anchor text “Hotels”. Now that’s not necessarily a problem because hotels is a good keyword but say they also want to rank that page for a cluster of related keywords like ‘cheap hotels’, ‘book hotels’, ‘hotel deals’ etc – then it would be beneficial to vary the internal anchor text used to link to that page.

Design wise that’s not going to be too easy to do in a main menu like Expedia have got in their masthead but if you’re using a footer nav you’ve probably got a bit more flexibility.

A deep footer nav like the one above is one way to deliver internal links to your key SEO pages and because its in the footer you’ve probably got a bit more space to alternate anchor text. So what I might want to do is vary the internal anchor text on the ‘cheap hotels in Brighton’ link so some of my internal links use different variations like ‘cheap Brighton hotels’ or ‘budget hotels in Brighton’.

In WordPress this is pretty easy to do without any coding.

First we need to setup 2 menus with the different anchor text variations we want to use…

The first menu has the main terms we want to use as anchor text for each key page.

In this example the second menu is going to link to the same pages but with slightly different anchor text, you could of course link to completely different pages in order to mix up your internal links and give juice to different pages:

Now all we need to do is tell WordPress to display the first menu on some pages and the second menu on other pages. To do that install a plugin called Widget Logic – this is a really handy little plugin which extends your WordPress widgets and lets you use conditional tags to tell wordpress what pages a particular plugin should appear on.

If you’ve got a small site you could use this to specify the exact pages which ‘menu 1′ should appear on and the pages which ‘menu 2′ should appear on but for larger sites you’ll need to be a bit broader so in this example I’m going to display menu 1 on category pages, static pages and tag pages using this conditional logic:

is_category() OR is_page() OR is_tag()

Then show menu 2, with the alternate anchor text, on single post pages using:

is_single()

Now we have a couple of hundred internal links (the single posts) using the ‘budget hotels in Brighton’ anchor text and the rest using ‘cheap hotels in Brighton’.

It should go without saying that this is a very simple example of how you can use this sort of system. If you’re using WordPress and you’re planning on using any more than a couple of variations you’ll find it more convenient to apply the conditional logic in your functions.php file than with the drag and drop widgets in wordpress admin.

You can do something similar with other off the shelf CMS’ (its actually even easier in Joomla) or if you’ve got a bespoke CMS you’ll need to code it yourself but its not especially complex and if you can get it working on large websites the gains can be mind blowing. For example lets say you’re an ecommerce site and you want to rank your Russell Hobbs 15082 Illuminating glass kettle page for:

• Illuminating glass Kettle
• Russell Hobbs Illuminating glass Kettle
• Russell Hobbs 15082
• Russell Hobbs Illuminating glass Kettle reviews
• Buy Russell Hobbs Illuminating glass Kettle

You don’t need to manually create all those links in your CMS like I’ve showed in the WordPress example above, you just need to tell your CMS to pull slightly different links out of the database on different pages of your site. This is very useful if you want to rank for thousands of products keywords with different attributes, model numbers and so forth – and who doesn’t want that right?!

I’m planning on getting back into blogging in the next few months so hopefully they’ll be more posts here. Might be a good time to grab my feed if you haven’t already:-)

I spoke at the BrightonSEO conference last Friday on the slightly controversial topic of building blog networks for your link building campaigns. I have included my slides from the presentation below:

I really wanted to make this session as honest and practical as possible and realistically with a room full of 400 people of mixed abilities and backgrounds that wasn’t going to go down well with everyone. Judging by the feedback and emails though plenty of people found it useful which is good. For anyone who was offended by the subject matter I guess all I can say is if you don’t want to learn about SEO, don’t go to an SEO conference!

Big thanks to Kelvin and the Sitevis gang for putting on a great day.

Any questions on the presentation ask in the comments or get in touch john (at) ioptimal.co.uk

Run for your lives it’s another post about the panda update! I don’t usually blog about SEO news and algorithm shifts for a couple of reasons- firstly it’s boring and other sites will always be better for that sort of thing. Secondly because of the approach I take to SEO I rarely get effected by changes at Google.

Actually most of my sites and my clients, have either gained slightly or been unaffected by the panda update. I do however think it’s pretty significant and have spoken to a few site owners who have been smashed by it although not nearly as badly as some are making out (and no I won’t be linking to searchmetrics here!).

Before I talk about how I would go about beating the panda I have to point out that this update seems specifically designed to devalue sites in markets which Google is looking to enter. Airline aggregation, voucher codes, reviews and local directories are all businesses Google wants to muscle in on and reducing these sites visibility and therefore traffic is a handy way to bolster the visibility of their own offerings in these markets. From that point of view if you’re in a business which Google wants a piece of you might have more problems on your plate than this one update.

Anyway on with the post…

Most discussion around the update so far seems to be concerned with content and the devaluation of so called “low quality content”. For me that’s a bit of a red herring here. While that may be the goal, explaining the update in these terms suggests that Google is making a qualitative assessment of content in the way a human reader would. Thinking in these terms probably isn’t that helpful, Google still pretty much just has the same data to work from when it comes to assessing a page, the update is simply a different interpretation of this data, so:

• Internal links
• External links
• Onpage factors
• Duplication checking
• Click stream data (maybe)

If you look at those factors actually very little has changed and sites which do well on all of these (think wikipedia) don’t appear to have been affected.

Part of the issue here seems to be that for while now Google has been ranking pages with few links, based on domain “trust” and strong onpage signals- hence the ehow effect. Now unless your articles are directly (or closely) linked to the source of that trust through internal links, or have links coming into them from external sources they might not rank like they used to.

So what the f**k do I do?

My first bit of advice to sites which have taken a knock is don’t panic and jump on the first advice you read on SEO blogs. One of the knee jerk reactions so far which I’ve heard banded around is to remove “low quality content” from your site. Last week I received a few of these emails from Brighthub, where I’m an author:

Now I’m not going to tell you that every article I’ve ever published on article sites is top quality but bright hub are really throwing the baby out with the bathwater here. Some of these articles they’re deleting were really pretty decent and now they’ve returned them to authors they’ll never get that content back. The first thing I did when I got these emails was to take that content and publish it on other sites instead, as I’m sure most of the affected authors did.

Other article sites also seem to be taking similar steps, banning user accounts and getting rid of articles. If it where me I’d keep publishing for now and ride the storm.

Your content is not the problem

In most cases at least. For years Google have preached about content and how site owners should create great content and wait for the traffic which would magically appear. I really don’t think the point of this update was for site owners to start thinking of their content as a liability and penalising sites for having too much content.

If your content is copied or scraped from other sites then yeah it’s sucking PageRank from your good pages and could do you more harm than good. But I don’t see any cases where it could be a good idea to delete unique content, whatever its quality. Instead I would first look at ways to deliver more links to your deep content pages, either by improving your internal link architecture or boosting your inbound links from external sources.

Thin content pages

Now at the other end of the spectrum we have thin content pages. Those voucher code and review sites which seem to have taken a hit. From what I’ve seen, and obviously this is just theory at this stage, this isn’t as simple as the number of words on your pages so all those site owners who are desperately ordering textbroker content to thicken their deep pages might want to hold fire.

Adding content is always a good idea and if you add 400 extra words to any page you should get more search traffic, but I don’t think this doesn’t work how most people understand it. If you’ve seen your long tail traffic take a hit after panda one way to regain some of that traffic is to add more content, but that isn’t going to fix the systemic issues with your site or regain the traffic you lost during panda, it’s just going to bump up your long tail search traffic in other places by adding new keywords to your pages which you weren’t ranking for before.

Again here I would personally look to address other issues before adding content en mass.

Action plan

So here’s the stuff I’d look at:

• Identify the pages on your site which have lost traffic after the update- is it across the board or just certain sections?
• Identify your internal link hubs – parts of your site with the highest PageRank or number of internal/ external links.
• Internal linking – instead of deleting pages which have been affected by Panda, create new links to those pages from your internal link hubs (or from pages closely linked from your link hubs)
• Run an external link building campaign for a select number of affected pages to see if a boost in external links helps. Be systematic, use one tactic to link to one group of pages, another to another group of pages so you can see what works and what doesn’t. Going forward try to ensure that every page on your site has at least one external link pointing to it. Don’t be afraid to link out if you have to to get links back
• Audit your outbound links. Linking out is probably a good thing in general but not if you’re linking to spam, that’ll kill you. You queries like this to identify and delete these links.
• Identify duplicate content on your site using copyscape. If nobody ever visits those pages then you can think about deleting them else maybe just noindex them for the time being
• Built trust in the root of your domain. It never hurts to do this anyway but I’ve noticed that while a few of the sites I’ve seen affected by the update have lots of links/ trust at their root (homepage) their link velocity has plateaued in recent years. Start by checking your site for links to broken pages and 301 redirecting these back to your homepage (link juice recovery tool is good for this). Maybe even think about yahoo directory listings if you don’t already have them or other means to quickly boost your quality link numbers and get your homepage link velocity moving again.

Bear in mind this might not be good advice, they’re just ideas. But the point is its definitely not bad advice, all this stuff is actionable and should only help your site overall, even if it doesn’t address your panda related issues.

The Yahoo directory has long been part of the staple of many a link building campaign. A lot of SEO’s still seem to recommend it (although I doubt many have tested it properly) but is one directory link really worth $300/ year?

Sometimes but usually not is the short answer, read on for the long answer…

Strengths of the Yahoo Directory

Yahoo.com is one of the oldest sites around and the directory is older than Google so it’s well regarded as a trustworthy source of links. What’s more when Google first started indexing the web and creating PageRank directories like Yahoo probably played a pretty big part in that original benchmarking. Fast forward to 2011 and Google still look for trust signals from reputable sources with some level of editorial control. If I remember rightly until pretty recently the Yahoo directory actually got a mention in the Google webmaster guidelines. In terms of the domain itself dir.yahoo.com has a PageRank of 8/10 and SEOmoz give the root domain a “domain authority” score of 93/100. There’s over 6000 sites linking to the directories homepage. So in short it’s still a powerful site to have a link from and on some level a Yahoo directory link is only going to help your rankings.

It’s also one of the few authority links you can get away with buying without falling foul of the paid link police.

Problems with the Yahoo Directory

All of the problems really stem from the cost of submission. $299/ year (or $600 for adult sites!). So if you keep your listing for 5 years you’ll of spent $1500 on one link. Now if your link budget is in the hundreds of thousands that’s going to look like a drop in the ocean but for everyone else it’s a reasonable investment and one which is worth considering carefully before you dive in.

Despite what you might read you can expect to get zero traffic from a Yahoo directory listing and if you get a couple of visits you can be pleasantly surprised. It really is just an SEO link. But how much value does it actually pass and will it help you rank?

Really this depends on the category where you get listed. With such a big, deep directory that PR 8 homepage value diminishes pretty quickly as you get a few levels down. If what you do is very niche chances are you’ll find your listing ends up in a remote deep category at least 5 or 6 levels deep. At that level the link is only going to pass a small amount of PR. In some cases the page might not even be indexed. If you’re a local business it gets even worse – you’re likely to end up as much as 11 levels deep like this Brighton hotels category. For this reason I rarely recommend the Yahoo directory to local businesses.

The strict guidelines for Yahoo directory submission are both it’s saviour and it’s curse. Because they’re strict Google still seems to like to use them as a trusted link source, but it also means:

• The editors will bury you into a crap category (SEO speaking) because it’s the most relevant
• You can only link to your homepage rather than an internal money page
• You can only use your site name for the link which means unless you’ve got a keyword rich domain the anchor text won’t really help you rank.

Don’t get me wrong this is all stuff a good directory should be doing, it’s just not exactly optimal from an SEO point of view.

So what you’re left with is basically an expensive link which you’re buying pretty much exclusively to increase your websites “trust” (note I consider this to be very different to PageRank). The thing about trust is it’s a bit of a mythical beast, it’s extremely hard to measure, test or prove. It’s also not likely to be something which can come from a single link source or type of link. If you look at the sites in your niche which you’d regard to be “trusted” they’ve probably got links from a wide range of sources- not just high value directory listings. To some extent I think trust also comes from link volume, so you need to weigh up the alternative ways you could spend that money and maybe get more links or even better links.

Over the last 6 months I’ve cancelled the renewals on 5 yahoo directory listings and while I don’t claim to have controlled this in away way so I can call it a test, I haven’t seen anything which makes me think I’ve lost trust from those links being removed. Traffic and my ability to rank new content for long to mid-tail phrases has remained consistent or continued to improve. I think maybe if you only have a small handful of links you may still notice the repercussions of removing a listing but in a sea of hundreds or thousands of linking domains it’s hard to think one link will make that much difference.

If you’re considering a paid Yahoo directory listing I’d ask a few questions first:

Can I afford it? If you’re looking at remortgaging the house to pay the submission fee you should probably think twice. I wouldn’t pay more than 5% of my annual link budget on one link. That would mean unless you’ve got over $6000 to spend on links for your site in a year you probably shouldn’t consider it. On the other hand if the fee would account for less than 1% of your budget (i.e. you’re spending $30,000+ a year on links) its probably worth doing.

Is it worth it? This is closely related to the question above but what I’m getting at here is whether you make enough on what your site is selling to justify spending this much on a link. If you’re selling a product which you earn $500 per unit on then that listing only has to get you one extra sale to pay for itself. If you’re selling something with a $1 margin you’ll need to shift 300 extra units just to cover the cost of the listing. Look at the search demand for your product and decide  if this is realistic.

What category can I get in? Browse through the directory and work out what categories you might be able to get listed in. Assume the editors will move you to the lowest and most relevant category (doesn’t always happen but it’s possible). What sort of metrics does that page have? Look at PageRank, mozRank, AC rank, number of outbound links, links from internal sources, links from external sources (if any). Link buyers will have a better idea of what it would cost them to get links of a similar quality through text link ads but ultimately you just have to make a judgement here. If it’s not got any toolbar pagerank/ mozRank I wouldn’t bother personally.

Can it help me rank? Assuming the link anchor text will be your site name, will that help you rank? Yahoo Directory can still be useful if you’ve got a new exact match domain you’re trying to rank for the exact match keyword but for everyone else you should be ranking for your brand name anyway.

Do I need it? If you’re an established site who already has some PageRank and maybe even some of that trust stuff, are you really going to see a notable improvement in your rankings across the board by adding a Yahoo Directory link? If your domains more than a few years old, has more than a few hundred linking domains or has any other means of getting trust links from .edu/.ac.uk sites I’d doubt you’ll get value from Yahoo directory submission.

Do I have a hard time getting authority links? If you fall within a competitive or slightly dirty niche but think you can get away with a listing on Yahoo it might be worth doing. Yes I’m talking to you erectile dysfunction medication affiliates:-)

What are the alternatives?

Another way to look at whether a yahoo listing is worth the money is to ask what else you could do with that $300/ year (within the realm of link building- I’m not talking about high class hookers or class A’s!). Here’s some ideas…

• Buy a permanent listing on BOTW.org – I’d seriously consider this one, botw isn’t as authoritative but it’s better organised, has less spam and let’s you submit internal pages. You can pay a one off fee which is the same price as the Yahoo recurring fee.

Botw.org and Botw.org.uk are probably a better option for local businesses

• Buy permanent listings on a handful of lower level directories like joeant.com
• Rent a link on the homepage of a relevant site in your niche or your local student union website
• Hire the authority blogger in your niche to write a post for your site (bound to get you a link or two)
• Commission a small piece of research or online survey
• Hire a decent writer to produce 5000 words for an in-depth link bait piece
• Hire a blogger to write 5 guest posts to publish on other sites

I guess the point is there’s plenty of ways to spend that money without the recurring fee and with the possibility of getting you more links in the future. Certainly anything which  involves producing content for link bait is a bit more risky in that you’re not guaranteed any links but at least you get the content to publish on your site which should drive some long tail search traffic even if it fails to get links.

At the end of the day it you have infinite budget you’ll want to get listed in Yahoo and everywhere else you can. But for everyone else I’d seriously consider alternative options. And if you’ve got a renewal coming up for your Yahoo listing it might be worth reviewing whether you still need that link enough to justify $300.

If you’re doing SEO for a big ecommerce site which sells everything including the kitchen sink – department stores, catalogues that sort of thing this is a question which will undoubtedly come up…

We’ve got 1,000,000 products in 5,000 categories – what keywords should we optimise our homepage for?

Usually the homepage’s of these mahusive shops will have a load of link equity i.e. Argos have got about 3,500 linking root domains. But in almost all the cases I can find these shops are failing to make good use of that homepage power in their keyword strategy.

What you often find in these big ecommerce organisations is there’s warring factions at play internally, all competing for homepage exposure for their category of products which can make this a bit more difficult but lets cast that aside and focus on the SEO…

Most sites with this problem will go down one of 2 routes:

1) Optimise for a generic catch all term like “Online shopping”

I don’t like this approach as not only will it be pretty competitive but also any traffic you get from a term like that is likely to convert poorly as its too generic to capture qualified shoppers

2) List your key product categories

Like HMV’s page title:

Buy Music CDs, DVDs, Games, Consoles, Blu Ray, MP3s & More

or Amazon‘s:

Amazon.co.uk: Low Prices in Electronics, Books, Sports Equipment & more

This isn’t a bad strategy if you can make it work but usually I find big retailers get whooped on these types of category keywords by more specialist retailers and exact match domains. Even the mighty Amazon homepage doesn’t rank for any of the categories they seem to be targeting in their homepage page title.

Here’s what I’d do instead…

Rather than picking a few big keywords to plonk on your homepage which remain pretty static throughout your campaign, instead use your homepage to rank quickly for seasonal terms and trending products. So in Novemeber you might use the homepage to target “Christmas shopping”, quickly after you’ll want to switch it up to focus on “January sales”, then “Valentines gifts”. In the lead up to summer you might want to target “Gas BBQ’s” or when a hot new product comes out like the “Nintendo 3DS” that’s what you go after on your homepage.

The point about your homepage is any changes you make to it are likely to be indexed very quickly and because of all the link equity/ PageRank pointing to it this is the fastest way to get a ranking for lucrative seasonal terms. As any etailer will attest to, hitting seasonal shopping trends like this is where the money is at.

A really nice example of this which I grabbed ages ago but can’t find the screenshot of now was Ticketline (I think, or it might of been See tickets, sorry!) anyway when Take That released their tour dates last year and the whole ticketing business wanted to rank for “Take that tickets” they flipped their usual homepage onto a different url, introduced a Take That splashpage on the homepage url and ranked top 5 just as the tickets dropped. Good job!

How do you decide what keywords to target on your homepage?

Another quick post today…

I really hate Q & A sites, they’re 95% morons asking questions and other morons wasting their time answering them (if you’ve got that much time on your hands get a blog and make some money people!). However I can’t deny they have something of a magic formula when it comes to bottom feeding off long tail search traffic because plenty of people like to search in that Ask Jeeves style of “how do I”, “how can I” or “what is”.

Actually targeting the long tail Q & A style queries is pretty easy though. Here’s an example…

1. Take a page you’re trying to get traffic to for example I’ll use my link building page
2. Work out what the main theme/ keyword for the page is- in this case link building
3. Head over to Yahoo Answers or Quora and do a search on that keyword.



4. Sift through the nonsense questions and spam and work out what the most prevalent, recurring questions are on the subject and how people are wording them so something like:
   • How to build better links to your website?
   • What is your best link building strategy?
   • What is the most important factor in link building?
   • How to get permanent one one links for free
5. Add a feature area to your page under a heading like Find out on this page or This article will show you and list the questions which the page answers underneath

Voilà…

You can apply this to pretty much any page if you’re a bit creative with how you style it. The example I’ve given here is just for show so I wouldn’t expect to rank for these terms but in less competitive niches rolling out a feature like this will really help to boost your long tail.

There are parts of internet marketing which take a lot of time. I’m a big advocate of doing things properly, especially when it comes to link building. However sometimes the quickest things actually have the biggest impact. So clear a couple of hours in your day and run through my list of the best SEO quick wins (and a few non-SEO one’s thrown in for good measure)…

Link juice recovery

The juice recovery tool is part of the Cemper Link Research Tools. It looks for links to broken pages on your site and lets you download an htaccess file to redirect all those pages to your homepage. Not a new idea, but definitely a quick way to do it. My last report found 10 links to broken pages, redirecting these is like gaining 10 new links. Nice.

Time taken – 10 minutes (+ about 30 mins for the report to run)

Search for brand mentions which don’t link

Again not a new technique and it doesn’t always work that well but when it does you get a super quick list of top quality link prospects to email. This is simply a case of running “your brand name -linkdomain:yourwebsite.com” (not sure if this still works in the US?)

Time taken – about an hour, depending on the number of results

Upgrade your server

A few weeks ago I noticed one of my servers running a bit slowly. I didn’t have a lot of time to mess around tuning it up to make it run faster so I pinged an email to my hosting company to see what they could do. They upgraded something ( I can’t remember what it was!) for an extra tenner a month. Now it runs like lightening and my bounce rate is about 5% down. Meaning I need less traffic to make more money.

Time taken – 5 minutes.

Best of the web advertising

I did a write up of this the other day. If you need high quality, relevant, deep links with the anchor text of your choice BOTW sponsorship is well worth a look. And providing you’ve got the cash to hand it will only take you a few minutes to get setup.

Time taken – 15 minutes

Paid directory listings

Beyond the usual suspect like Yahoo directory, BOTW etc I still think there’s plenty of value in getting links from a range of other directories, provided it doesn’t take you forever to do the submissions. Directory maximizer have a paid directory service where you pay a fee once to them, plugin your keywords and they’ll handle the pain in the arse submissions and payments. You can cherry pick the directories from their list which you want to submit too (some are definitely better than others). They’ve also got a special one off fee for aviva directory which is worth having as its usually an annual renewal.

Time taken – 20 mins

Run a user test

When was the last time you tested your website on a real user? One of the quickest ways I’ve found to identify opportunities for quick fixes around usability and conversion rate optimisation is to setup a user test on usertesting.com. The setup only takes a few minutes and you get test results back really quickly which you can turn into an action list for your developers. Loads more DIY CRO tips here.

Time taken – 1 hour (its going to take longer to actually action stuff off the back of this)

Links from staff

Why not use your company wide mailing list for something a bit more useful than sharing drunken photos from the office christmas party for a change. No matter how big your organisation is (ok if you’re a freelancer like me this will be less effective) there’s sure to be someone in the office who runs their own website or blog or is active in one social network or another so send out a company wide link request telling asking everyone to make sure they link from those sites to the company website using xyz anchor text. For bonus points get them to change the website link in their linkedin profile from “Company website” to “Blog” that way you get a followed link:-)

Time taken: 15 minutes

Install Tynt

Tynt is a neat little script which automatically attaches a link to your site whenever anyone copy and pastes something off one of your pages into a WYSIWYG editor. It only take a few minutes to setup on most sites and may well land you a few extra links if you’ve got a large content site.

Time taken: 30 minutes

Identify keywords you’re just missing out on

I’ve touched on this a few times in previous posts. Its really easy if you’ve got Raven tools setup. Start in the Analytics keyword report and add the top 10 or 20 non-branded keywords which are sending traffic to your site to the SERP tracker so you can lookup where you’re ranking for them. Wait for the rankings to come in then sort the keywords which you’re already on page 1 for. Its fair to say if you weren’t tracking these keywords you weren’t pro-actively optimising for them but they’re already on page 1 and sending traffic. Often a few  tweaks to the page titles and content of those ranking pages can push you up to the top few positions for those keywords without any extra link building or expense.

Loads of potential hanging around the bottom of the first page of results

Time taken: 45 minutes

Leave a comment on this post

You’ve read all the way to the bottom so you may as well get a link out of it. Feel free to leave a comment below, you’ll get a followed link and for this post only I’ll approve comments with whatever spammy keyword you want to use instead of your name!

Time taken: 5 minutes

Feel free to share your own quick win tips in the comments.

One of my favourite ways to build up a link building prospect list is to find a few sites which I think I can get a link from, either with a simple link request, a guest post, a payment or something more creative, then to dig around for similar sites which might also make good prospects.

Here’s a run down of a few tools you can use to make this research a bit easier. All these tools work best if you use them for general queries or themes rather than something very specific.

Google ‘related’ operand

This is the simplest and still probably most effective way to search for similar sites. You can either search for related:www.mysite.com on Google or use the “similar” button which sits next to the cache link on some results.

Similarsites.com

Similar Sites is a great little search tool which uncovers the top related sites from a starting site. Again keep the starting url as generic as possible and this search tool will analyse the themes and topic of the site and suggest similar alternatives. I find this especially useful for uncovering advertising opportunities with non-commercial sites or for recruiting niche affiliates.

Google Chrome similar pages extension

Google make the best link building tools! This is a neat little extension for Chrome which shows you similar pages to the page you’re on. I like this tool for finding similar content on other sites so if I’m on an article about “things to do in Barcelona” this tools is good for finding similar articles on other sites, as opposed to similarsites.com which is better for finding similar sites based on their overall theme, which doesn’t always work as well for finding relevant content on generally themed site like a world travel guide.

SimilarWeb

From the same people who make the similarsites.com tool and I presume based on the same results but this firefox extension shows you similar sites to the one you’re on in a side panel. This is a pretty efficient way to browse prospects. I browse to a site, tag it in Raven tools link manager then click the next similar site in the sidebar and repeat- a really quick way to manually build up a qualified prospect list.

Directories & links pages

Not exactly a tool I know but decent general web directories like DMOZ or Best of the Web (see my previous post on Best of the Web advertising) are often a handy resource for finding sites in a particular category. Start with a seed site and identify what directories its listed in, then work through the other sites listed in that category.

Some of the deep categories and particularly local listings on botw.org are a great source of closely related sites, most of which are non-commercial

Similarly links pages like you see on many old school information sites often link out to lots of the most established sites within a particular niche, making them a really quick research tool when entering a new niche (blogrolls can be used in the same way if you’re looking for related blog sites).

What techniques do you use to research similar sites for your link building campaigns?

I’ve been using site sponsorship on botw.org recently and been getting some really good results so I thought I’d do a quick write up.

For those who don’t know Best of the Web is one of the oldest web directories about, and one of the few which have managed to maintain a decent editorial standard over the years and not succumbed to the temptation of selling spammy sitewide links or approving garbage sites just to make money. As a link building tactic I’m still a big fan of premium web directory submission, although I think the power of BOTW is probably a bit overstated by a lot of SEO’s (might have something to do with the lucrative affiliate program they run:-)

Anyway in addition to letting you pay for a normal listing in the directory BOTW also offer category sponsorship which means instead of just being in the most relevant (usually meaning deepest) category in the directory you can advertise at the top of a category of your choosing.  The ads look like this:

Aside from the pretty green background these listing render like any other listing on the site and go through the same editorial review meaning they’re followed SEO friendly links. Unlike normal listings however the editors won’t bury your listing in a deep category which gets very little juice from the homepage.

See the issue with BOTW, and most directories, is they tend to have a lot of link equity at the root but very little deep linking meaning the homepage and top level categories have plenty of juice but the further you get from the homepage, often 4 or 5 levels on a big directory, the less power those pages have. Couple that with the number of outbound links in mid-tier categories and you get to a stage where a link on a bottom level category is unlikely to pass much weight at all. By placing these sponsorships on a high level category, ideally 1 or 2 ‘clicks’ off the homepage you get to siphon off some of that juice before it starts evaporating. Top level categories like the insurance category have got some nice metrics:

I started running some sponsorships on a couple of categories on botw.org about 3 months ago for a client in a pretty competitive, tricky little niche and the links appear to have given them a very nice little boost, just enough to move them from the top of page 2 to top 5 positions, just before the xmas rush as this graph hopefully, sort of shows!

Site sponsorships aren’t that cheap at $50USD/ month but to be honest that’s a drop in the ocean compared to what I know a lot of people spend on inferior text links which also come with a risk warning. You get a 30 day free trial when you first sign up, which is cool, but in my experience not really long enough to see a big impact on your rankings. If you’re thinking of giving these ads a try my top tips would be:

• Get in as high a category as possible (there’s a maximum of 3 slots available per category and the best one’s are filled so shop around)
• Use MozRank, the number of internal links and good old fashioned toolbar pagerank to gauge the power of each category
• Link to an internal page on your site so you can measure the results
• For local campaigns try the regional directories. BOTW UK isn’t as strong as the main .org domain but there’s some juicy categories available- pretty much any Scottish business could benefit from a listing on this page for example.
• Don’t expect any traffic from the ads

Sign up for the 30 day free trial here.