Vertical Measures

Don’t Launch Your New Site Before Using These 4 Website Marketing Techniques

Mike Huber — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 12:00:35 +0000

Many businesses that are new to Internet marketing start with building out their site and then look at the type and volume of content they will deploy. This approach is exactly backwards. Many brand sites that we work with have thousands of pages that are, quite frankly, ineffective because of the way they built their site structure and their content focus. Had they done the keyword research first and determined their content focus and volume, they would have built out their sites very differently and the Internet marketing techniques used to grow their traffic would be much more effective.

The four website marketing techniques listed below will save you time, trouble and effort as you deploy your new website. By following these techniques, you will be able to determine the best keyword phrases to focus on, the type and focus of your content, the structure of your site as well as the phrases you should use for your anchor text in your initial link building efforts.

1. Keyword Analysis

One of the most effective things you can do as a start-up is to determine what keywords you will focus on for your business marketing. Many terms are extremely competitive and it will be very difficult for you to acquire a top 3 search engine listing. Other, long-tail terms will have significant volume in the aggregate but will be less competitive and give you the opportunity to rank and gain traffic.

Some things to think about as you do your keyword research:

Volume

Volume is certainly important. You want to target terms that have enough traffic to make writing content around that keyword worthwhile. You’ll find that the most competitive terms have the most volume. You want to rank for these terms but you’ll also want to look past this very competitive set of terms and find others that have a good search volume but a lower competitive index.

Competitive Index

You can use Google AdWords to determine the competitive index for a particular keyword phrase. The index is based on a 1-100 ranking. If the keyword phrase is 100, it is the most difficult with a 1 being the easiest.

We build a keyword research document for our clients that looks at these phrases and organizes them to quickly see the opportunities. Using color in the spreadsheet gives you a quick visual of where to focus your efforts. Highlight your column in EXCEL and apply conditional formatting. It will give you a color scale as shown below. You would want to stay away from the terms in the red scale and lean more towards the green. In our example, “what to do in phoenix” offers a good monthly search volume with a low competitive index.

Once you’ve determined your initial keywords, it’s a simple matter to brainstorm ideas for content.

2. Developing Your Content

The following technique is one we use at Vertical Measures and it will help you generate lots of content ideas around your keywords. You should end up with a solid content calendar with many long tail terms focused on good traffic volume and lower competition.

You’ll need some time to do this and a way to capture your new list of ideas.

Content Suggestion Tools

Start with http://soovle.com. This site allows you to type in your keyword and see suggestions from some of the main search engines. It will give you ideas for long tail terms and you’ll find some terms you never even thought of. Enter your keyword slowly and look at the suggested terms as you are typing the phrase. Make a note of the suggestions. You’ll start seeing the keywords from your initial research as well as many others.

Another great resource is http://www.ubersuggest.org. This site takes your base term and extracts Google suggestions for it. You can download all the suggestions via a text file.

Armed with your keyword list, you can come up with ideas for content. Before you actually go to the next step, you may want to run all the additional ideas through Google AdWords to determine the competitive nature and traffic potential so you can focus on the terms that will give you the best leverage.

Your Content Should Solve Problems or Answer Questions

The above process is designed for you to come up with ideas to build your content around. Look for things that will answer your client’s questions, solve their problems or engage them on your site. What terms lend themselves to infographics, video, top 10 lists and how-to articles? Content with headlines that solve problems are often the most popular.

Top 10 Ways To…
7 Secrets of…
How to Fix Your… In 10 Minutes

With this in mind, visit a few other sites like:

http://answers.yahoo.com/
http://www.quora.com/
http://www.linkedin.com/answers
http://www.facebook.com/questions/ (depends on friends as you can only see friends’ questions)

Start by entering your phrase in the search section and look for the kinds of questions people are asking about your keywords and your business focus. You can get more results by using variations of your phrases. Make note of these questions and any others that come to mind while doing this research as they will make good ideas for content headlines.

By now, you should have lots of ideas that are vetted for traffic and their competitive nature. Put these in a spreadsheet and start adding title suggestions and content types. Some of the keywords will lend themselves to written content, others to video or infographics.

Take your list of ideas and add them to your content calendar.

3. Developing Your Site Structure

It gets a bit tougher here. Now with the type and volume of content you plan to deploy, you’ll need to determine the kind of site structure you’ll need. This is one of the most important things to get right as you develop your web presence. I can’t tell you how many clients we work with that have gotten this part very wrong. If your site is set up incorrectly, then it’s difficult to maximize the value of content, link building, social media and other Internet marketing techniques.

Start with determining the categories and the directories you’ll need. Sometimes, based on your content focus, it’s really easy. But with some clients that have a tremendous number of products or a wide variety of content it becomes more difficult. Set your directories and wire-frame the site. Getting a visual of the site often allows you to “see” things that don’t line up well or places where you can revise and simplify your site architecture. Sites like mockflow.com and gliffy.com can help you with this step. You can try Gliffy for free.

I’ve always been an advocate of “owning” your own publishing platform. That is, to be able to add content whenever you choose. We work with so many clients that tell us it takes weeks to add content. Don’t put yourself in this boat. Use a content management system that allows you to post content whenever you want and to add directories as well. WordPress is a great content management system as are Drupal and Joomla. Many small businesses and start ups have very limited budgets. I recommend these as all of them are free and have strong development communities around them which provide ancillary plug ins and other features that enhance the core content management systems. There are also numerous paid CMS systems.

4. Link Building

Your content is written; video is shot and edited; now it’s time to get links to your site. Start with manufacturers or vendors if you have an e-commerce site. If you are selling services, then go to any of the professionals you’ve used to get started and have them link to your site. These are great places to get your “first” links.

Go back to your initial keyword report and determine the long tail terms that have a lot of volume and low competition and start building links with those terms.

Most of us focus on off-page links but don’t forget the value of internal linking. Make it a point to show the search engines what you think is important on your site and what keywords you value the most by using your anchor text with them. Many sites use terms like, “click here” or “learn more” rather than using their keyword phrases. If your content is important enough to link to, then use a keyword in your anchor text.

Link Building Case Study: Leveraging Engaging Content

Kaila Strong — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 12:00:25 +0000

Back in November here on the Vertical Measures blog we published a content piece we’d been working on for quite some time, “The Authority Building Machine Infographic”. Producing one great piece of content each quarter is something every business should strive to do, whether it’s a video, case study, webinar or even an infographic.

A good piece of content can help you build the authority of your site (as we showcase in our Infographic) and additionally can bring targeted niche traffic to your site and paying customers to your virtual door. Don’t believe me? Check out the results of our recent infographic and see for yourself. (We can’t give you this kind of detail for the work we do for clients, but happy to share our results.)

Social Metrics

Engaging with customers through the use of social media is one surefire way to build a community of engaged prospects and also a fab way to get some social links too. Our team tweeted, +1′d, Facebook’d, bookmarked and commented to help promote our content piece from both branded and personal accounts.

After all was said and done we received almost 200 RTs on the original post, 24 Google +1s, almost 4,000 Stumbles (1500 from paid campaign), 17 Facebook Likes, 52 Facebook shares and Topsy shows over 250 posts via social channels. Guest blog posts and others who embedded our infographic showed social media success too:

SearchEngineJournal.com – Tweeted 294 times, 12 Google +1s and 17 Facebook Likes
SearchEngineWatch.com – Tweeted 364 times, 21 Google +1s and 63 Facebook Likes
SocialTimes.com – Tweeted 104 times and 18 Facebook Likes
MediaBistro.com – Tweeted 70 times

Takeaway? It’s important to cater your social promotion to the content piece and to your industry. In addition it pays to do some pre-promotion and planning. We knew that our infographic was complex, most are. We took separate key concepts from the infographic and wrote very “evergreen” guest blog posts about those concepts: 4 Ways to Use Linked In to Promote Your Website, Using Social Media to Build Site Authority, 5 Content Pieces to Build Site Authority, How Infographics Can Help You Build Site Authority, and Six Ways You Can Use Google + to Build Authority.

With great content like this you can get your Infographic embedded on a niche site and keep the momentum up around the theme of your Infographic. Sure, our Infographic is pretty niche and our industry isn’t like others – but imagine the possibilities with a strategy like this. An online health site could develop an infographic giving facts about a rise in childhood obesity. Then they could develop 5-10 different guest blog posts around that topic: what the leading causes are, recent treatment options, a personal account from a parent, an interview with a doctor who specializes in childhood obesity, etc… A few tips: prepare your posts prior to your Infographic going live, reach out to bloggers ahead of time and get on editorial calendars. It may take 30-60 days to get added to an editorial calendar so be sure to keep this in mind – especially true for large publications.

Traffic Metrics

By no means was our latest infographic the most trafficked post we’ve ever had but wowsers did we see some traffic jumps. Since November our blog post has received over 5,000 unique views and time spent on page is over 5 minutes – and that’s just people who actually went to our original post. By marketing our Infographic with guest blog posts and doing some social promotion we got the most out of our Infographic and expect to see continued traffic driven to our site for months and even years to come.

Link Metrics

As a company who started off primarily in the link building world, we know just how valuable a great link to your website can be – priceless. Our infographic drew in a whopping 1400+ links from over 50 linking root domains with an average domain authority of 52. Sure, our awesome team can take credit for building some of the links (our guest posts & social links). But the rest of the links were about as natural as it gets – embeds or blog posts linking back to our site and infographic. We expected to get quite a few links, heck we’re a link building company aren’t we? But over 1400 surpassed even our expectations.

Investment vs. Return

In reviewing the success of any content leveraging activities you have to think about how the investment stacks up to the return. Our team put in an estimated 50+ hours worth of work developing the graphics, writing blog posts, doing social promotion, brainstorming and strategizing over the course of a three month period. It’s quite an investment, one with a price tag of several thousand dollars. But when looking at the return of over 50 unique liking root domains with average DA 50+ you’re looking to spend almost $15,000 to acquire these links at current industry rates. Not to mention the traffic that was driven to our site; 5,000 targeted visitors at our industry rates would be several thousand dollars as well.

In the end we’re very happy with the results. Have you seen similar results by leveraging engaging content in the past?

Accelerate! Nominated in 2012 Small Business Book Awards

Sarah Moraes — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 12:00:09 +0000

We were thrilled to find out that Accelerate!, Arnie Kuenn’s best-selling Internet marketing book, is nominated in Small Business Trends’ 2012 Small Business Book Awards in the category of marketing.

The Small Business Book Awards recognizes business books published in 2011. The top 10 winners will be selected by readers based on number of votes as the Best Small Business Books of 2012, while the top five vote-getters in each category become Category Winners.

Voting commences February 1, 2012 and ends February 16. In last year’s Awards, over 41,000 votes were cast by the community. Please vote for Accelerate! and spread the word to family, friends and fellow book lovers.

If you haven’t read Accelerate! yet, the book is for small to large organizations eager to enhance their content marketing. The book includes eight steps to achieving a comprehensive, successful content marketing plan. The book also includes contributions from 16 other industry experts including; Jay Baer, Rand Fishkin and Joe Pulizzi. With case studies and real world examples of companies that have experienced great success with content marketing, Accelerate! is packed with tools that will help any business get started today. Pick up the book at Amazon or download a free, condensed version, The 8 Steps to Content Marketing Guide for 2012.

To vote for Accelerate!, just visit http://bookawards.smallbiztrends.com/marketing_2011/accelerate-3/.

Crucial Steps for Building Website Authority

Brad Kuenn — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 11:30:59 +0000

As most SEOs know by now, a strong authoritative website does not need to be owned and operated by a large multimillion dollar corporation with an endless budget. With the strength in social networking, a website with very strong authority might only need to have the trust with the people in a certain niche. Now days, there are authoritative websites in every subject, from hair products to sports training. Understanding how to build authority to your site may require a bit of knowledge in internet marketing, but once you get the ball rolling in the right direction the possibilities are endless for your brand.

A website’s success can be measured by the amount of targeted visitors that it receives which can inevitably determine a site’s strength. To achieve the goal of an authoritative website, the site itself must rank highly for keywords that your targeted group is actually using to search (I know, it’s the chicken or the egg thing). The only way to enjoy a website’s continued triumphs is by maintaining the high number of targeted visitors on a persistent basis.

Aside from creating a visually enticing website, there are many helpful strategies that help keep visitors engaged and interested in coming back to the site. In no particular order, the following is what I would consider a “must have” list for building authority to your website:

Original Content

Probably one of the most valuable tactics you can use; updating the site multiple times a week with original quality content can drastically help drive authority. Avoid the fluff; generate worthy blog posts or articles. Writing informative or interesting blog posts that people will want to share is an easy and effective way to spread your brand throughout the specific niche community.

Videos

Video productions can often scare off many small business owners because they believe it will cost too much money without direct, immediate profit. However if you purchase an inexpensive flip camera, or an easy to use webcam and record a few simple “how-to” videos. Grab the embed code from your video host of choice, create a webpage or blog post around it and you might notice a heavy increase in visitors and social interaction on your site.

Infographics

If you have an in-house graphic designer, or can find a freelance graphic artist; projecting valuable information in the form of fun, easy to read, and straight to the point infographics can be extremely helpful in building authority for your site (see below). It’s also a great way to add “Share Buttons” to further promote your company.

Webinars

Organizing and producing a webinar on a topic in your niche can not only help acquire traffic to your site but can also generate promising leads in the form of viewers. You can also record your webinar and add it to your website or YouTube channel as another video directing toward your site.

Free Guides

By promoting a suitably written free guide or white paper, some of the most sought after traffic can come to your site by just writing 4 to 25 pages about something already in your expertise. Free guides generally contain information about your products or services, research, case studies, company opinions, or resource guides that list other top experts in your niche.

eBook

An eBook is significantly longer that a Free Guide. They take more energy and time to write, but when done correctly they can help push your business more into the mainstream, while at the same time, build your site’s authority. For a few hundred bucks you can even self publish and sell your eBook series on Amazon and Barnes & Noble too.

Get Involved and Be Personable

If you have seen my Profile Page, you know I aim to be as “real” as possible towards future leads and the community. Establishing yourself and your brand in a truthful, down to earth fashion will help attract more targeted audiences. Visitors today have a sharp eye on what is automated, and what has depth with real opinions. In a niche community, participate in forums and general discussions; add your input in as many relative discussions as possible to further your reputation as an expert.

Directories

This may sound fairly obvious, but industry directories and high authority directories will most likely have good Page Rank, and Domain Authority. While avoiding free directories that place links for everyone; using specific, high ranking directories can be an easy way to raise your sites authority. Just be sure the position of the link on the directory is placed on the most relevant page possible, and check if the page has good Page Authority as well.

Link Building

Choosing the right link building campaigns can significantly influence your website’s authority. Contact the resource pages that link to content comparable to what you provide on your site and inquire about being added to the list. Pull the backlinks from your competitors and you might find sites that are already linking to a site similar to yours. This can generate further leads to go after and will eventually raise the authority of your site.

Developing quality inbound links can significantly improve the sites authority. Backlinks are still the backbone of the web and are the most important signal to search engines to determine your website’s strength. As always, you want natural backlinks from as many different domains as possible. A useful link builder’s tip: Fix those broken links! While your website may still be live, those external links might not be. Use a tool to locate broken links or it’s suggested to manually check pages on your website every three months for any broken links.

Similar to broken links, broken pages can also send bad signals; make a list of the pages, fix them or 301 redirect them to the most suitable and appropriate live page. Most backlinks are acceptable, but the most beneficial ones clearly come from other highly trusted websites such as .gov domains, .edu domains, or even chief news sites. You should constantly be on the lookout for authority backlinks, because even a single solid link can considerably boost the authority of your website.

With the above strategies, you can start to build your site’s authority, and enhance your business’s success. Building your sites authority in any niche is a matter of making that website popular and growing its network through any and all means available. You want engaging, quality content that will keep users on the site, and persuade them to share the content through social avenues. By branching out the types of content you create, you’re sure to find an approach that appeals to your audience and that can assist in the quest of building authority to your site. All combined efforts create a working representation for how you can strive in building website authority. There isn’t a fast way to website recognition, but rather deliberate planning, long hours, and time.

Know of any other great examples of building a niche site into an authority? Let us know in the comments below.

There Are Only 2 Ways to Build Backlinks

Michael Schwartz — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 12:00:48 +0000

Here at Vertical Measures we’re always being asked about our link building methods and what secrets we are holding back. Even though we have developed some proprietary tools and methods, the truth is this: there just are not a lot of secrets.

The way we see it, link building comes down to two approaches: manual link building and link attraction. A mix of both tactics is needed for the most well-rounded link profile that can help your site rise up the SERPs.

Manual link building

Manual link building involves the process of securing targeted links by manually recommending the site to its webmaster. In so doing you know exactly what kind of link you will be acquiring (and can thus target core pages with said request) as the first step in manual link building is to seek out such links, either by utilizing a nifty search operator or sifting through your competitors’ backlinks.

Many different tactics comprise the manual link building approach:

Contacting webmasters directly is the most effective form of manual link building. This will often lead you to relevant backlinks, and as an added bonus you can usually control the anchor text. This method tests a link builder’s creativity as here they must craft an email compelling enough to convince the webmaster to grant you the link (after first opening the email). It can be a frustrating method at times since the response rate is often low but it’s ultimately rewarding because of the choice quality of these links.
We also often use link reclamation when contacting webmasters. This tactic involves using Open Site Explorer to locate web sites linking to you that are 404-ing. By then alerting the webmaster to this error, you will regain the link juice from the fixed link. You can also search a page for broken links and then suggest your content instead of the broken pages.
Then there’s blogger outreach. In this method link builders contact a site for the purpose of posting a guest post (with a link back to the client) on that site. This can often get you linked to a site with a superb Domain Authority that’s relevant in your niche. You can also submit your content to article sites if you cannot find a home for your post on a niche blog. When embarking on blogger outreach, consider using a site like MyBlogGuest to find guest posting opportunities.
Directories are great if you want to get your link on an authoritative site as the top directories have fantastic Domain Authority. Most directories will let you pick your own anchor text as an added benefit. We often choose directories with a homepage PR of at least 4 and look for directories that flow PageRank throughout their subfolders. Aviva Directory (DA 77), JoeAnt (DA 71) and Best of the Web (DA 56) are some of my favorites.
Finally, forum and blog commenting can help you join conversations already going on in your niche. Perhaps your site has a piece of content that can be useful in one of these discussions, and if not perhaps you can build such content once you see people are seeking such information.

The Pros and Cons of Manual Link Building

Pros	Cons
Control anchor text	Not always the best site or context
Mostly do follow	Lots of manual labor and time involved
Can target specific sites and the pages linked to	Must deal with lots of rejection
Can find relevancy
Know exactly what you are getting

Link Attraction

Link attraction, meanwhile, involves creating a piece of content that is good enough to attract a bucket full of links. This tactic provides the best ROI overall because these links are editorially chosen from a variety of diverse domains that you might not ordinarily be able to get a link from. Taking a swing with link attraction provides you the opportunity to hit a home run (or if you’re really lucky, a grand slam) because if the right piece of content goes viral you can receive a voluminous boost. Plus, since these are completely natural links there is no risk.

Many different tactics make up the link attraction tactic:

Infographics are perhaps the most widely used link attraction tactic. They involve lots of planning and require a skilled designer to execute, but the payoff can be enormous. Infographics take a topic or concept and represent it visually. When done right on a compelling topic, the links often flow in, as was the case with this Vertical Measures infographic on link data visualization (106 links from 41 root domains).
Videos work to the same effect. They also require some technical skill and can present a topic in an interesting manner. If such videos go viral they can bring lots of traffic and links, but you must be careful where you upload it. Uploading to a site like YouTube provides easy hosting, but then the traffic and links could go there instead of to your site.
A contest can do the same thing, and you can guarantee yourself some quality links if you make linking to your site a requirement to enter the contest. Links can be accrued by other sites linking to the landing page for your contest as well for publicity sake. If the prizes are enticing enough (including prizes for promoting the contest), this can be another source of major links.
The key to link attraction really comes down to creating exemplary content. This can come in the form of an interview with a fascinating subject, a white paper that goes into depth on an interesting new topic, a comprehensive eBook or even a rock solid blog post. The medium really doesn’t matter, what matters is creating content so superb that people feel compelled to share it and ultimately link to it. It doesn’t have to go viral to be a smashing success, but the best examples of link attraction will.

The Pros and Cons of Link Attraction

Pros	Cons
Editorially given	Cannot control anchor text or which page they link to
Mostly do follow	Will not know exactly what you are getting
From a variety of domains	Will have some failures on timely, extensive projects
Possible home runs (and grand slams)
No risk

For some excellent examples of link attraction, check out this video from Vertical Measures’ president Arnie Kuenn:

Ultimately, any comprehensive link building campaign should focus on both manual link building and link attraction. Through manual link building you can target relevant, authoritative sites in your niche, the type of links that provide a fat boost in the SERPs. Link attraction should be utilized as well because when a piece of content really hits it can provide an unmatched combination of authority, variety and naturalness. Neither tactic is necessarily better than the other, but in conjunction they can provide the kind of quantity and quality necessary for any well-rounded link campaign.

Which methods do you use to build links? Please share in the comments!