In this post, I’ll mention a few questions that you could ask your new link building client, but, in the case that you’re not working for a client, you could be asking them to your boss or maybe even to yourself as well.

Some of these questions should also be asked earlier in the sales process, for example before or during a sales pitch, but not every link marketer is in the situation that he or she is involved in this sales process from start till end.

What do you know about link marketing? What does your boss know about link marketing?

Starting with this question will make it a lot easier for you to keep your client happy. If he doesn’t know a lot about SEO and/ or link marketing yet, you can try to increase his level of knowledge, while you work for him. For example, when you’re working for someone who’s new to link building, reporting that ‘you’ve managed to get 2 highly relevant, editorial .edu links in just a few hours of work’, might not be such a good idea. Try to explain the value of links first, and/ or start your reporting with results that he can fully understand.

Also, when your contact person has to report to his superior, it’s also useful to get an idea of what the knowledge level of that manager is. That way, you can provide the right information to your contact person, to keep his boss happy as well. Using an approach like this usually results in a very happy contact person (you’re ‘helping him out’ as well), who’s willing to fight for you during meetings with his boss.

Did you hire an SEO or link building company in the past, or have you built links yourself?

Asking a question like this might give you an indication of what kind of strategies have been used in the past. For example, if your new client hired an SEO agency in the past, that mainly used services like TLA, ReviewMe and PPP to get new links, you know that you have to clean up first, before you can start building new links.

While tools like MajesticSEO also have the ability to show you what links were placed to a specific web page in the past, simply asking the client what strategies were used previously can give you just as much information.

Can you tell more about your company, i.e. the company philosophy, office locations, etc.?

Link building opportunities are everywhere. Office locations are a good start for localized link building, a list of important employees might help you to discover (linkless) press mentions, and the company philosophy may provide different link building angles as well.

Ask your client to provide as much information about the company and the people that work there as possible, including (old) brochures and other documentation. Filter out whatever you feel is necessary or useful, and write that down for future use.

What are the USPs of your product(s) or service(s)?

Just like with the company, you also need to know what is unique about the products your client is trying to sell. Unique angles lead to links. Are their products environmentally friendly? Aim at eco blogs & websites. Is your client the cheapest in the industry? Try to obtain links from price comparison websites, or focus on websites that offer money saving tips, just to name a few.

If your client is not able to tell you their USP, you’ll probably have a hard time promoting the website. No USP usually means mediocrity, and mediocrity means low link building conversion rates, because the website does not add a lot of extra value. Adding exceptional content to your client’s website will probably be your only option.

Can you name 5 of your biggest competitors? Can you explain why these companies are big competitors?

Asking this question can give you more insights in the knowledge level of your contact person (”yes, there is a difference between online and offline competition”), but can also be the jump start of your competitor analysis.

Also, adding ‘why are this your most important competitors’, may reveal some details about these competitors and their USPs as well. Some companies seem to know their competitors better than they know their own company, so asking this question might be very useful.

Do you have a LinkedIn profile, and -if so- can you accept me as a connection?

LinkedIn profiles, and some other social network profiles as well, are excellent to discover interesting connections that your new client may have.

First, you can try to see which journalists, bloggers, reporters or other interesting webmasters are directly connected to your contact person. Advise your client on how to use this network optimally, by giving him clear directions. Don’t just say “try to get links from these places”, but use him as one of your own link developers.

You can also try to find interesting connections the other way around. Determine which people are highly influential in your client’s industry, and find out if your client is connected to these influencers, or which of your client’s connections are.

Are you currently sponsoring any events, charities or whatsoever?

Asking this question (and getting ‘yes’ as an answer) can lead you to some low hanging fruit. High quality, very low hanging fruit. Lots of charities and events list their sponsors on their website, but not a lot do this in an optimal way. Some only mention contributing companies, others link using third party scripts and some use heavily unoptimized image links. Spending some time optimizing these relationships (in a non-spammy way, of course) is usually well worth it.

What kind of private data do you have?

I’m not talking about personal private data here, but lots of companies have a huge amount of market research information, general client data, or other facts and numbers that are perfectly suitable for creating linkbait-type of content. Try to find out what kind of data your client has. Most companies don’t even realize the value of the information they have, or what they could do with it.

Now comes the difficult part: when you have discovered some data, studies, or other information that you could use to attract more links, it’s time to convince the client why making his precious, valuable information accessible to the public (including competitors) is a good thing. Some clients will understand this straight away, but you might have a hard time convincing others.

Do you have any interns or students working at your company?

Interns and students not only can be an access point to a .edu domain, but can be used to create awesome, linkable content during their internship as well. Mix both, and you have the ability to publish links to awesome content on a .edu domain

What are your offline marketing plans for the next season?

Integrating online and offline marketing efforts can be highly effective. Instead of 1+1=2, it could even be 1+1=3, depending on the campaign and execution. However, even in 2009, not a lot of companies seem to realize this.

If your client is planning on launching a creative offline advertising campaign, you’d want to know, because failing to create a related linkbait campaign (or optimizing the online part of the campaign) would be a missed opportunity.

Of course, there are tons of other questions that you could ask a new (or existing) client. Do you have any other questions to add to this list, that you could ask a client?

10 Questions to Ask a New Link Marketing Client

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1. Starting Up a Link Marketing Campaign
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2. The Perfect Link Request Email Template
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3. Why Over 90% of All Link Requests Fail
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Link research is a very important part of a link marketing campaign. Tools like MajesticSEO or Linkscape can be very useful, but I’d recommend reading Garrett French’s link builder’s guide to analyzing SERP dominators for link opportunities as well. Combine these two things, and you’ll end up with a killer list of link targets.

When you’ve identified the most relevant and credible link targets, it’s time to contact them. If you’re not sure how to do this, one thing you could do is to ask advice from people who receive lots of link requests or press releases every day. These people can tell you which messages stand out from the crowd, and might be successful because of that.

And also:

• Content aggregation for links, traffic and buzz – Adam Singer
• Strategic link building for SEO – Lee Odden
• Link building Q&A with Ben Wills – Andy Beal
• 10 Link bait tips – Lyndon Antcliff
• Buzz is a vital element of digital PR – Adam Singer

Btw, feel free to share your favorite link marketing related posts of last month in the comments, if you feel that I missed something…

Link Building this Month (06.2009)

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All these different types of goals also show you that -although pitching your site is part of a link marketer’s daily routine- link marketing is more than just sending out link requests. During any good link marketing training you’ll learn that link marketing is just a search engine optimized form of marketing. And that there are no secrets.

And also:

• How being pet friendly became a link building opportunity – Wil Reynolds
• Trust and link building – Eric Enge
• Prepare yourself for link building – Court Tuttle
• Discrete viral factors that cause people to share crappy content – Brian Chappell
• Easy widgets for link building – Michael Martinez
• 17 Ways to accelerate links to your link bait (and other highly linkable content) – Garrett French
• Free links: The three principles – Melanie Nathan
• Effective link building strategies for successful link acquisition – Augusto Ellacuriaga
• Inbound link building quality flowchart – Nicolas Prudhon
• Distribute your link sources – Eric Enge
• And the last link of this month points to an article that I wrote for Youmoz; Link building from A to Z

Link Building this Month (05.2009)

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There are a few different types of tools that you can use for link building (I’m not talking about link building software here, btw), of which the most important ones are listed below.

One-click Analysis Tools

When you need to know simple things, like the amount of links that point to a specific page or domain according to Yahoo!, or which anchor text is being used (too) often, you need tools who give you this information in just a few clicks. One-click analysis tools are great to give you some quick insights in the situation of a website, but they come short when you’re performing an in-depth analysis.

SearchStatus

Actually, Quirk’s SearchStatus isn’t exactly a tool, but a collection of features in a single Firefox plugin. Useful information, such as Google TBPR, page- and domain links via Yahoo! SiteExplorer, whois information, Google’s cache of the page you’re visiting, an on-page link report and Archive.org are just a mouse click away. SearchStatus also provides the option to highlight all nofollow links, which is a very useful addition as well.

LinkDiagnosis

LinkDiagnosis, which is available as a web based tool and as Firefox plugin, is like the Yahoo! SiteExplorer on crack. It tries to filter out all low quality links (not always with success), provides a list of common anchor texts, and tries to create a list with the most popular pages of the domain you’re investigating.

A big benefit of LinkDiagnosis is that you can download the data (export=good ) as a csv file, and use it in the way you want it.

The speed of the tool depends on the size of the backlink profile you’re investigating. A small site will only take a few seconds, but it may take LinkDiagnosis somewhat longer (up to about half an hour) to create a report of a site with a larger backlink profile.

When you need a general overview of a link profile, want an estimation of what the most important pages (in terms of incoming links) of a domain are, or what the anchor text spreading is, LinkDiagnosis is to tool to go to.

In-Depth Analysis Tools

When you need more detailed information, for example when you’re investigating your own website, or your competitor’s, you need tools that go more into depth. These tools might show link building efforts, structures, or maybe even data from the past.

Although Google’s Webmaster Tools also can provide quite some link related info, I’m not going to mention this one, because it can only be used for your own sites, and not -for instance- competitors.

MajesticSEO

Both SEOmoz’ Linkscape and MajesticSEO try to create a (near) complete index of the web for SEO purposes. While Linkscape has a far more user friendly user interface, I prefer Majestic, because it can deliver a broader range of data, and because all data (instead of a limited amount) can be downloaded in csv format. MajesticSEO is free to use for your own site (verification required), but you have to pay for detailed competitor reports. MajesticSEO also has a (free) Bad Neighborhood Checker, which lists up to 25 domains on your IP address (both C and D class) sorted by the amount of backlinks.

The biggest ‘problem’ of MajesticSEO, is that it provides so much information, that it may be a data overload for some. To name a few things Majestic can do for you:

• Provide ‘normal’ information, such as anchor text use, or your most popular pages (sorted by incoming links)
• Show all incoming links of a domain sorted by TLD or country
• List all incoming links of a domain sorted by complete or C-class IP adress
• Give a separated view of the total amount of incoming links and the total amount of referring domains
• Show only links in frames, nofollow links, image links or redirect links
• Links from the past (excellent info when you take on a new client!)

Another great feature of Majestic is their Compare domain backlink history tool, which can compare the backlink discovery of up to five websites. This can be very useful when you want to keep track of your link building efforts, or if you want to spot anomalities in the link growth of your competitors. The functionality to investigate specific link discovery date ranges makes is very easy to determine what kind of link building or PR efforts caused a specific spike in new links.

One thing that you have to keep in mind, though, is that MajesticSEO shows you data of when they discovered new links, and not when these links were actually placed. The overall pattern is usually ok, but the actual dates can be a bit off.

Xenu’s Link Sleuth

Where MajesticSEO is awesome for off-site link research, Xenu’s Link Sleuth is excellent for on-site analysis. This tool, which tries to act as a search engine crawler, checks websites for broken links and displays a continuously updated list of URLs, which can be sorted by different criteria.

Link Sleuth is the perfect tool to give you an overview of your website (and internal link) structure, because it lists all incoming internal links per page, anchor text of links (or page title) and the depth level of each page. If an important page rests at level seven (7 clicks away from the home page) with just one incoming link, you know something is wrong.

The tool also shows you which of the pages you link to, both external and internal pages, return a 404 error. While Google Webmaster Tools also provides information about which of your URLs return a 404 error (a great place to start your link building campaign, btw), it doesn’t list off-site pages that return a 404. You can either remove these dead links from your pages, or contact the webmaster of the site, and ask if something went wrong (wink, wink).

You can also use Link Sleuth to run a report of a website you really want to get a link from. If you can spot a few dead links, you’ve found yourself a great opening to start communication with the webmaster of that particular site.

Link Target Tools

Now that you’ve analyzed the crap out of your own website and your competitors’, it’s time to use some tools that help you find new link targets.

Hubfinder

SEObook’s Hubfinder looks for sites which have co occurring links to related authoritative websites on a particular topic. The tool used to be free, but it is now only accessible for paid SEObook members. However, there are still a few (free) mirrors available, which allows you to play around with the tool a little bit.

You can enter up to ten (or even 20 with the paid version) competing websites, and Hubfinder looks for websites that link to at least two of these competing sites. You can also add your own website, so you can filter out all sites that already link to you very easily.

The result is a list of multiple (this can vary from a few dozen to a few hundred) websites that link to several of your competitors, but not to you. Excellent link targets, if you ask me.

The only thing you have to do yourself, is filter out all the low quality sites. The co-citation tool uses Yahoo! to gather results, which means that Dmoz clones, guestbooks and other low quality pages are usually included in the list of link targets.

Link Harvester

Link Harvester, another SEObook tool, shows unique domains linking to a site, including the IP address and unique C block addresses of the links. It also highlights links from .edu, .gov, .mil., and .ac.uk domains, as these links might have greater impact. It includes links to archive.org, whois, Google cache, and several other useful sites near each link, and also contains an export functionality.

SEOmoz Link Finder

SEOmoz’ Link Finder is a good tool to help you get going with finding potential new link targets via search engines. When you enter some basic information, such as your URL, a few important keywords, two competitors and your location, Link Finder creates a list of queries that may help you find relevant websites that might be willing to link to you.

This list contains search operators that lead to general directories, such as SEO + “submit your site” for example, local directories, relevant social media sites and competitor related queries.

Both SEObook and SoloSeo have a tool with the same goal, but I find Link Finder just a tad more complete, or more easy to use.

One thing that I definitely should add, is that you should never rely on link building tools only. Although the right toolbox can definitely help a lot, not a single tool can add creativity to your link marketing campaign. Tools are just a way to take a look at what your competition is doing, to find low hanging fruit, and to get you in the right direction.

If you happen to use any tools that you think are indispensable as well, feel free to share them in the comments.

Indispensable Link Building Tools

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3. New Link Building Tool: BuzzStream
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A Sphinn thread caused quite some stir about dofollow link building. Just hearing the term dofollow already makes my skin crawl, but luckily I’m not the only one. Also, Yoast mentioned Dave Naylor’s comment referer plugin at A4U, which tells you which comments were dropped by visitors who came from (i.e.) dofollow search engines. I will definitely try that one out.

In the ’scientific approach’ category, Marie-Claire Jenkins (a.k.a CJ) wrote about more link analysis methods. Combine these methods with an awesome tool like Majestic’s Compare Domain Link History and a link prospect qualification guide, and you’ll definitely be able to find some great link targets. And if you still fail to get these targets to link to your website, you might want to improve your email subject lines, or use any of the link attraction catalysts. Or you could create fake websites

Ian Lurie published a series about link building, which -after part 1, 2, 3 and 4- ended with some tips to out-execute the competition. He shared some great tips (quite a big bunch of link building tips, actually) and although most were of a beginner to intermediate level, his fine writing style makes the series a great read.

Lastly, I came across few presentations I believe are worth sharing. BuzzStream’s Jeremy Bencken spoke at the Austin SEO Meetup earlier this month, and, although the presentation took place in January, Wil Reynold’s 1 hour talk at Affiliate Summit is definitely worth listening to as well. The 3rd presentation is one of my own; the guys from A4U Expo already uploaded my presentation about link building for affiliates to SlideShare.

And also:

• 21 Tips to earn links and tweets to your blog post – Rand Fishkin
• SEO: Do link builders need to know it? – Julie Joyce
• 6 Real linkbait examples and the lessons learned – Dave Pye
• How NOT to request a link via email – Rebecca Kelley
• Increase online visibility for sales and links – Justilien Gaspard
• 10 linkbait strategies to build links and drive traffic – Chris Lake
• Optimizing anchor text and titles – Eric Enge
• Guest blogging for (a lot of) backlinks – Richard Baxter
• 15 Ways to measure (and GROW) your site’s linkability – Garrett French

Link Building this Month (04.2009)

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If you don’t have tickets yet, A4U is offering a 10% discount, but you’d better register asap.

I will be discussing link building tactics for publisher-side affiliates, as it can be very difficult to obtain links for affiliate websites sometimes. Bas van den Beld and John Straw will also be sharing their thoughts during the ‘Beyond linkbait’ session.

If you’re attending to the A4U as well, or are near Amsterdam on the 28th or 29th of April, and want to catch a beer (or two), feel free to leave a comment or to drop me an email. Unfortunately, I won’t be able to make it to the Queen’s Day party, but for those who have the opportunity to be in Amsterdam during Queen’s Day: don’t miss it!.

Speaking at A4U Expo

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One of my favorite posts of the year so far is Lisa Barone’s killer tips for getting links and content from Flickr, where she explains how the Flickr community can contribute to your content AND help you to promote it. Great stuff.

Also, Gyutae Park mentioned 5 ways to optimize your existing links. Especially his first point, asking links from someone who’s linked to you before, can work like a charm. Combine this with Lisa’s earliermentioned tips, a solid blogger pitching strategy, and probably some offline marketing, and a solid amount of awesome links is a near certainty.

And also:

• Eric Ward was wondering if Twitter is incredibly valuable or utterly useless for link building
• Garrett French listed 16 ways to measure a link’s marketing value
• Eric Enge discussed the temporal nature of link building
• Bill Slawski explained a Google patent on web link spam (btw, if you’re interested in more patent stuff, I highly recommend you to subscribe to Dave’s Dojo newsletter)

Link Marketing this Month (03.2009)

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2. Link Building Strategies: 69 Solid Tactics For 2009
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3. 10 Questions to Ask a New Link Marketing Client
   Yes, I know

In my opinion, the perfect link request email template looks something like this;

{Greeting} {Name},

{Opening/ Introduction}

{Explanation of why your website is relevant to the one you’re contacting}

{Include WIIFM for the person you’re emailing}

{Close},

{Your Name}

I bet you were hoping for a bit more . You were hoping for something that you could copy/ paste and save time with. Well, sorry, but it usually doesn’t work like that

The problem with sending out emails is that your contacting individuals. And every individual is different, and therefore requires a different approach. Sure, there are things that you can either automate or templatize, but this is pretty difficult with link requests in general. In most cases, using email templates will result in a significantly lower success or link conversion rate.

When you think about all different factors that come into play, you’ll probably agree with me:

• What industry are you in? Whether it’s tech, banking or automotive; every industry needs a different approach in email format, use of language and level of explanation.
• What kind of media are you approaching? Traditional media usually need (or are used to) a different approach than bloggers or other webmasters.
• What is the profession of the person you’re emailing? Is it a professor, a hobbyist or a school boy?
• Are you contacting a man or a woman? This isn’t just for the opening (Dear Mr. X/ Hello Mrs. Y), but you can use it for so many other things as well. Leveling, for instance.
• What’s the age of the person you’re trying to reach? A eighteen year old will probably communicate on a different level than an eighty year old.
• Does your contact person have any hobbies? Hobbies are excellent for personalization; you show that you’ve been following the person you’re contacting (don’t overdo this in a creepy way, though)
• What is your proposition? Are you just requesting a link, trying to establish a relationship, or are you aiming at a guest post?
• Are there other relevant factors you could use? Have you read other articles written by the person you’re trying to reach? Do you have a history with the guy you’re contacting, or are you contacting him out of the blue? What’s the relevance level between your website and the website you want to obtain a link from? Etcetera, etcetera.

If you’re constantly working in the same industry, contacting the same type of men (or women) of the same age, with the same hobbies, then, perhaps, you might be able to create a format that you could use yourself. However, I doubt that that’s your situation.

You could try to counter these statements by saying that sending out a link request is similar to email marketing (I’ve heard this argument in more than one occasion), but this simply isn’t true. When you’re using email marketing as a method of communicating with your customers, you (1) already have a relationship with the people you’re contacting, and (2) people don’t expect your email to be a personal email. Or do you expect that Zappos is crafting each and every email newsletter individually on a personal level? When it comes to a link request (or any other business proposal), people DO expect that the email comes from a real person, not a bot or tool.

Saving time in other ways

In stead of trying to save time by using templates that lower your success rate significantly, there are several other ways you can save time during a link marketing campaign.

> Contact relevant websites only

Lots of people are wasting time by contacting not (or slightly) related websites, in an attempt to obtain a link. Irrelevant websites will be much less likely to link to you, in comparison with relevant or highly relevant ones. So if you want to save time in an efficient way, filter out every website that’s not relevant enough. The same goes for low quality websites, by the way.

> Test your email skills

Although, like I mentioned before, no two websites or webmasters are the same, it still is possible to test your skills. For example, you could try to contact someone you know with a link request without disclosing that the email is yours. Afterwards, you can ask him what he or she thought of the email (or why it got deleted ). If the person finds out the email was sent by you, he/ she’ll probably honestly say what he or she thinks of your message. Repeat this a few times and learn from the opinions of your friends.

> Outsource your link marketing

Seriously, if you don’t want to do link building, you’re probably better off not doing so. If seen a lot of link requests in my life, and you can often see if it was sent by someone who’d rather be on the beach, or some place else.

In stead of focusing on link marketing, you could work on your on-site optimization, your content marketing, client acquisition or anything else you like to do. Hire someone to do the link building part for you, or to help you with the process.

You can compare sending out a link request to trying to close a sales deal; it all comes down to liking. And if the person you’re contacting doesn’t like your email, you probably won’t close the deal.

More about link requests at Clickz.com, SoloSEO and SEJ.com.

The Perfect Link Request Email Template

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Earlier this week, however, I received an email from the folks at BuzzStream, a new ‘Relationship and link building tool’, offering a peek at what they’ve built. Although the tool is still in beta, it already looks very promising. From their site:

BuzzStream for Link Building is a fully integrated set of tools designed to help you gain inbound links and improve search rankings in a systematic, fully scalable way. The secret lies in creating more effective outreach, by streamlining link research and dramatically enhancing your tracking capabilities.

BuzzStream for PR and Social Media Marketing is an integrated web-based toolset that can help you manage and optimize your word-of-mouth marketing activities. The key is more effective relationship-building — in a manageable way.

A nifty functionality is the BuzzMark bookmarklet, that -when you click on it- scans for the contact info and some additional data of the website you’re visiting. This tool can save you a lot of time, and other BuzzStream features can save you from a lot of data entry and frustration as well. The BuzzStream Team -Jeremy, Paul and Pam- are blogging and Tweeting quite actively, in order to receive more input from the audience and improve the tool even further. Dedication builds better tools.

The best thing about the tool, in my opinion, is that they don’t want to automate the entire process of link marketing, but they want to make the process easier. It’s not link building software, but a link administration help.

The good folks of BuzzStream had 20 spare Beta invites laying around, which means that I can offer access to the (still free) service to the first 20 people who leave a comment (or drop me an email).

New Link Building Tool: BuzzStream

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Tests in the past, as well as experience, have showed us that if you compare a text link with an optimized anchor text with an image link with the same words attached as alt attribute, the page where the anchor text link points to will rank higher. This means that there’s no need to determine if a text link is “better” than an image link, but it still is worth to test the differences and smaller factors underneath. Nothing big, but useful enough to run a test.

The test

For this test, I have set up a page on a new subdomain of an existing domain. Unfortunately, I can’t share the domain, nor the exact keyword combination, because this particular test has already been (accidentally) terminated. Let’s just say I deleted a file I wasn’t supposed to

First, I wrote 6 different texts that were optimized for a combination of 2 different keywords ([KW1 KW2]). Both of these keywords return results in Google, but if you add them together in a single query, zero results show up. All texts were unique, but similar in layout and optimization technique. The keywords where the pages have been optimized for were in the exact same locations (word-wise) on every page.

Then, I set up a page with 6 different links. Three of these links were image links, and three were text links. For the images, which all had non-keyword filenames, I used different images of the same size. Although I do know that Google uses link order in the process of link valuation, I left this factor out on purpose.

The positions of the links on the page were:

1. An image link without an alt attribute or title tag.
2. An image link without an alt attribute, but with a [KW1 KW2] title tag.
3. An image link with a [KW1 KW2] alt attribute, but without a title tag.
4. A text link with a non-keyword (ie click here) anchor text.
5. A text link with a partially optimized (more about KW1 here) anchor text.
6. A nofollowed link with [KW1 KW2] anchor text.

After all pages had been uploaded, I added two links for indexation and let the test soak for about four months. During these months, all results were constantly (every week) monitored to see if the rankings were stable. Just to be sure, I also set up a control test, but that one was slightly different from this test.

The hypothesis

Like I mentioned, I do know that the order of the links matters. Although the differences are small, it does matter if you’re the first link on a page or the 217th. Because it is extremely difficult to set up a page in a way that it distributes an equal amount of link strength to each link, I decided to list the links in an order that would make any positive result clearly visible. The -in my opinion- least valuable link was listed first. I expected Google to list the pages in the following order after searching for [KW1 KW2]:

1. An image link with a [KW1 KW2] alt attribute, but without a title tag.
2. A text link with a partially optimized (more about KW1 here) anchor text.
3. An image link without an alt attribute, but with a [KW1 KW2] title tag.
4. An image link without an alt attribute or title tag.
5. A text link with a non-keyword (ie click here) anchor text.

I assumed that the nofollowed page would not show up, but I included the page as an extra control measurement.

The results

About 3 months after the test was set up and the rankings didn’t change in two months, it was time to end the test. A search for [KW1 KW2] made Google only list two URLs in the results. Only page 1 and page 3 showed up. After clicking on ‘repeat the search with the omitted results included’, three more pages showed up in an order that was slightly different from what I expected. The optimized title tag link (#2 in the original set-up) ranked above the partially optimized anchor text link (#5 in the original set-up). As expected, the page where the nofollowed link pointed to, didn’t show up.

1. An image link with a [KW1 KW2] alt attribute, but without a title tag.
2. An image link without an alt attribute, but with a [KW1 KW2] title tag.
3. A text link with a partially optimized (more about [KW1] here) anchor text.
4. An image link without an alt attribute or title tag.
5. A text link with a non-keyword (ie click here) anchor text.

The control test did not show any different results.

The conclusion

The conclusion of this particular test, is that an image link with an optimized anchor text is more valuable than a text link with an anchor text that is not optimized very well, in terms of ability to pass relevance.

An image link with an optimized anchor text might be more valuable than a text link with an anchor text that is not optimized very well. Because of the small difference in rankings and because of the order the links were placed in, a new test should be set up in order to

While lots of folks try to avoid image links (image based navigation included), this is absolutely not necessary. Depending on the anchor text possibilities, I would even prefer image links over text links in some cases. When you have an imaged based navigation with links to ‘Home’, ‘Services’, ‘Products’ and ‘About’, for example, you can add extra value by making the alt attributes more descriptive. This test shows that an optimized alt attribute (’SEO Services’) might be better than a not so optimized anchor text (’Services’).

The side notes

Setting up an SEO test that is 100% valid remains extremely difficult for several reasons. I probably made a small mistake somewhere while setting up this test, but I do think the results are pretty valid.

Please note that this test only included links to internal pages. It might be that image links that point to external pages are being treated differently by the major search engines. Also, the image format that I used was not a standard format. Google might value a link from an image of 70×15 px different than a link from an image of 468×60 or 250×250 px. This however, can (and will) be tested in a different set-up.

A Good Alt is Better Than a Bad Anchor

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