All posts in link building

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Like most people, SEO practitioners reflect on the past year and attempt to improve their skills in the new year.

If you haven’t made up your mind what exactly you want to change in the coming year, check out these suggestions for 30 SEO resolutions for 2012 that draw on modern industry best practices and growing trends.

Running an SEO project smoothly and effectively requires juggling many skills:  creativity, proactivity, effective time management and organisation, to name just a few.

But I would argue that one of the most important attributes of a successful SEO campaign is communication of knowledge – within an agency, of course, but also (perhaps less obviously) with clients. Many clients have little or no knowledge of SEO, and why should they? That’s what we’re here for, after all. But it’s unfortunately a fact of life as an SEO that algorithm updates and other external factors are not the only risk posed to a successful SEO project. Without at least a minimal level of SEO education, actions taken by a client can actually be detrimental to the SEO efforts of their agency or consultant.

One of my SEO New Year’s Resolutions (more Resolutions from SEOptimise in a forthcoming blog post by Matthew Taylor) is to help clients to help us by ensuring they have enough knowledge to understand our work, its aims and methodologies, and what they can do to ensure that we’re able to get them the best results possible. So I thought I’d kick off the New Year by taking a look at the top ways in which an SEO project can be sabotaged by a client. This is not me ranting about my lovely clients by the way – it’s more a retrospective look at some of the bottlenecks I’ve encountered in otherwise smooth SEO projects over the last year or so.

1. Changing the website without telling us
Whether it’s launching a new section, rolling back to an old version of the site, rewriting copy or even a full blown redesign, it’s really important to get the SEO perspective before any changes are made, to ensure that a) new material is optimised from the word go and b) prior SEO efforts are not damaged or lost. There’s nothing worse than finding that your client’s rankings have plummeted because the site has been reverted to an old, unoptimised version without your knowledge.

The solution:  emphasise to your client the importance of liaising on potential website changes before they happen, and in plenty of time. If there’s a redesign in the offing, ensure you’re involved from the outset to ensure that the new site is structured in an SEO-friendly way. It’s much easier to make changes in the planning stages than it is to change things once it’s live.

Blog comments:  quick link building win or spam-tastic black hat method you wouldn’t touch with a barge pole?

I wanted to find out what the general consensus was on this controversial topic within the SEO world, so I set out on something of a fact-finding mission to attempt to answer one question:  does blog commenting work, and if so, can it be done in a white hat way? (Ok, I guess that’s two questions then.)

Let’s clarify what we mean by ‘blog commenting’
We’ve probably all left comments on blog posts we’ve enjoyed or where we’ve felt we had something to contribute. What we’re talking about here is the use of blog commenting purely for the purposes of gaining links – i.e. you wouldn’t have left a comment if you hadn’t been trying to build a link. That might mean an anonymous blog comment with an anchor text link in true old-school black hat style, or it could mean the more socially acceptable form of an actual contribution to a post but including a link back in the author profile, with your name as the anchor text. Or it could mean a comment linking to a resource on your site because it’s relevant to the post in question. Either way, the motivation behind the blog commenting I’m talking about is self-serving, making it ethically questionable in the eyes of many.

The results are in! We now have 202 votes for yesterday’s ‘do you buy links for SEO‘ poll – and it’s fair to say the results are very interesting.

The reason I asked this question in the first place was because I wanted to forget about the usual best practice advice we always hear and get an honest and realistic representation of what it actually takes to achieve top rankings in Google.

So let’s get straight to the answers:
Link buying results

Following Matt’s SEO ethics post and having had many interesting discussions about buying links with some SEO’s recently, I thought it would be interesting to run a quick anonymous poll to find out whether buying links still has a part to play in your SEO strategy.

So here goes:
Poll now closed – please see our results post

This is intended to show what is actually happening in the industry, perhaps against best practice advice – so I think it will be interesting to see the results. Obviously this is an anonymous poll and only vote information is collected. If you’d like to show us examples, feel free to leave them in the comments. But I’d probably advise against it to be honest!

New York*

On SEO forums one of the most often discussed topics are Google penalties. Webmasters seek help to determine whether and why they have been penalised by Google. They also want to know how to deal with the penalty once it’s established that they have been hit by one.

What is a Google penalty and what isn’t? There seem to be different definitions floating around.

While Google employees will tell you that many SEO issues described as penalties aren’t actually penalties, most people seem to consider sudden and unexplained ranking and/or search traffic drops as a penalty. They at least suspect they have been subjected to a penalty.

Today I’d like to assist webmasters in determining whether they have been hit by an actual Google penalty by listing common reasons for getting penalised by Google.

Some of them are simply Google filters that deal with overtly manipulative SEO techniques. Some of these aren’t penalties at all, but I list them here as well because they are often mistaken for a penalty.

So just check out this list of ways to get penalised by Google. Many of them are high risk SEO tactics considered to be black hat by some.

google +1 button

Google +1 for websites is here for a few days, and while some people are still (or again) skeptical, there are quite a lot of webmasters who have adopted the + 1 button almost immediately. The SEO industry has been especially quick to include the buttons. I am among them, while I still don’t use the Facebook like.

I’m not going to shout hooray because Google finally released a button, but nonetheless I can see that it’s the best and the hitherto most important attempt by Google at entering the social media arena. Most others failed miserably and Google has learned some lessons it seems.

The ease of use, for instance, and the quick announcement that the +1 votes will count as a ranking factor, are good signs that +1 will still be here a year from now.

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Most of traditional SEO link building is still centered around the idea of actually building the links as if on a construction site. The idea or metaphor that links are like bricks and you can use them for building has been successfully contested recently by Ross Hudgens in his essay “Please exit the link building“.

It was an excellent write up, but in the end it failed to offer a solution that is not really about building links. The alternative to link building is of course getting links.

Getting links implies that you do not manually build the links like a house in the real world, but people from outside who you may not even know link to you.

This is of course the logical way to get links, and was the way the Internet worked even before link building was considered to be part of SEO.

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With the recent “Panda” Google quality update one of the key changes was that low quality content and links within it have been discounted by Google. It means that

not only so-called content farms got hit by the Panda update, but also sites which heavily relied on content farms for inbound links.

Perhaps the most obvious casualty was article marketing. If article marketing was  one of your key link building tactics prior to the Panda update, you finally have to adapt to modern link building and link baiting techniques that still work in 2011.

 

In this list I focused on common sense, widely used techniques, of which you’ll find plenty of examples on the Web. I didn’t want to be particularly creative and spectacular. So if you are Eric Ward or Michael Martinez you might not find anything new here.

For everybody else: check the list to find out whether you use all of them or at least those fitting best in your area, niche or industry.

As the importance of SEO becomes increasingly widely recognised, millions more marketers have started churning out press releases. Unfortunately, many seem less concerned about the potential media coverage than about the optimisation benefits.

A good press release, when it’s picked up on and used by the media, can do wonders for your brand awareness and corporate authority. But it’s also great for optimisation, and if your agency is writing slapdash articles, calling them press releases and distributing them to a bunch of websites where nobody will ever read them, then you’re barely scraping the surface of your press release potential.

By creating press releases that writers and bloggers will actually use, your effort can pack a far more powerful punch both in online and offline marketing.  Here are some of my top tips for dramatically better releases.

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