This guest post is by Bamidele Onibalusi of YoungPrePro.com.

Guest blogging is currently among the most popular marketing tactics, and you can be sure find guides on guest blogging almost anywhere you go online.

The problem with guest blogging is that it is being used by so many people today that if you donít have a solid plan your blog will hardly benefit.

What do you want from guest blogging?

Imagine I ask the question, “What exactly do you want from guest blogging? How do you want guest blogging to contribute to the success of your blog?” What would be your answer?

I’m sure a lot of us will answer along the lines of, “I want to score a guest post on ProBlogger and get hundreds of visitors back to my blog as a result.” Or “I want to score a guest post on {insert top blog’s name} and bring my blog to limelight.”

The reality, though, is that while following the above approach might sound like a smart thing to do, it is hardly very effective. A guest post on a big blog in your niche won’t make your blog popular; ten guest posts on big blogs won’t, either.

I’ve written hundreds of guest posts for my blog in the past two years, a good portion of which were published on big blogs. I’ve even had a guest post published that sent me 1,000 visitors in a day, and another one that sent me around 1,500 visitors in one week. You’d expect these to be some of my most effective guest posts ever, but unfortunately, they weren’t.

The best guest posts I’ve ever written, in terms of results, were written in one week, and they were submitted to blogs youíve probably never heard of. I wrote 31 guest posts, and I submitted them all in one week.

Together, all of those guest posts sent me less than 150 visitors in total referral traffic. But, those 31 guest posts I wrote in one week have resulted in over 60,000 additional visitors in search engine traffic over the past six months.

Re-read the above paragraph; that was 31 guest posts in one week, submitted to very small blogs that sent little or no traffic, but which lead to over 60,000 visitors in six months.

If we do the math, that’s like an additional 10,000 visitors in a month, for just one week of work. It’s an average of 1935 visitors per guest post. (It’s actually more, because the real number was around 64,000 visitors, but I rounded it down for the purposes of this discussion. Another thing worth noting is that around 26 of those guest posts were published, but let’s leave it at the number written—31—for the sake of this article).

You’re probably thinking, “How did he do it?” I’ll answer that question in this article, but before I do so, I’ll try to convince you as to why this approach is better than just focusing on writing hit-and-miss guest posts for big blogs in your niche.

So you see clearly what I mean, here are screenshots of my search traffic before and after the challenge.

Six months of traffic before the challenge:

Six months of traffic after the challenge:

You’ll notice a huge increase in traffic in just six months with these screenshots. It’s like a 200% increase in traffic, even though I never did anything to increase my SEO traffic after the challenge.

I know a lot of factors count when it comes to SEO, so the stats above are to some extent subjective, but I’m certain the search engine traffic increase is hugely influenced by those 31 guest posts I talked about earlier. To prove this, I wrote a post just ten days after the challenge, since I’d already started noticing an additional 100+ search engine visitors. You can read the post to read more about my experience.

Why you should write guest posts for SEO instead of instant traffic

It’s more effective in the long run

If you’ve written a number of guest posts on big blogs before, you will notice the traffic you get hardly lasts. Depending on the quality of your guest post and content on your blog, you’ll be lucky to retain 10% of the visitors you got from a big guest post (you can retain more, of course, if you focus your efforts on getting subscribers).

With this in mind, even guest posts that sent me thousands of visitors only do that in the week or month of the guest post being published; after that, the traffic dies down and I hardly get any more traffic from those guest posts.

With guest blogging for SEO, however, the effect of a single guest post can last for months. Search engines take time to recognize and calculate links, but you can start seeing effects a few weeks after gaining a link.

The difference between writing guest posts for traffic and for SEO is that traffic dies down as your guest post gets buried on the blog where it was published, while traffic increases from the search engines as time goes on; in other words, the value of your linked guest post increases with time.

It’s easier to do

If you want a huge spike in traffic from your guest posts, you have to choose the very best blogs in your niche, and, to be honest, it takes time and effort to get published on them. In contrast, writing for links is easier with smaller blogs.

In other words, you can write, say, three guest posts for smaller blogs in the time it will take you to write one post for a bigger blog, and if you do things right you will be able to get results from the guest post on the smaller blogs in no time.

You get targeted traffic

Let’s be honest: when you write for a blog that publishes a host of topic, the traffic you will get will only be targeted to an extent, no matter how targeted your guest post is.

However, by focusing on SEO ,you’ll get more closely targeted traffic. People only use the search engines when searching for something specific, so they’re more likely to subscribe to your blog or buy your product if they come from the search engines (or at least, if they come through targeted keyword results).

It’s a passive, long-term strategy

A few guest posts can have an effect for years. Traffic doesn’t die down like it does when you experience a spike in traffic from a recently published guest post—with search-optimized posts, your traffic keeps increasing for years.

What’s more, you keep on getting more traffic without doing anything. For example, since I completed the 31 guest post challenge, I haven’t done anything to improve my SEO. Yet my search traffic keeps increasing.

SEO is very competitive, though, so depending on your field you might need to keep building links actively. But you’ll also get great results from doing that, and it will be more cost-effective than paying for ads.

What kinds of blogs did I submit my guest posts to?

Now that we’ve covered the benefits of writing guest posts to improve your SEO, let’s talk about the kinds of blogs you can write for. While my recommendation in this section reflects what I did, note that the better the blog, the better your results.

Here some metrics you can use when trying to select a blog to write for.

Alexa rank

Alexa ranks websites based on the number of people who visit the website with the Alexa toolbar installed. Even though this is subjective to an extent, that doesn’t mean it isn’t an effective measurement. In my own experience, blogs with good Alexa ranking have some authority in the search engines, so getting a link from them can be very effective.

During the challenge, I only wrote for blogs with an Alexa ranking below 400,000. Yep, you read that right. These kinds of blogs are very easy to find (in fact, you can find hundreds of them in a few hours), so getting published on them probably won’t be much of a problem.

You can check the Alexa ranking of any website by installing the Alexa toolbar.

Google Pagerank

Google Pagerank is still as effective as it used to be, and it is an actual sign of how much trust Google places in a website. For the challenge, I used blogs with a Pagerank of 2 or more.

The thing, however, is that I either used Pagerank or Alexa rank to assess the sites—rarely both. So if a blog has an Alexa ranking of 400k or less, I don’t care about its Pagerank. If a blog has a Pagerank of 2 or more, I don’t care about its Alexa ranking.

You can check the Pagerank of any website by installing the Google Toolbar, for Firefox, or the Pagerank Status add-on for Chrome.

Mozrank

The Mozrank of a blog is another important factor when determining whether to write a guest post for it or not. I didn’t know much about how Mozrank worked when I started the challenge, but it seems more accurate than Google Pagerank and Alexa ranking, so any blog with a Mozrank of 3 or more is a good fit irrespective of its Pagerank or Alexa rank.

You can check the Mozrank of any website by using the tool at Moonsy.com.

Customrank

This seems to be the best metric at the moment. It uses a combination of a blog’s Alexa rank, Mozrank, and other metrics to calculate the blog’s worth. Any blog with a Customrank score higher than 30 is a good place to start.

You can check the Customrank score of any website by visiting Customrank.com.

How to find blogs based on these metrics

While the above metrics give you an idea of what kinds of blogs you can write for to get good results, actually finding a blog to write for is another thing.

I’ve published the ultimate guide to guest blogging on my blog, and it contains practical and extensive tips on almost every aspect of guest blogging that this article won’t be able to cover. Check it out if you want a better idea of guest blogging and how to find blogs. However, here’s a short guide to finding blogs for guest blogging in any niche:

• Technorati: Technorati.com is the biggest blog directory available online, with a lot of quality blogs in various niches. You can find blogs on almost any topic you want by searching for the keyword of that topic using the Technorati search box on top of the page; one thing you should note about the search box, though, is that there are two options. There is an option to search for posts, and there is an option to search for blogs. Make sure you select the “blog” option when typing in your keyword. Also, make sure the keyword you’re searching for isn’t too generic or too specific. For example, don’t search for “health” if you’re in the health niche, and don’t search for “the major dangers of health” either. The first keyword is too generic, and the other is too specific. Instead, search for something slightly specific like “family health,” or “health blog.”
• Alltop: Alltop is like a more sophisticated and more organized version of Technorati. Unlike Technorati, it contains more quality blogs and is neatly organized by niche. Blogs in Alltop are also manually reviewed, so it’s very unlikely that you’ll find a blog in the wrong category. A disadvantage Alltop has in contrast to Technorati, though, is that it doesn’t list as many blogs. So while you will find quality blogs, you will find fewer of them than you will on Technorati.
• Google: You can find relevant blogs that accept guest posts in Google by using the following ideas:

  {niche} + write for us

  {niche} + submit guest post

  {niche} + guest blogging

  {niche} + submit post

  {niche} + guest blogger needed

  {niche} + contribute

  You can also try changing the terms to keywords you think people in need of guest posts will use. Make sure you replace “{niche}” with your niche, but let the plus sign remain. E.g. in the blogging niche I’ll search for something like “blogging + write for us” (of course, without the quotes).

You will find a lot of blogs using the methods I outlined in this section, but you can’t use all of them. Make sure you gauge any blog you write for with the metrics we discussed above.

Content, tags, and relevance: what kinds of guest posts did I submit?

One major question that comes up a lot when it comes to SEO and link building is that of relevancy. A lot of people are confused as to how effective it is to write a guest post for a non-relevant blog, or how relevant the post’s title should be.

My blog is a writing blog, but I didn’t write a single guest post for a related writing blog during the challenge, so I guess that answers your question about relevancy! I only wrote for blogs in the technology, blogging, and make-money-online niches, and the impact on the results I got was still significant.

One thing to note, however, was that I didn’t write irrelevant posts for these blogs. For example, I didn’t write a post about the latest Apple iPhone for a tech blog and link it back to my writing blog.

Every guest post I wrote was in some way related to my blog, and to the blog I contributed to. For example, a guest post on a blogging tips blog might be on how to write better blog posts. A guest post for a technology blog might be a post on top writing apps I have on my Blackberry (and I do have a Blackberry!). A guest post on a make-money-online blog might be a post on how to make money writing. You can see how those posts tied the topic of my blog to that of the host blog.

One major myth you’ll hear about using guest blogging as a link building strategy is that the quality of the content doesn’t matter; it does, so make sure you put extra effort into your content if you want to get good results from this tactic.

In a nutshell, there are two things to remember when writing guest posts for link building purposes:

• Relevance isn’t that important: By “relevance,” I’m referring to the relevance of the blog you’re submitting a guest post to, as compared to yours. Instead, focus on writing thematically relevant content for the blogs you guest post on. This means your content should tie the topic of your blog to that of the host blog. If you were to focus only on blogs in your niche, your approach will be limited. But if you can bridge the topic between your blog and that of your host, you will significantly increase your chances of getting good results.
• Use your keywords in your article: One thing I haven’t talked about is using keywords in your articles. With my challenge, I tried to use the keyword I want to rank for in every article at least twice, and I think this had a significant impact on the value of the links I got.

Using anchor text

As you read this article, you might come to the conclusion that this tactic isn’t effective with bigger blogs. The fact is, it is; in fact, the bigger the blog, the better your results.

The problem most people have when it comes to writing for big blogs, though, is that they don’t use anchor text, and that alone costs the author a lot of potential traffic.

What makes this whole approach worthwhile is your use of anchor text. The anchor text is the keyword you use to link back to any page on your blog—it’s a vote of authority for your site, and it tells the search engines what the page you link to is all about.

You have to use caution when using anchor text, though. Here are a few things you should keep in mind:

• Use variations: Don’t just keep using the same anchor text in your guest post bio. Use something different, but related to the same keyword. If you want to rank for “blogging tips,” don’t keep using that key phrase alone as the anchor text in every guest post. Some variations you might use are: blogging, blogging tips, blog, blog marketing, blogger, etc. All these keywords hint at the same thing, and over time you will end up ranking for your main keywords—and more.
• Don’t always use anchor text: Aside from using anchor text variations, one other thing you should consider is to not always use anchor text. If you think about it, not everyone will link to your blog using a keyword. Some will tell their readers to “click here” to read the article. And some will paste the direct link into their post. That’s exactly how you should approach your campaign, too—just make sure the majority of your links contain anchor text. A good approach is to use anchor text in a ratio of 1 to 10—don’t use keyword-rich anchor text for every ten keyword-rich anchor text links you create.
• Don’t focus on ranking just one page: The real key to success as far as SEO is concerned is relevancy; in other words, your efforts should be directed at pages that achieve or support a specific goal for your blog. Don’t make the mistake of linking to just the homepage—or just one page, for that matter. Focusing on optimizing a single page that isn’t popular will look unnatural; focusing on five or more different pages on your blog will look more natural. By focusing on a single page, you can also be affected should you stop ranking for that keyword, but focusing on several pages will more likely leave you unaffected.

I’m not saying you should link to all pages in your guest post; a guest post should link to just one or two pages. This means the success of your campaign will depend on the volume of the guest posts you can write.

What effort has it taken to keep the traffic? Was it really worth it?

The final, and most important question is, What effort has it taken to keep the traffic this challenge generated? Was it worth it? Was it a good return on the investment of my time and effort? You can bet it was worth it, as those 31 guest posts have attracted tens of thousands of additional visitors to my blog from the search engines. And they’re just the ones I could count—of course, a percentage of those visitors will share my posts, a percentage of those visitors will subscribe, and a percentage of those visitors will tell their friends too.

I haven’t tried using ads to grow my traffic before, but I know that the one week of effort I put into this challenge was more profitable than any ad could be. I generated free, targeted traffic I couldn’t get elsewhere, and it only continues to grow as time goes on.

I was so impressed with the results of the challenge that I’m planning to make guest blogging for links an integral part of my marketing approach going forward.

How are you using guest blogging for your business?

The good news is that it doesn’t matter if you’re a blog or a business owner, guest blogging can be a smart way to grow your traffic and improve your search engine rankings. Is this idea entirely new to you? How are you using guest blogging to grow your business? Tell us in the comments.

Would you like to take your business to the next level with smart guest blogging? If so, hire me and letís discuss how I can help take your business to the next level. Also, if youíre interested in cutting edge tips and techniques on how to use your writing to grow your business, make sure you subscribe to my newsletter by downloading my free eBook, The Writerís Handbook: How to Write for Traffic and Money.

Article source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ProbloggerHelpingBloggersEarnMoney/~3/VFiRDXtmxkw/

Over the last few days we’ve been talking about taking your blog to the often-elusive “next level.”

We’ve seen tips for developing your voice and message, creating stronger calls to action, and increasing traffic.

If you’re already working on those aspects of your blog, and are happy with your approach, you’ll probably be hungry for other ideas, looking to the future, and trying to predict what will be most successful tactics for you.

I know I do this myself—I’ll get an idea like the QLD blogging challenge and throw myself into making it happen.

That’s great—one of the best things about blogging is that it lets us pursue our passions!—but I have noticed a tendency to let things drop off my To Do list as these new ideas pop up. An example was pointed out by Ed Boyhan on my Google + post. He wrote:

“Seems kinda odd: here you are providing some useful info on how some use G+, but nowhere on this page is there a “+1? button to let me share with a circle I have for future reference. Makes me doubt your involvement in the G+ community.”

This is a valuable comment for two reasons. First, it’s a reminder of something I need to do, which dropped off my list. Whoops! Second, it explains what the implications of that oversight are—how that looks to my readers, which gives me motivation not just to get that task back on the To Do list, but also to actually act upon it and make that change to my blog.

But I know I’m not the only one who hesitates or overlooks small blogging tasks that, logically, I have no excuse not to have done!

Take a look at the comments on Kelly Crawford’s recent post, If Your Email Newsletter Isn’t Generating Cash You’re Doing Something Wrong.

Many of the people who responded to that post admitted that they hadn’t tried out some of the most common, and proven, newsletter marketing techniques for one reason or another, even though they knew they should, and wanted to.

All this makes me wonder if we wouldn’t see some big advances on our blogs if we just got through some of those little, should-have-done-it-ages-ago tasks that we keep pushing aside (even if we have good reason for doing so).

What if each of us put a day aside in the next week to knock as many of those little tasks off our To Do lists for good? What difference would that make to our blogs over the longer term? If nothing else, it would probably give each of us a much more solid platform from which to try to climb to the “next level.”

At the very least, let’s start by admitting some of the things that have slipped off our To Do lists. Don’t be embarrassed—I bet the things you’ve neglected aren’t as basic as my G+ sharing oversight!

What do you know you’re not doing, that you should be doing? Admit it in the comments. (You might even help remind the rest of us of other things we’ve forgotten we should be doing…) Even getting a small task off your list could be a big step in the right direction for your blog.

Article source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ProbloggerHelpingBloggersEarnMoney/~3/gklwv3d3Ncs/

Howdy, SEOmoz fans. Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Last week I got an email from a Moz fan who said, “Hey, Rand, I am trying to start up my SEO consulting business. My network is not that great yet. How am I going to find clients? Can you point me to a blog post?”

We’ve done several over the years, but I thought it was a great time to refresh and offer some practical tips and tactics for finding new business. I know there are a lot of folks out there who are seeking clients, who are considering going out on their own and starting their own consulting business, who’ve had success in-house, who’ve had success at other agencies. Let me give you some of the things that worked for us when we were in consulting and that work for a lot of the folks that we connect with in the field. Obviously, nearly 40% of SEOmoz’s membership are folks who do consulting and agency work, the other 60% being in-house. Of course, we get to interact with a lot of these people and hear their stories of what works well for them. I thought I’d start with a few of those.

So number one, if you’re just starting out and you have nothing else going on, I strongly recommend building a handful of case studies. What I mean by this is having a few sites and pages and projects that you can point to, even if you’re very early stage. Even if you’re saying, “You’re my first professional customer,” that’s fine, that’s okay. But have a few things that you’ve done in the past to show off your work.

So your brother has a hobby site, great. Maybe you’ve helped him to rank for a few keywords. Maybe you’ve helped him to build up a powerful Facebook fan page. Maybe you’ve helped him with some web marketing efforts on his Etsy store, whatever it is. Your friend’s got a LinkedIn profile. Maybe she needs some help outranking some other people who are ranking for her name. She knows that she’s going to be on the job market. You want to help her get position for that. You’re going to help her create other profiles and write some guest pieces and all this kind of stuff that’s going to help her show up highly in Google for her particular name. Maybe there’s a personal blog, either one that you’re running, one that someone else is running, a family member, a friend, and you can help optimize that site, get the right things installed in WordPress, get it moved over from Blogspot, get the post titles, doing some keyword research, having a few of the posts go hot. Great.

Now you can point to all of these case studies when clients talk to you and say, “Well, let me tell you about some of the things that worked well for this. Go to Google and search for this, you can see this page ranking, the reason that it’s ranking so well are these different things that I did. I can help you with that kind of stuff.” Having those case studies in your back pocket makes you very credible and believable, even if you are a very first-time consultant.

Of course, if you have a history of working with clients, one of the biggest problems that the SEO field has always had is that a lot of clients say, “Hey, I don’t want you discussing my particular project. I’d prefer you didn’t share and disclose which types of things you’ve worked on for me or what you’ve done.” That’s okay, and that’s another great reason to have this handful of case studies that you can show off so you can say, “Hey, here’s a few clients we’ve worked with” or “I can’t tell you who they are, but if we sign an NDA, I’ll be happy to disclose the names, and then they can serve as references, and then you can see the projects publicly that we’ve worked on, and those include some of these other ones.”

A great follow-up to this is to actually offer some pro bono work, and there are two types of organizations that I strongly recommend this for. The first one is local charities or non-profits. It could be national non- profits and charities if you have a high profile and you want to do that. So here’s Adorable Adoptions. It’s an animal shelter. It’s not actually an animal shelter. It’s an animal shelter I just created in my mind. Lives here in Seattle on this whiteboard only. Fantastic, right? So you can do some SEO work to help them rank well for adopt a pet, or thinking about what to do with my pets, or those kind of things.

The other one that I think is a really good option is when you see small local startups kicking things off, so maybe it’s somebody’s personal project, something they’re putting on Kickstarter, or something that they’re launching for the first time and some friend of yours through a network or through Twitter or through Facebook, you’ve seen that they’re launching this product through the TechPress. Great. Especially if they don’t have a lot of venture backing and they’re kind of on a tight bootstrap budget, maybe the founders still have day-to-day jobs, offer to kick in and help out. “Hey, do you need some help with your web marketing? I’ve done some things. I’m trying to build a portfolio, and I would love to show you guys how I can kick ass and then maybe build up some referrals in your network.” They’re going to be very, very grateful for that, especially those early stage folks who don’t have time and energy to focus on the marketing components. So I really like those.

But I have a pro tip here. Make the offer very specific, and make your pens work too. Make the offer very specific. The reason being here is that if you offer to do some work, you can find yourself in these pro bono types of situations where there’s just a lot of demands on your time, and as your business gets going or you have other projects you need to work on, those demands can become problematic. It can feel like a big conflict. So make sure that when you commit to something, you’re committing to a very specific project that has a clear end date or that has a very clear end point. So once that project or that date has been reached, you can reach back out and say, “Hey, really loved working with you guys. I hope you’ll recommend me in the future. I’d love to be able to use you as a reference for some future clients that I might get.” Fantastic, but you’ve made that closure happen and sealed that deal. Of course, if they need more of your time, they can ask for it and those kinds of things, but you want to have that built in from the start. If you don’t, you can get into a messy territory.

Number three, be a connector of people. Maybe you’re an introvert or you have introverted tendencies and you don’t love to go networking, that’s okay. That’s fine. But help people to find each other. Be on top of your local ecosystem in whatever world or niche you’re in and whatever geographic region you’re in. By being on top of what’s happening in the field, you can say, “Hey, I noticed that you said you’re looking for some software to help you with recruiting. I heard about The Resumator last week via TechCrunch or HackerNews or whatever. I’d be happy to make an introduction because I reached out to the founder there when I heard about it.” Don Charlton, the guy from The Resumator probably doesn’t need SEO help, but just as an example. And then help put those people together. If you have friends, if you have colleagues from former jobs, if you have people that you know through friends or family that have needs, putting them together and making those introductions can be fantastic. That becomes a referral source all on its own, and you will quickly see that other people who you’ve connected in the future will say, “Hey, you should meet so and so. She helped me connect with this person in the past, and she knows SEO stuff. So you should talk to her.” Great way to get business.

Number four, choose a specialty. For goodness sake, especially right now it’s critical because the field of web marketing is so crowded. There are so many people doing so many things that if you can choose a specialty and focus on it and then write about it and become known for it, this can really help your career.

I’ll give you a great example. So this guy over here who I’m going to label AJ Kohn. So AJ, right, San Francisco-based SEO guy wrote what I consider the definitive guide to Google+ for marketing and SEO, and does a fantastic job of posting on there regularly. He’s the only person I see in my stream who’s really posting six, seven, eight, nine times a day, posting a bunch of interesting stuff, a bunch of fun stuff, personal stuff, whatever it is, great photography stuff that he always posts. He’s made his topic area very unique. He started on Google+ in the very early days, was an early adopter of that. He wrote the definitive resource for it. By the way, he also wrote the definitive resource for Rel=Author and setting that up for sites, which I think is a great offshoot of that specialty. He contributes continuous updates to that and to other sites, like SearchEngineLand. He offers, obviously, to guest write for others, and he’s showing off his skills by actually winning in that arena. When I do a lot of searches inside my Gmail account, which is the one that’s connected to Google+, there’s AJ, the stuff that he’s Plus 1′d and shared and all these things, always ranking on page one for me because he shares so much content around the things that I consume. So he’s done a great job of this.

There are tons of areas of specialty that still need or could use people in them. I would still say even old school kinds of things, like we need a new update to the old masters of curated research, guys like Dan Thies and Richard Baxter. We need someone who’s getting into that world. We could definitely use someone to talk about the great advantages of Pinterest or LinkedIn. Chris from 97th Floor, Chris Bennett, does a phenomenal job with link-based still, infographics, interactive graphics. Once you get that association and are known for those specialties, people remember you, you have that branding, and then you’re going to get recommended for these things. So find something you love and find the unique angle on it and the specialty. Phenomenal way to get content out there on the Web and get your name known.

Number five. This seems counter-intuitive, but when you’re most desperate for business is when you make a lot of mistakes as an SEO consultant. I did this myself all the time, and I’ve talked to so many other people from the consulting and agency world who do this as well. They go, “Well, we have some people time free. I have some hours free. We really need the revenue coming in.” So you expand to take on projects and customers that you normally wouldn’t. The problem is that a lot of times, remember with accounts receivable, you’re not getting paid with a credit card up front here. So you need to count on that trust factor and the likeability factor and the familiarity to make sure. It’s actually a great idea when you’re desperate to be able to say to someone, “Hey, I’m sorry. This is not in my wheelhouse. You’re not the right kind of customer for me. I hope that you’ll refer business my way, but let me point you over to this other person who does this work and who I think would be a fit.” That interaction is oftentimes going to be much more positive than, “Yeah, let’s start some client work. Well, I can’t pay you that much, and besides I know you’re desperate for business. So I’m going to offer you pennies on the dollar or 50% your normal rate. Then you’re going to be locked into a contract with me, and by the way I’m unpleasant to work with.” This makes for very frustrating stuff. So be cautious not to be accepting everything, to be cutting your rates, all that kind of stuff early on or when your business is struggling on the consulting side. A lot of the times, particularly in our field, you can take on some personal projects that are likely to either win you business over the long term or can actually be a channel for direct revenue, so anything from an affiliate project to a blog that sells advertising, this kind of thing.

Number six, my last recommendation and probably the best one I’ve got, this is via Wil Reynolds over at SEER Interactive. Help people. Help everyone you can and not just in the ways that are around marketing and SEO and social media and inbound. Help everyone you possibly can with anything that you can possibly do for them. So you see somebody who has a problem on Twitter, someone needs help moving something and you go, “Man, that guy’s pretty cool. I’d really like to know him. You know what? I’ve got a van. I’m going to offer to pick up that chair that he needs at whatever furniture store. I’ll reach out over Twitter or maybe I’ll reach out over email.” Fantastic, right? You have a friend who’s out of work. I know you’re struggling as well, right? You’re trying to find clients. You obviously don’t have a position for them, but it doesn’t matter. As you’re looking across clients, you’re meeting with someone, maybe they don’t take you up on it and you say, “Hey, I know that we didn’t end up being your SEO agency. I didn’t end up being your consultant, but I have a friend who’s really good at project management and you said you were looking for a project manager position. I’d love to make the introduction.” Fantastic, just by helping people in any way you can. There’s a new local news site out there. There’s a new neighborhood blog. Fantastic. Offer to contribute. Get to know all the people in the space. As you build up a network of people who know you and like you and who you’ve done nice things for in the past, you will have no problem winning clients and influencing referrals in the future.

All right everyone, I hope you’ve enjoyed this edition of Whiteboard Friday. I look forward to maybe seeing some tips from you down there in the comments, and we’ll see you again next week. Take care.

Article source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/Uc0sZt0ILPA/ways-to-win-customers-and-influence-rankings-whiteboard-friday

It doesn’t matter whether you’re an on-site SEO consultant, a link-building specialist or an all-round ‘internet marketer’, content creation should be particularly high on your list of priorities. We’ve been hearing the phrase ‘content is king’ for years now, but given Google’s recent de-indexation of low-quality blog networks, the Panda updates and the new algorithm burning across the horizon, it seems it’s never been more true than in 2012.

It’s not difficult to understand the importance of high quality, unique and relevant content in the modern SEO industry; content of this type published on your own site can do wonders when it comes to link magnetism and social media metrics and similarly, can help you obtain extremely powerful links from high authority domains that might otherwise be out of your reach. But creating this content is easier said than done, particularly if you’re trying to compete in a crowded industry. Sure, if you’re working on behalf of a client in a fairly dull field it can be relatively easy to produce content that will attract attention, but competing in content-heavy industries like SEO, gaming and entertainment (for example) can be very, very difficult.

So how can you make creating high quality, shareable content easier? What processes can you follow to minimise the time you spend researching and thinking and maximise the time you spend creating and sharing your content?

To try and answer these questions I’ve put together the following article and infographic (a large chunk of my time working for Designbysoap is spent designing infographics) that aims to give you a structure for content creation, as well as some useful tips and tools. I hope you enjoy it and, more importantly, I hope it helps when it comes to creating high quality content for your own campaigns.

Click for a full size version if you’d like to print it.

Research

Typically, this is often the most time-intensive element of content creation, whilst annoyingly yielding the fewest results. I’ve spent numerous hours reading posts and analysing data that ultimately comes to nothing. Sure, it can be enjoyable and often rewarding in terms of learning about an industry, but it’s not always permissible to spend huge chunks of your time (or a clients’ for that matter) reading and searching only to end up with nothing to show for it.

Having said that, the research portion of your content creation process can often be one of the most important – delivering content based on flawed, incorrect, irrelevant or (perhaps worst of all) boring information will get you nowhere and will essentially nullify all your efforts in the latter stages.

Ultimately, you need to find out what’s popular in the area you’re working in. Your research needs to be around a topic that’s current, relevant to your industry, popular and, most importantly, likely to gain traction (whether that be via social media platforms, inbound links or attention from high profile sites).

To help you identify this kind of content, there are several excellent tools at your disposal;

Google News – helps you highlight areas of interest and current news

Google Trends – helps you hone into specific topics in any given area of interest

Google Insights – helps you discover what people are searching for around an area of interest. Great if you’re writing blog posts

Digg, Twitter, Reddit – helps you find out what’s popular with the readers, what kinds of topics are receiving the highest level of sharing

These are the platforms I turn to first, but there are plenty of others (Cracked, AllThingsNow, Bing News, Fark, etc.), all of which will add to your level of insight around any given topic. Now, these can certainly help you find up to date, reliable and current information and can be invaluable when it comes to highlighting the most popular topics, but they don’t solve the problem of minimising the time you’re spending on research.

This is where a phenomenal tool from SEOGadget comes in, that makes ingenious use of Excel and Google Docs. I hugely recommend you follow the link and save a copy of the document to your own Google Docs (when you’ve finished reading this post of course), as it will save you a massive amount of time and effort during the research stage. The tool allows you to add a search query within the excel document, after which it will pull in invaluable data from Google News, Google Insights, Twitter, Bing News, Digg and numerous other platforms. You can not only quickly and easily find out what’s hot, but you can see the most popular topics on a range of social media platforms and highlight the top and rising searches around any given topic. There’s a fair bit more to it, but I’ll leave you to discover all it has to offer – suffice it to say it’s a perfect tool for the content creation research stage.

Ideas

Once you’ve got a solid set of data and a firm grip on the type of information likely to be shared, you need to start brainstorming some ideas on how you’re going to present the information.

The first thing you need to decide is the angle from which you’re going to approach the information. It’s no good just re-formatting a post or piece of content that already exists (you see this a huge amount when it comes to content creation, particularly in the SEO industry), you need to add something new or interesting to what you’ve already got. Can you come at the information in a new way? Or add something new to the story? Can you produce something unique to the industry?

Essentially, you’re looking at how you’re going to present the information you’ve gathered (an in-depth blog post, a video, a static infographic, an interactive infographic, etc), how you’re going to approach the subject (informative, analytical, satirical, etc) and how you’re going to add something beneficial or attractive to the target audience (drawing new conclusions, bringing together lots of pieces of information, attempting to shock, informing, entertaining, etc).

An excellent example is SEOmoz’s own Google Algorithm Change History; all of this information is available elsewhere on the internet, but by pulling it all together and keeping it up to date, they’ve provided a piece of content that makes life easier for readers (bringing all the information together in one place), keeps them up to date (by displaying the latest information) and provides new insight (by viewing the complete history of algorithm updates, you can see the progression Google has taken, which offers far more insight and value than a post discussing just the most recent change).

Sometimes, it’s enough to simply be first – as long as the content you’re producing is high quality. A great example from a different industry is the Angry Birds Space infographic (section included below). This was the first quality infographic to be published on the latest Angry Birds installment; a game that saw a huge amount of buzz across news platforms for reaching 10 million downloads in just three days. The infographic is not only very nicely designed, but gained a decent amount of traction. Only two days after being published, the infographic has seen over 1,000 Facebook likes:

Infographic section via PlayVille

You can also gain a decent amount of traction by focusing your content around an upcoming event – a great example is the F1 2012 Season infographic (a section of which is included below). The infographic doesn’t necessarily offer anything new, but took advantage of the excitement surrounding the start of the new Formula 1 season, resulting in a very high placement for the infographic.

Infographic section via Autoblog

Another excellent idea is to try your best to involve other people in the idea (or even the research) stage; specifically, people you know have an influence in the industry you’re working in.

Let’s say you’re producing an infographic on console gaming – why not email some people from Destructoid, G4TV, Gamespot, IGN, etc. and ask them what they’d like to see in an infographic. Or give them a collection of your ideas and ask them which they think is the best – not only does this involve influencers in the early stages of your content creation, but it can help massively when it comes to placement and promotion.

If these people give you valuable insights or information, then include them in your content (in the sources section of an infographic, or via a credit link in a blog post) – you’d be amazed how much more willing people are to share things when they’re credited with a hand in the research or production.

Placement

Once you’ve gathered your information and you have an idea of the type of content you’re going to produce, you need to try and identify where the content is going to be placed.

Obviously if the content is going on your own website, then this is less of an issue, but if it’s a link-building exercise then having an idea of the kind of site you’ll be aiming for can make a big difference to how you approach the creation stage.

It can be a good idea to start your outreach before you approach the actual creation of your content, as confirming a placement beforehand will make your life much easier in terms of considering the target audience. If you know where the content is going to be placed, then you can tweak the language, style and tone you adopt throughout the piece in order to maximise your chances of appealing to their readers.

Conversely, you don’t necessarily need to have confirmed the placement location before you start work on the production stage. Often you may find it easier to convince sites to place your work once they’ve actually got something to look at, rather than trying to tempt them with just the concept. If you’re planning on completing your outreach once you’ve finished the content creation stage, then you should at least have an idea of the sort of website you’re going to be targeting. Don’t specifically aim content at one website before you contact them, as if they turn it down you may struggle to place it somewhere else.

When it comes to contacting specific websites, your best bet is to write a concise and polite email to the most relevant person at the organisation, then follow this up with a call a day or two later. Don’t be disheartened if you don’t hear back from your preferred placement, it’s still worth giving them a call just to check they’ve received your email and even if they turn it down, you’ve got a contact you can use for future pieces.

Creation

So you’ve done your research, you’ve got your content and you’ve got an idea of where you’re going to place the piece – now it’s time to actually create your content.

Giving you advice on the creation stage is a little tricky, as it will depend on what type of content you’re putting together. To overcome this, I’ll quickly cover the two most popular content types; blog posts and infographics.

Infographics

Having produced around 100 infographics personally over the last 18 months (and overseen scores more), I consider them to be one of my main areas of expertise. One of my major pet hates when it comes to infographics is people telling me that there are ‘rules’ to infographic production – there aren’t. An infographic doesn’t have to tell a story, it doesn’t have to avoid using text at all costs, in fact it doesn’t have to do anything other than display information that is either complimented by, or portrayed via graphics. So don’t get too caught up in the non-existent infographic ‘rules’ and just focus on producing something that is engaging to your target audience.

Some topics will require more text than others, particularly if the data is qualitative rather than quantitative. A lot of people will use phrases like ‘don’t make me read’ when they’re looking at infographics, but you should give your audience more credit – people don’t mind reading, as long as the information you’re including is concise and adds something to the visuals. If you can visualise it (i.e. statistical information), then do, if you can’t then don’t worry too much about it, people will forgive you.

Try and create an immediate impact with the visuals and draw readers into your infographic as early as possible, the most obvious place to do this is with the title. It’s amazing how many people are happy to just type the title in a nice big font and then move on to the rest of the content. But if you look at some of the best infographic designers (and the most popular infographics online), you’ll see that the title is a fantastic opportunity to grab the reader with a strong, relevant visual. I’ve included a few examples below to show you what I’m talking about (please note these are just a part of the original graphic — there is a lot more to see when you click on the link underneath each image!):

Infographic section via the Designbysoap blog

Infographic section via Volvo

Infographic section via HotelshopUK

Infographic section via Geekosystem

When it comes to visualising the data you’ve got, try and keep a consistent theme throughout the infographic, whether that’s through your choice of visualisation methods, the colours used or the style of design. If you can help it, try and avoid using too many infographic ‘cliches’ – a good example of this is using a line of six person icons to visualise a statistic like ‘60% of people use people icons in their infographics’.

Just try and be as creative as you can (which I realise isn’t really all that helpful, as it’s like saying ‘be more musically gifted’), and don’t take the lazy approach just because you’d like to get it finished.

My last point is on orientation – generally speaking, if you’re going to be placing the infographic online then you’re probably better off opting for a portrait infographic, rather than a landscape one. This is because it’s far easier to use online and usually allows you to use a longer file (people will always prefer to scroll up and down as opposed to left and right, if the web page even allows it).

Blog Posts

It seems like an obvious thing to say, but in-depth blog posts are far more likely to encourage sharing than a quick post that just skims over a topic. Long blog posts are great as long as they’re adding value to a topic – you should be informing, educating or entertaining your readers as much as you possibly can.

Include relevant, quality outbound links that are useful to your readers – if you find a good tool during your research phase, link to it. If you find a post that offers an alternative argument to what you’re saying, or adds additional information, link to it. Too many people are hesitant to link out from their blog posts, worried that it will give readers a reason to leave their page. Trust me, if you’re producing high quality content, they will come back (for example, when I’m reading blog posts and I come across a link I want to follow, I tend to open it in a new tab and then continue reading).

Again, it seems obvious, but pay attention to grammar and punctuation – it’s hard to come across as authoritative if your content is full of spelling mistakes, misplaced commas and missing capitalisations. It might sound strange, but grammatical errors can also put off people from sharing your content and you want to do everything possible to increase the likelihood of shares and links. If writing isn’t your strong point, then get someone else to proof read your articles before publishing, particularly if you’re sending them out as guest posts.

Another good tip is to try and engage your readers as early as possible in the post – the best places to do this are the title, the sub-title and the opening paragraph. There are many different ways to do this; provocation, humour, questioning, etc. just make sure you grab people as early as you can. Bear in mind it’s the title that will encourage click-through rates when it comes to blog front pages and aggregation networks such as Inbound.org. Having said this, don’t be deliberately misleading with your titles – sure it can increase click-through rates and traffic to have a title that draws attention, but if it’s erroneous then you’re far more likely to piss people off than you are to encourage sharing.

You should also try and help your readers as much as possible; something that often means not assuming knowledge on their part. Unless you’re writing for particularly high level, technical websites, it’s best not to over-use entropic language without clearly explaining yourself. If you’re writing a post full of tips, explain things to your readers – rather than just saying do this, tell them how to do it.

Another valuable tip is to try and break up the copy in particularly long articles – use sub-headings and paragraph breaks to make the article look less dense and more accessible to readers. You should also make sure you’re using images in your posts, not only do they break up long sections of text nicely, but they can often be extremely helpful, particularly in tutorials and ‘how-to’ articles (screenshots can be especially useful). When it comes to sourcing images, you should either be creating them yourself or using an online platform such as Shutterstock or Creative Commons, rather than just stealing them from other websites. Having said this, the latter is permissible in some situations, just be sure to include credit links to avoid upsetting other webmasters, and check the copyright laws in your country. Don’t forget to properly name and alt tag your images either – it’s amazing how often you see people missing this potentially valuable ranking signal.

Publish

So you’ve spent hours putting together a high quality piece of content, now it’s time to get it live. Hopefully you’ll have started your outreach before putting the content together, but if you didn’t, now’s the time to start sending some emails.

I would always advocate aiming as high as you possibly can (as long as the quality of the content is good enough), as it never hurts to try. When we’re advising our link-building engineers on gaining high profile placements, we get them to put a list of five or six potential placements together, in order of domain authority, traffic or level of engagement via social media (depending on the post content and what we’re trying to achieve). From there you can start at the top and work your way down, until someone agrees to place your content.

Once a placement has been confirmed, make sure you’ve got an idea of when it will be published, so you can start sharing as soon as possible. You should also keep up a level of etiquette when you’ve posted on someone else’s website – push the content as much as you can, link to it from other posts and send as much traffic and social media engagement as humanly possible. This not only makes the link more valuable, but will encourage the administrator to publish your posts in the future. You should also keep an eye on the comments and reply to as many as you can; keep up the level of engagement and discussion and be involved.

Promote

It’s amazing how many times we see people produce fantastic content, and then just leave it to either reach a large audience or, more often, fall flat on its face. If you’ve gone through all the effort of researching and producing a high quality piece of content, then you should continue that effort through to the post-publishing stage.

It’s true that if your content is good enough and it’s published on a high profile platform, then it will likely achieve a high level of social media traction and natural inbound links, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do your best to push it as best you can.

You should aim to utilise as many avenues as you can to promote your content, including social media, news aggregators, infographic publication sites and inbound links from other domains (particularly applicable if you or your team writes lots of related guest posts). I could include a massive list of sites you can use, but honestly it depends on the vertical in which you’re working. Instead, check out this awesome link building strategies post, this list of infographic distribution sites, this post on finding the perfect content promotion platform and this handy list of social bookmarking websites.

You should also try to reach out to influencers in the industry you’re working in, whether that be via phone, email or social media platforms. The success of this practise will depend on a variety of factors (including the content itself, the domain it’s published on, the author, the way you choose to make contact and the area of discussion), but it never hurts to try. If you made the effort of reaching out to people during your research and ideas phase as suggested, then you may find you get some great traction via some very influential people.

So that’s about it for my guide to creating good content – did I miss anything? Disagree with anything I said? Let me know in the comments below.

Post by John Pring from Designbysoap Ltd.

Article source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/ZZcvthFeGhA/indepth-guide-to-content-creation-with-infographic

I spend a lot of quality time in Private QA here on SEOmoz, and I recently passed a milestone – 1,000 private questions answered since we re-launched the system (just over a year ago). Not surprisingly, we see a lot of the same questions and concerns pop up over time, and I’d like to think I’ve learned a few things along the way (please tell me my suffering wasn’t in vain). This post is an attempt to distill the biggest lessons from those 1,000 questions…

1. Dogma Will Get You Killed

You finally got your head around SEO best practices, and then you tackled your first e-commerce site, only to find that nothing worked the way the blogs told you. Search is algorithmic, so we assume it follows the same rules for everyone. In theory, it usually does, but those rules are incredibly complex and situational. Google claims over 200 ranking factors, many of those factors are probably multi-part, the algorithm is changing more than once per day, and there’s occasionally a manual intervention to really screw things up.

It’s good to know the basics (and there are some best practices), but you have to learn to roll with the punches. Even something as “simple” as de-indexing a few dozen pages rarely goes as planned, and can take weeks or months. Measure, evaluate, and adapt. If one tag or tactic isn’t working, consider your options.

2. One-trick Ponies Make Good Glue

I wrote an entire post recently on this topic, specifically link-building vs. on-page SEO. People naturally get comfortable with one aspect of search marketing (link-building, on-page, social, etc.) and then want to “perfect” it, but at best they hit diminishing returns fast. At worst, they’re putting band-aids on URLs while they bleed to death from a huge link wound. I’ve seen sites with spotless on-page SEO that have been stuck for months suddenly leap through the rankings because they’ve acquired a few good links. On the flipside, I’ve seen sites that were a total mess but had solid link profiles miraculously improve when their on-page problems were fixed.

3. A Link, by Any Other Name…

…might still stink. In the rush to build links, too many people, especially people with brand new (read that “highly vulnerable”) sites, make the mistake of thinking that all links are equally good. It’s no mistake that my most linked to blog post in QA is Rand’s 2010 post “All Links are Not Created Equal”. It’s not just a question of spam and penalties – link value varies tremendously with the page, placement, density of links, and on and on.

Case in point: I can’t tell you how many people I’ve seen spend months on a DMOZ link only to have it buried on a page that has little or no internal PR or isn’t even indexed. Link-building is not just a numbers game. I’m not making a white-hat argument – it’s just SEO fact. Some links are better than others. Don’t waste your time on junk.

4. You’re Not a Black-hat Genius

Sorry to break it to you, but better to hear it from me than Google. First of all, if I can spot your paid links and gratuitous spam in 5 minutes of looking at Open Site Explorer data, how hard do you think it is for Google, who can essentially see the entire link-graph at a glance? Obviously, they don’t always get it right, and plenty of spam slips through the cracks, but the algorithm isn’t stupid, either. Ethics aside, the practical problem with black-hat SEO isn’t that it doesn’t work – the problem is that 98.7% of people do it badly.

At the risk of kicking you while you’re down, I also have to add that your link circle/wheel/tetrahedron isn’t brilliant, no matter what your mom says. Just because you’ve cross-linked 157 Squidoo lenses doesn’t mean that you’ve built an impenetrable web of black-hattery. If your link wheel were a Disney movie, the theme song would be “The Circle of Crap.”

5. On-page Is Getting Messier

I keep wanting to write a post on Google’s recent advice about pagination (and rel=prev/next), but then I get so angry I’m afraid I might turn green and start fighting alongside Iron Man – not that that wouldn’t be awesome. The problem isn’t that they’re wrong (although I think the advice is horribly over-generalized and often ineffective), but that they’ve put a tremendous burden on webmasters. Implementing a proper canonicalization + pagination scheme on a dynamic site with hundreds of thousands of pages is incredibly complicated, and requires not only substantial development resources but stellar communications between the SEO and dev teams (if you’re lucky enough to actually have teams of both). Add in HTML5, schemas, and the whole mess of other new options, and it’s only going to get more complicated.

6. Check Your Headers

Sorry, that wasn’t particularly helpful, so here’s an easy tip. When something isn’t going right and you don’t know why, check your page headers. Job #1 is to make sure that crawlers see what you see (or think you see). It’s unbelievable how often a problem comes down to a bad redirect, status code, or other crawler accessibility issue. There are tons of header checkers, from web-based to bookmarklets – I still use this header checker over at SEOBook.

7. Use Basic Tools Well

There are some great SEO tools out there, but I see the same issue in SEO that I do in writing, time management, and basically every single 21st-century human endeavor. We’re so busy chasing shiny new tools and the perfect app that we don’t bother to learn how to use any of those tools effectively. You can go a long way with a solid header checker, Google’s “site:” operator, a link analyzer (like our own Open Site Explorer) and a desktop crawler (I highly recommend Screaming Frog, but Xenu is still great, too). Master the “site:” operator and learn how to use it with “inurl:” and “intitle:”, and it’s amazing how many on-page problems you can diagnose. Stop chasing every new tool and learn how to use a handful really well. You’ll save a lot of time, money, and holes in your drywall.

8. Learn When to Be Patient

Patience may be the toughest skill any good SEO eventually has to learn. There are times when you’ll need to react quickly to a problem, especially a technical problem (like a bad redirect or site outage). There’s a fine line between reacting and over-reacting, though. One of the most common mistakes I see in technical SEO is when someone makes a change, it doesn’t immediately improve their rankings 24 hours later, and so they revert it or make another change on top of it. Even if it doesn’t make the problem worse (and it usually does), you’ll never be able to measure which change worked. Make sure your changes went live, that Google has acknowledged them (i.e. crawled and cached), and that you can measure the impact or lack of impact. Don’t change your strategy overnight based on bad information (or no information).

9. Stop Scheming Get to Work

This post was originally “8 Lessons…”, but when I wrote #4 I got so annoyed that I had to follow it up with maybe the most important SEO lesson I can teach you. Are you ready? Here it is (warning: this may be inappropriate for younger readers)…

The most frequent excuse I hear in QA is “I don’t have time to…” Let me ask you something. Isn’t this your business we’re talking about? Isn’t it your livelihood? Isn’t it the thing that puts food on your table and clothes on the backs of your children? You’d better damned well find the time. If 80% of your traffic is coming from Google, and you don’t “have the time” to do the hard work of improving your product, creating unique content, and participating in your industry, then here’s the simple truth: no blog post is going to save you.

Article source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/UoDrGovSDlg/9-lessons-from-1000-seo-questions

This guest post is by Timo Kiander of Productivesuperdad.com.

Are you afraid that you’ll never reach blogging success? Are you working your backside off on top of your day job to produce articles, ebooks, videos, and podcasts, and learn everything about Pinterest (or any other social network for that matter)?

Do you feel you are running on a blogging treadmill like a hamster but never giving yourself time to rest and recover?

If this is you, then welcome to the club! I have been there, done that, and I can relate. It’s not a very pleasant feeling to experience. However, things don’t have to be that way: there is a solution for this situation.

Burnouts, broken relationships, and abandoned blogs

Let’s face it: working harder and longer hours on your blog doesn’t necessarily make you more productive.

In the short term it might do that, but in the long run you are going to burn out. You are going to lose the fun of blogging too—even on the topic you’re passionate about.

On top of all that, you also put your relationships with your closest ones to danger. When too much of your blogging time is prioritized over the family time, you are soon in a situation where you have to make a decision: you can choose either your blog or your family.

They’re to blame (and you too!)

It’s a lot easier to blame someone else than to take responsibility for your own actions, but in this scenario there are really two responsible parties: them and you.

No matter which blogging hero (or productivity hero) you listen to, they keep telling you that more is better. Create more. Engage more. Be everywhere!

They say, “You cannot build a successful blog without working like crazy, taking massive action, and producing solid, shareable content on a frequent basis. And if you can do it all on a daily basis, that’s even better!”

So, you look up to your blogging hero and think, “Well … s/he must be right. I’ve got to get my act together and work more, do more, engage more. Otherwise, I’ll never see the blogging success that I want or the six-figure income that I’m dreaming about.”

You believe the stories they tell you. It’s virtual peer pressure at its worst—and you take the bait.

Time to slow down

I have been blogging since 2010 and I have consistently produced material for my blog twice per week. That includes written content and videos, and at some points I was even doing podcasts.

In addition, I have guest posted on big blogs and produced couple of ebooks as well—all while having a day job, a family (my wife and a son), and some time-consuming hobbies (I’m a triathlete and a marathoner).

Lately, I have felt like that hamster on a treadmill—I keep running and running but I never have a chance to relax or recover. Nor have I had time to study, do more research, or truly connect with other bloggers.

That’s why I decided to slow down my blogging pace. I’m not leaving blogosphere. I’m just cutting down the speed a bit. By doing this I aim to grow my blog even bigger than it is now.

In practice, slowing down means posting every other week instead of on a weekly basis. This change gives me more room to breathe, and allows me to do more reading and testing, and to create more new material.

For instance, for a couple of months I have wanted to build my own time management system, but I had to postpone the project because of lack of time. Or what about learning photo reading? That’s yet another project that I had to postpone. Interviews, tests, experiments, case studies … I guess you already know by now why I have never started with these projects, though they’re all on my list.

Some people are scared of this change and think that slowing down is like regressing—that if you slow down, you won’t be on everyone’s minds and lips anymore.

Well, maybe. But look around. There are many big bloggers who don’t follow a daily blog post pattern, and they’re still doing well! Derek Halpern and Glenn Allsop and Jon Morrow come to mind (and by the way, check out this video to learn why Derek is posting so infrequently).

In my opinion, slowing down is not regression. Actually, it is the best thing that has happened to me for a long time.

How to slow down successfully

Slowing down may sound easy, but in reality it’s not. One scary word keeps most of the bloggers working the same way they always have: fear.

They fear that if they change their routines and habits, they are not going to reach blogging success. They are also afraid of missing something crucial if they don’t follow to the letter what the gurus are teaching (advice that so many other bloggers are following).

But if they’re brave enough and decided to get through that glass wall known as fear, a new world would emerge for them. Are you one of these brave ones? If you are, here are five steps to follow that should make the transition much easier:

1. Acknowledge your current situation. You are stressed or burned out by blogging, thus you want to spend more time with your loved ones. Things cannot continue this way any longer.
2. Listen to external signals very carefully: Are you working too much and taking the common time off from your family? Are you working like a madman, but without any remarkable results? These clues should give you indication that you should slow down your blogging.
3. Make a decision to test the blogging slowdown. Shift to blogging once per week instead of every day, for example, and see what advantages and disadvantages it has for you.
4. Hire some professional help if possible. In fact, my decision to slow down was greatly affected by my blogging coach. Although at first his suggestion of slowing down sounded foreign, I have learned to appreciate it and I feel grateful for this advice! That’s really the power of having an external person looking at you: they have the ability to give powerful, objective advice for your benefit.
5. Connect with other bloggers and ask them to write guest posts for your blog. That way, you get content almost without any effort, and you can free up your time even more. And don’t forget interviews either. They are great a way to generate valuable content with less effort.

Don’t get me wrong: it is fine to learn from gurus, but be sure to adjust their lessons to your unique situation! You are the only one to say if you are capable of producing epic content every day, or only once a week.

Over to you now: have you slowed down your blogging pace because of increased stress, weaker relationships with your close ones, or just plain burning out—even when blogging about something you are passionate about? Leave your comments and share your experiences below. Let’s support each other to slow down!

Timo Kiander, a.k.a. Productive Superdad, teaches WAHD superdad productivity for work at home dads. If you want to get more productive in your own life, grab 222 of his best Tips for Becoming a Productivity Superstar.

Article source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ProbloggerHelpingBloggersEarnMoney/~3/7WbMtiCgjQI/

Christine Churchill , KeyRelevance – May 15, 2012

If you’ve been running a pay-per-click advertising campaign for a while, you have
probably achieved a level of performance that is providing a profitable return
on ad spend — “ROAS.”  The next step to
getting the most from PPC advertising is maximizing the percentage of time in which your
ads are showing for relevant, converting search queries.

In AdWords, this is called “Impression Share,” which Google
defines as the percentage of impressions you received divided by the estimated
number of impression you were eligible to receive.  Google likens total Impression Share to a big online pie with your piece of the
pie being your specific Impression Share.

Both Google and Microsoft offer Impression Share Metrics. But for simplicity this article will focus on the AdWords’ version.

Types of Impression Share Metrics

Google provides several metrics for determining your Impression Share.  Understanding and using these metrics effectively can help
you expand your traffic online. The three most useful metrics for tracking
impression share are:

• Lost Impression Share (Budget). These are
  lost opportunities due to daily spend limitations.  If you have no budget issues, this metric will be at or
  close to zero.

• Lost Impression Share (Rank). These are lost
  opportunities due to low bid prices, regardless of budget.  A low/zero number here means your ads
  are not getting pushed off the page by higher-performing competitors.

• Exact Match Impression Share (Search only). The percentage of impressions that exactly matched your keyword divided by estimated exact match
  impressions for which you were eligible. 
  Think of this as “Lost IS (Budget),” but ONLY for exact keyword matches in your
  account.  In contrast to the other
  two metrics, above, this metric counts opportunities instead of lost
  opportunities.

  If your ads are
  showing as often as possible, this metric will have a value close to 100 percent.  Note that broad and phrase keywords
  will also generate Exact Match IS data for those searches that match the
  broad/phrase keywords in your account.

From Google’s perspective, a lost “opportunity” is
not necessarily every search for which the keyword would match.  Google takes Quality Score and maximum bid
prices into account. So if you’re bidding a nickel in an auction with top bid
prices higher than $10 (for example), Google would not consider that auction
part of your lost opportunities. 
Google indicates that a 2-times increase in price would be a potential auction,
whereas a 10-times increase being needed would not.

Google also provides an overall Impression Share metric, but this metric is less useful than those broken down by budget, rank,
and exact match.  We will focus on
these metrics instead.

How to Get The Metrics To Show

Since Google doesn’t show the metrics by default, you will
need to turn on the metrics manually. 
To get the Impression Share metrics to be visible in your reports, do
the following:

1. From within your Adwords Account, go to the Campaigns
   Tab.

2. Click on the Columns/Customize Columns/Competitive
   metrics pull-down menu (circled below). 
   Choose all three impression share metrics to start.

3. Click
   “Save” and this will cause your impression share metrics to appear. (See image
   below).

These metrics are available at the Campaign and AdGroup
level, but not at keyword/ad level

Graphic showing where to go in your AdWords account to turn on
Impression Share Metrics.

How to Use The Metrics: Impression Share Problem
Scenarios

Limited

Budget. If “Lost Impression Share (Budget)” is high and your ROAS is profitable, you need to
raise your daily budgets.  High
return/high budget campaigns should be raised first. But assuming ROAS is good
and you have the cash flow, aim for Lost Impression (Budget) to be close to zero.

Limited Performance. -If “Lost Impression Share (Rank)” is higher, this means that your maximum cost-per-click bids (or cost-per-acquisition targets, if using cost-per-acquisition bidding) are too low for your ads to
place competitively.  Consider
additional performance-tuning to improve ROAS.  If ROAS is well above your limit, consider raising
bids.  This will make your cost per
conversion worsen somewhat, but the increase in volume might make up in total
profitability.

Both Lost Impression Share Metrics Are Non-Zero. Tune your budgets first, since this will raise
volume without generally making sales more expensive.

Exact Match Impression Share. If
your Exact Match Impression Share is low — say, below 80 percent — then your budget may be being
wasted on poorly target phrases. 
Run a Search Query report (at the AdGroup level) and review the search
queries for potential negative keywords to add to the account.  If you are selling digital cameras, for
example, you might not want your ads showing for “digital camera
reviews” so negating “review” and “reviews” might help
your budget by showing ads to searchers further along in the buying
process.

What about “Relative Click Through Rate”?

There is another performance metric available along with the Impression Share metrics called “Relative Click Through Rate”.  Relative CTR gives you feedback on the performance of the click through rate of your ads compared to other ads in the same auction.  This is one of the metrics that factors
into the Quality Score, so you might want to review this as well. 

A low Relative CTR means that your ads are less effective
than other ads in the same auction. 
This may mean that the ad copy is not effective — warranting an A/B
test.

If you are
using “dynamic keyword insertion” (DKI) awkwardly, then your resulting ad might
be less compelling or plainly bad. 
See the graphic below for an example of a poor DKI ad which would likely
have a low CTR and certainly doesn’t represent the company as they would
prefer.

Graphic showing example of awkward use of DKI, resulting in a less than
optimal ad.

Also consider
whether the keyword/search query mismatches are showing ads for poorly targeted
searches.  For example the
following ad showed for ads related to a search for “car insurance
job” could have easily been avoided with the addition of a negative
keyword for “job.”

Graphic
showing example of keyword/query mismatch:  A search for “car insurance job”
should NOT return
a general ad for car insurance.

Metrics Help Fine Tune Ad Delivery

The Impression Share metrics provide a useful way
to track your share of impressions and to help guide you to increase your share
of ad impressions.  Monitoring Impression
Share metrics regularly can ensure you get your fair share of impressions and
even increase your traffic from AdWords because the metrics let you know where
you need to make changes.

Christine Churchill is president of KeyRelevance.com, a full service Dallas search engine marketing company that specializes in helping businesses succeed online. Christine and her experienced team of online marketers provide a holistic approach to marketing: increasing a site’s visibility, improving the user experience on the site, and maximizing the site’s conversion potential.

Article source: http://www.wilsonweb.com/seo/Getting-Your-Fair-Impression-Share-on-Google.htm

Jeff Sexton – May 15, 2012

Lead generation sites are different than ecommerce sites. They usually sell services rather than products. The services are typically “considered purchases,” involving more research than most consumer products. And the buying-shopping-consideration cycle of a prospect is often far longer than typical ecommerce products.

All of those factors affect what areas and ideas you should consider testing first.  With that in mind, here’s a prioritized list of important areas to test.

1. Improvements and Assurances on Your Lead Form

There’s enough material on this one item to cover at least an entire article.  But the major points are as follows.

1. Addressing and obviating prospects’ concerns with your form design and copy, and
2. Minimizing requested information while retaining lead quality

Think about the kinds of questions that run through your own mind when filling out a lead form, such as:  

• What happens after I submit this form?  
• How long until the company replies?  
• Who will reply?  
• Is the company going to email or call?  
• Am I going to get auto-subscribed to spammy newsletters?  
• Will I get a high-pressure pitch, or is the company willing to just answer my questions?  
• Do the company have a privacy policy for this information?

So keeping those questions in mind, consider the following two forms.

One of these forms directly or indirectly addresses all of the prospect’s concerns while asking for a minimum amount of information. They other form answers nothing while asking for an inordinate amount of personal information. Model your lead form on the former rather than the latter.

2. Addressing “Precipitant Events” with Your Messaging

Services are usually purchased in two ways.

1. After a particularly long consideration period punctuated by a precipitating event;
2. Under duress following a precipitating event.

A homeowner might believe that he ought to get his septic tank pumped, and put it off until his neighbor ends up with having to replace his septic system.  After that, the homeowner may be ready.

Or, he might be oblivious to the need to maintain his septic system until his plumber informs him that his septic tank is backed up, and most likely broken, or in the best case, in need of pumping.  

Another example is fitness. I might read about and possibly contemplate joining a gym for months or even years, and then finally decide to do something either after seeing vacation photos of my blubbery body. Or I might have some kind of heart health scare.

Either way, there’s a precipitating event involved in getting me ready to buy.  And chances are your sales and customer service staffs know all about these precipitating events.

Look at your website and determine if your messaging and copy speaks to the emotional needs of someone experiencing one of these events.  Then create and test new copy that speaks to a prospect in the midst of one of those precipitating events.

3. Creating a Lead Nurturing Program for Early Stage Buyers

How do you talk to visitors who are considering getting a service, but who aren’t quite ready to pull out their wallets, or even talk to a sales representative?

The tried and true method is to engage these visitors with free content structured around their earlier stage research needs. The visitors give you an email address, and you give them a whitepaper, course, or shopping checklist.  

If you’re not doing this, you’re missing out on valuable leads and sales. And if you are doing this, it’s likely that the material you are providing those prospects doesn’t appeal for the most likely, upcoming precipitant events.  

For example, you’re offering a free report on “5 Things to Look for In a Pool Cleaning Service.”  If you know that a precipitant event for buying your services involves hard-to-kill algae blooms, you might want to ensure that your report emphasizes your business’s guaranteed ability to turn a green pool blue in 48 hours or less.  

That way, when the precipitant event — i.e., a sickly green pool only a few days before a planned pool party — actually descends upon the owners, they will know exactly who can fix that problem. That sale will be yours to lose.

Jeff Sexton of JeffSextonWrites.com
is a skilled copywriter who has consulted with several Fortune 50 companies, run hundreds of
messaging tests, and provides copywriting services to companies large
and small.

Article source: http://www.wilsonweb.com/conversion/3-Must-Test-Areas-for-Lead-Generation-Websites.htm

Dr. Ralph F. Wilson , Web Marketing Today – May 15, 2012

A user-friendly website can increase conversions, such as newsletter
signups, service quotes, or product sales. However, the process of making
a website more usable is non-intuitive. It often involves fully understanding
what a consumer sees.

We spoke recently with an expert on website usability. She’s Kathy
Fealy, owner of KF Multimedia Web
Inc., which devices web strategies to increase traffic and conversion
rates.

Web Marketing Today: You are a usability expert. In a nutshell, what is
usability?

Kathy Fealy: “Usability is a fancy term for user experience, the
process of thinking of your customers first and who is your customer and why
are they coming to your site?”

WMT: What are the common usability problems you see? And, what kinds of
rules of thumb can we give our readers so that they won’t make those same
mistakes?

Fealy: “I notice that a lot of sites have been designed for
everybody. And usually they sell to specific people or their services are going
to be for some specific types of people. So what I tell them to do is to try to
figure out exactly who those people are and to ask what kind of information
they are looking for, what kind of tasks are they wanting to complete? Then we
look a the navigation of the site — calls to action, and so forth — to see if
that flows that direction.”

WMT: In the technical field, it’s called personas.

Fealy: “Personas, yes. I find though that that word scares
people at times.”

WMT: So number one is develop an idea of who your customers are and
design for them. What’s your next rule of thumb?

Fealy: “I tell them to have good headlines, those that not only
will tell people what they are going to be finding, but also might appeal to
their emotions or motivations. And to those headlines tell them exactly what
they are going to find on that page. Because people like to be able to
scan.”

 

WMT: You know, as an SEO expert, that there’s a difference between a
title and a headline. What is that difference?

Fealy: “The difference is that a title is something that is used
for the search engines. But it’s also used by people when they go to the search
engine result pages.

“A headline is on the web page. Think of a newspaper and how you have your
headlines to help people understand what the contents are going to be
following, and sometimes there are sub-headlines. That’s what a headline is. On
the web page itself. Have it be something that will have them want to
read more.”

WMT: What’s another tip?

Fealy: “Have calls to action, especially if they have a form to
fill out. Submit buttons, they drive me insane because a technician invented
them. I always say have your buttons be something — if you’re going to have
something on button — have it be with the people should be wanting to do next.

“So if it’s to order, say ‘Review and Order,’ something like that would be
the better answer for that button. Sometimes the content management systems
don’t let you make those changes, but a lot of times you can get around
that.”

WMT: Where should you place your menu or menus? What’s the best from an
overall standpoint?

Fealy: “What I suggest is that they should have the menus, the main
heading is at the top of the page, below the main header. Like below their
banner for their logo or their information about their site. They
shouldn’t be at the very top of the page.

“Like right now with WordPress, the default is to put it a lot at the very
very top of the page, but people have banner blindness, so they may not see the
menu right away.”

WMT: Once you get the basics up, then you start testing to see what other
problems you might have.

Fealy: “Right, but I also say that they should test earlier too. I
mean there’s simple things — just by seeing if people understand what the page
is about.”

WMT: Testing also helps your clients realize how much they need this
process done.

Fealy: “Yes, and sometimes where the problems aren’t what they
would think they are, because they are so used to the site themselves.”

A user-friendly website can increase conversions, such as newsletter signups, service quotes, or product sales.  However, the process of making a website more usable is non-intuitive. It often involves stepping outside of a webmaster’s viewpoint to more fully understand what a consumer sees.

We spoke recently with an expert on website usability.  She’s Kathy Fealy, owner of KF Multimedia Web
Inc., which devices web strategies to increase traffic and conversion rates.

Web Marketing Today: You are a usability expert. In a nutshell, what is usability?

Kathy Fealy: “Usability is a fancy term for user experience, the process of thinking of your customers first and who is your customer and why are they coming to your site?”

WMT: What are the common usability problems you see? And, what kinds of rules of thumb can we give our readers so that they won’t make those same mistakes?

Fealy: “I notice that a lot of sites have been designed for everybody. And usually they sell to specific people or their services are going to be for some specific types of people. So what I tell them to do is to try to figure out exactly who those people are and to ask what kind of information they are looking for, what kind of tasks are they wanting to complete? Then we look a the navigation of the site — calls to action, and so forth — to see if that flows that direction.”

WMT: In the technical field, it’s called personas.

Fealy: “Personas, yes.  I find though that that word scares people at times.”

WMT: So number one is develop an idea of who your customers are and design for them.  What’s your next rule of thumb?

Fealy: “I tell them to have good headlines, those that not only will tell people what they are going to be finding, but also might appeal to their emotions or motivations. And to those headlines tell them exactly what they are going to find on that page. Because people like to be able to scan.”

WMT: You know, as an SEO expert, that there’s a difference between a title and a headline.  What is that difference?

Fealy: “The difference is that a title is something that is used for the search engines. But it’s also used by people when they go to the search engine result pages.

“A headline is on the web page. Think of a newspaper and how you have your headlines to help people understand what the contents are going to be following, and sometimes there are sub-headlines. That’s what a headline is. On the web page itself.  Have it be something that will have them want to read more.”

WMT: What’s another tip?

Fealy: “Have calls to action, especially if they have a form to fill out. Submit buttons, they drive me insane because they were invented by a technician. I always say have your buttons be something — if you’re going to have something on button — have it be with the people should be wanting to do next.

“So if it’s to order, say ‘Review and Order,’ something like that would be the better answer for that button. Sometimes the content management systems don’t let you make those changes, but a lot of times you can get around that.”

WMT: Where should you place your menu or menus? What’s the best from an overall standpoint?

Fealy: “What I suggest is that they should have the menus, the main heading is at the top of the page, below the main header. Like below their banner for their logo or their information about their site.  They shouldn’t be at the very top of the page.

“Like right now with WordPress, the default is to put it a lot at the very very top of the page, but people have banner blindness, so they may not see the menu right away.”

WMT: Once you get the basics up, then you start testing to see what other problems you might have.

Fealy: “Right, but I also say that they should test earlier too. I mean there’s simple things — just by seeing if people understand what the page is about.”

WMT: Testing also helps your clients realize how much they need this process done.

Fealy: “Yes, and sometimes where the problems aren’t what they would think they are, because they are so used to the site themselves.”

WMT: Right. Hey thanks for sharing with us. Can you tell me about your business and what you do?

Fealy: “Well I work with small to medium size businesses. I help them develop web strategies, take an overall look at their web marketing plan, and then help them through getting traffic to their site, as well as improving their conversion by usability.”

Kathy Fealy is the owner of KF Multimedia Web Inc., which helps small to medium businesses take an overall look at their web marketing plans, help them get traffic to their sites, as well as improving conversion rates by usability. This interview was recorded on November 15, 2011 at the SES Conference in Chicago.

Article source: http://www.wilsonweb.com/design/fealy-usability.htm

If the last few months of ranking changes have shown me anything, it’s that poorly executed link building strategy that many of us call white hat can be more dangerous than black-hat strategies like buying links. As a result of well intentioned but short-sighted link building, many sites have seen significant drops in rankings and traffic. Whether you employ link building tactics that are black, white, or any shade of grey, you can do yourself a favor by avoiding the appearance of link spam.

It’s become very obvious that recent updates hit sites that had overly aggressive link profiles. The types of sites that were almost exclusively within what I called the “danger zone” in a post about one month before Penguin hit. Highly unnatural anchor text and low-quality links are highly correlated, but anchor text appears to have been the focus.

I was only partially correct, as the majority of cases appear to be devalued links rather than penalties. Going forward, the wise SEO would want to take note of the types of link spam to make sure that what they’re doing doesn’t look like a type of link spam. Google’s response to and attitude towards each type of link spam varies, but every link building method becomes more and more risky as you begin moving towards the danger zone.

1. Cleansing Domains

While not technically a form of link building, 301 “cleansing” domains are a dynamic of link manipulation that every SEO should understand. When you play the black hat game, you know the chance of getting burned is very real. Building links to a domain that redirects to a main domain is one traditionally safe way to quickly recover from Google actions like Penguin. While everyone else toils away attempting to remove scores of exact-match anchor text, the spammers just cut the trouble redirected domains loose like anchors, and float on into the night with whatever treasure they’ve gathered. 

When Penguin hit, this linkfarm cleansing domain changed from a 301 to a 404 almost overnight.

Link building through redirects should be easy to catch, as new links to a domain that is currently redirecting is hardly natural behavior. To anyone watching, it’s like shooting up a flare that says, “I’m probably manipulating links.” The fact that search engines aren’t watching closely right now is no guarantee of future success, so I’d avoid this and similar behavior if future success is a goal.

2. Blog Networks Poorly Executed Guest Blogs

I’ve already covered the potential risks of blog networks in depth here. Google hates blog networks - fake blogs that members pay or contribute content to in order to get links back to their or their clients’ sites. Guest blogging and other forms of contributing content to legitimate sites is a much whiter tactic, but consider that a strategy that relies heavily on low-quality guest blogging looks a lot like blog network spam.

With blog networks, each blog has content with a constant ratio of words to links. It posts externally to a random sites multiple times, and with a lot of “inorganic” anchor text for commercially valuable terms. Almost all backlinks to blog networks are also spam. 

I cringe when I see low-quality blogs with questionable backlinks accepting guest blog posts that meet rigid word length and external link guidelines. Quality blogs tend not to care if the post is 400-500 words with two links in the bio, and quality writers tend not to ruin the post with excessive linking. Most of us see guest blogging as a white-hat tactic, but a backlink profile filled with low-quality guest posts looks remarkably similar to the profile of a site using automated blog networks.

I’d obviously steer clear of blog networks, but I’d be just as wary of low-quality inorganic guest blogs that look unnatural. Guest blog on sites with high quality standards and legitimate backlink profiles of their own.

3. Article Marketing Spam

Article link addiction is still a real thing for new SEOs. You get one or two links with anchor text of your choice, and your rankings rise. You’re not on the first page, but you do it again and get closer. The articles are easy and cheap, and they take no creativity or mental effort. You realize that you’re reaching diminishing returns on the articles, but your solution isn’t to stop – you just need to do more articles. Before you know it, you’re searching for lists of the top article sites that give followed links and looking for automated solutions to build low-quality links to your low-quality links.

Most articles are made for the sole purpose of getting a link, and essentially all followed links are self-generated rather than endorsements. Google has accordingly made article links count for very little, and has hammered article sites for their low-quality content. 

Maybe you’re wondering how to get a piece of that awesome trend, but hopefully you’ll join me in accepting that article directories aren’t coming back. Because they can theoretically be legitimate, article links are generally devalued rather than penalized. As with all link spam, your risk of receiving more harsh punishment rises proportionate to the percentage of similar links in your profile. 

4. Single-Post Blogs

Ironically named “Web 2.0 Blogs” by some spam peddlers, these two-page blogs on Tumblr and WordPress sub-domains never see the light of day. After setting up the free content hub with an article or two, the site is then “infused” with link juice, generally from social bookmarking links (discussed below).

Despite their prevalence, these sites don’t do much for rankings. Links with no weight come in, and links with no impact go out. They persist because with a decent free template, clients can be shown a link on a page that doesn’t look bad. Google doesn’t need to do much to weed these out, because they’re already doing nothing.

5. (Paid) Site-Wide Links

Site-wide footer links used to be all the rage. Google crippled their link-juice-passing power because most footer links pointing to external sites are either Google Bombs or paid links. Where else would you put a site-wide link that you don’t want your users to click?

To my point of avoiding the appearance of spam, Penguin slammed a number of sites with a high proportion of site-wide (footer) links that many would not have considered manipulative. Almost every free WordPress theme that I’ve seen links back to the creator’s page with choice anchor text, and now a lot of WordPress themes are desperately pushing updates to alter or remove the link. Penguin didn’t care if you got crazy with a plugin link, designed a web site, or hacked a template; the over-use of anchor text hit everyone. This goes to show that widespread industry practices aren’t inherently safe.

6. Paid Links in Content

There will never be a foolproof way to detect every paid link. That said it’s easier than you think to leave a footprint when you do it in bulk. You have to trust your sellers not to make it obvious, and the other buyers to keep unwanted attention off their own sites. If one buyer that you have no relationship to buys links recklessly, the scrutiny can trickle down through the sites they’re buying from and eventually back to you. 

If you do buy links, knowing what you’re doing isn’t enough. Make sure everyone involved knows what they’re doing. Google is not forgiving when it comes to buying links.

7. Link Exchanges, Wheels, etc.

Speaking of footprints, I believe it’s possible to build a machine learning model to start with a profile of known links violating guidelines, which you can acquire from paid link sites and link wheel middlemen with nothing more than an email address. You can then assess a probability of a site being linked to in that manner, corroborating potential buyers and sellers with a link graph of similar profiles. I have no idea what kind of computing/programming power this would take, but the footprint is anomalous enough that it should be possible.

Exchanging links through link schemes requires a lot more faith in a bunch of strangers than I can muster. In a link wheel, you’re only as strong and subtle as your “weakest links.” My opinion is that if you’re smart enough to avoid getting caught, you’re probably smart enough to build or write something awesome that will have superior results and lower risk than link wheels.

8. Low-Quality Press Release Syndication

High-quality syndication and wire services possess a few unattractive attributes for spammers: there are editorial guidelines, costs, and even fact checking. Low-quality syndication services will send almost anything through to any site that will take it. You’ll end up with a bunch of links, but not many that get indexed, and even fewer that get counted.

My experience has been that press releases have rapidly diminishing returns on syndication only, and the only way to see ROI is to generate actual, real coverage. I still see link-packed press releases all over the web that don’t have a chance of getting coverage – really, your site redesign is not news-worthy. I’m not sure whether to attribute this to bad PR, bad SEO, or both.

9. Linkbait and Switch

In this context, we’re talking about creating a real piece of linkbait for credible links, and later replacing the content with something more financially beneficial. Tricking people into linking to content is clearly not something Google would be ok with. I don’t see linkbait and switch done very often, but I die a little every time I see it. If you’re able to create and spread viral content, there’s no need to risk upsetting link partners and search engines. Instead, make the best of it with smart links on the viral URL, repeat success, and become a known source for great content.

10. Directories

Directories have been discussed to death. The summary is that Google wants to devalue links from directories with no true standards. Here’s a Matt Cutts video and blog post on the topic. Directory links often suffer from a high out/in linking ratio, but those worth getting are those that are actually used for local businesses (think Yelp) and any trafficked industry directories.

1. Would I pay money for a listing here?
2. Are the majority of current listings quality sites?
3. Do listings link with the business or site name?

If the answer to any of these questions is no, don’t bother with a link. This immediately excludes all but a handful of RSS or blog feed directories, which are mostly used to report higher quantities of links. When I was trained as an SEO, I was taught that directories would never hurt, but they might help a tiny bit, so I should go get thousands of them in the cheapest way possible. Recent experience has taught us that poor directory links can be a liability.

Even as I was in the process of writing this post, it appears that Google began deindexing low-quality directories. The effect seems small so far – perhaps testifying to their minimal impact on improving rankings in the first place – but we’ll have to wait and see.

11. Link Farms and Networks

I honestly can’t speak as an authority on link farms, having never used them personally or seen them in action.

“I’m telling you right now, the engines are very very smart about this kind of thing, and they’ve seen link farming over and over and over again in every different permutation. Granted, you might find the one permutation – the one system – that works for you today, but guess what? It’s not going to work tomorrow; it’s not going to work in the long run.” – Rand in 2009

My sense is that this prediction came true over and over again. I’d love to hear your thoughts.

12. Social Bookmarking Sharing Sites

Links from the majority of social bookmarking sites carry no value. Pointing a dozen of them at a page might not even be enough to get the page crawled. Any quality links that go in have their equity immediately torn a million different directions if links are followed. The prevalence of spam-filled and abandoned social bookmarking sites tells me that site builders seriously over-estimated how much we would care about other people’s bookmarks.

Sites focusing on user-generated links and content have their own ways of handling trash. Active sites with good spam control and user involvement will filter spam on their own while placing the best content prominently. If you’d like to test this, just submit a commercial link to any front-page sub-Reddit and time how long it takes to get the link banned. Social sites with low spam control stop getting visitors and incoming links while being overrun by low quality external links. Just ask Digg.

13. Forum Spam

Forum spam may never die, though it is already dead. About a year ago, we faced a question about a forum signature link that was in literally thousands of posts on a popular online forum. When we removed the signature links, the change was similar to effect of most forum links: zero. It doesn’t even matter if you nofollow all links. Much like social sites, forums that can’t manage the spam quickly turn into a cesspool of garbled phrases and anchor text links. Bing’s webmaster forums are a depressing example.

14. Unintended Followed Link Spam

From time to time you’ll hear of a new way someone found to get a link on an authoritative site. Examples I have seen include links in bios, “workout journals” that the site let users keep, wish lists, and uploaded files. Sometimes these exploits (for lack of a better term) go viral, and everyone can’t wait to fill out their bio on a DA 90+ site. 

In rare instances, this kind of link spam works – until the hole is plugged. I can’t help but shake my head when I see someone talking about how you can upload a random file or fill out a bio somewhere. This isn’t the sort of thing to base your SEO strategy around. It’s not long-term, and it’s not high-impact. 

15. Profile Spam

While similar to unintended followed links on authority domains, profile spam deserves its own discussion due to their abundance. It would be difficult for Google to take any harsh action on profiles, as there is a legitimate reason for reserving massive numbers of profiles to prevent squatters and imitators from using a brand name. 

What will hurt you is when your profile name and/or anchor text doesn’t match your site or brand name. 

“The name’s Insurance. Car Insurance”

When profile links are followed and indexed, Google usually interprets the page as a user page and values it accordingly. Obviously Google’s system for devaluing profile links is not perfect right now. I know it’s sometimes satisfying just to get an easy link somewhere, but profile link spam is a great example of running without moving.

16. Comment Spam

If I were an engineer on a team designed to combat web spam, the very first thing I would do would be to add a classifier to blog comments. I would then devalue every last one. Only then would I create exceptions where blog comments would count for anything.

I have no idea if it works that way, but it probably doesn’t. I do know that blogs with unfiltered followed links are generally old and unread, and they often look like this:

Let’s pretend that Google counts every link equally, regardless of where it is on the page. How much do you think 1/1809th of the link juice on a low-authority page is worth to you? Maybe I’m missing something here, because I can’t imagine spam commenting being worth anything at any price. Let’s just hope you didn’t build anchor text into those comments.

17. Domain Purchase and Redirect/Canonical

Buying domains for their link juice is an old classic, but I don’t think I have anything to add beyond what Danny Sullivan wrote on the matter. I’m also a fan of Rand’s suggestion to buy blogs and run them rather than pulling out the fangs and sucking every ounce of life out of a once-thriving blog.

Domain buying still works disgustingly well in the (rare) cases where done correctly. I would imagine that dozens of redirected domains will eventually bring some unwelcome traffic to your site directly from Mountain View, but fighting spam has historically been much easier in my imagination than in reality.

This list is not meant to be comprehensive, but it should paint a picture of the types of spam that are out there, which ones are working, and what kinds of behaviors could get you in trouble. 

Spam Links: Not Worth It

I have very deliberately written about what spam links “look like.” If you do believe that black hat SEO is wrong, immoral, or in any way unsavory that’s fine – just make sure your white hat links don’t look like black hat links. If you think that white hat SEOs are sheep, or pawns of Google, the same still applies: your links shouldn’t look manipulative.

I’m advising against the tactics above because the potential benefits don’t outweigh the risks. If your questionable link building does fall apart and your links are devalued, there’s a significant cost of time wasted building links that don’t count. There’s also the opportunity cost – what could you have been doing instead? Finally, clearing up a manual penalty can take insane amounts of effort and remove Google’s revenue stream in the meantime.

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