Posts on State of Search about ‘Linkbuilding’

Understanding Your Link Profile – Part Two

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Hopefully if you are reading this then you’ve already read last month’s part one. If you haven’t already read it then I’d suggest doing so or this won’t make a great deal of sense! In part one I went through some basics such as collecting data from tools such as Open Site Explorer and Majestic; moving on to explain how you can pull in domain page rank using SEO Tools for Excel and checking whether or not your links are live with the custom filters in Screaming Frog.  The idea behind part one was to help you to get to the point at which you can quickly filter through your data and identify links that might be worth considering for removal.

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Majestic SEO Announces ‘Keyword Checker’

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Majestic SEO has announced the launch of new functionality ‘Keyword Checker‘. As from today you will be able to type a keyword into the Majestic SEO homepage instead of a URL.  Also being launched is the ‘Bulk Keyword Checker’ function – allowing you to add hundreds or keywords and view on screen or export metrics as a CSV file. (more…)

Understanding Your Link Profile – Part One

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I’ve always believed that link building without knowing what your current link profile looks like is a bit like flying blind. Especially with the recent goings on, as an SEO you really need to have a good understanding of who’s linking to you, and in what context those sites are linking. Ideally, you should have a good handle on anchor text distribution,  page rank distribution and also a solid idea of what your competitions link profiles look like – i.e do you fit in or does your site stand out like a sore thumb?

As a minimum step when starting a link building project, I’ll make sure I take a good look at the client’s current link profile, focusing in on what the anchor text looks like; and to try and ascertain what sort of link building has been conducted in the past. That helps me to make some decisions about what anchor text to target, and what I might be up against. Key to this is being able to quickly gather the data you need and organise it in a way that tells the right story. (more…)

5 Ways to Increase your Link Building Efficiency

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We all know that link building is hard. It takes time, effort and patience to get good quality links. So any minor tweaks or improvements to your process and the tools you use can have a big effect on your hit rate. Below I’ll talk about five small tips and tricks to help with your link building which will not take loads of time to execute and put into your existing process. (more…)

Link Building Through Blogger Outreach

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Last week I was kindly invited to speak at the latest Search London meetup in London which is organised by Jo Turnbull. The topic I spoke about was Link Building through Blogger Outreach.  I know that this is an area that many people are interested in so I wanted to turn my slides into a blog post which will hopefully help many of you who build links.

Being honest about link building, it isn’t that easy. But it can be made easier with the right processes and the right tools. I’m going to outline a process for content based link building which will include the use of a number of tools.
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8 Link Building Tools I Couldn’t Live Without

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I’d say roughly 80% of my time as an SEO is spent link building. It can be a tough challenge sometimes, but I always find it satisfying to see the fruits of my labour coming through. Whilst I strongly believe that link building is all about hard graft, and that you should be able to do the job with all but an email address; the following tools certainly make my life a lot easier. Included in this list are tools that I use for a variety of things such as valuing a link prospect, right through to identifying poor quality links that I might want to consider removing. (more…)

Penguins, Anchor Text and Headaches: What Do We Do Now?

Anchor Text Post Penguin update

As a link builder, what particularly interested/scared me most about the Penguin update was the part which penalised the use of over-optimised anchor text. I must’ve read 10 blog posts about it but still, in amongst the bumph remains my biggest question; what anchor text am I supposed to use now? I’m not going to focus on the Penguin update as a whole, instead I’m going to delve into the world of exact match anchor texts, and try to work out exactly what us link builders are supposed to do now that the Penguins are in force. (more…)

King Content vs. Panda: How To Survive & Thrive With The New Content Rules

The session covered various strategies on how to avoid Panda and Penguin and focused on the future of link building. There were some very different viewpoints and some interesting takeaways.

Ken Dobell, President, Digital, DAC Group 

Ken covered the why and the how of Panda and posed the question what is in the head of a panda or a penguin. Most adult search engine users say the relevance and quality of results are improving over time. This is probably because people are getting better at search. 43% of all searches consist of four or more words. 64% of these searches return zero exact matches. This shows the demand of search exceeding the supply of search results.

We as SEOs optimise for broad terms, this is a short sighted strategy and typically the first search undertaken before the search is refined. Relevancy is massively important as search engines try and become more focused on usefulness. Answering a skeletal question is no longer enough. This is why eHow got hit. Penguin was in response to Google telling SEOs to stop trying so hard. The next generation is universal and semantic search.

Google is going far beyond ten blue links and are moving towards a deeper more personal engagement. Combined with social signals this is only going to get more important. We need to keep it real and make sure you create great content which satisfies a need. People need to like you more than they need to notice you. Make sure your landing pages answer questions, are easy to use and are scalable.

Focus on what matters, create fulfilling user experiences and focus on where Google is going.

Simon Penson, founder, Zazzle Media LTD

Simon focused on understanding site penalties. Penguin is a filter to kill webspam but it’s had a far greater impact. It’s really ramped up of late as the rollouts get closer together. The greatest fear we have is the fear of the unknown. The continuum of understanding is a process that will help you deal with that:

1)      Data – understanding your own link profile and work out where it’s weakest. Anchor text, relevance and low quality links are all issues.

2)      Information – add context to the data and structure it in a way that helps you understand it. Add competitors. You should look for short paragraphs of text and groups of links & content, evaluate if you are there.

3)      Knowledge – build up experience; look at your backlink acquisition graph. It should be a smooth graph, peaks and troughs are bad.

4)      Wisdom – live with it long term

Key takeaways: understand your link profile using the methods above and rework if necessary.

Stephen Croome, Head of SEO Delivery, SEOGadget

Stephen shared a case study of PrezzyBox and how they got hit by Panda. They completely lost all rankings but recovered.

The work they did:

1)      Get a good monitoring system – use AWR, GA, GWMT, Twitter, Email, if you don’t have a group of people on email you should do.

2)      Use data to help clients make difficult decisions – getting clients to get rid of large sections of their website is tough. Check all the content that isn’t driving traffic, its low quality traffic and you could get rid of it.

3)      Cleaned up the site’s index by dealing with extraneous URLs – there were loads of querystring based urls, they deleted or re-homed orphan pages. They cleaned up their internal linking and global nav.

4)      Rewrote the content that drove money but got rid of the dupe content.

5)      Throw away categories that had no depth of products – only target good content and throw away bad content

6)      They created unique content for every category. Snippets were fine for now but they will need to improve that. They used related searches to build in snippets

7)      Used UGC – each product was shared

Vince Blackham, Director of Social Media, 97th Floor (@vinceblackham)

Vince focused about how social is affecting search and how content plays a part in that.  Last month 52 updates were made to the algo and authority was affected in 6 of them. Links are carrying less weight and there is more to come. With Google getting better at evaluating bad links content is going to be the best long term exercise. People are still more interested in data visualisation than a year ago. Bad designs won’t get you anywhere. Test various infographics and that helps you build up a case that works best.

Permabait is an interactive that’s based on an API that’s interesting and permanent. A breakdown on Warren Buffets money earning through a Yahoo API was a great success. Instruction based graphics target Pinterest and resulted in great visits but great revenue too. They also generate a lot of links and impact in the social graph. Do it all now and embrace social.

Link Building on the Highway to Hell

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Thinking Like Mr G.

As a teenager I spent hours, days and weeks, practising guitar. I was so passionate about it that I would play until my fingers (and ears) bled and I had no choice but to stop. For me, my future was going to be full of magical rock performances, international stardom and illustrious guitar solos.

But as I got older, I started thinking about the music I liked and what I enjoyed – more often than not, it was its simplicity that I admired. Overly technical musicians, who were only concerned with playing as many-notes-per-second as possible turned me off and I started searching for musicians that knew when to hold back. In short, they knew what not to play, as well as they knew what to play. (more…)

The Psychology of Link Building

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Last week I spoke at a Distilled Meetup themed around the Psychology of Link Building, alongside Mike Essex from Koozai and Phil Nottingham from Distilled.

It was a really interesting event, and now I’m finally on the road to recovery from my #girlflu, I thought I’d share some of my insights and takeaways from the evening. This is however less a write-up of the event, and more a few stand-outs thoughts on link building and the thoughts behind it as an overview. (more…)

Link Building – Learning Lessons from Sales and Business

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At the weekend I gave a presentation at Think Visibility ‘Link Building Lessons from Swiss Toni’ which was all about taking lessons from sales and successful business people, and seeing how we can apply that to link building. I thought it would be good to go into a bit more detail as to the ideas behind the session. The whole thought process started from my mild obsession with business and being inspired by people who ‘just do it’. It got me thinking that there’s a pretty strong tie in with link building and sales. From finding potential link opportunities, to getting your outreach and pitch right to maximise your success rate – these are all things that great sales people have learnt to master.

When I talk about ‘sales’ I’m definitely not referring to the irritating kind of people that call you up with a well rehearsed sketch of BS; I’m talking about the skill of identifying what other people need and then tailoring your pitch to suit. In my mind this is all about trying to create a ‘win, win, win’ type of situation where everyone comes out on top. Relating that back to link building in a guest posting situation the blog should be ‘proud’ to publish the content, their readers should enjoy it enough to share/link to, and you of course get the link and some traffic. If you can provide stuff that genuinely benefits other websites and their audience, your chances of future links and an ongoing relationship increase dramatically. (more…)

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