Author Archives: Ryan Clark

About Ryan Clark

I'm the CEO of Linkbuildr Marketing and the brains behind our branding and blog content. I specialize in effective marketing strategies for hotels, luxury brands and real estate. If your brand is in need of a boost then don't hesitate to contact me for a free proposal. Follow me on Google+: +Ryan Clark Twitter: @Linkbuildr on Twitter. You can also come ask me a question on our Facebook Page.  

ChamberofCommerce.com Needs Your Listing!

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March 16  |  Link Building  |   Ryan Clark

With the recent string of top notch business/company directories I’ve been finding great places to build links, expand your business and build your brand better. I recently talked about getting listed with Company.com and Manta.com, and now I bring you ChamberOfCommerce.com. I really like these types of sites as they provide legit businesses with a place to network and build trust online. Currently this website is for US businesses only, so us Canadians weren’t able to sign up and build a legit profile.

The links are cloaked so there’s no link juice being passed, but that’s fine with us. Not every link needs to be follow/dofollow to have value. While there are varying levels of accounts you can get from free to costly, I’d hope the more expensive monthly accounts come with some sort of added benefit…but now I’m getting into paid link territory. There’s not much else offered here that’s unique at the moment other than business advice and guidance from industry professionals. That’s nothing to shake a stick at but it definitely won’t come cheap!

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Google Panda Q/A From SMX West

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March 15  |  Link Building Videos  |   Ryan Clark

SMX West has just wrapped up, sadly we missed it and were stuck sitting here in the office working away. There are always a ton of awesome videos that come from the conference, and sadly not a lot of them get the exposure they should. I really enjoy slapping these on my mobile and watching them while I work out, or before falling asleep. But, generally speaking they’re brilliant videos with industry leaders discussing the latest and greatest, and in this case the latest and painful. The Panda/Farm update has heads still spinning, and we’re still seeing a lot of scrapers and spam still ranking quite well. I hope this video clears up some of the questions you may have had, or if you’re just wanting to see what the marketing world is getting at behind close doors.

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Rand Talks About Preventing Link Based Penalties

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March 15  |  Link Building Videos  |   Ryan Clark

It has been a while since I posted a Whiteboard Friday post from the fine folks at SEOmoz. So when I saw Rand rocking that snazzy sweater, I just new I had to do my part and share it here. I wish more people would watch this video because they have no idea the nightmare that is cleaning it all up. This video covers a whole spectrum of linking topics that will cause trouble, as well what to do to stay out of the black hole that Google can put you in at a moments notice. I highly recommend checking out their original post because they graciously provided a transcript.

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Animoto.com Review: Client Case Study

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March 14  |  Video SEO  |   Ryan Clark

A lot of our clients need, must, want and absolutely have to utilize video marketing. For those who don’t know the costs of producing high quality, high definition video then you’re in for a shock. If you have to ask then…well you should know the rest of that quote. The majority of our clients are of course hotels, real estate agents and ecommerce sites and are always in need of video content. There are many great reasons why you should be marketing with video and I’ll go into that a bit here. First, I’ll try and convince you to try out Animoto’s FREE program and see if it is a must have tool in your arsenal. It’s really too easy not to folks, so don’t miss out!

The video by Rose does a wonderful job of showing you how easy it is to create videos, and how many useful options there are packed into this web software. The main idea is to create picture sideshows in a much more fashionable sense. So when it comes to showcasing products on your online shop, making a slide show of your latest property listing or just showing off the family vacation, it’s a breeze. We recently had a client whip out 25 high quality videos for us to use, all in which showcased his unique products. Guess what we saw?

His first sale by video! The videos were only shared on their Youtube profile, and since they’re unique, they made quite the jump start on their account. This meant his videos were indexing at a rapid rate, the views starting climbing and most importantly his profile with that juicy Youtube link was indexed. We honestly didn’t expect to see a sale come from the videos that quickly, but since they have some very sought after furniture that sale came fast. After further inspection we started to see a few of his videos were already ranking in the top 5 spots for his target keyword, and that meant a onslaught of highly targeted viewers were watching the video. Luckily we make sure each video description includes a link to the direct product, along with a unique to Youtube only description.

So what else? The videos were next used on their social media accounts including their Facebook Page, Twitter account and on their blog. The videos were also added as embeds on the actual product pages which is a great thing to do in an ecommerce shop. Why you ask? Well let me give you two great answers. First up it adds more content to your page, and looks more complete in my opinion. Secondly, we noticed a huge increase in the time-on-site due to the people sitting there and watching the 90 second video. The bounce rate is better, the customer is more happy and our client seemed to be the happiest of all. They were not expecting, or thinking, about the overall benefit to video marketing. Really it’s a no-brainer, but it’s just another tactic in a sea of marketing options one can take advantage of.

There are tons of social video sites out there in which you can use your videos and build a few extra links. These won’t be ultra-awesome authority links, but they’ll add a nice and diverse hit to your link profile. This is something we love to make sure out clients have going on. After a couple months, we also noticed sites like Squidoo, Hubpages and social media scapers embedding our clients videos. We have no problem with this because some included their link, it made the views and ratings go up and that’s key to ranking those videos. For those who don’t know how easy it is to rank Youtube videos for long-tail keywords are missing out!

Try Animoto Out for FREE!

 

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Matt Cutts On NoFollow Links

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March 13  |  Link Building Videos  |   Ryan Clark

Matt answers an interesting question from a webmaster in Thailand about only using nofollow links throughout his website. I can imagine how confusing this can get for some new webmaster’s out there. What should I append nofollow too, how should I build my internal linking structure and is that going to be seen as a PageRank passing link? Hopefully some of you find this post informative and give new webmasters an idea of how to go about linking without fear of screwing something up.

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Paid Links in 2011

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March 13  |  Black Hat  |   Ryan Clark

I never thought I’d be writing another post about paid links, especially in 2011. Talk about beating a dead horse, resurrecting it and then beating it to death again. You can find our team helping people for free on Google’s Webmaster Central, and it is the reason I’ve decided to blab on the topic. Almost on a daily basis we’re answering topics where the webmaster either has no idea that buying links are a no-no, or they’re not checking who they’re hiring. I could have stated a third option, but I just cannot imagine people are dumb enough to buy the kind of paid links we’re seeing. I’m talking the usual lame blog with dozens of unrelated anchor text links all over the place..footer, blogroll and in-content text ads. A blog about potty training doing a post on car insurance…as Gob from Arrested Development would say, “Come On!

The latest thread I posted on was from a printing company in the UK. They made a post stating that they’ve lost most of their traffic over night. Imagine that folks. How would you feel if you had to come back tomorrow morning and tell your staff that business is going to get really rough. It would be even worse if you had to start laying off workers because of the massive monetary hit your company is about to take. Don’t let this be you folks, as well let this be a lesson to not keep all your eggs in one basket. Google is a volatile lover, and that’s why our company builds relationships on line…not just links.

If you’ve hired a link building consultant in the past year and haven’t bothered to look deep into the links you’re getting, do so right now! If you’re seeing a whole lot of lousy links then you need to jump on that asap. You wouldn’t believe the amount of potential clients that come to us in major trouble from past people hired. They were either burned hard and lost most of their business, or they were teetering on the edge of getting caught.

In this day and age, if your top anchor text count is for a specific search term you’re targeting and not your company/brand name, then I’d be a little worried. Google has been cracking down more and more, and they’ve even stated recently that major changes are coming to the way they view links. No one really knows what that entails, but I can imagine they’ll start looking closer into “natural” link profiles. A common factor in the clients we help get out of a penalty is the fact that their top 10 used anchor texts were obvious links to game the system.

If you’re going to still buy links against the advice of the Google gods, then at least do it smart. Link networks are always lousy and obvious, links from unrelated sites are obvious, and links in the sidebar or footer are just plain silly…I’m getting tired of cleaning up paid links for people!

Peace out

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Gwazu.com Makes Twitter Contests A Breeze

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March 11  |  Twitter Marketing  |   Ryan Clark

Our team has been handling a lot of contests lately in the social media realm, so when a new tool comes out we’re always thankful. Getting followers to your social media channels are more important than ever, and we have an inkling that it’s going to be even more crucial by the end of 2011. Marketing a contest by Twitter is so easy that not doing one is just plain crazy. Gwazu.com has recently come onto the radar of our team not only for its contest marketing ability, but to enter random give-aways when we’re bored. I thought we’d take a quick look at what makes this web app tick, and hopefully persuade some brands to start using their platform.

The first thing I’ll mention is the complete ease of entering a contest from the consumers point of view. As long as you’re logged into your Twitter account, you just need to click the enter contest button and you’re done. It doesn’t get any easier than that! This should really entice companies and brands to jump on board and utilize their platform. Those ReTweets should be nice and handy in getting a lot of exposure, and play things right so that people are funneled to your Facebook Page.

Getting your contest listed here for now just requires a simple email and a reading of their rules. Gwazu’s aim is to alert the world about the biggest and best social media contests, so I don’t recommend coming to them with a measly $10 gift card to Mcdonalds…although I’d most likely sign up for that! You can also pay to advertise in their featured contest spot which is top dead center, schmack dab in the middle! So what are you waiting for? Get on that social media contest your brand has been dying to do before it’s too late!

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Jaxified.com Makes Social Media Tracking Easy

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March 11  |  Link Building Tools  |   Ryan Clark

While the social web grows uncontrollably just like the normal web has done, there is too much to do and too much to track. How much statistical data can one take? Well, just a little more thanks to Jaxified.com. I’ve been utilizing a few different methods of tracking our Facebook Likes and ReTweets from across the digital landscape, and recently we’ve been running the free trial from this neat little web app. To me, the URL shortener, ReTweets and FB Likes are nearly the same as a link. so wouldn’t it would be great to know just exactly how many you’re getting to your content?

The feature you’ll also find a huge bonus to this social tracking system is its ability to track trends from blogs in your industry. Jaxified can measure not only your blog, but blogs in your field so you see how their content is performing. so you can spot trending topics and write better content. It can find breaking viral stories and show you who the key influencer’s are for each post and conversation. This is huge for identifying what’s going on in real time and interact as the buzz is taking place…brilliant!

There are a whole slough of other features within their platform, so I highly recommend checking out the demo for a good look. The pricing plans are well affordable, and any business serious about their social presence should be looking into a tool like this. The more time you can save, the more knowledge you have, the better off your company or business will be in the long run. If anyone out there has used Jaxified, lets hear what you think and especially if its helping your business.

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