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.

SES New York Worthy Workshops

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May 11 | News | Ryan Clark

I don’t know how many of you are planning on attending SES New York, or any SES for that matter , but it should be on your radar regardless that they’re sponsoring my site. I don’t want to go into a sales pitch, but I do want to quickly cover the workshops of interest that related to link building. For those of you not familiar with SES I highly recommend click on the banners(affiliated with me) here and getting a feel for what they have to offer. Whether you’re a seasoned vet, or just starting out these events can be a great way to network and learn a thing or two. You’ll find that most of the information spoken about at these conferences is already widely covered on the web, but you’ll still find a few gems worthy of the admission.

Like most of their venues, there are both basic and advanced workshops and the New York series has a session at both levels. Regardless of the topics you’ll find a handful of skilled link builders from companies and other industries that you might not run into on the web. If you’re working for a company you most likely have the benefit of attending any workshop you like so lets take a look at both the workshops regarding link building this year in New York.

Basic Workshop:

Linking Strategies that Increase Rankings

After on-site improvements, gaining links from other websites is a critical marketing activity. Links are a primary factor in the search engine rankings, and making your site “linkeable” will build your rankings and relevance within your market. The session will cover types of links, linking campaigns and effective content-link strategies.

If you have barely any link building knowledge this should give you a great start into planning out and attacking a campaign. You will also come out of it with a good understanding of what to do and most importantly, what not to do. So many people get into some scary link building practices an although they may work, you might be putting your company at risk in the long run.

Advanced Workshop:

Social Media + SEO = even bigger results

Social Media has taken the internet to new levels of consumer-brand interaction. Advanced SEO topics will cover the uses of social media in your marketing efforts. Social Media is a vital part of building links, building rankings, and overall visibility for your website. Marketers must be aware of the potential for both positive and negative effects of social media. Developing a social media plan for your organization will build a prepared campaign and one that can also deal with negative PR.

This workshop is much more to my liking! I’m big on makin a social media splash while building links because the two are very much intertwined. Bringing in more business is all about networking and connecting with potential customers. Having a strong social media presence on top of building links is and has made my job easier, and it will do the same for you.

Create Resources For Links In Your Industry

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May 7 | Link Building | Ryan Clark

For those of you in an industry that is a little behind the times when it comes to marketing online, then it’s time to take advantage. I’ve had a big client that unfortunately started to run out of quality places to get related links. This gave me the idea to plan out a long term strategy that would help grow his business as well as bring in quality links. Some of the options I’ve covered here but who doesn’t like a nice little list to go over?

So my client has his site and I’ve been link building on it for 5 months which has netted us just over 300 quality links from related sites, social media and through linkbait. This has proved to be effective enough to destroy the competition and make it tough for anyone coming up to catch up. My client didn’t want to stop there even though I reached the ranking goals, and me wanting to make more money I obliged.

His site was just a usual static html site with no social aspects, and defintely no blog. Since his industry was void of any sort of social media site, or industry resource, I suggested we create 4 seperate sites over the next 6 months. This would allow him to do a few things like have strong links back to his company, get more exposure and have assets that are worth something in the long run.

So a lot of this shouldn’t come as a surprise to any of you, but it is something to think about. It requires a lot of work and then the waiting for things to kick off in the coming months. So how many of you have gone out and done something like this? Has it worked out to your benefit? If you’re still wondering what resources I’m talking about I was talking about these:

Social Video Site
Web/Business Directory
Blog
Industry Podcast
Industry Forum
Classifieds

These are just a few examples of seperate sites that can be created on a seperate IP or server. Obviously we wouldn’t put all this effort into it just for a link, but it gives you such an advantage over your industry, and you can control the links going to competitors because you’re the webmaster. So again, nothing ground breaking here but just something to think about if you’re in a quiet niche.

Tagged Link Building, marketing, social media marketing

Dangers Of Nofollow On Whiteboard Friday

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May 1 | Internal Link Building | Ryan Clark

SEOmoz Whiteboard Friday – Dangers of Nofollow from Scott Willoughby on Vimeo.

Tagged Internal Link Building, Link Building, rand fishkin, seomoz, whiteboard friday

Content For Links & Go Compare

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April 30 | Link Building, News | Ryan Clark

There has been a lot of talk lately about companies offering content for links and there are people on all sides of the fence, including myself. I just read an excellent article by Linktank(must read blog btw) entitled The Content For Links Debate, and I completely agree with what he has to say in regards to going about this tactic. A lot of the chatter has been revolving around the Go Compare fiasco which has seen them up and down in Google.

If you haven’t heard about it, then let me fill you in quickly. They were basically sending out mass emails saying they’ll write content for your site and include one simple link back to their website. This method can work out great but I can see how a lot of people didn’t like the way they went about things. Mass emailing a template to webmaster’s is not a great way of doing things. I however think that this is a great method of link building if done properly, and by properly I mean getting personal in each and every email. I also read that they were offering around 400 word articles as content, and to me this doesn’t come close to cutting it. If you’re wanting that link from the other site you’d best be writing at least 2000 words on something new and fresh, not rehashed. Spend the time doing the social media marketing to attract links to that content, which will in return pass on quality link juice.

Now it isn’t clear that they(Go Compare) received a penalty mainly because they bounced back quickly. If you’ve done link building in a tough niche you’ll know that your rankings will fluctuate all over the place. You also don’t want to be too aggressive going after one keyword because that’s going to get you notice and slapped.

I could go on and on about this subject but i’ll let you folks write me some comments with your thoughts. I’m also going to link to a bunch of great posts already talking about what I’ve covered here and then some. It’s a touchy subject, and link building is a mine field of an industry so it’s fun(hard?) to keep up on things.

How to Determine a Search Engine Penalty – Jonathan Stewart
Go Compare Penalized Again – Patrick Altoft
The Content For Links Debate – Linktank
Content For Links – Kieron Donoghue
Link Building In Ultra Competitive Niches – Red Cardinal

Tagged content for links, gocompare, google penalty, Link Building

Love.com At A Glance

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April 30 | News | Ryan Clark

I wasn’t aware of Love.com until I read Aaron Wall’s post “Does Google Love.com Spam?” which lead me to peering into their backlink profile and more. Aaron is the man when it comes to pointing out the crazy things companies will do and AOL is redefining content scraping. Now most sites wouldn’t have lasted this long but when you’re AOL you have a little bit more sway that others. I don’t want to get into the ethics of it all, but instead take a peek at their backlink profile and how they’re abusing social media.

Love.com Backlinks:

So far they’re blistering along in the search engines with nearly 150,000 pages indexed in just Google. Aaron tweet’d that he’d give away some SEOBook prizes if anyone could guess the date this would start dropping, and honestly I’m not sure if this will happen quickly. Love.com is going to at least have a grace period mainly due to the age of their domain name, and when you see their backlink profile you’ll shit a brick. Before I even ran them through LinkVoodoo’s Backlink Analyzer I expected to see a lot of AOL owned sites providing most of the juice. Well as of today I’m seeing just over 1000 backlinks with 93% of them being dofollow which is quite rare in a backlink profile, but I was right in guessing most of them would be from an AOL owned site. Also as expected, since most of the sections are on their own subdomain a lot of the links are coming from those.This also means that 93% of the links are pointing to their root index.

So far this has been working out in their favor and I can see the pagerank is flowing around to a lot of the Love.com subdomains. So all in all despite the crazyness this site is going to bring out in the SEO world it is worth the behind the scenes look at how you can manipulate the search engines. I’ve attached the .csv file from out private beta version of the LinkVoodoo backlink analyzer in case you’re wondering how I’m getting reports. It will be out soon so don’t worry, we’re still testing and fixing some bugs so this report may not include all the backlinks but it will be damn close.

Download: Love.com Link Analysis

Love.com’s Twitter Usage:

Everyone is using Twitter these days and it didn’t take me long to see how Love.com was making use of it either. It’s a great way to get traffic, but they’re seemingly taking it to the next level. If you do a quick search for Love.com on Twitter you’ll see what’s going on here. Tons and tons of seperate Twitter accounts based on niche feeding in news from the site. It is too early to tell if this is working out great for them but it’s interesting none the less.

What do you folks think about this?

Love.com’s Alexa:

I know Alexa isn’t the best for measuring traffic volumes but it will do fine just to see how things are progressing so far. As you can see the Scraping + Domain Age + Link Profile is bringing in the traffic so far, but I can’t wait to see the results a few months from now. I think Aaron’s guessing game is a great idea and I think I’ll make my bid.

Tagged Link Building, love.com, scraping, twitter

Link Building With Your Pictures

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April 28 | Link Building | Ryan Clark

This post I was a little nervous about pushing to the public mainly because the potential for abuse, and we all know that most link building techniques do get abused quite badly. With that being said, I had recently worked with a photographer and the research I did for his campaign lead me to the data for this post. If you’re a photographer and are wanting to expand your business you’ll find this resource quite handy, and a great way to build up a relevant backlink profile in the process. So I hope these link building resources get used wisely and I don’t wanna see a bunch of people using other people’s pictures to go on a link building bonanza.

This client in particular had a good response from the search engines with these methods and is rapidly showing improvement within the serps. Another killer factor that makes this work and doesn’t piss off any of the sites is of course great content. If you’re going to be showing off your work you best make sure those photo’s are your best work because I saw a lot of his work get very popular on some of these sites. This photographer specialized in scenery shots within his state and had a nice stockpile of beautiful shots that managed to capture the attention of a lot of people.

I approached the campaign with a couple different angles in mind, one being a whole host of picture/photography sites that let you submit your work and get nice juicy links. Two being the use of a hosted gallery with an embed feature. I found a few different open source gallery scripts that worked great, and the only thing I had to do was some minor PHP coding to make sure a link back to his site was obtained when embedded.

Wallpapers:

Everyone loves a nice wallpaper for their desktop and we were able to make use of a whole host of juicy wallpaper sites out there. A lot of these sites will allow you to submit your work and receive a link back which is great. This is where the great content comes into play because if you have a good shot your wallpaper could become quite popular. I also connected with local bloggers in his area to let them know of his new wallpapers and we managed to snag a few great links, and the bloggers were more than happy to do so. Sometimes you have to get the word out about your content instead of relying it on going viral. I’m going to keep the list of wallpaper sites to a minimum but here are a few that allow you to get a link back for your work. A lot of the sites are not all too quality so they might not be worth the submit. There are a lot of these sites out there so use the Google commands to help weed them out easily.

Wallpaper Seek – Submit
Wallpaper Cube – Submit
Wallpaper4God – Submit
IndieWalls – Submit

Screensavers:

The same sort of work goes into screensaver sites as the wallpaper ones. If you have a bunch of great themed pictures you can create a cool screensaver and submit that around the web for exposure and links. I recommend going to any one of the free music websites with mp3 downloads and finding commercial free tunes to spruce up the screensaver, which will increase your approval odds. I know this method is spammed often and you have to watch out for low quality sites, so make sure you’re submitting your finest work. Again I’m only going to post a few here but you can use Google to find hundreds of these sites, so submit with caution.

DesktopScreensaver.com – Submit
FreeSaver.com – Submit
Saverpit.com – Submit
Screensaversplanet.com – Submit

Social Pictures Sites:

I knew before I started this client’s campaign that there were a lot of great social photo/picture sites out there and it lead me on quite the journey. For a photographer these sites are a goldmine for attracting not only links, but attention to your quality work. These sites though are where my concerns for mass spamming come into play, and I can’t stress enough the need to be ethical in your marketing efforts. Some of these sites you cannot obtain links from, but if you have great content it is worth the exposure especially if you have a watermark on your work.

Zoto is a great alternative to Flickr and features a very nice minimalistic design that makes browsing photos easy on the eyes. You can’t get any links from Zoto but it’s great for social media marketing and getting that exposure you’ll be needing.

Fotolog is another social picture site that is very active and has a whole bunch of features such as embedding, user profiles and a friend network. You can get nofollow links within your profile and in the picture description. So there’s no need to upload watermarked photos here because you can just link to your portfolio and attract some attention.

Photosig is a great little site that has been booming with activity lately and I found no shortage of amazing pictures. If you’re working and come to this site prepare to find yourself time warped 2 hours ahead because there is so much to look at. Aside from being able to host your galleries on here there is a very active forum and and a bunch of useful articles. I think my favorite part about this site is you get critical feedback from other photographer’s. Aside from all that you can get a couple dofollow links to your homepage or portfolio, so make sure you fill out your bio.

DeviantArt should be no stranger to any photographer or artist as it is one of the largest photo and art websites on the web. I love the site even though it looks like Myspace in regards to its awful design and content cluttering. Regardless it is a place you shouldn’t overlook especially when it’s free to sign up and post your work. It’s also a great place to network and get in touch with other photographer’s and your pictures can rank easier if you want to go after longtails. Last but not least, you can obtain dofollow links in your photos comments and on your profile page.

More Photography Social Sites:

http://smugmug.com/
http://www.buzznet.com/
http://www.webshots.com/
http://pixrat.ibibo.com/
http://www.shareapic.net/
http://jalbum.net/
http://www.zooomr.com/
http://www.imageloop.com/en/index.htm
http://www.iimmgg.com/
http://www.scrapblog.com/
http://weheartit.com
http://www.phanfare.com/
http://photosynth.net/
http://vi.sualize.us/
http://www.photoshop.com/
http://www.dumpr.net/
http://www.glogster.com/
http://www.dailybooth.com
http://www.photoshelter.com

Matt Cutts On Google’s Link: Command

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March 25 | Link Building, Link Building Tools, Link Building Videos | Ryan Clark

I always see a lot of people asking about the link: command in Google and why it doesn’t show all your backlinks. Matt Cutts talks about that as well as some other interesting tidbits, and why Google has chosen to take that route.

Tagged google, Link Building, link:, matt cutts

Twitter SEO Benefits & Application

38 Comments

March 23 | Link Building, Twitter Marketing | Ryan Clark

Everyone knows that your Twitter profile URL is nofollow and doesn’t pass on any of the link loving, but there are still ways to attract some nice links with your Twitter account. Some of the links obtained won’t be all that powerful right now, but the way Twitter and its apps have been growing, it’s worth it in the long run…kind of like RRSP’s or a Chia Pet. Also on the topic of Twitter and SEO, someone either on Sphinn, SEOmoz or some forum mentioned that Twitter Search results were ranking well in Google lately. This lead me to some other interesting finds and ideas on ranking for a large number of longtails.

There are a few Twitter user directories out there in the wild and they do have an added benefit towards your link building efforts. With the added benefit of snagging a dofollow link, you also get to grow your followers. Another perk about getting links built to your Twitter profile is that you can rank it higher in the serps. I’ve got an Ecommerce shop that I run in my free time and I’ve managed to rank my Twitter profile for one of the top keywords within the niche, and it drives sales.

Twibs.com is a new business directory for Twitter users and accounts, and I imagine this will grow like crazy. The site has been around since January and has been growing decently since then, nearing the 100,000 mark on Alexa. Within your Twib Business Listing, you get a dofollow link to both your Twitter profile, and your homepage or blog. You can push your Twibs page into the Google index yourself, or waiting should end in the same result. There are nearly 10,000 pages indexed from Twibs, so the spiders are doing their thing.

Tweeple.com used to be home to what now is Tweeplepages.com, and they’ve made a few changes since I’ve last looked. The main domain, Tweeple.com, is undergoing either a site redesign or a code overhaul because I’m noticing some functionality changes on the new site. On your Tweeple Page, you do get dofollow links back to your homepage or blog, but now the links are being masked. Still a great place to make new Twitter friends.

Tweetfind.com is a Twitter directory and search engine to find like minded people. The site also has a few extra features like Twitter news, statistics and interesting user profiles listed daily. You can add yourself for free, and if approved, you’ll be rewarded with a profile page that includes dofollow links to your Twitter Profile and homepage/blog. It’s too early to tell if this site will continue to grow, but chances are good and the traffic has been slowly moving up since its launch in January.

JustTweetIt.com brings an interesting approach to the Twitter directory scene but it’s worth the 2 minutes it takes to submit. It’s free to submit and each category has a list of tweeters within that niche along with a link to their profile, and to their homepage. The link to your Twitter profile is dofollow while the link to your homepage is not. No worries though, you’ll find that once you add yourself here, your followers will grow.

WeFollow.com is the newest Twitter directory by Digg’s Kevin Rose, but it’s mainly a list of the biggest players on the social media site. You can add your Twitter profile for free which doesn’t add any link benefits, but it might help your followers list rise. A lot of people bitched about that the site doesn’t promote find new users, but following people within your niche who can attract that many subscribers can’t be all that bad.

I’m sure this is just a start to the number of Twitter directory like sites will start popping up, so keep an eye out and feel free to list any I missed in the comments. Now let’s take a look at what’s going on with Twitter Search queriry results, and how you could possibly rank easily for some longtail keywords. Now I know this is going to be exploited by some annoying spammers, but if you’re competing in a certain niche, why not try and take a bigger piece of the traffic pie with your account? Obviously the more heavily searched for terms will be harder to work with, but I encourage you to run some of your own tests.

So word on the street Twitter search page results are showing up within the search results, and they’re even ranking for keywords. I took a quick peek to see if it were true and found some pretty interesting results. I’ll make it brief because I’m most likely making some of you either sleepy, or nauseous from all the blue color in this post.

I picked one random indexed search query that contained a keyword that would be easy to rank for, then another that would pose to be a little bit more difficult. So first up on the list is the search query “wickedwire“. This is where it currently ranks;

The second keyword was a lot more competitive yet the search result for it ranked way higher than I would have expected. You all know the world famous beer, or the world famous book of world records….”Guinness“. Let’s take a look at where the search query ranks for this;

Well the evidence is there, but the question that comes to my mind is…how long will Google allow this. I’m partial to this search listing showing up because it does give the user a link to a very recently updated look into Guinness. But then again, the way it shows up within Google’s results doesn’t seem all that SEO friendly. Do let me know what you folks think about this.

Related Blog Posts:

Twitter SEO – How to Optimize Your Website For Twitter Search – Winning The Web

Is Twitter The Next SEO Haven? – The Blog Herald

Twitter, SEO and Online Marketing: You’re Missing The Point – SEO Group

Twitter Tweaks Its Title Tags For Google Juice – Techcrunch

Twitter: Incredibly Valuable Or Utterly Useless As A Link Building Tool? – Eric Ward

Twitter Links Are a Source of External Links…Sometimes – YOUmoz

Twitter Dupe Content and Link Building Strategy – YOUmoz