Link Building

Get Listed With Company.com

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March 10  |  Link Building  |   Ryan Clark

It has been a while since we’ve dropped an actual link building tip, so how about we finally give everyone something to work with? A lot of past tips just ended up getting spammed to death, so this is a good reason we stopped dropping linking tips. We will however give you folks a bone if there is something industry specific, or a moderated site that won’t end up in the spam bin. Today that website in question is Company.com, and they’re more than just a link building resource. I’m pleased to see what they’re doing with the site overall, and you can bet this social business platform is going places in 2011.

While it has been a mediocre year in growth for the site, it seems it is also the first this platform was deployed on the domain. The 2.0 revolution has brought on all sorts of new age business directories, but few are as nicely designed and thought out as this one. The only other company database I can think of that even comes close is Manta. I created our Company.com profile rather quickly as of today, so it isn’t the prettiest, but it does give you an idea what you can do on this powerhouse of a social network.

Besides getting your business page listed with them( which includes links), there is a whole whack of cool stuff you can do here. I’ll start by saying business networking opportunities are a plenty, and the questions & answers section is fully interactive. They have an articles section that is written by their team, but hopefully they’ll open it up to quality writers from companies listed on their site. I don’t see why they wouldn’t do this because it’s a great way to have amazing people write great content. All in all, you don’t want to miss out from listing your business with Company.com!

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Content Scrapers Outranking Your Website? You’re Not Alone

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January 27  |  Link Building  |   Ryan Clark

As I went off yesterday about Google going after content scrapers and low quality websites, I also should have gone into this topic a little more. Our site gets scraped by a few sites and while it is getting better, I’m still finding posts I wrote a week or two ago getting outranked by the scraper site. This pisses me off to no end, and I don’t need any more stress in my life that’s for sure.

Matt Cutts has stated, below on video for good measure, that in most cases it won’t hurt your site. He also stated, that it can help out a little if the scraper site links to your site. This is all fine and dandy, the problem I have is all the scrapers I’m dealing with are not linking back, they’re stripping my links and they’re even hot linking my our images. I’ll go into how to attempt to put a stop to that below without having to hire some h4x0r to DDoS the living stink out of their server….not that I would ever recommend that lol.

On our end, from my constant checking, I’ve noticed a few things that I thought would have helped beat out the scraper sites. Google has mentioned that Facebook Likes and Retweets help rank your content, but even after 50+ likes on a content piece, and about a dozen ReTweets I didn’t notice much. I still need to measure what threshold levels are in place for that style of marketing to take effect. I’ve even submitted the best of the content to Digg, Reddit’s SEO section and a few other bookmarking sites we have built up properly.

So about two weeks ago we started using Google’s two new meta tags for content producers which is supposed to tell Google it started here first. If you’re using WordPress, I’ll spare you the time reading my post and you can just go ahead and install WP Original Source and never think about it again. I will say that we’re seeing a huge improvement with our content ranking very well, and our main scraper isn’t even registering in the SERPs anymore.

Some other advice I can give out here is get a few internal links pointing to your content when you can. I’ll even try and see what older, indexed content we have that is on the same topic and find a way to add a link in. Make sure you’re also using a related posts plugin if you’re a blog, just like the one you’ll see below this post. Every little bit helps, but if that’s still not working you can always file a DMCA complaint with Google and their Webhost. Sadly, when I tried this nothing at all ever happened, but I wish you better luck.

Last but not least, this is another good reason to grow your social profiles properly and of course, bigger and better! Having more and more people Retweet and Like your content is only going to help in the long run, even if we didn’t see any movement with it at the moment. This can also lead to Twitter apps picking up your content, and as I’ve mentioned before, most of them follow their links and we see almost lightning quick indexing because of it. I’ll also take this opportunity to BEG you all to Follow us on Twitter because we’re awesome.

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Google VS Bing: Round 1

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January 22  |  Link Building  |   Ryan Clark

There has been a lot of complaining from webmasters around the world about Google’s quality in the search results, so I thought we could take a different scenarios and see for ourselves. I for one complain daily about Google, but mostly to the staff here and they’re getting pretty sick of it. We’ll take a look at different types of keywords and compare results to see what kind of useful information we’re getting back, especially for product reviews. I recently needed some information on a legit product for a personal reason, and I can say with Google I didn’t even come close to getting what I wanted.

Example 1) Buy Cialis on Google

We all know Xrumer backlink spamming is more rampant than ever, an the buy Cialis keyword is a perfect example of how Google can’t do anything about it.

Example 1) Buy Cialis on Bing

As you can see here there isn’t much difference in regards to hacked and spam sites ranking for this keyword on Bing. So it seems the same backlink schemes work here although there is an online pharmacy ranking number one this time, and not a .edu.

Regardless of the results, people will still get their dick pills. This kind of link spamming has been ruining all search engines slowly but surely, but all is not lost. In the next VS we’ll look at a few product review results and show that those are actually much cleaner these days. I’ve even noticed a huge positive clean up within Google for certain product review searches I’ve been monitoring, so stay tuned!

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Valentine’s Day Marketing For Links & Branding

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January 17  |  Link Building  |   Ryan Clark

Valentine’s Day is coming up whether you like it or not. Depending on which market you’re in, it could be a a good day for marketing not only in the link department, but in branding and social media as well. Companies selling flowers, candies, gifts and other romantic items have a slough of opportunities to take advantage of. I also look at it as a way to build some deep links to your internal product pages, something that is not always so easy to accomplish.

I always recommend to our clients to build a custom landing page for the day which can stand a chance for ranking, as well re-use over the years. This gives you a chance to build some strong link power to the page, and from there funnel that link juice into your weaker product pages. I love the idea for that, and the fact you can re-use the page next year and continue on in the same fashion. Take what you can from this and I hope this fake holiday brings your company some business, because that’s what it’s all really for after all.

Facebook & Twitter:

If you have a large following on these two sites then great, if not then make it another opportunity to gain more followers with your promotions. It’s nearly at the point where reaching individual people will be way easier through these social media platforms, so make sure your promotion involves being active on one of them. I usually recommend to our clients to make a contest up that involves Tweeting something, or at the very least, they have to be a part of the company Page to get in on the action. If you make the promotion involve user generated media, then you stand a greater chance of having your product seen due to the customer showing off their entry.

Coupon Marketing:

A quick Google search for Valentine’s Day coupons brings up all the usual suspect sites where you can submit your special coupons. This also will lead you to special coupon sites that only deal with this days deals. After some browsing down after the 3rd a 4th page it was also apparent that there were some old coupon pages that you could attempt a good old fashioned direct email campaign out on.

Google Discussions & Blog Search:

I’m a huge fan of Google’s blog search, and even more the Discussions section of their ever growing list of useful tools. A search here for Valentine’s Day Deals brings up over 250,000 results….needless to say that’s going to take forever and a day to break down by even a team of marketers. While this is an ok example, use my advice to sniff out the more niche opportunities within your companies market.

In Closing:

While this wasn’t a huge list, this should be enough of a start to keep you very busy from now until the 14th of February. There are other things you can do to attract attention, so get your thinking cap on and figure out what else lies out there. While I’m not the first to write on the topic, I can lend you some more help by linking these great posts on the subject;

– 20 Valentines Day Marketing Ideas for Ecommerce via Get Elastic

– 10 Great Valentines Day Marketing Tips via Flower Shop Network

– Valentine’s Day Marketing Ideas via Josh Whitford

– E-mailed With Love: Valentine’s Day Marketing Tips via Ecommerce Guide

– More Valentine’s Day Marketing Ideas via Gooruze

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7 Link Building Tips For Restaurants

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January 14  |  Link Building  |   Ryan Clark

I recently spent some time in Seattle working for a well known restaurant down there. I was invited to work on site to not only get a feel for their business in person, but help generate some cool content to use as linkbait. The overall experience was rewarding and allowed me to build links for a niche I never really have before. The amount of unique link building options for a restaurant was an eye opener, and hopefully these tips get your place off and running.

The local search market is getting more crowded every week, and ranking well involves many factors. If you’re in a large city like Seattle, things can be even more difficult. The best way to attract someone to your restaurant is easily your food, right? With that being said, food content is king! The first step I took with this business was bringing in a local photographer to shoot all of their dishes for not only their website, but for use in our social media campaigns. Their website only had a few pictures in all, and half were just interior shots of the restaurant….this wouldn’t do! So before you set out to score some links, make sure you have juicy shots of that beautiful food ready for use in your link building efforts.

Tip 1) Group Deal Sites

With the exploding popularity of group deal websites like Groupon, Living Social and others, you should not ignore these any longer. The first obvious benefit is the opportunity to expand your brand throughout your community, and secondly lies the gold mine of quality link building opportunities. Most of these sites offer great links within your businesses profile which only goes to add to the diversity of your link profile…something were a huge advocate of!

Tip 2) Zagat Rated

Restaurants love to hear feedback, and having a great Zagat rating is a great honor for any kitchen. Being listed on Zagat’s website also comes with a link among other things, but for this article we’ll just stick to that. You can even get a sticker to remind customer’s that they can also take part and rate your restaurant online. Don’t be afraid to embrace the user review because you’re going to get one whether you like it or not.

Tip 3) Local Food Bloggers

Almost every town in North America and Europe has a food critic or blogger, and they’re prime targets for scoring a link as well as extra exposure. We invited one prominent local foodie come out for a lovely evening with her husband which eventually ended up on her food blog with some nice brand links. The restaurant also noticed social mentions due to her Tweeting about it, logging into the restaurant via Foursquare and traffic from her Facebook Page. This also resulted in our client restaurant in getting nearly 50 new Facebook Page fans of their own which will result in a decent amount of revenue in the future.


Tip 4) Urbanspoon.com

This is perhaps one of the best know restaurant review sites out there for every time of local eatery…no matter if you’re McDonalds, some food stand on 5th street or the best known luxury spot in town. This site ranks very well for keywords you’re going to want to rank for, plus you get a nice link out of it. You can also take advantage of linking out to other reviews of your place which gives more link juice to those reviews. All in all, good stuff!

Tip 5) Local Business & Restaurant Directories

Every city has a good number of local business directories, all in which will have a restaurant/food section. While directory links are not the hottest these days, it doesn’t hurt at all to be listed here. You may not get a huge amount of link juice, but you will also benefit from the local search traffic they get. The same goes for restaurant directories, not the hottest but there is a decent amount of them out there. Just fire up Google (or your favorite search engine), and try a search for restaurant directory, or even better yet, try and break it down locally. It doesn’t take up much of your time, some will have a small fee but at least you’re continuing on building a more diverse link portfolio.

Tip 6) Foursquare

Foursquare is another great way to socially get active within your community, it’s also another great place to snag a link. Venues do get a link here, and the more active your page is the better off you’re going to be. If you’re already not on there, dive in and setup some wicked deals for the local mayor. Our restaurant offered up to $30 worth of free drinks to its mayor and it’s generating a lot of buzz after only two weeks of going live. You can also jump on board with Gowalla, Yelp Check-ins and even Facebook’s if you’re feeling frisky.


Tip 7) Competitor Backlink Analysis

This was mega handy when we were link building for our client restaurant. We made a list of 30 of the top restaurants in Seattle and went ahead and dug out all their backlinks. We used OpenSiteExplorer as well as Link Diagnosis to quickly make the rounds, and what we came up with made our job that much easier. We found over 100 quality linking opportunities by doing this and managed to score dozens of links from them within the first 72 hours of working that week. If you’re in a large city you’ll find a lot of hidden resources by doing this so don’t overlook it, even if you’re not a SEO consultant.

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Promote Yourself With Superscout.com

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October 24  |  Link Building  |   Ryan Clark

For those of you running your own consulting business online, here’s a tip to help bring in some more business, do a little more branding and even bring yourself a nice link. We of all people know that when you start to get really busy with clients, the less time you have to market your services to new potential businesses. This can eventually catch up to you so hopefully this site helps keeps things flowing and pushes a little extra branding for your services, and the company.

Superscout.com provides both employers and employees a social network for brand and job growth. While you can get a company link, that shouldn`t be the main focus of use. Remember that I`ve toned down my public link releases just because the majority of people on the interwebs spam. So put the site to good use by taking advantage by putting up your company profile, add your latest jobs and keep in touch with job applicants who you connect with.

For consultants like myself, you can get quick and easy access to all the jobs and employers all the while keeping track of what`s going on. The one really interesting factor from an employee`s end of things is the real contact with companies I`ve experienced on here. Superscout.com does a great job and keeping companies coming back and active, so take advantage while the getting is good!

Press Release Link Building Strategies For 2010

6 Comments
October 2  |  Link Building  |   Ryan Clark

With the Holiday season upon us, companies vamping up their marketing efforts, it’s time to rethink your press release strategy. Our company does a lot of PR for people not only for links, in fact usually they’re not first in mind, but to build the overall brand through exposure.

There’s nothing wrong or negative about the usual process, I just like to do things a little bit different..a little more ninja like. We can definitely get more out of the resources available to we the people, you just have to dig a little deeper.

As of late, Google has really been putting emphasis on building your brand. This could be through social media, the links you build and other citations. This is good news for companies and brands because this adds more fuel to the fire.

Social media is also an important aspect of a typical PR these days, so this can be used to your advantage. How many social media sites pick up these news stories? I can tell you now, getting a extra link or two from the likes of Squidoo, Topix.net and others isn’t too difficult.

One last thing before we get into it. I know that the search engines are not giving amazing link juice from each news site, on the same topic. So throw out any thoughts of targeted anchor text in your release. For one, it looks cleaner, and secondly, you’re putting these efforts towards your brand/site overall. You can obviously used targeted anchor text, I would however leave PR power to go towards just building up the root domain.

Part 1: Mixing up the sites you use to send a PR

There are many press release sites to choose from, and picking the right one will make the difference. The first advice I like to give clients is to utilize different PR sites for your news. You might as well spread it out and get some nice and easy links from their homepage. PRWeb releases tend to stay indexed easily, as well rank quite easily for long tail terms.

I’m going to list 5 PR sites I like to use, as well the ones I think that have retained the most link authority and brand status. These sites usually don’t push junk news, so you can rest assured you’re not getting garbage.

PRWeb.com – We’ll start with the biggest, most networked and one of the most trusted news distribution services around today. PRWeb combines their large news network with not only newsrooms, but blog sources as well as its social media connections. Prices range from $150 USD up to $350 and beyond.

24-7pressrelease.com – These folks are another big player and they have a couple good things going on. First, their network is quite large and has a lot of top niches in its arsenal. The prices for a PR here are really affordable, and if the second point is that they have a company/business directory. That directoriy itself has held up its quality and is well worth the review process.

MarketWire.com – Another large PR network that has a huge business network. I’ve had a lot of success releasing normal PR’s for my clients, and personally. You can see a list of each indsutry contact resource beforehand, so this feature plays into the next section for this post.

URLWire.com – All you SEO consultants are most likely well awre of Eric Ward’s news wire. It’s highly recommended by me, not because I’m brown nosing, but due to Eric’s style. Again, this isn’t a place you can go to submit junk news and expect the world. URLWire works to network your news with the most related sites in your industry. Release prices start at around $500 USD and I’ve seen some of the most successful news campaigns launched from here.

PR.com – Another PR service you are most likely familiar with. This news network also boasts a lot of connections within its distribution network. PR.com also happens to have their own business/company directory in which you ca get into.

Part 2: Press Release Link Analysis

Link analysis on a press release you say? Hell yea and why not?! Before picking any service I highly recommend you start snooping on the competition. Open up the link builders beloved Excel and start off a spreadsheet for me. Next, hit up the 5 press release sites linked above and try and find your competitors releases. If you cannot find any, take a look at what other companies are doing PR’s within your industry.

Ok, so now what? When you find a press release or two within your niche, turn on SEO Quake, Open Site Explorer, Majestic SEO or any backlink analyzer that does individual pages. All I ask you to do is see which news releases got picked up where. This will give you an idea of what to expect from your news. Obviously this isn’t fool proof, but I like a little more tactical application in my process.

Next, go back to news that’s 6 months or older and do the same thing. I’d take account of which PR sites do better at keeping that release indexed. As well, see if that release is ranking well for any long tail keywords associated.

This ain’t rocket science, but it is a little link science I guess. Even though I wasn’t a boy scout, they’re slogan certainly applies nicely to this industry. Just remember to look at the tags used and make sure those are on your list. That should help you target the news sites looking for your content.

Part 3: Build Links to Your PR

Some releases you put out are going to fall flat, sorry to say. Even with careful planning there are certain aspects that are just out of anyone’s control.

If you already have a network of blogs, social media profiles and other websites then you can do your part. Linking back to your news release from these areas is relevant, and will help keep that news alive and kicking.

Some companies even have a newsroom on their site, and from what I’ve seen it doesn’t cost you any dupe problems and helps keep things indexed. It’s all relevant to your company, so there is nothing black/grey hat going on here.

Final Thoughts:

While you’ll not notice a huge amount of traction from your first optimized release, keep at it, mixing things up. After half, or even a full year you’ll have a great diverse link set from all sorts of news sites.

I’d also keep in mind that these releases are spread across so many different sites. Google is obviously not giving “max link juice” through heavily syndicated content. Then again, prove me wrong by keeping meticulous statistics and track the movement yourself.

I hope this inspires businesses to take their PR campaigns to a new level. Let me know if anyone else out there has been implementing something similar, and if it is working for you.

Advanced Link Building Q & A With Cemper

1 Comments
August 16  |  Link Building  |   Ryan Clark

 

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