Wiep.net

Link Building this Month (08.2010)

Wiep — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 10:13:47 +0000

SEO seems to have a questionable reputation, unfortunately, which is comparable to the reputation of car salesmen and lawyers. I’m sure that, like in any other industry, over 80% of the people working in it has the best intentions, but it’s tactics like this and threads like this that give both the 80% and the other 20% a bad name. That’s just how things work, and “92 reasons why SEOs are God’s gift to humanity”-type posts usually only make it worse. You are now a car salesman, deal with it.

Now on to today’s main concern for many of these SEOs: getting links (legitimately). One way to get links is via PR. And although many news websites and journalists don’t link out very often, there are still lots of ways to get links from newspapers. Just make sure that your pitch is ok, that you’re pitching the right person in the right way, and you’ll double your chances of success. Keep in mind, though, that influence != popularity.

And more great articles:

5 Link building questions that make me die a little inside – Jennifer Van Iderstyne
An infographic case study – Ken Lyons
Five things I’ve learned about paid links – Melanie Nathan
Link building expectations formula – George Fisher
124 eCommerce link building queries – Garrett French
Market research for link building – Paddy Moogan
Link building techniques: risk vs. reward – Ian Lurie
7 Different visualisations of link profiles – Tom Critchlow
Different types of overlooked linbait – Jordan Kasteler
How to promote link worthy content – Arnie Kuenn
Investing in link building – Mike Pantoliano
SESSF link building live blogging – Garrett French
ASE link building live blogging – Lisa Barone

PS – Feel free to drop me a note or to shout at me on Twitter if you think I left out an amazing article. Desperately need more link building round-ups? Ontolo publishes one every week!

This post, Link Building this Month (08.2010), was published on Wiep's link building blog. Visit the site to read more stuff, or to join the link building conversation.

Link Building this Month (03.2010)
Compared to last month, it’s been relatively quiet in terms of link...

5 Reasons Why I Won’t Link to Your Website

Wiep — Mon, 16 Aug 2010 14:59:21 +0000

When I’m in the middle of creating a new website or an in-depth blog article, one of things I usually do is making a list of which websites to link out to. Sometimes, visitors may find a resource page, a list with links to other relevant websites or a few in-content links very interesting. And when a page is relevant to mine, meets a certain quality standard, and adds value to the content on my page, I’m usually more than happy to link to it. For free. However, you’d be surprised how very few pages meet that quality standard.

1. Ads before content

If I want to see nothing but ads, I’ll go to Google. When I’m looking for content to link to, and I land on a page with a 336×280 AdSense block above the fold, or with bouncing banner ads that have to be minimized before I can read the content on the page, I will definitely not link to it. Why on earth would I want to let my visitors experience something annoying like that?

It’s not a problem that you try to monetize your website, but do you really have to turn your page into a blinking neon sign to do so? Ditch some ads and get more links!

2. Bad writing & grammar

You don’t have to be a best selling novelist, but you should be able to tell me a story without boring me to death. Also, when you’re too lazy to use a spell checker, you probably didn’t deserve that link. Remarkable writers score bonus points, though.

If you don’t like writing, hire someone to do it for you! You can usually tell if someone doesn’t like writing, just by reading one of his or her articles. Try Demand Media if you want to see some examples…

3. Sell, sell, sell

A good salesman knows when he should try to sell something, and when it’s time to socialize or to talk about other things. Bad salesmen try to sell nearly anything, at all times, to anyone, which can be quite annoying. Is your website a good or a bad salesman?

There’s nothing wrong with promoting your services every now and then, but when nearly every blog post is nothing but a lengthy sales pitch with a picture of a kitten, I won’t be linking out to you anytime soon.

4. Link greed and pink illness

The web is a social place. Linking out every now and then is not a bad thing. It might be the link builder in me, but when I see a blog that has zero outbound links in the last 10 or so articles, I’ll go and find a more social website to link out to. The same goes for linking out to your sources. Link out, and thou wilt receive.

Websites that automatically nofollow all outbound links are even worse, in my opinion. I don’t care if it’s company policy, a WordPress plugin going berserk, or ‘something that IT should have fixed two weeks ago’, I’ll do the same to you. Nofollow and thou wilt receive. Yes, karma can be a bitch.

5. Being mediocre

Just recently, I was looking for an article with beautiful city landscapes for an ‘additional resources’ section of a page. I ended up at a nicely written page about city landscapes and what’s beautiful about them, but that page did not contain any photographs. When the SERPS of the topic of your page contain image results (like so), your page should contain images. Period.

Also, when you do a ‘Top 101 Ways to do X’ article, make sure that it contains 101 ways to do X. Not 14, followed by 87 variations of the first fourteen ways. When I send my visitors away from my site to visit yours, I want them to go ‘ooh’ and ‘aah’. Not ‘meh’ or ‘boo’.

Of course, there are several other reasons that will make me think twice about linking to your website (lack of uniqueness, very ugly web design, bad neighborhoods, not having an ‘about us’ section, being a direct competitor, etc.), but for me, the 5 reasons mentioned in this article are the most important ones.

How about you? What makes you link to other websites, or what prevents you from doing so?

This post, 5 Reasons Why I Won’t Link to Your Website, was published on Wiep's link building blog. Visit the site to read more stuff, or to join the link building conversation.

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Link Building: It’s All In the Details

Wiep — Tue, 10 Aug 2010 08:00:02 +0000

When it comes to link building (but with most other things as well) most people try to find shortcuts. They look for ‘secrets’, smart things that can get them to rank very quickly, preferably without any effort. Unfortunately, I have to say that there are no link building secrets, shortcuts or quick tricks. Well, except for one maybe; have an eye for details.

Just think about it…

Do you start your email with ‘Dear Webmaster’ or with ‘Dear Lauren’?
Is your content good or great?
Do you use a spell checker?
Do you mention the word ‘Pagerank’ in your emails or not?
Are you an ‘SEO Link Builder’ or a ‘Product manager’ according to your email signature?
Do you send out thank you notes?
Do you use the word ‘guru’ in your Twitter bio?
Have you thought your content’s title well through, or did you just write down the first thing that came to mind?
Do you test or do you assume?
Do you block your HTTP referrer or not?
Are you going to send a press release on Tuesday morning or Friday afternoon?
Do you buy your links from a broker or privately?
Do you take no for an answer?
Can you answer the most important link building question?
Do you *really* understand what you’re promoting?
Do you *really* know who you need to target?
Did you hire the expensive designer, or the one that was $50 cheaper?
Do you use the phone as well, or email only?

And that’s just a *very* small portion of all the details you have to think about. Nothing special, it’s all common sense. Get it all wrong, and you’ll find yourself spending your Saturday nights at the DigitalPoint forums, complaining that ‘link building is so hard and it’s not working anymore’. Get it all right, and you’ve got a chance of dominating your niche.

This post, Link Building: It’s All In the Details, was published on Wiep's link building blog. Visit the site to read more stuff, or to join the link building conversation.

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Need Local Links? Use the Local Keyword Tool

Wiep — Tue, 03 Aug 2010 19:09:24 +0000

A few weeks ago, Aaron Wall and Geordie Carswell launched a new PPC Training and Community Forum. This is an excellent place to learn about PPC for both newbies (like me) and experienced paid search marketers. With 50 (!) training modules, a very helpful and knowledgeable community and 11 very useful PPC tools, PPC Blog’s training center has a lot to offer. Link builders can learn a lot from doing PPC (and vice versa), so I’d highly recommend you to check it out. Just read the PPC blog, and you’ll get a feeling of what quality you can expect.

To prove that it’s not for PPC marketers only, I’ll highlight one of the tools from PPC Blog’s arsenal that can be used during a link building campaign as well.

The Local Keyword Tool

One of PPC Blog’s tools is the Local Keyword Tool, which you can use to create a large set of locally targeted keywords. However, you can also use it to create search queries that help you find local link targets. Just enter the zipcode of the region that you’re targeting (it currently works for eight countries, but this number will get higher) and a radius, and the tool will generate a list with relevant locations.

Click to enlarge

After the list with zip codes, communities, counties, states, and state codes has shown up, you can enter two additional keyword groups. Try adding keywords relevant to your products or services (plumbing, flowers, lawyer) in the first one, and adding some additional keywords like resources, articles, listings or blog in the second one. The third column can be used for the locations.

Click to enlarge

There you go: a very long list with search queries that you can use to find new local link targets. Not bad for a PPC tool, huh?

PS – For those of you wondering, yes, I will be updating this page soon, hopefully later this month…

Update: Darren Shaw of Whitespark.ca informed me about his Local Citation Finder Tool that is released on August 5th. The output of the tool will look something like this, which can be very useful for local websites.

This post, Need Local Links? Use the Local Keyword Tool, was published on Wiep's link building blog. Visit the site to read more stuff, or to join the link building conversation.

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Link Building this Month (07.2010)

Wiep — Mon, 02 Aug 2010 08:00:40 +0000

We’re only halfway during the summer, but I think that this years winner of the SEMMYs is already decided. Rae Hoffman collected the thoughts of 11 great link builders (just like she did two years ago) and compiled something that I would call link building awesomeness. That’s about 100 years of link building experience in one article, so you’d better read it, bookmark it, print it and read it again.

The reason why group interview articles are so great to read, is because they are usually packed with real life examples (not guesses or assumptions), case studies, tips from the field and some form of link building discussion. Any link building strategy tips, advice on how to do research, or content marketing guidance you get from such an article has already been tested an tuned, so you can use it straight away.

And more great articles:

Are we over-engineering the link graph? – Nicola Stott
The 5 types of influencers on the web – Lisa Barone
9 Steps to SEO PR that won’t drive the PR team crazy – Ian Lurie
The evolution of ranking signals – David Harry
Visualising back link data using Venn diagrams – Kelvin Newman
15 Tips for harnassing your creativity – Tucker Cummings
Content based link opportunity analysis – Garrett French
Crafting real business metrics for link building – Conrad Saam
Guest blogging: leveraging expertise and influence – Loren Baker
How to focus on content to create linkbait – Jordan Kasteler
Link bait: half luck, half skill, half something else – Ian Lurie
How to rank on page 1 of Google without buying one paid link – Neil Patel
Beginners guide to link building – Steven Bradley
Linktoberfest (Infographic) – Vertical Measures
Link building Monopoly (Infographic) – Linkbuilding.nl

This post, Link Building this Month (07.2010), was published on Wiep's link building blog. Visit the site to read more stuff, or to join the link building conversation.

Link Building this Month (03.2010)
Compared to last month, it’s been relatively quiet in terms of link...

Link Building: Just Another Popularity Game

Wiep — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 12:05:27 +0000

You can come up with all the explanations you want, but link building basically is nothing more but a popularity game.

(click to enlarge)

Infographic by Linkbuilding.nl, which is the Dutch company I run together with Martijn.

This post, Link Building: Just Another Popularity Game, was published on Wiep's link building blog. Visit the site to read more stuff, or to join the link building conversation.

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Link Building this Month (06.2010)

Wiep — Mon, 05 Jul 2010 18:24:43 +0000

“Link building is becoming more difficult lately. People don’t link out anymore and Twitter is polluting the link graph. Oh, and Google isn’t treating my links they way they should.” This seems to be the consensus on various blogs, forums and even Twitter, but I can’t say I agree with it.

Actually, I even think that link building has become more easy, and especially a lot more fun during the past few years. Sure, it can be different to build links to certain types of websites, and some industries are more polluted with bad links than the Gulf of Mexico currently is with oil, but this just asks for more creativity.

Thinking outside the box, evaluating success from the past, building relationships, or even thinking a bit past the usual tactics while avoiding the most common pitfalls can bring you quite far. In other words: there’s no such thing as advanced link building – it’s simply a mix between creativity, logical thinking and persistence (sometimes with a little bit of help).

And also:

Real life link building examples from SMX Advanced at Bruce Clay and SEO Gadget
The myth of volume-based link building – Hugo Guzman
Why building links is important – Leo Dimilo
Choosing the right link development strategy – Kieran Flanagan
Death to the paid link – Ross Hudgens
Link building opportunities big brands miss – Rishi Lakhani

This post, Link Building this Month (06.2010), was published on Wiep's link building blog. Visit the site to read more stuff, or to join the link building conversation.

Link Building this Month (03.2010)
Compared to last month, it’s been relatively quiet in terms of link...

How to Create World Link Maps With Majestic SEO & Google Spreadsheets

Wiep — Fri, 04 Jun 2010 07:30:38 +0000

Managers love visuals. Nice charts, infographics or pivot tables make excellent excuses for not having to actually *read* those long reports or documents. And since link building reports tend to be packed with data, they love to see something visually appealing every few pages to give their eyes some rest.

A possible chart that could spice up your SEO or link building document, is a World Link Map, which displays your link profile on a world heatmap. And although this may sound like a lot of work, it’s actually quite easy. All you need is Majestic SEO and Google Spreadsheets.

Step 1: Get the data

Create an Advanced Report of the website who’s link profile you’d like to see in a World Link Map via Majestic SEO. Select ‘Countries’ in the Report Menu and export this report to csv.

Besides using Majestic’s ‘Countries’ info, which uses the IP adress of a website to determine the country of origin, you can also use the TLD data that Majestic provides. Although such a report is more accurate for ccTLDs, it is also a bit more work to create a World Link Map with this data.

Step 2: Copy, paste & ISO codes

Now you can copy the first five columns and paste them into Google Spreadsheets (or delete the other columns if you have opened the csv file from Google Spreadsheets directly). Now insert one column between the first (Country) and the second (RefDomains) column, which you can title ‘Country code’, or something similar.

In order to let Google create a nice map of the world, you will have to add the ISO Country Codes of all countries into this column. This is not my favorite step in this process, but adding the ISO Country Codes to the country csv export is already on Majestic SEO’s feature request list :) Until then, if you’re planning on creating multiple maps, I’d suggest taking a look at using the QUERY formula.

Step 3: Create a World Link Map

Right-click anywhere in your spreadsheet, and select ‘Insert Gadget’. After clicking on ‘Maps’, select the option ‘Heatmap’.

Now you can select the field range and the map region, before you hit ‘Apply and close’. The result is a small map, which displays your link profile. Light colored countries indicate a low level of links, while you get linked a lot from bright colored countries. Grey countries indicate no links at all.

Some examples
These World Link Maps can highlight interesting situations. For example, the relatively high amount of links from Polish websites is a bit strange for a Scottish website.

And this African News website seems to get links from anywhere but Africa…

You can take things even further, by dividing the amount of links by (for example) the spent marketing budget in certain countries, population, or any other data.

The map below shows the link profile of the earlier mentioned African News website, but with the amount of links per country weighed against the amount of internet users in that country.

As you can see, there’s quite a lot you can do with link data and a map of the world, besides ‘just creating pretty maps’. While creating a World Link Map may not be very useful for most SMB websites, link visualizations like this may reveal very interesting overviews for large and/ or international websites.

This post, How to Create World Link Maps With Majestic SEO & Google Spreadsheets, was published on Wiep's link building blog. Visit the site to read more stuff, or to join the link building conversation.

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Link Building this Month (05.2010)

Wiep — Thu, 03 Jun 2010 13:39:30 +0000

Newspapers are asked to remove links, natural links become a rarity, and more and more webmasters become link-greedy; the link graph is breaking down. In other words: link building seems to become more difficult.

Sure, there are still many relatively easy ways to get links to your SMB website, or to build links to local websites, but this trend will probably not go away. Link tactic differentiation, of which creatively pursuing .gov links or by building links backwards (a very effective way of content based link building) are just a few examples, is probably more important than it ever was.

And also:

Link building normalization – Anthony Verre
The reasonable surfer – Bill Slawski (but please read this one, too)
What kind of links do you need – Scott Willoughby
9 “Reach metrics” for evaluating guest publishing opportunities – Garrett French
Breathe new life into your emailed link requests – Julie Joyce
How to use goverment website information to create sticky link bait – Debra Mastaler
All links are not created equal – Rand Fishkin

This post, Link Building this Month (05.2010), was published on Wiep's link building blog. Visit the site to read more stuff, or to join the link building conversation.

Link Building this Month (03.2010)
Compared to last month, it’s been relatively quiet in terms of link...

10 Link Building Tools Reviewed

Wiep — Mon, 17 May 2010 10:42:56 +0000

I have written about useful link building tools here in more than one occasion, but I still get questions about which tools to use (or not) quite regularly. This made me decide to write reviews of the most useful and/ or well-known link building tools available on the market.

The first set of reviews includes reviews of four free link building tools, and six paid link building tools. One of these paid link building tools is Influence Finder, a great tool that is being launched at SMX Advanced London at this very moment.

I will continue to add new tools to the list of tools, starting with the tools that I have already listed. If you want me to review your tool, or to test a tool you’ve heard of and want to know if it’s any good, feel free to let me know.

Free link building tools

Link Diagnosis
Majestic SEO Free tools
MyBlogGuest (coming soon)
Open Site Explorer
Yahoo! Site Explorer

You can find all link building tools I have reviewed, or will be reviewing in the near future, right here: link building tools.

This post, 10 Link Building Tools Reviewed, was published on Wiep's link building blog. Visit the site to read more stuff, or to join the link building conversation.

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