I knew that Google stopped allowing ads for search phrases like ‘buy links‘ and ‘text link ads‘ a while ago, but apparently, Google stopped accepting ads for ‘link building‘ as well. After doing some research, I noticed that a member at WMW noticed this too, around a month ago.
According to the Google AdWords help center, “This keyword is not permitted to show your ads in the targeted location.”
The first part of this series was a selection of tips on how to use your surroundings to come up with interesting ideas that can lead to great amounts of traffic, attention and links. After you’ve carefully selected the idea of your choice, it’s time to prepare yourself thoroughly and to turn that idea into a content page that’s capable of reaching the audience that you’ve always wanted to target.
Creating Killer Content
There are many characteristics of killer content, most of which are important enough to make or break your launch. Misuse of images, boring pages, bad language or other distracting factors can lead to failure. Remember that a even a flagship is as strong as its weakest link.
Your flagship does not necessarily have to be a boat, by DC3-Detroit
Headline
A superb headline can create a massive amount of attention for just a mediocre article, but a bad headline can result in a killer peace of content that doesn’t get noticed. Make sure to give your content the headline that it deserves, but don’t overdo it.
Also, don’t forget to try to get a related keyword into your headline. Because a part of the webmasters that link to your page will use the original title as anchor text, this will increase the possibility that you’ll end up ranking for those keywords. Don’t force in a keyword, though. A good headline prevails over a keyword rich headline.
First paragraph
Although you may choose to submit your own piece of content to Digg and StumbleUpon (or let someone submit it for you), you’ll probably -and hopefully- won’t submit it to every social media platform out there. If you want to increase the chance of hitting the frontpage of social news sites that you don’t even know exist, you’ll have to make sure that the first paragraph is a great one. People who submit stuff to social media websites regularly -me included-, often use the first (or one of the first) lines of text and use it as the description of the submission. Make it easier for them AND make it more likely to hit the front page by creating your own description that’s disguised as an opening paragraph.
Content
The appearance of a page can either be informational (mostly text), it can be visual (images all over the place), or it can be usable (a tool, or movable objects). Of course, a page can be a mix of the above, but usually, only one will be the upper hand. Make sure
Informational page
If you’ve created an information page, it doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t use images, but use them wisely. The text is the most important of the page, so make sure that the images you use don’t distract your readers. In stead, you could spice it up a notch with graphical text images, a great header, or interesting charts for example. The images must serve the rest of the content. Oh, and don’t forget to use that spell check.
Visual page
If you’re building a page that’s mostly visual, it’s tempting to stuff it with as many images and as many different colors as possible. However, using too many images, a lot of different colors, or even mixing up different styles can make your page look cluttered and unclear. If you focus on a single (or just a few) images in stead, take your time when selecting colors and try to keep the page in a single style, it’ll be much easier to ‘understand’ and to digest. Try to avoid the most common stock images, though, or try to make them look differently in stead.
Usable page The fact that you’re creating a page that’s meant to be ‘used’, doesn’t mean that it shouldn’t be interesting to look at. While the focus should be on clarity, ease of use and the end result, attractiveness definitely shouldn’t be neglected.
About page
Nothing is worse than reading a great post on a blog or a great article on a website, and you can’t find the name of the author anywhere. Or his or her email address.
Provide as much information as possible. This will not only look much more professional, but it’ll also help you to build a personal brand and it increases the chance of someone actually contacting you. You might provide a contact button, but if I can’t find out who to contact, I probably won’t give it a try.
Ask for help
I don’t consider myself to be a very good writer and I really suck at programming. Although I’m trying to improve it, I also can’t design very well. Just like me, you probably don’t own all of these skills as well, so that’s why you’ll have to get some help from time to time.
The relationship between the quality of content and the amount of attention is an exponential one. A slight increase in quality (the difference between your design skills and those of your friend/ colleague/ business partner) can cause a massive increase in attention. Don’t be afraid to ask for help, you can’t be the best in everything.
Besides increasing the possibility of success, asking help also saves you time and it can improve your business network as well.
Preparation
Unlike some seem to think, preparation does not start one day before the planned launch. Preparation starts on the day that you decide what you’re going to build, it’s more time consuming than most people think and it’s a key factor in any launch.
Networking does not start after your product launch, press release or whatever you’re distributing. It starts weeks before that. Contact journalists and try building up a relationship. This does not only benefit you now, but it will be an advantage when you’re trying to reach that bigger audience next time as well. A PR pitch has more effect if you know the one you’re sending the pitch to, even if you happen to know this person for just a short while yet.
Try to create a powerful social online profile, such as a Digg or StumbleUpon profile. You’ll need all the luck of the world if you try to reach Digg’s front page with a profile that you’ve created just ten minutes ago.
Use the people you know. Friends, family members or other people in your personal network that happen to know someone that owns a related website or that participates online in any way, might be able to help you promoting your piece as well. Don’t spam them for every thing you publish, though, or don’t look surprised if you have difficulties reaching them again if you do…
Preparing your target list
You’ve already done research in your niche and you’ve probably kept track of your competitors as well. Hopefully, you’ve saved all this data, because this data can jump start your target press list.
Check out which news websites, bloggers and portals have linked to related stories that went hot in the past and you’ll end up with a list of targets that are both interested in the subject and capable of making your launch a success.
Preparation Checklist
Although some of these points may seem silly, there are several things you shouldn’t forget to check. You wouldn’t be the first one that almost launched a very successful campaign, but ended up in a ‘Top 10 Stupid Marketing Mistakes of the Year’ list in stead…
bandwidth
- do you have sufficient bandwidth or do you have shared hosting? email usage & contact info
- is important info, such as your email address, correctly displayed on your website and does it work? double check the page
- double check for things like layout and multiple browser compatibilities. Let a friend check it out, for example. statistics
- don’t forget to include your analytics code on the content page. misspellings
- re-read the entire page word for word to make sure that everything is spelled out correctly.
In short
Even a slight mistake or less attractive feature can turn a great piece of content into an almost great piece of content. And almost great just isn’t good enough. If you can’t make something exceptional yourself, ask help, input or advice from someone who can.
Although some might try to, you can’t create a successful content marketing campaign overnight. Solid preparation is key and this starts days (but more often weeks) in advance. If you want to be successful next week, you’ll have to lay the foundation today and start building tomorrow.
Stay tuned -or subscribe to the RSS- for the last part of this series, which will be titled ‘Launching, Monitoring & After Care’.
I’ve seen several SEO job interviewrelated postspass by, but I haven’t seen a link building related one yet. If you’re looking for a somewhat experienced link builder (I’m not talking about hiring a newbie that you’ll be training intensively here), there are a few questions I’d suggest asking your candidate.
1. What is it that you think that a link builder does all day? Because having ‘link builder’ as a job title sounds like you’re either working on a construction ground or in a factory, I like to hire link marketers in stead. You need passion, determination, knowledge, vision and excellent communication skills, so it really isn’t that boring, simplistic task that lots of people think it is.
This would probably keep you in the race:
Things like creating content, networking, following SEO news, following general news, negotiating terms, researching link profiles and advising clients in their communication strategy are also part of a link marketer’s job.
This probably wouldn’t:
“It’s a mix of spamming forums, hunting for blogs with the dofollow plugin and playing pong.”
Well, actually, that last part is true…
2. What’s your personal stance in the paid link discussion?
There are only two answers that would bug me off here. If you either don’t care about Google’s guidelines and keep buying links like you always did, or if you agree with the big G for the full 100% and fill out paid link reports on a daily basis, I probably wouldn’t hire you.
This would probably keep you in the race:
If you can separate your personal, greyish hat, affiliate website that has around a hundred anchor text rich paid links pointing at it (most of which are for testing reasons, of course ) from a client’s website, you’re pretty safe here.
This probably wouldn’t:
“Well, the reason why I applied here, is because Google trimmed the PageRank of most of my websites. Because my income was based solely on text link ads on those sites, and I have absolutely no clue how to monetize the sites now, I thought I’d give it a shot…”
3. Which link or which achievement are you the most proud of?
Pride is a sign of passion and that’s what you need in this job. Not everyone can live with promoting someone else’s website for a living. If you’re able reach the top 3 for a highly competitive keyword, you might be good at building links. If you can be proud of a client that you’ve helped to reach the top 3 for a highly competitive keyword, then you might be a good link marketer.
This would probably keep you in the race:
“Are you familiar with the ‘web promotion’ category in the Yahoo Directory? I was the one that requested Jerry Yang to create that one a while ago…”
This probably wouldn’t:
“I guess getting banned from MSN because of link spamming is quite an achievement…”
4. Let’s say www.onlinebookstore.com, a website that sells books online, is one of our customers. How would you start such a campaign?
I have to admit that this is a tricky one, but it’s very easy at the same time. How tempting it may be to start listing several websites and tactics that you could use, you really need more info here. What if the homepage was the nightmare of every search engine robot? What are the goals and what’s the current situation? What’s the background of the store and to what countries do they ship? There’s just too many questions that have to be answered first…
This would probably keep you in the race:
Ask questions! You can only provide the best service if you know all the details.
This probably wouldn’t:
“I’d use an Indian directory submission program to get onlinebookstore.com listed in about 2,000 general directories for about $249,-. With anchor text variation, of course: you can pick two different ones!”
5. What determines the value of a link?
There are numerous different factors that you could list here, but the main point here is that you can tell that no two links are equal and that the value of a link depends on the situation.
This would probably keep you in the race:
Naming factors like traffic, relevancy, anchor text, authority and/ or link age would make you score a few points. Mentioning the link value factors document would be a bonus point.
This probably wouldn’t:
“It’s a combination of the page’s PageRank, Alexa ranking and the asking price of the link at Text Link Ads.”
Besides information (and perhaps a bit of entertainment), this post also has another function; we‘re actually looking for people that breathe search, including for someone with link marketing experience. So if you’re interested and/ or if this post triggered you, feel free to drop me a note
There’s no doubt that creating a valuable piece of content is a great way -and maybe even the best way- to attract links. However, when I mention link baiting (or link targeted content), I often get reactions like ‘it sounds nice, but link baiting probably isn’t the way to go for me’, or that ‘building content to attract links doesn’t work in my industry’. Bullocks. In a three step guide (of which this is part one) I’ll try to show you how everyone can come up with great ideas, can turn the idea into a piece of killer content and can make that piece attract great links.
Start Close
While it usually is best to enter a brainstorming session with a blank mindset, it’s even better to check what you’ve got first. Good ideas are often closer than you think.
Things can be closer than you think, by Pictophelia
-Your own website
If your website isn’t a brand new one, you probably have at least a few pages that managed to attract a few or more good links. You can either investigate why these pages got mentioned elsewhere (and use that info for a new article), or find your best one, improve it and launch V2.
- Your own head
What kind of resources are you missing in your niche? What kind of tool have you always wanted to use but couldn’t find? What kind of content would make you go ‘WOW’? Build it!
Brainstorming for Ideas
The great thing about brainstorming is that you can’t brainstorm the wrong way. Of course, there are guidelines you can follow and techniques you can use, but in theory, every method you use to come up with new ideas would be considered brainstorming. Effective brainstorming, however…
Brainstorming, by faroekat
Like I said earlier, it can be quite effective to start a brainstorming session with an empty mind. Because your link targeted mind probably even rattles on in your sleep, it might be useful to invite someone that isn’t that much into links as you are. Some people always invite the client they’re working for, but I don’t think that’s best in every situation. No matter how hard you try, for some types of personality, tunnel vision is an almost certainty. On the other hand, bringing in the knowledge of your client does add extra value.
More tips for your brainstorming session:
Appoint one person to lead the discussion and to write down all ideas.
Record everything to make sure that you don’t miss anything. And to be able to provide evidence to the client that you haven’t been drinking all afternoon, of course
Encouraging your fellow brainstormers to participate, encouraging great ideas and encouraging to shout out everything that comes up is key to a harmonized brainstorm session.
Furthermore, one of the most important things to keep in mind during a brainstorming session is that you shouldn’t settle for the first reasonably good idea you come up with. Good ideas arise pretty quickly, great ideas need time to grow. The best tip I can probably give you is to just start a session. Brainstorm with a few colleagues about a simple item, such as what you’ll be having for lunch or how you can improve your working conditions. You could even be brainstorming about how to brainstorm. Evaluate that session afterwards and learn from it. Experience will lead to inspiration.
Researching for Inspiration
After your brainstorming session, where you’ve probably generated over a few dozen ideas, you might be tempted to drill the list down to the most useful ideas straight away. In stead, letting these ideas soak for a short while and researching ideas that have worked in the past, researching ideas that have failed in the past and researching your niche might be a better solution. Don’t take a short cut by copying the ideas you come across, but use them as inspiring input.
Doing research, by revlimit
Think Social
The voice of the community will show you what might work.
- Use Digg’s search function
Look for relevant articles, posts or pages that have made it to Digg’s front page in the past by entering a relevant keyword in the search box. This might give you some inspiration and it should give you an idea of what might work in your niche.
- Stumble upon related pages
Use StumbleUpon to find pages that are related to the content you want to promote. Check what kind of pages receive lots of thumbs up and positive research. You’ll not only come across at least a few great pages you’ve never seen before, but you’ll also get an impression of popular stuff in your area.
- Your favorite news site
That news website you visit every day (whether it’s a big news site or just a local one) has historical data of what kind of related articles or posts have made it to the front page. Do a site query to find relevant news articles that got mentioned on the news site earlier.
- Social Niche sites
Is it difficult to find related stuff on one of the big social media websites, or are you looking for more targeted traffic? There’s a social media website for nearly every niche, so don’t just refrain yourself to the mainstream sites.
Think Niche
Only here will history, relevance and authority show up.
- Your competitor
Some people can’t stand it when a competitor gets mentioned on a popular news or niche website. In stead of enviously watching how they get all the attention, you could also see this as an opportunity and investigate why they got mentioned. If you don’t follow your competitors on a regular basis (which I can’t imagine), use a nifty tool like LinkDiagnosis to research which page on your competitor’s website has the most incoming links. Investigate why this page managed to do this and use that info in your advantage.
- Research your ultimate link target
You probably have at least one website in mind that you’re dying to get a link from. You know, that popular blogger or that portal that everybody in your niche visits daily. If you can find out which pages on this website have attracted a lot of links or managed to create a lot of buzz,
- Research your ultimate link target’s competitor
If there are multiple large targets in your niche, you can use the best features of both sites to get links to your own. Find out what the most popular/ interesting/ valuable page of link target 1 is and offer to make a better version of that page to target 2. Now find an interesting tool or feature on target 2 and offer to make something similar to target 1. Don’t forget to mention your own website as the source or author, of course.
- Respond to your ultimate link target
Did the website you’re after just release a great post or did it fire up a heated conversation? Respond to it. Whether you agree or not, responding to a news item or adding something to a discussion can be a great way to attract links from the initiator, participants and/ or other related sites.
- Contact your ultimate link target
It doesn’t get more simple than this. Contact the website you want to get a link from and ask them what kind of content they’ve always been looking for. Build it, let them know where it is (or you could even offer your link target to let them host the entire piece of content) and you’ll get the link you were after. Keep in mind that this kind of target bait is only worth it in a few occasions, but you’ll probably know when
Selecting the Right Idea
After you’ve gathered dozens of great ideas, it’s not important to choose the idea that you’ll be working on, but it’s important to choose the idea you’ll be working on first. It would be a sin to leave the rest of the ideas untouched, wouldn’t it?
Selecting the right idea is nothing more than determining which one of the options will probably help you to reach your end goal -whether that’s just lots of links, links with specific relevance, traffic or anything else.
You’ve checked your own site, you came up with dozens of creative ideas and did research on what works (and what probably won’t), so you’ve got enough data. Your client has enough knowledge of the niche and you have enough knowledge of SEO to be able to come up with the best option together. In the end, you’ll find out that the final choice will be one that’s made by feeling.
Oh, and a little tip here; make sure that -if you work for one- your client makes the final choice. If you think he might choose for the wrong option, give him better directions. This ensures a better relationship in the future, no matter what the outcome is.
Use the Results
Now that you’ve done a great deal of research -and hopefully have a ship load of ideas-, it’s important not to forget your research data as well. You just found out that both industry blogger X and related website Y have both linked to that press release that your competitor sent out earlier. Since they’re both linking to this page, it might be useful to include blogger X and website Y in the list of websites you’ll be contacting when you announce your great piece of content. More about this in part two, but don’t forget to save the data you’ve collected. Having to do things twice can be a real pain…
Conclusion
This list is just an indication that there are tons of places where you can find inspiration for creating content that attracts links like a magnet. Some, however, ask themselves if link baiting isn’t a bit overrated, I do believe that creating link targeted content really is worth it - and it sure as hell can be so for everyone (be careful with widgetbait, though). Besides link and ranking related reasons, you shouldn’t forget that the piece of content and the traffic it attracts aren’t exactly worthless.
Next in line is part two of three: Creating content & Preparation
Just recently, someone asked me what automated link software I would recommend. When I asked him if he meant useful tools like Link Diagnosis, he made clear that he actually was looking for software that sends out a bucket load of unsolicited link request emails with the speed of sound to use for his main link building strategy for a white hat site. I really thought stuff like that had already died out, but apparently (and unfortunately) not.
Sure, link software may get your niche affiliate website a few nice rankings for a few days, but that usually doesn’t last longer than Milli Vanilli’s singing career. For everyone who’s still looking for software that inflates their rankings, here’s why these kind of tools just make my skin crawl…
1. Far from personal
I have received link requests that started with “Dear Sir/ Madame”, “Hello Webmaster” or even “Dear [NAME]” in more than one occasion. Not only does sending out link trade request emails that mention the term ‘PageRank’ more often than Larry and Sergey’s original patent to the owner of a link building related blog already makes me think that you possibly haven’t taken a thorough look at my website, but if you also can’t even find my name on this blog…
2. It results in an unnatural link profile
If you use link software as your main strategy, you’ll end up with a link profile that’s more artificial than Michael Jackson’s nose. Sure, Google doesn’t mind a few anchor text rich links on links.htm pages, but even Live frowns upon the kind of pattern that software can build for you. Okay, maybe that last part isn’t entirely true
3. Sensitive to flaws
You just hit the ’send’ button and realize that you misspelled both your own URL and your company name. The problem is that you didn’t send out just a single email, but you sent it to nearly a thousand website owners. Doh!
4. Easy to copy
Automated link software is easy to get and easy to use. Any one of your competitors can copy your entire linking strategy within an hour, which means you’re already at the same level again.
6. You only get low quality links Just to let you know what you may expect from link software: the so called link partner -that you’ve carefully selected- links back from a robots.txt’ed out resources page, and you may find another one of your links ending up on a page with nothing but viagra and poker crap. Absolutely not worth the trouble…
7. The big boys don’t use it
Do some research on SERPs for keywords like ‘car insurance’, ‘celebrity news’, or even ’seo’ and I will assure you that you won’t find a single one that uses automated link software in the top 50. Seriously, there’s a reason why…
8. It shifts your focus the wrong way Although it usually doesn’t take a whole week to find out what your brilliant piece of software can do for you, you could have used that time more efficiently. By creating killer content, by networking with the best or simply by serving your customers, for example.
9. You always miss the links you want And this is the most important reason. Automated link software won’t bring you the links you really want and/ or need. Do you really think that using link software will end up in getting a link from the NY Times, Wikipedia (one that stays in ) or that niche portal you’re dying to get a link from? Or that it will result in a Digg front page and thousands of StumbleUpon referers? Think again.
Oh, and if you happen to own or use link software (and I don’t mean link tools) that you do think will bring in valuable links, feel free to drop me an email and prove me wrong. But I don’t think that will happen
Last week, I noticed that the PageRank of Wiep.net dropped from 4 to 2. The PR of all internal pages, such as the Link Value Factors, dropped with two points as well, so this is clearly a manual PageRank penalty. After discussing this with several folks, the only reason I can think of why this happened is the footer of my blog (this design is a free WP Theme). It’s either that, or it’s because I haven’t been blogging a lot lately and this is Matt’s way to let me know that I should post more often
First of all I want to stress out that I personally couldn’t care less about this penalty and this is not an “I want my PageRank back!” scream. I wouldn’t even care if Google turned it into a PR0, a greyed out PR or even a red or purple PageRank, but I do care about the reason why. If this PageRank penalty is because of the links in the footer (it actually is my only website that’s 100% clean ), it’s wrong for several reasons.
1. Lots of WP templates work with ’sponsored by’ footer and/ or blogroll links and lots of mom and pop bloggers have never heard of either paid links, Matt Cutts, or even Google. Others may think that PageRank is directly related to their rankings and will turn hysterical if they see that their PR has been lowered because of factors that they don’t know is wrong.
In stead of lowering the rankings of the advertisers, Google thinks it’s more appropriate to lower the toolbar PR of template users who -in some cases, not in my case!- don’t even know they’re doing something wrong.
2. How about ‘designed by’ links? Can your PR get lowered because of linking to your website designer as well? This is pretty much the same.
3. This actually is a penalty for linking to irrelevant websites. Besides using the WP template, I never accepted any form of payment or whatsoever, so technically, the links aren’t even paid ones.
4. Indirectly, Google’s telling people which website template they can use and which ones they can’t. It’s either breaking the template’s conditions of use (leaving the links up is mandatory), risking a lowered PageRank, or following the Rules Of Google.
Some have suggested to nofollow or remove the links in the footer and to do a reinclusion request, but I’ve decided not to. In stead, I’ll do exactly what I said I will do my footer; I’ll leave the links up (which is mandatory when you use the template) until I have a new design. Do you have designing skills that rock and some spare time? Drop me a note and you might just end up with a ‘designed by’ footer link. From a PR2 blog…
Until then, does someone have a green pen, so I can fill up the void on my toolbar?
) from a client’s website, you’re pretty safe here.
