SEO Werkt!

by Nick Stamoulis

Over the years I’ve found that’s it easy enough to explain to someone what they should do with their link building campaign–the types of links they’re looking for, how to build a 12 month strategy, how to evaluate the quality of a link and so forth–but where a lot of site owners and marketing managers get hung up isn’t with the actual building of links, it’s usually because of the attitude and mindset they have when they start their link building campaign. Getting into the right mindset before you even build you first link is critical. Here are four things you need to not only keep in mind when going about your link building, but adopt as your link building mantra:

1. Finding quality links takes time.

Once you’ve exhausted all the easy win link building opportunities (updating old author or social profiles, adding more cross links between your company blog and website, etc) it’s time to focus on finding the new, hard-to-get links that are going to provide real value to your link profile and help you connect with your target audience. My advice has always been to look for at least one quality link every day so your link building campaign doesn’t get pushed to the back burner. Sometimes a great link will just fall into your lap (provided you recognize it as such) and other days you’ll spend several hours combing the Internet for a great link. There’s no way around it really–finding quality links is a mostly manual process and that takes time. It’s better to just accept the fact and stick to one link a day (although if you find two or three then run with it!) so you aren’t overwhelmed and don’t get frustrated with the slow moving process.

2. Link building is forever.

Some site owners think that once they hit the top of the SERPs or a pre-determined organic visitor growth goal that their SEO is done and over with and that they can rest on what link building they’ve already done. Unfortunately, the moment you stop building quality links is the moment you start to slip backwards. Will your SEO campaign come crashing down around your ears the first day you pause your link building? Probably not. You might not even notice anything is amiss for several months. But every day you aren’t thinking about link building your competition is. There could be hundreds, maybe even thousands of websites all vying for ten spots in Google and just because you’re at the top today that doesn’t mean you have your position locked in forever. If you don’t continue to invest in the value of your website and focus on building and attracting more quality links over time sooner or later the competition is going to catch up and surpass you.

3. Think of each link as an entryway into your website.

If Google vanished off the face of the earth tomorrow how would potential customers find your site? Think of every link you build as a potential doorway into your site for your visitors. The more doorways pointing to your site the better chance you have of connecting with your target audience. But it isn’t just about building as many doorways as possible; link building should be about building the right kind of doorways. Look for sites that your target audience actually visits; blogs, community sites, forums, industry sites and publications, and so forth. Referral links like these can actually send valuable traffic to your site AND add real SEO value to your link profile. While more links is good, more quality links on sites that cater to your target audience is better. Building links that are designed to send targeted traffic your way (even if it’s just 2-3 visitors a month) and not just make your link profile larger is also a good way to ensure that you aren’t building the kind of links that can get you into hot water with the search engines.

4. Don’t let the competition dictate your link building strategy.

A lot of site owners think that if they can just find the “secret” to their competition’s link building they can reverse engineer similar success. Here’s the thing–doing a competitive link audit before beginning your own link building strategy is a great idea because it gives you a good baseline; how does your website measure up against the competition? If you’ve only got 10 links and the top competitor has 10,000 you know you’ve got a long road ahead of you. But keep in mind that every website is different and what works for the competition might not work for you. And just because the competition has a link from a certain website that doesn’t mean you have to build a link from the same site. What if 9,000 of the competitor’s links came from low-quality directories or spam blogs? That’s not the kind of link portfolio you want to build.

Look for link building opportunities within your competitors’ link profiles that you can take advantage of but don’t turn into an SEO copycat. Remember, you want to be better than your competition! Doing what they have already done still leaves you two steps behind.

In my experience, I’ve found that site owners with the right mindset and attitude about link building tend to get the most value out of their efforts. They have the right expectations going in, they understand what is expected of them and their link profile, and they truly “get it.” Link building isn’t just about growing your backlink profile; it’s about marketing your business.

Be sure and visit our small business news site.

As you know, Wikipedia nofollows all their external links, so links from Wikipedia should have no impact on your rankings – be it positive or negative.

A WebmasterWorld thread have some SEOs disagreeing with that.

Some are saying because there are so many Wikipedia scrapers out there, when you get a link from Wikipedia it can hurt you.

A Junior WebmasterWorld member explained his case:

My recently relaunched website has been featured in Wikipedia as a ‘resource’ on a very relevant page. I have no idea who did this but I was obviously thrilled at first that somebody felt my website was relevant enough to appear there.

This seems to have caused no end of problems on Google, however. Because my website’s brand name is also a popular keyword in its niche (it is an EMD, but a short one) that is the keyword that this indivudual used on Wikipedia. My problem is that there are dozens if not hundreds of websites that scrape Wikipedia and now my keyword appears as anchor text on those websites.

It seems that Google has penalised me for this because from their point of view they see dozens of links with the same anchor text. Because my website is relatively young this makes up a large proportion of the link profile and I don’t think this looks natural.

I guess if the scraper remove the nofollow and if the site has very other links to it, outside of the scrapers, I guess it can hurt.

But this all seems a bit farfetched and I suspect there is some other issue.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Posted by randfish

If you've used or considered using the Mozscape API to retrieve link metrics data, we've got something unique to share – a brand new beta of a much faster, more robust API. This beta version currently has just a few testers (and we're seeking more), but thus far, we're seeing remarkable results.

Carin, who manages the big data team here at Moz, helped share the story with me last week:

• The current API is not able to support everyone's use case! Some people need to make a lot of calls in a really short period of time – our API currently can't support more than 10 requests/second (even for paid users). Others have a large list of URLs they want to update metrics on every new index release – our current API doesn't support batching very well and will timeout with batch sizes larger than 50 URLs.
• The beta version has made some serious performance improvements with single URL throughput and can handle 200 requests / second – the beta API is seeing a 400% throughput improvement, although response times will still be the same
• To address batching users we've developed a new batching model – online batching (available in the beta API) and offline batching (coming soon to the beta API)
  • Online batching: the maximum amount of results we can process in a POST without a timeout from S3. This has been improved from 50 URLs to 500 URLs in one batch request
  • Offline batching (still in development): for batch sizes larger than 500 URLs, offline batching will process through the entire list (probably up to a certain limit not yet decided) and return a downloadable CSV link to S3 where all the data will be available. Since this is still in development, it is not clear the SLA on offline batching, but this feature will be also be available for beta testing as soon as it is feature complete!

Mozscape's API is pretty big today – we served 154,352,249 (154 million) requests in the first 10 days of August and returned 1,186,736,774 (1.2 billion) rows of link metrics data.

You can still sign up free or try our paid API, but if you have serious demand for high-volume or large batches of link data, we'd love to have you in the beta for the new API. Just contact Andrew Dumont – andrew@seomoz.org – and he'll get you set up!

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don’t have time to hunt down but want to read!

Everywhere I look, I see B2B marketing that spouts "join the conversation," "get in the conversation," and other references to the word that skew it's meaning into the equivalent of "talk to the hand."

In my last post, I wrote about debunking the B2B buzzword, engagement. In the same vein, I'm wondering what the heck happened to the art of conversation? Have we become so numb by the ability to publish whatever we want that we've forgotten how to be human?

The words dialogue and conversation are also interchanged without thought but, in online marketing, they have different criterion:

Conversation: an interchange of thought, information actively shared between/among people. (Requires 2 or more people)

Dialogue: an exchange of information (Only requires one person)

The difference here is that a conversation is an active exchange of information between people where a dialogue (as an exchange of information) could be between a person and a website, blog, video, etc. without the need for two active (human) participants.

I think this is an important distinction. I do not think the two are interchangeable.

Let's look at some examples of what a conversation is NOT:

• A push email – even if the recipient clicks
• A Tweet with no commentary (title and link and handle)
• A blog post with comments from readers, but no response from the author (This does, however, change if readers are commenting in response to each other.)
• A white paper download
• Viewing a video

Examples of what transforms dialogue into conversation is response.

• I receive an email, click the link, and forward the email on to a colleague who responds back to me with comment about the content I shared. We may exchange several more emails in discussion about the content.
• I receive a comment on my blog, respond back and ask a follow-on question and the person comes back to answer the question. Or another reader jumps in and answers the question I asked and I respond to them.
• Someone posts a question to a LinkedIn group and provides a link to a blog post or article on the topic. Group members respond by leaving comments and referencing perspectives of others – discussion ensues.

If I had just clicked the link and read the information in the first example, there is no conversation. It's the act of involving others and adding my commentary that turns the dialogue into a conversation. There must be back and forth between people for a conversation to form.

The evolution is that we don't need oral communication to have a conversation. As long as two people are involved, a conversation can be facilitated by a variety of technology platforms, from email to communities to social media and beyond.

But, it's only dialogue if technology is carrying on half of the conversation.

Don't get me wrong, I'm a huge proponent of marketing automation. Use your technology to establish a dialogue that engages people through contextual information they want and need, GO YOU! But it's not a conversation until another person gets involved. This is because the "dialogue" is dependent on the behavior of the single participant, not both.

[If I visit this webpage, the system sends me a link to content A. If I visit a landing page and download a white paper, the system sends me content B. Etc. In a dialoge scenario, there's not a possiblity that it could veer off to content X.]

This is even more important when you consider social media. I see so many exchanges where someone is looking for help, only to be told to call an 800 number. Really? That's the best you can do? Although that fits the criterion for a conversation (2 or more people), there's also a difference between a valuable conversation and a crappy excuse for one.

So, when you think about "conversation" in marketing terms – what are you doing to make it more human?

And for those of you thinking "Wait. I get thousands of responses to my nurturing program! I can't possibly deal with this…" I would point you to buying stages and personas and battening down your lead scoring schema to get to intelligence that's useful. It's all in your approach to prioritization.

Don't let conversation become a meaningless buzzword. With a little art and science we can make marketing human, approachable, and definitely more social.

Google released Account chooser today, which lets you easily toggle between Gmail accounts without having to enter and re-enter your email or password.

Account chooser was first noticed by The Next Web, and undoubtedly excites any person that uses Gmail for both work and personal accounts. In order to enable the feature, you must first go to this link, which automatically signs you up if you’re logged into one of your accounts. That account becomes the default account from which you can add others. You must click “stay signed in” in order for the feature to work.

The new Gmail login screen is a small box that displays your name, the email address, and an image if you have one on your account. Multiple sign-on will be enabled across many of Google’s products, but the company notes that some of its products are not friendly with the feature yet. If you attempt to access a Google product that does not support Account chooser, then you will be automatically reverted to your default account.

Google does provide a set of suggestions on how to protect your accounts if you’re using Account chooser on a shared computer, but it’s always best not to have a signed-in account on a computer accessed by others.

You can always disable the feature and turn it back on when you’re ready.

hat tip The Next Web

Filed under: cloud

Is there one link, story, picture or thought that you saw online this week that you think somebody you know must see?

My friends: Alistair Croll (BitCurrent, Year One Labs, GigaOM, Human 2.0, the author of Complete Web Monitoring and Managing Bandwidth: Deploying QOS in Enterprise Networks), Hugh McGuire (The Book Oven, LibriVox, iambik, PressBooks, Media Hacks) and I decided that every week or so the three of us are going to share one link for one another (for a total of six links) that each individual feels the other person "must see".

Check out these six links that we’re recommending to one another:

• Human cycles: history as science – Kurzweil. "Look for patterns in enough places and you’ll find them. And three iterations does not make a cycle, so take this with a grain of salt. But according to Peter Turchin, who studies weather patterns, upheavals in human society come at regular intervals. And the next one is due in 2020. Stockpile some canned food and stuff money in your mattresses." (Alistair for Hugh).
• Pocketful Of Dough – Gourmet. "Ever wonder how to tip your way into a restaurant? This Gourmet Magazine piece by an intrepid reporter explains what it feels like to jump the queue at some of the world’s best tables. Far from feeling slimy or underhanded, he found himself empowered, part of a secret elite. As much a study of restaurant dynamics as good advice. It’s a fun read." (Alistair for Mitch).
• How Apple and Amazon Security Flaws Led to My Epic Hacking – Wired. "I’ve been waking up in sweats after reading this. The horror of losing control of my digital life is… horrifying. And then today: my Mac died. People: back things up, and have a sensible security approach to your digital life." (Hugh for Alistair).
• Two Weeks of Nothing: Random Thoughts After a Relaxing Vacation – Arjun Basu. "Remember when people blogged, and you knew them, or got to know them online, and they got to know you? I miss those days. This is just a nice old fashioned blog post from my pal, Arjun Basu, about a bunch of stuff he was thinking about during and after an unconnected holiday. Refreshing to read." (Hugh for Mitch).
• Before Green Eggs: See The Advertising Work Of Dr. Seuss – Fast Company. "What The Beatles are to music, Dr. Seuss is to children’s book. You come to that realization pretty quickly once you have young kids and start reading to them on a nightly basis. Nobody does it better than Dr. Seuss. Period. End of sentence. As you read to your kids, you will marvel not only at his words and art but – and, much more impressively – where his ideas came from. They are not only ‘out there,’ but they’re amazingly clever and warming. In the past while, I’ve become interested in obscure art and some strange pieces. One of my potential areas of interests was to start picking up some Dr. Seuss prints. After seeing this, it’s clear that before buying anything, I should probably read his biography. I had no idea he was in advertising, and I had never seen some of these amazing pieces." (Mitch for Alistair).
• The 5 Things People Regret Most Before They Die – Business Insider. "The contents of this news item could be a blog post (or three) unto itself. We get caught up in our daily work and the anxiety that comes with it. So few of us ever really sit and ruminate on our final days. While there’s nothing mind-blowingly new on this list, it would probably be wise to print it out and stick it somewhere visible. Thinking about these five regrets on a daily basis could well inspire a change in your moral compass. The majority of us think that we’ll go to bed one night and never wake up. That’s glamorous, but unlikely. Imagine having years of sitting around and waiting for your final day to arrive (with little to do but wait)? What do you think you will do with that time? What type of regrets do you think you will have? Take a look at this list and have a serious chat with yourself." (Mitch for Hugh… and everybody else).

Now it’s your turn: in the comment section below pick one thing that you saw this week that inspired you and share it.

Tags:

alistair croll

amazon

apple

arjun basu

bitcurrent

business insider

complete web monitoring

dr seuss

fast company

gigaom

gourmet magazine

hacking

hugh mcguire

human 20

iambik

kurweil

librivox

link exchange

linkbait

managing bandwidth

media hacks

peter turchin

pressbooks

story

the beatles

the book oven

wired

year one labs

For someone who’s new to Twitter, one of the first things that they want to know is how to get more followers. Having hundreds and thousands of followers is a social proof for other users of how influential a particular account. It only makes sense to use the number of followers as a metric for influence, as it can be a sign of fame that an average user has achieved.

Optimize Your Twitter Profile

The good thing about Twitter profile is that it’s simple and straightforward. That’s why it’s important that you upload a profile picture, and optimize your Bio section.

You have 160 characters to tell your potential followers why they should follow you. Make it interesting, and include your brand’s selected keywords if you can. Moreover, stay consistent with the way you brand your business on the web. This will help your profile define the niche that you want to target. That way, you can attract qualified followers.

Connect Your Other Networks

If you have a blog, website or email newsletter, be sure to add your Twitter link to it. This way, people who are already connected to you online through other means can have an immediate way of finding you on Twitter.

You can also add a Retweet button on your blog posts, so that it can be easier for your followers and readers to share your entry with their networks. In turn, your brand can expand its online presence on the micro-blogging site.

You can also add your Twitter link on your forum signature, email’s closing remark and other social media profiles like Facebook.

Be Proactive

Once you’ve set up your profile and weave your web, it’s time to use your Twitter account the way it should be used. It’s important that you join the conversation because it can extend your social graph with every tweets, retweets, mention and hash tag that you make.

By joining the conversation relevant to your niche, you’re not only widening your popularity, you are also attracting the right audience.

Follow Back

In the Twitter universe, it is an unwritten rule that you have to follow back the users who follow you. That’s why in order to increase your number of followers; you should also learn how to follow other users. You can do this automatically or use Twitter directories. Nevertheless, you have to balance your following is to follower ratio so you won’t look like a spammer.

image: Twitter

The post Become a Twitter Celebrity—Get More Followers appeared first on About Social Media.

RIM is wounded, and predators are starting to pick up the scent.

RIM has attracted the attention of IBM, which may be interested in buying RIM’s Enterprise Services unit, a pair of sources told Bloomberg.

Enterprise Services is RIM’s bread-and-butter. The link between BlackBerry devices and the software that manages them, the unit generated  at least $4.1 billion in revenue last year. It would take a pretty compelling offer from IBM for RIM to part with the unit — which is why the sale seems so unlikely.

(And if you doubt the importance of that $4.1 billion number, consider that it’s almost the exact value of RIM’s recent market cap estimates. So, yeah — Enterprise Services is pretty important.)

RIM, naturally, isn’t saying much about the report. ”We don’t comment on rumors and speculation,”  Nick Manning, a company spokesman, told VentureBeat this morning. IBM also gave a “no comment” on the rumors.

While there’s very little to go on in the report, we do know that RIM CEO Thorstein Heins is extremely unlikely to go for the deal like this — at least at this point. Right now RIM is more interested in seeing how well its BlackBerry 10 devices do next year, so don’t expect any high-profile sells anytime soon.

Photo: Shutterstock/Joanne Weston

Filed under: mobile

There are not many link building resources and experts I really trust and can recommend. Eric Ward is one of those few people I have been following for as long as I am involved in SEO. I have been subscribed to Eric’s “LinkMoses Private” and I can hardly recommend it highly enough. Note: I am [...]

Piracy has been a persistent problem for content owners over the years, but Singapore-based Tell My Friends thinks it may have come up with a novel solution. Where UK-based We7 sought to tackle the problem by offering consumers free songs tagged with 10-second advertisements, Tell My Friends gives users a way to share music, ebooks, videos and apps legally while getting paid for their efforts.

Now in beta, Tell My Friends aims to celebrate music’s inherent “paying it forward” nature, in the site’s own words. Rather than sharing an illegally downloaded copy of a song or other content, however, the company encourages users to share a link to licensed music instead; not only that, but it pays users each time someone else buys from the link they share. How it works? Users begin by signing up for a free Tell My Friends account. Then, each time they make a new music purchase, they can choose to share it on their social networks. When they do, a unique identifier code links their original share to people who subsequently buy the track. Thereafter, anytime anyone clicks on the shared link they get an order page along with a sample and information about the song. Those who directly click and buy from the original link earn the original user a set amount per purchase for up to 10 purchasers; those who buy from links shared by others earn the originator a slightly smaller commission per purchase. The video below explains the premise in more detail:

Tell My Friends works closely with societies like Composers and Authors Society of Singapore (COMPASS), Music Publishers Singapore (MPS), labels, publishers and independent artists to negotiate and determine royalty rates in advance. It also helps promote local musicians by organizing events such as concerts and performances. Typically, at least 50 percent of the revenue from the sale of each product goes back to the people who created it; about 30 percent goes back to Tell My Friends users in the form of commissions, the company says, while the remainder goes toward administration. Music-minded entrepreneurs around the globe: one to emulate for the audiophiles and artists in your neck of the woods?

Website: www.tell-my-friends.com
Contact: www.tell-my-friends.com/contactus

Spotted by: Katharina Kieck