Whilst a simple text link can bring untold traffic from a busy site, a banner, button or creative can often add colour and variation to a webpage, and bring in more visitors from a link. Bloggers love to liven up their pages with images and photos so help make them give your link that little bit more chance to stand out by offering easy to cut and paste images with instructions.
These can also be used by press and media who often come looking for a press pack and images to use for stories. Be warned though – no-one is keen on reading through 25 pages of instructions for use of your images which goes into intricate detail about the size of margin allowed round an image etc etc. If you want a successful link building strategy, that helps people to promote your company, KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid)!
To learn more about link marketing, see tip #45 in our Search Engine Optimisation book.
How many times in a week do you receive an email requesting a link that clearly shows the person emailing has not even made the time to visit your site? Establishing reciprocal links with other sites means making an effort!
The real point is that you are trying to create a rapport and hopefully a lasting relationship with the site you have identified as being beneficial for a link, and therefore you need to remember that any email request will be read by an individual who probably knows their website inside out.
Link building requires you to get personal, be friendly, and show that you have taken the time to consider your request to them carefully by looking around their site.
So, when requesting links from others, it is always helpful to point out where a link to your content would be most appropriate on their site, and suggest anchor text. This can only be done by a manual inspection of their site, and by looking at it from their point of view too ie where a link to a specific article of yours would benefit visitors to their site.
To find out more about link marketing, see tip #45 in our Search Engine Optimisation book.
One of the many things that you need to consider when developing your linking strategy is whether your links and anchor text are optimised. This means that when the search engines take into account a) where your links are pointing and b) the keywords present in the link, you will be accredited with the maximum ‘score’ according to their algorithms. This also applies to links pointing to your site from others.
Check your internal and backlinks regularly to ensure that you are using appropriate anchor text and that those who have been kind enough to link to you are also helping promote the most important keywords about your website, product, services and company.
A simple tool to give you an idea of what your backlinks look like is http://www.webconfs.com/anchor-text-analysis.php
You can use the following Boolean expression on Yahoo to find who is linking to you:
linkdomain:clickthrough-marketing.com -link:http://clickthrough-marketing.com -link:http://www.clickthrough-marketing.com -site:clickthrough-marketing.com (This will ensure that none of your internal links show up).
Make sure your keyword list is regularly checked to ensure that your top performing keywords (and this can include long tail terms) are also being included in your links and anchor text. However, do not get too eager with optimising anchor text as there is the potential to overdo it and upset the major search engines in the process.
You can find out more about how to optimise your site for search engines in our Search Engine Optimisation book.
One of the many questions that is asked frequently concerns hyphens in domain names. So, for instance would the search engines view your site more favourably if you use www.checkoutmycoolwebsite.com or www.check-out-my-cool-website.com?
The search engines have become fairly canny about recognising keywords in domain names now after all, it is by judging whether a site is relevant that they gain reputation points and make money, and domain names are included in the search engines’ algorithms. So, in a way the question bears far less importance now than it did a few years ago. However, the reality is that domain names are now so cheap that it is difficult not to justify buying several to cover all bases.
Firstly, it prevents anyone else buying them and your potential customers landing on the wrong website. And secondly, you never know when the search engines are going to change how they operate!
A more important question than asking yourself whether the search engines think a domain name with hyphens in is a good idea is to ask yourself whether your potential website visitors will? Imagine trying to tell someone your website address over the phone will the addition of hyphens make it more difficult to capture your address correctly than if it is just simple words?
Another point to make is that it is always worth buying domain names which reflect certain areas of your business or your product set. For instance, your ecommerce shop may have different categories e.g. domestic appliances, garden equipment etc so why not buy yourbrandgardenmachines.co.uk as well as yourbranddomesticappliances.co.uk? You can then point these at the category within your shop of the product set your potential customer is most likely to be interested in. This means that domain then acts as a targeted landing zone and can be tied in to PPC campaigns or specific search engine marketing strategies, giving you easily measurable statistics for those activities.
For over a decade, websites and email have ruled the roost. Each day now, their overall dominion of the Net is undermined, and it is imperative that any business understands how to capitalise on these changes and new developments.
The most important thing to understand is that any prospect looking for your kind of product or service may well not find you through a search engine. It could be through a link, a tweet, a Facebook status update, a forum signature or post, on an aggregator such as alltop.com, a multimedia press release through pitchengine.com, a video on Youtube.com or metacafe.com, a podcast, an SMS, or much more.
If a prospect is looking for information, for instance, a white paper on search engine optimisation or the latest news on your industry sector, an event in their area, or an expert to ask, you need to be found by whichever channel and means they use to look for what they are seeking. And this means that if the prospect falls over your info on one channel, you need to ensure that the info they are looking for is there and not several more clicks away and a ‘delve into the depths’ search. Or at the very least, there is a clear signpost to the info and an indication they are in the right place or soon will be.
With a proliferation of corporate Facebook pages, there is often a failure to make these pages one of the signposts to further knowledge or information. It is a simple matter to use your Facebook page as an aggregator of all that your company is communicating to the outside world. This allows people who use Facebook as a preferred medium to instantly grasp your raison d’etre and the quality and quantity of information that is now available to them from you.
The majority of outputs from services such as Twitter, YouTube, Linkedin, Blogger, WordPress etc are available as RSS feeds. RSS stands for Real Simple Syndication. And this is what you are doing – “syndicating” your content so that it is available through multiple sources. Whilst there should always be a focus on ensuring that your content is syndicated to external sites to reinforce your linking, branding and content strategies, it is always worth checking that your own content is syndicated within your own properties too – whether these are Facebook pages, Linkedin profiles, YouTube channel etc.
Not only does this offer the chance to have automatically, regularly updated content on each of your properties, it also generates an archive of multiple keywords over time to help your sites be found, and shows any visitor that you are alive and kicking and keeping up with all that is happening in your world. Don’t just link to the information, where possible include it directly on the page using the multiple tools available to do so.
So, take a look now. Is your latest corporate tweet showing on your Facebook page? Are your blog posts showing? Is your most recent press release there? Are your YouTube videos embedded?
Once done, your Facebook page will become infinitely more attractive to visitors, who will then ‘like’ it so it shows on their wall and then the feed which all their friends see, which attracts more visitors, who then ‘Like’ it – see where we are going?!
URL shortening services have become more and more common as websites achieve record-breaking URL lengths for individual pages. (Luckily, this site is very simple but imagine if they had a database driven site with lengthy URLs for each page?! http://www.llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwyll-llantysiliogogogoch.com/)
So, why would you use a URL shortener? Well, there are multiple reasons.
Here are a list of some of those we have found whilst updating our list this week.
However, be warned. There have been many over the last few years but it seems they all struggle to survive as we have found more dead than alive! If you are posting your shortened URL to places where you are relying on it to still work in a few years time, think twice. It may be better to have the full URL with an OPTIONAL shorter link just in case the service folds.
Whichever service you use, remember to keep track of your links so that you know which points where!
A campaign has been started in response to the Digital Economy Bill and also those websites and news organisations who cite copyright issues about linking to content on their websites.
Right2Link.org has been set up to ensure that linking to websites remains free to all.
Whilst few people would argue with the rights of a news publisher to charge for their content, or any business for that matter, the problem begins when the owners of that content start to demand that all “signposts” to that content are removed.
Links are the stitches that hold together the fabric of the Web, allowing all of us to find and share content of interest. For digital marketers, links are a vital part of our marketing strategies, and establishing links on reputable sites is of prime importance.
The current situation, which is developing rather quickly for most people’s liking, is that certain large corporations are endeavouring to take control of how and where links are placed, restricting access to certain content, and preventing a free flow of movement around the web. The search engines are being accused of benefiting financially from links to copyright content, whilst the media corps tend to forget that it is through the search engines that the majority of their users will find that content in the first place.
What do you think? Should anyone be allowed to place a link to any item of content, anywhere? How do those of us in new media, rather than news media, ensure that we are permitted to continue to share links with our readership to pertinent items, wherever these items are found on the Net?
Has the Digital Economy Bill, inadvertently or otherwise, stepped into the world of censorship and restriction of freedom of speech that should not have a place in a free, democratic society?
If you have any concerns about the way this may be going, check out the Right2Link campaign today.
Imagine a large corporate, looking to increase links to their site and also raise brand awareness amongst potential customers, and demonstrate the expertise within their company.
Forum marketing is an ideal tool at this juncture, so let’s wheel out an in-house expert to post to a variety of fora and help out those communities with technical problems. Thus clearly exhibiting the knowledge within the business, plus reinforcing the image of a caring company.
However, due to company policy and a culture of fear about online damage to reputation, this expert can only post after getting permission from the PR department. Generally, most PR and Marcomms department are specialists in press releases, marketing communications, crisis management and so on.
Now, they are expected to be able to judge the value of a response made to a question in a forum on a subject in which the expert has spent 25 years becoming so knowledgeable. It may well be that they do not understand the question. After all, it is being asked for a reason ie the answer can’t readily be found elsewhere.
The expert then needs to educate the PR department as to why he has given said answer, and why the question is being asked, and how this fits into the overall marketing strategy of the company (not the expert’s forte, of course).
This all takes time, and therefore costs money. And is also utterly pointless.
If you employ your staff because they are GOOD at what they do, then trust them. Sure, monitor their excursions into fora to start with to ensure they are fully au fait with the brand and are on message, but don’t involve the PR department. Leave them to get press releases out, deal with the media, develop marketing strategies on and offline; don’t expect them to suddenly become experts in the minutiae of your technical department’s expertise.
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I was actually looking for a tool that would allow me to easily see who was pulling the RSS feeds from certain sites and came across Copygator instead. Whilst the original search was not for content theft per se, but rather to discover where content is being syndicated, this seemed a useful tool.
Copygator constantly monitors RSS feeds to see if blog posts are reproduced elsewhere, and then lets you know. Over 250 million blog posts have been compared to date.
This led to urlfan.com which lists the most popular websites and finds Web 2.0 properties that have linked to you.
Has anyone used either of these before? Do you have any comments on them, or suggestions for similar tools?
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Take a look at your website.
On every page, and every piece of great content, how many ways of sharing that content do you have? None? One? Many?
Do you make it easy for a site visitor to send out a link to that content? Can they tweet it, add it to Digg, Facebook, delicious? Is there a retweet or reblog button? Is there an RSS feed to syndicate the content not just to RSS readers, but also to sites that accept RSS feeds? Have you added your RSS feed to sites who cater for your target audience? Is your blog RSS feed listed everywhere it can be? Are you on authoritative blogs’ blogrolls? Can your video content be embedded in other people’s sites?
Do you make all of the above as easy as clicking a mouse?
Take a look at this video (which is quite amusing!) and note the simplicity of sharing the video, embedding it on your own site, tweeting, adding to facebook, digging etc.
Is your content this easy to share? Or are you still manually seeking out valuable links rather than letting your users do it for you?
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