How Do I Make All Those Inbound Links Relevant, To Improve My Ranking?

What is the best way to do an inbound link campaign and engineer the links for maximum SEO influence? Inbound links and inbound link strategies are a great way to get an improved ranking within Google for highly competitive keywords. With inbound links there are 3 attributes that you should implement to maximize the effectiveness when directing a link back to your site.

1. Do the inbound links contain the keyword that relates to the page itís linking to? For example, if the link is going to point back to a page on your site about tennis shoes, the link text should read something like “New Brand of Tennis Shoes”, basically the words “tennis shoes” should be in the title of the text link. In essence what happens is the search engine reads the title of the text link, then follows the link back to your site and reads the title tag on the page it’s linked to, and says is this page what the title of the text link said it was? If it is then it helps increase the link and seo relevancy.

2. Do the inbound links reside on a web page that is relevant to your site? For example, if your site had sports shoes for sale, putting a link on a site that has a lot of information about sports, or a blog that deals with sports would be a good thing. Where as, if you were to put a link on a site or blog that dealt with something irrelevant, like pottery, the relevancy would not be powerful. This is one of the many dangers of using a “link farm” to put links out there for your site, they just scatter the links around and rarely hit a site that is relevant to your site. So keep the links that point to your site located on other pages that are relevant to your site. If you do that it helps increase the link and seo relevancy.

3. Finally, does the site that the inbound link resides on have good page rank in itself? Granted this is not something that you can completely control, yet it still can be monitored. You will have to put less inbound links out there if your inbound links reside on highly trafficked and highly ranked sites, and more inbound links if you use sites that are less trafficked. Keep in mind both #1 and #2 above need to take place for #3 to matter.

Note: Once you get inbound links, it only helps you as long as the link is active on the other site, so they are more of a short term boost unless managed well.

1. Link out to bad neighborhoods: Google follows links that are on your site and linking out to unrelated sites, spam sites, or link farms will put your site in a bad neighborhood. This will drop your quality and trust score and ultimately your rankings within Google.

2. Implement a massive link campaign: Gaining inbound links to your site from reputable, relevant high page rank sites is one of the building blocks for good rankings. This can actually hurt you if you do it too quickly. Building links should be a gradual process (or at least appear as one).

A few years back design firms would put their link on the bottom of every page of sites they would design. This massive influx of links from those sites threw up a red flag with Google as if they were participating in link farms that spammed the search engines with links. This actually had the opposite effect that they were hoping, and Google started ignoring those links because they looked like spam.

I guess itís a double edged sword, you would not want Google counting a bunch of spam links that your competition put out there pointing to your site and subsequently hurting your quality and trust score. So in that regard it helps, but it also blocks a site from gaining hundreds or thousands of links overnight even if the intentions are good.

3. Adding thousands of pages to a site overnight: There are sites that create many pages quickly or have many articles they add to their site at one time. The best thing to do would be to release these in waves and not all at once. Again, this throws up a red flag in Google and the fate of those pages is either, they are instantly dumped into the supplemental results and the only way to get them out is to build quality links to those pages or even worse they will not be indexed at all.

What should you put in your description tag for the search engines you might ask?

I recently got this question from a client and thought I would quickly give my thoughts.

The description tag is the text that shows up under the listing in the natural search results, and has 3 goals.

1. It plays a small role with the ranking

2. Sets your listing apart from the other 9 on the page.

3. It is the marketing hook that gets your result clicked on when it is among 9 other results targeting the same thing you have.

So the way I would structure the description tag to accomplish these goals would be:

Primary keyword - Couple related words ( primary keyword), couple related words. Your “hook”, marketing lingo, or tag line.

Remember, only 150 characters will show up under your listing link in Google, so don’t put to much fluff in the description tag, don’t stuff it with keywords, and make it conversational to get that click.

For those of you who don’t know what “supplemental results” are, they are pages that are placed in the secondary index for various reasons such as duplicate content or lack of links to them. This might not seem like a problem, but the pages in the supplemental index will only show in the search results if there are no other pages that match the search term a user is looking for.

The following is my theory based on website testing and research:

When a page is launched:

Google does an analysis of the page which includes a series of unique qualifiers in a few different algorithms to determine which index the page will be placed in, the page rank, the keyword set it will be ranked for, and where it will be ranked. I believe content uniqueness and quality is what Google uses first to determine which index to place the page in.

You have about a month of a page being launched to get quality links to it:

In about a month Google implements a second phase in which it analyzes the page for inbound links from quality sites to determine if it will keep it in the index it was originally placed in. If a page has no links coming into it, Google assumes the content is not what people might be searching for or is not popular, and there is a strong possibility that it will be put into the supplemental index.

Getting Pages Out Of the Supplemental:

Pages in the supplemental index get crawled less frequently than the primary index. So once a page is placed in the supplemental index the quickest way to get it to the primary index is to build QUALITY links to the page from other pages both internal and external.

Most traditional marketing firms struggled to embrace interactive marketing like my 90 year grandfather who still wrecks his golf cart once a year would struggle with a Porsche. But even the most cutting edge SEO firms have trouble grasping SEO. Treating SEO like a media buy.

In the past marketing agencies bought “media” ñ radio spots, TV ads and some had even ventured into Google Adwords. It was a predictable routine. Marketing firms bought an audience count associated with broadcasts or readership. In the case of Adwords there was an audience count for each keyword phrase. But marketing firms could associate a demographic to a keyword phrases only in the rarest of instances

This is where things began to unravel.

But marketing companies still understood a basic Ad agency law: “he who spends the most wins.” This made Google Adwords familiar and usable even if it was not well understood.

But natural search was ruled by a different law: “he who is most relevant to the internet as a whole wins.” This came at a time when telemarketers burned up the phone lines and irritated even the CEO’s of marketing agencies during their dinner hour. Marketing messages had become invasive and reached the fevered pitch of a local car dealerships TV ad. This was a time when being the loudest and flashiest and buying the right spot made you the market place winner.

Suddenly the site in the number one position wasn’t the big bank roll website backed by a New York ad agency but the one that had the most relevant thing to say. Possibly a small mom and pop with little marketing budget but an inexhaustible knowledge of their product on their website. “Knowledge that was liquid capital”, says Bill.

Worse than being confusing to marketing firms it was confusing to businesses. This was the 90’s when companies didn’t see knowledge as liquid capital they where busy laying off knowledge workers in favor of a “leaner, meaner” company. Companies like IBM hired ad agencies to create elaborate PR campaigns to develop and “sincere message” because no one had worked there long enough to know what their message was. Even internet companies like AOL and Lycos put on magic shows for stock holders to make them believe in perceived innovations.

But searchers where busy crossing over multiple psychographic and demographic divisions. They went to news sites and got the news that interested them and ignored what didn’t. They never sat through a news broadcast again. They shopped for gizmos and gadgets and never heard and single radio jingle. The searcher was not bound to the internet by anything but a desire for information and community. The PR campaigns and fake innovations rolled off their lean mental muscles like rain.

It was refreshing and love of the internet grew with the adoption of natural search.

So everyone scrambled; the marketing firm, and the businesses to harness the power of being the most relevant. Company policies about openness where turned upside down. Ad agencies where running around like their hair was on fire wondering “what to write about”. Agencies and businesses tried to trick the search engines and the visitors into believing they had relevancy. But the engines matured and evolve and so do the searchers.

The agency or the company that truly wields the power of search engine optimization knows.

1. Write about what you do and who you are

2. Write frequently

3. Participate in your online communities and social groups.

“Short of a few technical obstacles to accommodate the search engines everything else will take care of it self”, says Bill Ross of Rank Better SEO.

It’s imperative to do a full technical analysis and website crawl audit before you start your search engine optimization campaigns.
“We have worked with many clients who have done extensive search engine optimization campaigns and spent thousands of dollars to do meta data rewrites, copy optimization and link building campaigns with other SEO firms and still are nowhere to be found in the search engines”, said Bill Ross of Rank Better SEO and Blue Wave Design Studio.

When talking with these businesses we get the same old “we tried it but it didn’t work” mentality, when if they had just started out with a website crawl audit and a technical analysis they would have seen that they either created a spider trap, had un-crawlable navigation or created some other programming trap that the spiders could not get out of in order to properly crawl and index the pages on their site. With a trap in place it would not matter how much SEO was done on the site because the spiders would not be able to get in to see the hard work that was done.

A full crawl audit makes sure the spiders are getting into your pages and you don’t have any road blocks to stop them from accessing the marketing you have done throughout your site.
An example that I came up against was when I was working with a large ecommerce site whose rankings dropped off significantly over a 3 month period for no apparent reason. They had paid a well known SEO firm to do meta data optimization an extensive internal and external link building campaign to help their rankings. After 3 months with this other firm and seeing minimal results we offered to do a quick crawl analysis on their site.

What we found was a spider trap they had created buy doing improper redirects and shopping cart link placement that trapped the spiders in an infinite loop and did not allow them to enter their site. Now we did find that some of their pages were gaining popularity in the search engines due to the fact that they were from a previous, less complicated form of the site that was able to be crawled by the search engines, but these pages were minimal and accounted for only 5 pages out of the 1200 skews they had on their site.

So they could have continued to spend thousands of dollars, I am sure that firm would have continued to pour money into more and more optimization with minimal results, but instead they came to us to find and fix the problem at the roots. We also looked at 2 other ecommerce sites they had, one being their 30 million dollar mother ship, and they had created the same crawl problem, along with duplicating content across their site with a programming error when writing their URL structure, and duplicating key content with their in house affiliate program.

So doing a technical analysis and crawl audit is imperative, can save a company thousands of dollars in the long run, and uncovers programming issues with the site that are not apparent on the surface that are effecting organic ranking and that keep you from getting ranked better in Google, MSN, and Yahoo on a much larger scale.

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SEO Needs To Prove ROI Just Like Any Other Marketing Medium

I spoke to a prospect today day that was with a large SEO firm. Almost 1/3 of the amount their contract paid to the SEO firm was for ñ account management. “Oh I don’t mind paying for account management”, the prospect said. “I can call them every week if I need to and tell them how angry or concerned I am about my lack of natural rankings and they always pick up the phone. I have designated account rep so I always speak to the same person.”

If this prospect’s Search Engine Optimization campaign was successful why would they need to call someone every week to express anger or concern? Why not put that money toward getting ranked instead of talking with an account rep every week about how you are not ranked? Or put your time and energy toward your business instead of pleading with your SEO firm to do their job. This SEO Firm had customer service but flawed product. They also failed on a core principal that is a land mine for many SEO firm - ROI.

The SEO firm failed to prove ROI

Instead of proving the ROI for the SEO campaign, the SEO firm had invested in account managers to placate clients when they called distressed about the lack of performance for their SEO marketing campaign. This client had been with their SEO firm for 2 years and had never been ranked on Google for any of their key terms. But every week there was a willing ear that told them, “just spend a little more with us and the rankings will come”. Unfortunately this prospect had fallen for this song and dance to the tune of 60 K. I can think of 100 ways they could have use this money to build their business other than complaining to the SEO firm’s account manager.

Six simple steps to prove ROI

It is the job of your SEO to show the value of their work. But here are the steps you can take to make sure you are tracking the ROI of a SEO campaign.

Step 1: Before you sign up with an SEO firm begin using a tracking program such as Google Analytics that will show you the keyword and search engine a visitor arrive from.

Step 2: Place the tracking tags for you tracking program on EVERY page of your website.

Step 3: Place a conversion tag on your “thank you for ordering page”.

Step 4: Bench mark your traffic for 30 days to confirm what rankings and traffic you had before starting the SEO campaign.

Step 5: Using your tracking software carefully observe not just increases in traffic but also increase in conversions.

Step 6: Assign an average “sale value” to each conversion. If you have a lead generation site, assign a “lead value” to each form submit. Using a 180 day evaluation period, multiply the “sale value” times the number of conversions you got ñ over and above your bench mark period. The amount of revenue generated by the marketing campaign should 7 to 10 times the value of the SEO firms contract.

Consistency throughout the search engine optimization structure of an ecommerce site with both internal linking and keywords will help you capture the organic rankings you deserve.

There was a great article about internal linking and how to engineer the anchor text from SEOmoz which expresses my thoughts exactly about how to structure internal linking. Below is a short cut from that article.

In the example, we have a website that wants to build search-targeted pages for 4 unique keyword terms:

* Wind

* Wind Energy

* Wind Turbines

In order to effectively communicate to the engines (and to users) which page is targeting each particular keyword, I’ve used anchor text from the generic “wind” page to each of the more specific subpages and, likewise, linked back to the generic “wind” page from those subpages with the singular anchor text phrase “wind.”

Proper internal link engineering is a great way to help your rankings, and pairs itself up with what I am going to talk about, which is keyword themes and consumer silos throughout the site, and how running your internal linking structure from these keywords and across these silos will greatly help boost the relevancy and power of those links. Read more about linking strategies which talks about external linking coming in, but the way the link is engineered is virtually the same.

Consumer Silos:

These are created when you have more then one major consumer category or service and the products within those silos interact with one another. For example let’s take bestbuy.com. I would say they have 4 major silos which are Home Entertainment, Computers, Music, and Appliances. Within these silos are specific categories and keywords that all interact with one another, but hold a separate universe of buyers.

“Keyword themes throughout an ecommerce site and within each consumer silo for your meta data are one of the keys to ranking for a specific keyword set. As we have discovered with testing, the title tag is one of the primary factors for ranking within Google and if engineered properly can have one of the greatest impacts on ranking”, said Bill Ross Of Rank Better SEO. A keyword theme is made up of primary and secondary keywords that represent your goals, products and overall image you want to site to represent.
Primary Keyword Themes for each Consumer Silo:

These are representative of your core products within each consumer silo from a high level view. This set should contain 3 or 4 major terms for a site that has over 30 pages since the ratio of total unique pages of copy to your major keyword set will need to be larger since these are usually highly competitive terms you will be looking to optimize for. For the bestbuy.com example lets take the Music Silo, you might have primary keywords such as “country, rap, rock”. The Home Entertainment Silo might have HDTV, CD Players, DVD Players. You can use these or the secondary keywords for the anchor text for the internal link engineering where it makes sense.

Secondary Keyword Themes:

These represent secondary goals or products for the site. These should be more specific product names or specific categories. These secondary keywords should span across the consumer silos for up selling. bestbuy.com now within each of these primary keyword sets there are secondary sets like Sony CD Player for the home entertainment silo, or The Dixie Chicks for the music silo. These secondary keywords can be used to up sell someone who just got a new Sony CD player for their house and needs a CD.

Creating a keyword theme for the site should be done when the site is built, redesigned or re-engineered this will ensure all the organic ranking factors can be taken into account and it will give you a holistic approach to your keyword theme and produce the best rankings. This involves comparing a keywords analysis to your product set, goals and competitive landscape.

What You Get From A CSS Web Design:

1. Reduced bandwidth: Smaller file sizes obviously mean reduced bandwidth costs, which for high traffic sites can mean enormous savings.

2. CSS can replace some JavaScript functions: Again allowing a reduction in page size which increases speed.

3. A higher search engine ranking: The code of a CSS Web Design is cleaner and therefore more accessible to search engines.

4. Faster download speed: Slow download speed is often cited as one of the biggest usability complaints for websites. Browsers read through tables twice before displaying their contents, once to work out their structure and once to determine their content.

10. Having duplicate sites and wrong redirects (301 good, 302 bad)

9. Link Farms

8. Sharing links (to many reciprocal links)

7. To many keywords in your meta tags or on the page(aka: keyword stuffing)

6. Duplicate Content

5. Sites made entirely of images and image text

4. Not Enough unique content

3. Non-unique meta data on each page

2. Improper linking strategies

1. Sites that are mainly built with FLASH