A natural/organic link is not necessarily “the opposite of the unnatural link”. It is much more than that.

And although unnatural links are in fashion, maybe its time to put the spotlight on the organic links.

What is a Natural Link?

Natural links refer to those links that are put on websites without a direct intention of influencing the rankings of Google (at least from the POV of Google). These are called natural links because they haven’t been elicited in any way. As mentioned in the Webmaster Tools Help, Google considers to be a vote of confidence a link that page A makes to page B. These “votes”, usually,  help your site rank higher in the search engine. The thing is that this vote, the link, has to be made naturally, meaning that you don’t have to influence in any way someone’s decision to link to you. Shortly, natural link building means that no explicit agreement to exchange or place links was done.

Natural Links are an investment that will pay dividends on the long term!

You might be stuffed with it, but let me illustrate the natural/unnatural dilemma with an example from politics. Elections are in full swing and you, the citizen, have to decide which mayor would be the best for your city. Your vote will be considered sincere and also legal only if your choice will be made solely because you agree with someone’s political agenda or you think that a certain person fits best the role of the mayor of your city. If a candidate or someone from his staff try to “buy” your vote with money or by offering you goods or services, that vote won’t be based on that candidate’s political qualities anymore, will it? That vote will not be relevant and might also bring some legal consequences. The same things apply when it comes to natural links. They need to be obtained organically, without anyone trying to manipulate the situation.

Natural Link Synonyms

Natural links may be found “in the wild” under the following names:

• organic links
• good links
• ok links
• high quality links
• Google friendly links

Why “Natural” & “Link” in the same phrase?

Talking about a “natural” link building strategy might sound like an oxymoron. As they first appear, links were all natural and even now, links are supposed to be natural, right? Yes, I feel the hand of reality slapping me, so allow me to rephrase that.

As the digital world got bigger and bigger, webmasters began to feel smaller and smaller. Site owners started to feel insignificant if not lost in the incredibly large web. The need to create link strategies that will speed up the process and put webmasters in their dream place, the search engines’ first page, increased proportionally with the digital world.

For someone to naturally click on the most relevant site for his search query would mean that he would know all the content from all the sites that exist.

Pretty utopian, isn’t it? How the “natural” process really goes is that users link to the most relevant sites they find from a predefined list of webpages. They don’t really give their vote of confidence to the site with the best content that there is but to the one that is most relevant to him from “the short list” of webpages which is available. With almost 80% of users clicking on links that they find on the very first page of a search engine’s responses, everybody wants to be on that list. Who designs those “short lists”? Algorithms do. The people behind those algorithms are continually seeking to improve their ability in identifying which sites are to be trusted and which not. The sites that appear on the “short list” may be the ones that know how to “dance” along with the ranking factors and not necessary the ones with the most relevant content for a certain matter.

Google’s algorithm job is to spot signals of naturalness. The webmaster’s job is to act as natural as possible. But what happens when the algorithm changes? An action that was considered natural until then can pass as unnatural now. Huge amounts of money are being lost or won based on the algorithm’s rules. It’s a cycle that repeats every day, week, month, year. I think the Ralph Tegtmeier (aka @fantomaster) puts the finger on the problem in the following video:

Link Earning

The concept of link earning puts together all the qualitative efforts that a webmaster does in order to gain organic links. The key to this strategy might be crafting your content for your readership and not for Google. The new SEO context might oblige us to forget about link building and start focusing more and more on link earning.

Here are some methods of earning links:

• Generate original information

A good place where you can put your effort into is original analysis and research. Netizens are more than glad to find out new, interesting things. If you really dig in to find something and you generate interesting facts, you are more likely to get links. We’re doing this a lot at cognitiveSEO, so, let the links come to us! 🙂 The good part with generating original research is that it is not just about linking, it is about sticking in someone’s mind or making a really big difference in a specific area.

You must create content that you yourself would go out of your way and read.

• Be active in social media

Think of where people spend most of their time. That’s right; on Facebook, Tweeter, Google+, etc. If your users spend 4 hours a day on facebook, maybe you should start spending some time there too. You don’t have to just wait for your possible customers to come to you, you may need to pay them a visit. Being active in social media can pay off in lots of ways, not just links. You get to know your target and you can also find new opportunities for your business.

• Share your knowledge

Yes, “how to’s” and tutorials is what I am talking about. If you’ve managed to do something or you discovered how to make something faster or easier, you could help other people by making a tutorial about it. It will be highly appreciated in the online world. Even if you don’t get the pile of links you were hoping for, but you will bring exposure to your brand.

Content for the “Long tail ” only needs a couple of link to rank high.

As I mentioned before, sometimes it’s not just about the links; it’s about having a resource that no one else has. In the long run it will pay off.

• Community Building

Community building is a long term investment that will pay off on the long term.

You can obtain natural links from creating content that is not only relevant and useful but that will have the power to attract links from bloggers, people from forums, blog comments, etc.

• Answer Questions Online

I am talking about answering the many questions people have in the online world. On a forum, for instance, you can answer to a question about how to get rid of some spyware. If your answer will bring the solution or any added value, the community will appreciate. It is likely that they remember that you “saved” them in some situation and most likely they will reword you with a link. So, helping other people can be a big way to do it. Don’t expect to win the Nobel Peace Prize but you may expect an investment that will pay dividends on the long term.

• Offer a Free Service to Your Community

Run a service that people find really useful or something that improves others’ experience in the digital world. For instance, you can create a browser extension. I am sure that you are familiar with the AdBlock extension. This extension is an open source that generated millions of downloads and a pretty nice amount of money made from donations. As you can see, people are grateful and willing to pay off as long as their experience as a user is improved. What is great about offering a service is that you can do the work once and on the long term lots of people will pay you off in links.

Techniques that Don’t Involve Great Content

It is hard to say that there are techniques that won’t rely great content. Let’s see, though, what we can find in this field:

• Controversy

You don’t have to be a tabloid to obtain buzz and links. You don’t have to make a profession out of gossiping or hating everybody either but some controversy might give you a boost of traffic now and then.

Done with measure, some controversy generates a lot of links but is not a long term strategy.

There will be a boost in the beginning but at some point, people will pay less and less attention to you. You don’t want to be like the boy that cried “wolf” and afterwards, no one believed him anymore. If you always get busy with saying “look at me, I am being loud, you have to pay a lot of attention to me”, you may irreparably lose your authority and credibility.

• Site Architecture

I know it may sound common but sometimes we tend to take for granted the little things. You have to make sure that your site has a good site architecture. What is the easiest way to find out? Answer to these questions: Can your site be crawled? Can your site be bookmarked? Can Google or the user get to all the pages on your site? If the answer to these questions is “no” or “I don’t know for sure”, you need to take a look at your site before doing anything else. If your site is broken your changes of being linked at are almost Zero.

• Offline Activities and Branding

Being hooked in the online world we often forget about the great opportunities that the offline world brings. If you forgot about outdoor and smart unconventional advertising and brand building, it’s a good time you bring them back into your playground.

• Newsletters

Another way in which you can drive traffic, conversions and ultimately links are  Newsletters. They might look a bit out of fashion but they still work. This way you make it easier for your public to have your information show up in their inbox and, therefore, easier to click on it.

Common Mistakes

You did everything by the book, but the results don’t look as you expected. So, what could have possible happened? I’ll list three common mistakes that may occur in the “link zone”.

1. You were too busy creating a link building strategy

Your job is not just creating a link building strategy. If your main activity will be focused on building links for search engines, you are cutting off a lot of avenues.

Before being preoccupied with how to get links, you have to build something really attractive, a reason why people would want to link to you.

After you managed that, don’t forget that there is more than the online world. There is a broader area of offline marketing out there that can bring you the links you wish for. You need to get rid of the tunnel vision focused on just links and start marketing your website without thinking about search engines but about your consumer instead.

You use the wrong keywords on your site.

For instance, you’ve just opened a great sushi restaurant in Manhattan. You don’t want to just say “sushi” but you want to include words like “where do I find the best sushi in Manhattan” etc, because it is very likely for people to search for “sushi manhattan”. Think about what the user is going to type and include those words on your page. You need to do a proper keyword research for your own site. Also, let’s say you have a car service shop. Post a list with all the services you have to offer on your site but not in a jpg or pdf format, but in plain text. Put your business hours on your page. It is very likely for people to look for a car service open till late and you might be the one who offers this service;

That piece of information can generate a link and, further on, a client.

You’ve messed up the title or the description of your page

You want to have something that people will actually click on when they see it on the search results.

What is your home page title? If, for instance, I am going to bookmark it, will I easily understand later what was really about or is the title not very suggestive? Also, your description will show up in the snippet and that synopsis can be a link generator or, on the contrary, a turn off for the user.

Conclusion

It is hard to tell whether a 100% natural link building strategy will get you on the first pages of the search engine in a favorable period of time. But one thing is for sure: while techniques and strategies come and go, organic links will always remain.

Everything you are doing is first of all for the audience and not for the search engines.

There is no (or shouldn’t be) such a thing as a manual on how to build links organically, or how to create the exact type of content that results in valuable links. There are some guidelines you need to follow and some directions you can track that can help you have a natural, worry- free link profile.

Photo credits: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

The post Organic Links – What they are and How to get them? appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.

Edwards writes, “What do you want out of a personal relationship? Loyalty and value are at the top of this list. This is the same way you should think about link building and how you should approach it. Be valuable and loyal to people and you will have a high return on your time invested. It’s important to find those areas where the like-minded people are that you wish to communicate with.”

I couldn’t agree more with that assessment about personal relationships, value and loyalty. Finding like-minded people is important, but that’s not link building. Nor is it simply relationship building—it’s called networking, and it’s been around for as long as humans have walked the Earth.

Chameleons and Buzzwords

Relationship building, link earning and other new buzzwords are being thrown around to replace link building because of its admittedly sordid past. The industry as a whole doesn’t focus on building spammy links anymore, but we still build links. People are quick to leave the old at the altar and marry new terms. They’re quick to rebrand themselves. But at the end of the day, we’re still building links. We don’t need to abandon ship. We can build relationships and build links at the same time, but they’re not the same thing. One cannot replace the other.

Relationship building isn’t bad—it’s one of the keys to success in business. Link building is not the same as relationship building. When link building reaches its highest potential, it includes elements of relationship building. The middle of that particular custom illustration should be large and robust, but they’re not the same thing.

Survival Becomes Marketing

Let’s talk about relationship building, though, because it’s an important topic. For the purposes of this article, let’s embrace the old ways and refer to it as networking.

Imagine a tribe of cave people. They knew how to kill the woolly mammoth, but they were cold. A neighboring cave tribe knew the secret of fire, but they didn’t have much to eat. Cave tribe A networks with cave tribe B because, hey, they have something in common and they can help each other out. They build a relationship. That simple concept has escalated forward into marketing, sales, link building and everything else we do.

We build links to make money. We need money because we want to support our relationships just as much as we want to support ourselves. Nothing in this world happens without relationships. That’s especially true with link building.

The thing about that, though, is that you can’t force relationships. Sometimes when you write a guest post and it’s placed on the perfect site, you don’t exchange more than a few words with the webmaster. Either they don’t have the time or the interest. It shouldn’t happen that way the majority of the time, but that’s reality. You’ve still created a good link, but a relationship wasn’t built in the process. A relationship doesn’t automatically flicker into existence when a hyperlink is created. In the best circumstances, a relationship is created along with the link, but there are plenty of times when that’s not the case—and the link is still perfectly good.

Who You Know

The relationships you do build are important, however. They’re not just important for your link building campaign; they’re also an important part of your overall marketing strategy. You might even make an actual friend in the process, which is just as important.

Good relationships often provide us with great link opportunities, give us new ideas and allow us to take a look at the industry from a different perspective. They also open doorways into other new relationships.

Getting to know the editors of a popular industry website is a fantastic networking opportunity. The same goes for participating in the industry’s online community with comments and social media. Those are valuable relationships for obvious reasons.

I talked about it before, but link building and networking should cross over often. In an ideal world, the two would always cross over. A quality link can be built without a relationship, but if a relationship is built along with it, your overall marketing strategy will be better off for it. The two fit together closely, but they’re not the same thing. Networking is essential for businesses. Networking is an essential component of any effective online marketing strategy, and so is link building. They work together, but using a fancy new buzzword does not mean that link building is the same thing as networking.

When Edwards writes, “Try thinking about link building as a way to build value and loyalty with people in your vertical. Not only will it be a longer-term effort that just spamming people for links, but the effect will be longer lasting and way more authentic.” she is absolutely correct.

Spam, as far as effective link building goes, is a thing of the past, for a normal business (shady tactics still exist … and they might get you a quick rank and along with it a big ranking penalty). Though we’re still mending some fences, the industry has moved beyond building spammy links and onto creating useful links powered by human brains.

We want to approach every blogger and webmaster like a human being and provide something of value—but that won’t always yield a relationship. Link building is not networking, but they’re both valuable weapons in any online marketer’s arsenal—especially when they cross over.

About the author

Jon Ball is VP of Business Development for Page One Power. Jon specializes in developing highly effective link building strategies for clients across the world. Trained as a professional portrait photographer, he still passionately pursues photography as a hobby.

The post Sick to Death of Relationship Building appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.

Important Update!

We released the automatic unnatural link classification tool to help you in your unnatural link recovery, after this post was published.

We recommend you check it for unnatural link analysis!

With the latest chit chat that Google is going to release the next version of Google Penguin soon, I think it is a good time to remember how you can easily detect unnatural links in your sites’ profile.

This detection technique can to be used for any site, even if it did not receive a penalty or unnatural link warning. It is a good technique that you can use to understand and manage the risk that you might be exposed to when the next unnatural link update comes.

Lovely site BitsofLace – Unfortunately Bad Linking Used …

This case study presents the story of a penalized site and how an unnatural links detection process should be approached. (mention – the site was brought to our attention by one of our customers asking for help in segmenting the unnatural links pointing to this site)

The site is operating in the “Lingerie” niche (BitsofLace.com) and has received several unnatural link warnings in the past. Their rankings have dropped significantly because of the unnatural links that were built in the past by several agencies or individual SEOs.

Let’s start with the conclusion so you can quickly understand what was wrong with the links of this site.

To put it simple, this site lost rankings because of an often seen, boring and un-creative link building strategy that combines a deadly mix of:

• Paid blog posts
• Web Directory links
• Forum & Article Directory links

So how did I find all this out? Here is the entire process described.  You can apply it to any site.

I started with a full link profile analysis. Looking for big distributions of links I notice the following:

• A high density of blog, article directory and web directory links
• A high number of commercial anchor texts versus brand related.

These signals guide me to look further at the webpage type distribution.

1. The story of the Paid Blog Links

Blog links are not unnatural usually, neither web directory or article directory links (or any other type of link … just to clear this out) … but it all comes to the distribution, volume and how they were acquired.

I check the deeper profile of these blog links.

We have them split in:

• Blog Post links
• Blog Comment Links
• Blogrolls and similar link types

Let’s dig deeper. The majority of the links are coming from blog posts. This could be a natural thing.  Content Marketing, customers writing about the service etc.

This isn’t the case unfortunately.

The first unnatural links signal is the low quality of the linking pages.

If I order by link quality, the most important link looks like a paid blog post. Natural links (expos, trade shows, real reviews etc) are also found but these are a tiny fraction (max 1%).

I should have looked at the commercial anchor text distribution for the blog links segment first of all.

A 55% commercial anchor text ratio is totally unnatural for sure.

I am looking at another 3-4 links and I can profile them all based on the similar footprint.

Here are some screenshots so that you can get the idea.

Content written around commercial anchor text posted on these blogs. All of these blog post links are unnatural from Google’s point of view. They were built with the sole purpose of influencing Google’s rankings. They do not provide any value to the user!

The same can be said about the other links coming from blogrolls and blog comments.

~21% Unnatural Links Detected on Blogs.

 2. The story of the “old and dirty” Web Directory linking technique.

How natural can Web Directory links be you should ask yourself? Last year Google even started de-indexing directories.

Let’s be frank for a moment, you put those links there with the sole purpose of increasing your rankings.

Rarely we see high quality web directories sending real traffic to your site via the link posted there.

With such a high distribution of 23% links coming from web directories I should mark all as unnatural without even looking at them. But let’s be accurate and methodical and make an informed decision.

Having such a high percentage of 93% links DoFollowed, highlights the intention of the people that “optimized” this link profile to have the site rank higher with Web Directory links.

I tried inspecting these links in various forms so that I could find a quality link from a web directory.

I couldn’t!

I checked the most powerful links ordered by Domain Trustworthiness and Link Trustworthiness. All the top links are low quality web directories (from the user’s experience point of view) by any metric you choose to filter.

Here’s a quick preview on some of these low quality unnatural web directory links.

~23% Unnatural Links Detected on Web Directories.

 3. The story of the Forum “Personas”

Normally you get people talking in forums about your product. They might be mentioning your brand, talking about your service etc. When you have a high distribution of forum domains sending links to your site we can only have two options:

1. The site is a “super super” successful brand.
2. The site is promoted by a “super” proactive forum spammer.

Again we have a lot of DoFollow links. Raises a red flag!

In the forum links segment I searched for the word “profile” in the title or link and this is what we got as a visual link profile.

Why I searched for the word “profile” you might ask?

Because this represents the fingerprint for forum profile pages or “personas” as some SEOs call them.

Fake Forum profiles created with the sole purpose of generating unnatural links to the promoted site.

We do have some natural links generated by real people on the forums but these are like 10% out of the entire dataset. The rest are “personas” generating links both on profile pages and inside forum discussions.

~17% Unnatural Links Detected on Forums.

4. Article Directory Thin Content can Sink your site.

As a link building strategy this is an old one, that once worked and now it doesn’t anymore. As with any other link building strategy, the more it is abused by SEOs worldwide, the less it is going to work on a long term, as it is something that is generated unnaturally with the purpose of influencing the search engine’s rankings.

Here is the type of thin content linking in with commercial anchor text that was used for this site.

Natural Link?

Not at all!

Human generated content posted on a mass scale on 95 article directories. Variation of the anchor text and content is found on all of these sites. The problem is that Google can fingerprint this as it has a big proportion of the link profile and it raises a red flag for Google to check.

~11% Unnatural Links Detected on Article Directories.

Let’s recap:

• ~21% Unnatural Links Detected on Blogs.
• ~23% Unnatural Links Detected on Web Directories.
• ~17% Unnatural Links Detected on Forums.
• ~11% Unnatural Links Detected on Article Directories.

Total 72% Unnatural Links Detected

And this is not all!

We can go even deeper and check the other type of pages, and I am sure we will find more unnatural links. I just wanted to showcase how easy it is to spot these unnatural links by segmenting the links by webpage type.

The website type segmentation gives you the macro view on the link building strategies used.

The analysis was done in 5 minutes + 10 minutes to have the cognitiveSEO system crawl and analyze the entire dataset of links so that we have fresh data on the links analyzed. It took me 5 hours to finalize this article though :). I hope you will enjoy it!

Here are some other articles that are of great help when it comes to identifying unnatural and low quality links:

• Identify Low Quality Links [how to]
• Surfacing Unnatural Links > Why You’re Doing it Wrong [how to]
• Backlinks Analysis Case Study
• Google Penguin Case Study
• Google Penguin Crashes Wedding Site’s Shady Link Building Strategy [case study]

What do you think about the unnatural link building strategy used by this site?

What other methods do you apply to segment unnatural links?

The post Unnatural Links Detection – How To Guide & Case Study appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.

Find Infographics in Competitor’s Top Linked Pages

If you know your competitors are using infographics for link bait, then your best bet is to start by doing a little digging into their backlink profile to see which infographics make a dent. You can start with the inBound Link Analysis tool’s list of top linked pages to see if infographics make the cut of the top 20 linked pages on the domain.

You can also use the Visual Link Explorer to see top linked pages and hover over them to see which ones are infographics.

The Visual Link Explorer will let you know which infographics have the strongest backlinks based on the dot size.

It can also help you quickly find the types of sites that would be likely to link to your infographics. Make sure to note these as you might want to pitch them your infographic once it’s published. The site owners may even appreciate it if you let them know that you’re sharing your infographic with them because you saw that they published something similar in the past.

See Infographics Published on Mashable

Another way to find out what infographics are likely to get the most amount of attention (and thus, the most amount of backlinks) is to look at the infographics published over at Mashable.

Since they changed the layout, you can keep scrolling down to continue loading older posts. Then use your browser’s find option (usually CTRL+F or command+F) to find infographics on keywords related to your industry. You can even hover over each of the posts to see the social sharing summary.

Another top site to find infographics that are popular? Holy Kaw! They don’t have an infographics category, so you might just want to use Google search (site:holykaw.alltop.com infographic) to see if they’ve published infographics on a specific topic.

Want to get your infographic published on a site like Mashable or Holy Kaw? Start building relationships with the people who write the infographic posts through blog comments, social shares, etc. Then you may be in a good position to just “let them know” about your infographic in hopes that they will publish it.

Identify Trending Topics Related to Your Niche

If you have access to a designer, then one way to make sure you get lots of social shares and links is to create an infographic based on a trending topic. You can see what Google considered a trending topic at Google Trends. You can also watch the top news blogs in your industry too see if they all start talking about a specific topic.

The key to trending topics is timing. The sooner you can get your infographic published, the sooner you can start getting links to it. Once you publish it, you should use keep an eye out on all the blogs that are writing about the topic. Then contact them to see if they want to add an informative infographic to their post. If your infographic is good and has lots of relevant information, you’ll likely get your link.

SeoQuake in Google Search

Speaking of Google Search, you can use SeoQuake to find out how many backlinks each page in search results has. You can then sort the pages by number of backlinks.

In some cases, you’ll probably find posts with a collection of infographics. These are good pages to research as you’ll see what kind of infographics bloggers love. Getting your infographic published in one of these posts can lead to a strong backlink since collections get linked to often.

What other ways do you research infographic topics that will be great link bait?

The post Identifying the Best Topics for Infographic Link Bait appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.

In this post, we’re going to look at how these article directories are doing today as well as the top directory that was never affected by the Google Panda updates. Plus you will get some tips on how to approach a quality link building campaign through article marketing.

Article Directories Today

Curious about the state of the top article directories? Here’s what you need to know.

EzineArticles.com

EzineArticles.com currently maintains a Google PageRank of 6 and Domain Authority of 93. Since being struck by Google Panda, they have given their website a facelift and emphasize that they accept high-quality, original articles only. They have also revamped their guidelines to specify that articles cannot be rehashed (aka, spun), must be a minimum of 400 words (with a suggested length of 400 – 700 words), and should include proper HTML formatting throughout. Overall, their guidelines want to gear articles towards being reader friendly vs. just SEO friendly.

Authors get special treatment on EzineArticles with a complete bio page that includes multiple links to business websites, a blog, and a personal site. You can also get links back to your main social profiles including Google+ in order to claim authorship of your articles.

Now, let’s look at the traffic EzineArticles receives. The below graph shows their traffic prior to the first Google Panda update and after.

This shows that traffic from search has not recovered their traffic since the original Panda update. Since Google hasn’t given EzineArticles their rankings back, it is questionable whether links from these artless will hold any as much weight as they used to as far as Google is concerned.

In terms of traffic generation, SEMrush shows that out of 190K keywords they ranked for in January 2013, almost 2,200 are at the number one position. This means that you can still generate a good amount of traffic from EzineArticles depending on the keywords your article ranks for and their search volume.

Hubpages.com

Hubpages currently maintains a Google PageRank of 6 and Domain Authority of 90. After they were hit by Google Panda, they revamped their website in a big way. Author profiles and articles were moved from the main domain to personalized subdomains (author.hubpages.com). Unfortunately for the authors, all of their articles and profiles lost any PageRank and Page Authority they had gained. And while author pages are nicer looking, authors have lost the ability to place links with keyword anchor text in their bio. They can only link to one website and their social profiles using icons.

The major changes that Hubpages made did work in regaining them their rankings in search about six months after the first Google Panda update.

Although their search engine traffic has been slowly declining again, they still rank for over 2 million keywords which is much better than EzineArticles. Over 10K of those keywords are at the number one position. One of the keywords in the number one position receives 22K searches per month and outranks 24 million other items in search – including a result from Wikipedia! One can assume they are still in Google’s good graces and that links from their network count.

Squidoo.com

Squidoo.com currently maintains a Google PageRank of 7 and Domain Authority of 95. It was one of the article networks that was not affected by the original Google Panda update. In fact, their network has only seen a steady growth in rankings.

In terms of strategy, they have a similar setup to Hubpages when it comes to content. They allow you to add text, video, images, and other Squidoo type widgets. Ironically, they allowed for more spam within their articles than Hubpages with a widget that allowed visitors to Squidoo articles to add links at will – some dofollow, some nofollow.

They currently rank for over 5 million keywords.

Article Marketing the Right Way

So how can you take advantage of article marketing for links and traffic – the right way. Here are some tips!

• Reserve your best content for your own website, then for guest blogging opportunities. Regardless of how great an article network is, you will want your best content to be on your own website first. Your next best content should be focused to guest blogging efforts in your niche. If the latter doesn’t exist, then you can apply that content towards article networks.
• Create unique content geared towards readers, not search engines. While optimizing your articles for search is a good thing, they shouldn’t just be written for search engines. Imagine your next client was going to read an article you posted on Squidoo as their first impression of your business. Write your articles with an end goal to actually drive a visitor back to the website you link to in your article or or your author bio.
• Skip automated spinning software. This includes any service that offers to take one piece of content and syndicate it across article networks. It goes back to unique content, and spinning software creates anything but.
• Build up your author profiles. Most of the good article directories allow you to create a strong author bio. Be sure that yours includes important information about you and your company as well as links to your website and social profiles.
• Claim Google authorship. Assuming you’re creating quality, unique content, you won’t mind sharing it via the authorship link between your articles and your Google+ profile. Having a picture by your articles in search could result in more clicks and more traffic back to your website.

Do you still use article marketing in your search marketing strategy or to generate traffic? What networks do you use and what additional tips would you give?

The post How to Get the Most Out of Article Marketing Today appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.

Quality Directory Checklist

Here are some ways to test a directory to see if it is a good fit for your link building strategy.

Domain Authority

First off, you will want to make sure that the directories you choose for building links to your website have a good domain authority, Google PageRank, and any other metric you value most. The stronger the directory domain, the better the backlink.

Authoritative Backlinks

Are authoritative websites linking to the directory of your choice? This shows that the directory not only gets recognition but it also gets traffic.

Cached & Indexed Pages

Is the page your link will be placed upon indexed in Google search and cached? Be sure to check by doing a quick site:domain.com/category/page and cache:domain.com/category/page query. This may not work for newer categories, but if one seems well established with several links, then you should find that it has been visited by Google search bots.

Outgoing LInks

One of the reasons DMOZ is such a valuable link is because it is so hard to get into. The directories you submit your website to should have a strong moderation process, regardless of whether you pay or not. If a directory links out to bad websites, then it is not one you want to add your link to.

First Page Opportunities

Generally, the first page of a specific directory category will have the highest rankings, authority, and traffic. Hence you will want to make sure that your website will be placed on the most relevant category’s first page – and that it will stay there. That may be worth the investment in a featured listing.

Social Shares

Check to see if your directory has some social shares. This shows that people are talking about the directory (hopefully satisfied customers) and that the directory might be getting social traffic along with direct traffic from referrals and search engines.

Quality Content

Last, but not least, does your target directory have quality content of their own? This can show Google that it is more than just a directory and you that it is a constantly updated site. Having quality content should mean that the directory is less likely to get penalized and that your link will not lose its value.

Directory Submission Tips

Submitting to a quality directory is not the end of the story. You need to make your submission count by doing the following.

• Submitting to the proper category. You might be tempted to aim for a page with higher authority, but make sure that it is also relevant.
• Don’t use keyword anchor text. Google will not need it if your website link is in the proper category.
• Vary your descriptions. Especially if the directory is niche specific, make sure your description matches the audience that would be browsing the directory.
• Use all of the options. Some directories allow for additional deep links, longer descriptions, and social links. Get your money’s worth by using them all.

Directory Coupon Codes

Since you’re probably ready to start submitting your websites to directories, here are some coupon codes that you’ll find useful. These directories all have a minimum Domain Authority of 60.

• Directory Journal – Get 20% off all listings with coupon code DJ20GM.
• Alive Directory – Get 20% off all listings with coupon code ADC2013.
• Abilogic – Get 15% off listings with coupon code ABIKEY13.
• Jasmine Directory – Get 30% off listings with coupon code JD2013.
• Aviva Directory – Get $20 off listings with coupon code growmap.
• Hot vs. Not Directory – Get 20% off listings with discount code GM20HVN.
• Ezilon Directory – Get 30% off listings with discount codes s1z8v if you pay vial PayPal and SMV8Z if you pay via credit card.

What are your favorite directories? Please share in the comments.

The post How to Find & Evaluate Directory Links appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.

“Advertorials”

Google Advertorial Update Mockup

I ran an indepth analysis on cognitiveSEO for Interflora and some of its top competitors, that are still ranking.Here are some of my findings.

1. The Interflora backlink profile does not look more unnatural, that any of its, still ranking, competitors. They all have low quality links from :

• blogs
• forums
• web-directories
• and tons of other low quality sites that might be considered as being root of this penalty.

Unnatural links are the penalty, obviously, and this is because most of the trust of a site is carried through links, these being the epicenter of any Google ranking. But in this case, Google might try to enforce another existing rule from their guidelines …

“Advertorial Marketing”

If we take in consideration Matt Cutts’ recent affirmation that paid advertorials are to be treated as any other link, based on Google’s quality guidelines, this strengthens my belief even more.

Coincidence? I do not think so. Most of the stuff that Matt Cutts says on his social media accounts is “measured”, taking in consideration that any wrong wording could lead to wrong conclusions made by the SEO industry.

If it is a general low quality links penalty, then why did not Google penalize all of the sites listed here ( plus many more). All of them share a lot of low quality links.

What counts is that now you should think twice before buying an advertorial. Doing it slowly is still ok, but if you do it on large scale you should mark your links as “nofollow” to be able to “fly safe”. It does not matter if your links contain brand or commercial anchor text, they are treated the same. Interflora had a lot of brand anchor text advertorials that got them penalized.

What are you thoughts on this penalty? Is it worth the name of an update?

The post Interflora Penalty – Advertorials Gone Wrong appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.

Local Review Sites

If you’re not interested in the reputation management benefits of local review sites, then you will be interested in building local links. Most sites will allow you to have a link to your website along with your business listing, but only if you create or claim your listing.

When it comes to SEO value, however, you may not be looking at the holy grail of anchor text and dofollow. Here’s what you will get on the following popular local review sites.

• Links from Yelp are redirected.
• Links from Merchant Circle are dofollow. Anchor text is the domain URL without the http://.
• Links from Yellow Pages are nofollow.
• Links from Zomato (for restaurants) are nofollow with “Website” as the anchor text.
• Links from TripAdvisor are redirected.

Regardless of the direct SEO value, having your website listed in local review sites counts as citations which can help you rank well in local search results. So if you can take advantage of these sites, be sure to do so.

As you create or claim your local profiles, be sure to complete them with at least the basics. You’ll want to add your address, phone number, a blurb about your business, and at least one photo if not more. If you want to expedite the process, you can try services like Universal Business Listing – they will submit your business listing to the important local review sites for you and maintain those listings with continued membership.

Local Directories

Another link building strategy is using local directories. If you don’t list yourself in any other local networks, be sure to at least get listed by creating a local page profile on Google My Business (formerly Google Places), Yahoo Local, and Bing places for business.

When you create a business account on a third party website, make sure you have the correct company’s contact information displayed, such as name, address and phone number (NAP). Google My Business is a great place to start and run a business online, also. Focus your strategy on local SEO optimization to dominate local search engines. 

Creating an account on Google My business will bring you a lot of benefits. For example, if you search for restaurants in New York first will appear the results from Google maps (with information you added in your Google my business account) and then the results from Google search. Usually the results from maps take a lot of space above the fold, you can see the rest of the results if you scroll down. 

If you don’t use that you might loose a significat percentage of the users that could end up on your site and in your physical business location.

Once you’ve covered these local search directories, then you can branch out into discovering additional local directories to get listed in. One way to discover them is to find a local business in your industry that ranks well in local search and use the backlink reporting tool to see what local directories they are listed in.

You’ll get a quick glance of what directories they have links from, what locations they are listed in, and which ones offer dofollow links along with their overall domain authority.

Also note that some mainstream directories have local listings. Citysearch, for example, has a list with all the states from US that allows you to navigate to regional listings.

You can find more directories on Directory Critic which allows you to sort by various criteria. You can find localized directories under the Niche Directory Lists section, making it easier for you to get links from local sites.

When you’re submitting your website to non-localized directories, you can add the local element to your submission by using local anchor text (if allowed) such as New York Dentist instead of just Dentist. As always, remember to vary your anchor text across the links you build.

Local Partners

Are there businesses in your region that are in the same industry, but not competitors? Are there business owners in other industries that you network with at local events? If so, consider making them your partners – link partners, of course.

Suggest that both link back to each other on a page from your websites named partners, local resources, or similar. Make sure the businesses have good websites and do not link out to miscellaneous links – only other local businesses. Think of it as a high quality, very relevant local link exchange.

One way to make the link offer more appealing? Pitch it as a way for both of your businesses to send each other referral business. Maybe add a bonus such as offering the other business’s customers discounts for your business’s products or services. 

You can start by joining or creating a local community and buitl relationships. Send press releases, share information on social media and get the word out there. It is a safe method, it takes some tine ended, but on the long term you will end up with relationships that are more valuable. This is more about earning links,  rather then building them.

Local Broken Links

Broken link building can be very effective on a local level. The strategy (in a nutshell) involves finding websites that are no longer live, finding links to them, and suggesting that the webmaster replaces the dead links with a link to your website.

There are lots of ways to find broken links. When it comes to finding broken local links, you can analyze pages with lots of local links using a broken link checker like Check My Links for Chrome or Link Checker for Firefox. Another way to do it is by searching Yelp for closed businesses in your industry using the following search query.

site:www.yelp.com intitle:closed intitle:city industry

Site Explorer has an easy way to show you broken pages. If you search you site or your competitor’s site, then go to the Broken Pages you’ll see a list or you may not see anything if you don’t have broken links. Lucky you!

You’ll likely find several closed businesses similar to yours. Lookup their websites and if they are no longer active, check the backlinks to those websites to see if you can get the webmasters to update their links from the broken one to yours.

Do you utilize local link building strategies? Please share your tips in the comments!

The post Utilizing Local Link Building Opportunities appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.

Photo Credit: dcJohn on Flickr

Google Alerts for Brand Mentions

If someone mentions your name, your business name, or your website online, then you’ll likely want them to link to you to. Google Alerts makes it easy to keep track of your mentions via email or RSS.

Each time you see a mention, check it out to make sure the website is linking back to you. If they or not, or you would prefer they link to something else, send a friendly email to the webmaster, author, or editor to see if you can get them to add or change the link. Most typically respond positively to this type of request.

Redirection for Missing Pages

Google Webmaster Tools makes it easy to find out if you have any missing pages on your website. You can find these under Health > Crawl Errors, then click on Not found errors (if any).

To find out how valuable this strategy can be, simply click on some of the URLs listed as missing. Then click on the Linked from tab to see how many backlinks are pointing to the missing URL. You could gain redirection juice on a huge amount of links if you go through the redirection process.

If you’re not a fan of messing with your server side files and have a WordPress website, you can create redirections from your WordPress dashboard using the Redirection plugin. Not only can you create the redirects, but you can see the number of times people have clicked on the bad link which should further convince you to keep up with your broken links!

Change Requests for Old Domains

While you can redirect broken links on your own domain, if you no longer own a domain that you once possessed, you won’t be able to simply redirect those links to new ones on your current website. In this case, you’ll want to contact anyone linked to you old domains and ask for your links to be updated.

This can be a tricky task, however, if your old domain is now owned by someone else who has a similar purpose or similar content.

Aside from domains you’ve lost, this is also a good way to reclaim links built to properties you used to own on hosted sites like WordPress.com or other free platforms. Maybe you started out your blog on Blogger and received a lot of links to it, but now have a blog on your own domain. It never hurts to go back, check your old properties’ backlinks, and see if you can get them changed to your new site.

Updated Links for Lost Offsite Content

Have you ever submitted a great piece of content to a site, only to find that down the road, the site no longer exists? If you saved your content (which you always should), you could get some links from this opportunity.

First, you’ll want to see if there are links built to the URL your content previously existed upon. If there are, take that content and place it on your own website. Then you’ll want to contact all of the sites linked to your old piece of offsite content and ask them to link to the new content. This should lead to good results as most people would want to make sure the content they linked to is still live, assuming those sites are still being maintained.

Credit for Content

If you use infographics in your link building strategy, then you will want to make sure you have gotten the maximum number of links possible for each infographic. No matter how simple you make it for people to link back to your website along with your infographic, you may still discover lots of websites using it without a link.

To find out, use Google Image search. Upload your infographic and let Google go out and discover any instances of it on the web. Alternatively, you can also do a Google search for the exact title of your infographic. As you discover sites using your infographic, you can contact them and ask that they add attribution back to your website.

This strategy also works well for Creative Commons images. If you create great images that people can use on their websites and blogs, make them Creative Commons licensed. Share them on sites like Flickr. Then look for websites using the images to make sure they have been credited properly back to you with a backlink to your website. If not, request one.

What other strategies do you use to claim pre-existing link opportunities? Please share in the comments!

The post Link Reclamation – How to Get the Links You Deserve appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.

This is where using a link building persona can come in handy. It takes a little evaluation of the site you are targeting and the person (webmaster) you are going to email to decide what persona to go with, but if you choose the right one along with a well-composed link request, you are going to stand a better shot of your link.

Photo Credit: Nicolas Nova on Flickr

Here are some example link building personas to choose from, why they work (or don’t), and keys to using them effectively.

The Online Marketer / SEO

Most link builders fit into this category as many people hire out to agencies and consultants for their SEO work. Emails from SEOs are typically more focused on getting the link details down to a point and less focused on building a personal relationship with the webmaster. SEOs usually do not have a lot of enthusiasm for the websites they are building links for, and that generally shows in the email.

The result: Emails from this perspective are ignored by many webmasters. Alternatively, the ones that know many SEOs will pay for a link will respond to the link request by requesting compensation, regardless of whether the SEO mentioned whether they would pay for the link in the request. The overall success rate with this approach is probably lowest.

The Website / Business Owner

Approaching a webmaster as the website owner, business owner, or employee of the website you are building usually has a more genuine feel. Emails from someone directly involved in the website or business are typically more focused on introducing the website / business and why it would be a beneficial link for the webmaster to share with their audience. Great enthusiasm for the website they are building links for is shown in the email.

The result: Emails from this perspective are usually met with a more positive response. Instead of buying a link, you may be redirected to purchase advertising, but it will happen less often.

The trick (if you are not affiliated with the website or business) is making webmasters think that you are. While you can use a generic email address like Gmail, it’s best if you can get an email address from the domain of the website itself (you@domain.com). Let your client know that the best responses happen this way. Just don’t do anything spammy with the client’s domain-based email address or you could get them in trouble.

A Fan of the Webmaster

This persona allows you to interact with the webmaster in a helpful manner. It’s a good one to use when you are working on a broken link strategy which entails looking for pages with broken links relevant to the website you are building links for and asking the webmaster to replace the broken link with yours. You can also use it for a regular link request where you simply suggest to a webmaster that the website you are building links for would fit perfectly on a specific page on their website.

The result: Emails from this perspective are usually viewed as being helpful, especially if they are coming from someone who is a fan. Hence, they can be effective. There is little chance that the webmaster will expect compensation coming from this approach.

The key is to make sure that the webmaster knows you are a fan by mentioning something about their website outside of the page you are building the link upon. For example, you regularly check out their site for resources on that particular topic and happened to find another resource that would go great with the ones the webmaster has already suggested.

Do you use personas for link building? What other approaches have you attempted and what have been the results? Please share in the comments!

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