What to Do When Your Link Building Gets Stuck

Sooner or later it is bound to happen. You or your SEO professional are in month nine of the year-long link building strategy and you’ve hit a wall. It feels like there are no more quality blogs to comment on, your list of directories to submit to is getting smaller and good, new ones increasingly hard to find and creating new content feels like pulling teeth. You’ve hit the link building wall. If you work in a relatively niche industry, you may hit this wall sooner than others. But don’t let this stop your link building efforts or SEO tactics in general.

Here are a few ideas of what to do when your link building gets stuck:

Don’t get frustrated

It’s easy to feel like you are banging your head against a wall. The first thing to remember is to not get frustrated. Frustration leads to desperation which can lead you into black hat SEO territory. No matter how slow the link building is getting, it’s never worth using black hat SEO techniques to keep the process moving.

Take a look back

Sort through your previous link building activities and check on blogs you commented on to see if the comments actually went through. If they didn’t, trying commenting on another post on that blog. It’s possible that the blog owner isn’t actively monitoring comments, but that doesn’t mean you should keep from trying again.

Also look back at your directory submissions and make sure those got posted. If they didn’t, try resubmitting your URL. If the link did go through, make sure you filled out the profile as completely as you could. If you’ve updated any keywords, go in and edit the profile description to match.

Double check on your article submissions. If an article didn’t go through, feel free to resubmit it to a different site. Why let good content go to waste? As long as it is still relevant, you can publish it on another site.

Check out the competition

If you are really stuck, check out what kind of SEO your top three competitors are doing. What blogs are they commenting on, what kind of news are they pushing in press releases. Maybe one of them stumbled upon a really good link building source that you can use for your own efforts. What associations are they apart of? What trade shows are they going to? Their on- and offline marketing efforts might just be the inspiration you need.

Look outside your industry

If you’re a company that makes tennis rackets, you’ve probably focused your link building efforts to the tennis/tennis racket industry. Take a look outside your specific niche and find related industries that you can work with. Why not see if you can make headway elsewhere? Think outside the box and see where that takes you.

The important thing is to not give up. With so much time and effort already invested in your link building strategy, don’t throw away what you’ve done because you aren’t sure where to go.

Source: http://www.business2community.com/online-marketing/what-to-do-when-your-link-building-gets-stuck-025915

Introduction to Google PageRank: Myths & Facts

Google's PageRank algorithm has been around since, well, as long as Google itself. Yet there still seems to be a lot of confusion about what it is, how it works, how important it is and how we can use data based on it.

While all of those things have changed to a degree over the years, as Google as refined and developed the way it does things, the basic facts have remained constant.
Before we begin diving into PageRank, however, we need to make an important distinction between two things:

• PageRank: This refers both to the algorithm itself and the score given to each page as a result of it.
  
• Toolbar PageRank: This unofficial term is the name usually given to the publicly displayed PageRank score. Officially, it's only available through the Google Toolbar (hence the name), but in reality many SEO tools provide it.

We'll look at these two things separately.

PageRank: What is it, Exactly?
PageRank is what made Google what it is today: a heuristic analysis of the web's link graph, or, in simpler terms, a concrete, mathematical way to ascribe importance to a web page based on the links that point to it from other web pages.

This is what initially made Google's results so successful compared to the nine other search engines that had come before it. Although they weren't the first to look at links, they were the first to do it in such a meaningful way.

I won't go into great detail on exactly how it works, but if you're interested, Matt Cutts has a decent bit of information about it as the intro to his post about why PageRank sculpting no longer works.

The algorithm itself is described in Brin and Page's seminal paper, "Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Search Engine." In other words, it's public knowledge.

However, it is also clear that PageRank has evolved a lot over the last 10 years. The basic structure is probably pretty much the same as it has ever been, but it has become much more sophisticated in many respects (for example, introducing an additional factor for detecting and valuing links based on where they are on a page, as well as on the strength of the page).

For this reason, PageRank as presented in the original paper is usually referred to as pure or classic PageRank, as opposed to its modern counterpart.

It's also clear that Google now uses many other factors to produce the search results that you see every day. Some of them, as with PageRank, will be based solely on links. Others will be based on all sorts of other factors.

Google doesn't reveal how important PageRank is as a part of this total mix, but while its importance has clearly diminished over time, it is still an important part of the total ranking algorithm.

But now that we've discussed the PageRank algorithm itself, what about the number that is derived from it?

Google is also suitably vague about this (and, remember, they don't reveal it either: they only reveal the Toolbar PageRank), but, in essence, it is a logarithmic scale (like the Richter scale for measuring earthquakes) with a base of about 16.

So, that means that a PageRank of 2 is 16 times bigger than a PageRank of 1; a PageRank of 3 is 16 times better than a PageRank of 2, and so on. Just to give you an idea of some scales here:

• PageRank 4 is 4,096 times better than PageRank 1
• PageRank 5 is 65,536 times better than PageRank 1
• PageRank 5.1 86,475 times better than PageRank 1
• PageRank 7 is 4,294,967,296 (over 4 billion) times better than PageRank 1

So, hidden within that deceptively simple scale from zero to 10 is actually a massive range of importance. And this brings us nicely onto Toolbar PageRank.

Is Toolbar PageRank Just the Number From the PageRank Algorithm?
No. Google would like you to believe that this is the case, but most SEO professionals believe that there are other ranking factors from different algorithms mixed in with this number.

However, the main problem isn't whether it is or isn't just PageRank, but the fact that there is precious little information about whether it is or isn't. There are also a number of other problems with it:

1. It's only reported to one significant figure. It should be obvious from the above numerical examples that even the difference between PageRanks 5 and 5.01 is far bigger than the difference between PageRanks 4 and 5. So, the single figure that we're given bears remarkably little information.
   
2. Even ignoring that is it/isn't it PageRank debate, the number given by Google is probably not an accurate reflection of a page's PageRank anyway.
   
3. It's only updated for each page three or fours times per year. In contrast, Google's internal representation of a page's PageRank is probably updated almost constantly.

It should be clear by now that although the PageRank algorithm itself is important, Toolbar PageRank is next to useless as an SEO metric. I would recommend not using it at all as a measure of an SEO campaign's performance (what you should be measuring we can discuss another time!).

It does have one worthwhile use, however, which is looking for manual penalties (although even in this context it should be used with caution). If you are monitoring the rank of a page over time and it suddenly drops, that is a good indication that a penalty has been applied.

Likewise, if you're comparing a page's PageRank with its equivalent mozRank (an indepedent figure that guesses at what a page's PageRank really is) and the PageRank is markedly lower than the mozRank, that may also indicate a manual penalty. This can be useful when selecting link building partners.

It can also have some use for analyzing how Google perceives the importance of pages within a single site by comparing PageRanks across the domain and for looking for missed opportunities (i.e., if you have a page with a high PageRank but no traffic, it probably means that you need to work on incoming anchor text and on-page optimization for your chosen keywords). However, I wouldn't recommend using it to compare page across different domains.

Busting Some Myths
And lastly, lets finish off by dispelling some common myths and misconceptions around PageRank:

1. PageRank acts like a vote for one page by another. It's a great description for lay people, but it really doesn't work that way -- and is actually quite misleading. If you are, or want to be, an SEO professional, it's really worth understanding PageRank properly: read Matt Cutt's post that I linked above (or read the original paper). A good analogy would be that is calculates the probability that a web surfer will end up on any given page if he or she follows links around the web at random. One immediate impact from this is that linking out actually reduces a page's PageRank. It also shows us that a link from a page with many incoming links is better from a page that has just a few.
   
2. Sites have PageRank. No, they don't! PageRank applies just to individual pages, not to sites as a whole. People often refer to the PageRank of their site, but what they are actually referring to (unwittingly or otherwise) is the PageRank of their site's home page. It is thought that Google does have another link based algorithm, often referred to as DomainRank, that works in exactly the same way as PageRank, but at the domain level, not the page level. But that's a different story. It's also worth noting that home pages tend to have higher PageRanks than pages within a site, as they tend to have more links pointing to them.
   
3. PageRank relates directly to traffic. It doesn't. PageRank is an indicator of a page's latent ability to rank, but says nothing about how it is actually ranking or for what terms it is ranking. Think of it as a potential. For actual rankings to occur, Google also has to associate a given page with one or more keywords, however strongly, and it uses entirely different algorithms to do that (both link based and otherwise). So, it is not uncommon to see, for example, a PageRank 3 page getting orders of magnitude more traffic than a PageRank 5 page, because the former is strongly associated with some popular keywords, and the latter is potentially not strongly associated with anything. However, it's reasonable to assume that between two pages equally associated with the same keywords, the one with the stronger PageRank would rank higher in the results (although all the usual caveats in the information given above still apply).
   
4. PageRank shows how important Google thinks your site is. No. PageRank is just one of many factors that Google employs for indexing sites and ranking them.
   
5. PageRank is Google's only link-related algorithm. Again, false -- although when Google first started this was probably true. They now use calculations based on links for all sorts of other things to do with indexation, ranking, and keyword association.

Summary
Having at least a decent working knowledge of PageRank is vital to the working SEO, both in terms of helping with link building and understanding the distribution of PageRank scores around the web. However, as an SEO metric, outside of some very narrow circumstances, Toolbar PageRank is almost completely worthless and should be approached with extreme caution.

Source: http://searchenginewatch.com/3642190

Social Media Marketing Basics: Think First

Social media marketing is new. Social is great -- it's free and it's a pot of gold that only takes a few days to set up and not more than a week to get results.


Just look at all the books on Amazon. Look at the number of results you get in Google when you do a search for "social media success." This is it!


The above is what you might read from a so-called "guru" who really doesn't know what he's talking about.

In reality, successful social media marketing costs money, takes time, and requires hard work. And do you think it's new? Think again.

For many search marketers and social media experts, this may be obvious, but many marketers just starting with social still feel that they are starting something new and forget to take two critical steps: thinking and planning.

Social Media Marketing is Nothing New
Let's start with the feeling that being social is completely new. Really? You think so?

The essence of using social marketing has been with us for centuries. Jesus Christ probably was one of the first who realized that he needed others to spread his words. He had 12 followers at first, but those 12 eventually reached millions -- and he didn't have a Twitter account.

People have been social for ages. If you go to a specific restaurant, for instance, chances are someone within your social circle pointed you toward that restaurant.

So being social is nothing new, and as a marketer you have to realize that. Social media is a tool that can help you "do" your marketing, but you have to have the basics right: you want to find your "apostles," the people who will spread your message.

Let's zoom in a little on two things marketers should know when it comes to using social media full force. These are two things you can take from "old" marketing methods, but some social media marketers tend to forget.

Target Audience
The "old style" marketer looks at a potential target audience before doing anything. Somehow many marketers who want to do social marketing don't seem to care about that, they look at the tool first: "We need to Twitter, so let's Twitter!"

As a marketer you shouldn't dive into social media right away. Think first. Find out who you're targeting -- and make sure you aren't looking at your potential audience one-dimensionally.

Your potential clients are one part of your target audience, but don't forget about those apostles who will spread your message. The goal of targeting your apostles is to inform your potential clients, not to necessarily turn them into clients.

Where?
Something "old school" marketers always look at is where to target people.

As said, many marketers think they have to go social and immediately open up a Twitter account and create a Facebook page. But for who and for what?

Again: think first. Where is your target audience? Are they on Twitter? Do they want to see you on Facebook? Or maybe you should be focusing more on LinkedIn, for example?

This is a different kind of "where" than "old" marketing, but it's still there.

Summary
In short: marketers shouldn't treat social as if it's a completely new ballgame. Yes, there are new elements to it, but the mindset has been around for centuries. Keep that in mind and social will become a lot more effective.

Source: http://searchenginewatch.com/3642198

How To Hire an In-House SEO

For many companies, hiring an SEO is diving into the dreaded realm of information "you don't know you don't know." In the search world, there are few more expensive and time wasting efforts than hiring a full-time employee who's in over his/her head.

The spectrum of talent is far too wide in the search world. There are terrifically gifted folks and others who lack the required knowledge and skill set to have any impact.
There are two major reasons for this astronomical talent disparity within the industry:

1. Search is an unregulated industry.
   
2. The process for hiring an SEO has been largely unexplored.

Here is a four-step guide to hiring a good SEO. Marketing managers: consider yourself equipped to make the right hire!

Step 1: Get a Strategy From an Agency
Contrary to popular belief, many agencies such frequently work with in-house teams (or companies planning an in-house move) and happily provide walk-away audits and strategies for creating search traffic.

Having a strategy in place before beginning the hiring process is a great way to understand your search needs, essential tasks, and realistic (data-driven) goals. This provides a great, objective framework to use as a guide during the hiring process.

If you aren't budgeted for a full strategy, see if you can hire an agency for site review. It won't be nearly as thorough, but should provide a high-level understanding of your search needs.

Step 2: Collect Your Talent Pool
Ask for recommendations, post on relevant job boards, and weed through the siege of monster.com. Try to get a pool of at least five candidates with relevant work experience.

Step 3: Interview & Test
There are five essential skills required to be an effective SEO consultant. Failure to answer any of the following questions with a resounding "yes!" should be considered a non-starter.

1. Does the consultant have a strong understanding of on-page factors? Is the code clean, light, and formatted properly? Are keywords used appropriately? The ability to analyze, understand, and quickly make on-page changes are a foundation of search.

• Ask: What are the five most important factors in on-page optimization?
  
• Ask: What are some on-page activities that are considered black hat by Google?
  
• Ask: What is cross-domain canonicalization?
  
• Test: Give your candidate a laptop with only Notepad open (and no Internet connection!). Ask the SEO to code a page from scratch and optimize it for 2-3 keywords. This test will give you a strong understanding of the SEO's coding skills, ability to execute a task quickly and effectively, and an overall understanding of important on-page search factors. At the very least, ask your consultant to write some meta data.

2. Does the consultant have a strong understanding of off-page factors?

• Ask: What are the most important off-page ranking factors?
  
• Ask: Can you discuss previous link building efforts and results in terms of traffics/rankings/and revenue?
  
• Test: This is the perfect opportunity to give your candidate a case study. For example, X domain is looking to increase rankings for the keyword "teddy bears." Based on their ranking goals, competitive landscape, and audience demographic, please create two to three link building strategies and accompanying campaigns (I use this term loosely). An SEO candidate can really prove his worth if he's able to generate an ROI model.

3. Does the consultant have a strong conceptual understanding of other channel activities such as conversion optimization or social media?

• Ask: How do you see SEO and social media interacting in the next five years?
  
• Test: Show the candidate a PPC landing page and ask him/her to list five different ways to improve conversion rates.

4. Does the consultant have reasonably strong analytics skills?

• Ask: Do you have the capacity to correlate revenue to search traffic?
  
• Ask: How would you measure rankings?
  
• Test: Allow the candidate access to analytics. Ask your consultant to segment traffic by non-branded search terms and to determine the most valuable search terms.

5. Does the candidate have the ability to perform market/keyword research?

• Ask: Describe your process for conducting competitive research. What tools (if any) do you use?
  
• Ask: What is the most important step we need to take to catch up to competitor X?
  
• Test: Give your candidate a list of five keywords and ask him/her to sort the list by most competitive to least competitive and by the keywords that you think would convert at the highest rates.

Step 4: Hire the Agency for a Few More Hours
If you've followed step three, you should have a tremendous data set to make a decision. Give the data to the agency and ask them to review the answers (I would recommend removing candidates' names).

The agency should be able to quickly review and make recommendations or call out red flags based upon the answers. Additionally, the agency will likely be able to point out any potential weaknesses that might be addressed through training after the hiring process is complete.

Final Takeaways
Good SEOs always appreciate the opportunity to demonstrate their skill sets, so don't be afraid to ask these types of questions. Feel free to turn to the agency or a trusted third party to help tailor questions like the ones listed above to your unique business goals.

Remember, tests like the ones listed above only give any idea of skill set. Be sure to get qualified references and a verifiable performance history to help mitigate risk.

Source: http://searchenginewatch.com/3642213

8 Reasons SEO Audits are Needed Before Sites are Built

If you’ve worked in the SEO industry for any significant length of time, you’ve inevitably had a situation arise where a brand new site was being planned or an existing site was being overhauled and you were brought in to ensure the new (or new version) site would get SEO.

And unless you have magic fairy dust at your beck and call, you have also had to deal with the fact that you were called in after the new site was already planned. Or more likely, the build was already taking place. Or worse, already done and in launch mode. Unfortunately this is the wrong time to be doing SEO, let alone performing an SEO audit.

1. Keyword Focus

If you don’t know what keywords to focus on, you can’t truly know or understand the topical focus you need to convey across the entire site. Sure, you may have content already written – maybe even from a previous site. Except without current data on now-trending topics, your message could now be irrelevant. Or even if it’s relevant, it could be lacking the focus necessary to current search trends.

In an SEO audit, keyword research is paramount. Not only to hone in on timely relevance and trending, but to also help reveal who the true competitors are that are currently ranking for those main topics you need to focus on.

2. URL Structure

All too often, marketers or site designers or developers know there needs to be content related to services or products, and information about the company or business, yet without first having an SEO audit performed, URLs can’t properly be seeded without that keyword research being performed. And only after the keyword research is performed can you understand what the URL structure needs to look like.

3. Content Organization

URL structure is integral to content organization, and builds on topical organization. Without a proper SEO audit, you don’t know the best way to organize the content on a site. Sure, you can guess, or “think” you know, yet that’s like rolling the dice believing (falsely) that “good enough” is well, good enough. If you don’t get your content organization plan hammered out before site build or rebuild, you end up causing topical dilution.

4. Content Depth

Without a proper SEO audit, how do you know the amount of content you need, whether it’s on an individual page, an entire section, or the whole site? Only a proper audit can reveal the sweet spot in your goal setting plans for competitive success. And only the sweet spot, weighed against topical focus priorities, will reveal how much content you need.

5. Inbound Link Planning

Only a proper SEO audit can reveal the details of a link building plan, based on the combination of the previous four reasons you need to do the audit first. From what keywords you’ll need in your inbound link mix, to what the URLs will be you’ll be targeting, to which groups of content need how much link building effort to support, supplement or overcome content depth factors.

6. Social Media Needs

Without a proper audit, social media initiatives are another shot in the dark. Maybe you’re going to succeed at reaching your prospective clients or customers, yet even if you do, you won’t be able to maximize the value of your effort without that site audit.

A properly performed audit will reveal details about your target market, competitive landscape and opportunities for social media initiatives. Again, the sweet spot grid will help identify some of these, as will an understanding of those topic priorities.

7. Production Costs

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been brought in to perform an audit after production has begun. Let’s just say “too many”. Given all of the issues I’ve described above, it’s going to inevitably mean some of that production effort will have to be scrapped if you want to get the full value from your SEO efforts. URL changes, content re-organization, topical messaging, starting link building campaigns…

All of these cost additional money that can always be saved by first having that audit performed.

8. Sanity

This is actually an important reason – not just for the sake of the person performing the audit. Every person involved in the process, whether they’re willing to acknowledge this factor or not, will suffer a lot less stress, a lot less chaos when an audit is performed first.

Real World Barriers

Quite often, you’ll find key players in the web initiative will have a vested interest in having the site build started or even completed before SEO is considered. Usually it’s a financial issue – “we have to get the new site out there sooner – we can’t afford to wait a week or a month…”

Sadly, that’s usually because people have made promises or commitments they are unwilling to break. Sometimes its fear based, other times its more subtle fear – pride, stubborn thinking, ego-driven need to maintain control of a process. And yes, sometimes its even a matter of “any site is better than no site”.

Nonetheless, when taking a detached view of everything involved and the ramifications of failing to have that audit performed before the site build, everything points to the sequence needing to be audit first, build later.


Read more: http://www.searchenginejournal.com/8-reasons-seo-audits-are-needed-before-sites-are-built/28858/

Google +1 Released: It’s Not a Social Network

Among the names announced for Google’s rumored social network are “Google Me” and “Google+1.” Well, at the end of March Google announced that Google +1 is being launched. However, while the utility is social in nature, this certainly isn’t Google’s shot at a service that can compete with Facebook. Rather, it’s a simple button that allows users to indicate which sites they found to be useful.

The easiest comparison to make is with Bing’s current “like” option for pages (integrated with Facebook). The new “+1″ button will appear in much the same location and serve a similar function: letting others connected to you know that you found the site useful. The end goal is to make the search results more social, allowing you to see results that have been +1′d by others like you.

But how does Google determine which users really are “like you”? The first method used is examining similar interests. If you +1 nine sites and another user also +1s those nine sites, a tenth site on the same category +1′d by that other user is likely to be of interest to you. However, Google also assures us that they will be adding a more integrated social structure, where connections on Twitter and other similar sites would also be used to help find appropriate pages. Should Google ever release a full-fledged social service, it would almost certainly be integrated as well.

+1, especially when combined with the new option to block sites, is also a service that adds a level of human curation to the search results. This may help address issues of spam that have become so central to focus lately, although exactly how much impact +1 will have depends on how strong its impact is on general SERP placement.

The +1 button is available now on the experimental search site, and will be propogated to the main site once some initial testing has been completed. Other +1 services, including buttons for webmasters to add to their site (allowing +1ing past the search page), are also being released.

Read more: http://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-1-released-its-not-a-social-network/29006/