All too often, I get a fair amount of frantic emails from people who are seeing a dropoff in rankings and/or traffic after the latest algorithmic update and are looking for help or just a second opinion. Sometimes a keyword that has been number 2 for 8 months in a row moves down a spot […]
In the past few months, link building as we’ve known it has been totally shaken up by three major events: Google anounced that they were changing how they view links (nicely recapped here:) Pandamonium! Certain large blog networks were devalued and webmasters started to receive warnings about unnatural links. Link building can still work well […]
I really hate reading articles where people say “I told you so” or blast someone’s techniques, but the recent crackdown and deindexing of blog networks is a great lesson in what can happen if you rely on any one method in link building. I know people who run these types of networks and I know people […]
Links are usually the first thing that people look at when something happens in the SERPs. Surely, if your rankings fall, you must just have crap links, right? Well look elsewhere too…because I’m here to tell you that immediately blaming the links and not looking for problems elsewhere won’t always get those rankings back up. […]
Every day it seems that there’s a new tool out there to monitor, measure, track, and suggest what we should be doing. Many of these are free or offer free trials, which I love, but finding the time to test out a new tool in order to see if it suits you isn’t always easy. […]
The goal of most link building campaigns is to drive traffic to your site and get amazing rankings. However, consider this: with all the available social media channels where people will be engaging with your brand, why not view them with the same importance as your main site? What will happen if your site gets […]
Next up in our tool review series is Majestic SEO‘s suite. There are 4 levels of access with one being free (and limited) and the others being grouped by the amount of reports/access to their API needed. (Note: the free package may still require you to register in order to see a fuller dataset.) Paid plans […]
For many search marketers, SEO Book is a legend. Founded by (another legend) Aaron Wall in 2003, SEO Book now includes Aaron’s wife Giovanna Villanueva, Peter Da Vanzo, and Eric Covino. Membership works out to around $10 a day ($300 a month) and includes over 100 custom training modules, a private forum, exclusive members-only tools, and […]
I recently did the SMX East 2011 Link Clinic with Rae Hoffman-Dolan and beforehand, this being my first time speaking at an event, I wanted some advice. One thing she said really hit home, and that was not to turn the session into an SEO clinic. I would have done just that actually. To me, […]
Asking questions is considered to be one of the most basic yet the most effective ways of learning. Whether you ask questions to better understand a technique, an event, or a motive, you’re gaining insight that should help you in the present and the future. It’s no wonder that question and answer sites continue to […]
I’ve been interested in assistive technology for years, dating back to when I was (briefly) a social worker and I saw how differently abled users navigated the Internet. As an SEO and a link builder, I’m tasked with making sure that search engines and users can find and interpret content, but as you can imagine, […]
As site quality becomes more of a factor in how Google values sites, it’s going to become critical for link builders to be able to figure out what identifies a quality site. However, link builders aren’t miracle workers. Two years ago, we could make sites rank for just about anything by grabbing up links like […]
Since “how much would it take me to get started?” is a common question that potential clients ask me, I thought I’d expand a bit on my original answer to Debra Mastaler’s forum questions. I love the idea of only having $100 to get started because many times, having less money means you have to […]
It’s often said that paid links have created a false economy. As someone who has admittedly purchased links and contributed to that, I would definitely have to agree. I’ve caught loads of heck for buying links and there have been recent high-profile slaps for sites caught buying links, but what isn’t often discussed is the […]
Although my agency does use a variety of paid and free tools for various purposes, by and large, we do most of our discovery through manually searching the web. If you’ve done it, you will know that while it’s fun and interesting at times, it’s also a serious pain. It’s inefficient, it’s tedious, and you’re […]
Functionalism is a concept that first intrigued me when I studied Anthropology in college, as I really responded to the idea that people do certain things for certain individual reasons that matter only to them, reasons that may seem crazy to outsiders, but that truly do make up a necessary part of someone’s culture. It’s […]
There is a company that I once bought something from, something that did not at all live up to my expectations, something that was just cheap and tacky and not at all what I wanted. However, it was quite inexpensive and I wasn’t feeling particularly outraged, so I just grinned and bore it. Fast forward […]
In case you haven’t noticed, some sites look fairly horrific on mobile devices. Everything is all jumbled up and that link you really want to click is almost impossible to get to. If you’re the link builder who begged and begged (and maybe even paid) to get that link, you’ve now lost a potential mobile […]
Have you noticed that it’s harder to find critical contact information these days? If you have a question about an online order, finding a phone number so that you can speak to an actual person is a nightmare at times. Some sites are automatically setting ridiculous default options for you (yay spammy and for-sale email […]
When you’re trying to build as natural a backlink profile as possible, you need to carefully think about all the things that could make it look strange. If your typical link growth each month over the past 12 months has been 5 links, getting 100 will seem odd. Suddenly focusing on an incredibly bizarre long-tailed […]
With the rush to move sites up to the top of the SERPs, all of my clients want keyword-rich text links. It makes sense, as if you’re trying to rank number one for the phrase “cheap environmental home design” you’re obviously going to want that in your anchor text. However, there’s much more to the […]
When a potential client comes to us for a proposal, the first thing that we do is to analyze the existing backlink profile. We used to put an insane amount of time into this exercise, but when that time is weighed against other tasks for existing clients, we decided that it needed to be made […]
Last month, I wrote about how to use your site’s bounce rate for link building purposes. Someone emailed me privately to ask if there were any other (perhaps not so standard) metrics that I used outside of toolbar PageRank, keyword rankings, and traffic. In an effort to see if I could find something I’ve never […]
The bounce rate of a site is the percentage of users who leave without going to another page on your site before the analytics session times out, with the length of a session being dependent upon your specific analytics package (I’ve heard that 30 minutes is the average.) Usually listed as Bounce Rate in your […]
Look around for link building advice and one of the most common pieces is to re-engineer the backlink profile of your competitors. The reasoning behind this is that if they’re ranking well (meaning above you, of course), they must be doing what Google likes, so why not copy it and see yourself shoot up in […]
I’m currently reading a novel that many people rave about, but it’s not really my thing. My least favorite book ever is One Hundred Years of Solitude. I despise U2 and thought Shakespeare in Love was the most laughable piece of crap I’ve ever seen. I think Hall and Oates’ “Private Eyes” is one of […]
Many potential clients ask me what types of links they can expect if they hire us. Like any other link building company, we have our own in-house link guidelines, which clients can adapt to suit their own needs. Some clients take more risks than others, some have an in-house SEO team who guide us, and […]
Emails are the main method that my link builders use in order to build new links. It’s how we started doing things, and it continues to work for us. While there are other methods that we’ve tried, emails seem to work the best for us. That could be because for a lot of the industries […]
In 1964, Marshall McLuhan proposed the idea “that media itself, not the content it carries, should be the focus of study.” He said that a medium affects the society in which it plays a role not only by the content delivered over the medium, but also by the characteristics of the medium itself. He gave […]
Whether you’re building links for yourself or a client, at some point you need to make sure that you’re procuring inbound links to not only your homepage, but also your critical subpages. Chances are, that if you have a nicely fleshed out site that has been built (and updated) with sound SEO principles in mind, […]
If you’re one of those people who is opposed to blog links, then you’re not thinking of inbound links as a potential to send qualified traffic to your site, and that’s a serious marketing mistake. Occasionally one of our clients will state that they’d no longer like us to pursue blog links, and we argue […]
If you’ve never worked for a client who also has other people doing the same thing you do, just wait…you will. For particularly large or especially competitive link campaigns, it has become more commonplace for a company to try various options, sometimes all at once. While covering several angles is definitely a smart marketing move, it […]
When you begin a link campaign, whether you’ve inherited one or you’re starting fresh, it’s obviously a good idea to get a sense of where things stand. There are tons of articles and tools out there that exist to help you do this, and that’s fantastic (and much nicer than what we had a few […]
In this crazy digital era where even people like my poor old gospel-singing father look online for almost everything (usually guns and cashews), you really need to understand how to use as many types of advertising as possible in order to improve your efforts and expand your reach. Since link building is all over the […]
Link building tends to be viewed as on off-page activity – you’re not messing with title tags or site architecture and you don’t actually have to touch the site itself or write new content. However, if all you are doing is building more inbound links to your site without doing any analysis of on-page factors, […]
One of my link builders recently had the brilliant idea of putting together and sending out a questionnaire designed to gather information how the other link builders in our agency perform their daily link building tasks. We’ve always worked on the assumption that each link builder will naturally be drawn to using certain specific tools […]
What should you do, as a polite and plucky link builder, if some of your inbound links just aren’t up to snuff? Do you risk alienating a well-meaning webmaster by pointing out that he’s linked to an old page that no longer exists? That he’s spelled your company’s name incorrectly, or, even worse, your URL? […]
I’ve noticed something interesting on Twitter: the #followfriday craze has spawned loads of users saying “that’s great, but tell me WHY I should follow this person.” In the interest of cramming in those precious 140 characters, many people choose to just fill the space with people to follow, rather than explaining the reasoning behind saying […]
If you use Majestic SEO’s Compare Domain Backlink History tool to view the link growth profiles of a few sites, you’ll most likely notice at least one link spike somewhere. A link spike is exactly what it sounds like it would be: a point in time when backlinks go up sharply, backlinks go back down […]
What exactly is the long tail? Individually unimportant, but collectively significant according to Chris Anderson, who coined the term in 2004. Why is the idea of the long-tailed keyphrase so critical to your link building campaign? (Besides the obvious reason that is its very definition, of course.) It’s mainly because these keyphrases (which have been […]