Ecommerce Link Building Strategies For 2010
SEOmoz Pro Webinar on link building strategies for 2010; focusing on how important link building is for SEO becuase of how much ecommerce stores have to benefit from SEO as part of their marketing mix. Here are some takeaways from the webinar with suggestions on how to apply to your online store.
Before you launch any marketing endeavor, you need to decide the desired outcome you want to achieve so you can set proper goals, create a strategy to meet those goals and then take action to bring your marketing strategy to life. To start, here are five worthy goals that a well planned & executed link building campaign will help you achieve:
1. Spread your brand awareness
2. Increase the individual ranking of a specific page for a specific keyword search
3. Diversify traffic from web properties beyond search engines
4. Increase your website’s ability to rank pages, both new & old
5. Achieve more complete indexation of your existing pages
Resist the temptation to shoot for all five goals at once. Pick one that is the most important to you; list the others in descending order of importance, for future action.
You’re much more likely to succeed and stick to the roadmap if you see progress early. Putting all your focus toward one goal helps you see progress much quicker than if you were to spread your efforts across five projects. Now for a little secret: many of the link building methods I am going to share will help you achieve multiple goals with each action. In essence, you compress the work needed to achieve multiple goals at once with overlapping link building.
Here are 3 methods to achieve each of the goals above.
Spread Brand Awareness
Increasing your brand awareness with SEO requires you to focus on exposure points for your website and brand.To increase brand awareness, go after sites with a high traffic volume, focusing on websites that already attract the people you want to sell to. Use these three simple, daily tasks to start spreading brand awareness:
Spread brand awareness with technorati, google blog search and yahoo answers
1. Read & comment on blogs
2. Answer questions in industry forums, groups (LinkedIn Groups) and answer sites (Yahoo Answers)
3. Start using Twitter, don’t promote yourself; instead, promote others with Retweet
Increase Rankings For Specific Pages
Getting your website to show up on the first page or top 3 results in the search engines for a specific keyword search is what most people think of when performing SEO. A definite advantage to this is that you can craft your content & marketing to the customer persona of someone performing that specific search. In order to achieve your desired outcome you will need links from a variety of high quality websites with specific anchor text linking to a specific page.
Here are three link building methods for getting links to rank individual pages for specific keyword searches:
Increase rankings with SEOmoz Linkscape and PRweb
1. Review sites already ranking for that keyword and build a list of domains that link to the site already ranking for the keyword query. Using Linkscape, you can find out exactly how many websites link to the site with that exact anchor text. Go after the links the sites already ranking have obtained.
2. Write an article on a long tail keyword that contains your short tail keyword term, syndicate or license that content to other sites with an attribution link to your site. This gives you complete control over the link and anchor text. Depending on where you syndicate you may or may not be able to control what websites pick up the article.
3. Press Release on a newsworthy topic your company is involved with targeted anchor text. PRWeb allows you to submit a press release and include a link with anchor text you choose for $200. Trust me, that’s a bargain.
Diversify Traffic Beyond Search Engines
While it feels great to see 80%+ of your traffic coming from organic search and anywhere from 75% to 90% of that traffic coming from Google it puts your website traffic at high risk. What happens if you disappear from the Google search results because of something out of your control? Do you really want your business to rely on just Google or any other search engine? Assuming you want continued and lasting success, you should diversify your traffic so that it is coming in from many sources.
Successful investors diversify their portfolio and successful online stores diversify their traffic sources because it leads to increased revenue sources. There are two areas to focus on when diversifying your traffic: sites with large volumes of traffic and sites with highly targeted traffic. Sites that have both are the cream of the crop for you and deserve the most focus.
The same tactics covered above in spreading brand awareness also work for diversifying your traffic. In addition, here are 3 more useful ideas.
Tubemogul video distribution and analytics
1. Tubemogul – Use tubemogul to distribute videos to multiple sites. I don’t care what you sell people are looking for videos to watch about it because the majority of people would rather watch than read. Don’t believe me? Video consumption is up while Newspapers are cutting jobs.
2. Flickr – A Picture is worth a thousand words and you can tie pictures of unrelated things back to your product or service with creativity. Pictures also help show you are a real, living human doing real things in the real world. The “fake” persona immediately disappears.
3. Your Favorite Website – That’s right, on whatever websites you enjoy today for fun start connecting with people and spreading awareness of your website. If you read news, then use something like reddit or digg. If you like randomness use twitter more. In the end, give back to the website you love in an unselfish way and you will find opportunities for exposure open you never thought possible.
Increase Ranking Ability
How cool would it be for your new pages to show up on the first page of the search results within days or hours? Amazon, ESPN and CNN have all accomplished this by generating so many incoming links from so many different websites that the search engines make an assumption that almost anything they publish must be worthy of ranking.
The good news is you don’t have to be a million or billion dollar brand website to accomplish this. You may not be able to take on Amazon for books; however, everything from jewelry to pet supplies to clothes still has room for dominant players in the search results.
The goal to accomplish this is to get a high volume of authoritative sites to link to you consistently over time. A key to success is that once someone knows about you or talks about you; don’t let them forget about you. When you stay “top of mind” the likelihood of getting multiple links over time increases.
Here are some ways to passively get a large number of links from a ton of different sites; there is work upfront but the payoff is ongoing:
1. Create a fun quiz that gives a badge at the end people can share on their blog or profile page on any number of sites. An example might be, “Are You A Redneck Marketer? Take A Quiz To Find Out”. Create 3-5 levels of Redneck Marketer and present based on answers.
2. Create free online training and offer some certification or completion recognition that includes embeddable HTML content (similar to the quiz badge) for people to put on their site, blog or profile.
3. Create a tool to help solve a problem. This could be something people use to make a purchase decision such as a wizard to decide what fits your customer’s needs. Or maybe it helps post purchase with something such as an electrical conversion calculator.
Achieve More Complete Indexation Of Your Site
As your site grows to 100,000 pages and progresses past 1,000,000+ pages you may find it difficult to keep your pages in the search index.
Amazon indexation in Google
The best way to combat this is to continually get links to your inner pages with a focus on pages you see falling out of the index. You can use both internal linking and external link building to help solve your indexation woes.
1. Link to the pages not getting indexed from pages on your site that are already indexed and get crawled often in Google. You don’t have to use your home page but the page with the link should be within one link click from your home page which makes the page out of the index only two link clicks away. The sooner the link appears on your site page the better because search robots crawl from top to bottom, left to right.
2. Guest blog post on another site and find a way to link directly to the page you want indexed. The great part about this is you get a page on someone else’s site with a very targeted link.
3. Contest Prize – Usually for ecommerce sites specific product pages are the ones that become difficult to keep in the index. Hold a contest focused around the product(s) that you are having trouble keeping indexed. Everywhere you promote the contest include a link to the product page.
Now you have three link building strategies to help you achieve five different link building goals. The most important part of being successful in SEO is taking action immediately and daily. Pick your most important goal from above and perform one of the strategies today.
What tactics have you deployed to achieve your link building goals? Share your ideas by leaving a comment below.
SEOmoz Pro Webinar on link building strategies for 2010; focusing on how important link building is for SEO becuase of how much ecommerce stores have to benefit from SEO as part of their marketing mix. Here are some takeaways from the webinar with suggestions on how to apply to your online store.
Before you launch any marketing endeavor, you need to decide the desired outcome you want to achieve so you can set proper goals, create a strategy to meet those goals and then take action to bring your marketing strategy to life. To start, here are five worthy goals that a well planned & executed link building campaign will help you achieve:
1. Spread your brand awareness
2. Increase the individual ranking of a specific page for a specific keyword search
3. Diversify traffic from web properties beyond search engines
4. Increase your website’s ability to rank pages, both new & old
5. Achieve more complete indexation of your existing pages
Resist the temptation to shoot for all five goals at once. Pick one that is the most important to you; list the others in descending order of importance, for future action.
You’re much more likely to succeed and stick to the roadmap if you see progress early. Putting all your focus toward one goal helps you see progress much quicker than if you were to spread your efforts across five projects. Now for a little secret: many of the link building methods I am going to share will help you achieve multiple goals with each action. In essence, you compress the work needed to achieve multiple goals at once with overlapping link building.
Here are 3 methods to achieve each of the goals above.
Spread Brand Awareness
Increasing your brand awareness with SEO requires you to focus on exposure points for your website and brand.To increase brand awareness, go after sites with a high traffic volume, focusing on websites that already attract the people you want to sell to. Use these three simple, daily tasks to start spreading brand awareness:
Spread brand awareness with technorati, google blog search and yahoo answers
1. Read & comment on blogs
2. Answer questions in industry forums, groups (LinkedIn Groups) and answer sites (Yahoo Answers)
3. Start using Twitter, don’t promote yourself; instead, promote others with Retweet
Increase Rankings For Specific Pages
Getting your website to show up on the first page or top 3 results in the search engines for a specific keyword search is what most people think of when performing SEO. A definite advantage to this is that you can craft your content & marketing to the customer persona of someone performing that specific search. In order to achieve your desired outcome you will need links from a variety of high quality websites with specific anchor text linking to a specific page.
Here are three link building methods for getting links to rank individual pages for specific keyword searches:
Increase rankings with SEOmoz Linkscape and PRweb
1. Review sites already ranking for that keyword and build a list of domains that link to the site already ranking for the keyword query. Using Linkscape, you can find out exactly how many websites link to the site with that exact anchor text. Go after the links the sites already ranking have obtained.
2. Write an article on a long tail keyword that contains your short tail keyword term, syndicate or license that content to other sites with an attribution link to your site. This gives you complete control over the link and anchor text. Depending on where you syndicate you may or may not be able to control what websites pick up the article.
3. Press Release on a newsworthy topic your company is involved with targeted anchor text. PRWeb allows you to submit a press release and include a link with anchor text you choose for $200. Trust me, that’s a bargain.
Diversify Traffic Beyond Search Engines
While it feels great to see 80%+ of your traffic coming from organic search and anywhere from 75% to 90% of that traffic coming from Google it puts your website traffic at high risk. What happens if you disappear from the Google search results because of something out of your control? Do you really want your business to rely on just Google or any other search engine? Assuming you want continued and lasting success, you should diversify your traffic so that it is coming in from many sources.
Successful investors diversify their portfolio and successful online stores diversify their traffic sources because it leads to increased revenue sources. There are two areas to focus on when diversifying your traffic: sites with large volumes of traffic and sites with highly targeted traffic. Sites that have both are the cream of the crop for you and deserve the most focus.
The same tactics covered above in spreading brand awareness also work for diversifying your traffic. In addition, here are 3 more useful ideas.
Tubemogul video distribution and analytics
1. Tubemogul – Use tubemogul to distribute videos to multiple sites. I don’t care what you sell people are looking for videos to watch about it because the majority of people would rather watch than read. Don’t believe me? Video consumption is up while Newspapers are cutting jobs.
2. Flickr – A Picture is worth a thousand words and you can tie pictures of unrelated things back to your product or service with creativity. Pictures also help show you are a real, living human doing real things in the real world. The “fake” persona immediately disappears.
3. Your Favorite Website – That’s right, on whatever websites you enjoy today for fun start connecting with people and spreading awareness of your website. If you read news, then use something like reddit or digg. If you like randomness use twitter more. In the end, give back to the website you love in an unselfish way and you will find opportunities for exposure open you never thought possible.
Increase Ranking Ability
How cool would it be for your new pages to show up on the first page of the search results within days or hours? Amazon, ESPN and CNN have all accomplished this by generating so many incoming links from so many different websites that the search engines make an assumption that almost anything they publish must be worthy of ranking.
The good news is you don’t have to be a million or billion dollar brand website to accomplish this. You may not be able to take on Amazon for books; however, everything from jewelry to pet supplies to clothes still has room for dominant players in the search results.
The goal to accomplish this is to get a high volume of authoritative sites to link to you consistently over time. A key to success is that once someone knows about you or talks about you; don’t let them forget about you. When you stay “top of mind” the likelihood of getting multiple links over time increases.
Here are some ways to passively get a large number of links from a ton of different sites; there is work upfront but the payoff is ongoing:
1. Create a fun quiz that gives a badge at the end people can share on their blog or profile page on any number of sites. An example might be, “Are You A Redneck Marketer? Take A Quiz To Find Out”. Create 3-5 levels of Redneck Marketer and present based on answers.
2. Create free online training and offer some certification or completion recognition that includes embeddable HTML content (similar to the quiz badge) for people to put on their site, blog or profile.
3. Create a tool to help solve a problem. This could be something people use to make a purchase decision such as a wizard to decide what fits your customer’s needs. Or maybe it helps post purchase with something such as an electrical conversion calculator.
Achieve More Complete Indexation Of Your Site
As your site grows to 100,000 pages and progresses past 1,000,000+ pages you may find it difficult to keep your pages in the search index.
Amazon indexation in Google
The best way to combat this is to continually get links to your inner pages with a focus on pages you see falling out of the index. You can use both internal linking and external link building to help solve your indexation woes.
1. Link to the pages not getting indexed from pages on your site that are already indexed and get crawled often in Google. You don’t have to use your home page but the page with the link should be within one link click from your home page which makes the page out of the index only two link clicks away. The sooner the link appears on your site page the better because search robots crawl from top to bottom, left to right.
2. Guest blog post on another site and find a way to link directly to the page you want indexed. The great part about this is you get a page on someone else’s site with a very targeted link.
3. Contest Prize – Usually for ecommerce sites specific product pages are the ones that become difficult to keep in the index. Hold a contest focused around the product(s) that you are having trouble keeping indexed. Everywhere you promote the contest include a link to the product page.
Now you have three link building strategies to help you achieve five different link building goals. The most important part of being successful in SEO is taking action immediately and daily. Pick your most important goal from above and perform one of the strategies today.
What tactics have you deployed to achieve your link building goals? Share your ideas by leaving a comment below.
After June 2009, Google Page Rank next update was definitely expected in September 2009, but now there are some news coming as Google has started the process. Google updates the PR at an interval of 3 months or so but this time they are taking more time. Google released the Google Wave and then they are also busy in Google Caffeine. Webmaster team is also busy in the upgrading the Webmaster Tool. But this time lot many websites confirming the news that Google has started the process in July and it is going to release its update on 30 October 2009.
The last update was in 23rd of June. Until now only a few site have been affected by the PR update. On 30 Oct 09 we will see clearly what are the effects of this October PR update.
Although page rank doesn’t determine your position in results, it shows your site social status and power. A site with PR 7 has more back links and more weight, when this site publishes an article it will get quickly on the first page of Google Search, even if it doesn’t have back links.
There are a lot of ways that you can improve your site’s page ranking in search engines, unfortunately, not all of them are good. Some people employ certain methods in acquiring a high page rank in search engines, even if these are considered to be deceitful in the sense that they are designed to trick the search engines – one of these methods is actually duplicating web content.
What is duplicate content?
Duplicate content in SEO is actually any web content that is considered to be similar to another site. Search engines have actually implemented new filters specifically to monitor these types of deceitful attempts to improve site’s search engine page rankings. A lot of people think that by creating multiple but similar replicas of their web pages or content, that they will be able to improve their site’s page rankings since they will be able to get multiple listings for their site. Since search engines are now monitoring these types of trickery, sites using duplicate content can actually end up getting banned from search engine indexes instead of improving their ranking.
What are considered as duplicate content?
There are a couple of duplicate content types that are being rampantly utilized by a lot of people, each one a bit different in their use, but all of them employed for the same purpose, which is to trick search engines to get better page rankings.
One way of getting a duplicate content is by having very similar websites or identical web pages on different sub-domains or domains that offer basically the same content. This may include landing or door pages aside from the content, so make sure that you avoid using this if you don’t want your site to become vulnerable to search engines’ duplicate content filter.
Another method of creating duplicate content is by simply taking content from another website or page and reorganizing it to make it appear dissimilar to its original form, though it is actually the same.
Product descriptions from many eCommerce sites are actually being utilized by other sites as well. Other sites simply copy the product description of manufacturer’s utilized by other competitive markets as well. And add the fact that the product name, as well as the name of artist, manufacturer, writer or creator would be included, a significant amount of content would show up on your page. Although this is much harder to spot, it is still considered to be a duplicate content, or spam.
Distribution of copied articles by other sites other than the one that distributed the original article can also be considered to be a duplicate content. Unfortunately, although some search engines still deem the site where the original article came from as relevant, some however, do not.
How do a search engines filter duplicate content?
Search engines filter for duplicate content by using the same means for analyzing and indexing page ranking for sites, and that is through the use of crawlers or robots. These robots or crawlers go through different websites and catalogues these sites by reading and saving information to their database. Once this is done, these robots then analyzes and compares all the information it has taken from one website to all the others that It has visited by using certain algorithms to determine if the site’s content is relevant, and if it can be considered as a duplicate content or spam.
How to avoid duplicate content?
Although you may not have any intentions to try and deceive search engines to improve your site’s page ranking, your site might still get flagged as having duplicate content. One way that you can avoid this from happening is by checking yourself if there are duplicate contents of your page. Just make sure that you avoid too much similarities with another page’s content for this can still appear as duplicate content to some filters, even if it isn’t considered to be a spam.
What is duplicate content?
Duplicate content in SEO is actually any web content that is considered to be similar to another site. Search engines have actually implemented new filters specifically to monitor these types of deceitful attempts to improve site’s search engine page rankings. A lot of people think that by creating multiple but similar replicas of their web pages or content, that they will be able to improve their site’s page rankings since they will be able to get multiple listings for their site. Since search engines are now monitoring these types of trickery, sites using duplicate content can actually end up getting banned from search engine indexes instead of improving their ranking.
What are considered as duplicate content?
There are a couple of duplicate content types that are being rampantly utilized by a lot of people, each one a bit different in their use, but all of them employed for the same purpose, which is to trick search engines to get better page rankings.
One way of getting a duplicate content is by having very similar websites or identical web pages on different sub-domains or domains that offer basically the same content. This may include landing or door pages aside from the content, so make sure that you avoid using this if you don’t want your site to become vulnerable to search engines’ duplicate content filter.
Another method of creating duplicate content is by simply taking content from another website or page and reorganizing it to make it appear dissimilar to its original form, though it is actually the same.
Product descriptions from many eCommerce sites are actually being utilized by other sites as well. Other sites simply copy the product description of manufacturer’s utilized by other competitive markets as well. And add the fact that the product name, as well as the name of artist, manufacturer, writer or creator would be included, a significant amount of content would show up on your page. Although this is much harder to spot, it is still considered to be a duplicate content, or spam.
Distribution of copied articles by other sites other than the one that distributed the original article can also be considered to be a duplicate content. Unfortunately, although some search engines still deem the site where the original article came from as relevant, some however, do not.
How do a search engines filter duplicate content?
Search engines filter for duplicate content by using the same means for analyzing and indexing page ranking for sites, and that is through the use of crawlers or robots. These robots or crawlers go through different websites and catalogues these sites by reading and saving information to their database. Once this is done, these robots then analyzes and compares all the information it has taken from one website to all the others that It has visited by using certain algorithms to determine if the site’s content is relevant, and if it can be considered as a duplicate content or spam.
How to avoid duplicate content?
Although you may not have any intentions to try and deceive search engines to improve your site’s page ranking, your site might still get flagged as having duplicate content. One way that you can avoid this from happening is by checking yourself if there are duplicate contents of your page. Just make sure that you avoid too much similarities with another page’s content for this can still appear as duplicate content to some filters, even if it isn’t considered to be a spam.
Do you know that the basic excogitation of shared online bookmarks innovate in around April 1996 when their is an official launch of itList which features to included public and private bookmarks.As the time passes and web 2.0 is ready to take birth their is a series of launch of several online bookmark services like Blink, Backflip, Clip2, ClickMarks, HotLinks, and so many others.They provided folders for masterminding bookmarks, and some services automatically synchronizes the bookmarks into folders.
What is the benefits of using Social bookmarking?
If you are a webmaster,blog owner or a blogger then you must have to know about the benefits of using social bookmarking services.Some of the important reasons are as follows:
1. To get unique traffic from various zone of social networks
2. In order to create a social buzz on your product and brands
3. To get faster indexing of the website in the search engines like google,yahoo and msn live search.
4. To get high Google page rank from various back links and bookmarking sites.
5. To get a good alexa ranks with the help of target traffic coming on your website from classified origins.
What to do if we don’t have time?
If you don’t have time to buzz your brand then you can ask your friends to do so or the best way is to get some Social Bookmarking Service that may enrich you with the above 5 benefits like Buzz,traffic Google indexing and if you want you also the Link Building Service to get better juice of google page ranks.
Ad Format:
The third way to improve ad performance is to choose another ad format. AdSense provides you with many different ad formats.
In general, wide formats seem to perform better than narrow formats. This is because people can read more words at a time without having to skip a line. I've experienced that the 336x280 large rectangle, the 250x250 square and the 160x600 wide skyscraper have done best. These are quite big ad formats, of course, so they need lots of space, but if they're placed well they usually generate more income than the smaller and narrow ad formats.
Another good format is the wide 728x90 leaderboard, which does best under the editorial content of a web page or directly under the page header, in my experience. The 468x60 banner format does not convert that well, but it can still be placed in areas where there isn't much space available, i.e. directly in the page header (next to the logo) or within articles.
I hope these tips help to get your Adsense CTR up by at least 100% if not more.
Best Google Adsense Link Colors to get higher CTR?
• Match the colors of your ads with the colour scheme of your site. Blending with your sites color profile helps to identify them not as ads, but as links similar to those of your site. The more the AdSense looks like part of your site, the higher CTR you will get. You can also match the Adsense fonts with your website font design for great results.
• Blend ads with your page - remove the borders by having a similar color as your background helps to show ads as being part of your site. Do not blend text or the ‘Ads by Gooooogle’ with your background color as it is against Google TOS (Google does not like hidden text!). However, such blending may not work for you always due to banner blindness. Neither do they see the ads, not do they click on them. So sometimes a bold contrasting ad may work better depending on your website design.
• Experiment by changing the colors, background of advertisements. You have to find out what works best for your site, not others. You can also rotate Adsense colors to reduce ad blindness.
The third way to improve ad performance is to choose another ad format. AdSense provides you with many different ad formats.
In general, wide formats seem to perform better than narrow formats. This is because people can read more words at a time without having to skip a line. I've experienced that the 336x280 large rectangle, the 250x250 square and the 160x600 wide skyscraper have done best. These are quite big ad formats, of course, so they need lots of space, but if they're placed well they usually generate more income than the smaller and narrow ad formats.
Another good format is the wide 728x90 leaderboard, which does best under the editorial content of a web page or directly under the page header, in my experience. The 468x60 banner format does not convert that well, but it can still be placed in areas where there isn't much space available, i.e. directly in the page header (next to the logo) or within articles.
I hope these tips help to get your Adsense CTR up by at least 100% if not more.
Best Google Adsense Link Colors to get higher CTR?
• Match the colors of your ads with the colour scheme of your site. Blending with your sites color profile helps to identify them not as ads, but as links similar to those of your site. The more the AdSense looks like part of your site, the higher CTR you will get. You can also match the Adsense fonts with your website font design for great results.
• Blend ads with your page - remove the borders by having a similar color as your background helps to show ads as being part of your site. Do not blend text or the ‘Ads by Gooooogle’ with your background color as it is against Google TOS (Google does not like hidden text!). However, such blending may not work for you always due to banner blindness. Neither do they see the ads, not do they click on them. So sometimes a bold contrasting ad may work better depending on your website design.
• Experiment by changing the colors, background of advertisements. You have to find out what works best for your site, not others. You can also rotate Adsense colors to reduce ad blindness.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)