Archive for July, 2010
Changes in Natural Linking - Death, Rebirth, or a Return to the Roots?
When contemplating link-building strategies you need to take the user experience into account. They should look at your citations (links) as references to substantiating or relevant documents. Search engines will use these signals to define your site. Consider the user experience when focusing on building contextually relevant links for your business, and you will be rewarded with higher amounts of relevant direct referrals and relevant search engine placement.
There’s been some excellent articles recently focused on this issue, including changes in natural linking by Eric Enge, Editorial Citation by Rand Fishkin and natural link building strategies by Michael Gray.
Michael’s analysis was interesting in that he took Google’s guidelines at face value, created great content, and spent only 10% of his time building links manually. After six months of blogging, Google represented just over 0.5% of his referral traffic. That’s a pathetic amount, considering how popular the posts were in StumbleUpon, Digg, and other social networks. In fact, when he analyzed his traffic, he discovered that the blog didn’t perform in the top 100 for even the simplest keywords. The exception was one post for which Michael did a little link building. Apart from this limited effort, certain posts which received over 30,000 views from social marketing generated almost no natural inbound links.
Now, Michael isn’t advocating that content doesn’t matter. It does, as it engages readers and entices them to return. His article restates a point everyone in the industry has been making for years: If you build it, they don’t just come, or in this case, the links don’t just happen, and the engines won’t just refer anyone your way. As Ian Lurie wrote: “content alone is not going to boost you into the top 10 for any even remotely relevant phrase”
Of particular interest to me in juxtaposition to the pieces by Ian and Michael were the articles by Eric Enge and Rand Fishkin. Rand hypothesizes that 20% of the web’s links exist to influence the search engines. That’s a lot of noise, but that also means 80% are not there just to influence search engines. Eric makes the point that 80% leaves lots of meat to work with and links are still a big factor, but he also estimates that you need to spend 30% of marketing energy into social media, which is interesting in the context of Michael’s lack of success with organic link building from social networks.
There’s an interesting question in Eric’s article, which every site operator should ask themselves: “If you aren’t good enough to be worth linking to, then what do you have anyway?” The answer is of course, you need to build better content. But, a hint to the broader correct answer can actually be found in the title of Rand’s article: Editorial Citation.
Rand notes this in his reference to three periods of linking: 1) early web; links were editorial like footnotes and citations, helping people navigate the web; 2) The engines incorporate web page links as a value metric in ranking algorithms (Google / Alltheweb/ Teoma); 3) non-webpage citations. Google’s recent patent publication which was reviewed by Eric Ward, supports this last point - see Eric’s point #5.
However, another point in the patent leads us in towards additional context: user interaction with links may determine their value, and may go a long way to resolving the dichotomy between the points these articles circle, but also may point search marketers towards clues around link building strategies going forward.
Links from different areas of the document will have different value, and will pass different amounts of link juice flow. Obviously, a link from one site to the next where the link is located in the main body content and is relevant to both the origin and destination will end up scoring higher than an irrelevant link, or links within footers, template side navs and the like. Which really is the point: links as citations are the oldest form of linking, and still carry the most value.
Bryan Eisenberg & Richard Zwicky at SES Toronto
Bryan Eisenberg, who is the best-selling author of “Waiting for Your Cat to Bark?: Persuading Customers When They Ignore Marketing” and many other books and I did a panel together recently at SES Toronto. After the panel, he interviewed me with regards to meaningful metrics. It was a good panel, and interview.
Perhaps the most salient point from both panel and interview is that when a business is trying to understand and evaluate key metrics in online marketing they need to look through the entire value-chain. The challenges of the changing marketplace make it very difficult for marketers to measure all channels equitably and fairly, balancing search, social media, email, newsletters, etc. Bryan highlighted the importance of cross channel metrics, which I was able to substantiate with an example of a client who was struggling to find value in PPC after having only invested in, and measured, one channel. Upon examination, the client discovered that a significant portion of the business’s social and organic search traffic was preceded by visits from the paid channel, and that these multi-touch visits were actually converting and providing measurable results at a higher rate than single visit traffic.
I hope you take the 5 minutes to listen to the interview, and feel free to send me any questions that you have as a consequence.
The Launch of Linker - SEO’s Version of Matchmaking
Ten days ago, after a long period of development followed by extensive testing during our Beta period, Linker has been launched to the public for anyone to sign up.
In the early days of the Internet, before the search engines came along, navigation was driven by links which allowed people to jump from one place (document) to another. People used hyperlinks as authors use footnotes in reference texts. The purpose of the links were to provide citations, and to advise readers of other valuable resources which they ought to consult.
When the Internet began to become popular with the masses, marketers started using links as a means of traffic acquisition. I did this type of link building as far back in the mid 1990’s “Before Google” for my own businesses. This marketing trend was actually followed by, not preceded by the search engines recognizing the value of links, and embedding a weighting value for links into their algorithms. Of course, at first the search engine did things differently, valuing any old link as a positive score. When this link recognition system was discovered as a performance score value in search results, it was unsurprising that some marketers saw the opportunity and took advantage of it. What is surprising is how far away from the fundamental reasons for link building the noise in the marketplace has taken this strategy, especially in light of how strongly the search engines have driven away from volume. Their mantra could be qualified as back to the future in regards to link values.
The reality is high value links matter. Period. A high quality link is one which readers will find of value. Generally, these links are found within the body content of a document and the link points out to content on another page or site which is relevant to your content. Your link is adding perspective for your readers, and also helping build both your sites’ authority in the search results.
Finding great resources to link to is not easy however. There’s so much content, how do you know which are the best resources, and the ones which are the most relevant to you and your readers? Just as importantly, how do you get in contact with representatives of the right sites which are the appropriate matches for yours? This was the challenge I used to face as an online marketer, and the manual process I was explaining internally when we came up with the idea behind Linker.
I’ll be starting a series of posts shortly around the philosophy behind the Linker product, and how it came to be. The reality is, no one likes to get all those spammy “link to me” emails that flood our email inboxes. They really are useless Junk. Links from, or to these low value, low relevance domains won’t add to your site’s user experience, or add any value to your business in terms of visibility in the search engines. That said, everyone with any online marketing knowledge recognizes that link building is a formidable tool in any good marketing campaign. The point everyone needs to focus on is that good quality, relevant link-building improves the user experience of your web site, and at the same time also drives traffic via search engines and direct referrals. Addressing this need is why we built Linker, a context and relevance driven introduction system which people have labeled a dating service for online marketers.