You have to love stuff like this.
I did a search on “positive blog” this morning to check rankings on one of my other blogs. Here are the results (in particular, you’ll want to look at the number one result):
http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&rlz=1T4GGIH_enUS228US228&q=positive+blog
Error? Ouch. Gotta love updated SERPs.
The start of every month is either a time for celebrated accomplishment or perplexed head scratching. I never know what it will bring me. That’s because the start of every month is when I perform link audits. I check to see what progress (or lack thereof) has been made for the past 30 days. But I’ve noticed one consistent trend over the past 60 - 90 days. Links are dropping. And primarily to the home page of sites that I’m monitoring.
Why is this happening? There are any number of explanations including the following:
1. The tool is not 100% accurate. Search engines are notorious for not telling you the whole story.
2. It’s the natural ebb and flow of link development. If there is anything consistent about link building, it’s the fact that the numbers are inconsistent. That’s just how it happens. Links don’t get crawled (or reported), pages (and whole sites) disappear, and search engines update their indices.
3. Search engines are getting selective of what links are worthy of being reported. With SEs constantly updating their algorithms to deliver the best results possible, they quite often evaluate how their weighing individual elements, such as links, that play into rankings.
All of these are very plausible explanations. More often than not, I have found an entirely different culprit at work:
Site wide links.
Also knows as run-of-site links, these links typically reside in the global footer of a Web site and link back to another site. The three telling tales that a group of links are site wide links are:
To test and see if a site wide link is dragging down your overall link popularity metric, watch the link popularity of your site and compare it to the pages being indexed of the site linking to yours. If the pages indexed increase, or remain relatively stable, and your link popularity continues to drop, the site wide link is most likely at fault. To be sure, you should focus your measurement just on the page that the link(s) are pointing to.
Is this something to care about? Possibly. Something to panic about? Probably not. The reason for that is because like I said earlier, these links typically have the brand name or site name as their anchor text. If you’ve done a good job optimizing your site, you should already be showing up number one for your brand. If not, you probably have more issues than a site wide link.
It is an absolute pleasure to let you all know that I will be on an internet marketing panel at an upcoming event here in the Cleveland area. Ladies Who Launch, a organization committed to women entreprenuers is having a live event in Cleveland. They are expecting between 200 and 300 women to attend and learn about starting, maintaining and marketing their businesses.
The Cleveland live event will take place May 16, 2008 at the Cleveland Play House. I will be speaking about SEO and leveraging social media to promote online businesses and company Web sites. I’m very excited about it all and thanks to Margey Lowery for inviting me to speak!
Today is my birthday and I was amazed when I opened my email account to find several happy birthday wishes. Not from people, but from social media sites that I belong to. I started scouring my social media sites to find out who else has this personalize feature.
Not surprisingly, Facebook had a nice banner on my home page wishing me a Happy Birthday. There were also four friends who posted fond wishes as well including one friend who I’ve never met and actually only know through Facebook.
Next came a couple of mom blogger groups I belong to. This was really cool to me since moms are typically incredibly busy and for a site devoted to these busy women, this was especially touching.
A NASCAR site that I signed up on a long time ago for some sports-related research sent me a note as did a Quilting forum I belong to and participate in regularly.
Now, I just got an email from Borders wishing me well and sending me a 25% coupon (you better believe I’m going to spend it today, too).
Why am I bringing this up on blog? Because Web 2.0 is all about being personal. It’s all about relationships. Connecting and getting to know people is at the heart of social media. Regardless of what your motivation is for using any type of social media, users today want to be heard. And they appreciate those who share the same passion.
So often, I have seen companies and big businesses start a blog or a social network or set up a facebook page because it’s the “next thing to do” without taking into consideration that the people who are most likely to engage in this type of activity want to be heard and want to know that their opinion matters, even if you disagree. Setting up anything that encouarages users to generate content will draw attention, certainly. But without the right mindset about how to manage it, forget it. You’re not going to get far at all.
As most of you (should) know, I work at an interactive agency called Brulant. While we are very serious about what we do and we work ridiculously hard, we also have a really good time. Note to self, however: don’t ever go on vacation for an extended period of time. While this hasn’t happened to me but to a colleague, the shenanigans are our daily entertainment.
I have a three step starter process when working with a client in building links. By knowing the following items, I get a huge jump start on my work. I ask the client:
1. What do you stand for? Not the same as a brand positioning statement, this tells me what is truly important to my client. Is it educating your customer base? Is it providing high quality products that could save their life or otherwise improve their quality of living?
2. Who are you looking to reach? Age, gender, socioeconomic background, status in life… all of those things will guide my strategies in the right direction.
3. What are you doing to better the world? Sponsorships and partnerships play a huge role in this. This also gives your humanitarian position a spotlight. If you’re not doing anything, what do you want to do? Hopefully, the answer isn’t “nothing.”
When you look at these three things and combine with an overall picture of the site (current sources of link popularity, content inventory, etc) you can create a strategy that is not the standard cookie cutter approach, but is tailored to your client, their industry, and their goals.
Myth: Link Builders have to do all the work themselves. FALSE
When it comes to link development, many feel that they are all by themselves in the big, bad world of link requests and directory submissions. That certainly is not the case. Yet many link builders (either paid or suckers volunteers) get lost, overwhelmed and feel as though no one can do what they are doing.
Fear no more! Help is here! And it comes in many different forms.
1. Writers - We all know that valuable content attracts links especially when the content is:
Working with writers will help you reach out beyond the mundane directory submissions that encompass a lot of our time. Having valuable content to present to another site can get you some great links from valuable domains.
2. SEO Strategy Experts. These guys (and gals) should have a ton of insight into industry research, competitors and the targeted (and most coveted) keywords to go after.
3. The Data Junky. Those analytics types blow my mind. I should know, I’m related to one. They are able to look at things in a different, and “unique” manner that will help you in both strategy and execution. Not to mention measuring the effectiveness of your link building efforts. Looking beyond the Site Explorer numbers is critical, but where do you look? How do you know you’re doing “well?” The analytics friends that you encounter along the way will be beneficial beyond compare. Even if they do have an unhealthy affinity for Star Trek.
4. Social Media Gurus. You know the type. Have their own blog, twitter all throughout the day, facebook friends galore… they know everything about social media before the mainsteam crowd does. And they know what works and what doesn’t. Having some insight into the popular and upcoming trends is a huge benefit when it comes to link development, especially ground breaking ideas like link bait concepts. Make them your friends and try to keep up. With friends like these, you’ll need some high tech running shoes.
Now, you may not be on a team as diverse as this where you are working. I am fortunate as I work with a ton of brilliant people. But they are out there. And you will be able to find them the more that you reach out.
Over on SearchEngineLand.com, there is a weekly article series on link building by Eric Ward. This week, he has written about something that is truly close to my heart.
I, like many of you I have no doubt, rely on the internet for much needed information on a variety of sources. Whether it be tips on my favorite hobbies (I am a crafting nut for anyone who doesn’t know), showtimes for the newest blockbuster I want to go see, or a recipe for vegetarian lasagna, I go to the Web time and time again. Sometimes, my research is of a more serious nature. Like researching healthy living tips for my two small children, or learning about diabetes and how I can help my grandfather, or discovering what my risk factors are for getting breast cancer since I am the daughter of a survivor.
These topics are (obviously) incredibly important to me as well as to millions of others who are in the same predicament as I am: sifting through the muck to find out what is truly expert advice, and what is just a link to yet another drug that has nothing to do with me. That’s why I completely agree with Eric in his post called Life, Death, and Links.
It’s a known fact that black hat link builders can kill the quality content by burying it under drug ads and product pages by building a ton of links that are poor in quality, but have enough juice to shoot them to the top of the rankings. They’re doing their job, you may argue. They are also pushing non-relevant content to the top of the SERPs without concern as to what the user is actually looking for. They have taken the most important element out of the entire equation: the people who are surfing looking for vital information to make their lives better. They spend all their time trying to game the system. It’s so much easier to give the search engines what they want and (albeit patiently) build the links over time to continue push your site in the general upward direction in the SERPs.
When you are beginning work on a link development project, it’s important to start with the right information before diving into the work head first. Here are questions you should ask before beginning:
1. How many links do I currently have?
2. Where are those links coming from? Directories? Random blog posts? Educational sites?
3. Who am I looking to target? Coming up with two or three personas can be very helpful.
4. What is my brand position? How do I want the public to see my site / company?
5. What are my business goals?
6. How will I define success?
7. How will I measure statistics to determine if I have achieved that level of success?
8. What resources do I currently have to work with.
Obviously, the answers to these questions will indicate a number of things in terms of your link building campaign. Your audience will determine where you are looking to get links from. Your brand indicates what caliber of sites you are looking at and what, specifically, you will be saying on those sites. The amount of resources will determine what you can do now and what you will have to build up to. Defining your analytics can help tie in a whole other group of individuals, or spur you into learning how to use the analytics you already have running on your site.
Of course, these are not all the questions you should ask when starting, but this is definitely a list of “must-asks” and it will open the door to all those other things that you need to learn about your company or site and how it will apply to your link building and overall SEO efforts.
Over in the link building search engine watch forum, a member asked a great question about managing a team of link builders and I was very excited to weigh in. But a couple of forum posts just isn’t enough content to cover all the really important keys to successfully managing a team of inviduals like link builders.
Link builders are, by nature, very different than most people. We tend to enjoy working by ourselves, follow random trails of information and suddenly wondering “how did I get to this site/ page?” Eric Ward has a great article called The Portrait of a Perfect Link Builder that really clued me into the fact that link development is something I need to be focused in. He writes:
As companies realize that content publicity and link building must be a core part of online marketing, rather than just the latest SEO fad, those same companies are faced with the challenge that there’s no consensus or body of research to help them pinpoint the person with the perfect skill set to do that job. Not only that, but the perfect skill set itself is open to great debate. Is link building a technical skill requiring programming or experience similar to on-page content/code optimization? Is link building more related to publicity and public relations, which would indicate the need for a different set of qualifications? And what would those qualifications be? Computer science degree? MBA? MSLS? Member of the PRSA? What about an MBA with a specialty in ecommerce? Can any of them do the job?
So, let’s assume that you have interviewed and hired a group of link builders that fit this description. What should you do next? Here are five keys to managing a team of link builders whether they have prior experience in SEO and link acquisition or not.
1. Train them thoroughly. Putting together a comprehensive overview of link building, what it means, and how to measure success will give your link builders a whole picture approach to link building that is truly invaluable. If you only tell them “this is how you submit to directories,” then you are severely limiting yourself. Tell them about content and how it builds links, social media and how it means more than just dropping links. Tell them about link popularity and visibility. Tell them about strategy, not just tasks.
2. Let them explore. Give your team the ability to learn more on their own. Provide resources that allow them to grow not just in link building, but in SEO in general. Give them the power to test their theories, to participate in forums, to explore a new tactic. Show them how to measure their work and gauge success.
3. Collaborate. Regular team meetings with brainstorm sessions, educational presentations, and group discussions will allow ideas to build themselves out and team members to grow as link builders. It also allows your team’s vision of link building to expand.
4. Keep learning yourself. Just like your team needs to grow, so does their management. Subscribe to forums, regular newsletters, and attend webinars. Pass along the information and invite your team to share the stuff they learn with you.
5. Give regular feedback. Establish what you want to measure/ evaluate and set up regular one-on-one meetings with your team to give them their feedback. Yes, this is a lot of time. If you have 20+ team members, establish mentors within your team. Pick 3-4 of your top most well-rounded link building team members and have them take on a couple of newer team members. Let them perform the evaluations and submit their feedback to you as well. This keeps you in the loop and it gives everyone insight into where they need to improve. Some possible points of evaluation that I listed out in the Search Engine Watch forum could include (and are certainly not limited to):
- How many submissions can they accomplish in an hour?
- How many submissions are declined due to not looking at the site guidelines?
- How often are they evaluating the quality of the sites that are being submitted to?
- What type of feedback are they giving the team regarding these sites?
- How often are they finding new sites to submit to?
- Are they finding more efficient ways to accomplish tasks?
- How much are they communicating to other team members about what they are seeing in these sites?
- What is the quality of that feedback?
- How quickly did they ramp up on the task?
- Are they training new team members on processes?
- Are they proactively getting more knowledgeable about their piece(s) on their own?
- Can they work with little supervision?
- Is their work returning positive results in both link popularity and keyword visibility?
When all of these pieces are in place, you will be able to establish regular check points and a team that is empowered to grow without constant hand-holding. A final piece of advice: listen to your team. What are they passionate about? Could their passions possibly lend themselves to a particular piece of link building that is yet to be explored? What do they hate about their job or role? What options can you provide them? Listening and then acting on that information will make your team appreciate you even more and allow you all a bit more space to grow and to work together more cohesively.
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