My motives were both business and personal. When I hear people talking abut link building software, they almost always focus on the time such software saves. What they don’t talk about as much is the impact (or lack of) it has on either click traffic or search rank.  Over the years I have probably tested and used over 100 different programs that in one way or another assisted with some aspect of the link building process. Many are long gone. Some are wonderful and incredibly powerful, others should be taken off the market. 

The reason so many link building tools and programs exist is because of the gold rush mentality many link builders have. Anyone can create some type of linking related software, slap it on the web, and sell it.  My hunch is that 95% of all linking related software programs, whether client based or in the cloud, are useless.  In fact, it was becasue they were all so useless that I ended up creating my own.

“My hunch is 95% of all linking related software programs, whether client based or in the cloud, are useless”

Link Building Software – What to Avoid
First, if the software gives you an option to send email automatically to a supposed link target site, run for your life.  This part of the link building process can never be automated and implemented correctly.  This is not to say all automation during the link building process is bad, but rather that there are certain aspects of the process that should never be automated, and email is at the top of that list.

Second, any software that uses Google’s Pagerank as a key part of their process is doomed.  I could write 500 pages about why, so you’ll have to trust me here.  Letting Pagerank dictate your linking strategy is foolish, and any software that gives you any other impression is trying to scare you.  Pagerank is a very useful metric, in certain ways and in certain situations, but I would never pursue a link target because of it’s Pagerank, and I’ve sought links from hundreds of sites that had none.

Third, if the software queries a search engine that no linger exists, you might be suspicious.  I’m not kidding. At least two programs that help identify link targets include search engines that no longer exist.

Fourth, just because some link building software provides a module for creating and managing a links directory does not mean you should implement one, or use that software to manage it.  If you want to hear a few horror stories about why, contact me privately. 

Link Building Software – What to Seek
This one is so obvious most people overlook it.  What company created the software? Do they have a good reputation? Do they have a successful history you can research.  Do they provide names of people who work at the company? Are they trying to be a one trick pony and claim expertise in link building when they have never actually done any link building themselves?  And just because a tool ranks well for the term link building software does not mean that software will be effective.  I remember several link building software programs that stamped a sitewide link on every page of the auto-generated directory pages they created.  Once upon a time sitewides were thought by some to be clever.  Now, siteswides are largely devalued.

I’ll close with a more philosophical question.  Most people agree that publicity, links, and awareness within the right vertical are the key to success for any web site.  Links play a role in nearly every type of online marketing activity, from a plain vanilla links page to a Twitter tweet.  At the same time, at the end of these billions of links is a mouse poised to click, and a person is holding it. A Person.  The web is about people and passion and interests and curiosity and having a voice if you want one.  People.

Do you really want to put the most important part of your online strategy in the hands of something created by someone you don’t know, and who doesn’t know your business?

Link Building Software – Who Does It Right
If I you are in charge of link building, research and pick from these tools. Consider using more than one.

Link Insight (disclaimer – I am co-creator)
Buzzstream
Ontolo
Open Site Explorer/Linkscape
Majestic
SEO Book
Raven

Link well!

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Why you might be scratching your head at my analogy(and they are not always the best), there is quite a lot of validity in this statement considering that organic traffic increases can be much like that shiny car, pretty on the outside and hollow on the inside. For the most part, any SEO firm at some point can perform enough basic SEO and content creation to lift a site’s traffic simply because at some point you will drive so much long tail traffic that referrals will likely increase. What so often looks like a great report should have additional questions posed.

A review of your site analytics and these factors in mind can paint a better picture of whether your SEO program is targeted appropriately.

What site sections are driving traffic?

       -   Site sections such as a blog can drive a lot of traffic for a blog but often are virally motivated and this traffic can result in a 80+% bounce rate. Your traffic should be landing on your homepage or key pages that are a starting point for your conversion funnel or a page along this pathway.

How do organic visitors consume your content?

       -   Only in a perfect world does someone stumble upon your site and immediately become so enthralled that they instantly perform the intended action you are attempting. From an organic-wide view you need to ensure that page views, pages-per-visit and time on site are gradually increasing. This is also a way to show that site content has been developed for search engines but also for human visitors as content is compelling and there are links and calls to action to help propel visitors throughout the site.

Are organic referrals branded or non-branded?

       -   Every time you go all out on an offline effort or social promotion you are building your brand. And while not every offline viewer picks up a telephone and not every social user follows a link these web users search for company through a branded term. It is very important to parse your SEO reporting by branded and non-branded segments. Non-branded development should most often be your focus as a common SEO goal is to gain visibility across popular brand/service related terms.

How well does organic search referral s convert?

       -   Yes, I know, this is obvious. However, I am still surprised at how many people do not even think about this factor but more so with the climb in traffic. A thousand visits that do not convert at all are not as important as one visit that converts (brand identity freaks excluded). Analysis of these conversion metrics will allow you to figure out the most important goal of whether visitors are doing what you want them to.

Asking these questions of your SEO firm or analyzing these areas for yourself will help you to identify if your SEO campaign is successful or if the traffic numbers are misleading. Rankings are great but if they drove hollow traffic there is no importance for having a listing in that position and driving meaninglessness traffic. Who knows, if your site is a likely candidate for the conditions above, hopefully after a little work your traffic will drop next month…and your conversions will increase.

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I wanted to highlight a little problem that might see you being outranked for your own content. I am not talking about scrapers either, legitimate situations. You may ultimately be screwed for all your hard work developing quality content. Actually, the better you do your job, the more likely it is.

In the present world of SEO (and internet marketing in general) we all know that the ‘build it and they will come’ approach just ain’t going to cut it. One way to get the word out and even build some authority is the use of content syndication. This is generally in the form of RSS. And a LOT of us use this approach.

Did you know that this might just be a bad idea? Especially with a full feed?

Talking to Googlers

Some 18 months back the folks at WebProNews asked me if they could syndicate my content, verbatim, on their family of IM news sites. Right away one has to start worrying about this as they might just out-rank me for my own content, (given that they have greater authority). Thus I decided to talk to a Googler pal to see what the advised approach for this is.

At the time I was told that as long as the secondary source had a link back to the original, things should work out fine. And this did seem to be the case 80% of the time. Occasionally I’d get outranked (oddly Google was showing BOTH identical posts 1-2 in the SERP), but that was the exception, not the rule.

Fast forward, early 2010. I was working on a project in the finance world which was syndicating content out to a variety of locales including heavy weights such as ‘the Street‘. We noticed that, even with linkage to the original, we were getting spanked in the reg SERPs and Google News.

Back to Google we go.

This time I was told that we should look to throttle the RSS by delaying it some to ensure it was the first version picked up. Ok, great, so it seems that authority sites most certainly can still kick yer ass if you’re not careful.

The Case Study

I was chatting in the SEO Dojo chat room with my pal (and social media guru) Samir Balwani whom was having some issues with his blog and this very problem. As an example we can look at the post; 5 Things I Would Tell a Social Media Professor

If we look at a search for some leader text we see this – Or a Google search via post TITLE such as this here; “5 things I would tell a social media professor“.

You can see he is getting outranked by not only SMT but FaceBook as well (where he had a full feed). This, as you might imagine is not an ideal situation. Interestingly it should be noted that both of those entries actually link to the original via redirects. As we know there is some link love loss from that which means our 20% just got even worse.

Ultimately these domains had more authority and are effectively stealing his thunder AND rankings. Sure, we all want the authority building that can come from being in these publications, but at what cost? At very least we should be controlling which content gets syndicated and which doesn’t (I have a deal with WebProNews that they don’t touch any pillar content for example).

The Fix

And so what can we do to have the best of both world? To get the name out there without having and adverse affect on our SEO efforts? A few things come to mind and have been shown to work in these situations.

• Delay RSS – this was Google’s advice although I have not found an option for this in (their own) Feedburner system. This means you need to do it via the RSS programming on your site and then hook that up to the feedburner system.

• Only use partial feeds – this is certainly another option that will also help solve the problem, though in some cases they don’t allow that. For example SMT says, “ We do not use partial feeds or content summaries or posts without a photo or avatar. We are a community, not a link referral service.”

• Make sure article TITLE is linked up – while not huge, it can help to further strengthen the post itself for the core terms being targeted. Every little bit helps.

• Don’t let them link to RSS UTM – in the SMT instance, they linked back to the actual RSS feed link which get’s parsed as a 301 and certainly loses some juice to the original. Where possible, avoid this.

As you may have figured out along the trail, this is certainly something that we need to be aware of. In Samir’s case, he really wasn’t paying attention and this has been going on for quite some time. I can only imagine the traffic losses he’s suffered because of it. If you are syndicating your content via FULL FEED, you should be monitoring it to ensure that this isn’t happening to you.

And Google? Guys, if you’re aware of the problem in the search dept., why not give a head’s up to the folks at FeedBurner while we’re at it ( I tried to ) and get an option to be able to delay the feed, just for such situations. #justsayin’

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In a social economy where attention is a precious commodity, the ability to strip a social object down to its essence to capture attention has less to do with compacting character counts and more to do with the art and science of packaging and presenting content so that it is immediately compelling, simple to grasp and appreciate and in turn, share across social graphs.

For participants in the socialization of media, an ever-thinning attention span is forcing the rapid evolution of our ability to multitask – albeit at shallow depths.  Cognition is thereby stimulated by relevance, simplicity, and in social networks, the objects and content screened and shared by peers.

In Twitter, we learned that there is indeed an art to ReTweets and to increase the likelihood for tweets to spread, the words and times we choose dictate their lifespan and ultimately, fate. To examine social objects and how they affect sharing in Facebook, I once again reached out to my friend and social scientist, Dan Zarrella.

Zarrella studied Facebook data for quite some time and observed that simplicity, among other interesting linguistic and timed attributes, is the key to triggering word of mouth.

Readability’s Effects on Sharing in Facebook

With a view from the top, we can see that Facebook sharing is enhanced by simple language and thus modernizes the old adage KISS to now represent Keep it Simple and “Shareable.”

In his research, Zarrella examined article titles and matched the propensity for sharing with reading grade levels. The results were revealing to say the least. Essentially, the higher the share rates, the lower the reading grade level, with notable spikes resonating at fifth and ninth grades.

Numerical Value

For those looking to capitalize on propagating your content in Facebook, although the same could be true in other online mediums, consider the addition of digits to your titles.

Yes, there’s a reason why we as content consumers, are duped into reading and distributing social objects with numerical digits in the headline. For example, the title of this article is intentional “7 Scientific Ways to Promote Sharing on Facebook.“  Social science now shows that there’s a reason why articles with similar titles consistently perform well.

In Facebook, titles with digits (1-9) outperform text only titles. As much as I’d like to see more originality in and creativity in the school of compelling headline writing, the numbers add up to make a strong case for considering alternatives.

Carpe Diem

Similar to Twitter, there are days and times where we as content consumers transform into curators by sharing relevant content objects.

Whereas on Twitter, RT’s occur most often on Monday and Friday, Facebook users seem most likely to share on Saturdays and Sundays. It’s important to note here that while sharing is notably higher on the weekend, the volume of URLs introduced into Facebook are higher during weekdays, most notably Wednesdays and Fridays.  However, as Zarrella observed, stories published on the weekends tended to be shared on Facebook on average, more than those published during the week. This could be due in part to the fact that more than half of businesses in the U.S. block Facebook and other social networks in the workplace. But then again, if this were true, the science of retweets would also prove otherwise.

Personally, I’ve experimented with this over the last couple of years. Indeed, content introduced on Twitter, tends to spark greater reactions during the week, with Monday and Wednesday and Friday in particular. However, when I withhold the same object and introduce it to my social graph in Facebook on Saturday morning, responses are far more notable.

What Are Words For, When No One Listens Anymore

The act of sharing implies so much more than curation. When we “Like” or share content in Facebook, we are essentially endorsing it and as such, recommending it to friends and followers to act and react.

The words we intentionally or unintentionally surround the objects we share result in either relevance or irrelevance.

While current events play a role defining the most shareable content, truly, experiential words such as “why,” “most,” “world,” and “how” trigger the greatest volume of shares in aggregate. However, when viewing the activity of words in isolation of sharing events, “you” and “video” prove extremely noteworthy.

When words aren’t working for you, they’re working against you. As documented, certain words serve as inhibitors to sharing, closing the attention aperture before content has an opportunity to breathe. According to Zarrella’s research, the least shareable words include expressions I would not have otherwise guessed, including “review,” “poll,” and “social.” Among the least shareable words however, the following terms are introduced with greater frequency, however do not engender the desired outcome, “time,” “Twitter,” and “live.”

Action Speaks Louder Than Words

Part-of-speech also lends to the shareability of social object. Much like Tweets or any other update in the “statusphere,” brevity serves as a framework for what we introduce into the stream.

Seems that we have proof that actions speak louder than words, or at the very least, verbs as action words appear to motivate sharing with important nouns following in second. As to be expected, there are a greater number of nouns introduced into updates, however, it is verbs that imply action and therefore the right verbs compel us to share. Adjectives and adverbs appear to be among the least shared parts-of-speech in Facebook as our attention spans are trained to look beyond promotion or hyperbole.

The Glass is Half Full

The effect of linguistic content and the tone of updates and objects introduced in Facebook say everything about you. At the same time, determine whether someone reads, ignores, and more importantly, shares what they encounter.

Negative updates are among the least shared objects with positive sentiment and words sitting on the opposite end, prove to be among the most shared. It’s interesting to note that a greater number of negative updates are introduced into NewsFeeds than those that are positive. I suppose it’s to be expected, but sex is at the very top of the list and also among the least often introduced into social feeds. I’m also pleasantly surprised and encouraged to see learning, media, work and constructive in the company of shareable linguistic performers.

There are times where the content we introduce into the activity feeds of those in our social graph is intended to inspire sharing across the graphs of friends and friends of friends. Consider the science and then craft the update to employ it to your benefit – and hopefully the benefit of others.

Antione de Saint Exupéry observed, “Perfection is reached not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.”

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Ideally, the link profile of your site should indicate an entity that gives and receives links. The whole idea of a “web” indicates interconnected sites that reference each other. If your site receives links, but does not give any out, then it is going to resemble a dead end or a black hole. Even if your links are fairly unobtrusive, and go to informational sites (as opposed to competitor sites) you can create a more natural looking site profile as you build your link portfolio.

Lastly, it pays to avoid complex (or not so complex) interlinking to your own sites, or to “web rings” which all link to each other. In the eyes of a search engine algorithm, these relationships are easy to spot and can work against you. Your link building profile should make your site look like a great source of information that isn’t afraid to refer users to other sites for further study. As an added bonus, users tend to go back to websites that help them find what they’re looking for, and that goes right back into the directive to “build a site as if search engines did not exist.”

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Testimonial link building really is a win-win scenario for both sites and usually has a much higher approval rate than your standard link request emails. The contact gets another testimonial to place on their site, while you get a new incoming link.

Another good feature of testimonial based links is that they can be often found on core product pages or even the homepage. This means they’re going to have a strong positive influence in your overall link popularity.

Getting started is as simple as writing an email to a few of your suppliers. Explain to them how happy you are with the service and offer to write a few lines they can place on their site.

If they accept, write something specific and ask if it would be ok for them to provide a link to your site. You can make it simple for them by showing an example of how you would like the link to be created:

Hi Supplier name,

“This is an example comment praising the suppliers business.”

Your Name, CEO of Company name – a leading provider of example services.

While this can be a great strategy, only offer to write a testimonial if you are genuinely happy with a supplier’s service! Happy link building.

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Just over a year ago I wrote my first and only guest post, as an entry into Marketing Pilgrim’s annual competition. At the time when I published the article, I joked that “I had been robbed“, you wouldn’t believe the number of comments suggesting a way to get my revenge, file DMCA, report to Google or recover my “stolen” article.

Climbing The Heights Of Mount Google

When you set out to climb a mountain, or rank for a competitive keyword term, some methods are effective.

This is a simplistic look at climbing the heights of Mount Google.

Human Pyramid

A human pyramid might be suitable for those low hanging fruit, but this method is unlikely to help you scale great heights. Not only is it hard to gain great height, but the weak construction is easily eroded by competitors.

Photo credit: S@TS

Belay or Blogroll

Whilst exchanging blogroll links can help lift you up to a certain level, they can effectively anchor you to your peers. From an SEO point of view they are more about securing your position than lifting you higher. If you have achieved a certain height, there is nothing wrong with pulling up a few team mates. They can then aid in a push for the summit, which can be a very lonely solo trek.

Photo credit: dfinnecy

Grappling Hook

This is the “gizmo” mindset, that specific tools can blast your website or blog to prominence, maybe as a clown from a circus cannon, or to scale the walls of the Vatican in Mission Impossible.

Whilst I am a fan of some forms of automation, and it can achieve significant results, those results are often short-lived. Whether it is trackback and referrer spam, automated social bookmarking, directory submission software, or other quick fix, the writing is on the wall before you even start, only many are too blind to see it.

Not everyone gets a safety net, or is Ethan Hunt.

Photo credit: Wikipedia

Teamwork

Teamwork is often the most effective method, especially if one member of the team is already at the top of the mountain, and can pull you up.

Photo credit: JasonRogers

V.I.P. Ticket

It might not convey the same bragging rights, or sense of achievement, but if you are a “big hitter” working for a major corporation, or have plenty of funds to grease the wheels, there are faster ways to the top.

Photo credit: Photo Monkey

Highest Mountain

Don’t try to climb the highest mountain from the start, it will always end in failure. Start on lower slopes, build experience, and if possible gather together a solid team to help you scale the higher slopes of Mount Google.

Then again, who wants to be top of the mountain, and why am I writing a guest post Pull me up Andy!

2009 Competition

The 2009 Competition has just reached the judging stages – batch 1 & batch 2 – there are some good articles to read on all kinds of online marketing

Followup

As a guest article, I was a little disappointed in the results. Not so much my results in the competition, but overall traffic, appeal to Stumbleupon visitors, etc.

I deliberately chose a different style of article, more images, light weight/broad appeal content, but with a deeper message that might have not quite sunk in for readers.

I am going to try another attempt at the same article using diagrams and more specific wording soon.

Originally published at andybeard.eu

It is going to be sold through ClickBank and depending on how ambitious I feel, it may also be sold in paperback.  I have created an e-book before, The Seven Day Millionaire, but that product was created only 7 months into my marketing career and while I had been making a lot of money, I didn’t realize the reasons why I had become successful so quickly.

I have seen many products come and go throughout the years on ClickBank, but I want to be one of the first to create a product with actual staying power.  I have planning this book for about a year already, and now I am going to start going through the marketing and production phases followed by actually writing it over the summer.  My plan is to create it and have a sales page done by August and to then go into full scale affiliate scouting and promotions for it.

You will hear all about it as time goes on, but for now I will just leave you with a list of the steps I plan to take to promote my book, so that you can replicate my plans for your own needs.

10 Steps to creating and launching  a product on ClickBank:

1. Think of a product to create
2. Do market research to make sure that the niche isn’t over saturated, and check to make sure there is market demand
3. Think of a title, and register that domain
4. Create the product – If you are creating an ebook write it in OpenOffice and use their PDF export option.
5. Work with a graphic designer for the sales page (I’ll post a link to whichever designer I decide to go with, currently there is one that I want to hear back from) – This is my current step in the process.
6. Begin building your credentials as an expert (posting articles, trying to get into trade magazines, newspapers, etc.)
7. Start recruiting affiliates, they will be the primary engine of sales so do what you need to court them.  Many posts to come in the near future about how I plan to get affiliates.
8. Begin promoting the product itself to drive up buzz (well before the actual launch)
9. Capture affiliate and customer emails via opt-in lists on the sales page so you can have big support for the launch date
10. Watch the ClickBank gravity system propel your product to the top as more affiliates jump on board as they sense a profitable product.

This is a very general outline, I will be going into detail on each section of the process as I go along.  I expect to be posting once every 2-3 days until November, and then I will slow down a bit as launch comes closer to happening.

Thank you to all my loyal readers, I’m sorry that I always do this to you but I am going to be back for a while this time.

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