What’s a back link?

The best way to get people to find your website is to have loads of arrows point to it – back links are arrows.

Look at the third sentence in this blog post. You can see there’s a link – search engine optimisation – which points you to a blog post on my other blog (www.freelancecopywritersblog.com) . If I were to write about being a copywriter who would be able to boost your businesses visibility and sales by producing eye-catching sales writing that inspires customers to buy, that is a link to my main website.

How do you get back links?

Encouraging people to link to your website takes work and requires the generation of a lot of high quality content. By providing great information regularly, people will want to link to you. Creating hints and tips in your chosen field will also help elevate you to expert status, and with that comes more links. 

But there are ways you can also generate links yourself.

Blogging and article marketing are two very effective ways of building back links, especially the most sought after type – the keyword hypertext link.  When you post an article and insert a keyword hypertext link into your text, you are effectively funnelling a bit of link juice to your website. That might sound a bit strange, but this is how it works:

Using an article site with a high Google Page Rank (e.g. ezinearticles) and you add a hypertext keyword links (a follow link as opposed to a no follow link), a little bit of page rank is also passed along the link. Therefore the more links like that, the higher your chances of increasing your own website’s page rank.

You can also generate back links by guest blogging, using social media and social networking sites. There are some sites out there that will let you create your own micro-site which gives you even more exposure. 

Although back links are very important to your SEO strategy, you mustn’t forget about the other elements of SEO – you must also consider your website’s structure and content.

As the diagram above illustrates all three elements are essential if you want your website to be found online.

But you must remember that SEO is an on-going process. Your strategy must be constantly reviews and tweaked to generate the most traffic and conversions possible.

Your competitors will be doing all of this, so if you stop you’ll gradually become invisible to online customers.

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However, search engine traffic by itself is a small part of the story. Understanding traffic from other sites can sometimes be more indicative of a website’s overall success in its field, and can provide valuable information about a site’s total footprint on the World Wide Web. An oft-repeated piece of advice from Google is to design a site as if search engines did not exist. If you consider that sites once relied on reference traffic from each other, you can understand the potential for developing traffic between sites. Secondarily, you can improve your link popularity by cultivating relationships with other popular sites in your industry.

Monitoring other sources of web traffic can help you uncover positive and negative references to your business. With the rise of social media, it is easier than ever for people to comment on your store and your services, and even an unhappy reference will often link to your site. Tracing the link back to its source lets you do some low cost reputation management, where you can either refute the person’s point of view or thank them for their kind words.

You can also develop relationships with sites that are sending you good traffic and leads. We have seen a couple of cases where sites are referenced in a list of resources, and that list is used by interested shoppers. Not surprisingly, some of these sites will move your name to the top of their lists for a certain amount of money, but even then you can be the “top” site in your field, which is akin to the old phone book trick of adding “AAAA” to your name to make it to the front of the business listings.

Another aspect of checking referring sites relates to click fraud and misuse of your website. To detect click fraud, you can usually see pages on your site that are getting referenced from shady looking sites, and the fraud is easy to spot because you will have a bounce rate that is close to 100%, or a visit time averaging one second. Basically, a site is misusing content match or search match in combination with automated clicking tools. If you detect this type of behavior, and you are the one buying the PPC, then you may want to alert your search engine directly and/or shut off the portion of the campaign that resulted in phony clicks.

It may seem counter-intuitive, but referencing (and getting traffic from) a competitor can be a win-win situation online. As long as you aren’t selling identical products, some cross-linking between sites can improve the user experience and may even give window shoppers an opportunity to choose your site. From our own standpoint, we have noticed competitor traffic coming to our website, and if someone else in the field has an interesting tool or article then we aren’t afraid to make a reference to it on our own site. Search engines prefer a collaborative internet; a certain amount of professional courtesy puts you on the high road, even when you’re going after the same customers.

If you’re seeing a lot of “direct” traffic coming to your site, you are either experiencing brand loyalty, lots of return customers, or there are a lot of people who keep your site bookmarked. Some of the bigger “dot com” companies will see direct traffic because people just type the site name into the browser bar. As a side note, a heavy amount of “direct” traffic can also indicate that Analytics code is not loaded on every page of the site, so if your direct traffic numbers don’t seem credible you should ensure that you have tracking code placed on every page.

Knowing where your non-search clicks come from can provide you with a wealth of information about how people get to your site, how they use it, and which demographics are the most profitable. You can even model user behavior by each referring source, which may offer you a chance to improve certain site features that would drive up your conversion rate. The ability to spot traffic trends from outside sites also provides you with opportunities to expand your web traffic beyond SEO and PPC, which is a stealthy path toward increased profitability that your competitors may not even be trying. No matter how you use the information about outside click sources, a better picture of your audience is always beneficial in the dynamic world of websites and the internet.

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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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The Asian contestant, Alex Wong, is a ballet dancer. Yet for his challenge, he had to do a hip-hop routine with all-star dancer hip-hop dancer Twitch. Something completely out of Alex’s comfort zone, but as you can see from the video and crowd/judges reaction, he nailed it. He took a chance, knew what had to be done, and nailed it.

Now think of you and your business, and how this can relate to you.

Comfort zones are funny things. On the one hand, they keep us safe because we don’t expect any surprised. On the other, they stunt our growth because they keep us safe.

Staying within our comfort zone means we don’t have to worry about taking chances; we’ve found our niche and success level and we’re happy to stick to it. That’s fine, and if you just need a certain level of success to achieve the results you first started your business for, then comfort zones will absolutely work for you.

But if you’re looking to really push your business buttons and stand out in your niche or industry, comfort zones will only take you so far. The real success only comes from taking risks.

Push yourself mentally and creatively. Look at everyday things and see how you can take that to the next level. See beyond the simple.

There’ll be a lot of stumbles along the way, and it won’t be easy to take off your comforter blanket and take the steps into new directions. But think of it this way – your customers aren’t standing still. They’re always looking for the best for them, not just the best full stop.

Comfort zones might make you the best; but they don’t necessarily make you the best for your customers. There’s a difference – step outside your zone and you’ll have a better view of what that is.

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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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For that, the best option is setting yourself up with a self-hosted WordPress blog.

While there’s nothing wrong per se with free blogging options like Blogger or WordPress (the .com version; self-hosted WordPress is on the .org domain), they severely limit how much interaction you have with them from a user perspective. Designs are limited as well, and add-ons aren’t supported, and to make a truly effective social media hub on your blog, you need fluidity to design.

The worst thing about free blogging options is that you’re also placing all your content into the hands of a third-party. If Blogger, WordPress or any other free blogging platforms change their Terms and Conditions, you could find yourself without a blog. With a self-hosted option, all the control lies in your hands. While there are other options like TypePad and Squarespace, I just prefer WordPress for its ease-of-use and community support.

Going Self-Hosted

Just in case you aren’t already using self-hosted WordPress, here’s a quick guide to getting set up :

• Choose a domain name and a web host to host your blog. Bluehost is perfect for this, since it offers packages that set up the domain and hosting as an all-in-one package. There are several others, so Google “web host” and find the one right for you.
• Once you have your account, you’ll be taken to an area called C-panel. This is simply the Admin dashboard for all the backroom stuff associated with your site. Once in there, its simply a matter of using Fantastico to set up your WordPress account, as shown by my friend  John Haydon’s video.

Planting the Seeds

The reasons for using a self-hosted WordPress blog are numerous, but the main two (at least as far as a social media hub is concerned) are design and add-on flexibility. Since the hub is going to be both your home-base and outpost, you need a platform that can handle your needs – WordPress is perfect for this.

The look and feel of your hub will define how useful it is to your visitors. The less cluttered the look, the more effective the hub can be, although some folks prefer a more information-led design. This is where WordPress and a premium theme comes into play (a theme is just a pre-designed look or framework for your blog) -  you can choose a template, page, sub-pages, sub-domain or any number of design options to present your hub.

There are benefits to each option:

• A page holds everything in one area, although it could get cluttered.
• Sub-pages allow you to set up different niche hubs (more on that tomorrow).
• Sub-domains offer a completely separate hub altogether, but still tied to your blog’s main domain.
• Templates allow a different look and feel from your blog design, and help give that unique hub feel.

What you choose will mostly be determined by how many resources you populate your hub with. How you populate these resources is up to you; again, the great thing with self-hosted WordPress is that the flexibility of design is limitless, thanks to plug-ins.

Social Media Plug-Ins for Your Hub

WordPress is an open-source community, which means that there is a whole community of developers making really cool applications (or plug-ins) every day. These are released to the WordPress userbase (almost always free of charge) and you can then use them on your blog to help turn it into anything you like.

Some of the best ones for a social media hub (and ones that I’ll show you examples of in the design post coming next in the series) include:

• Enthropia’s Lifestream. One of the ways to show what you’re up to on different networks is Lifestreaming, and Enthropia’s plug-in for WordPress is one of the simplest. This is perfect for those that don’t want a full-on social media hub.
• Twitter Tools. Offers great integration between Twitter and your blog and vice versa, including tweet archives, posts, admin options and more.
• Smart YouTube. Ideal for video bloggers, this gives you a larger set of options than just video embedding – playlists, RSS feed support and iPhone compatibility being just a few.
• FotoBook. While there are plug-ins and widgets to integrate your blog with Facebook, one of the coolest to do this in reverse is FotoBook. This imports all your pictures from Facebook and enhances the personal aspect of your social media hub.

These are just some plug-ins that, along with your design and the existing applications from the various social networks, will make up your social media hub. The great thing with WordPress is that, no matter what you’re looking to do via your hub, you can probably find a plug-in for it. Just go to WordPress Extend and start searching – that’s where the treasure is to shape your hub, your way.

Takeaway: Make a list of how many features you’d like on your blog. Decide if you want to go for a single page, sub-pages, sub-domain and how intensive or lite you wish your hub to be. Sketch some ideas for layout, since tomorrow we’ll look at the various options available, with examples of each to a successful hub.

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Live HTTP Header in basic sense, is when a user requests a page from a website. Each page is returned with a header response, these header responses include:

• 200 – OK
• 301 – Moved Permanently
• 302- Temporarily Moved
• 400 – Bad Request
• 401 – Unauthorised
• 403 – Forbidden
• 404 – Not Found

For us that are in the SEO business its an invaluable tool to use on a regular basis. Here are some of the things to look for when checking the header responses for SEO purposes.

• Does a link to your site 302 redirect? – a 302 links does not pass any PageRank so will not be as strong
• Does any pages in your site 404? – This means your page no longer exists and should be redirected to pass links juice as well as take your user to a more relevant page
• Does your home page redirect? – If it does you will need to either remove the redirect or change it to a 301
• Does the page redirect more than 5 times? – If it does, Google may not be able to follow all the links
• Too many 404 pages or bad request pages may indicate to Google that your site is not trustworthy, which is not good

So if you’re having some issues on your website that sells blackberry bold parts or some steak seasoning. You could be losing out on some money here. Even if you don’t know how to fix the problem, its good to understand what is happening. Notify your webmaster and correct the issue.

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I am a big fan of using PPC to get accurate and converting keyword data and optimizing to help rank for those keywords that you KNOW convert (or at least have a very good chance of converting again). This can also be done in reverse.

In a lot of cases, pay per click campaigns can give you some really valuable insights into the words that people use to find your site and ultimately become customers. In many cases, these words are quite long and were never phrases you were specifically targeting. Adwords for example can give you data on hundreds of CONVERTING long tail search terms. Once you know know what they are, you can simply craft a page specifically for those terms, focus on the on page elements, then sometimes all it takes is a new blog post linking to that page either internally or externally to get it into the number 1 position on the search engines. I wrote a post on the correlation between PPC and SEO a while back and I feel it’s still true today.

I do realize that optimizing for a search term that converts once every month may seem like a waste of resources in the short term but those rankings are easier to get and can add up quickly. To compete in a saturated market from the grass-roots level it’s essential. I also believe this method of growth and promotion is in line perfectly with what Matt Cutts (The head of search quality and webspam at Google) mentioned in the below webmaster help video in June. The video is only 87 seconds long but his point is clear.

Matt also reinforces this point again at his wordcamp presentation, (skip to ~29:30). He mentions specifically:

“Build up, build up, don’t over reach… you have to get there gradually”

“Start with a smaller niche then embiggen that niche”

“You’re writing about more and more important things and bigger niches and eventually, over time, people get to know you … they’re sending you links and LIFE IS GOOD.”

This method of building up very specific content should attract links naturally and over time build up the reputation and authority that your site needs these days to even have a chance in more competitive markets.

So we know that rankings matter. They matter a lot. There will never be a way to know 100% for sure where you rank for a given phrase but I think it’s pretty important to have as good an idea as possible so you can monitor the “success of your embiggening” (you can’t measure what you can’t track). I know a lot of people/SEOs are not fans of rank checkers but I think that if you monitor your rankings over local search engines over a long enough period of time, you get a good idea of how your doing and weather or not you need to focus more on the long tail or specific regions.

I wont go into too much detail about the variety of rank checkers available, Ann Smarty does a great job of that here but I will mention the one that we use here at Redfly. We use Advanced Web Ranking.

Advanced Web Ranking allows you to track as many keywords as you see fit across every search engine imaginable, including every regional version of the major ones. The search engine database is updated almost daily and they even have the latest versions of Google caffeine and all it’s regional indexes included.

What’s even better is the fact that it uses the search engines API keys (You all still have your Google SOAP API keys right?) so you’re not violating any of the search engines rules about automated queries. The reporting is fantastic and you can easily see at a glance you’re overall organic visibility. The one problem I have with this application is that it only allows a single API key, I’d love to be able to enter multiple APIs, especially for each site. It’s expensive and not for everyone but for those serious about tracking rankings over multiple sites, I highly recommend it.

Imagine if you had data on 1000 longtail keywords that only converted once or twice each year from your PPC campaigns. Each conversion is valued at say, €100. If you rank on page one for these results in the organic SERPs, chances are you’ll eventually get clicks and conversions. If you only get ONE conversion for each of these keywords again, that’s still €100,000. I’d be willing to bet you could generate relatively decent content for each of those terms for less than €100, especially if you are bootstrapping and especially if that content you are creating helps build your authority (see above). It’s a win-win-win situation. You’re creating content that you KNOW converts, that you KNOW will help build your authority (because you KNOW your customers convert on these topics) and that you KNOW is a worthwhile investment of time. It’s essential to monitor how you’re doing for these terms.

I know a lot of people will not agree with me in the value of tracking individual keyword rankings, they are indeed in a state of “everflux” (although longer tail term rankings tend to be a LOT more stable). But surely having a reasonable idea of how you’re performing holds value? Especially if you are entering a competitive market “through the back door” using the long tail method outlined above and in the videos by Matt.

What rank checkers do you use? Do you find they are a waste of time?

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