SEO and Social Media

Link building can be tricky.  Sometimes it’s hard to figure out where to jump in.  There are enough obtuse options and strategies to make an SEO cry tears of pain.  If you’re not employing a vendor to handle it, the bottom line is that link building is time consuming – no matter how you approach it.  There are tools that help you determine find the friendly links and good link partners through different ‘guesstimation’ algos, but if you’re not using them you need to come up with your own plan of attack.  A less efficient way to find links is to Google sites with related themes and content and try to negotiate links with them manually.  This manual part of link building does give you a lot of SEO control over the link partners and what the link looks like (ie, the keywords in anchor text, supplemental text near the link, input in the kind of link it is, etc.).  However, I like to optimize this approach with a few tricks.

Set Your Goals and Research Your Keywords

Before starting any link campaign you should have an idea of what you’re trying to accomplish.  Let’s say we’re trying to optimize a deep ecommerce page selling Star Wars audio books.  Let’s suppose the goal is to get this page to rank for some highly converting keywords.  Before I try to get links to this page, I’ll do some preliminary keyword research and figure out the top 5 keywords that make the sale.  I might round up these keywords through my analytics (sales data from natural search, paid search, and internal site search), and correlate them with keywords that Google, Keyword Discovery or WordTracker suggests.  I also do some poking around in social networks for alternative phrases that come straight from the mouths of the people (tools like Blogpulse, WhosTalkin, Twitterfall, TweetVolume,  connect you with conversations using your keywords and can sometimes give you alternatives or inspiration to build your own).  I check out semantic search engines for relationships I didn’t think of (Quintura is a good one because it’s visual interface makes it quick).  You might even find some options from the Link Diagnosis tool I’ll be talking about next.

Finding Link Partners and getting a Friendly Link

Next, if I’m focused on link building for SEO, I want to create a collection of sites to try to get links from.  I’ll do this by thinking about my competitors.  I could go to Yahoo and do the “link operator” (simply go to yahoo and type link:www.competitorsite.com into the search box, then take a look at the backlinks Yahoo returns), but I’ve become fond of a free tool called LinkDiagnosis.com.   By entering an SEO competitor into this tool, I’ll get insight into their backlinks.  If the website is linking to my competitor, maybe they’ll link to me too!  Note: Link Diagnosis works better if you install the Firefox extension they offer.  More insight to the links including PageRank, anchor text of every backlink, and more.  It’s a good tool.

Which Sites Do Not Have NoFollow?

Link Diagnosis gives me a lot of link building insight, but it also does something I really like.  Of course we want to get potential link partners, but we also want those partners to have NoFollows so they can pass PageRank.  By clicking the “good” slice in the Link Types pie, you’ll get a list of just the websites that link out using without using NoFollow.  Sometimes they’re blogs with comment boards, sometimes they’re social networks, sometimes they might be directories you never heard about, sometimes they’re small sites where reaching the webmaster won’t be too difficult.  Sweet!  Plus, with the FireFox extension, you can even see them ranked by PageRank to help you decide on which links to try to obtain first.

Popularity: 100% [?]

Frank Zappa wrote a song called “Cheepness” (released in 1974 on Roxy & Elsewhere… so good!  Great songs, great guitar effects, humor, but I digress). It’s about old, outdated monster movies that are done so poorly that you can see the zippers on the monster costumes. Once upon a time these monster movies scared people. Now in 2009 audiences are mature, and it usually takes CGI to be effectively scary today (visually speaking).

I’m going to make a stretch comparison here…

Cheap SEOs are outdated too. What’s a cheap SEO? Well, they charge very little and, well, offer very little. They’re tactic of choice is often SPAM. Sometimes the cheap SEOs are those who are new to the industry (maybe they just haven’t matured yet), or know a little about SEO but are convinced they can consult on it. Typically cheap SEOs use old tactics on shoestring budgets. They haven’t grasped the concept of actionable reporting, analytics, or had enough experience yet to understand what strategies are feasible in the modern day. The truth is their zippers aren’t hard to find if you’re looking in the right places. The problem lies when potential clients don’t have enough insight to look for the zipper.

Valid SEOs compete against cheap SEOs, either with ego and attitude, or concern (personally I’m in the concern camp). The SEO space is ever-changing, but there still seems to be this monster lurking in our space. This cheap-suited, space helmet wearing, fur ridden creature from beyond, eager to devour our world.

It’s fine that SEOs charge a wide range of prices for their services. The more established, experienced, or ‘rock star’ the SEO, the more they charge an hour. I’ve seen rates of $200 to $300/hr. A wide gamut is normal in any service.  In my case, I typically work with big brand clients. But there’s a part of me that really enjoys focusing on the smaller companies who need to compete with the big dogs. That’s a great challenge!  That’s also where I started my SEO career, and I’ve always have a soft spot for the little guy. When potentially pitching a small client I might charge 80-90% less. Not quite to the aforementioned “cheepness” line, but balancing integrity, value and money on that line. My own war against cheapness maybe?  In part.

This post was inspired by a company I was speaking with recently.  They were looking for SEO on a dynamically driven site targeting domestic regions. The site was pretty thin and though it did rank for some good head terms, really could use some SEO for the long-tail. In most cases that’s where the magic happens.  There was a long road ahead of this site.

The proposal I sent was the same I’d send a large client, but at a tenth of my usual price. Like any proposal, it’s a starting point, and I offered flexibility. The final response to the proposal was ‘not interested’.  No problem – as a consultant you factor in more declines than acceptances.  However, the reply went on to say “unless (I) could offer something substantial at a reasonable price” he wasn’t interested. In reading that line, I quickly decided this would not work for me, and was thankful it didn’t get any further. A consultant/client relationship really needs to be tight and focused on the same goals with the same belief in the SEO strategies and tactics. If there’s already a disconnect on the value of the offering (both monetarily and in terms of effectiveness), it really isn’t worth pursuing when it’s already at a blowout price. In sales you balance trust and desire, but pushing for the wrong accounts has burned me before. Eventually a consultant grows a sixth sense about such things.  You really need to weigh the value of educating the potential client vs. the amount of work involved vs. the portfolio you already have vs. the net income.

Though any reputable agency wouldn’t touch this small fish, there are plenty of independent SEOs out there that will take this work. Unfortunately, it seems that many SEOs on this level have mastered the sales and not the skills (my opinion). Clearly there are SEO services that hit and run, and have really ruined the landscape not just for the SEOs, but more so for the clients. I feel bad for any client that is going to leave a noble, valiant offering for a cheap trap. But where is that line? How much time does a real SEO spend defending this space against the imperfects? Is it really an SEOs battle to defend marketing – let alone SEO marketing – to a business’ “bottom line”? If you’re ethical, how much of your world is fixing the zippers showing in the monster suits, exposing those zippers, or promoting over them?  It’s a tough call, but it is the SEO landscape today.

The Cheapness of the SEO Industry

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Popularity: 15% [?]

When it comes to SERPs, and what users choose from the array of results, Google says, “Our User Experience Research team has found that people evaluate the search results page so quickly that they make most of their decisions unconsciously.” I could have told them that for a free Google mug. And maybe a Google Frisbee.

Search engines, like any object you use on a routine basis, becomes an extension of your senses. Are we really surprised that a thumbnail in universal search draws attention? No. It’s the contrast to a plain. It’s a key component to effective design, photography, and even magic tricks. But what Google determines from this study is that the thumbnails in the SERPs are also not a distraction if they don’t fit the kind of information a specific user seeking.

Behold – Eye Tracking Studies: More Than Meets The Eye

What Eye Tracking Says About Blended Search

Popularity: unranked [?]

When auditing a site, one of the first things I check is the use of images in place of actual text.  Why?  Well, because when I was a website designer/developer, I was very picky about the simplest aesthetics.  It drove me crazy how ugly arial and verdana could look sometimes.  Blocky, jagged, and “blech”.  I started life as a graphic designer, and just always paid attention to typography.  So, if the text I wanted to style wasn’t imperative to users and search engines (which it usually was), I would just Photoshop an image together with the words in the .gif, .png, or .jpg.  Otherwise, I would sacrifice typography aesthetics for SEO 99% of the time.

But then sIFR came along (and was given some love from Google.).  To work, sIFR requires JavaScript and Flash.  The beauty of sIFR is that it allows designers to render text into .swf files and use fonts that web browsers and computers otherwise don’t have loaded.  In the source code, the actual text was visible for search engine spiders.  This made search engines happy, and designers ecstatic.

Now there’s the FLIR (FaceLift Image Replacement) alternative, which just like sIFR, is Google friendly.  FLIR works like sIFR with JavaScript, but removes the Flash component.  True, most browsers have Flash installed (if not manually installed by users), but eliminating the chances someone doesn’t seems like a good thing to me!  FLIR does however require PHP to be installed on your web host, which is pretty much commonplace on any good web host today.

So how does it look?  Pretty good (once I determine exactly what font I love).  Take a look at the title of this post.  You can’t highlight it because it’s a .png file (ie, a graphic).  If you search my source code for the title, you’ll still find it in all its glory.  Although the header tags are not being used in my particular implementation, I do have this set up to repeat the same text in the alt attributes (I might augment this overlay on the header tags in the future, but I wanted to experiment with the alts for the time being.)

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Popularity: unranked [?]