The Maine SEO Blog

About a week and a half ago, I attended a MarketingProfs webinar with SEO and link building gurus Stephan Spencer and Eric Ward.  The presentation itself was called “Link Building for Online Publicity, Buzz & SEO - What’s New & What’s Tried and True”.

Here is a sampling of my notes, basically the major things I pulled from the presentation (most of which I either did not know or Stephan and Eric simply solidified).

• It’s not all about the SEO and PageRank. It’s about driving qualified traffic; there are other quality links (many that have no SEO value at all) that you should go after:
  - Directory links (DMOZ, Yahoo! Directory)
  - Temporary buzz links (Digg)
  - Paid-for links (Eric gave the example of Adbrite)
  - Vertical links
  - Email-based links
  - Links from blogs
  - Editorial links
  - Organic links
• Finding vertical/topical links:
  - searchengineguide.com/searchengines.html
  - searchenginecolossus.com
  - Google (search for “seo search engine”)
• 301 redirects pass link juice; 302’s do not.
• Tips for requesting links:
  - Subject line is the most important, letting the webmaster or blogger know that you are not a spammer.  Make it personal and use the title of their site.
  - Make the email short and sweet, again letting the webmaster/blogger know you’re not a spammer.  Link to a specific page (preferably NOT the homepage) and why/how it would interest their audience.
  - Include a brief overview of what the site is all about - don’t make your potential linker do all the work!
• Tips for link reclamation (in other words, what to do if your URLs change):
  - Identify these useless links in your Google Webmaster Tools
  - Contact linking sites
  - 301 redirect
• Tips for updating link text (in other words, getting backlinks to change anchor text from “click here” to something a little more relevant and keyword rich):
  - Review existing backlinks with a backlink analyzer (something like Linkscape from SEOmoz)
  - If the keywords you’re targeting are NOT in the anchor text, consider contacting the webmaster/blogger (using the same sort of technique as requesting links).
• Check how PageRank is flowing and if you have an error codes with a Server Header Checker (search for Google and use one of the top 10).
• Track link building efforts with tools:
  - trackengine.com
  - changenotes.com
  - google.com/alerts
  - urlywarning.net
  - changedetect.com

Nicki Hicks
Maine SEO

Make a difference, go vote!!!!

Moderator: Danny Sullivan, Editor-in-Chief, Search Engine Land

Speakers:
Bruce Clay, President, Bruce Clay, Inc.
Todd Friesen, President, Oilman SEO
Rae Hoffman, Owner, Sugarrae Internet Consulting
Jill Whalen, CEO and Founder, High Rankings
Mike Greban

Topic: Social Media

• Bruce Clay: site has spiked on search engines due to traffic from social media links
• Rae Hoffman: great for letting Google know that people are visiting your site and using it
• Mike Greban: Social search – people searching social networks; “new signals to search engines”; bookmarks give search engine weight

Topic: Content

• TF: become the expert in your industry - and show you are with the content you provide
• JW: are you answering people’s questions?
• MG: content is NOT just compelling copy: video, images; “Build good content and build it for the end user”
• RH: content doesn’t need to be perfect or great every time – just good content all the time, and tastes of great (example: cool content for flower shop: the funniest cards they see)

Topic: nofollow

• MG: why link to sites that you are nofollow’ing? Doesn’t think you should waste time with nofollow
• JW: thinks Google will eventually stop using nofollow tags, she doesn’t use them
• RH: thinks it’s a new fad, that it’s better to have good external links, thinks it’s a red flag
• TF: doesn’t believe in them
• BC: works for him

Topic: Blogs

• MG: how does the end user want to receive your information?
• JW: watch dead blogs and hackers
• RH: suggests to read about Wordpress SEO, Feedburner for WP (“mybrand”); Google knows # of subscribers of RSS feed
• BC: add relevant blogposts faster than relevant pages; dedicated bloggers; integrate info into site

NOTE: These notes are the major points of the presentations, and do not include every point the presenter made.

Moderator: Detlev Johnson, CEO, SearchReturn

Speaker: Roger Montti (AKA martinibuster), Owner, martinibuster

• Small window for links from .edu (Spring/Fall, when schools are in session)
• Focus: two main link building initiatives - industry heavyweight backlinks, charitable opportunities
• .edu’s are generally desirable because: usually not in bad neighborhoods, in maps of link relationships, these pages are generally going to fall outside of relationships that are known for link manipulation and commerce, sometimes features original, authoritative and expert content (but not always), relevance
• .edu’s to look for: hotlinks, bookmarks, links, directory, resources

Speaker: Jeff Muendel, Search and Online Marketing Analyst, NetConcepts

• LinkedIn: three active links can be added, with modified anchor text
• Link Building campaign - encourage employees to create LinkedIn profiles w/ publicly accessible profiles, link deeper into the site – not necessarily the homepage
• Network in Meatspace (AKA the real world) - build relationships w/ bloggers, register and attend conferences who link to the attendees, real world meetups (meetup.com)
• Hunting for commonalities: tools: Ranking.thumbshots.com, Aaron Wall’s hubfinder tool
• Make donations and get links

Speaker: Debra Mastaler, President, Alliance-Link

• Develop base links: foundational links – solid links to insulate (directories); variety of elements: blog, rss, wiki, video, photo, downloads, coupons, article, affiliate, newsletters; directory sources: Google Directory
• Benefits: increases deep linking, uses keyword anchors, descriptive text, provides diverse text
• Association links – chamber of commerce, associations, clubs and organizations, advocacy works, federations, etc. (for associations: weddle’s) - networking is key (mail/email to membership, provide incentive to link), buy ad space for association newsletters (paper and electronic, provide copy), develop contests, develop scholarships,
  optimize your listing in membership directory, issue press release
• Media Links - target key journalists, backlink competitors, mine social news and bookmarking sites, set Google Alert for news and add keywords, cyberjournalist.net, Yahoo! news directory, blogcatalog, pay for sources, topix directory
• Issue press releases - avoid free press releases, pay for distribution details and inlink reporting, highlight willingness and give interviews, look for niche distribution services (such as Biz Wiz Wire)
• Develop and promote your onsite media resource (”news”)

Speaker: Eric Ward, CEO, EricWard.com

• 3 killer link reclamation strategies: request 404 error log, sort 404 log data from most requested pages, look down your sorted list - but go beyond the typical ‘top 100 referrers’

Speaker: Rand Fishkin, CEO, SEOmoz

• Linkscape

Q & A

• Only the first link counts!!!
• To change/kill pages, 301 redirect!!

NOTE: These notes are the major points of the presentations, and do not include every point the presenter made.

Moderator: Danny Sullivan, Editor-in-Chief, Search Engine Land

Speaker: Nathan Buggia, Live Search Webmaster Central, Lead Program Manager, Microsoft

• AJAX/HIJAX - Down-level experience, don’t use javascript for links, use <noscript> tags
• CSS - can improve performance better by separating formatting from content, has been abused by Spammers to hide links and keywords

Speaker: Sharad Verma, Senior Product Manager, Web Search, Yahoo!

• 3 pillars of 2.0: experience (last.fm, youtube.com), participation (tagging, reviews, comments, wiki, blogs, yelp), community (Facebook, Twitter, etc.)
• 2.0 Tech: RSS, CSS
• External CSS is better than regular CSS - efficient crawling (makes pages light, reduces file size, etc.)
• To do w/ CSS: don’t disallow CSS in robots.txt, don’t hide text using CSS (white on white, display:none, etc.)
• Are you a web site or web application? Search engines have a difficult time crawling javascript, AJAX content (Can’t be linked to, can’t be bookmarked, can have poor link juice and hence poor rankings, can’t be read from screen readers and text-based browsers)
• SEs can index flash
• Problems w/ flash: Most flash rendered with javascript, no deep linking → less link juice, one URL for the entire flash movie → bad user experience
• RSS  - More visibility of your content on the web (users, publishers), more links and traffic to your site → higher rankings
• Best bets: alternative navigation and content in HTML, submit sitemaps, robots.txt (don’t exclude CSS, javascript)

Speaker: Tony Adam, SEO Manager, Yahoo!

• Think about user experience
• Content controlled by javascript is not search engine friendly

Q & A

• Do SEs use h1 tags? (Live and Google: uses h1, Yahoo: doesn’t use h1)
• Submit sitemaps
• Use short, concise URLs
• Keywords in URLS!!!!

NOTE: These notes are the major points of the presentations, and do not include every point the presenter made.