The Maine SEO Blog

I want to discuss some of the links a little further that Eric Ward brought up in the MarketingProfs Link Building Webinar I attended a few weeks ago.  He said something very important: there are a select group of links that you should pursue that, while they have no PageRank or SEO value, are overwhelmingly valuable simply by the conversions you recieve.

1. Email links - Would you consider sending out an email newsletter without a link to your site?  I hope not.  For while you get no SEO value for that link, you will most certainly get the clicks…and conversions.
2. Temporary Buzz links - from sites like Digg and Sphinn.  While these links do get “followed”, the temporary buzz created will get you a boost in traffic while they’re up.
3. Social media links - Links from Twitter and Facebook are nofollowed, but can create buzz and traffic just the same. (Linkedin links are followed.)
4. Blog comment links - Generally, when you leave a comment on a blog or article, your website is nofollowed.  But that doesn’t mean people can’t click on it.  Leaving an insightful comment just might get more traffic to your site.
5. Collateral/Marketing materials - Technically not a link, but still necessary.  These include every physical marketing flyer, handout, newspaper/magazine print your company puts out to radio and tv advertisements.  Give people a call-to-action: go to our website.

So while these links may not yield in more search engine traffic or (in most cases) backlinks, they will certainly give you more direct traffic and conversions.

Nicki Hicks
Linking for Traffic’s Sake

Happy 2009!  My how the year flies by!!

As a present for entering the New Year, the great Google guru Matt Cutts has confirmed it: Google’s Toolbar PageRank has officially been updated for the first time since September.

The Maine SEO blog has gone from a PR 2 to a PR 4!

Toolbar PageRank is basically inaccurate after a few days, as it’s updated only about every 3 months.  So if yours is up, enjoy and Happy New Year!

Nicki Hicks
What’s your New Year’s PR?

I’m a huge advocate for measuring success and using geeky measurement tools to do it.  As a compliment to Google Analytics, there is Webmaster Tools.  While there is some overlap between the two, together, they give you a pretty good picture of how your site is doing.  And while some think Google knows too much about our websites (yes, they see same data as you do), the trade off is that it’s free.

1. Installation is easy. Choose to either plop a meta-tag into your code or upload an HTML file.
2. Quickly check for web crawl errors. Have any 404 errors?  Any nofollows or robots.txt you didn’t know about?
3. Can your site be accessed via smart phone? No need to check manually…Webmaster Tools will tell you!
4. Specific help for SEO. In the Diagnostics > Content Analysis section, check out any meta-description, title tag, or non-indexable content issues your site may have.
5. Top Search Queries. More of a fun fact than anything.  What top 20 keywords do you rank for?  What percentage of people that search for that term click on your site?  More importantly, ask yourself…are these the terms you optimized your site for?
6. “What Googlebot sees.” Very powerful information.  You can see exactly what anchor text people are using when linking to your site.
7. Pages with external links. Which are your most linked-to (read:popular) pages?  Webmaster Tools will show you most, if not all, of your incoming links.  Plus, you can view your backlinks in graph form with Glync.
8. Remove a URL. This tool can be incredibly useful if you have duplicate content or have removed a page for some reason.  This tool goes hand-in-hand with the web crawl errors page: after you find an error, you can then remove the page from Google’s index (it usually takes only a few days to complete the process).
9. Various other perks of having Webmaster Tools: crawl stats (how often Google crawls your site), subscriber stats (if you have a blog or email newsletter: how many subscribers do you have?), view your sitemap(s), generate and view your robots.txt file, enhance your 404 error pages (if you don’t already have a template matching your own design), and many more!

Nicki Hicks
If I add any more tools to my toolbox, where the heck am I gonna put my hammer?

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

Have a safe and happy holiday; and if you’re traveling to or from New England, be careful in the snow!!  (Or just use it to build an obnoxiously large snowperson….)