Gaining the best quality links is something I try to do for all my clients, but it is something that is often overlooked by a lot of people, especially those of you who are doing your own SEO. The problem is that there are so many conflicting ideas, strategies and opinions that cause confusion. In fact if you go back some years you will see a lot of experts talking about gaining lots of links from “high PR” websites and even directories, something which I wouldn’t dream of doing today.

Whilst gaining as many links as you can is a good idea you have to be resourceful with the time you have and go for the links that will give you the most benefit, instead of just anything you can get your hands on. Countless times I have gained tens or even hundreds of links for a website over a period and seen some improvement, only to then gain one high quality link and see it shoot up the rankings. The simple fact is that Google’s algorithms know what a high quality site looks like and will place importance on those websites. If that website then links to you, Google will see it as a trust signal and therefore a reason to boost your ranking (obviously it’s not as simple as that, but that’s how I describe it).

What does a great link look like?

A few years ago you would hear people saying that a great link is one with high PR! No longer is that the case. The algorithms are so much more complex than this now and PR is probably one of the most misleading things to look at.

One thing to start with is to look for high authority websites in your industry. I’m sure you will be aware of some in your industry already. These are the types of sites that break news or have many high profile people contributing to it.

SEOMoz provide great metrics for authority and trust in their OpenSiteExplorer tool. Page Authority and Domain Authority are the ones to look at here, the higher these numbers the more authoritative that website is. However even if you see a link to a site on here that has high Page Authority and Domain Authority it doesn’t always equate to a great link. Take a look at the linking page, what is on it? How many other links are on it? Is it a follow or no-follow link? You’ll want to make sure that the page has as little links as possible and that the link is no-follow and of course that the content is relevant.

There are other metrics and things to look at which will help you find great links but I think these metrics are enough to get you started.

One tip I recommend is to use OpenSiteExplorer to find sites that are linking to your competitors, this will show you some of the high quality sites that are linking to them and will give you an idea of the types of links you need.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is rapidly becoming one of the most, if not the most important marketing channels around. Consider that every day there are more than a billion searches on Google for information (Google data, September 2010) this is a massive market for opportunities and brand awareness. In order for a website to succeed online it must be found on Google.

Tips to improve ranking

Basics

The basics consist of improving your current website so that search engines can crawl your website and understand what your data is about. You need to make sure that you know what keywords you are targeting and make sure that your SEO is focussed on them. Here are a few things to look at and change to include your target keywords.

• Heading Tags (H1, H2, H3 etc )
• Page Title (make sure it is ~70 characters and includes your target phrases)
• Alt Tags (used to describe images, try to make them relevant)
• Meta Description (this is the snippet that appears on search engines, make sure they are understandable to a human and also include target phrases)
• Content (don’t overuse or stuff keywords, make sure that it is all natural looking to a human)

Remember that your website is for a human to view so you don’t want to overdo the SEO so that it looks un-natural and “spammy” Google is clever enough to tell when you are manipulating for search engines.

Content

Another area to concentrate on is content, it is important to keep your website content fresh and full of useful information, search engines like websites that are updated often and provide unique informative content, so the more often you can update and the more unique and compelling you can make your content the better.

One of the best ways to do this is with a blog. This way you can talk about whatever is on your mind and encourage comments, it’s a great way to engage with visitors and also the comments will add to your content. Try to make use of your target keywords in your content and get into the habit of interlinking blog posts, but again don’t overdo it or it will look manipulative, a couple of mentions of a keyword is enough.

Linking

A key area to SEO is links. Search engines see links as a quality signal and treat them as a sort of voting system, any link you get is like a vote. This does not mean that all links are treated the same so don’t be trying to get as many links as you can. A link from a great site (for example The BBC) is much more valuable than a link from Joe Blogs Facebook profile. These links also have to be relevant, so if you own a gardening website it is no use getting a link from a website about finance.

One way to get links is to find websites in your niche that are willing to accept articles or give interviews to you, there are plenty of sites out there that does this so get looking. Links from quality sites are not always easy to get and require effort from you to get them, but the effort will pay off. I often advise that my clients send letters to website owners as it seems a more personal approach and your effort to do so may be looked upon favourably.

We provide bespoke Small Business Marketing Pack’s that will take a look at all the above areas and give you insight and help specifically for your site if you wish to get a professional opinion.

Purpose

Your website is there to give your business an online presence, although many companies get by on offline advertising and word of mouth, if you want to really excel you need an online presence. The Total UK online population stands at 46m (source: UKOM Sept 2010) which shows that there is a huge market to be exploited there.  One thing that surprises me is that many people think that as soon as they start a website they will be generating large amounts of traffic. How is this meant to happen if no-one knows of its existence? Having a website is not like having a high street store, people won’t be walking past the door every day, think of it more like a village shop located on a secluded street. You wouldn’t expect many people to know it’s there so the only way you can get its whereabouts and existence known is to get the word out. We’ll go into this more later on.

Design

I always like to compare a website to a shop, think of your homepage as the shop window and the internal pages as the different sections of your shop. You want to make sure people come into your shop so you have to make the shop window look good, perhaps even with promotions in the window. The same principles apply on your website. If you make slap-dash website using basic site creators you will end up with a messy, amateurish look, much like one of those market shops that sells cheap clothing and smells like meat from the butchers they are located next to. No-one wants that!

It is important you invest money into your website as it will be the foundation to online success. Look for a great designer, all website designers have portfolios so you will be able to see the quality of their work. Freelancers generally don’t cost as much and can spend more time on your project so try and find one if you can (Twitter is a great place for this). Here are some tips for your website homepage.

• Keep the content concise and understandable (7 +/- 2 is a good rule to follow in terms of amount of information)
• Make call-to-actions clear, you want people to perform the action so make it obvious
• Display promotions and pricing ( not necessarily a detailed price list but guide price e.g. from £39)
• Contact and about details need to be reached within one click from the homepage

Marketing

Having a great website without visitors is like owning an Aston Martin but not having a driving license, no-one is going to be able to see it. With the foundations in place you need to start thinking about generating traffic. There are many mediums to direct people to your site.

SEO

The most important one is SEO, this will generate the most traffic in the long run, provided it is done right. Make the effort to learn the basics at the very least or if you don’t have the time look to hire a professional like ourselves. SEO is a long term strategy and won’t bring you instant success but it is ultimately the most important thing you can do.

PPC

Adwords is the most common Pay Per Click platform and will probably generate the most traffic. PPC is instant unlike SEO, however it can be very expensive with costs per click costing on average around £2-3. PPC is a great starting point whilst you are building up the SEO.

Social Media

These are free tools to promote your business but will take time to build up and become effective. You can create a Twitter profile and build up your followers and spread the word about promotions and services. A Facebook Fan Page is also a great way to reach out to existing customers and also gain new ones. Keep it updated on company news, offers and industry news.

Magazine and Publications

Although this is a more traditional method, they still have a large reader base, try and include your website in all editorials and you should see many direct hits from it.

Referral Sites

Sites such as directories and profiles are a great place to put your website link. Not only is the linking great for your SEO but the links should hopefully generate some referral traffic, try and get your website link included everywhere you can.

Hopefully this information is enough to understand an online presence is more than just having a website and applying these tips should give you great success online.

Promoting a web widget for links can sometimes be a tough task, as you need to ensure that you can reach a certain level of adoption before the widget begins to snowball and gain adoption naturally. Here are my five tips when promoting a WordPress widget during the launch phase.

1) Contact bloggers directly via email, blog comments, and in forums.

If your widget relies heavily on being adopted, which most do, then you should aim to contact as many bloggers relevant to your widget as possible. I find that as well as sending the usual emails it can also be beneficial to leave threads in blogging forums and commenting on blogs to try and build relationships with bloggers prior to asking for adoption – the great thing about this is if a blogger refuses to install the widget you can still ask for insight into why not and how you could improve the widget.

2) Be Extensive When Building Your WordPress Holding Page

Possibly one of the best quick wins when promoting a WordPress widget, that doesn’t fully rely on the widget’s shareability is to ensure you create an extensive holding page on WordPress.org. By adding a large number of relevant tags, creating thorough descriptions, and ensuring you have a significant amount of positive compatibility reviews, your plugin page will have a far better chance of appearing when users are searching for a widget to install. I recently did this for Gartoo, who received 3 – 4 downloads a day from their WordPress plugin page before any promotion outside of WordPress even began. It’s definitely worth the extra time and effort.

3) Submit it to widget directories and widget review sites

There are so many widget directories out there such as wigipedia.com, and Yahoo Widgets that I don’t seem to receive many submissions. It’s pretty easy to get your widget featured on these sites and as they receive good amounts of traffic it can be a very beneficial place to promote your widget.

4) Create a recursive loop to install the widget

The great thing about widgets is that if they have a good concept, then they will keep getting installed over a long period of time without too much ongoing work. One tip to encourage this is to create a recursive install loop – i.e. when a blogger installs the widget on their blog there is a link or embed code allowing their visitors to install the widget on their blogs, which will then allow their visitors to download the widget and so on. Widgetbox do an excellent job of this on all of their free widgets.

5) Joint venture on the widget promotion

A really simple way to gain promotion of your widget is to partner with another company or website by offering them promotion as a ‘case study’ of a website that has installed the widget. You could include a screenshot of their site with the widget installed on your WordPress landing page, and mention them in the various promotional releases that are published about the widget.

This blog post was written by Marcus Taylor, a social media executive at SEOptimise

“A random act of kindness is a selfless act performed by a person or persons wishing to either assist or cheer up an individual or in some cases an animal. There will generally be no reason other than to make people smile, or be happier. …
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Random_act_of_kindness“

If you are looking for a way to separate yourself from competition then practising random acts of kindness could be your approach. When I say random acts of kindness I don’t mean doing something and looking for something in return, this is not a random act of kindness! If you’re going to do it properly you need to understand that you are doing it out of the goodness of your heart, never expect anything in return, you may get something In return which is great but don’t make this the aim!

With the increase in social media over the past few years, random acts of kindness are becoming a strategy that many companies are starting to employ, and often it makes all the difference when it comes to branding.

• “87% of UK consumers expect companies to consider societal interests equal to business interests, while 78% of Indian, 77% of Chinese and 80% of Brazilian consumers prefer brands that support good causes. (Source: Edelman, November 2010.)”
• 
  
• 71% of people “make it a point to buy brands from companies whose values are similar to my own.” (Source: Young & Rubicam, August 2010.)

Personal Touch

Consumers like it when they are made to feel special, so if they have tweeted about something and you respond with a personal tweet offering a free sample or something it can brighten their day, for example:

Interflora have probably made this persons day. What is great about this random act of kindness is that not only have you made someone’s day but you have performed a selfless act something which can in turn make you feel a lot better.

The benefits to your business is that selfless acts like this show that you are a considerate company and not like the business models of years gone by, the type that focus on profit only and will do anything to get money out of you! I’m sure you all know companies like this.

Not only will these acts give a good impression of your company, the power of word of mouth will spread this message, and with the increase in social media this message could spread virally quite easily. Like I said earlier, don’t expect these results, but if they do come along then you deserve it! As they say, what goes around comes around!

Performing random acts of kindness is something I have been learning to do for a while having read Don’t Sweat The Small Stuff by Richard Carlson. It’s a tactic designed to make you decrease stress and it definitely works, there is no better feeling than knowing you’ve made another person happy! It is certainly something I would suggest you consider doing in everyday life as well as for business.

As of today, 1^st March 2011 The Advertising Standards Agency (ASA) have the power to police what companies say and claim online, and that’s not just on their own site but anywhere, Facebook and Twitter included.

ASA only used to be able to monitor what you said in a paid for advertisement online, now they can monitor all your comments and marketing material.

The new changes mean that under the extended UK advertising code you cannot mislead, harm or offend, just as you can’t with paid ads. This movement is supported and part funded by Google who themselves are trying to police what webmasters do online and they hope that this joint venture could help quash the paid for links problem which they have been battling with for a long time.

Under new regulations paid links would also have to be made known in an obvious way to show that the link has been paid for.

There are many examples I can think of right now where companies are making claims or misleading people on their own website for example “The best…” or “the No.1….” without anything to back it up and this is very misleading to the average visitor. Under the new guidelines the ASA will ask you to remove such statements and could even include you in their name and shame list which they will use for repeat offenders.

The ASA have the support of the search engines and they have the power to add warning notices alongside the search results listings of products and brands of non-compliant businesses as well as force the removal of links pointing to the page with a non-compliant advertisement.

These changes will probably come as a relief to consumers who are frustrated by what companies claim they are or what they can do for you but it doesn’t mean that companies still won’t try and mislead you. The problem with the policing of what is being said online is that there is so much of it and only so much resource that ASA can give, so although there is the risk that the ASA will catch the company the rewards for that company are far greater and therefore they are willing to take the risk.

Who knows what effects these changes will have, I imagine that initially it will take some time to discover the limitations on what you can say and do, also it will be interesting to find out how big an impact ASA can actually have with limited resources.

Which social media sites should you be using and why?

Well it all depends on the type of business you run, there are times when Twitter can be ineffectual for a certain type of business and equally if not more times when Facebook doesn’t really add much value to a small business marketing effort. I suggest looking at what your competitors are up to as a starting point, you may find that they have a clever way of engaging with customers on twitter or have innovative ways of interacting on Facebook. You may also find that your competitors are not using these tools effectively or even using them at all, that’s fine, and this means you have a chance to tap into an unsaturated source of clientele.

There does however seem to be a bias towards Twitter when it comes to business however. This is largely due to the fact that business can reach out to everyone publicly and the fact that anyone can speak to you and you can speak to anyone too means that your exposure can spread virally more easily on Twitter and you don’t have to accept any invites or be accepted yourself by others.

Facebook on the other hand requires you to be a friend of someone to engage, although the introduction of Pages means that anyone can “like” what you do and you can spread a message that way. I think however, that Facebook missed the boat a bit with business users and Twitter got their first and this may be why there is a bias towards Twitter as a business tool.

The stats below show the activity of users on Twitter and Facebook, the latter showing that Facebook users tend to be more active over the weekend and Twitter users are busier through the week, suggesting that Twitter is more effective during working hours and Facebook is more effective during sociable hours. This is likely due to the type of activity, people see Twitter as a business tool and Facebook as a social tool.

There are many things to think about when deciding how to approach social media, but you need to understand your audience first and this should help you understand what platform to focus on. It may be that your audience is more likely to buy in “social hours” this could sway you to use Facebook as a primary marketing tool or your target audience may be business users which could in turn lean you towards Twitter. These rules aren’t concrete and you really need to do your homework before deciding which to focus on but I’m hopeful that this blog post should give you a good guide on how to use social media effectively and where to concentrate your efforts.

The following infographic should also provide great information on how small business owners are currently using social media.

Historical use of PageRank

PageRank is a link analysis algorithm, named after Larry Page, and it was introduced by Google in 1998, that just goes to show how old this algorithm is. PageRank determines the popularity of a given page based on the links pointing to that page, below is a diagram from SEOMoz explaining how it works.

This in its simplest form shows how your page would gain a PR of 6 based on the links pointing to it. Many describe PageRank as a voting system, each link that is passed over is a vote for the page it is pointing to and so suggesting to Google that the page should rank higher.

Why PageRank isn’t so useful in SEO anymore

The problem with the above is that nowadays it is too easy to manipulate PR and gain or even purchase high PR links from other sites in an effort to increase your own PR. For years it has been thought that the higher your PR the more likely you are to rank. It is only recently over the past couple of years that webmasters are becoming wiser to the fact that toolbar PageRank isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

There does however seem to still be a large number of webmasters and “SEO’s” still worrying about how high their PR is on their site. Stop worrying and stop trying to gain links from high PR sites, it doesn’t matter anymore!

Google’s ranking algorithms have become A LOT more complex since PageRank was introduced in 1998 and it would be a terrible shame if the basis of ranking was still as simple as the original PageRank algorithm.  One clue as to why toolbar PR isn’t that useful anymore is that Google don’t update it as much as they used to, in fact the last update before this was back in April 2009, if you were looking at toolbar PR last week then it was probably not a very accurate measure.

What should I focus on?

Google’s algorithms are a lot smarter now and can detect manipulation and spam a lot easier than they used to. In order to achieve the rankings you desire now in terms of links it is best to focus on gaining links from related websites and authority websites in your industry. Below is a diagram showing how links from related websites are better than links from high PR websites.

Tools such as SEOMoz Pro and Open Site Explorer are especially good at showing what you should be aiming for by giving you detailed link analysis and with their own measures such as MozRank and MozTrust which correlate very well with rankings and are much better measures for you to focus on. (this is not an advert for SEOMoz, I just rate their tools and experience very highly)

LinkedIn is an excellent series of strategies that CEOs can use to build lasting relationships with their staff members, clients and business associates and is an excellent way of saving time and money when it comes to forging these alliances.

This system is entirely self updating when it comes to managing contacts and data, and if you’re the CEO of a company and using something like ACT or salesforce.com as a way of managing all your data then you should be more than familiar with the hassle it can take to update all your client contact lists. LinkedIn allows you to get all your current client information with ease at any time. It also allows you to see who your connections are. This is excellent if you’re trying to seal a big business deal and need a bit of an extra link to them to get your foot in the door, LinkedIn allows you to see who your contacts are contacts with and allows you to contact these links to the industry.

You can then search through different industries and companies and even through your own employees to get the information you need with just a few clicks and searches, plus this is invaluable when it comes to maintaining contact with clients. A successful CEO can used LinkedIn to keep close contact with all their connections and clients and logging in just a few times a week will establish firm communications.

The QandA section on LinkedIn is a much better alternative than doing expensive and time consuming market research and this can sometimes lead to you finding some excellent business opportunities and forge some new relationships as you’re finding your answers. This is also an excellent way to keep tabs on the opposition and you can check other companies updates to see what they’re doing, who they’re hiring and what ventures they’re currently involved in. If you see something you like you can then contact them and create a link with them to see if their expertise could benefit you.

By sharing all your contacts and clients on LinkedIn you can get endorsements from your customers and business partners which will encourage more people to come to you with business, if you take just a few minutes to leave favourable feedback for a partner there’s a strong chance they’ll do the same for you in the future. Using LinkedIn will definitely make your business flourish.

What I think will happen

With the recession taking a taking a grip on companies in 2010, it was interesting to see that the majority of companies surveyed by Ecosultancy were anticipating an increase in both SEO and PPC budget over the next 12 months (Jun 2010- Jun 2011) as shown below.

Looking at the change since 2009 below I can see that there seems to be an higher increase in the amount of companies wanting to spend more on paid search this year than 2009, the reason this might be is because companies are wanting quick results and don’t wish to put investment into SEO which takes time for results to show.

There is however an increase in respondents wanting to increase SEO spend by 40-60% showing that there are companies who see the benefits of SEO and are willing to put the investment into it.

I believe that at the beginning of 2011 we might start to see an increase in the spend on SEO with companies coming out of the recession and starting to see increase in sales and profits. There also appears to be an increasing interest and knowledge in SEO, however the amount of SME’s that still don’t spend money on SEO is staggeringly high, here are some stats from Econsultancy.

• 22% did not know what SEO was, and therefore didn’t invest.
• 20% were aware SEO yet chose not to allocate any budget for it.
• 18% chose to spend their money on paid search instead.

This means that 60% of SME’s don’t spend anything on SEO, as high as this number is, this is still a decrease on previous years meaning that more companies are spending on SEO year on year. Positive news for all SEO’s I’m sure.