Online Marketing Course Bonus

Here's a great free tool that I was recently pointed to that helps you find good backlinks for your website.

As you know, creating relevant backlinks to your website is vital to search engine optimisation. Getting links that are at least as good as your competitors means that any extra you can add will give you a real advantage, so a tool that helps you find out who links to them is priceless.

You can do the job manually, but here's a tool that finds those 'citations' for you:

http://www.whitespark.ca/tools/local-citation-finder/

Just sign up (for free) then enter any local search term (eg, 'solicitor bury st edmunds') and you're done.

It works on Google.com or .co.uk (and even Google.ca) and you'll be emailed a list of results, plus a list of your top competitors and another list of potential backlinks (that no one is using), usually within a few minutes.

It's very impressive! Again, it's at http://www.whitespark.ca/tools/local-citation-finder/

Roy

Online Marketing 7 - Link Building

The most important thing for your website is to get it noticed by the search engines. So you certainly won't hurt your cause by submitting your new site to Google, Yahoo and Bing. Most of the smaller search engines take their info from one of those big three, so that will help anyway.

Then there's YouTube and the other video sites like Vimeo and Google Video, which we'll look at another time. YouTube, by the way, is now the second most popular 'search engine' after Google, at least in the UK...

But submitting your site doesn't guarantee that Google will even index it (add it to its list of billions of sites), let alone give it a good ranking and a high position in the search results.

So you need another strategy to make the Google spiders find your site, and that's linking from sites that Google already visits. The more popular and dynamic a site, the more often Google will visit it. That equates pretty closely to the site's PageRank and that gives increased value to any relevant links from that site.

So, build your links from sites that Google already likes and visits often. You can see when a spider last visited a site by clicking on the 'cached' link for that site in the search results. The more recent that cache is, the more often Google probably visits.

But just linking once, even to a very popular and active site isn't enough. Google has now publicly stated that recent links count far more tan older ones. Indeed, very old links are pretty much ignored. Which means you need to keep adding new links and renewing or replacing old ones to show them that your site is highly sought-after and that people are still keen to link to it (even though it's you who actually adds the links).

On that subject, it's likely that links added within the content of another site - ie, by the site owner - will one day count for more than those added by visitors or users, but I haven't seen Google say that yet. It probably isn't easy to discriminate between 'owner added' and 'user added' links but I wouldn't put anything beyond the geeks at Google!

So, it's probably going to be worth actually talking to website owners and negotiating an embedded link, but for now, keep building your links from any relevant site you can.

There is software available to automate much of the link-building process and we'll look at that in the near future. Meanwhile, try to add a few backlinks each week, as a minimum.

Roy

Online Marketing 5 - Optimised Listings

In our experiment for online marketing in Bury St Edmunds we spent a lot of time researching directories and building links as we went. It paid off, as you probably know.

We found that there are probably hundreds of directories and similar sites where you can list your company or service, so obviously I can't go into detail about exactly what to put in each field on every one of them!

What I can do here is give you some general advice and a few tips on the finer points of using directories to build backlinks to your site.

First of all, a directory that doesn't let you include backlinks is probably a waste of your time. A few of them might have enough traffic to justify listing your company with them, because they might bring some customers to your site, but generally, if you can't include a backlink, move on.

Secondly, a 'deep link' to the optimised page on your site is worth more than a link to your index page, unless they are one and the same. That should really only happen if you have a one-page site (or maybe one content page and some about us info on another page). So if you can add a deep link, always do so. Some directories even allow you several links, and you should definitely take full advantage of those.

Where you can include embedded links in your company description, use anchor text (the actual words highlighted as a link) that includes your target key phrase. Where you can add tags or labels, use your key phrase there as well. Use the key phrase in the rest of your description and heading if there is one.

Link building should be a continuing process. Adding loads of links very quickly is probably worse than adding the same number over a week or two. Worse still is adding plenty of links and then just stopping as though your work is done. This gives the wrong kind of signal to the search engines. In fact it's a sure sign you were trying to work the system, so you need to be consistent and keep adding or getting links to make your list-building look as natural and 'organic' as possible.

There are plenty of sites you can link from, so there's no reason to stop, even if you just add one link a week from now on. Keep at it and you should be able to keep your website where it belongs!

Incidentally, there's some new research just out that shows the relative importance of various factors in optimisation, especially in relation to Google. There are a few surprises and maybe a bit of controversy, too, and I'll look at that next time.

Roy

Online Marketing 4 - More Backlinks

So far in this online marketing course, we've covered keyword research, on site optimisation for your key phrase and building your first SEO backlinks by starting a blog.

There are lots of other ways of building backlinks, and also increasing your online presence. Ultimately, you could even take over most of page one of Google for your target key phrase, but that looks a lot more impressive if your website is number one. For that you need more backlinks from high ranking websites.

The easiest places to get high ranking links are directories and social media sites. Two directories we've had excellent results with are Free Index and Touch Local. While the easiest social media site yet invented has to be Twitter. We've also had good and very rapid results with free ads posted on Gumtree and Craigslist.

Facebook may not be free for much longer, but it's also worth using for driving traffic to your site and for SEO backlinks.

You can get a free listing on almost all directory websites, and most of those will give you at least one backlink. Some will only allow you to link to your website's front (index) page, but you should link to your optimised page, like this one to our online marketing Bury St Edmunds page if you can.

With some directories it might be worth paying for an enhanced listing, but there are so many free ones that you probably don't need to. Of course, you may get a few calls from directory owners trying to persuade you otherwise!

With social media, you can include a backlink in every post if you want, as well as the link to your website that you'll include in your profile. One of the benefits of posting links on social media sites is that they actually bring you traffic, not just search engine spiders, and traffic itself helps to improve your website's ranking, as well as bringing you potential customers, of course!

You can easily get ten good backlinks leading to your optimised webpage, or at least to your site, just by spending an hour or so adding yourself to directories and social media sites.

With some sites, that will be a very basic listing, but others allow you to optimise your listing quite a lot, too, and we'll look at that next time.

Until then, get linking!

Roy

Cinnamon Edge - Online Marketing and SEO in Bury St Edmunds