Link building is never easy and is probably the most frustrating task an SEO has to undertake. There are many different tools and techniques designed to help you be a more effective link builder, however if you use them without a plan or in isolation of each other you’ll soon find that it just doesn’t work.

Whenever you start a link building campaign you have to seriously consider the signals you are presenting to Google, including velocity, anchor text, sources and content. What kind of link patterns would you associate with a natural profile? How would these links be developed and where would they come from?

It doesn’t take a genius, just some logical thought and application. Think about it, when an online source suddenly gains a lot of links, how does this normally happen? You can bet Google are thinking about what these signals might be and how they can develop their algorithm to benefit websites that display such signals.

I am not endorsing the ‘build it and they will come’ mentality, I am simply encouraging some thought around the ‘natural’ offsite signals that might occur when something does go viral and/or acquire a lot of strong quality links in a reasonable amount of time.

This post is slightly linked to one I wrote on YOUmoz (not yet published) which considers the amount of budget wasted on isolated link building techniques.

The Viral Content Myth

At Branded3 we spend a lot of time trying to understand what offsite signals give us the biggest impact, it’s not always easy, but one thing I constantly have an issue with is ‘viral’ content. What is it? Why does certain content just work?

With not far off a decade in the SEO industry I have come to some conclusions regarding viral content, and that is:

The success of viral or link worthy content is more dependent on the publisher, than the true quality or appeal of the content

I believe many work under the false assumption that if they create something really awesome everyone will come along and link to it. The truth is unless you get the right sources to talk about it, it is never going to get the links it deserves.

It’s all about trust, think about it…. If you see a tweet/stumble/Facebook share linking to what seems like an interesting title, are you more likely to share it if the source is a trusted one? My guess is that you would.

I see it all the time on this blog and others that I read, some of my poorest content does better than much better articles simply because the right person has got hold of it and shared it with their community. There is some great content on SEOmoz, however the author of the article will often be the determining factor of how well liked or linked to it is. The more popular the author is the more popular the content, regardless of the actual quality.

The bottom line is trust matters, and if you don’t have it then you need to find someone who does and reach out to them. It’s time consuming, disheartening and difficult to master, but it is an absolute necessity.

Knowing this will change the way you link build, it will change the way you execute your viral efforts.

So how do we apply this? I want to run through a typical link building process we use to develop what we believe are the best possible offsite signals.

Creating the Right Signals

Let’s first take a look at a process chart I put together, then I’ll take you through each step and the reasoning behind them.

This process is set up to create the signals Google pick up on if you were to create a viral piece of content on your site, and/or that same content was referenced by an authoritative source somewhere else on the web.

Social/Content Idea

We have already established one of the determining factors of well linked to content is the source or publisher, however the content that you create still needs to be of interest to your audience whether it’s an interesting statistic, infographic or contention opinion.

You need to decide not only what type of content will be successful through social channels, but what type of content is going to attract links. Sure social sharing is fast becoming an important signal but if you want the maximum impact on your rankings it has to appeal to the linkerati not just those who share on Twitter and Facebook.

That’s why infographics are so popular because they are republished all over the web, with a link Bingo

Sourcing the Publisher

I must stress at this point, if you are fortunate enough to be the authority, the voice that everyone listens to and links to, then you don’t have to worry about this step, whatever content you decide to go with can go on your own domain.

However, the majority of us aren’t fortunate enough to be the authority, or we have a business that is never going to be conceived as commercially unbiased. So for the majority we have to highlight the authority sources in our industry and reach out to them. If your industry is particularly niche, then look to local and national newspapers and reach out to journalists that write in relevant columns.

If you’re persistent there is always a way to find these authority sources, maybe you won’t be in a strong enough position to reach for the top sources, so start with some mid-level players and work your way up. If you have an adequately sized budget money always talks.

Getting the Content Live

The next few steps can be rolled up into one, and let’s face it, there’s not much to discuss around getting your content live, however there are a few tips I’d like you to consider:

1 – Agree on the content beforehand with the publisher, this will save you a lot of time rewriting and amending

2 – Use a quote from your company somewhere in the article if possible, others will no doubt write and refer back to the publisher, you want a reason for them to link back to you too

Once the content has gone live you need to seamlessly move into the next few phases.

Leverage Relationships

Any SEO or Link Builder should be continually developing relationships within the blogsphere and reaching out to bloggers of all sizes within the industry they are working in. When your content goes live on the ‘authority’ source you can then leverage these relationships to develop guaranteed discussion and links.

Either re write the story, or ask the blogger to write and comment on the source from their own perspective, obviously attributing the links in a way most beneficial to your cause.

It’s important that these posts go live within days of the main resource going live, freshness is key to getting the maximum benefit.

If you’re struggling for bloggers to help you try BLU.

Syndication

Now I know there are mixed feelings about this in the SEO community, however I personally believe creating ‘noise’ links through press releases and syndication can be beneficial as part of the complete strategy.

Whenever you get a link on a ‘top’ resource, that article will go on to be scraped, hundreds if not thousands of times. It will also be re-reported all over the web on websites differing in terms of quality.

Google knows this, don’t you think they will consider it when weighing up offsite signals? I do, in fact I have seen much better results from using this as part of the strategy.

How do I use it? Re write articles around the subject matter, link back to the main resource as well as the target page on your website and spread the content around the web using press/article distribution. Use differing anchor text in each article, you’re not trying to Google bomb your site, just helping to recreate what happens when something naturally gets spread around the web.

Creating Social Signals

We all know that the social graph is growing in strength in terms of its impact on rankings, nowhere near as strong as the link graph but we know it’s a factor none the less.

Just like with bloggers you need to be continually reaching out to people via social media, constantly expanding your circle of influence. Then when your grand link building plan goes live you can send it their way and hopefully rely on some very influential shares.

Due to the viral nature of some of this strategy it is important to monitor your Google alerts, and contact any sites that have failed to give you a link. I am of the opinion that once content has been crawled new links put in it don’t count half as much, however I still think it is worth the effort to drop a short email to all those who fail to add a link, especially if they are a potential source of traffic.

There are three key points I’d like people to get from this post:

1) Creating link worthy content is as much about the publisher as it is the quality of content, trust is everything

2) Don’t use link building techniques in isolation, one strategy alone is never going to give you the results you want

3) Try and make all this happen in the space of a week, it has to resemble links and content that have a viral nature

Oh and when my YOUmoz post finally does go live, please head over there and give it a thumbs up There are some pretty interesting stats in there.

As always I’d love to hear your thoughts and any strategies that you find work.

So it’s been around a month since Panda hit the UK and even though there has been plenty of commentary around it I think it’s a good idea to go through some findings, I have seen the analytics of over 20 hit websites now and even though there is no clear answer yet there a few interesting trends.

Brand Protection

Out of all the websites I have seen hit 95% of them were ranking for terms which had firm commercial intent, from product terms to travel destinations, household appliances to well known services. Tech blogs are a perfect example of this, a lot of the tech blogs out there were hit badly, ranking for tech product terms pulling huge quantities of traffic away from the main retailers and manufactures, only for panda to roll out and systematically destroy traffic.

Google have confirmed 16% of search queries have been impacted, my guess is at least 95% of them relate to commercially driven terms.

Which Sites Are Ranking & What Are They Doing?

If you have been hit you need to ask yourself, generally what type of search queries have I lost traffic on? Then search 10 – 15 of those queries, what type of sites are they? What type of security do they have? Do they use a lot of ads?

Richard Baxter did a great analysis of site quality factors a few days ago, go through these and decide what the ranking sites are doing right, then try and do the same.

Sheer Quantity of Content

We noticed a couple of sites that had very thin pages, some with no more than 50 words, before Panda these sites were pulling in thousands every day, after panda this was almost wiped out.

If you run a site with lot’s of thin content, think about bulking that content out now to dodge the next update.

Increasing Content Authority With External Links

I have always been a fan of linking out to authority sites, relevant to the content you are writing, content farms rarely link out, and when they do it is normally in an author box.

If you have pages of very dry content try adding in links to some authorities on the subject, this not only shows Google your a worthwhile hub but it also shows that the content is there to help navigate users to the most relevant information on the web rather than just attracting traffic to click on your ads.

The aim of all this is to add value to your content;

- Adding Video
- Images
- authority links
- reducing ads
- Increasing quantity
- Decreasing duplication

All these areas need to be looked at if you are to pull your website out of Panda.

A lot of webmasters have begun to no index large parts of their site due to the quality of the pages, I personally wouldn’t recommend this as Google never likes to see diminishing sites, instead rework that content make it better rather than covering it up.

There is no guarantee any of this will work but you can either try it or hope Google will eventually manually reinstate you.

OK,this is going to be short but sweet and mostly me rambling, however try and stay with me I do have a point

Right, there has been a lot of moaning around the web about the state of the SERP’s, in fact I have done a fair bit myself, mostly about the crappy results being returned for pretty commercial terms.

Then Rand at SEOmoz brought up the issue and literally just today there was another post on the SEOmoz blog highlighting some crazy results Googlere returning a.

As far as I am concerned the moaning is over, there needs to be a solution and I don’t think killing links is the way forward.

The Link Graph

Many have suggested that the problem is the link graph, the fact it  is too easily manipulated and until Google drop their current model they’re always going to struggle with Spam, this has an element of truth in it but there is a fundamental problem.

Without the link graph Google have no business model…..they need a way of ranking sites and any other method just isn’t going to cut it.

Google commands a massive amount of targeted traffic, no matter what method or data is used to rank sites there is always going to be manipulation out there, where money can be made the scammers will always be around.

The Social Graph

Google have admitted to using social signals to rank sites and even though I have seen multiple examples of this working I still think it’s a minor rather than a major factor.

You can guarantee that if it became a ‘major’ factor paid tweets would be rife, spammed and hacked facebook profiles would become the ‘norm’ & paid stumblers, diggs, reddits etc…. would become even more popular than they already are.

Anchor Text

It has been mentioned on SEOmoz multiple times that anchor text is the issue and that Google should seriously devalue the impact it has on rankings but where to they add that value?

High PageRank = More Link buying

In content = More blog networks

Trust = Does anyone really know what that is??

I think the fact is no matter where Google tweak there algorithm it is always going to manipulated.

All Hope is Lost?

As far as I can see the only real way to sort this issue is to make more webmasters/business owners and bloggers aware of SEO how it works and why you should be investing in it.

Of course you’d say that Tim?

Well ye I would, however I honestly believe it’s the only way to clean up the SERP’s. Think of it this way you’re a business owner, you’re hot on SEO, you have a fantastic site and a top product, you see a fake spam site pop above you for your main keyword, obviously spam and not likely to be legitimate.

So what do you do??

You report it and it is removed within days, job done.

Now I know I am going to have those that passionately disagree with me and think this is encouraging site outing and it is but let me be clear.

If you have a genuine competitor that has bought a link on a dodgy site, that’s not spam, your Job or whoever is in charge of SEO is to beat them. A spam site is one that offers no value to a user what so ever, a genuine website is not spam regardless of how many anchor text links they have.

So the more people understand SEO, the more will understand spam, the more spam reports are complete and the less spam there is in the index.

There will be many big brand websites out there that think they should rank regardless because of there trust, brand presence or some other invisible factor, the truth is if you want a piece of the Google pie you have to invest, let’s all stop the moaning and get on with what we know works.

Yes the title sounds obvious right? Of course optimised content and traffic equate to more traffic duh! But where do analytics fit in?

Well I have banged on enough about long tail keywords on this blog but guess what? I am going to do it again as this is a really simple technique for increasing traffic almost immediately by doing a little research in your own analytics.

So enough talking head over to your Google analytics and get your last month’s worth of keyword data. This will show you all the results you were found on over the course of the month but we need to do something a little extra before we begin to dig a little deeper.

Scroll to the analytics filter below the keywords;

Select advanced filter and choose visits. What we want to do is check out visits that brought us 20 visits or less over the month. These will probably be very long tail keywords that we rank for and with a little bit of tweaking we can increase traffic on them.

Let me go through an example, I have filtered the results on SEO wizz and have come up with the following;

Like most people long tail keywords drive around 60% of my total search traffic, as I look down the list one immediately stands out;

A quick rank check on an incognito window shows I rank 4th for the term “writing seo content”, I am probably only receiving around 5% of the traffic on this keyword and with a little optimisation I can probably rank second or first, remember there is a huge difference between ranking first and anywhere below;

Information from SEOmoz’s recent post;

As you can see ranking second will double my traffic on this keyword and ranking first will increase it nearly 9 times!!! So I currently get 19 visits but can probably add 20 to that a month with 30 minutes worth of work. If I carry out this sort of optimisation on all long tail keywords I can probably increase traffic from 5749 to 40,000 a month.

Now don’t get me wrong this is very labour intensive but just imagine the benefit if you do a couple of hours per week? You could be increasing your traffic significantly every month. Next steps?

Find the keywords > Optimise the page > Fire a few internal links with anchor text > Fire a few external links with anchor text!!……. Easy

Just a quick note to everyone that has emailed me in the last few weeks, I have been run off my feet at branded3 hence the lack of responses; however I still love you and will reply asap.

When you deal with link building day in day out you really begin to notice even the smallest changes in Google’s algorithm.

Just before Christmas site wide links seemed to be giving some real pull, then there were the in content gems that seemed to instantly increase ranking.

However, in my opinion Google has switched its emphasis again and is now putting more weight on ‘fresh’ links, links found on pages never crawled before.

Fresh links have always been precious; however the impact of them has been blurred due to large amounts of site wide link buying.

Now Google has really got its act together and not only is the impact noticeable in terms of the links we build for clients but it has also been felt in the SERPS.

Recent SERP Changes

On the UK domain Google has really shaken up the top results, penalising sites with a lot of site wide links and giving more power to exact match domains and a more diverse link profile.

Some sites that ranked on the first page for “search engine optimisation” have now dropped back on to the second page which basically makes them invisible.

Changes In Approach

So how does this change what we do on a daily basis, well here are my thoughts;

• We need to all become writers and get involved in guest blogging, reporting and writing for news sites within our niche
• Press releases really begin to make a mark, a press release can flood you with fresh in content links. You will have to pay for the best services but it is definitely worth it.
• Viral content becomes even more important, make sure everything you write can be easily shared and write news worthy content. I am not going to go over viral content again but if you’re unsure about how to write good SEO content read my article on SEO content writing.
• I have always been a fan and the new importance of fresh links makes blog carnivals priceless links

These are just a few ideas and I am sure you can think of many more, don’t give up other link building methods, but if you’re looking for a real ranking boost, get yourself some fresh links.

I am an SEO at heart, I love the internet and Google and the way in which anyone, even those of us with limited means, can promote our products, services and even ourselves.

One of the key concepts of being successful online is understanding how to become authoritative in your given industry, how are you going to gain trust and convey your expertise.

The Main Problem

One of the main issues with today’s blogging world is duplicate information, blogs that simply publish the exact same news over and over and over again. No new angles, no new points of view, no unique news, research or scandal, simply rewrapped, duplicate content that you can read on hundreds of other sites.

Many people read authority blogs such as Copyblogger and Problogger and basically re-report the content from various posts.

If you want to stand out, if you want to be a better blogger and become an authority resource you cannot simply copy your way to the top.

Just to make myself totally clear on this point, many top bloggers have taken certain actions which have lead to their success, however I am specifically talking about their content, their articles and their news. Copying a success strategy is different to being one of the many online echoes.

You Don’t Need To Be Einstein To Build Trust and Authority

So you have an area of expertise, you offer services or a product, maybe you simply want to display your knowledge in a given area?

It is important to remember that you’re not going to do yourself any favours by making yourself sound smart, bare with me here.

I learnt a really important lesson at University through 2 separate experiences;

1) When I initially put an essay together I would try my best to make it as complex and professional as possible, using big words, complex theories and long winded paragraphs. My results were average to say the least and I was shocked considering the effort that had gone in. I later had a meeting with my tutor who explained that I was trying so hard to make my piece of work authoritative that I was missing out on some plain and simple principles, I changed my approach and attempted to make my work as straightforward and logical as possible, this did the trick and my grades started to increase.

2) As you will probably know you attend endless seminars at University and you always had your favourite teachers. Surprisingly the most popular teachers were not always the teachers with the most authority in a particular area; the best teachers were those who could convey complex principles in a simple way. Seminars that involved a tutor who had this skill were packed with students where as the others were made up of 4-5 students.

My point? Just because you have expertise in a given area your aim is not to baffle your readers with your extreme abilities and knowledge, visitors come to learn and most are not going to have such focused knowledge in your area of expertise, if you want to be an authority in a given area you have to learn to speak to the masses and not just the few people who are on the same level as you.

When was the last time you read blogs like Problogger and thought to yourself “wow that was deep, I’m confused”? Not very often I am imagining and that is because the articles generally speak to the masses. Do you think Problogger would have 100,000 subscribers if all the info was so complex only the top bloggers could really understand it?

Some More Points On Being An Authority

Never dismiss an idea for a post without thinking it through- Many times we have things on our mind that we dismiss, thinking “everybody knows this”, well sometimes they don’t, sometimes the things that seem simple to you are not so simple to others, so be open minded about your topics.

Stand up for yourself- Many follow the crowd either because it is easier or because they are afraid to say what they really believe. If you don’t agree with a specific point then say so, you are never going to stand out if you are travelling in the same direction as everyone else, plus you never know, once you voice your opinion other’s may gain the courage to follow.

Research your industry- No this does not mean re report from other authority blogs, but do research the points these blogs make, add your own personal twist to concepts and practices.

It’s not easy standing out in a world full of experts but whether you’re a blogger, marketer or other online business owner you need to put yourself out there and you are not going to do it by being the same as everyone else.

One of the most fundamental aspects of SEO is being able to pick keywords that are going to give you a return on investment. Niche keywords are those with a high search volume but low competition, you can rank for these very quickly, however first you have to be sure that you are going to make a return.

Before we get into the meat of this post I want to clarify that the techniques I am going to discuss are no secret and many internet marketers use them to find niche keywords, I obviously add my own tweaks to the process as experience tells me certain figures and measurements work better.

Also let me make it clear this process is far too time consuming for optimising posts and other deep pages, this research is to use when you start a new site based around a niche topic for the sole purpose of converting the traffic.

There are two things I want to make clear in this post;

A – How to find niche keywords

B – How you can tell if a particular keyword is going to be profitable

First thing I need to stress is that if you’re thinking about targeting the ‘make money online’ sphere, forget it. I consider myself an accomplished SEO and would not even consider starting down that path for two reasons; 1) competition is fierce 2) even though I could beat them I think my energy is spent better elsewhere and so is yours

Some Guiding Principles

We have already established that niche keywords are those with traffic but little competition, however how on earth do we know if they will be profitable. The truth is you never actually do however there are a few things we can do to narrow down the process.

First of all any niche keywords need to be “buying keywords”, keywords that searches input in order to buy a particular product to buy. Whether you are monetising with adsense, affiliate links or actual products this principle is fundamental, if the visitor hasn’t come by way of a buying keyword they are not going to click or purchase.

So it makes sense to me, to start our search for niche keywords on sites like Ebay or the mighty Amazon, here you will find hundreds of products to target, scroll through some and then let’s move to the next step.

Using The Google Keyword Tool

Yes it’s my favourite, the good old Google Keyword Tool and we are going to use it to work out which keywords are going to give us a good profit.

Here’s a quick example on the keyword ‘bracelets’, I don’t target this niche nor do I intend to, this is simply an example.

There are a couple of things you will notice from the picture and I want you to set up your keyword list in the same way.

1) Change the Match Type to Exact – This shows the amount of searches for the exact keyword on Google

2) Lose every column except the CPC price and the monthly global search

3) Order your list by the largest to the smallest search volume

4) Once this is in order download the keywords using the .csv (for excel) link

You should have a list of keywords that looks like this (You can order the columns as you wish)

Now what we need to do is estimate the income column.

Estimating Keyword Income

I must warn you at this point, we need to make a number of guesses and use a little math to figure out how much ranking for a particular keyword could be worth.

The only way we can work out potential income is by taking the Cost per Click into account and presume were trying to make money from adsense on our sites, this is not accurate but in my experience it is the ‘most’ accurate way to understand keyword potential.

So to do the Maths we do the following;

1) Multiply the Estimated Avg CPC by .25 – We are presuming that Google pays around 25% of the cost per click to the adsense publisher

2) Then multiply this amount by the monthly search volume

Now even if we get a no.1 ranking we are not going to take all the traffic and my experience you will only see about 35% of the traffic figure, so….

3) We multiply the amount by .35

4) Finally we multiply the running figure by .04 (This is presuming we can generate a 4% click through rate and most adsense optimised sites will exceed this percentage)

On your spreadsheet the sum will look like this;

Once we tap enter it will give us a monthly income figure for the first line like so;

That’s right people a number one ranking for the keywords bracelets could be worth about £4782.40 in adsense income or $7651.84. If you doubt that much money can be actually made ask yourself first, have you ever had a number 1 ranking in Google? For a product related keyword??

Of course the figures are not pin point accurate but I believe they give you a great idea about how profitable a niche is, this is how internet and affiliate marketers make money

Now of course you might not want to spend the next two years of your life attempting to rank for bracelets, however there are lots more keywords to go at with less competition.

Just look at some of the other keywords you could pursue and be ranking for in the next 6 months given the right SEO strategy.

I have not competitively analysed these keywords so I do not know what kind of competition they have, if you like the look of these keywords you will have to check out the top five on Google, below I’ll give you some guiding principles

Understanding the Competition

This is the main part people tend to get mixed up.

If you want to target a heavy niche then forget this part and just be prepared to work at it for a few years for a big return.

If you want to target lots of small niches do the following;

1) Search the chosen keyword on Google

2) Check the PageRank of the top 5 sites if any are a PageRank 4 or above move on, unless they do not use the ‘exact keyword’ in the title tag

3) Check the link popularity using yahoo links count (download the SEObook plugin SEO for Firefox) Any pages with ‘page’ link popularity of over 1000 then move on, unless the keyword is not in the title tag

What we are aiming to do here is target niches that we can rank for very quickly and start earning within 4 months, hopefully ranking in the top 5 after 6 months SEO work.

So there you have it!!!!

If you want to create a profitable niche you must first make sure the keywords are capable of pulling in the money.

Disclaimer – I have to say at this point that the above is not accurate and click value may differ depending on multiple factors, this is a system I and many other internet marketers recommend

I can’t finish this post without giving credit to the internet marketers that I know use this system.

Court and Mark at the Keyword Academy teach pretty much the same methods for locating profitable niches, they have a membership site which goes into a ton more detail, so if you are interested in this form of SEO you should check it out.

The methods I use, even though are very similar to others, differ slightly, as you do this more and more you will find out what works and what doesn’t. It can be a painful process but you make fewer mistakes the more you do it.

This is not a ‘make money online’ site

I am mindful that this sort of posts ventures into the ‘online money’ realm, I am mindful that I want SEO wizz to remain an SEO blog, however there is no getting away from the fact SEO is closely related with generating an income online. The make money arena is not for everyone, still even if you own a different sort of site this is great method of checking the potential of the keywords you are targeting.

Anyway hope everyone got something from it.

I don’t know if any of my long standing readers have noticed lately but I have been posting a lot less and my interaction on sites such as stumble, twitter and other social networks has been almost none existent.

Now besides being extremely busy there are other reasons for this, the truth is social networking and spending time on these sites building profiles has never been my strong point, the time it takes to become involved and interact, in my opinion, cannot be justified. I have found so much more reward in developing other areas of my blog and general online portfolio.

Before I go deep into this post I want to assure anyone who I meet or who have met via social media, or those who found my site via social links, that I am not disregarding them as ‘not worth the effort’, if you found me via social media that is great, I love interacting with others who are interested in SEO and other internet marketing strategies, however the ROI of time spent on social sites is simply overrated in my opinion. WOW that was a long (probably badly written) sentence!

You see originally I am from an internet marketing background, ranking sites and making money via affiliate products and ad clicks, I soon found myself in the Google Adwords game but quickly abandoned ship when it became too expensive to use for affiliate marketing. I only really decided to test social networks when I started marketing SEO wizz back in March this year, it was a test, it was time consuming and unfortunately the stats show I have wasted my time somewhat.

Any without any further waiting, here are my 5 reasons I have found social media to be an unprofitable strategy.

The Time

If you really want to build a network via sites like digg, stumble and twitter then you are going to need to put the hours in, I found at one point I was spending more time on these sites than I was spending on my own site! That can’t be right can it? Tweeting, stumbling, answering questions etc….

I met people yes, I got to help a lot of nice people and I also got help from a lot of nice people, but that rarely turned into leads, sales or links and on that note I’ll continue.

Low Conversion Rates

When I talk about conversion rates I am referring to SEO enquiries, ad clicks, affiliate clicks and subscribers. Social media simply does not convert compared to search traffic, that’s why I spend my time building my own site and its link portfolio.

Adsense: I have messed around with adsense on the site and trust me it converts nowhere near in the same league as it does on my other niche blogs but I haven’t really optimised the site for adsense. Still I found that search traffic has around a 2.45% click through rate and social traffic has about 0.13%. That is a huge, huge, huge difference. If I wanted to advertise on a site why would I ever pay to have my banner or link on a site that receives 90% social traffic?? That’s a bad investment.

Just to clarify at this point, for the exercise of establishing click through rates I have classed all referral and Direct traffic as “social traffic”

Affiliate Links: I did a 3 month test of having affiliate links in the right column of SEO wizz and yes I got quite a few commissions from it; however the same was true as was with the adsense. I made around 56 sales and only 1 came from social traffic, yes that’s right 1!! The rest came from Google with a few coming from Bing!!! So if you are in this game to make money social traffic is probably not the best route.

Subscribers: This is a figure I was quite surprised about, as I expected social traffic to do a lot better than it did. Search traffic has around a 0.6% subscriber rate whilst social traffic is a little better at 0.8%, now yes social traffic is ever so slightly better when it comes to developing a readership but only just and those readers aren’t going to buy from you, they’re simply going to read, which is fine but don’t be under the illusion that readers = profits.

SEO Enquiries: I won’t even go into this, just believe when I say the percentages are that low for social media that it’s not worth bothering with.

Social Visitors Are Not Looking For Solutions

I think this is the main factor to consider for any new online business and that is “social visitors generally aren’t looking to a solution to a problem”, they want interesting content and funny articles (the majority do anyway). Visitors that come to your site via search are inputting keyword after keyword into Google to try and find help to a problem or a need they are looking to satisfy. I get loads of long tail search traffic on terms like “how to rank higher in search engines”, “Where have all my links gone”, “Why is my site not ranking” and “how do I get more traffic”. These people are looking for answers, for products and for services.

Social traffic fulfils a purpose but does not provide profit.

Link Acquisition

When I was spending hours on twitter and stumble I kept telling myself, hey it’s a great way to build links. The truth is 90% of my links have come from my own link building efforts like, article marketing, directory submissions, blog carnivals and press releases. Yes I have links from some viral posts not from social media sites but from other websites that have found my content. Saying all this one of my biggest link building strategies has been through keyword targeting. I published a post on Bing SEO back in the summer, I did and still do get search traffic to that post, over 500 a month and it is still continuing to pull in links for me, around 350 as it stands. The long tail targeted posts on my site get search traffic and convert into sales, clicks, readers and links better than any other form of traffic.

High Bounce Rates

Now this is only a minor factor but still social media traffic involves huge bounce rates, I think stumble averages around 85% with Twitter not far behind. Now I know there is no concrete evidence to show this effects search engine rankings, however no matter how you look at it high bounce rates on a content rich site never looks particularly good. In comparison bounce rates on search traffic is around 50%, again which would you prefer???

Right I have battered social media enough, let me offer a little consolation and make a few points about what social media can actually do;

- Help you brand your site
- Help you rank for your company/site name (first page domination)
- Build friendships
- Help you find advice on topics
- It can be fun

Despite these facts, in my opinion, social media should be kept in its rightful place and that is to assist in connecting with people and not as a business building tool, because the truth is that it is a highly unprofitable way to spend your time online.

Just so I don’t get scorned, Yes I do use twitter a little and every now and then I login to my stumble account, however I am sick to death of the spam!!! Stumble my “diamond shop” home page and review it??? Come on guys, even if I stumble it it’s not going to make your site profitable!!! Spend your time doing something more worthwhile, like ranking for “buy diamond rings” (hmm I wonder how much search traffic it gets?).

Also just to clear something up, I mentioned at the beginning of the post I have not been posting as often as I once did and there are a number of reasons for this;

a) I decided to post once a week, this allows me to put together a better quality post.

b) I have been so busy with client work

c) Link building does more for my traffic than posting 3 times a week for the sake of it ever could

Has my traffic levels dropped? Nope they have increased.

Have I lost subscribers? Nope they have increased.

Have I lost anything? Yes!! The pain in my hands from typing 3 or 4 times a week

Seriously everyone the advice you read on most social blogs, in my opinion is false;

- You don’t need to post every day

- You don’t need to create endless pointless lists

- You don’t have to spend all your time on digg, stumble and twitter

Don’t let huge subscriber lists fool you, it does not equal success or profit (unless your goal is to get as many subscribers as possible, then it equals success).

Remember it’s easy for the high profile bloggers to say “just create great content and submit it to social sites” the fact is they have a load of loyal readers who hang on everything they say and go out and push their content all over the web, meanwhile 98% of start up bloggers do the same thing and realise it doesn’t quite work the same.

Don’t bother submitting your posts to these sites, if someone really likes your content they will submit it and pass it around their network. This is where social media comes into play, not by spamming social sites but by allowing networks of friends to share content easily.

I hope I haven’t offended anyone with this post; I value all the friendships I have built up via multiple means. I enjoy writing and interacting with those who read and interact with my content, all I am saying is that none of this = money, profits or anything like that.

If you want to read another excellent post with a great take on social media head over to Jason’s business blog (sorry Jason I pinched your image).

Also if you want to read some more posts on the value of social traffic head over to Allyn’s Blogger Illustrated post on Social Traffic (very funny guy) and Griz’s take on social media traffic. Both are a no holds barred assault on social traffic, so if you think you might get offended; best not click the links

Until next time!

Let me start this post by making it clear that this is not a promotional post, there are no affiliate links in it and I will try my best not to use any promotional language.

The reviews are from my own experience as I have used the services over the past 3 months, some quite a lot longer.

The next thing I want to make clear is that this post is to help those who actively build links, if you don’t think article marketing is ethical or content distribution is a valid way of getting links then this post is seriously not for you, if you read it you may leave this blog and never return

One Way Link Building

I know there are quite a few “SEO” newbies that read this blog, however if you think you fully understand one way link building you can skip this section and go straight into the reviews.

One way links are those links that point back to your site without any return link the linking page.

e.g.

- If I get a link from Jonny at givemealink.com that is a one way link.

- If I return a link to Jonny’s page that links to me this is a reciprocal link.

- If I return a link to a different page on Jonny’s domain that is what is known as a triangular link.

I hope that makes sense…

There is nothing wrong with reciprocal or triangular links as long as we keep them to a minimum, they are sometimes good to use to help a new site gain trust or strengthen an established sites link profile.

However…. One way links need to make up at least 80% of our link profile, they are given more weight from Google as a one way link is a reference without a return vote, no other reason for giving the link other than the fact you are pointing people to a great resource, apparently.

So as webmasters it is important that we start getting these one way links and doing it with the content on our own sites alone is a real pain in the a%! in fact it never really materialises for 95% of webmasters, even if their content was the best anyone could provide in that niche. I have seen so many blogs with great content, hardly being noticed online because they have failed to fully understand the concept that content is king.

Yes, content is king, but only when you use it right and posting 10 times a week is not using it right and will probably end in you getting burnt out and giving up, only to start a new blog on a new theme 3 months later making the same mistakes.

The following reviews are going to show you some great systems for generating ‘one way back links’ of course some are better than others and if you’re in an extremely low competition niche you may not even have to pay, anyway let’s kick into the meat of this post.

The Free Way

Yes if you have absolutely no competition or your competition are a few crappy little sites who don’t know what a link is then, Yes all you need is your time.

Use sites like Ezine Articles and GO Articles, to publish content in return for a link back. You can read more about article submissions in a post I published a few weeks back on ‘mass article submissions‘ and why they are not as effective as they were.

As well as publishing the odd article for a link you can also submit your site to directories (Yes this still works) and you can submit your individual blog posts to blog carnivals.

Do around a month of this and you will see a steady increase in links, and if there is little competition for your keyword you should be at least on the first page of Google.

It is so important to use your target anchor text when creating these links back to your site, however remember to mix it up using different variations. I recommend using the exact anchor text around 30% of the time, the others should be variations and/or your domain name.

Ok, let’s fly into the product reviews at last, remember these reviews are 100% genuine and designed to give you a true insight into the product and my own experience with it. The products are in no particular order; however I will tell you at the end which I use and prefer. Remember the products that will suite you will depend on your exact needs and budget.

Article Marketer

Article Marketer is a mass distribution network that pumps your article out to thousands of ezines and their subscribers.

First thing to get out of the way is that Article Marketer has now split into to 2 different companies since October 2009, however both systems are very similar and work in a similar way.

Both Distribute Your Articles and Content Crooner send your articles out to thousands of directories and ezines.

The services cost between $30 and $40 monthly with discounts when you pay for a year or a life time membership.

Some things to keep in mind

1) Even though your articles are sent out to thousands it is not going to be published on thousands.

2) Also your article is going to be the identical content on every directory so only the strongest domains will be indexed.

3) You can typically expect to acquire between 15 – 35 back links with every article you distribute.

Who does this product suite

I would recommend this to anyone who writes one ‘quality’ article a week for distribution and when I mean quality I am talking about something worthy of a guest blog post. If you tend to write 400 word descriptive articles (like me ) I suggest you save your money and distribute them manually.

My Article Network

My Article Network is a similar sort of set up, however has some big differences.

First of all it has over 10,000 active blogs to publish your content on, all with separate IP’s, excellent but how is it different to article marketer and co?

My article network also gives you to tools to spin your content, basically this means you rewrite the paragraphs a few times and my article network mixes them all around to create unique articles. This means more of your articles are indexed and you get more links.

The price of the service is $47 a month, if you stop paying your articles stop being distributed and this leads us onto the negative side of my article network.

Once you have written and submitted your content, it starts to be distributed, slowly. In fact you will be lucky to get more than 3 distributions per article a day, on top of this you have no idea where the content is going to or the quality of the sites. I used Google to see how many articles were being indexed and the success rate was a little better than article marketer and co, however the blogs were slightly better quality also.

Who does it suite?

If you have a site that needs a moderate amount of link building then this could be the perfect product, I would recommend writing a few articles a week and you should be able to build between 80 – 250 back links a month, which is a nice steady rate.

Unique Article Wizard

The Unique Article Wizard is hyped up something crazy, in fact in the UK we would say it’s a little too cheesy!!

Hang on though everyone, block out the cheesy hype because this product actually works and works well.

It works on the same premise as the other two products distributing your site to thousands of directories and blogs, so how does it differ??

Well it does in two ways….

1) The spinning tool and options used in this service are the best I have come across and…

2) The quality of the sites submitted to are the best I have come across in a distribution service.

I have used this product for the last 3 month and the average article generates around 300 links, I am not trying to over sell this but these are the kind of results it gives.

Does it have a downside??

Actually yes and it’s the price. Its $67 a month to use the services and this could seem kind of expensive, especially if you are creating little or no income from your site, however apart from that I see no other downsides. It really is an excellent tool.

Backlink Solutions

OK we start to move into a different area of one way link building and that is with blog networks.

Backlink Solutions is a network of blogs (around 300) that will allow you to publish content on their network. Again the blogs are on differing IP’s and your snippet or article will be published at a rate of between 1 and 20 a day.

Differences to the above products

First of all the blog network is quality with some blogs boasting a PageRank of 5 and 6 (not all some are as low as 2 and 3).

The second benefit is all the blogs look and act like blogs therefore are more likely to be indexed.

The third benefit is that you only have to publish snippets of content (over 150 words) this means you get more links for less time.

Lastly they also have a tool for you to spin the content so you will get more indexed links.

The Price?

$97 Ouch – Yes but it really is worth it for all you get, the only downside apart from the price is that, some of the content does not get indexed and therefore the link building potential is limited, however you place your links within the content which looks more editorial and therefore holds more weight on Google.

Who is this for???

If you are making some good money online this is your next purchase, you can build quality links in a very small amount of time, however if you are making no money it will be difficult to justify.

Linkvana

Linkvana is very similar to Backlink Solutions, it has a large blog network of high PageRank blogs which you submit snippets of content to in return for a link.

The differences

- You can only submit one piece of content for 1 link

- They will only issue 2 – 5 snippets a day per domain

- You can have profiles for as many different domains as you like (even if you don’t own the domains, Backlink Solutions does not allow this)

- You can hire someone to write your content for $2 a snippet (I like this )

These differences make Linkvana a little more search engine friendly and in my opinion give you a better quality of link.

The Downsides

- You can only build 2 – 5 links a day per domain
- The price is $147 a month

Who is this for?

In my opinion linkvana is only for those who already have profitable sites or those who engage in client work and professional link building. $147 is a lot if you only have 1 or blogs that don’t really pull in any cash.

What Do I use

Before I tell you this, first understand I do a fair amount of client work.

I actually use Unique Article Wizard and Linkvana, however if I only had my own sites to worry about and not clients as well, I would use Backlink Solutions instead of linkvana.

You may want to start with the article wizard and then when you have built some income invest in one of the blog networks also.

Is this blackhat?

This is not an easy one to answer and depends on your interpretation of “blackhat SEO”.

My opinion is that it is not. Article marketing has been around before the internet was born and distributing content for a link is no different to guest posting or submitting your site to a directory.

What about spinning and submitting multiple copies of the same article

Well, effectively you are distributing different articles to different directories? What is the harm in that, you are simply making sure Google gives the content unique recognition and therefore recognises the links.

In my opinion this is not blackhat, you are not scraping content, hacking and planting hidden links, all the content is written by humans. What more do you want??

Some Important Link Building Notes

- If you have a new site start off building links slowly and gradually build up the amount.

- If you use these services I recommend submitting content no more than 30 times a day, you don’t want to get penalised for link bombing.

- Remember to mix up your anchor text, you will be penalised for building exact anchors too fact even if it is a 2 page drop for a month, do you really want to risk it?

- Write quality content and your success rate will increase, this will lead to more links for the time you spend writing.

Don’t think you can compete with those people who are using these tools, you will lose. If you care about your business you need to make some sort of investment even if it is simply your time.

I hope you found this useful and please let me know if you have any questions.

This is the first post I have had chance to write this week as I have been working on another project which has meant a great deal of research and content creation.

For those of you who didn’t know, as well as an SEO consultant I am also pretty heavily involved in ‘niche blogging’. This basically means I rank blogs on Google to generate income through ads and affiliate links, hey once you have learnt SEO why not make some money out of it and leverage your sites?

Anyway I may talk about niche blogging in later posts and my current project is not finished therefore posting at SEOwizz is going to be down to once a week I’m afraid.

What I wanted to do today is highlight a couple of things that may be obvious to a lot of my readers but thought I would highlight it for the minority.

We all have widgets we use in the sidebars of our blogs, whether its recent comments, recent posts, popular articles, friends lists, blogrolls, rss feeds or simply ads, we all have them. All these features help our readers interact with our content and our community, however recent comments and popular posts widgets also benefit us from an SEO point of view, let me explain.

Recent Posts

Yes most of us have the recent posts widget in our sidebars acting as a site wide link to our most recent pearls of wisdom, however having them there does so much more than simply helping readers find your newest material.

A common problem many bloggers face is getting their most recent content indexed quickly, now this can be down to a lack of back links or it could be that Google does not think the new page is important enough yet.

A recent posts widget puts a link to that page on every page of your blog, what could be more important than a page with a link from every page of your blog? The page will be crawled more and therefore indexed quicker.

There is another benefit to having your recent posts displayed on every page and that is, exposure. If you don’t have a recent posts widget then your post is only displayed on your blog homepage, but what about visitors that hit deep pages? They may only read the deep page and bounce, however if your most recent posts are displayed in the sidebar there is a chance one of the titles may attract their attention and WHAM!! They click through and a bounce is saved.

I still don’t think bounce rate is a ranking factor yet but it may be one day and having a low bounce rate is good for any informational site.

Popular Posts

Again having a popular posts widget is a great way to increase interaction with your readers but it is also a great way of increasing the value of your most popular posts.

Again if your most popular posts are linked to from every page on your site, Google will index them quicker and the pages will rank higher.

So you will be getting more traffic to your cracking content via search engines and obviously more traffic to the pages by having links to them on every page of your site.

What does this mean?? Well,, your content is popular for a reason, that’s because its great!! So naturally the more people that read it the more links you will acquire, the higher rankings you will get and more visitors will keep streaming through.

So in broad terms Recent Posts + Popular Posts = More Visits, More Links, Higher Rankings, More Traffic, Lower Bounce Rates.

Dofollow Blogs

Over the past month I have been experimenting by leaving comments on dofollow blogs and getting the site wide ‘top commentators’ links that give you a link from every page. All I wanted to know was, how much value does it have as a link building method?

OK…. The first bit of news is yes the links were recognised by Google and Yes my link popularity went up around 5% from 4500 to about 4800 ish.

Did this effect rankings

NO – but let me discuss this at the end.

Did it do anything in terms of SEO

YES! I noticed a significant increase in search engine traffic, in fact one day I had 500 visits from search, 2 weeks after ‘top commentator’ links were recognised on 2 sites. Unfortunately the increase could have been caused by other factors, like link age or long tail ranking increases, however the fact it came directly after the commentator links makes me believe this had something to do with it.

Now I want to talk rankings and I want to talk about it very carefully, this due to the fact I don’t want people to rush out and spam do follow blogs.

OK…. My rankings did not increase, not even one place and I believe there are better ways to build links for rank.

Anyway, I believe do follow blogs links can be beneficial for ranks if….. You use a target anchor text.

Now I am actually going to discourage blog commenting for SEO purposes for the following reasons;

A – Only the site wide ‘top commentators’ links are really worth it

B – Commenting simply for a link decreases the value of the discussion

C – The longevity of these type of links are questionable, to say the least (The blogger could remove the link or ‘top commentators’ widget.)

D – If your link drops out of the top comments widget you have to start all over again.

Let me explain point D a little better;

If you place a load of comments on a do follow blog and get a link in the ‘top commentators’ widget then congrats you have a site wide link, however…..

Google has this little aspect of their algorithm that gives weight to the age of links, what happens if you forget to comment for a while, get knocked out of the top spots and Google crawl’s the page and your link is not there?? (Most blogs are crawled daily – well the ones worth getting these links from are)

This will mean you have to go plant a load more comments and you are right back to the beginning with Google seeing it as a fresh link, I hope you follow that.

I am not saying don’t comment at all, but only do so to add value and when you really have an interest in the conversation or topic. I wouldn’t want anyone commenting here that was doing it for a link only.

Also if you are trying to build a solid link profile, these types of links are far too risky, you could see half your link profile vanish in days given the right circumstances.

Anyway these are my observations; please feel free to leave your thoughts in the comments.