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.

Before we get into this, Happy New Year! I hope it’s a prosperous one for all.

I wanted to start the New Year off talking about image search, mainly because I think it’s a massively underused method for driving search traffic. In the last year I have had the privilege of working on a few image focussed SEO campaigns and the results I’v seen are unreal.

How unreal?? 50 – 500,000 visits per month in 6 months? Oh yes.

Of course there is a major caveat to image search and that is some industries are particularly difficult, if not impossible to optimise for, however the ones that aren’t hold major riches.

So let’s begin by going over some basic optimisation advice, and then we can delve into a bit of strategy.

The Rules to Image Optimisation

Text, Text, Text

Yup, just like on page SEO your text must be optimised. Where?

> The file name
> Alt attribute
> Image Title
> Page Title
> Text around the image

You have probably read the above many times before so I am not going to bore you with the details, however there is one word of warning, don’t just stuff random keywords into these areas, not good.

Try and be as descriptive as possible and specific to the image, not just in your alt attribute but in every part of the page that matters.

Stick With JPG

Out of all the testing we did our JPG images always performed the best, this is probably due to the fact they are the most common and can be read by all browsers. Plus you can easily compress them reducing load time on image heavy pages.

We try and stick to between 1KB and 60KB for all our images, anything over 70KB tends to take too long to load and never performs as well.

First Past the Post! The Freshness Boost!

It has been mentioned a couple of times over the last couple of years, but in my opinion this is massive.

Even if you have a fairly new website you can still benefit from publishing fresh unique images, and you can rank not only on image search but within global search as well.

Make your images fresh, make them as unique as possible, and push them out on a fresh article, fully optimised and Bam! You’re onto a winner. You could also consider using tools like Google Trends to take advantage of search spikes, works very well.

Amount of Images on a Page

SEO’s in the past have advised against having too many images on a page, however in the last 12 months I have found the complete opposite, consistently the pages with the most images on have outperformed the ones with one or two on, massively outperformed.

Keep your images as clean as possible, reducing file sizes and if you’re using WordPress, super cache and lazy load are perfect plugins.

So my opinion, more is better.

A Quick Case Study

Now I am can’t give you the full details due to client confidentiality, however I can display the potential in terms of search traffic.

After taking advantage of some celebrity booms towards the end of last year we managed the following through image search alone on a fashion website;

[image of traffic spike]

This website only launched at the end of 2010, barely had 20 links and yet was capable of driving over 1 million visitors in 4 months, result!

Think of an Angle

Unless your aim is to drive up the amount you can charge for ads, you’re going to have to seriously consider the type of traffic you target.

Here are a few examples:

Clothing

I worked on a project with a clothes retailer, one of the first things we did was to roam the web for celebrities that were wearing their clothes or clothes that we’re similar. We would then Photoshop the images enough to make them unique and then publish them on the blog, fully optimised.

Result > Tons of search traffic for fashion tips around a particular celebrity, conversion rate? Around 0.3% not great but the traffic was easy to get.

Cosmetics

At the end of 2010 I worked with a cosmetics website, they had some great beauty and hair products but their image search was zero.

So, first things first, get the blog set up, begin writing tons of tips (with images) about hair and makeup techniques. You’d be surprised how much search there is in this area, obviously not as much as the celebrity space but enough to make a material difference to the online performance of this business.

Result > Drove an additional 10,000 visitors per month through image search, increased Twitter and Facebook following by over 1000% and continue to benefit the business in terms of conversions and revenue.

Don’t Forget The Links!

Think about it, if you are pushing out fresh, interesting content that is ranking highly in global and image search, the natural consequence is a lot of people finding your content and hey presto! Linking back to it.

Seriously, ranking highly on Google with interesting fresh content is one of the best link building techniques there is, in the last 12 months using these exact same techniques I have managed to secure links on sites like The Daily Mail, TMZ, The Huffington Post and even CNN!

If you are in an industry that lends itself to image search then you absolutely have to execute this, if you are a news website pumping out fresh material you need to seriously consider the value of image search. Over the course of 2011, out of 3 websites I worked with, we drove over 3 million unique visitors via image search, it’s a channel that needs giving a little more respect in my opinion.

We’ve known since 2009 that Google fully supports the cross domain rel=canonical and more recently it has transpired that the canonical may be faster and more effective than a 301, the traditional way for SEO’s to point the right link juice at the right places.

Seriously, there are a number of ways this can be used to boost SEO efforts and deliver the right signals to the right pages.

Getting Social Signals To Boring Pages

If you run an ecommerce site selling ‘dog leads’ you are likely going to struggle to get any social attention, however now Twitter and Facebook links are part of the algo, and from what we are seeing a pretty significant factor, you really want to be leveraging this to boost your rankings, so what do you do?

Well, start by making sure you have a blog with all the usual social buttons, write a post, something catchy with lot’s of images, ’5 most expensive dog leads’… maybe.

Push this around your social power accounts, share it on Twitter, Facebook, Stumble etc…… Now this post has plenty of social POW, all helping it rank

But hold on, the page we really want to rank higher is our ‘Premium Leads’ range

So…. We simply use the canonical tag to pass on all that lovely social juice! The User get’s the quirky content but Google credits your premium range.

Now this could be considered a little bit ‘grey hat’ but you could put things in place to minimise any risk, ‘This post was written on the back of research by our Premium Leads department’… I think you know what I am getting at.

Building Links Before Products Hit

My fellow SEO and colleague at Branded3 gave a great presentation on getting the most out of SEO specifically for Ecommerce sites, part of the presentation focussed on building links to blog posts targeting products that you know are coming to the market place but not yet released.

When it comes to new product releases Google seem to have a ‘first past the post’ rule, if you get the best page up and linked to the quickest then you win in the long run.

So you optimise and link to the blog posts months before it is launched and then 301 once the actual product page is live! Geniuous and works well, trust me.

However the user loses that smashing post on the blog, well they do if you 301 but if the canonical works better, hey presto!

Manipulation

Of course this leaves the door wide open to manipulation and there are many who would consider the above, grey if not black hat, however the fact remains it works well and Google allow it, at least for now.

SEO’s have been buying canonical links for ages, however with this recent research you can bet it is going to become more and more common. Are Google going to start punishing sites that buy canonical links

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.

I have had very little time to blog over the last couple of months, the industry seems to be booming even more so than a few years ago which means I am kept very busy!

Despite the lack of posts (other than quick news updates) there has been loads I want to talk about, Google continues to evolve and the rankings continue to keep fluctuating, due to this SEO’s are more often than not having to think outside the box.

So this post will be a bit of a round up but also my view on what it takes to be a ‘top ranked website with huge traffic’.

You see, there are a lot of people who rank well on Google, a few big keywords rank in the middle of the first page and their overall search traffic is respectable, however if they want to seriously increase traffic & rankings they need a strong search strategy that incorporates link building, social, PR, content and branding. Without this it is very difficult to take the top spot of the SERP’s and dominate longtail traffic.

Google Panda, E-commerce & Creating Great Content

Google Panda hasn’t rolled out in the UK yet, however as I mentioned in my last post we can see the impact when segmenting US Google traffic to a website, in many cases the impact has been pretty brutal and sites affected need to address the issues before it comes to the UK.

The issues are simple, Google has devalued sites with vast amounts of duplicate content that can be found across the web on multiple domains. Unfortunately this seems to be impacting e-commerce websites who’s product descriptions tend to be copied from a large data base and published across the web.

This is basically Google saying “we want better content at the top of the SERP’s’ and if e-commerce sites want to be top ranked sites they have to embrace this and figure out how to develop unique content across potentially thousands of products.

Social Signals

It’s just about common knowledge now that Google are incorporating social signals into their ranking algorithm and the recent launch of +1 sends a clear message that this is the direction they will continue to go down.

Again any site that wants to be a ‘top’ site needs to embrace this and adapt their SEO efforts accordingly.

Unique Domains Linking

This is a factor that has been around a long long time, however building unique domains isn’t something that happens overnight and if you want to be at the top you need to make it your business to know how you can develop your link profile quickly.

There was a time when building links too fast was seen as a negative signal and this still kind of applies to newer/thin sites, however once your site has a little authority and plenty of depth, then is the time to open the flood gates and attract links as quickly as you can.

Sure you could go out and buy a load of text links, it may get you on the first page but we’re not talking about first page we’re talking about being on top, maybe you can get on top with bought links in an industry that has very little or no competition, but in competitive industries I would save the money and spend it being more creative.

So if you’re trying to decide on what your strategy should look like in 2011 here are my recommendations;

Twitter Campaigns

After numerous tests I can fully confirm Tweets are a ranking signal, on more than 10 occasions now I have seen tweets that include a link to a page, boost the rankings of the target page, however you’re not just looking for 1 or 2 tweets you’re looking for hundreds if not thousands.

It may take a bit of time to do this but:

- competitions
- giveaways
- petitions

Are great ways to generate tons of tweets, competitions on twitter are becoming more and more popular and can generate a lot of activity, they are certainly my favourite way to leverage tweets.

Facebook Sharing

I blogged on the power of Facebook just before Christmas and still firmly believe this will play a big role in rankings moving forward, in fact Tom Critchlow recently published some correlation data on SEOmoz about how facebook shares correlate as well as linking domains to Google rankings. Now this only correlation but it gives an indication that they are important and could become more so.

- Make sure you have a presence on Facebook
- Interact and share
– Connect your blog to facebook to push out regular updates
- Have  like buttons on your pages (great for e commerce product pages)

I am almost certain this will become more of a factor during 2011 so probably best to get started now.

Press Releases

Yes good ol press releases, a link building tool used for years, the quality and impact of press releases has been brought into question many times, however if used in conjunction with other mass link building methods they can be quite effective.

- Come up with a unique press release idea
- Re write the release 10 – 15 times
– Get 10 – 14 bloggers on board to publish one of the copies, link to it and link back to your target site
- Make sure the press release has links to your site (optimised)
- Also throw in a bit of syndication just for good measure

Getting this right is almost like guaranteed viral activity and great for giving your whole domain a freshness boost.

Quality Content

As mentioned above, never has it been more important to create quality content than it is now, with Panda here and Google looking to rapidly clean up the SERP’s, creating useful content should be at the top of the agenda for any online business.

- Having a blog on the site is becoming more important
- User generated content is an excellent strategy for most commercial sites
- Making sure content is sharable

These are things the SEO community has been shouting about for a while and if you haven’t done it already now is the time to pick up the ball. Content that is unique, sharable, useful and diverse is going to help drive longtail traffic and result in higher rankings across your whole domain.

Another thing to consider in line with this is user behaviour, I am not sold on this but with the amount of data Google has makes it bound to play a role in the future;

- Bounce rates
- Page views
- social sharing

How users interact with content could be used as a sign of quality in the future, however I have so far seen no evidence of it yet.

Now if you are going to implement all of the above and try to be a ‘top ranked’ site you are going to need the budget for it, this stuff won’t come cheap. If you are a smaller business then I would suggest investing in the basics:

- blog posts
- articles
- badges
- content generation & social sharing

As your income starts to grow then reinvest in making your search campaign more creative and diverse.

Remember, in most industries you can develop decent traffic & rankings by doing the basics, however to be a top site and take your business to the next level you need to incorporate the bigger picture.

Well I hate to report on old news but I can’t resist. Google Instant hits and all of a sudden it’s the death of SEO all over again! For the 50th time in the last 12 months?

For those of you who haven’t read about Google instant, first of all where have you been? Secondly switch on your personalised search and perform your favourite query “seowizz” see how the screen immediately updates after each letter? Sent my eye’s funny to be honest.

You may also want to read about it here.

I really want to focus on this “SEO death” and all the SEO haters, you know the ones, create great content and use keywords people

What I want to know is, why are people so eager to see SEO squashed? Every time Google announces a new search feature, all of a sudden SEO dies.

Personalised search – SEO is dead?

Universal Search – SEO has changed forever!

Alternative search options like wonder wheel – It’s the end!!

The truth is none of these have even come close to ending SEO, even in its traditional sense, in fact they have improved SEO and made the industry more diverse.

At the end of the day Google’s business model is based on SEO, webmasters and searchers flocked to them because of their willingness to engage and openness about optimisation (kind of). If there was no SEO I honestly think Google would not exist, at least not as we know it. While ever there is a ranking system that pulls in traffic SEO will always exist.

So to all you SEO haters, sorry but were still here and businesses are spending more on SEO than ever!!!

Silly Comments

What really riles me is the silly comments you get from people who obviously don’t work in search, they mislead and can give genuine SEO’s a really bad name. For e.g.

“There’s a lot of “black hat” SEO (which involves things like stuffing the comments of blogs with links to your site, in the hope Google will think lots of bloggers love the pointed-to site) and there’s “white-hat” stuff like many others do, which is simply trying to get yourself noticed by using the words that people are searching for prominently on your page.”

Charles Arthur – The Guardian

First of all ‘black-hat’ SEO’s would not waste their time with comment stuffing, mainly because the majority are no follow, but ultimately because it doesn’t really work. Then to the ‘white-hat’ SEO’s who simply write content and try to include some keywords they picked off a keyword tool, if any SEO tells you they solely practice either of the above then they are not good SEO’s or even SEO’s for that matter.

This point of view is unfortunately common and typically journalistic.

Then there is the comment on Steve Rubel’s blog;

“Here’s what this means: (referring to Google Instant) no two people will see the same web. Once a single search would do the trick – and everyone saw the same results. That’s what made search engine optimization work. Now, with this, everyone is going to start tweaking their searches in real-time. The reason this is a game changer is feedback. When you get feedback, you change your behaviors. “

Correct me if I am wrong but isn’t this what personalised search did? After all Instant only works if you’re signed into your Google account right?

Will SEO Change?

For once in my SEO career I am completely behind Matt Cutts, well not the first time but you know what I mean;

“The search results will remain the same for a query, but it’s possible that people will learn to search differently over time. For example, I was recently researching a congressperson. With Google Instant, it was more visible to me that this congressperson had proposed an energy plan, so I refined my search to learn more, and quickly found myself reading a post on the congressperson’s blog that had been on page 2 of the search results.”

This is spot on, search behaviour will almost definitely feel the impact, users may stop short of a full search or change their search as irrelevant results coming up every 3 seconds. This could actually benefit SEO as Users refine their search there will be more long tail traffic to go at, more low hanging fruit for the new online business etc….

Tom Critchlow at Distilled sums it up nicely from a quote on stateofsearch;

“This change is huge. This is the kind of change that will get talked about in the streets by people who have never even heard of SEO. That said, the underlying system is intact – users search for keyphrases and click on things that rank. So fundamentally nothing has changed for us – the biggest change I can see so far is that unless you hit enter the organic serps are pushed WAY down the page. This is especially true for local results with a map box. So competition for the top few slots could get more fierce as clicks drop off for any ranking 3+….”

Search will always change, user behaviour will always be affected by anything Google launches. Google is simply trying to move with what they think users want to see, faster search results, I would say they want to see more relevant results and I am not sure that Instant is going to deliver that. Still, we shall watch, observe and change as needed, just like every good SEO ever has.

So looks like Instant will effect search about as much as personalised results did, just remind me, what was personalised search all about again?

Hello!!!

First of all let me apologise it has been almost a month since I last posted. I have been unbelievably busy on various projects and unfortunately the blog has had to take a back seat. However, you should now start seeing regular posts again

As I said, over the last 5 – 6 weeks I have been making preparations for various projects, some my own and others with Branded3. As I have been trying to devise a link strategy for these new websites it occurred to me there aren’t many SEO’s that are actually going to tell you how a site ranks in Google.

We all know a website needs links, but how do you get them? Where do you get them? What makes them good? What makes them useless? Unfortunately you’re going to get a lot of mixed messages in this area for a few different reasons;

1 – High profile SEO blogs (SEOmoz) have to say what they think Google want them to say, even when they talk about what I call ‘cheap SEO’ methods they always back it up with, “we don’t think this will work in the long term” meaning “we can’t endorse this, regardless of how well it works”.

2 – You then get those bloggers who simply repeat everything they read on the high profile blogs adding very little in term of their own experience.

3 – There are also those people who don’t want to get on the wrong side of Google so they keep things to themselves and attempt to discreetly push others in the right direction.

I unfortunately now fall into the bottom category… I posted a month ago on how links don’t have to be indexed to count and hinted at a site that might be using linking techniques with this in mind. Within a week of posting the website I ‘hinted’ at was removed and my site lost PR and all my site links (still lost now). I didn’t lose any of my rankings or traffic but I have seen this kind of activity before and it’s normally Google’s way of saying ‘be careful’.

I may be completely wrong but it all seems a little coincidental to me….. hmmm

Anyway, in a complete show of defiance I decided to post some of the biggest link building myths your likely to read online and many times from the most popular resources, let’s dive right in…….

You should aim for high PageRank Links

Why???

Because they pass more juice? True

Because they have more authority? Debatable!!!

The truth is what we know as toolbar pagerank is absolutely irrelevant when it comes to link building these days. I could launch a site tomorrow and have a PR5 by the next update by buying a handful of high PageRank links; this wouldn’t make my new spam site a good place to get a link from.

In terms of rankings for a keyword term toolbar PageRank is irrelevant – I have lost count of the amount of times I have out ranked a high PR website with a PR2 blog. Seriously toolbar PageRank is not going to help you on your way to top rankings, if that’s your link building plan be prepared to fail.

I am not saying you shouldn’t get high PR links, just don’t rely on them, you need a lot more to rank at the top of Google

Links that aren’t relevant don’t count

Absolutely laughable……

Yes you should aim to get links from relevant websites with good authority but the fact that people say irrelevant links don’t count is a joke. My advice is, if you can get a link from a site, GET IT!! Yes look for relevant links but don’t refuse one because it isn’t relevant.

Links that aren’t indexed don’t count

Well I addressed this in my previous post, however for all those who hang onto Matts Cutts every word; “Just because we see them doesn’t mean their passing weight” & “just because there in webmaster tools doesn’t mean they count”.

Believe me or not when I say I have seen websites rank with as few as 6 indexed links for majorly competitive terms, all the anchor text ones aren’t even indexed.

This is what I believe – Google comes along crawls a new page, decides the page isn’t worth indexing but still follows the links on it and credits anchor text accordingly. I a firm believer that anchor text only counts the first time it is crawled,, What!!! I hear you say?

That’s right; I think all those people who look for social mentions and then run around asking people to change the anchor text are wasting their time. Let me give you an example.

- I have ranked for the keyword ‘SEO’ for the last 6 months in around 14th ish.

- Patrick at Blogstorm gave me a link in April with the Anchor Text “SEO consultant”

- My ranking for this keyword jumped to 3rd within a week

- 3 weeks after placing the link he changed it to just “SEO” for me to see the effect….. There wasn’t any

- I still rank 3rd for “SEO consultant” and my “SEO” rank hasn’t budged

So what does this mean?? Does Google only count the link the first time it is crawled? Does Google count links placed on a page after it has crawled it a few times already? Does buying links within old blog posts/news articles work?? My opinion is NO, don’t waste your money or time.

(By the way there are high profile SEO firms out there that will try and sell you this tactic, trust me when I say don’t waste your money, keep it for links within fresh content)

Link Buyers Get Punished

You know what maybe they do, however I have never seen it. In fact I could put a giant list together in the next few days of thousands of sites actively buying links, report it to Google and nothing would ever be done.

I know there are those out there saying they have seen a site punished, unfortunately I would want to know the website and see definitive proof that it was the links that caused the punishment and not some other error.

I’ll say no more on link buying in fear of being slapped by G (Don’t you just hate competitors that report you to Google just because they can’t get ahead of you in the SERPS?)

Google actively checks IP’s

I agree that Google could do this, but are they???

Again I have seen no evidence of it and regularly see websites ranking thanks to a nice IP linked network. They may check it upon a manual review but not on a bulk basis.

It pains me to say this but when it comes to SEO you shouldn’t believe everything you read, there are too many copy bloggers and others who are scared of being slapped. As you have read above I have my own suspicions about the readers of SEOwizz and Google connections but the way I see it is I am only telling the truth. If Google did punish link buyers then I would be singing a different song, if Google were more open about the anchor text signal there would be no need to speculate and dig deep into link data.

What Google have to recognise is that webmasters aren’t really bothered about what Google consider to be good or bad SEO, they only want to know what works. Google should put all SEO bloggers out of the picture and just start getting honest.

Sorry for the mass content on this page but it has been a while

First of all apologies for the lack of posting over the last couple of weeks, work has been busy and the World Cup has pretty much dominated my evenings

So now England have been dumped out shamefully I thought it might be a good idea to discuss something pretty positive that has happened to me over this World Cup period, I NOW RANK IN THE TOP 5 FOR ‘search engine optimisation’!!!

Now that I have gained a glory ranking I thought it might be a good idea to discuss how I got there. I work with clients daily that throw massive budgets at SEO and not surprisingly get results very quick, however my blog has had very little in terms of budget thrown at it and it goes to show you can make it to the top working cheap, the results will come a lot slower though.

Altogether it has taken me 18 months to position my website there; I did a lot of the work in the early stages and as my site has grown in trust the anchor text from article directories and blog carnivals have really started to count.

The truth is, in the last 3 months I have done very little link building with most of my links coming socially and none of them anchored with the target keyword (except maybe one site wide a fellow SEO kindly gave me).I genuinely believe working to a tight budget does not exclude you from achieving results as long as you’re consistent and gradually increase your investment.

Anyway enough bragging, what I want to do now is show you my exact approach to ranking SEO wizz where it currently is (4th ‘search engine optimisation’ 13th ‘seo’),

Quarter One

The first 3 months of any blog are painful, you spend 90% of your time writing and 10% reading, however there were a few fundamentals I wanted to achieve in the first Quarter, ones that I knew would see me well in the future;

- I wanted to create a hook, so I developed some tutorials, this would ensure a nice flow of natural links

- I wanted to have at least 20 posts optimised for long tail target keywords

- I made it a must to at least get one link back to each deep page/post

I knew things would be slow at first as I have created many affiliate blogs and they have all started the same way.

Quarter Two

My blog now had enough content and I could really let Google know it existed without risking the sandbox. The idea was to get as many links to the blog as possible with preferential anchor text.

- I decided to write 100 articles

- Submitted them through Article Marketer (Now content crooner)

- Mixed the anchor text between my main target keywords search engine optimisation, seo techniques, google seo, seo consultant, seo (All of which are now on the first page of Google bar ‘SEO’ however watch this space.)

This wasn’t about getting the blog to rank, it was more about building a bulk amount of links so that I could get new content indexed faster and give myself a little bit of an anchor text push.

Quarter Three

Traffic was now picking up; Google was beginning to give me a little authority so it was now time to turn up the heat. To do this I decided to write some posts that would ensure me a way of getting links in the long term, I am talking serious viral content.

There is an important definition to be made here, some people consider viral content as a way of driving masses of traffic, the problem is going viral on stumble (which I have done quite a few times) does not necessarily mean masses of links, in fact very often it doesn’t mean any. I wanted to create content that when people did find it they would link to it.

- I posted on Bing SEO vs Google and did a small case study (I rank no.1 for Bing SEO and gain new links every week with no effort)

- I posted about Link/Ranking correlation (Linked to by SEOmoz and has delivered 1000′s of visitors and recognition)

- I also completed a monster post on SEO content writing which ranks very highly and is still my third most visited page!!

This is the back bone of my website, the posts that give a return over the long period and not just an instant traffic boost. Every website should create this type of content/product/resource, something that is going to continually get new recognition.

Quarter Four

I was really beginning to rank well now but still needed more diverse links; I had some high quality links but needed a more diverse profile. To accomplish this I;

- Submitted to blog carnivals taking advantage of preferential anchor text

- Joined new forums adding my links in bio’s and signatures (not spamming, genuine forums)

- Attempted some cross linking with other bloggers (Didn’t particularly work)

The above gave me a better profile and pushed my PageRank to 4; however I was still sitting on the second page for some of my major terms.

Quarter Five

Now I had a diverse profile and some really good quality or high PageRank links, however it was time to bulk up the quantity, to do this I:

- Created some reciprocal link partners with good online buddies

- Commented on do follow blogs with ‘top commenter’ widgets (I stopped this as it didn’t really work)

The increase in the sheer quantity of links lifted me onto the first page of Google for a lot of terms; however I still needed to add something to the mix…

Quarter Six

I knew in order to reach the top five I need those ‘trusted’ links from websites long established on Google and the only way to do this was to grovel!

- I leveraged all my blogging connections and friends

- I offered links from my other sites in return for a link to SEO wizz

I only managed a few however these highly trusted links were very effective, pushing my website to the top of the tree!

You see??? No Magic, no ridiculous techniques just hard work and a smart well thought-out plan and anyone can do the same, given the right skills and commitment.

What’s my plan moving forward???

Well I can’t give everything away; however I will let you know when I’ve done it

Thanks to all who read, link to, promote and support SEO wizz, reaching the top wouldn’t have been possible without you guys.

Cheers

I always worry about posting new found research as some clever dick always pops up to tell you they discovered it in 1999, however I have noticed something in the rankings recently that has made me re think Google rankings.

The Story

OK so I decided a couple of weeks ago to rank for “SEO consultant”, just something I fancied really, not the most competitive term.

Anyway….. I have obviously been keeping an eye on the rankings over the past few weeks on this particular keyword and a few more as well and there has been some pretty dramatic trends in the rankings.

One day I checked and I was 7th for “seo consultant” refreshed and I was 15th, refreshed again and I was 4th!!!

It’s not just that keyword either, I searched “search engine optimisation” I was 11th, refreshed and I was 26th and again and I was 7th.

Now rankings have always been up and down but this was a little crazier than usual.

Webmaster Tools Update

So…. Google announce the webmaster tools up date only a few days ago which explains that they are now tracking click through rates in the keyword sections of webmaster tools.

Now I don’t know how accurate these figures are and they seem to differ quite a bit to Google analytics, however the data it presents is interesting.

Just take a look at the below screen shot;

Now I am only using “bing SEO” as the example but the data establishes a few things across multiple keywords.

The first thing you notice is that out of 320 impressions I only ranked first 260 times (these impressions figures aren’t accurate as I usually receive around 600 visitors on this keyword a month), this means I don’t rank number one, I only rank there around 70% of the time.

The Old Theory

The old SEO theory determines your rank based on page optimisation and the number of links your page/domain has, the only thing affecting rankings would be competition in Google’s algorithm. I now think this is outdated and wrong, over the last 6 months I and other SEO’s have seen massive fluctuations in rankings suggesting a new way of ranking sites and determining traffic.

My Theory

Well, this is what I suspect, Google have confirmed nothing yet or any other SEO authority but the evidence I have seen strongly suggests rotational rankings.

Let me explain…. You do a search in Google on your main key term and you rank 4th, so you rank 4th??? Wrong you may rank 4th in that instance but you could complete the same search 10 seconds later and you rank 10th, a huge difference not only in ranking but the traffic too.

So… Google determines the rank of your site determined on page factors and links and then ranks you in a range of positions could be 5 – 10 or it could be position 2 to 4 pages back, depending on the person searching, there location, personalised search, time of day.

Ultimately how well optimised your site is determines how often you rank in a top position.

So your aim is not to rank in the top 5, which is now impossible, your aim should be to rank their most of the time.

What Does This Mean?

It means quite a lot.

1 – Determining traffic in a certain position is now impossible

2 – Your ranking position can change every second even if you’re searching on the same IP using an incognito window on chrome

3 – You can never say I rank number one, but only I rank number one most of the time

You see there are so many websites competing for the same space that Google has no choice but to use a rotational system like this and for all we know they may use the click through rate to decide whether your ranking gets better or worse, maybe.

I’d love to know everyone’s thoughts on this and if anyone has noticed these changes.

Testing keyword difficulty has never been a straight forward task, what do you test with? Links in? Links to domain? Search Volume? Awords Competition?

The truth is that all of them contribute toward the ‘keyword difficulty’ factor.

This is another post when I am going to sing the praises of the SEOmoz crewe, since they stopped delivering SEO services I have noticed a huge investment in their tools, mostly in making linkscape data more reliable but also tweaking the current tool box.

A tool that was announced this week was the new keyword difficulty tool, it breaks down all the metrics for you, so if your an SEO professional there is no better visualisation tool for client proposals, in my opinion.

Just check out some of the features:-

Adwords Data

Not only does the tool give you a difficulty factor in the form of a percentage (the higher it is the harder it is to rank) but it also gives you the relevant Adwords search including broad and exact match.

This is all the information you really need when trying to determine the potential of target keywords however, it doesn’t stop there.

Page / Domain Authority Metrics

The tool nicely shows the page and domain authority of the top ten sites, letting you see exactly what you’re up against.

Page authority is the SEO metric for the overall authority of any given page on the web based on link juice and authority, domain authority is based on the entire links to the domain as a whole.

Break Down Of Links

As we should know now, all links are not equal and we need to be aware of how many links our competition have, also how much authority those links are passing.

On top of that we now know that the amount of links to a domain is almost as strong a determining factor as the amount of links to a particular page.

As we can see the tool nicely breaks down the link data showing how many unique domains are linking to each of the top ten results.

Now if you’re not an SEO or internet marketer your probably not going to pay for the tool, however if you are an SEO professional, in my opinion the tools are the best on the market.

This particular tool can be used for more than just helping clients visualise their competition within their niche, it can also be used for mass research on the SERPS for multiple keywords.