Five Unique Ways Small Businesses Can Win at Link Earning

We’re seeing the industry shift now that massive corporations finally understand the value of online marketing. Enterprise level SEO is becoming more prominent. This is a great opportunity for SEOs who can appeal to clients with that stature, but it presents a problem to SEOs and small businesses who have limited resources.

In a world of massive promotions and big budgets, how can small businesses and local search optimizers set themselves apart? Here are first five strategies you can leverage to grab that much needed attention in the online sphere.

1. Host an Event

Events can be an incredibly powerful way to capture links that would otherwise be impossible. It’s so effective that any local event of sufficient size is bound to attract some links. That said, you can really up the ante and pull in a huge amount of SEO value if you optimize the event for online benefit.

First things first; you’ll need an event page on your site. Without a page, you’ll miss out on a tremendous amount of SEO value. This is the page you want to promote through all of your online and social media channels.

If you’re selling tickets, keep the ticket sales page separate. If you use Eventbrite to set up ticket sales, you can get a followed link out of it. Same goes for Brown Paper Tickets. Meanwhile, you should be able to get your event listed in tons of event listing directories and local newspapers. These are relevant directories that people actually use, so they make for perfect links. Yes, you should take advantage of listings even if they’re nofollow, assuming there’s any real traffic potential (and there always should be when you are manually building links).

In addition to local event sites, you should also take advantage of national ones like Meetup, Eventful, and Events.org.

Since odds are high you aren’t the first business to host an event in your area, there’s also nothing wrong with scoping some of the other local event pages with Open Site Explorer to see where they’re getting their links.

I hope it’s obvious that your event should be more than a tool to get links from event sites. You may need to hire a contractor to set up the event (preferably one who links to their clients), and you should certainly put a great deal of thought into how to monetize the event, or at least make it pay for itself.

Be sure to capitalize on the local features of Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and Foursquare to reach as many people as possible. Your link building efforts shouldn’t stop there either. Do some outreach and, if possible, work with some local micro-celebrities to capture as much attention as possible.

Assuming you have a local location to promote, be sure to get your business address attached to as many of your links as possible. Those citations are solid gold. Even if the event is hosted somewhere else, there’s no reason you can’t say something along the lines of: “For more information, get in touch at…”
Also be sure to cash in on Schema.org markup to get rich snippets in the search results.

2. Sponsor a Charity

Have a cause you care about? There’s no shame in getting some SEO value out of it while also using it to help improve your reputation. It would be beyond cynical, and unlikely to pay off, if you tried to use charities for SEO alone, but there’s no reason not to make the most of it when you do. Local businesses are the biggest contributors to charities, and they can be a great opportunity.

The most obvious bit of SEO value is a link to your site from the charity as one of their sponsors. Many charities do this simply by default, and many that don’t will still be happy to send a link to return the favor.

Causes and charities also tend to spread through social networks more readily than just about any business message. If you embrace a cause and promote it on social networks, this can be a great way to expand your reach.

Be careful when mixing promotion and charity work, however. Business involvement in social causes is often viewed with skepticism, and if you blatantly capitalize you may end up getting shunned. Only embrace those causes that you sincerely believe in. SEO and other marketing efforts should always come second.

3. Build a Tool

We’ve been mentioning tools frequently as of late, and with good reason. The most popular sites on the web are all tools, not what would traditionally be called content sites. Tools naturally attract links because they are inherently more engaging than passive content.

While a content-driven strategy certainly does require a great deal of creativity and skill, tools arguably require even more creativity. Content at least obeys a preset format: blog post, video, infographic, white paper. It may take creativity, research, and ingenuity to figure out what the content should be about and the best way to put it together, but at least you have some idea of what the end product is going to look like.

Tools are very different. Google, Facebook, and Twitter were like nothing that had come before them. Tools are designed entirely around the problem they are meant to solve, and take on completely novel forms every time they are created.

For this reason, it’s difficult to give advice on how to create a tool for SEO value. You’ll need coders, graphic designers, and a spark of ingenuity. Beyond that, the sky’s the limit. The most linked to sites on the web don’t lie. Tools that people find useful or entertaining grab more links than anything else on the web.

4. Get in Your Local Newspaper

Why go for small time blogs when you can get listed in the most reputable publication in your area? Local newspapers are hungry for content just like bloggers, and there’s nothing stopping you from getting an entry in your local paper if you put your mind to it.

Making the paper is all about one thing: being newsworthy. The rest is window dressing. If you can bring something to the table that they haven’t reported on before, that will interest their readers, then you’re already halfway there. It’s all about the “inside scoop.” What can you reveal to the press that will intrigue them?

If you don’t think you have the writing skills to make the cut, there’s a fairly simple solution for that as well. Hire somebody who’s made it into the local paper before. Ask them for feedback on whether the idea is newsworthy, and let them take it from concept to published article. A one-off job is worth the money if it means a link from an established publisher.

A word of caution here, however. Make sure the content is actually going to make it to the web. Many local newspapers only published half of their content online, and many of them delete it as time goes by. Don’t bother working with a paper unless you know the content is going to make it online and stay there. Unless, of course, the paper would bring so much exposure that it would result in natural links from secondary sources.

5. Befriend the Mom Bloggers

I’m generalizing a bit when I say “mom” blogger. They don’t need to be moms, or even female. The point is, small blogs with tightly knit communities are some of the most powerful forces to be reckoned with on the web. These small communities have tremendous influence on social networks. The community members tend to know each other very well and have developed a great deal of trust.

There are undoubtedly “mom” bloggers in your area. They keep online food diaries, review products, share design inspiration, and dominate Pinterest. Get these people on your side and you won’t just see links with SEO value, you’ll see referral traffic that doesn’t quit.

Email : naturalseosolution@gmail.com | Mo : 8763723377 | Skype : sunmoon.mohanty

Continue

How Guest Bloggers are Sleepwalking Their Way into Penalties

  How do you get links in a post-penguin world? For far too many the answer seems to be, exclusively, guest posting. Today I’m going to give you four reasons why I think this tactic is as dangerous as those it replaced.
Note: I’m not about to say that ‘all’ guest posting is bad – in the same way not all directories are automatically spammy. I’m also not about to say ‘all’ guest bloggers will be penalised. What I will do is point out the dangers of guest posting as Google becomes increasingly intelligent; and what you can do to avoid them.

Link Quality

Penguin really hurt sites that relied on low-quality links. Many have responded by setting a minimum domain authority threshold when prospecting. To keep the process efficient they then remove sites with a DA over a certain level – seeing these as less likely to accept content.

No new site owner ever sat down and thought ‘hmm, well I best not link to buybluewidgets.com today, my domain authority’s only 28 – I’ll wait a few months’. Equally, the reason Mashable's not linking to you isn't because your DA has yet to hit a magical level. If you offer something of value links naturally come from a huge variety of high, medium and low quality sites. High quality links are rare naturally, that’s part of what makes them so valuable, but they do occur. As a result, a completely natural link portfolio looks something like this:

I’ve now started to see new sites, fresh out of a ‘successful’ outreach campaign whose link portfolio looks like this:

There’s little way that this could have occurred un-engineered and, if it’s obvious to us then it’ll be obvious to Google too.

"Mass guest posting is dangerous because it creates an unnatural looking link quality graph." [tweet]

Link Type

Conventional wisdom tells us that directories are bad, blogs are good and academic links are amazing. Tools like Link Research Tools and Linkdex allow you to break up your competitors’ links by type - if SEO tools can do this then so can Google. I took a vertical at random and wasn’t surprised to see this:

It’s not unusual to find sites with a huge percentage of their links coming from directories and these are sites we currently think of as having engaged in low-quality link building. So your site proudly strides in to the market and builds this profile:

I’m not saying that you need to replicate the industry standard – that’s not going to put you ahead of your competitors. I am saying “A link profile made up of only one type of link looks unnatural – whatever those links are.” [tweet]

Link Location

Google devalued footer links because they’re too easy to game. Google devalued sidebar links because they were being purchased en masse. Are links in author boxes next? When you’re consistently relying on links in guest-post author boxes you’re building a very obvious footprint. Due to the author box’s proximity to the author markup, relatively standard layout and positioning on the page it would be incredibly easy for Google to algorithmically target them in the same way it did sidebars and footers.

When a link’s in the middle of a post there’s an assumption that it’s there because it’s relevant. When a link’s in the author box it’s rarely there for the benefit of the user – it’s the writer’s payment for the post. It’s a box in which the author advertises themselves. So it could be argued the author box is a form of paid advertisement. How long until Matt Cutts does a video saying those links should be no-followed?

That’s all before you consider that the link’s in a box that gets skipped over by readers. That means you can expect virtually no traffic from it. Wouldn't it be better to be building links that drive traffic as well as rankings?

“Anchor-text-heavy links in author boxes look fishy, even to non-marketers; let’s stop building them.” [tweet]

Authorship

Google’s really started to push authorship as an important signal. So, many guest bloggers have used their own name (or repeatedly the same name) in each of their guest posts to build up their authority. This has led to a great new form of competitor link-building. If you’re an agency, this creates a competitive issue:

Whoever you are, this creates two other problems:

1. Your competitors can Google your name and easily find your link-building efforts – no SEO tool necessary.
2. Whichever domain you’re building links to has a large number of their links coming from a single author.

Every SEO knows how important domain diversity is; having a large number of your links coming from a single author is the authorship version of putting them all on the same domain. Assuming all other factors are equal (including average link quality), which of these do you think Google would be likely to rank more highly:

In real life it’s natural to assume a company that has lots of people talking about it is more important than one nobody's heard of - that has very few people mentioning it; shouldn’t Google follow the same principal with linking authors?

Let’s assume Google gets smarter still. On your Google profile there’s a nice box for you to enter your employment history. What if Google used that data to make a graph similar to this?

Search engines see links as an indicator of quality because they’re essentially recommendations. If most of a company’s recommendations are coming from its own employees would you trust them? You’d probably just ignore those recommendations. What if Google decided to discount all links created by a company’s own employees? Simpler still, what if Google decided to ignore all links created by SEOs where those links are in articles that aren’t talking about SEO? Google’s collecting all this data now, why wouldn’t it use it?

“One person authoring the majority of your links looks like link building – because it is.” [tweet]
Fundamentally, this all comes back to Dr Pete’s Top 1 SEO Tips For 2013 – diversify. Each of the issues is a problem of oversimplifying the link building process. I’m convinced that taking a holistic view to inbound marketing not only provides the highest ROI, but will increasingly become the only ‘safe’ way to aggressively grow a company’s reach online.

Takeaways:

1. Don’t rely on any one type of site for a majority of your links; build links of all types into your plans.
2. Be aware of the quality of links you're building, but make sure to keep the overall portfolio looking natural.
3. Don't use a single author for all your content - vary it between different, real, people. When using external writers, use their authorship to help further vary the mix.
4. Split up different parts of a client’s campaign between different team members; that way there should naturally be a slightly different approach applied across the client’s links.
5. Oversimplifying a link building process may make it faster, but the footprint it generates also makes it riskier.

Have you begun to scale back, or even phase-out, guest posting? Let me know in the comments below.

naturalseosolution@gmail.com | Mo : 8763723377 | Skype : sunmoon.mohanty

Continue