However, each also offers natural growth of your user base and
provides visitors that come through systems other than search
engines. Strangely, although the goal of SEO is better search
rankings, the best sites in each industry often receive 50% or
fewer of their total visitors from search engines. Why? Because
if thousands of visitors are anxiously visiting your site via
bookmarks, links, and direct type-ins at the address bar, you've
achieved the content and status necessary to not only be ranked
exceptionally well, but have visitors that know your site and
want to visit, no matter what the search engines say. This
methodology is particularly valuable because a site that doesn't
rely entirely on search engines for traffic, ironically, has a
far better chance of getting visitors through them.
Community Building
Creating a user base that develops into a full-scale
community is no easy task, but it's one of the holy grails of
online marketing and promotion. The idea is to develop
frequently updated content in the form of a blog, forum, wiki,
or other muti-user input system that can become a central
reference and gathering point for a significant number of
individuals in an industry.
Once a community is established, the input of individual
members and coverage of events in these systems are natural
sources for incoming links from bloggers and writers in the
field, be they members or simply browsers. In addition, many
members who run sites of their own will point to the community
as their gathering place, creating even greater link value.
Community building requires finesse and good online relationship
skills, but the rewards are tremendous.
Press Releases and Public Relations
Influencing mainstream or niche press outlets to cover your
company or its actions can be a highly effective way to drive
attention to your site, which, if link worthy, can earn a
fantastic number of links in short order. Press release sites
like
PRNewsWire and
PRWeb are good starting places for driving traffic and
links, and as both feed the major online news search engines (Yahoo!
&
Google News), they can provide high visibility as well.
Optimizing press releases is a unique practice in and of itself
- placement of text in the title and in visible headlines,
compelling story writing, and proper content structure are all
important elements. One of the most touted experts in this field
(Greg Jarboe) runs a site with specific advice (SEO-PR)
on the subject of optimizing press releases in particular.
Beyond releases, however, is influencing journalists to write
editorial news stories about your subject and including a link
or mention of your site. Some of the most highly touted PR
(public relations) firms in the world charge a fortune for this
service, but on a small scale it can be performed in-house. The
trick is to have content and information so compelling and
interesting that journalists would love to cover it. If you have
the makings of a great story with a near-perfect fit for your
site, email a few journalists whose work you've found to be on
similar topics. Don't start with the New York Times, though. Go
local, independent, and friendly to increase your chances of
success.
Link Building Based on Competitive Analysis
Looking at the links obtained by your top competitors and
pursuing methods of your own to get listed on those sites/pages
is an excellent way to stay competitive in the link building
race. It's also a good way to get natural traffic; as these are
the links and sites that send your competitors their traffic,
they will also bring visitors to your site. The methodology for
investigating a competitor's links is fairly straightforward,
although more complex methods can be used by the advanced
researcher.
The best source of linkage data is Yahoo!. Google purposely
does not report accurate link data with their link: command, and
MSN's rankings of links can often show less valuable and
effective links at the top. Yahoo!, however, currently shows the
greatest accuracy in numbers of links, and also sorts well,
typically placing more valuable links near the top of the
results.
At Yahoo!, the following searches can be used to find pages
that link to other sites/pages:
- Linkdomain:url.com
This command will show you all the pages that link to any
page hosted at the domain url.com.
- Link:http://www.url.com/page.html
This command will show only those pages which link directly
to the specified page.
- Linkdomain:url.com
word
This search will show all pages with the term "word" that
link to pages hosted at the URL. You can use this to find
topical linking pages that may be providing benefit for
specific areas.
- Linkdomain:url.com
-term
Use the - sign to indicate that pages which include a
particular term should be excluded from the search; for
example, searching for all links that point to a site that
don't contain your company name on the page (i.e.
linkdomain:seobook.com -seomoz). Note that searches can
contain multiple - signs and terms if you require very
specific information (or wish to exclude lots of noisy
data).
- Linkdomain:url.com
-site:url.com
In addition to the - sign as a term remover, you
can remove sites from the results as well. This can be
especially valuable if one large site links to the target
site on every page, and you wish to see the links that don't
include that site. It can also be valuable to remove the
site itself, (i.e. linkdomain:seomoz.org -site:seomoz.org),
so as not to see results from internal pages.
Competitive analysis also includes using the top search
results themselves as sources for links. If a site or page ranks
particularly well for many related searches, a link from that
site can send a healthy number of interested surfers to you.
Rankings in the SERPs is also an excellent way to determine the
value of a link, so if a page ranks highly for the term or
phrase you're targeting, a link from that page is sure to
provide great assistance in your goal to achieve top placement.
Building Personality & Reputation
The cult of personality on the Internet provides excellent
opportunities for charismatic, well-written individuals to make
headlines, friends, and links through online networking. A
variety of social interaction sites operate across industries on
the web, delivering ready-made sources for building a reputation
and earning links. The keys to this methodology are to provide
honest, intelligent contributions to existing discussions while
maintaining a connection between yourself and the communities.
Online forums are great places to start, and can frequently
lead to additional venues for the engagement of your colleagues.
In building a successful reputation in an online forum, honesty,
integrity, and openness provide the best chances to be taken
seriously and seen by others as an expert on your subject
matter. Forums typically offer a built-in system for referring
folks to your site - the signature link. Although debate exists
on whether search engines count these links for ranking
purposes, there can be little doubt about their effectiveness in
driving forum visitors to your site. One last tip for forums is
to use a single link to your site in your signature - ensuring
that people identify you with one unique online property, rather
than several. Combining these effective techniques of forum
posting and signature links with blogging can also be very
valuable.
In addition to forums, outlets like blog comments (which
frequently use the "nofollow" attribute, and are thus valuable
for live visitors but not search engines), ICQ Channels,
chatrooms, Google groups, and privately hosted boards or
chatrooms can all serve a similar purpose. Stay consistent in
each format - using the same voice, avatar (the accompanying
photo on many forums), and username in order to build reputation
and recognition.
Highly Competitive Terms & Phrases
For some terms and phrases, even the best websites with the
most diligent promotional efforts will have a very difficult
time penetrating the top 10-20 results. In these instances, it
can be tempting to rely on efforts outside of the search
engines' guidelines. However strong this temptation may be, be
advised that search engines do not tolerate spam or manipulation
via automated links, nor do they allow such results to flourish
for long. Although these methods, commonly referred to as "black
hat SEO", may have some effectiveness in the short term, they
have little chance of long-term success in the SERPs and may
become permanently banned from search results.
For highly competitive results (from "mortgage" to "car
insurance" to "university degree"), targeting the above
described "long tail" (the more niche-related search terms for
which a smaller degree of heavy competition exists) can be the
best method. Search engines are also careful to consider the age
of a site and its links and give heavy weight to those sites
with long-held, highly trusted links. Thus, while rankings may
be sparse at first, over time an enterprising site owner can
achieve some measure of notice, even in the most competitive of
searches.
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