Clients like to know where they rank for what keyword and where they ranked for that keyword last month, it’s reassuring to see what raw metric is driving all of the others even if this is something the SEO industry is trying to distance itself from.

One long standing problem with “ranking reports” is that they are boring and visually unappealing unless you want to put some serious time into design or have some software automate the process for you. The problem with the software option is that when google changes the way it displays the SERP the software can fail and will require updating. Historically this has been a problem, enter Market Samurai (there has been no payment for this post and there are no affiliate payments made on sales).

Having just finished a free trial on Market Samurai it looks like there is a solution which is a relatively undocumented feature within this suite of SEO tools. The rank tracker module of Market Samurai monitors the SERPs for the exact ranking of a keyword in relation to a website and creates a visually appealing graph to reflect this – gone are the days of ugly Excel created charts copied onto a Powerpoint slide. As the program is routinely updated so frequently changes to the SERP are handled in the stride of normal development, as the program is still in beta is not unusual to see an update a week, I have seen two in the last three days.

Tracking SERP positions is not really the main feature of Market Samurai, however, it is one that it particularly useful when working for clients and possibly one that is less well known. The tool was originally created as a keyword research tool and this is the area in which it really comes into its own. There are loads of reviews and tutorials illustrating how the tool can be used to find and exploit niches but the best way to get a feel for how to use it in this capacity is to look at the video tutorials on the official website, if you are interested in this area then download the trial and follow some of the videos. I thought it might be useful to share the information on rank tracking above as it’s something I know people have struggled with and it’s a relatively undocumented feature that is hidden away behind other more complex functionality.

The most valued link is a red one?

This blog isn’t intended as a source of basic search engine optimization tips – there are already plenty of SEO “experts” clogging Twitter with posts like “showing the user different content to the search engine could get you banned”. But over the coming weeks we will be posting several entries explicitly showing how to be effective in link building. Rather than just posting these entries It seemed like this topic required an introduction rather than just starting with “link building tip #1”, as we don’t want to alienate anyone.

The acquisition of links is considered one of the most basic concepts in SEO, but the actual practice of gathering links is something people often struggle with – it’s time consuming and in many niches such as online dating competitive. So, we’re going to give you the kind of justifications you would need to convince an outsider that a link building project is worthwhile. Then we’ll look at the best ways strategically to go about obtaining links.

Question: Do I need to bother with link building?

Short Answer: Yes, if you want to rank in the search engines.

Detailed Answer

Yes. The only exception is if you have an established, respected and trusted domain that already ranks well in the search engines and you are targeting a non-competitive term. If this is the case, you might get away with putting up a new highly optimized page on your existing domain.

Search engines respond to queries (searches) by showing the most relevant results from previously indexed web pages. The decision around which pages to display will largely be informed by which site, and page, is regarded as “the authority” on a given query. For example, if you search for the term Jaguar parts, the more authoritative sites on that topic stand a better chance of ranking than those regarded as less important. Domain trust comes a close second to authority. Trust is built in a very similar manner.

The single most contributing factor in deciding if a website (or web page) is an authority (or is to be trusted) is the site’s trail of backlinks (sometimes called a backlink profile or backlink footprint) – that is, an assessment of all the links that point back to the site. You may have heard the analogy that a link to your site is like a vote for it. Life would be much simpler if all votes were equal…but as you would expect, some votes are more equal than others!

It is a common misconception that the strength of a site’s vote is related to the pagerank of the site and of the page on which that link appears. Although there is some truth in this, building links purely through a pagerank focused approach is just clumsy.

Question: So what makes a link valuable?

Short Answer: Relevance, authority, trust, page position, anchor text and natural flow of traffic from the linking location

Detailed Answer

Relevance

When you acquire a link from a relevant source, that link has more weight than a more general link from a site or page that is unrelated to your content. The more relevant the link, the more value that link will be credited with. A complex algorithm is employed by the engines to evaluate pages and part of the evaluation process decides upon the topic of a page.

Authority

Links from sites which have established themselves as an authority on a specific topic will have more weight than links from sites which have not established themselves. This means that an authority link from a relevant page on a related site is extremely valuable.

Trust

Search engines will “trust” credible sites, and a relevant link from a trusted site carries significant weight. One element that establishes a website’s level of trust is the site’s backlink footprint. The more “good” links a site has from authoritative trusted sites, the more it can be trusted. Pages on a domain are also allocated a trust factor, and a homepage is more likely to be trustworthy than a forum page. This is because a homepage is the site’s front to the world while the forum contains content which the site owner has less control over – and in the worst case, contains totally unmoderated content.

The main objective of equating trust into rankings is to eliminate low quality spam sites from search engine results pages (SERPs). Presently, sites that are new and appear to be spam are prevented from gaining significant ground in the SERPs. As a general rule, such sites have a poor backlink footprint, and linking out to them is something you should avoid if you want to increase the level of trust in your own domain. Linking to a neighborhood of bad sites immediately associates you with them – and naturally, you are less likely to trust someone in a bad neighborhood.

Link Position/style

This is a grey area with no explicit statement from any authority figure at the time of writing (of which I am aware – please enlighten me in the comments section if you know otherwise), but I feel confident in saying that different areas of a page are trusted more than others. Links at the foot of a page carry less weight than those in a side bar, and they too are less powerful than links in the header. But the best type of link is a contextual one which sits within relevant body copy of a page.

In addition to the position of the link outlined above, it’s useful to note that text links carry the most weight, image links with alt text come second and flash/java links finish close to the bottom. Anything leading edge from a design perspective (Flash) is not good for SEO, however, we can do some magic things with CSS styles on HTML menus quite effectively.

Anchor Text

While the link itself is a vote for the site, the anchor text could be said to be the “definition” of the vote. Search engines validate the topic of your page by using the exact text used to link to your pages. the “anchor text” is the wording used in the html link for example in the following link the words “penny shares” form the anchor text: Penny shares

Anchor text defines a vote

While it helps to have internal links within your website that point to different pages, having external links (the voices of others) to define these pages adds considerable weight. This is especially true when these definitions come from reliable sources, when there are multiple different sources, and when those sources are considered to be authorities on that subject.

By this point you should start to see how it’s all coming together.

For example. Suppose your website is about lizards, and one particular page is about lizard food. You would link to that page using words like “types of lizard food”, and that would help search engines to define the page content. If a partner site also linked to that page using the words “healthy lizard food”, this would add weight to the page and increase the trust of the search engines that this page is indeed about lizard food.

For this reason, the classic “click here” anchor text is now being hustled out of fashion. It is non-descriptive and it doesn’t help target any keywords (other than “click here”, of course).

As different pages on your site will be about different things, you might have pages on lizard food, lizard habitats, lizard hygiene and lizard life expectancy. It would therefore make sense to acquire links to all of these pages with relevant anchor text and to consider breaking them out into different targeted pages.

Clearly, exact duplication of the phrase you want to rank for in the anchor is the best option in a theoretical world. But having some variation is a good thing. For example, it’s important that your page about lizard life expectancy is linked with “lizard life expectancy”, but it would also help to have “how long will your lizard live”, “lizard life length”, etc. This is because in the real world people search for different things (and you should evaluate the number of searches on each specific term against your targeted phrases). Varying the anchor text while staying on topic makes the link building process seem more natural to the engines (the chances everyone who naturally stumbled across your site and linked to it of their own accord using exactly the same text is slim) so will help avoid any spam flags and providing the anchor text is related to the content it will help define it and add credibility.

This type of deep linking enhances the chances of an individual page appearing in the SERPs, and it gives the site more weight overall.

The natural flow of traffic from the linking location

This is definitely not something you should overlook. If your link can bring a flow of natural traffic from the site which it lives on, then you will have the added benefit of visitors. And we mustn’t forget about visitors. All the work you are going to do to achieve high rankings is basically intended to pull in visitors, and a really good link will do this by the very nature of its placement. Let’s face it, if a link is bringing in visitors, then it will go some way to ticking all of the boxes we’ve just talked about.

How to plan a link building campaign

If you are thinking about a link building campaign for the purpose of improving your rankings in the SERPs, then you have already realized that on page optimization is not going to be enough to get you where you want to be. Link acquisition is where you need to be.

Put simply, the most effective thing you can do is acquire as many backlinks as you can that fit the criteria that has been defined above. You might not need more links than your competitors, but you will need a better link profile all in all. This might mean more links, might mean links from more IPs, more trusted links or more relevant ones, aim for more links to the best practices defined above and you will outrank the competition.

Amassing links

Contrary to what many experts would have you believe, getting lots of links from a single domain can be very advantageous – and it can provide you with an easy way to collect several different versions of your anchor text. If you’re able to acquire several links from a single domain (perhaps you have a good relationship with the webmaster) then it presents you with the opportunity to easily acquire a selection of varying anchor text from that domain (possibly to different deep linked locations within your site) thus targeting different phrases. If the domain in question meets the other criteria above to make it a worthy link neighborhood this will greatly help towards ranking for more than one term. Networking is a powerful thing!

One thing to note here is that Google only accredits the first outgoing anchor text link to a domain on an individual page. So for example, if the text “one thing” at the start of this sentence linked to your page any anchor text lower on the page would not carry weight. This is why it’s useful to have multiple link with different anchor texts on the same domain. That said, it can prove useful, but not if they reside on the same page.

In conclusion

The above steps will help you target different keywords and potentially allow you to give your vote many different definitions. But you need to go further. Increasing the number of vote definitions you have you will still need to raise the number of votes overall (bearing in mind those watchwords – authority, trust, position and anchor text guidelines).

Even when you achieve the rank you desire within the search engines, linkbuilding is something you should continue with. Admittedly, once you have got where you want to be you can often slow down in your link building. But there is an argument that says links can lose weight over time. If you acquire a mass of links which push you though to the first page before stopping, you are also in danger of appearing as though you have created all of your links using an unnatural process (spam flags).

Search engines aim to rank content in order of relevance to search queries, and they encourage only natural link building. If a website owner publishes a piece of high quality content and it naturally attracts links, it is likely that there could be a surge in the number of links initially pointing at it. And more would be acquired gradually over time, even when people eventually stop linking to that content in mass.

This natural approach is one that most SEO experts would advise you to adopt. In my experience, gaining no links over a period of time and then gaining a few hundred a week and repeating the process does not cause a problem. I can’t say for sure if a couple of hundred links a week would fly below Google’s radar, and if you want to be super cautious with your site, following the best practice advice would be the best approach. To get flagged as a spam site for the volume of links you build you have to do something pretty special.

But even so, you should always work out the risk and potential reward on a per site basis.

The next few posts will identify the most effective ways to build a quality backlink profile, the techniques will be enlightening to some and common sense to others, subscribe to the RSS to be informed as soon as each update goes live.

Competitor keywords, no longer fair game?

It may soon become a criminal offence to bid on a competitor’s registered trademark to advertise your products or services through Google AdWords and other PPC advertising solutions. Google have already clamped down on the use of competitors trademarks within ad copy but this could soon be taken a step further to give additional protection to branded terms and potentially eliminate bidding on competitor keywords altogether.

Numerous national European cases have been passed to the European Court of Justice (ECJ) as they work to ascertain whether the bidding on competitors trademarks should be classed as infringement upon them.

The adwords bidding system has historically been (and still is) ungoverned, meaning a company is free to use another company’s trademarks in order to attract people who may be searching for a rival brand.

While it will be some time before the ECJ makes its judgement, the Advocate General is expected to reveal his feelings on this issue in the near future. In most cases, the views of the Advocate General are borne out in the ruling of the ECJ, so his opinion carries a great deal of weight. Regardless of the eventual decision, now is a crucial time for a large number of businesses. Some will be looking to exploit this system before it’s too late, others will be looking to clean up their act in case the ECJ decides it is unlawful.

Exploitation and Damage Limitation

If the ECJ decides that bidding on registered trademarks within AdWords is illegal, those companies whose trademarks are being used without their permission will have some interesting opportunities for recompense:

• They can issue legal proceedings to get an injunction
• They can sue for damages
• They can demand an account of their competitor’s profits attributable to the trademark infringement

They can also recover any legal costs for the above. Clearly, while each of these presents a significant financial benefit, the biggest advantage will be the prospect of holding a nailed on legal claim against a competitor. As a business, that gives you a great deal of leverage!

Once a decision is reached – and the industry has no idea which way the decision will go – evidence will likely disappear very quickly as competitors cease bidding on competitors’ trademarked terms (see below for details) or even through google and other facilitators covering their tracks. Because of this, now is a good time to gather evidence should the opportunity arise when googling your own brand names and trademarks. Screenshots of google results pages and where they click though to may prove useful down the road, although this in unlikely to be enough on its own.

Risk and Mitigation

If you don’t bid on competitor keywords (or trademarks) in this manner, you’ve nothing to worry about and for the coming weeks this might be a good policy to adopt.  It may be worth making sure you have registered your own, to ensure that your competitor cannot. Equally, it’s a good idea to exercise some vigilance and check that nobody in your business has done so – even unintentionally. Ignorance is unlikely to be an excuse.

Protect your own brand

If you are bidding on a competitor’s trademark to help promote your own business, the time may be fast approaching when you need to make sure that the other company doesn’t find out. The easiest way to ensure this is to suspend your AdWord account: google states that once you action this process, all adwords will stop within the hour. This link will take you to a page that gives instructions on how to do this:

Close your google adwords account

It may then be advisable to open a new account for the purposes of re-establishing links to your own trademarks and key words even at a cost to your quality score. On the other hand, if the ECJ rules that this practice is actually lawful, you can simply reinstate your original account. After all – it’s better to lose some revenue from AdWords than it is to face a lawsuit and the resulting payout. Now might be a good time to review the revenue generated though bidding on a competitors brand terms if you have not done this for some time, it’s not really the time to be taking a punt on a not-so-profitable search engine estate branding exercise.

PPC stop and think

Getting the most out of pay per click advertising in the B2B realm

B2B environments are far more complex, both on and offline than other advertising environments, and this complexity carries over to online advertising. Generally, the B2B environment has a longer sales cycle as well as a convoluted purchasing process; one that is typically done in a manner which means that the decision to buy often does not lie with an individual who may be exposed to your advert while searching, but any number of people (who many have never seen your advert or even of heard of you). The actual purchasing process within larger organisations, no matter how modern and streamlined, rarely lend themselves to a paperless checkout/purchasing process. This is something that we will be revisiting here in the coming weeks.




A B2B PPC campaign could see a huge amount of clicks on a given keyword; and in fact, these clicks may even convert to sales. However, as we know, clicks and conversions alone do not make the process profitable – in retrospect they could make for a huge expense.

In order to profit through PPC advertising, you will have to develop and implement a model specific to your company from the very start. And depending on your exact business model, it is important to tailor the campaign towards predefined, concise goals that sit alongside and complement the overall model.

Knowing the acceptable price per acquisition is often the best starting point, and drilling down to acquisition by specific channel can provide you with even further insight. B2B models often assert a fairly high cost per acquisition after giving consideration to the customer lifecycle. But with a pay per click campaign this acquisition can be polluted by individuals (c’s rather than b’s) who have little or no long term profitability, and this can really skew such findings.

Defining the goals and developing the model is, of course, highly dependent upon the (range of) product both for sale and promoted within the campaign –some products that really do

Business to business PPC

make things easier for marketers. For example, a supplier of clocking-in equipment is not likely to attract a huge amount of interest from individuals, and therefore marketers and advertisers will not need to worry about shielding the campaign from unprofitable consumers as much as a supplier of wholesale storage bins would. Worst case scenario means that all of your keywords around the words “storage” and “bins” could attract an influx of traffic from consumers wanting household bins.

Keyword tools and tools that try to identify the quantity of traffic generated by specific search terms have their place in the development of an adwords campaign as well; but there effectiveness is limited. There is no way these tools can recognise or account for the true value of a keyword to your business; and this one thing that forms the foundation of a successful paid search campaign. To a keyword tool traffic is traffic, all of equal value.

The root of the problem

The problem stems partially from adwords’ inability to specifically target businesses in the same way an offline mailing would. Because you cannot decide who clicks your ads when running an adwords campaign online, you will likely experience a high number of inappropriate clicks on an ad that fail to convert – and this can be costly especially where small business and startups are concerned.

With PPC, marketers cannot even filter out ‘bad clicks’ by functioning as trade only as a bad click would need to be made in the first place just to reach a page providing this information – and of course by that time it is already too late. Of course with offline mailing you can target companies and even consumers much more directly; but in today’s information age, who wants to spend the time and money associated with printing out materials and mailing them all over the country?

There is no quick fix for the above problem; however, there are several best practice guides in existence which aim to streamline your PPC campaign within the B2B realm. The problem with these guides, however, is that (perhaps in an attempt to appeal to a larger audience) they are quite general and apply the standard rules of PPC advertising.

The guides referred to above may be ideal for those who are just learning the basics of PPC and trying to apply it to a B2B world, however, anyone who wants to profit from a successful online campaign­­ will need significantly more insight. Guides focusing on ad copy, budgeting, the long tail and negative keywords, all of which are vital to a successful campaign are not enough on their own. How many times can you repackage googles adwords guidelines and call it good advice? A local council would need a different ppc campaign to a sole trader who in turn would need things handled differently to a video production company – each requires a very unique approach.

In the coming weeks we will explore some techniques that can be applied to a B2B PPC campaign on an account, technical and business level to enhance what you have already and lay the foundations for success in the future. We will also look at the legal issues which surround PPC advertising when competitor keywords and trademarks are involved Subscribe to the RSS to be alerted when the post is live.

Please consider visiting our sponser:
Home Mortgage Modification

Keyword Research
Free PDF downloads
books search
Microsoft Office 2010
VPMi – PM software
kudos fishing tackle for your best fishing
SEO Company India
Best Home Loans – Webdeal.com.au provides the most competitive home loan products in Australia
negotiating skills
SEO experts in UK Increase organic search engine rankings. Increase your sales. Increase your profits. The UKs leading SEO company. FREE SEO ANALYSIS – Call 0845 331 3512 today!
myspace graphics
funny junk
Diamond Rings
Diamond Studs
About Sapphire Jewelry