A Three-Pronged Approach to Link Building

by John Eberhard

Link building is a vital part of getting your site to rank well with search engines. Google says that the number of links on other sites pointing to your site is the primary criteria for their determining how high they will rank your site for any given keyword.

Internet marketers used to do something called “reciprocal link building,” where they would contact other webmasters for other sites and offer to put up a link to that webmaster’s site if he would link to them on his site. I believe it has been two years since Google totally devalued these types of links, making them of no value any more. But I still get emails from other webmasters asking to do reciprocal linking. And incredibly I still see articles where the author promotes doing it. Get with it guys!

I have found that three actions are the most successful ones for developing links to a web site today.

Article Directories

For some odd reason in the SEO community, many of the writers look down their noses at article directories, don’t use them or even talk about them. I once posted something on a forum on a major SEO site about article directories and the moderator removed it!

So I don’t know what these SEO types have against article directories, but I have been taking articles about my clients (and my own company) and posting them on article directories, for about four years, and have built up thousands and thousands of links for clients. My own site as of today has 34,300 links to it. I have taken client web sites with practically no links and built them up to thousands in just a few months.

The article should be 400 words (some sites have a minimum), and should be written about some topic of interest in your industry, but should not directly pitch your company. Then you create a “Bio box” which contains a short blurb about the author, his company web site address (actually you can have up to three web addresses) and can contain a phone number.

We have software which partially automates the article submission process, and we will submit to usually 50 to 100 sites per month for our clients. Some of the top article directories includes http://www.goarticles.com, http://www.isnare.com/ and http://www.dime-co.com/.

Online PR

I write press releases about the client company and something they are doing, then submit them to several online PR sites that contain lots of press releases. I have selected PR sites that, if they accept your press release, it will automatically also go onto Google News.

Getting these press releases onto the PR sites creates high quality links. When you check your links for your web site, these PR sites will come up high, on the first couple pages. Some of the online PR sites include www.pr.com, www.24-7pressrelease.com, and www.prlog.org.

So posting articles on article directories creates high volume links, and press releases on the online PR sites creates high quality links.

Blogging

Another great way to create links to your main web site is to write blog articles, post them to your blog, and link certain words in your article back to pages on your main web site. I think this has the most value if your blog has a different address from your main web site.

You should write your article so that it contains keywords that you are trying to rank well for, and then link up to three of those keywords back to appropriate pages on your main web site. Most blogs today are made using either Wordpress or Typepad.

I go one step further on blogging, which is to set up blogs on all the free blogging sites; www.wordpress.com, www.blogger.com, www.posterous.com, www.livejournal.com, and www.blog.com. I used to use www.tumblr.com, but they recently contacted me and told me it is against their policy to allow blog posts with links in them (!?!), so I no longer use them.

I then put my blog article on all these free blogs too, with links pointing back to my main web site or client web site. So if the client has a Wordpress blog, and then I have set up five free blogs for him, that is six blogs. So one article, with three links in it to his main site, will, by this action, create 18 links.

I also use a feature on www.Posterous.com where you can hook up all your blogs to it. Then you send out your article on Posterous and it automatically goes out to all your blogs.

So if I am doing an article and press release for a client each month, I will submit the article to the article directories and the press release to the online PR sites, but I will also post both the article and press release to the client’s blogs.

Summary

I have found, over several years and with much trial and error, that a three-pronged approach to link building, as described above, is the most effective, gets tons of links, and moves a web site up in the search engine rankings.

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Google Maps

by John Eberhard

Google is definitely the place to be found online, with 72.11% of all Internet searches, compared to 14.57% for second place Yahoo. And page one is also the place to be, since 83% of all search engine searchers do not go past page one.

But getting onto page one for Google for your top keywords isn’t always easy. Getting onto page one for the regular or organic listings, via search engine optimization (SEO) and link building, can take 6 months or more. And for a really competitive keyword, you may not get onto page one at all.

You can get onto page one via paid ads with Google AdWords, which is great. But it’s also a continuing expense.

Google Maps is a feature of Google whereby when Google perceives through the nature of your search that you are searching for something local, it will bring up a map on page one. The map will have balloons on it showing the location of different vendors, and there will be listings shown to the right of the map.

So the Google Maps feature is a great way to get your business listing onto the elusive page one of Google. And with the graphic, it pulls your attention right to the map, which is partway down the page.

This new feature is great for local businesses like restaurants, home improvement companies, health care practices, dance studios, attorneys, private schools, or any business that services a local area. When you consider that 66% of Americans use the Internet to find local businesses, and 73% of all Internet activity is related to local content, if you have a local business, you need to get onto Google Maps.

The tendency is to think that if your business is listed somewhere in Google, that you will automatically be put onto Google Maps. Not so. You have to go through a whole process to get your listing up there, and the link will click through to sort of a mini web page for your business on Google, with your contact info, a map, description, pictures, and customer reviews.

Part of the process of getting your business on Google Maps involves “claiming” your listing, then putting up all the information, and uploading photos. It also helps your placement of your listing (how close it is to the top) if you also have listings on Yahoo and MSN, and on other sites such as Yelp and Hotfrog.

Once a searcher clicks on “more info” on the map, they will be taken to your Google Maps page, which includes, as mentioned before, customer reviews. As I covered in an article a few weeks ago, with customer reviews, as Don Henley says “This could be heaven or this could be hell,” depending on what kind of reviews you get. A couple bad reviews can have a way of killing online business, and somehow they have a way of going to the top of the review listings and staying there a long time.

My recommendation for local businesses is:

1. Get your company listed on Google Maps. We can do this for you if desired.
2. Put up an autoresponder email system like I described in my article a few weeks ago, whereby you enter the email addresses of happy customers into it, and then the system sends them several emails over the course of a week or two asking them to write an online review for you. The emails also include links to several places where they can write reviews. This allows you to be proactive in getting good reviews that will soon outnumber any bad ones.

Using this system you will get onto page one of Google and hopefully will get you good online reviews that will outnumber the bad ones. I am relatively new on this whole line so I don’t know what the numbers are like, but getting onto page one of Google is always a good thing.

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The Full Social: How to Put the Pedal to the Metal with Social Media Marketing

by John Eberhard

Most people these days are familiar with Facebook and Twitter, and maybe MySpace and LinkedIn. And certainly Facebook and Twitter are the two 800 pound gorillas in the room with social media marketing.

But what if you’re not content with just using one or two sites for social media marketing? What if you want to really put the pedal to the metal? Go the distance? Be a world class social media marketer?

The Full Social

As a nod to “The Full Monty” movie I am outlining the Full Social, which is a program of all or nearly all of the social media marketing actions one can take.

First Tier Sites

The first tier social media sites are Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and MySpace. The importance of these sites is roughly in that order. The goal is to start accounts, get lots of friends or followers, then put out regular updates on what you are doing with your business. The idea is that by putting out regular updates on what you are doing, you keep yourself high in people’s awareness as the provide of ____ (your product or service). You should also post things occasionally about your personal life, and comment on other people’s posts, so as to develop and maintain engagement. I recommend that people start an account on Ping.fm and hook up all your accounts to it. Then you can post your status updates from Ping.fm and they go out to all the sites at once.

Creating a Facebook fan page gets you a really high quality link to your site or sites, but so many people are doing these now that it is getting harder to get lots of fans.

Second Tier Sites

The second tier social media sites include Plaxo, Plurk, FriendFeed, Bebo, Friendster, Hi5, Orkut and PerfSpot. Same handling as above.

YouTube

Some people consider YouTube a first tier site but it is sort of in its own category because of the way it is used. The idea is to create some videos that promote your business and then get them up on YouTube. Be sure to include your web address and some of your top keywords in the description box. Creating videos these days is not that expensive, using a Flip camera and software such as Camtasia. But it is definitely time consuming.

Squidoo And HubPages

Squidoo.com and HubPages.com are similar in that you can start an account and put up pages on any given topic. You can add pictures, videos, links to your blog and so on, to your pages. For a while these two sites were devalued by Google for some reason but that is over now. The pages you create give you very high quality links and both sites get a lot of traffic. Squidoo is much more friendly to marketing than HubPages, which only allows you to put one link per page.

Business Directories

There are a variety of social media business directories online today, where you can create a listing for your business that includes your contact info, a company description, and links to all your web sites. Some of the sites include HotFrog.com, AboutUs.org, and Mashable.com. One of the advantages of putting up listings on these sites, aside from people seeing your listing and contacting you, is that these listings create very high quality links back to your web site.

Blogging

Blogging is really its own activity but some people consider that it falls under social media. I recommend creating a main blog, using either Wordpress or Typepad, then post something to it weekly. I also recommend starting blog accounts on the free blogging sites, including Wordpress.com, Blogger.com, Posterous.com, LiveJournal.com, and Blog.com. Then using your Posterous.com account, you can hook up all your other blogs to it (including your main blog) and posting on Posterous.com will then send your content out to all your blogs at once. Be sure to include 1-3 links in your post back to your main web site. Some people, when I mention this setup, voice concern over “duplicative content penalties.” However, Google states there is no such penalty so this is apparently a stubborn urban legend. Make sure to send out a “ping” or notification to all the blog search engines after each post, using Pingomatic.com.

Social Bookmarking Sites

Social bookmarking is a way for people to organize, store, manage and search for bookmarks of resources online. Top bookmarking sites include Delicious.com, Digg.com, StumbleUpon.com, and Reddit.com. Aside from being a sort of online listing of your favorite web pages, each counts as a link. So you can create bookmarks of all your web sites, individual pages within the sites, and of your blogs.

Summary

Pursuing a full program of social media marketing will get your company out there broadly across the Internet, create a lot of links to your site, put your regular communications in front of a lot of people, and drive in business.

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