Last week I did a basic link building presentation internally to our team here at PushON, as a little refresher and to help some of our newly acquired staff. The presentation covers the basics of link building, including some methods, tools and instances where link building can benefit a website (both traffic-wise and via improved search engine rankings).
Some of the information from the slides can be found below.
What is Link Building?
The process of improving the number of external links to a given website, from relevant and authoritative domains.
Links are seen in the eyes of the search engines as ‘votes’ – the better the links you have, the bigger the opportunity for a website to gain increased search engine visibility (dependant on other factors).
Link building usually accounts for the majority of work carried out on an on-going search marketing campaign (along with CRO, reporting/analysis and on-page optimisation).
Links represent around 67% of what drives search engine rankings.
(2010 SEOmoz survey)
Why Links Matter
Although not ideal, it is one of the many contributing factors that is difficult for people to exploit (effectively) – bar some time-consuming exceptions such as content networks.
Establishing a link on a relevant and popular page could mean more than just search engine benefit, as it is likely to send potentially converting traffic to your website.
Having great content is useless if it isn’t being found in search, so external links can be an effective means of improving indexation and visibility for pages which may struggle to perform without.
What Makes a Good Link?
- Non-Existance of Nofollow Attribute
- Relevance of Linking Domain/Page
- Age of Linking Domain
- TLD of Linking Domain(.ac.uk <> .tk)
- Authority of Linking Page
- Destination URL (inc canonicalisation)
- Anchor Text
- Link Positioning (on page)
- Google PageRank
- Potential Traffic Gained
If you have any suggestions on how this could be improved then please feel free to add them in the comments.
Topics: link building | Leave Us a Comment »
Continuing on from our success at this year’s Big Chip Awards where we won Best Use of Search for the second year running, as well as playing a part in the winning entry for Best On-line Brand Development, we have been nominated twice at this year’s Fresh Awards.
The first nomination is in the e-Targeting & Marketing category for our work in conjunction with Brazen on the Hyundai 30 Beats campaign. The second is, yes you guessed it, in the Sites & Search category for our work for CreativeTourist.
Hopefully, we can continue our successful year in terms of awards and bring back some silverware for our ever-growing trophy cabinet.
Topics: PushON Work | Leave Us a Comment »
- 22% of all time spent on the Internet worldwide is on a social network
- 75% of Internet users visit a social network or blog when they go online (24% increase from last year)
- The average worldwide user now spends 6 hours using social networks a month, this was only 3 and a half hours last year (66% increase)
- Dell – Have invested large amounts of money into building a cross-platform community, this includes: Numerous Twitter usernames (for each country, as well as for different areas of business), a very active presence on Facebook, and host a growing network of blogs.
- Intel - Like Dell, have fully embraced social media usage across their company. The foundations of this started with the creation of Intelpedia, a team based collaboration in the form of a wiki which now holds some 15,000 articles. The development of this eventually led to the establishment of the Social Media Guidelines (now, impressively, available in over 35 languages). And most interestingly the creation of the Social Media Center of Excellence demonstrated the impact of social media on Intel, where a multi-disciplined team with knowledge spanning legal, marketing, PR and web-based communications was formed in order to establish protocols and strategies for Intel employees and their use of social media tools. Furthermore, Intel’s benefits from using social media has been proved by the introduction of the Digital IQ certificate offered to their employees, the content of this course is explained in more detail here. One key learning here is their views on moderation and their Good, the Bad, but not the Ugly framework – simply put, if content is good or bad then it is approved (you should not dissaprove negative content, it could lead to vital learnings about your company) however, if content is ‘ugly’ offensive or discriminatory then dissaprove it.
- Kodak – If you’re looking for a concise introduction to social media from the perspective of a global brand, whilst also gaining tips and insights into how they approach it as a corporation then the most all encompassing guide would be Kodak’s.
- And, (rather bizarrely) the US Air Force – Where some companies have detailed their policies through practice and the development of schemes, others, such as the US Air Force (of all people!), have formalized their practices in a framework widely referenced in the digital circuit. Their approach the social media as a whole should also be praised for their forward looking stance, especially when existing as an entirely different organisation as the others listed here. Their reason for the adoption of social media protocols can be understood by Colonel Caldwell’s (acting Director of Public Affairs) realisation that ’75% of Airmen use Myspace, 70% use Youtube and 50% use Facebook’ (a number that has no doubt grown since that interview) and his wish to have “330,000 people [the entirety of the US Air Force] to be in Public Affairs”.
Topics: Clever Stuff, Digital, Facebook, Online Marketing Guide, PushON Work, Social Media, Social Networking, Training, twitter | 3 Comments »
Ever had the problem of presenting data to a client and struggling to explain it’s application or meaning? A more creative approach that we have recently adopted here at PushON is using a nifty new word cloud creation tool Wordle. Wordle is a great tool that lets you create randomly generated word clouds from the most prominent words either in a data set, any given URL or a del.icio.us username. This has become especially useful for presenting keyword research to clients, by creating a word cloud where the most popular terms (in terms of traffic volume) are the most prominent. In order to demonstrate this process I have done a step-by-step guide below:
Let’s imagine that we’re doing some rough keyword research around beer, suppose we plug in 5 terms into the Google Keyword Tool ‘beer, ale, pint, bitter, stout’ and export this data to Excel. The only data that we will need for this analysis is the ‘keyword’ and ‘local monthly searches’ so delete the rest. Now clean up the keyword term by removing the squared brackets by entering the formula =SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(A2, “[", " "),"]“, ” “).
Topics: Clever Stuff, PushON Work | 2 Comments »
I will start with an infographic, mainly because I love them but also because this infographic helps demonstrate the raw power of Linkedin. With over 70 million users in over 200 countries it’s hard to ignore.
source: Hubspot
So if like many, you are underutilizing your Linkedin profile, here are some quick fire tips to boost your profile and promote your business.
Optimise Your Profile
You should treat your Linkedin page a bit like a landing page and optimize it for search. You will want to try and related keywords within your profile copy and add links to your website. Linkedin allows you to add three links to your profile. You should optimize the display text and make sure you make use of all three-link opportunities. Finally you should ensure that you provide a complete profile.
Topics: Marketing, PushON Work, Search Engine Marketing (SEM), Social Media, Social Networking | Leave Us a Comment »