If you have been tasked with the link building for a website, you don’t necessarily have to look far from home to improve things. Google Analytics has its many uses, and with a little help it can get even better. To improve the value of existing links with Analytics, here are is a very useful custom filter.

Discovering the Full Referral URL

This feature should be available by default in Analytics, but even after all this time it isn’t. When looking at the referring traffic on a website you are only provided with the domain view as opposed to the specific page in which the referral came from. To see the full referral URL in Google Analytics an advanced custom filter is needed – and here’s how: (credit to Sebastien Page for posting this).

1. Log in to Analytics and click ‘Edit’ on the profile
2. Scroll down to the filters and chose ‘Add Filter’
3. Name the filter (eg ‘Full Referral URL’) then use the following options:

Filter Type: Custom Filter

Advanced

Field A -> Extract A:         Referral               (.*)

Field B -> Extract B:         blank

Output To -> Constructor:            User Defined     $A1

Field A Required               Yes

Field B Required               No

Override Output Field    Yes

Case Sensitive   No

4. Save the changes

The custom filter won’t work retroactively, but after it has been applied you will be able to view the full referral by going to the ‘Visitors’ option in the navigation menu of the profile, and selecting ‘User Defined’.

Improving the Value of Links

Once you are able to see the full referring URL you have the ability to explore those links in more detail and improve the value (in some cases). Here are some instances in which you may wish to change how a link is being directed to a website:

• The link is pointing to a non-primary URL (for example the non-www copy of the site)
• The anchor text is irrelevant (or untargeted)
• The link would be better suited to another page on the website
• The link has the ‘nofollow’ attribute applied to it
• The link is positioned around irrelevant content, such as headings that say “Sponsored Links”

Contacting a website owner to request a change to a link isn’t a difficult task, and you will find that most of the time they are willing to do so. It’s a quick and easy job for them, and if you could also offer them a bit of free link advice for themselves to sweeten the deal!

The perfect link-profile is the imperfect link-profile

Any link-builder will tell you that the perfect link is one from domain x, appearing in the body there, with this anchor text, and the page title, heading and x, y and z this, this and this. But a whole link-profile that replicates this would be hugely unnatural and as a result you might be overly optimising – missing out on some real superstar wins.

• Quality link-building is less about being correct and more about measured mistakes.
• Boolean search engine algorithms are old school; topic semantics and naturalist styles are the way forward.

The temptations in link-building…

Nepotism, link-buying and using your own portfolio of sites to build links provides a big temptation to those that partake in this activity to drop links onto those sites using highly optimised short-tail terms.

If, indeed you do have control of over the anchor text, the link title and location of the link…why not mix things up? Throw in some ultra long-tail, some URLs, some domain name links, short-tail, some random tail, etc, etc…it’s for the greater SEO good, trust me!

Are patterns natural?

I carried out a site review recently, and approximately 45% of the site’s link-profile was made up of 4 very close variations on a very short-tail term, across 1,000’s of links. This is not natural, and flagged excessive keyword targeting in the link-building activity in a a huge industry, when really they should be optimising for a broader range of terms.

More often than not, you will see the domain name or the URL as the link for the site, not an overly imposing handful of short-tail terms. In this instance, those links also sat on unrelated pages and sites with blogrolls including ‘Replica Rolex watches’ and ‘Cialis’ links, et al…not exactly the ideal online neighbourhood to be associated with.

All it would take is for a search engine to flag this irregularity, have a human moderator review that link-profile and devalue those links – causing a massive shift in the site’s visibility. This is quite obviously not good SEO service.

Empirical Methodological Naturalism

Methodological naturalism, or the testing of causes and events in our surroundings to support or reject our hypothesis, is a great way of developing our understanding in SEO. I for one follow the mantra that it is possible to over-optimise. A contradiction of terms? Well no, I don’t think so.

Experience and some understanding of search engine algorithms tells me that as much as search engines want to provide the exact match, the best and most relevant result, it has to resolve two things…it must satisfy queries with unspecified searcher intent and in doing this, it must filter search engine spam.

A generic search for “DVD”, could have the intent to make a purchase, rent a DVD, informational research, get news, view latest trailers, get an image, etc, etc…It therefore must piece together the most relevant result using a variety of metrics, looking at things like historic searches, possibly behavioural metrics (e.g. frequency or % of returning visitors to a website), etc…As a result you need to optimise for intent as much as you do a keyword.

Optimising for “DVD” might therefore be very unhelpful but optimising for “DVD rental” or “DVD shop” communicates to the search engines that you are online with a commercial intent and therefore the search engine can look to provide the most relevant visitors at the least effort. For this reason, although it’s important to specify your intention, it’s good to mix things up. For this reason you need a healthy list of modifying terms at your disposal.

Variety is the spice of life!

Nofollow, stop words, miscellaneous words, various lengths of anchor text, semantic variations, modifiers, typos, synonyms, IP… these all make the naturalness of the links that much more natural. A site can obviously take quite a number of these ‘perfect links’ but I wouldn’t want to ever suggest that you

The search engines have more data than is possible to imagine – so be mindful of that next time you want to buy a sack full of links and dump them on your link-profile; how natural is that going to look over time?!! Any link profile can of course absorb quite a number of perfect links in a natural way but be mindful of how this occurs and at what rate. A search engines link-graph consists of masses of data so anomalies can stand-out a mile (check-out Majestic SEO for some insights on previous link-profile activity).

More Reading

OK, so maybe ‘sabotaging your link-profile’ is a slight exaggeration but it’s massively important for longevity of results in my opinion. If it’s a topic that’s new to you, make sure you do a load more reading…

There’s loads of stuff out there, but a couple of my favourites that inspired this post will provide you with plenty of reading, include Marie-Claire Jenkins post on Huomah and Shaun Anderson’s over at Hobo << really cool stuff.

What are your thoughts?

Does anchor text density play a major part in your link-building activity?

About Guest Poster, Ben McKay

Ben is a SEO Manager at Mediaedge:cia, and writes about SEO consulting over at Just Me and My and more recently Greensplash Design, SEO Scoop and Search Engine Journal.

Ben’s a huge fan of some of the geekiest SEO blogs around, and has a number of favourite SEO blogs, and hates writing in the third person! He’s a sociable chap so make sure you say hello to Ben on Twitter.

In many ways the praises of deep links go unsung but in fact play an integral part in SEO. When building a campaign we want to build both the domain authority and individual page strengths. Deep links tie in to page strength as we need to in some way to tell Google (and other search engines) that our sites also have excellent content on pages other than that of the home page. To do this we employ a number of internal and external link development tactics.

I will now outline some quick and easy ways to gain deep links.

Link Bait

This is something that i don’t play with nearly enough but i certainly have a great appreciation for it. Link baiting is essentially where you create a piece of content that preferably goes viral to help develop links. It’s something that people would look naturally want to link to. You could literally write several books on this topic but i would recommend checking out SEO Shark’s blog. One of my favourite examples of link bait is the search engine smackdown game. Work of genius. All I will say is that link bait is a kind of art and the pay off can be significant.

link baiting Vs viral search success

Article Submissions

Article marketing has come under some heavy scrutiny in the SEO field over the last few years but it still remains an effective tool for creating one way links. Creating a well written article with links pointing to several pages in your site can help develop your number of links however the strength of these links can be fairly low. At least they are on topic and relevant. Some of the more popular articles sites include:

EzineArticles
Go Articles
Article Base

Directories

I think directories still have there place in SEO and they can be a nice way to build deep links to your site. You will find many directories offer one link pointing to the home page with an additional 5 links pointing towards your inner pages. One that offer deep links are often paid. I have found this particular tactic to be extremely effective in getting inner pages to rank well in the past.

Social Media

The number of social media sites is growing all the time and many of them are now offering do follow links. It’s a nice and simple tactic but its worth spending the time developing profiles properly. I personally like Squidoo as you build the pages up and develop reasonably strong page ranked links.

Internal Linking

This is without doubt the easiest method to build deep links and is proven to be extremely effective. Pointing internal links to key pages not only helps develop there status but also points users to your key content. It’s important to not over do it and review your site structure and content first. Don’t forget to use that anchor text wisely.

There are of course many ways to build deep links and i have mentioned some of the main ones above. Another key one for example could be guest blog posts. My final bit of advice is to review your sites structure and content first and devise a focused strategy.

Happy Hunting……

Although there are many factors that influence where your website will be ranked in the SERP some factors are more important than others. After taking a look at Bing for a few days now and carrying out some analysis it has become apparent that Bing uses a very different algorithm to Google. A good example that shows this clearly is searching for SEO Manchester in both Google and Bing.

The two SERPs looks very different, only one of the top ten results are the same and many big SEO agencies in Manchester are missing from the Bing SERP. You’ll also notice that the Bing Local Listings are not very competitive at all with only one agency being listed.

So which factors should you focus on to rank well in Bing?

• A mixture of inbound links including a good number with good keyword rich anchor text (see this great article on Link Building Secrets by Patrick Atloft).
• Make sure you write keyword rich, unique meta data which is also human readable.

If you have any other ideas on which factors are most important to rank in Bing please leave a comment and let us know!

I’m a little apprehensive at the thought of opening the floodgates, but what we give out in link love, we hope to gain in contributions to the conversation.

Has anyone had experience – good or bad?

Most people in the industry know it’s time consuming, and often tedious, but you can’t argue with the results you get from a good link building campaign.

There are so many methods, that it’s difficult to teach, but we’ve put together a link building process flow here:

It’s a bit like a ‘Choose your own adventure‘, so print it out for each client or website, and mark off the paths you’ve travelled. Repeat paths that are keyword specific for each of your keywords or phrases.

(Right click and rotate to see it the right way round).

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4prgDMt1dR0[/youtube]

What it is, and why you would want to maintain one to help your business.

Also a great explanation of RSS and its usage.

Masses of traffic is pointless if you don’t convert it into sales, leads or repeat visitors. It’s so easy to find what you want online, if you make it difficult for your users, then they will go elsewhere and they won’t come back.

Justin Palmer has written an excellent checklist to help improve your E-commerce conversion rates.

Another thing to consider is creating useful, regularly updated content for your users.  This has a three fold benefit:

1. You have the opportunity to appear in search results for a larger quantity of search terms related to your industry/products/services
2. People will come back later to see what other useful stuff you have to offer
3. People will link to you (this helps increase the number of referrals you get & your search engine rankings)

When you have a number of keywords in your ad group, sometimes it’s handy to use the keyword insertion method when creating your adverts.

This is where you use the text {keyword:default text} to pull in the keyword that a user types to triggers the advert.

This means you can highly relevant and targeted adverts without having to write individual adverts for every one of the keywords you’re bidding on.

Default Pay Per Click Advert Headline

You define your default text in the case where the user searches for a phrase that is too long to fit in your advert.  For example in one of the adverts I’m testing, I’ve used the text “Blue Ultimatt® Emulsion” as the alternative, so if someone types “where can I buy blue emulsion paint” it will display the following advert:

Pay Per Click Advert Keyword Insertion

However when you use the {keyword:default text} in your title or advert, and the text is not too long, it will show in the following format:

As you can see above, the text is all lower case… and not particularly inviting.

Capitalisation of keywords in your advert

What I found out today that was quite useful is that you can change the capitalisation of the keywords use in your advert, so you can display an advert like this instead:

Table of PPC keyword capitalisation

I’ve added a table of capitalisation variations that you can use when writing your pay per click adverts here:

* I wouldn’t advise all caps, unless you really want to shout!

When not to use automatic keyword insertion

There are no hard and fast rules for this, but consider the following:

• If your competitors are all using the keyword insertion method for niche terms, you’re advert isn’t going to stand out one bit.  Check the actual results, and see whether your advert looks invitingly relevant or insipidly generic.
• Are your keywords loosely grouped? If you’re trying to automate too much, you may be churning out adverts that may be relevant to the keywords used, but the landing page won’t match.
• Are you bidding on your competitors brand names? if so, your advert may falsely imply that you’re selling their products.  This isn’t good karma, but more importantly, you’re unlikely to make a sale from someone who specifically wants a product you don’t sell.