Internet Marketing Q&A

How to Build Quality Back-links? (Some innovative strategies)

Brunner Nathan asks: What are good ways to get quality backlinks for my technology blog?

Here I list some of the innovative strategies to get quality backlinks. Most articles with same title tell you which links are quality and which are not.  But, this is about about strategies. Here are some of my suggestions:

Quality Contents

Write quality contents, contents that are shareworthy and newsworthy. That way, you get backlinks, shares, and reviews.

Leverage Networks in Social Media

Connect your blog with various social media and try to build different set of network on each social media (e.g. the same network in Facebook and Twitter will not give you much boost, but if there are 2 different set of network, you can leverage the network in greater way. I mostly write a review about an article after seeing it in social media).

Another thing you can do is grow your network to include more blogger and journalists. You can use LinkedIn to find and get connected with these audiences. Building personal relationship also helps.

Be the First to Write

Be the first to write about a technology update. This is the tricky part, when you do keyword research. Because  the demand for the keyword has not been created. But, this should be seen as opportunity, since there are pretty less competitors. And with major technology update, people start to search for the keywords and they link and socially share the articles they find. (e.g. iPhone 6 videos were released a few days ago. If you are the first to post the news, then you might get more views, shares, and backlinks.

Publish in Web Magazines

Write for Technology blog magazines like Social Media Today. They often compile articles from others sites.

Facebook Promotion to Bloggers and Journalists

You can go for Promotion in Facebook. The good thing is, you can select audience who can see you post by interest. Select these interests: #blogging #your-technology-keyword #journalism (and many more, I hope you get the idea)

AdWords Audience Targeting

Similarly, you also can do audience targeting through AdWords. Target bloggers, journalists, etc.

Paid Guest Blogging

If you want to buy links, don’t buy them directly. Hire paid guest bloggers to write on their blogs about your site. Getting quoted by bloggers from high PR or quality blogs is not actually cheap. If you have exceptionally well contents, you can approach a blogger to write about or quote your technology post. Another thing is, I really hate to get such offers from some company to push commercial contents. So, keep the blogger’s link quoting taste in mind and develop contents accordingly. The good thing about this is that, you can get links from good blogs and you also can leverage their social media networks and get some social signals.

Recent Updates and Developments in SEO

In response to the question in Quora: What is recent development in seo?

Image Courtesy: Hongkiat

If I discard changes before Duplicate Content filter, then the recent changes were:

Personalized Search

Searches have become more personalized even before “Search Plus you World” was introduced. Some of ranking of sites you see are tailored based on your location, frequent visit to site, and a lot of other factors. A search for “basis” in USA will show various results. But, when I am searching “basis” in Bangladesh, it showing me the site of the largest Software Association (Bangladesh Association of Software and Information Services) that is also popular in Bangladesh.

This also made some SEO Stupid people that says their site is in top 10 and they do not need SEO, because they really find their site on top 10 position. Honestly, I have come across several people like this.

Local Search Algorithm Merges with Global Algorithm

Previously Google used to have separate algorithm for Local Searches, now the the Local Search Algorithm is a part of the mother algorithm of Google.

The Jagger Update

The Jagger update made Paid Link building vulnerable. And also have made major changes in Offpage SEO by discarding the value of spammy links, reciprocal links, and link farms making them Rest in Peace forever.

Brand or Authority Update for Longtail Searches

Previously some pages used to rank for long tail phrases. But, Google changed the algorithm to favor larger brands or sites that have more authority. So, Authority becomes powerful than page rank.

Realtime Search and Faster Indexing

Google has made real-time search and faster indexing, so when a earthquake happens and you search in Google, you find better results now. Moreover, Google also rolled out the freshness algorithm for 30%+ of the search queries that deserves freshness. Though not all keywords were affected by this.

Google Instant Search and Preview

Google instant and preview is one of the major changes that happened which is more tied to Click Through Rate, and less to SEO. However, this has changed the perception of ranking on SERPs.

Social Signals

Matt Cutts and Danny Sullivan at the end of 2010 declared that Google does use social signal as one of their ranking signal for SEO.

Panda Update

Panda Update is perhaps the major update that happened after the Duplicate Content filter. It introduced couple of new changes in SEO to go for better quality contents. Google Sandbox was like the spam filter, but Google Panda became the Priority Inbox. i.e. while the spam team concentrates on spammy contents, the Panda actually liked quality contents. This has made some great content farm sites like Ezine Articles to fall.

Schema.org

To ensure richer search results, Google has announced partnership with Schema. This does enable Google to show more ornamental results on SERPs.

Search Plus your World

“Search Plus your World” s also one of the major visual and algorithmic changes in SEO. This has lead Google to become Recommendation Engine from Search Engine. And your search result is more personalized now, but this according to the likes of your friends also.

Venice Update

With the Venice Update, results are now more localized than ever. You do see more localized sites for most popular queries. That’s why for popular queries large previously popular site saw drop in traffic.

Recent Link Evaluation Changes

Google recently mentioned that they have changed how they evaluate links. But, they were pretty much unclear on what they mean by that. It seems that Google is steadily changing their perception about evaluating links they used to, since the gaming is happening very much in that area. Moreover, they are steadily turning off some SEO value or signals from anchor texts. 

The Future is Social Signals

As social media becomes more and more popular, Google does have the need to switch to other signals that they can get access to and also can give them better quality ranking. So, social is the future and Google+ was not introduced just to fight against Facebook. 

For more detailed update, please see Google Algorithm Change History on SEOMoz

© Asif Anwar of SEOPPCSMM.COM - Source: Recent Updates and Developments in SEO

(Source: quora.com)

Best Online Video Advertising Campaign on Youtube and Vimeo

Video Advertising is becoming more popular day by day. Moreover, each website is using video as promo, testimonial, product presentation, etc. to grow their sales from their website. This blog discusses some basic traits of videos that made adverts go viral and made to the top videos in YouTube and other video media.

Top Viral Advertisement Videos Had Babies

Baby videos always became viral in social media. However, most of them were not really advertisement. I guess, most of the shares were and is still are triggered by females, who are greater influencers than males. That’s why when Evian rolled out the Evian Babies Roller Scatting Video, it was really something to make the video go viral.

Top Viral Advertisement Videos were Socially Customized

Many of you know that, The Old Spice video campaign with Isaiah Mustafa made a series of socially customized videos for Old Spice fans and followers. Since these videos were socially customized, it went viral all over the internet, which gave us new insights to how video virality can increase sales.

After the success of Evian Babies Roller Scatting Video, the company started a socially customization campaign. This video allowed people to put their own pictures in the video with the baby body printed on the body. This videos also triggered a lot of hits.

Top Viral Videos were Expandable Video Ads

Many of you saw the “A hunter shoots a bear”. In the video, the most amazing part was when, the hunter reaches out from the regular YouTube screen and reaches for Tipp-Ex Correction Tape to wipeout “Shoots” the bear title on the video. This was also a great hit in YouTube. Since these videos expanded from their usual video screen, they were called expandable videos.

Other than “A Hunter Shoots a Bear”, there were many other good expandable videos in Youtube and Vimeo. To have a peak at the list of top expandable videos, have a look at the article: Expandable Video Ads on YouTube and Vimeo - Innovative Web Advertisement.

(Source: quora.com)

Satellite Blogs and Link Wheel - Are they Black-hat SEO?

Is creating satelite blogs and posting seo-friendly posts considered black-hat SEO technique?

If I create 10 blogs on open platforms (like blogger, tumblr, posterous, etc.) and post unique articles with links to my main site is this considered black hat SEO?

Photo Credit: The SEO World

The Google Panda Affect

After the Google Panda update, many people saw a drop in traffic in sites that ranked for too many keywords. That means, if you have a site that targets too many and often irrelevant keywords, then you might see drop in traffic.

To fight with this problem, Hubspot has assigned Subdomains for each user. Because, Google treats subdomains as separate sites. That’s why all the Blogspot and WordPress subdomain blogs get the Google Love.

But, the point is, you need to have narrow focus on each blog. Don’t just go on and build blogs with the same topic. This also increases you effort for marketing and spend. Moreover, it is helpful to outsource specfic topics which will not overlap on each other and have specific focus.

If you are doing that, then it is not Blackhat. Moreover, think about the usability of the site. If you are not posting crappy materials over and over again and giving your audience some valuable information and resources, then that is not Blackhat.

Proper Use of Link Wheel

Creating satellite blogs is a part of Link Wheel strategy in SEO. According to many SEO scholars, it does work, but it is not granted as a good White Hat SEO Strategy. Moreover, it is also not a Blackhat SEO Strategy. That’s why Link Wheel is called a Grey Hat SEO Strategy.

One of the pros of Link Wheel is that, you have to work hard on building inbound links the way you want. Most of the time, you need to depend on others to give you link juice the way you want it. But, in real life, this is not always possible. So, the best way to get links the way you want is by making them. And that’s why Link Wheel came into being.

However, most people use link wheel to give inbound link from similar contents and from blogs that are very much similar. The narrow focus of each micro-site or satellite blogs is rarely seen. However, if you follow the previous suggestion of narrowing your focus and building blogs and micro-sites based on the narrow niche, then you would be doing something that Google has no problem with. And hence practicing White Hat SEO.

One of the Good practice is to target each microsite for Long Tail Keywords that adds peripheral keywords to the original keywords. e.g. if your target keyword is “Web Design”, then you can have separate micro-site or satellite blog for “Joomla Web Design”, “WordPress Web Design”, “ASP Web Design”, etc. You have to make sure that the satellite blog about “WordPress Web Design”, talks only about WordPress Web Design.

(Source: quora.com)

Does Bounce Rate Influence Ranking in Google for SEO?

Does Internal Visit Bounce Rate Influence Ranking for SEO?

The bounce rate of page is an internal factor that should not be tracked by Google. And also should not be a SERP ranking factor, even if Google can track page bounce rate with Google Analytics, Free Google Wifi, and Google Toolbar. Doing so would also be an unethical business practice.

Moreover, a year back in a video, Matt Cutts confirmed that they are and will not use the user data in Google Analytics in their ranking signals. So, we can rule out that Page Visit Bounce Rate is and will be a ranking factor for Google.

Does Google SERP Bounce Count in SEO?

People are also talking about the Bounce that happens by landing on the page and then returning back to the search result page (SERP) by hitting the “Back” button in the browser. Let’s call it SERP Bounce. This SERP Bounce can be granted as quality factor, since it can give you some extent of quality perspective of the site.

Recently, Google introduced “Block all site results” feature. You can see an extra link below a site saying “Block all www.badsite.com results”, when you have visited the page and immediately bounced back to the the Search Engine Result Page or SERP. You can make use of this feature only if your are signed in. Moreover, this is one of the proofs that Google is tracking the SERP Bounce back, when you visit a low quality site.

What Happens When You Block the Results of a Site from SERP

Here is what Google has to say:

Once you’ve blocked a domain, you won’t see it in your future search results… On the settings page you can find details about the sites you’ve blocked, block new sites, or unblock sites if you’ve changed your mind.

So, according to Google SERP Bounce, Google automatically puts result block link below the site title to flag the site as irrelevant when you do a SERP Bounce.

Does Google SERP Bounce Influence Rankings and SEO?

SERP Bounce is not a universal behavior. e.g. I like to use Ctrl+Click and open all good results I find in separate window or tab. In this situation there is no “Back” option in the browser. Moreover, if I search again, after visiting a page, it will not be considered a bounce. So, I don’t think Google will be using it as universal signal like other factors in the Google Search Algorithm.

This is mostly be a spam identification or quality factor, rather than a ranking factor. Google did the same previously with the SearchWiki feature, which was rumored to be a great ranking factor :-), Google clearly mentioned that:

We’re adding this feature because we believe giving you control over the results you find will provide an even more personalized and enjoyable experience on Google. In addition, while we’re not currently using the domains people block as a signal in ranking, we’ll look at the data and see whether it would be useful as we continue to evaluate and improve our search results in the future.

B2B Blogging Strategies - How Does a B2B Blog Get Noticed?

How does a B2B blog get noticed?

How does an ERP software blog such as ours get noticed? What are some common strategies for gaining followers and growing traffic?

B2B Blogging Strategy with Business Problem Keywords

The idea is to get qualified visitor from Business visitors that are not general visitors. Generally, the keywords that general visitors use and business visitors use are different. And the level of skills and qualifications also differ. The keywords that general visitors use may be popular, but the use of business related keywords have less search volume or traffic. But, they do generate fine tune qualified traffic from businesses. So, you should be blogging for businesses only, not general visitors.

One of the best way is to identify the major problems your business customers may face and are looking for contents for the solution online. e.g. I filmed a video and was looking for ways to flip it. There was not a single software that were addressing this problem. But, I found it from a eHow article. So, if the software companies were blogging about it, then they could have gained more authority score from me.

Seek Business Problem Keywords

To find the business problem keywords, you can do the following:

• You can do a target market survey
• You can conduct a mystery shopping to find out the problems by yourself
• Look at forums, quora, LinkedIn Answers, and other Q&A sites to get a list of keywords that addresses business problems that you can solve
• Set a Google Alert for your and competitor’s brand to track your reviews and problems of you business customers

B2B Blogging Strategies with Longtail Keywords

After identifying the business problem keywords, you can do extensive keyword research to find more keywords. You can divide them in 3, like Prewords, Corewords, and Postwords to find longtail keywords. The details of this idea in documented in the following presentation:

Keyword Research and Analysis - SEO Fundamental Workshop at BASIS View more presentations from Asif Anwar

Once you have the longtail keywords. Use them as topic and start blogging about them. Also make those articles search engine friendly.

(Source: quora.com)

Does using Google Campaign Tracking URLs affect SEO when link-building?

Usually Google Campaign Tracking URL, looks like this: http://www.seoppcsmm.com/?utm_source=google&utm_medium=ppc&utm_term=seo&utm_content=ads&utm_campaign=campaignx

This takes you to the same URL http://www.seoppcsmm.com/. But, it looks like a bit different dynamic URL. When you create a link that looks different (except # extensions) than the original URL, then Google will treat that URL in different manner. Since they are treated as different URL, Google will also index the duplicate version of the page, if you don’t block the Google bot to index the page.

It will obviously influence SEO, since Google is giving differential treatment. First of all, the URL will create duplicate content problem. Again, it will not point to same URL that you want link for. However, you can get SEO influence if you follow the suggestions below:

• Use a custom landing page for your ads in separate folder on the site and serve contents that are blocked by Robots.txt and use Google tracking URL versions on those pages (however, I personally don’t like blocking contents with Robots.txt, rather the “noinindex,follow” meta flows more link juice that just blocking it
• From Google Webmaster go to URL Parameter and mention the Parameter that always stays with with Google Campaign Tracking URLs (e.g. utm_source) and choose the option “No: Does not affect the page content”
• Make sure the robots meta tag on the page mentions “noinindex,follow”. This will disallow pages to be index, but still pass link juice to other relevant pages
• Make sure that the content of the page links to the original page. This will increase the authority of the original page
• Since the page contains duplicate contents, make sure the page contains canonical meta (before <head> section) (e.g. <link rel=”canonical” href=”http://www.seoppcsmm.com/” />). I usually prefer the trailing slashed URL as main original URL. More info on Canonical Meta on http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/02/specify-your-canonical.html

Once you have done all of these for your site/pages, then you might be able to get the most link-juice out of Google Campaign Tracking URLs.

(Source: quora.com)

Is writing keyword rich articles for Ezinearticles.com, in hopes of improving SEO, pointless with Google’s recent changes?

This is an answer is posted by Asif Anwar in Quora. Follow the link to source below for more Answers.

The new Google algorithm update has struck the content farms. But, relevance score is something Google always gives preference to. This score can be achieved by getting links from relevant pages. 

Most of the time, you don’t have the control over the relevance of a page. But, the contents farms give you some level of controls on creating relevance by allowing you to post keyword rich articles. So, it will be easy for your to get the links. But, when getting something becomes easy, Google does not like it.

However, getting link juice and relevance score from these articles may not be quite easy. Because, Google gives preference to unique contents. So, if you submit the same article or spinned article with same word count throughout all the article submission sites aka content farms, then Google may not give you much preference.

If you have unique articles on various themes on these article submission sites, and can establish yourself as an authority, then you can earn a lot of brand value as well as some SEO value.

(Source: quora.com)

Is Social SEO an on-site or off-site technique?

This is an answer is posted by Asif Anwar in Quora. Follow the link to source below for more Answers.

Social SEO can be both Onsite and Offsite. After the F8 conference in San Fransisco, Facebook introduced many social sharing optimization techniques. Commonly, these technique can be called Facebook Optimization (FBO). If you need to know about basic features of Facebook Optimization, then have a look at this post.

The techniques for FBO plus the optimization technique for other social media is collectively called Social Media Optimization (SMO). SMO is fully a Onsite SEO technique.

But in recent video by Matt Cutts about Social Signals has confirmed that Google is using social signals as another signal in their ranking algorithm. So, what ever activity you have on the social media site, will affect your ranking. And this is also a Offsite SEO technique.

However, there are some debate about which social signal is more important in the eye of Google. I have posted my debate here.
But, for the debate if Social SEO is Onpage or Offpage, it is clear that both can be applied.

Is robots index/follow, in the absence of any noindex/nofollow restriction, useful?

This is an answer is posted by Asif Anwar in Quora. Follow the link to source below for more Answers.

It’s no use in using index,follow robots meta (or meta robots) since most search engines by default follows the index,follow,all philosophy. 

Rather, there are other combinations: 

1. noindex,follow: For removing duplicate contents from index, but still flow the link juice through all the pages in the site, and
2. index,nofollow: For pages with links to user based contents aka login pages. It also can be used for pages that have external links or pages with more than 100 links. And sometimes for PR Herding.

These 2 are also helpful in getting your desired or strategic indexing purpose.

(Source: quora.com)