Why is link building important?

By getting carefully targeted traffic from related sites can lead to a natural, long-term increase in page impressions, with this comes increased conversions – where users either make a purchase or making contact with the company through the web site.

The result being increased awareness, visibility and credibility of your site. As well as link popularity and PageRank.

Extra links pointing to your site also obtains wider search engine exposure and helps the website get indexed by search engines.

Link building along with on site optimisation are the two factors which are vital to a
successful SEO campaign.

Tools for measuring the back links to your site

You will want to know how well your link building campaign is going, and how many links have been successful that you have submitted to other sites, and if your content is great other people would have blogged or posted links to your site as well.

With the tools below you can measure and adapt your link building campaign to work more successfully for you. Especially if you are paying for directory listings, you may find the low traffic you are getting from one site may be a complete waste of money.

• Google Analytics
• Google Link Operator – Where you type “link: www.yourwebsitename.com” to find out the number of links Google has found that are pointing to your site
• Yahoo Site Explorer Similar to Google Operator search, uses Yahoo’s cache instead – more comprehensive

Link building principles

• More inbound links (backlinks) to a page will increase your PageRank
• Link quality is important – one link from a high quality website may be better than 100 links from low quality ones
• Sites with on-page optimisation for a particular keyphrase are favoured by SEs

Use only ‘ethical’ search engine methods

When choosing a company to link building services make sure they use ethical techniques. As any ‘black hat’ or devious methods could violate Google’s Guidelines, Yahoo Guidelines or MSN’s Guidelines for search engine optimisation practices.

Link building Mind Map

The map below shows the methods you can use to build links to your site, as well as measure the success of them.

Instructions: Click and drag the map like a Google Map. You can expand or collapse the ‘nodes’ by clicking on the + or -, and also zoom in or out with the buttons at the bottom of the map.

Learn about our website promotion services.

Download this information a client eguide.

Where did the idea for this site come from?

With an idea and a sketch by Founder and Chairman of Twitter, Jack Dorsey. He explains:

One night in July of that year I had an idea to make a more “live” LiveJournal. Real-time, up-to-date, from the road. Akin to updating your AIM status from wherever you are, and sharing it. For the next 5 years, I thought about this concept and tried to silently introduce it into my various projects.

Photo of wireframe that was to become the basis for the design of Twitter

In 2006 Twitter launched, and immediately the service rapidly gained popularity: In March 2007, it won the 2007 South by Southwest Web Award in the blog category. Dorsey gave the following playful acceptance speech at SXSW: “We’d like to thank you in 140 characters or less. And we just did!”.

Early adopters we mainly web type people and various geek collectives sending their thoughts to other connected friends.

For us, it has been excellent for gaining instant insight into new products, people views on various web services and keeping in touch with colleagues, friends and peers without having to email or call them!

Brand and reputation management

However, it didn’t take long for forward thinking companies to identify that they could directly converse with their customers on this rapidly growing social media platform.

Never before has one been able to track and measure what is being said about your brand and product online. View the results for the keyword ‘cornflakes‘ using Twitter Search. This surely has to be the quickest and most cost effective way to communicate with your customers, increase coverage of your brand, and increase the strength of your company reputation, online.

Today, Twitter is one of the most visited websites in the UK

UK Internet traffic to the site has increased 10-fold over past last 12 months. For the week ending 17/01/09 Twitter ranked as the 291st most visited website in the UK, up from a ranking of 2,953 for the week ending 19/01/08. UK Internet traffic to the website has increased by 974% over this period.

Source: Hitwise

The most popular website visited after Twitter is Facebook. Britain’s most popular social network continues to pick up users and is now the second most visited website in the UK after Google UK. As we reported a few weeks ago, on Christmas Day Facebook received 1 in every 22 UK Internet visits.

Prominent Users on Twitter

A number of politicians, celebrities use twitter to communicate with their followers/fans.

• Barack Obama with over 144,000 followers
• Jonathan Ross
• Alan Carr
• Stephen Fry
• Richard Branson
• 10 Downing Street

Twitter first for breaking news

Using Twitter search to monitor the ‘buzz’ over last years US elections was a fantastic way to get into the voters minds, as well as getting their opinions, gut reactions and feelings on what was happening at a very detailed street level with all the events and coverage.

Earlier this month, US Airways Flight 1549 experienced multiple bird strikes and had to be ditched in the Hudson River after takeoff from LaGuardia Airport in New York City. Janis Krum, a passenger on one of the ferries that rushed to help, took a picture of the downed plane as passengers were still evacuating and tweeted it via TwitPic before traditional media arrived at the scene.

Twitter featured on BBC homepage

Perhaps the strongest sign that Twitter has reached the mainstream is being featured on the homepage of one of the worlds busiest websites.

Questions on the future of Twitter

There is no doubt Twitter is here to stay.

The question I have is the problem of friends on other social networks. How soon will they realise they have to start a new friends list on this site as well? Something we have been aware of for all too long, effectively a ‘Walled Gardens for each social network’. Perhaps mass demand will increase the adoption of OpenID. Although, single source sign-on was dropped from Twitters features during a company restructure in 2008 so is not currently supported.

Also with our current friends on Twitter are a bit more low-fi than some of the techy conversations we may have currently with colleagues on Twitter, this is leading to multiple profiles for the same person. For example, a business and personal (private) profile.

Another problem is that all the Facebook friends you’re currently avoiding will track you down on Twitter – so what then?

You can follow me on Twitter @JimCallender, where I continue to enjoy the service and would gladly pay for some additional features. I find the short method of communicating in 140 characters or less and ‘from one-to-many’ to fit my style and enjoy ‘following’ and updating my friends.

Further Reading

• Look out Twitter, the masses are coming!
• How Twitter was born

A part of our web site promotion services, a lot of our customers get worried when their sites drop PageRank, due to a new algorithm Google is ranking sites by usually.

Hopefully, this post should clear up the aspects of what you need else you need to be aware of in the current search marketplace.

PageRank is scored out of 10, and is measured by the relevancy of incoming links, site content and external links.

PageRank is, at best, a blunt geometric measure of the likely authority of a site, but frankly, it is the furthest thing from a real assessment of whether you have good link reputation. It is a red herring, let’s try to stop worrying about it.

To make real progress in SEO you must attend to:

• Visibility – the technical accessibility and structure of your content to
  Google
• Content – such that it is consistent with how your prospects actually search
• Reputation – do things that makes your site irresistible as a link target
  for relevant sites

People spend lots of money that they are wasting every month on that poor linking building and other SEO old school services like submitting to search engines.

The way to get your site ranked high involved little effort, just plain old relevancy. 3 amazing links are better than 10,000 paid for / irrelevant ones. PageRank is great if used properly, along with word of mouth, when journalists write about the URL, make sure they drop the link in the online article or it’s completely useless to anyone.

Videos of the experts explaining current SEO ideas at PubCon:

Interview with Matt Cutt’s which covers these ideas and changes at Google.

Interview with Bruce Clay’s ideas on the future of SEO

Whether you like it or not, HTML email marketing campaigns are a core requirement for any successful email marketing program.

An email campaign can boost a companies revenue by millions of pounds, for example over this Christmas period how many do you think you will receive from your favourite brands – electronics, music, etc?

Email marketing is a cheap and successful online marketing method. Cheap in relation to posting out printed flyers to every recipient. And successful by being able to measure the success of every email campaign, tracking every open time and read time for each email. HTML emails done correctly, offer a better conversion rate, and people choose HTML over plain text format more often.

So, here’s a list to help all email marketers and designers create the perfect email, and make sure it appears as you intended on your customers computers. If you feel I’ve missed any important ones, feel free to leave a comment.

Make no mistake, HTML email design and development is a complete minefield. There are very few rules that you can rely upon across all mail clients. Let’s do this:

1. USE INLINE CSS + TABLES
External and internal style sheets are ignored by a number of email clients. Back to the old school with tables too. Yes, it means going back to 1999 coding, and does make the code heavy, but it means you can guarantee locking down the styles to be correct in the ‘majority’ of email clients.

2. EMAIL TEMPLATES
Unless you have extensive personal experience to draw on,
you’re most likely going to want start with a template that gets most of the fundamentals right. Save yourself some time, get some inspiration and free templates here:

• carbon graffiti
• campaign monitor gallery

3. USE ABSOLUTE DIMENSIONS
In pixels for all measurements. For example, give images and tables exact pixel dimensions – so the browser knows exactly how to display it. Email clients are not as forgiving as web browsers.

4. THE DESIGN
The width of the email design to be no more than 600 pixels wide, so the full width of the email can be seen in the view port in email preview mode.

5. ACCESSIBILITY
Make sure it is readable, with images turned off does the email make sense? By default images are not displayed in most email clients (unless you have added the address to your contacts), also not creating the best look for your company.

Image of email in web-mail client (Gmail) – notice that the email doesn’t make much sense with the images turned off? This can be improved by adding copy to the ALT attribute in the html code:

• Use Alt attributes
• Use anchor link as well to take people to important subheadings in your email
• Last resort – have a prominent link to your web version of the same email

6. FANTASTIC COPYWRITING
Attention grabbing headlines that will make users want to read more and click through. The attention grabbing information should be already visible in the viewport area when the email loads, very few people will scroll – like on web pages unless they like the information, drawing them down the page.

Image of email in web-mail client (Thunderbird) – notice that even with the images turned off the email still reads well, with the headline drawing you into the main content of the email. Simple design, yet to the point and easy to read, effective.

7. CSS SUPPORT IN EMAIL CLIENTS
Enter The email standards project.

These guys have taken the email design issue by the scruff of the neck and are actually getting Yahoo, Gmail, Outlook to take notice of the need for Email standards compliance.

Currently we grade the email clients in the following way:

The Angel’s Choir:

Strong and generally reliable HTML rendering capabilities – Thunderbird, AppleMail, and Opera Mail
You can essentially treat these mail clients as if they are normal, modern browsers.

The Muddlers:

This group includes the majority of the remaining mail clients and includes Outlook 2003, Outlook Express, and Yahoo Mail.

While you’ll probably encounter some variability in their renderings — often in text size and margins/padding – the Muddlers will generally honour your page layout.

The Legion of Doom:

Each uses their own unique but evil super-powers to subvert and destroy your HTML
Outlook 2007, Gmail, Lotus notes – rewrite CSS, padding/margins, no positioning support, removes backgrounds.

8. TESTING
Use litmusapp.com which sends back how your email looks on the following email clients:

Web-based email clients

* AOL Web
* Comcast
* Earthlink
* Gmail
* Mail.com
* MSN Hotmail
* Windows Live Hotmail
* Yahoo! Classic
* Yahoo! Mail

Desktop email clients

* AOL 9
* Lotus Notes 6.5.4
* Outlook 2003
* Outlook 2007
* Outlook Express 6
* Outlook XP
* Thunderbird
* Windows Mail (actually, what is that?)

Mobile email clients

* Blackberry
* Windows Mobile 5
* Windows Mobile 6

9 . THE FUTURE
At various sites there are thousands of new subscribers to html newsletters every single month. And those subscribers still always choose HTML over plain text at a rate of 15-20 to 1. In short, while we might not like it, your clients probably prefer HTML email, and so does their audience.

10. STICK WITH IT
Use the templates, HTML formats are here to stay so remember to keep it simple as possible, and test early and often.

Need our help? We offer web design and development services that will take the stress away from your email marketing campaign. Contact us to find out how we can help you.

Google Blog Search has been gaining fans, just as its web search did years ago, thanks to sophisticate ranking technology. Have you moved your blog searching to Google, or do Technorati or other blog searches work for you instead?

SEO by the Sea blogger Bill Slawski has made a recent blog post about a filing by Google for ranking blog search turned up several points that could help a blog show up in a search, or keep it from being a factor.

Slawski found that Google considers blogs to contain three content types:

1/ The content of recent posts,
2/ A blogroll, and;
3/ Blog metadata (author profile information and/or other information about the blog or its author).

While it’s likely Google is going to look at other factors in ranking blogs, the positives and negatives observed by Slawski show how the process resembles the fabled PageRank Google has used as part of its website rankings.

Positive factors for a blog include its popularity, inclusion in blogrolls (especially high-quality ones), and tagging of the blog. News aggregator subscriptions could imply high popularity. Google said that it could validate those against “subscriptions spam” by checking for unique subscriber IP addresses.

For example, if a certain blog document is clicked more than other blog documents when the blog document appears in result sets, this may be an indication that the blog document is popular and, thus, a positive indicator of the quality of the blog document.

Some negative factors could impact a blog. New posting frequency, especially at set intervals, could be a tipoff of a low quality, i.e. spam, blog. Post content and size might raise alarms in Google’s algorithm, and push the blog to a lower ranking.

Slawski offered a couple of points where such negative ranking could affect a blog that actually contains valid content. A blog about Nigerian spam emails, he noted, may not rank well by Google’s criteria.

Google could also divine some unsavory intent by the way links get sprinkled throughout a blog, by Slawski’s reckoning:

Link distribution of the blog document It appears that under this quality scoring system, whom you are linking to is considered, too:

As disclosed above, some posts are created to increase the pagerank of a particular blog document. In some cases, a high percentage of all links from the posts or from the blog document all point to ether a single web page, or to a single external site. If the number of links to any single external site exceeds a threshold, this can be a negative indication of quality of the blog document.

Some interesting points made in the SEO world as we continuously try to establish the tactics of Google and its algorithms.

1. Usability and will become increasingly important for natural search .

A major part of the process of SEO focus will shift towards website functionality and usability for two reasons for 2 reasons;

First, search engine algorithms are increasingly taking user-experience into consideration when calculating ranking.

Secondly, mainstream advertisers are moving back towards SEO but those advertisers will require something stronger than Top10 placements to justify spending money on the mysterious marketing miracle SEO represents. When an SEO can tell his or her clients they will not only get strong placements but will also get a website redeveloped specifically to increase conversions, that SEO will make more sales.

2. Increasing Trend towards Local search services

Local search grew by 13% year-on-year (Source Hitwise; November 2005). Yell.com remained the most popular vertical search site, a position that it has held for the past 15 months, attracting 64% of the market share of local search visits although its share is declining with Local.co.uk and ThomsonLocal.com taking over 5% share each. All the major UK search engines are aggressively pushing local search functions. We are also seeing a corresponding trend towards more targeted localized searching by consumers.

3. SEO/SEM Community expands services to include specialties and features such as Google Base, MSN Fremont and Yahoo Shopping.

Google and all the other major search entities is likely to be heavily influenced by the appearance and placement of online businesses in other, less known search-venues. This will move SEOs to offer services supporting Google Base, MSN Fremont and Yahoo Shopping, along with the slew of other “alternative” search arenas.

4. Google’s will continue to dominate UK search.

Google will continue to be the most popular search entity in the UK. It dominates the organic search market and has nearly absolute power in the paid-advertising arena. Having beat Microsoft to the deal with AOL, Google enters 2006 even more powerful than it entered 2005. These products will increasingly form part of general SEO strategies.

5. Link building will become more complex and more strategic

We are already seeing major changes in the implementation of link building strategies for clients. In the future the trend will be towards maximizing internal relationship for clients such as affiliate networks, blogs and incorporating PR services into strategic content deliver.

6. More high profile brands banned

Search Engine will become increasingly stricter with spammers, Google has already demonstrated how it is becoming stricter in monitoring spamming techniques and banning high profile brands E.g. banning BMW.de in Feb 2006.

7. Trend towards natural SEO as opposed to paid Search due to;

• Keyword inflation- clients faced with the prospect of spending increasing amounts to maintain their positions on Adword and Overture; ROI is expected to decline Costs are rising exponentially for competitive terms.
• Growing understanding from Marketing directors on the importance of building search into a wider online and overall marketing strategies.
• Longer-term advantage of organic SEO vs paid listings
• Some sectors or PPC cannot advertise e.g Google Adwords
• Increasing client concern about PPC click fraud despite agency assurances.

More web sites than you think change their IP addresses by moving to new servers each day. As long as your IP address doesnt change on a daily basis the web sites pagerank and rankings will not be affected dramatically.

However, Google Local decides on selecting the web sites for local searches depending on the TLD (Top Level Domain). For example, UK search for “plumbers” will favour a co.uk instead of .com TLD and also where the server and IP address is.

So to keep your data in the UK for this type of search would favour your web site.

They share a lot of interesting tips for webmasters, by placing everyone in the story of Buffy, the vampire slayer.

You’ll find a lot about forums, links, bad neighborhood, link baiting, having your own domain, authority, SERPs and the discussion is really entertaining. The audio file has 68 minutes and it’s an episode of GoodKarma, at Webmaster Radio.

Direct link to the MP3 file [63 MB]

AOL’s search nerds intended the files to be an academic resource but didn’t consider that users might be peeved to see their private queries become a research tool. Last weekend, the Internet service provider tried to pull back the data, but by that point it had leaked all over the Web.

If you’ve ever wanted to see what other people type into search boxes, now’s your chance.

Which type of surfer are you?

• The Pornhound – Big surprise, there are millions of searches for mind-bendingly kinky stuff.
• The Shopper – AOL’s logs reveal that searches for “coupons” are a lot more common
• The Manhunter – The person who searches for other people.
• The Obsessive – The guy who searches for the same thing over and over and over.
• The Omnivore – Many users aren’t obsessive—they’re just online a lot. Their search terms, while frequent, show little repetition or regularity.
• The Newbie – They just figured out how to turn on the computer.
• The Basket Case – AOL being a pretend therapist who only responds to your problems (“I am sad”) with more questions (“Why do you say you are sad?”).