Online marketing Calgary

For some time now I've been trying to systematize the process of link building. I just ran a quick experiment on some of my friends / competitors: Anduro, Foundpages and Vovia. As they say, "check what competition does and do better". This post shows a process I used to define link-building categories as well as a list of these categories. This should help people who's tasked with on-going link building.

My link building research methodology

1. identified top 3 competitors for "online marketing Calgary"
2. ran all three of them through Yahoo Site Explorer (inbound links from outside domains)
3. saved the TSV files for each of those competitors
4. merged all three files and added two more columns (links to, type of link)
5. went through the list to remove duplicate domains
6. ended up with a list of over 400 sites linking back to my competitors
7. identified the links in one of the following categories

Link building categories identified

• Clients and Partners: this one is self explanatory. Whenever you do a project or partner with somebody ask if they could place a link to your site on theirs. Make sure your anchor text is in order. You can event cut some cost of the project to get that link. However, if you're thinking of doing it, make sure their site has a significant pagerank (anything above PR4 is good).
• Offline participation: Take part in industry events (as a speaker) or organize your own. Either way there will be link building opportunities. For example, bigger events usually send out an email blast with speakers bio. Ask if you could include a link in that bio, especially if you can anchor link to your site (text "Online marketing expert" linking to your site).
• Online participation:
  • join industry forums, ask questions, give answers, comment, participate. Building links form blog comments has worked well for me. Just make sure you provide quality feedback in your comments. Use StumbleUpon to find relevant blogs to comment on. Don't overdo it though. Balance with other link building practices.
  • do guest posts: there are plenty of group and individual blogs in your industry. Come out as an expert and write an article in an area of your business. Approach the blog owner and as to contribute with an article. Don't forget to include properly formatted anchor text in your article. Don't overdo with the number of links to your site inside the article. 2-3 links is plenty.
  • share your content: if you're blogging on regular basis, make sure you 1) make sharing your articles easy, 2) you share those article with your network on Twitter, Faceook, StumbleUpon.
• General directories: these are directories like DMOZ, Yahoo! Directory, Business.com, etc. Some are paid, some are free. Just make sure that a listing has an option of linking to your site. Linking with anchor text is ideal.
• Geo-specific directories: Google values local connections. There's probably a lot of directories in your locale. Make sure you are there. I'm looking at my competitors and they're in most of the local directories.
• Thematic directories: Doing a quick Google search for " "your indsutry" AND "directory" " will probably give you a list of directories in your specific industry. They will be from all over the world but they will be theme specific. Engines like when your site is on the list with other relevant resources.
• In the media: One of my competitors got mentioned in a very powerful news source. Think industry specific (Mashable, TechCrunch) and geo-specific (Calgary Herald, Calgary Sun). If you have a news worthy story, I suggest you connect with your local reporters on the topic. Even if you don't think you have a story, still connect, find out what the trends are and what the reporter is writing like. Make this connection! (courtesy of Never Eat Alone by Keith Ferazzi).
• Link-bait and quality content development: It's a great sign when others link to specific posts on your site. Engine love that and they thing that your site has developed natural authority among like-minded people. Having a link from a relevant site is worth a lot, so I suggest you invest time into quality content development.

I hope that all makes sense. Feel free to let me know what other proven ways you found useful.

Last Friday I had pleasure of presenting at one of Calgary's social media regular gatherings organized by McQ Design and called Social Media Breakfasts Calgary (#SMBYYC). Check Social Media Breakfast to learn more about the initiative. I absolutely loved the venue, the audience and atmosphere, and I'll definitely recommend you checking these events out in the future.

My presentation was spread between the following 3 topics: branded search marketing, social networks and online reputation management. My goal was to outline the importance of branded search as well as give some practical advice on how to perform well in branded search. Here it is in a nutshell. BTW, the presentation is now on my online marketing presentations page.

What is branded search?

It's an activity of searching for specific company / brand names using major search engines. When does it happen?

• "heard something about your product and want to know what it's all about"
• "know what it is, I'm ready to buy, just need to buy it"

Why is branded search important?

Because branded search activity happens very late in the conversion funnel, and, as a result, leads to much higher conversion rates. Let's take a look at an example: standard decision making process:

1. we come up with a problem
2. search for alternatives
3. evaluate alternatives
4. make the decision
5. evaluate the decision

As consumers we do general search for general key terms at step 2. We do branded search at step 4. I hope you get the point. Let me know if you have questions in the comments below.

Taking branded search for granted

As many other things in life, we take branded search for granted. We say "why do we need to pay attention for branded search if we're already #1 in Google for our company name?". It's true, especially if your company name is karamba123. However, there are other listings on the 1st page of Google and what are those?

• Are they relevant to your business?
• Do they describe your business positively?
• Can you control those listings?

Do social network profiles help your branded search presence?

Most of the social networks we're using today do not pass Google Juice or authority to your site. However, some do, and when this happens, your site can greatly benefit from a link from one of these social network profiles. Moreover, bigger social networks rank very well for branded search. So, having a profile with the right social networks can not only add some Google Juice but also improve your branded search presence.

My little search experiment

• My goal was to answer the question: what are the top social media properties that rank well for branded search terms?
• My methodology was as simple and included 3 steps:
  1. Choose local people with strong social media presence
  2. Perform Google searches for each person (brands in this case) and tabulate the results
  3. Go through the lists of properties and identify the common
• My results were the following 9 social networks that are well worth maintaining for the sake of controlling your 1st page Google rankings.
  1. Twitter
  2. Linkedin
  3. Facebook
  4. youtube
  5. Slideshare
  6. Meetup
  7. Friendfeed
  8. Business Exchange
  9. Flickr

The reason there's only 9 is two-fold: 1) because the 10th is hopefully your site, 2) I lost one in data manipulations and could not find it for the presentation.

What are the lessons?

There were three simple lessons I wanted to share. And my hope is that these will help you improve your branded search presence.

1. Choose the right social networks to manage. Some of them are worth it, some of them aren't. Please don't leave your social network if it's not part of the 9. If you have a community of people that you enjoy, by all means, please stay, make conversations, help people, share some value.
2. Cover the 1st page of Google with your brand properties. Treat Google's first page as the first point of contact with your brand. Let the people connect to your Facebook page right from Google's result page. This will make their life so much simpler.
3. Have control over the listings on the first page. Make sure your snippet titles and descriptions are in line with your brand / product. Ideally, you should be able to control, in most of the cases you don't though. Do you want me to clarify this point? Just ask me in the comments.

Bonus link: at the end of the presentation I shared a bonus link to a page where SEOmoz team recommends a list of SEO friendly social networks. There's a short list of 25 and there's a long one of over 100. I'm not saying that you should have a profile in all of those. Choose which ones work for you and those that host your community of interest.

Next steps

And, of course, the next steps. These are the things you need to do to get started on improving your branded search presence.

1. Search your brand, company name, product name using Google or Bing. Is your brand on the first page? What are the listings that surround it?
2. Review your social profile inventory. What are the networks that you currently participate in? Are they on the first page?
3. Create profiles with SEO friendly social networks (if you haven't done so already). Use my list of 9, as well as SEOmoz's lists of 25 and the one that's over a 100.
4. Make sure your control titles and description of the listings. If your Facebook page Google listing describing your business, product properly?

The presentation is available now. Take a look, follow the notes, do the next steps and, please ask questions in the comments. Let's collectively find a better way of doing things!

Special thanks for making this happen go to: Chett (for introducing me to such a great event), Jane Waye (for organizing such a great event), Alex Poda (for emcee-ing the event), Aaron Krootje (for THE wake up call), AlexKGT (for being there). If you were at the event, please feel free to leave a comment or as questions. If you missed it, I look forward to seeing you at the future events!

I attended a meeting where a few people were discussing age groups who uses social networks the most. I didn't have any valuable insight (proven results, experiments, statistics, etc) on it so I decided to go and do some looking. Here's the result of my social media demographics research. This article can help you find where your audience is.

Findings

• People talk, but it does not necessarily mean that these talks are substantiated by real research
• There's more female on MySpace and Facebook than male. However, if you want to socialize with boys go to Digg and Reddit.
• MySpace is a place for young and middle-class people, whereas Linkedin hosts a lot of 75-99k folks as well as leads in all categories above 100k.
• There's a lot of graduates that are looking for a job on Linkedin. MySpace leads with people with "some college" education.
• Want to talk to 55-64? Go to Linkedin. 0-17 babies are all on MySpace.
• According to Google Ad Planner, the most active social network age group in the U.S. is 35-44.
• Bebo has a lot of kids and Classmates.com is the biggest on 65+ age group.

Sources

• Who's using which social networking sites, an article at Flowtown.com
• Ages of social network users, a study at Royal Pingdom
• Social media demographics and analytics, article at 123socialmedia.com
• Facts and fiction of social media demographics at SocialMediaToday.com
• BDPA-BETF Social Media Demographics May 2010, article on Slideshare.net
• Gender and age data of social network users by RapLeaf

I'd appreciate if you can share some of your sources for social media statistics.

Once your site has a solid base: clear understanding of your product and the audience, strong keywords, proper SEO implementation, etc. it's much easier to build on it. This article is about being consistent when we talk about online marketing and SEO.

Content development

Content development is about creating original and fresh content. This is exactly what shows search engines that your site is growing, contributing to the universe. This should be the key element of your SEO maintenance strategy. A few things to note:

• Articles frequencies: frequency of new content is important. Often it does not matter how what the time interval between updates is, as long as it's regular (i.e. weekly articles is usually a good way to start). Once you're comfortable with this frequency (and you start getting returning visitors for new portions of knowledge), you can start increasing the frequency to twice a week, three times a week and daily articles.
• Article length: there are many different perspectives on it. The average number of words in a good article varies from 400 to 700. Make sure it's not too long (people have different reading behaviours online as opposed to reading books, magazines and newspapers). Make sure it's long enough to convey your points with an intro, body and conclusion sections.

Content distribution

Once your article is written, it's time to get it distributed. Yes, Google will eventually pick up on new content. However, distributing your articles once they are written make your content index even faster (usually within a matter of minutes / hours). There's a few things that will help you:

• Ping services: ping is kind of like a "poke" on Facebook. It's about letting search engines know that you've got new content. There are many services (paid and free) that will ping search engines for you. Here's a list of ping sites I use in my WordPress. This ensures that every time there's a post, a ping is sent to all those 40+ services. To learn more about pinging Google: ping services.
• Share + bookmark: If you're using Wordress to produce and manage your articles like I do, you should have a AddToAny plugin installed. This plugin adds sharing / bookmarking button to the end of your articles. This way readers can save / bookmark or share the article for later review or to share with friends. Other blogging platforms should also have similar plugins. If you don't have a blog platform like Wordress, Joomla, etc. you can use their non-plugin service at AddToAny. I use this sharing button to manually bookmark and share my new articles with the network of my social profiles.
• Online press releases: There is a few different services aimed at distributing your press releases online (PRWeb, Marketwire, Google: online pr distribution for more options). Your PR release is your new article. Before sending it in, make sure you follow all the guidelines (usually on a vendor website) as well as keep an eye on proper anchor formats to get the most out of those releases. This way of distribution will not only get you indexed fast but also will generate a number of links to your site. And, as a bonus, if your article gets published in a quality publication, you get the bragging rights.
• Guest posts are a good practice to have. Pick a few sites / blogs in your area of expertise, ask if you can send them your weekly articles. They're usually looking for content and will be happy to feature yours. Then, start sending your articles to them on weekly basis. Not all of them will get published but the ones that do will be worth it. IMPORTANT: make sure each of your articles includes properly anchored link to your site.

Link building

Link building has to be periodic. It's not enough to bulk-link-build in the beginning. It's about gaining authority with search engines and the process is continuous. Search engines need to see that there's consistent increase in the number and quality of sites linking back to you over a period of time. That is why gradual link building is much more important than one time. There's a few things you can do here:

• Engage in link bait: Link bait is about creating quality content on your sites in hopes that the community finds it useful and starts linking back to it. In other words link bait is creating link-worthy content. There are a few things that characterize a good link bait article.
• Read and participate: As you read industry periodicals make sure you share your opinion (if you have one of course, don't just leave a comment for the sake of link building, they will get deleted) and engage in conversation on blogs. Ensure that every time you leave a quality comment you get a quality credit in a form of a good anchor.
• Hire a link builder: I know, this is controversial. And many SEOs will disagree with this. Although I'm a firm believer in quality link building through articles and community participation, I still think that the number growth in links matters. At the end of each month I'm tracking both links I generated as a result of my community engagement as well as links that were generated for me by a lower cost provider. Time and experimentation will tell, but for now let's leave it at that.

Website analytics

Analytics is super important, especially in the age of it being so affordable through Google Analytics. Establish goals (usually done at step 5 of my process. Use Google Analytics to check how you did this month. Make adjustments to your efforts as needed. Sometimes it's better to leave things as they are for another reporting period. Some results may take time to show.

A few other things:

• Avoid drastic changes to your site structure (category / directory changes, page name changes)
• Read SEO resources to stay up to date on the industry of search engine marketing

This concludes my 7-step SEO process. I hope it was helpful in defining the key stages of SEO for your new website. One thing to remember: it's all about creating quality content consistently. I encourage you to comment and add your observations to each of the articles in this series.

Link building is important because the more sites link back to you the more authority your site has in the eyes of a search engines. It's like "it's better when people tell good things about you, than when you go and talk about yourself".

Not all links are created equal. These are some of the key things that differentiate links:

• dofollow and nofollow links. In other words, links that transfer
• one way, two way and even three way. You should be interested in one way links.
• links from directories, social bookmarking sites, blog articles, blog comments, etc. The more diverse your links sources are the better.
• links from quality, trusted, authoritative websites. These links you need! Although it may take awhile to get a link from an authority website, but it's definitely worth it. For example your article gets published in TechCrunch. Or your product is cited in New York Times.
• links from general resources and industry-specific resources

Without getting into too many details, there's a few things to keep in mind when linkbuilding:

• Pay attention to both quantity and quality, having said that quality of links is always more important. It's way better to have one link from New York Times and a hundreds thousands of links from questionable directories.
• Make sure links that you are getting are from relevant resources (for the most part).
• Anchor text is super important. Anchor is linked text. A good anchor for an SEO Service company is SEO Service. Also make sure to differentiate your anchors. For example, instead of using just SEO Service use multiple anchors like SEO company, SEO Service, SEO Reports, etc.
• Take a snapshot of your current link profile (sites that link back to you). There's a section on how to do it in my previous post on taking SEO performance snapshots. Once you have that base number you can track your month-to-month easily.

There are tools available that will help you discover sites to link to, monitor your link building activity and manage your link building process. Below are only a few options for link building tools.

• Backlink watch (Free): helps you monitor who links back to you, what anchor text is used and if it's a dofollow or nofollow link.
• Link Builder tool from Wordtracker (Paid): I have not used it but for some reason I trust these guys. This is supposed to be a multi-purpose tool to help you run your link building program.
• Linkscape and Open Site Explorer tools by SEOmoz (Free): these two are free link building tools from a reliable vendor.
• List of tools at Search Engine Land (Free and paid): this is a comprehensive list of solid tools by a solid publisher.

This list should be sufficient. You can, of course, search Google to find more link building tools but I recommend you get to work of actually link building and NOT looking for better tools and evaluating alternatives. Believe me, I spent countless hours looking at tools only to find out that the link building work was not happening.

Although this step is not critical to increasing your search rankings, it's very important to measuring your results down the road. You will have to know what works and what does not. The goal of this step is to create a starting point for measuring your SEO results.

First, let's make sure you've got a website analytics installed. My first recommendation is Google Analytics. It's free, simple to install (if you have access to edit pages on your site), very flexible and offers tones of insight into your website user behaviors. If you don't have access to edit your pages, ask your webmaster. There are also companies like Squarespace that offer its own website statistics packages, so feel free to use those. Second, you will want to create starting measurements of the following things. Of course, a new site will have all values = 0. But hey, 0 is a good starting point.

• Website visitors (the simplest thing to track through any analytics package of your choice)
• Number of pages on your website (check you sitemap.xml file)
• Number of pages indexed by Google, Bing and Yahoo! (search: site:www.domain.com)
• Number of links pointing to your pages / domain: there's a few options here:
  • Google: links:www.domain.com
  • Check SEOmoz's: Open Site Explorer tool
  • Yahoo! Site Explorer. Here are the steps: 1) explore your URL, 2) select inlinks button, 3) choose shot inlinks "except for this domain".
• Run your site though something like Website Grader, which is a free tool to check your overall website health. As a result of the check you will get an overall score (based on multiple dimensions). Just rerun the tool again in a month to see how you do.
• Check to see your current search ranking for selected key phrases using tools like WebCEO and Raven Tool. Both tools have free trials / versions, so make sure you both check current status and recheck in a month. Choose one tool for long term work. Going back and forth between tools takes time and gets on your nerves.

Last but not the least, it's important to have goals. Having a baseline snapshot and a monthly goal draws pretty much a straight line to success. If you don't reach the goal by the end of the month, it's ok. Any information is good information, because it makes you think about improvement. Tweak critical things and keep at it month after month.

By this point you should have thought about your product, engaged into keyword research, and implemented SEO changes on your pages. Let's now look at what you need to do to let search engines know that your site is out there.

Website submission to search engines is no longer as critical as it used to be for one reason: the only engines you need to submit are Google, Bing and Yahoo! (and very soon it's going to be just Google and Bing). And those engines have spiders that will visit your site if a currently indexed site is linking to one of your pages. However, there's a few things to keep in mind to simplify life for search crawlers and speed up your indexation.

First, you will need to prepare your website for search engine submission. It's very simple. You need to ensure that you have a sitemap.xml file in your root directory (i.e. domain.com/sitemap.xml). The sitemap.xml will tell crawlers the structure of your site in a language crawlers understand.

• Let's create the sitemap.xml  file using one of a great free XML sitemap services. Please note that this tool is deal for smaller sites. Large sites with 1000s of pages will need to pay for the services.
• Once you got the sitemap generated, just drop it into your root directory. Once done, just check the result to make sure. Your sitemap (for search engines) should now be here: domain.com/sitemap.xml.

If you can drop the files into root directory you should be able to tweak pages as well. You will need this when verifying your website submission with search engines. You can do it one of two ways: insert a line of code inside <head></head> or drop a file into the root directory of your site (much like you did with sitemap.xml).

Second, once you have the sitemap.xml, it's the time to let the search engines know who you are. Each of the major search engines has a Webmaster Central. That's where webmasters talk to search engines. It's a great idea to create an account with Google, Yahoo! and Bing so that you have access to their Webmaster areas. Submission process is pretty much the same for all 3 engines. Let's take a look.

• Google Webmaster Central: Google calls it a one-stop shop for webmaster resources that will help with your crawling and indexing questions, see keyword usage and traffic information relevant to your site. Once you get in, find the button "Add a site", follow instructions. One separate step I recommend is submitting a sitemap. You can find the submission button inside "Site configuration > Sitemaps".
• Yahoo! Site Explorer: Does pretty much the same thing as Google. Click on "Submit your site" and follow the instructions. Again, submitting a sitemap.xml is a separate step that I recommend.
• Bing Toolbox: Yet another version of a webmaster central. Looks slightly different, especially after a recent update, but the purpose is the same and functionality is similar.

Again, submitting sitemaps, registering with search engines is not necessary. Search engines will come on their own (if somebody that's indexed links back to you). However, based on my experience, submitting sitemap.xml helps to speed up the process, and helps you get on the same page (speak the same language) with search engines. Additionally, there's a plenty of intelligence you can pick up from those webmaster tools about your website performance in search engines.

Thanks for sticking around for this one. The next step is about setting up analytics and creating a baseline report. This will help measure your SEO results in the following months.