The Reciprocal Consulting Blog

Many SEOs are still selling spam links to their customers. These are links sold under the guise of “link building.” The problem is, they don’t really provide any link juice. Google has shut them down, which means you should avoid them like the plague.

1. Article marketing – Article marketing used to be the bomb. Then it bombed. Google killed article marketing when it began penalizing article directories for content spam. Link spam went with it. Essentially, if you write articles just for the link value, then you won’t get any link value.
2. Paid footer links – You get an e-mail from someone who wants to buy space on your blog. They offer you a nice price for a site-wide link, but it’s not related to your niche. So where do you stuff it? In your footer. No one clicks those links, right? Right. And Google pretty much ignores them. They could even penalize you if they detect that paid link.
3. Web directories – Like article marketing, web directories used to be high value links. Then everyone started doing it and there went the neighborhood. These days, very few directories are good for links and the ones that are are highly specialized and probably require some form of payment.
4. Social bookmarking sites – Two years ago social bookmarking sites were great for links. Not any more. They went by way of directories and articles. Low value if any at all.
5. Forum spam – I’m surprised there are people still doing this. Don’t set up a profile in a forum just to get links. It doesn’t work.
6. Blog comments – Blog comments are cool if you provide value to the discussion. If you are just commenting to get a link, guess what? The search engines know it.
7. Profile spam – So you heard about a new social networking site. It’s popular and gaining users faster than Google can ban link spammers. So you join, add a profile, and link to every site you own. Bad idea. You just wasted your time.

Doing things just to get a link rarely works. Add value and you’ll get the link you want. Be sure to add value.

In light of the Penguin update you’ve probably been hearing a lot about quality content. In fact, since the first Panda update, every SEO in the world has come out in favor of quality content. It makes you wonder if they were in favor of quality before they got beat down. They certainly weren’t talking about it then.

So why are they talking about it now?

SEOs have always been interested in whatever is going to make their websites rank higher in the search engines. At one time that meant counting keywords and focusing on keyword density. Even after it was evident that keyword densities didn’t work, many SEOs kept advising their clients to count keywords anyway.

Then there was link counting. And anchor text manipulation. Link building became a spam game between SEOs to see who could acquire the most and the best links. Many of them won. Then along came Panda.

Getting boinked isn’t fun. Especially if it costs you money. But if you focus on producing quality content, then you don’t have to worry about getting boinked. And this hasn’t changed. Quality today means the same thing it meant in 1998. The only thing that has changed is that now every SEO on the planet wants to focus on it.

Quality content means writing content that your readers want to read. It means providing useful and valuable information on a topic that is important to your audience. If you can do that, you’ll rank for the right key terms.

I’ve been reading more and more about AuthorRank lately. So let’s define what that is.

AuthorRank is a new ranking algorithm instituted by Google. While it isn’t official in terms of Google itself saying this is what they do, speculation among SEOs and Internet marketers is that this is the direction Google is moving and the way authority will be judged in the future. It actually makes a lot of sense.

Instead of analyzing raw back links, Google will analyze who those links are from. Not “who” as in web properties, but “who” as in actual authors.

For instance, if you are linked to from another website in your niche, that’s grand. But if Bob Jones links to you from that website and Bob Jones is the most authoritative author in your niche, then that’s pure gold. If Sally Matthews is a new author with a slightly positive authority, then that link from her article will carry some weight based on the authority of the website, but it won’t carry as much authority as a link from Bob Jones.

Under this system, AuthorRank makes recommendations (links) from established authoritative authors much more valuable. The system will invariably do away with spam and link gaming. But it has to be managed.

In other words, AuthorRank is a score (kind of like a credit score) that will force web authors to pay much more careful attention to who they link to and why. They will have to manage their authority within their various niches. You might as well call it a type of reputation management.

As I said, this isn’t official, but I can see the Web moving in that direction and it’s all going to start making Web authors be more careful with what they with with their links.

I have to admit that when I read the title of this article at SiteProNews I thought, “OK, here’s another shallow article on how domain names are the Holy Grail of SEO. Isn’t that so 2005?”

After reading the article I have to agree with its premise.

Much has been said of link building, link baiting, and other here-today-gone-tomorrow SEO schemes. But Google always seems to find a way to make these “hot” SEO tactics not so hot after a series of algorithm changes. But one thing Google has never seemed to target for limitation is the domain name. It could very well be the most important SEO ranking factor long term.

I like the way the author puts it in these paragraphs:

Many SEO experts would suggest high quality backlinks from keyword related authority sites to be the overriding factor for high rankings. Others would suggest, in the new improved Panda-Empowered Google, on-page and on-site metrics are now the most important ranking factors to be considered for high listings.

However, I would suggest another old ranking factor, which is still one of the most over-riding factors for getting those top listings in Google. Simply put, having the exact keywords or keyword phrase in your domain name and title, is the most important ranking factor.

Unlike other SEO ranking factors, domain names are a tight security against fluctuating algorithms intended to kill search engine spam. Just by putting your exact keyword phrase – your primary phrase – in your domain name and ensuring that your website is full of high quality content, that alone is a goldmine of search ranking potential. In many cases, link building isn’t even necessary. I’ve seen sites rank on that alone.

The key is in choosing a keyword phrase that accurately depicts what your site is about without getting cute. Then, filling that website’s pages with high quality content which also targets that keyword phrase without going into excess.

Domain names are like real estate. If you build your business on the most desirable corner in a city, then you will no doubt get tons of traffic. People will stop in to see what you are about. And the real estate is limited. In the same way, a domain name can be like that street corner. Its value can increase according to market demand and the limitations imposed on the space.

Do it well and your domain name can serve you for years to come.

If you don’t have a huge budget but you still want to take advantage of the benefits of link building, there are ways you can build solid links to your website or blog without spending a lot of time or money on the effort. It does, however, take some creativity.

The first step is to ask for guest bloggers to write content for your blog. Set up a Guest Blogger page on your blog and get people to sign up to be a guest blogger. Then, give them some sample post titles to write, but be willing to accept other types of posts as well. Keep an open mind. But one thing you don’t want to sacrifice on is quality. Insist that all content you publish is high quality content.

Be sure to promote your guests posts through your social media accounts. Then follow those guest bloggers on their social media accounts. Retweet their tweets, Like their posts, and build that relationship.

After you’ve built your relationships, cash in. Ask those fellow bloggers if you can write a guest post on their blog. When you do, use the rel=author tag to link your guest posts to your Google+ account (you do have one, don’t you?) and link your Google+ account to your guests posts. Also link those guest posts back to your blog or website, which is the inbound link that you’ve been coveting.

Building links this way won’t be fast, but it is effective and it doesn’t cost an arm and a leg.

As you study your competition, one thing that you should be aware of is who your competitors are getting links from. You can discover your competition’s inbound links by using a link checker. It’s relatively easy and inexpensive to do.

Why should you check on your competition’s inbound links? For several reasons. Here are a few.

• Too see if there are potential link partners for your own website. If a particular website links to your competition, they may link to you as well. Ask yourself what you can do to attract a similar link.
• Inbound links are used by the search engines to determine rankings in search results. If you believe your competition is getting unfair rankings you might find opportunities to report spammy links or unethical linking practices such as link buying.
• Compare your link portfolio to your competition’s. Are you missing any opportunities? Are they?
• One sneaky way to blow past your competition is to discover broken links they might have. You can contact the linker and offer your website as a linking destination instead.

There are lots of reasons why you should be looking into your competition’s link practices. You want to find out if your competition is doing something that you should be doing or if they are doing something unethical that you know you don’t want to do. But even more importantly, you want to find missed linking opportunities that you can take advantage of.

Link checking is a very important competitive intelligence tool. You should use it.

A reader asked Mike Blumenthal if linking to her Google Places page would make it rank higher in the search engines.

The question has its basis on the longstanding practice of many SEOs to build inbound links to pages on their websites. Such inbound links have often increased the rankings of their web pages in the search engines. But there are flaws in thinking the same practice when applies to a Google Places page would have the same effect.

First, a Google Places page, as Mike Blumenthal points out, is a search result. Linking to it would be like linking to a search results page for a query that is related to your business niche. That wouldn’t boost your web pages any and it wouldn’t make any sense.

Secondly, linking out from your website to an external page would drain link juice that you could put to better use on your internal pages.

While such linking might be detrimental in terms of your website’s SEO, there may be times when linking to your Google Places page constitutes good marketing. For instance, if you want your website visitors to see all the rave reviews your business gets on Google, then you could link to the page. But I wouldn’t do that from your home page and I’d recommend that you do it using a no-follow link.

Sometimes, detrimental or harmful linking practices can be good marketing practices, and vice-versa. This is where you have to do some weighing of pros and cons. Choose a value that is most important to you and perform the action that makes that value work for you.

You could call 2011 The Year of the Panda. Panda in this case is a reference to Google Panda, the algorithm update that killed hundreds or thousands of websites instantly, many of them big name websites. It also did in some microsites.

And that makes us ask the question, are microsites good for SEO?

My answer is, they can be if done right. The problem so often is that website designers do not often do them correctly.

So, What’s A Microsite?

A microsite is a small website that serves a specific purpose. It is usually defined as a site that consists of only 3-5 pages not counting the terms of service and privacy policy pages. The focus is very narrow and specific.

You can build a microsite that targets a narrower niche within your broad company website’s niche. But what has killed many SEOs trying to use microsites is they linked them all together in a massive link building scheme. Google caught on and all their sites were de-indexed. Rather quickly.

If you build microsites, build them as standalone webites, not as link satellites for your larger site.

The Real Benefit Of A Microsite

The real benefit to having multiple microsites is not that you can use them to build links to your major corporate website. The real benefit is that you can use them as separate websites that achieve search engine rankings on their own.

If you have three microsites that each target their own specific keywords, that’s 6 times the number of opportunities to rank well for the keywords that you are targeting. That’s in addition to the ranking opportunities of your main website. And that’s if you don’t link them together.

You have to make sure your microsites aren’t associated with each in any way. Treat them like separate businesses and promote them as such.

Now that Google Knol is dead, is there an alternative that you can use for your articles?

Yes, there is. It’s called Blogger. That’s Google’s free blog service.

You can use Blogger as your own article directory and there are two ways to do it.

First, you can start one blog and periodically post your articles there and link back to your company branded blog or website. The second way to use Blogger as an article directory is to upload each article you want to post to its own blog utilizing your primary keyword as the blog subdomain.

Both strategies work well.

Blogger has been listed as the second most trafficked social media website, ahead of Twitter by more than twice the traffic.

Of course, this Nielsen report doesn’t consider YouTube. Still, that puts Blogger into the high traffic arena, and it’s good for SEO as well. Being owned by Google, you’d expect no less, right?

The key to using Blogger as your own article directory is to not overdo it. You don’t want to draw undue attention to yourself as a link spammer, but you do want to use the tools at your disposal to build good inbound links. Blogger is great as a link building tool, and it could send you some additional traffic as well.

If you plan on doing any online marketing in 2012, what are the important methods of marketing that you should focus on? What should you stay away from?

First and foremost, SEO is definitely not dead. You shouldn’t give up on that yet. But it has changed in the last five years.

For instance, if you are out prowling for links and looking for high PR do-follow links, then you are probably wasting your time. But if you are focusing on placing your unique articles on high profile, high traffic websites where they will be seen, then that is a much better way to go about link building in 2012.

Social media is another online marketing tactic that isn’t going away. However, don’t just sign up for a bunch of social media websites and forgetting about them. Stick the large sites with current traction and high traffic. For most businesses, that means Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google+. If there are niche-specific sites that you can focus on, join them too.

Whichever social media websites you decide to join, stay active.

Video marketing and mobile marketing are two other online content strategies that are gaining ground and look to be effective in 2012.

Online marketing hasn’t changed much in the last five to ten years, but it has changed. Make note of the changes and keep promoting your content far and wide.

Most SEOs will tell you that the way to boost your rankings in the search engines is to build lots and lots of inbound links. Don’t build external links – those that link out – because they drain your authority juice away. Build your inbound links with great anchor text from relevant high authority websites and you’ll be the golden boy of SEO.

That advice really sucks. I’ll tell you why.

Google has long caught onto the practice of spammy links that follow all the rules of the book. They’ve done changed their algorithms at least a couple of dozen times to prevent those links from helping websites that shouldn’t rank. So do all the crafty link building you can following all the usual rules. It won’t work.

What does work is linking out to other sites within your niche. Don’t worry about draining your authority juice. You probably don’t have any yet.

Rather, consider yourself an authority in your niche and act like it. Would an authority link to a resource off site that would help a reader more than anything else you can post on your own? Of course he would. Then do that. Real authority websites link out promiscuously. They link to websites that are helpful to their readers.

That’s not to say you should link everywhere you can. Be selective about your external links. You don’t want to send your readers to warez sites or sites where they’ll pick up a malicious virus.

Set your standards for excellence based on common sense. Link to sites that add value to your niche for your readers. Become a real authority, not some fake authority based on spammy links that get you nowhere.

Leave it to Aaron Wall to come up with the link building is dead infographic. But the veteran SEO has been chiding Google for its policies for several years now. Still, I think he has a good point. This infographic illustrates how traditional link building is dying. (I’d embed it, but the smallest option – 640px – is too wide for this blog.)

What I think this infographic is saying is that Google is favoring big corporations at the expense of small businesses. Do you see that? Do you agree?

Something else that Aaron Wall does not mention in this infographic is Google+. I believe it is Google’s hope that everyone will start using Google+, then they will know what your interests are intrinsically. Link building won’t be necessary if Google can rely entirely on social cues to deliver you the content you’d be most interested in. And companies that spend their time building links for SEO purposes will just be wasting their time.

This makes me wonder what kind of Web we’ll have 2-5 years from now. Will link building be completely dead? Will the Web be entirely social and will the Web’s biggest search engine deliver all its results based on how you interact with Google+?

What do you think?

Not all links have to be text links. Of course, text links are more valuable than image links, but when building out your link portfolio, think diversity. Images can diversify your links and do it in ways beyond the obvious kinds of links. Some websites might never link to you textually, but might use an image you offer while compensating you with an attribution link.

Here are 9 creative ways to encourage other webmasters to link to you with images.

1. Create an image resource center on your website and allow anyone to use them as long as they give you a link back to your website.
2. Use your own images in your blog and use a keyword phrase in the image’s caption to link to an internal page on your website.
3. Send an e-mail to websites that hotlink your images and ask them to download the image and upload it to their own servers, then link back to you. If they refuse or don’t answer, send them a follow up reminding them that your suggestion is better than being slapped with a DMCA complaint.
4. Start a Flickr, Photobucket, or Picasa account and include instructions to anyone who wants to use your images showing them how to link to you.
5. Create an image widget and allow others to use it on their websites.
6. Run an image contest
7. Start an image blog
8. Send out a social media release to Pitchengine.
9. Send your images to photo bloggers and ask them to review your image gallery.

Link building is an important part of running a website, but doing the same old thing can get tiresome. Try a few creative methods of link building with images.

Google has announced that Google Knol is going away. But not for good.

In actuality, they’re just changing form. But there may be more to it than simply a metamorphosis. It looks like a complete branding job and Google is getting out of the picture.

It appears that Annotum intends to keep the basic format of Knol while changing its platform to WordPress. But it’s unclear what else will change beyond that. Currently, Knol pages provide a link building benefit for authors – the few – who use them. But will Annotum continue that? Will Google place a higher priority on content published on Annotum? Those questions have yet to remain unanswered.

Furthermore, Annotum seems interested in targeting the scientific and scholarly communities, which is how Knol started out. But because Google didn’t put strict guidelines on the content, much of it became commercial. And that appeared to be by design. Some people suspect that Google encouraged commercial content. Whether they did or not is neither here nor there since the Knol domain will no longer be active after May 1, 2012.

Change is something Internet marketers have come to expect. And Google giving up on products not doing well is another. There’s no real surprise here. But if you have Knol pages, then you should either import them to Annotum or download them for other uses.

Define “more effective.”

Article marketing has been around a long time. At one time it was the preferred link building method of savvy online marketers. Then social media came along.

Social media has never really been about building links, per se. It was about making connections, but it had the side benefit of helping you build great links – if you did it right. And article marketing could lead to great connections that increased your bottom line.

So which one is more effective?

If you’re talking about sheer marketing power, I’d have to say article marketing. Only, today we do it differently.

If you write great articles and get them published on high traffic websites with a lot of authority, not only can you build great inbound links for your website, but you can also drive loads of targeted traffic to your website. The key is to target the right venues for your articles. And if you do that right, those articles will be online for years allowing you to reap the benefits of article marketing for a long time.

Social media has its benefits too. Reputation management, authority, relationships. But you have to keep your marketing in perspective. What works best for you?

SEO is a science/art that changes over time. Strategies that worked ten years ago may be employed differently if you want to see the same results. Article marketing is one SEO tactic that is still useful, but successful Internet marketers aren’t doing it the same way they used to.

Let’s be clear about what is the purpose of article marketing. It’s actually three purposes.

1. Link building - Yes, article marketing can help you build inbound links to your websites, but it’s just one reason you write articles and seek publication on other websites.
2. Reputation building – Articles are also great for building your reputation as an authority in your niche.
3. Pre-selling – If you write your articles the right way, your prospects will be pre-sold. That is, they’ll almost be ready to buy when they land on your website.

Ultimately, you want to drive new traffic to your website. That’s why you write and publish articles. So why not go to high traffic publishers with a high authority rating? Three such websites are listed below.

Knol – Google Knol pages are great because you can put your links right in the article.
HubPages – Build knowledge hubs where each article focuses on a specific topic within your niche.
Squidoo – Created by Seth Godin, Squidoo allows you to build lenses around specific topics where each lens consist of multiple articles that link back to other places on the web.

All three of these high PageRank websites are great traffic generators and awesome link building tools. They’re perfect for article marketing.

For years, leading SEO firm SEOmoz has recommended to search marketers that exact match anchor text is the way to go when building links. Yesterday, in a video and blog post, they reversed that advice and said that partial match anchor text will be important for future search marketing.

Here’s the video. Listen carefully.

So what’s he saying? Here’s how I interpret the message.

The most important factor in the way that you build links back to your web pages is to think like a human, not a robot. In other words, what comes naturally?

If you were to link from one page on the web to another without SEO being a factor – let’s say you just wanted to build a link that encouraged readers to click it and go to your page – what phrase would you use to create that link? It’s different in every circumstance. That’s why anchor text diversity is so important.

When you consider anchor text diversity, it’s important not to get into a This vs. That mentality. The question isn’t so much about whether exact match is right or wrong or whether partial match is better than exact match, but rather that both are necessary in certain situations. Your job as a search marketer or webmaster is to determine which is most appropriate for a given link on a given page.

When you think of social media, what do you think about in terms of benefits? Most people are wrapped up in the idea of engagement, and that certainly is a benefit. But is it the only one?

Here are 4 of the most important benefits to using social media starting with audience engagement.

1. Audience engagement – When you participate in social media – whether it be Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, or something else – audience engagement is one of the most important benefits. Done correctly, you can have your audience hang on your every word.
2. Reputation Management – Another benefit is the increase in your social stature. Reputation management can cut both ways so you should watch you Ps and Qs.
3. Link Building - Many social media websites are do-follow, but beyond that even you can build links through social media just by being interesting. Some people will link to your content through their blog if they like what you are doing.
4. Traffic - Finally, traffic. If you don’t have enough traffic to your website, then engage in social media. If you are effective, you’ll see your traffic go up in great numbers.

These are just a few of the benefits to social media marketing, but they are important benefits. If you are ready to take advantage of them, get involved right now.

Online, visual information is powerful. Images, they’re very powerful. Videos are even more powerful. But infographics may be the most powerful images of all.

Infographics rely on two things – both powerful in themselves.

1. Information
2. Graphics

An infographic is simply a set of facts – or information – packaged visually. The information is cast as an image, or graphic, so that it is easy to consume, doesn’t take a lot of time to analyze, and provides a visual look at a load of information that might be more difficult and detailed to analyze in simple text form.

The downside to infographics is that they are difficult to SEO. Because they are an image rather than text, you have to treat them like an image for the search engines. The upside, however, is that a powerful infographic can attract a huge amount of links, which is outstanding SEO. You can actually use an infographic as link bait and improve the overall SEO of your website.

You should also include an alt tag for your infographic to give it that image SEO quality you desire.

Once your visitor shows up to your site to see the work you’ve put into the powerful visual presentation of your information, you should get them to share it with their friends by providing social sharing buttons. That can be additional SEO and a huge source of traffic.

Google Panda has all sorts of websites trying something new. And about every 3-4 months now, Google updates its update and you’ll hear a little murmur ripple through the blogosphere. Well, HubPages is taking a different approach. They’re assigning subdomains.

Assigning is correct, unless you claim your own subdomain by August 10.

This is a great article marketing opportunity for Hubbers. If you’re not currently a Hubber, then you can still get the online reputation management benefits.

The way HubPages works, you can put links in your articles, but your articles better be quality articles and not spam. If your articles are low quality, then your subdomain will be low quality and will likely have low search engine rankings if any at all. Bottom line: If you want your subdomain, and your articles, to rank well, then you’d better write high quality articles. Period.

That’s the way article marketing should be. Your high quality articles will produce links for your web pages, send traffic to your website, and provide you with a strong voice of authority with an equally strong reputation.

Start building your HubPages now. Be diligent in your efforts and you will see a huge increase in your reputation and get the traffic and links you want.