Archive for July, 2009
July 23rd, 2009 by Patrick Hare
Creating effective search engine optimization (SEO) and marketing (SEM) campaigns for medical professionals involves a slightly different strategy than a campaign for other professionals. There are several different reasons why this is the case. Aside from considerations related to FDA, AMA, and other regulatory guidelines for physician advertising online, websites for doctors have their own unique challenges.
In some cases, the first challenge is the medical professional. In many cases doctors expect to get their website traffic from people who search for them on a first name basis. This is rarely the case. Some more web savvy physicians are aware that people are actually searching for medical terms and specialties. Specialized terms are not as common, but can be quite lucrative. For instance, a person searching for “dentists” may want anything from a cleaning to a root canal, but people who are looking for “oral surgeons” are probably dealing with a more expensive problem. As search engine professionals, one of our first tasks involves educating doctors, dentists, and alternative practitioners about what search engines are looking for, and how people use search engines.
Normally it only takes a few weeks to get a doctor found for his or her name, but it takes longer to get found for a field of practice. In most cases, doctors and medical clinics serve patients who live within a few miles of their offices, while hospitals have a larger footprint. For doctors who operate in sparsely populated areas and small towns, or who don’t have too much competition in their practice, search engine rankings can be achieved fairly easily. On the other side of the coin, it may be difficult to be found for a term like “dentist NYC” because the city has a large population, or for “Beverly Hills Plastic Surgeon” because there is a high level of competition for such surgery in this area despite the town’s low population. If you aren’t on the first page of search engine results, then 90% of web searchers are not going to find your site, so the need for optimization quickly becomes apparent to most doctors.
Medical professionals who want to get found on search engines can therefore expect a “sliding scale” when it comes to SEO based on these factors. Challenging and competitive search engine cases will require robust web page modification and the acquisition of links from related websites. This is because links from other sites serve as an endorsement for your own website. Better site links are more costly and confer more prestige, in the same way that an internship at the Mayo Clinic carries more weight than a residency in the Caribbean. If you can get links to your website from medical journals, schools, and other publications, you may gain an advantage over doctors who have not done so. Search marketing agencies can also help you secure sufficient links to get found for your specialty, with everything from local directory submission to more complex link acquisition.
Here are some tips for better search engine placement and new patient growth:
- If you’re operating in a local area, make sure you mention your office location and nearby towns or communities from which you expect patients.
- Make sure your site has a clean, modern look that inspires confidence.
- Show your phone number prominently at the top of each page.
- If you take credit cards, show the logos for the ones you accept.
- Show medical insurance providers that you accept. Make sure you mention this in the text of your site, not just in images, because search engines aren’t good at identifying pictures.
- List all of your specialties. People search on a variety of medical terms, so be sure to include them. If you have specific medical equipment that may attract patients (like an open MRI) then be sure to let people know.
- Avoid graphic images of procedures or before/after unless people get fair warning before viewing.
- Submit your site to online Yellow Page and local directories (we can do this for you).
- Keep your site fresh by adding a blog or new content. If medical care laws change one way or the other, giving more information to patients may be helpful. Generally speaking, search engines reward relevant content, so giving more information to potential patients can improve your search engine rankings.
Anyone who sells medical services, whether through a doctor’s office, walk-in clinic, hospital, or office compex, should understand the emergence of the internet as a tool for finding medical care. In the past, phone book advertising dominated the medical marketing field, and there are still plenty of people who check the yellow pages for doctors. However, an emerging segment of the general public is using the internet not only to find doctors and clinics, but also to compare service offerings, locations, and specialties. Many medical professionals have even found success selling high-end cosmetic and alternative treatments to patients from around the globe, exclusively from online advertising. For those doctors, dentists, chiropractors, cosmetic surgeons, psychiatrists, dermatologists, and podiatrists who just need to be found in their own neighborhoods, there are several inexpensive ways to promote themselves online. In the same way that people consult specialists for their medical problems, a search marketing specialist may have the answer to your search engine traffic and new patient growth.
Note: Click Here to learn more about Medical SEO
Tags: medical sem, medical seo, search engine optimization
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July 22nd, 2009 by Patrick Hare
Website security is still a top concern among online shoppers. Considering the upsurge in stories about identity theft, stolen credit cards, and insecure government websites, there is a justified lack of trust in today’s internet marketplace. For the online retailer, this barrier needs to be overcome.
One recent trend in website security involves displaying a security seal on the page. Sites like McAfee/Hackersafe, Verisign, and Trust Guard have services that scan your site and declare to the world that it is secure from today’s hacking threats. Given that hackers are always trying new things, the services update themselves on a regular basis and apply new tests to their member sites every day.
For anyone who collects personally identifiable information, whether it is names and addresses or credit cards, security seals have a direct impact on the bottom line. At Web.com Search Agency, we have noticed that prominent seals on client sites (ideally placed on every page) improve conversion rates significantly. We have found that the indicator itself builds credibility, and there is also a secondary idea that disreputable sites won’t take the time to acquire such a seal. As a point of warning, we advise testing the seal (by clicking on it) to ensure that it is an actual security seal and not just an image.
Cyber attacks and information theft are among the toughest online actions to combat, since they are based in countries around the globe, and may come from compromised computer networks (AKA Botnets) which are controlled from elsewhere. While a security certificate won’t prevent an attempt on your site, it does offer a distinct advantage because a third party is checking for obvious holes in your defenses. Given that attackers use automated tools to scour the internet for potential victims, the right level of protection may indeed be the “shield” advertised by these vendors. Even though you will likely find that your customer’s trust is the most profitable aspect of displaying security credentials, there is a definite peace of mind in knowing that your site is up to today’s standards.
Tags: security seal
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July 21st, 2009 by Patrick Hare
If you haven’t been to Yahoo.com lately, you may have learned from CNN that Yahoo! has a new homepage design. It can be personalized by the user, but the default design has an interesting aspect of its own.
A quick peek at the page indicates that it is calling more attention to its search feature, which resolves to a results page with the usual 10 natural results. Yahoo! then wraps the natural search results with around 14 paid ads (4 on top, 8 on the right, and 2 on the bottom) which is generally in excess of the delivery given by Google, but it does give advertisers a greater chance of being seen on the first page, which is very important. For example, you can usually find our site (submitawebsite.com, now known as Web.com Search Agency) around the #9 natural result in both Yahoo and Google for “search engine optimization.” This is a very competitive term and one of our claims to fame, since every SEO firm in the world wants to show its ability to be found somewhere in the top 30 search engine results, and will pay lots of money if they aren’t on the first page of natural results. (Your results may vary, since search engines show slightly different results depending on location and previous search history.)
How does the new Yahoo! homepage help the average website owner who is buying paid ads? In general, we see a better conversion rate for the traffic that comes from Yahoo Search Marketing, so an increase in search volume may lead to more conversions, lowering the overall cost per acquisition across the board. One of the stumbling blocks for cash-strapped online sellers has been volume, so people will occasionally forego Yahoo! and MSN/Bing in favor of as much Google traffic as they can afford. Unfortunately, this may not be the most cost effective approach for people who make a bigger profit on smaller search engines. If Yahoo! succeeds in demonstrating this to people, they may be able to lure more dollars back to their engine.
The advantage of this new format is that it should encourage people to search before they get distracted by content and other page elements. Given the downturn in paid search spending, this should help Yahoo! make the most of the bad economy. For Web.com Search Agency clients, the reduced competition means there is a lower overall cost of paid search advertising, since there are fewer bidders. Additionally, we have been able to help “big spenders” reduce their cost per acquisition, and in some cases they can get more of the “good clicks” that drive revenue.
Tags: ppc, yahoo
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July 21st, 2009 by Patrick Hare
If you’re shopping around for search engine optimization (SEO) services, or just learning how to improve search engine rankings, you probably noticed that people in the SEO industry use a lot of terminology. One commonly used phrase at Web.com Search Agency is “long tail search” which applies equally to SEO and Pay-Per-Click (PPC) management. Its importance cannot be underestimated.
Generally speaking (and highly oversimplified), a “long tail” keyword is a phrase that is 3 words or longer. Understanding of long tail value involves a certain knowledge of search engine user behavior. People usually start searching with a single word or two word phrase, which would be considered a “short tail” phrase. The search engine then spits out a long list of possible results. If people don’t like what they see, they add another word or two to the query and search again. If this phrase is relevant to what you are offering, this search type can be highly valuable. Having a match for a long tail search, whether it is in natural search results or PPC ads, is a great way to turn a visitor into a paying customer.
(note that the search engine “long tail” differs from the internet sales “long tail” model where you can make money having a diverse set of products on sites like Amazon.com or Ebay.com.)
Millions of people search the internet every day, using millions of different search variations. According to a popular white paper, 41% of people will repeat a search when they don’t get the result they want. They do this by making the search tail longer, or re-phrasing the search. If you can’t afford to get an exact match on the first search, this 41% share represents a huge opportunity.
Getting the most out of long tail SEO
Without discounting the high volume that you can get from matching short-tail terms (which you should generally go after) long tail terms can be moneymakers. Getting found for long-tail terms does not always take as much effort for each keyword phrase, but we generally advise creating more pages of content that can capture these searches. For instance, if you sell thousands of different office products, you can get long tail results like “hp inkjet bright white paper c1861a” with far less effort than the word “paper.” You will need a shopping cart system that can create multiple individual pages that are search engine friendly. Note that you need a big enough batch of products to account for the relatively low amount of searches for each item, and you might need to add content and a few links to product pages that are more competitive. In short, long tail searches create an aggregate of customers, but they can be extremely useful when you factor in lifetime customer value.
There are several other easy ways to get long-tail traffic for very little money. You can put white papers on your site where search engines can find them. You can answer common customer questions online. You can add a forum, but this usually requires a certain amount of maintenance. If you have lots of technical specifications for your products, and they aren’t trade secrets, you can post them on your site as well. Another easy way to get more long-tail results is to have a blog, and talk about what you do, the type of services you provide, and industry news from your point of view. If you measure your results in an analytics program, you are sure to be amazed at the wide variety of search results you see for your products and services after your pages are picked up by search engines.
How to expand your long tail presence in Pay-Per-Click
PPC long tail terms are added by expanding your set of keywords. The first and easiest way to do this is to use the keyword tool provided by the marketing platform. Google Adwords does a great job of suggesting long-tail terms, and anything that is relevant should be added. Adding less relevant terms may result in a lower quality score. Whenever possible, the keyword for each term should land the user on the most relevant page to the product or service. There are multiple ways to organize all of your long-tail terms, but even a low budget site could have several hundred long-tail keywords in a single campaign. Conversion tracking is highly recommended, as you will find that some terms will have a very high conversion rate, and you will want to adjust your budget so you can take advantage of the best phrases. You may also note that some terms get poor results, so you should either pause the keywords or fix the landing page so it matches the customer search term better.
One method for generating long tail PPC terms is not recommended because it may not be worth the time. There are tools that automatically generate long phrases for PPC campaigns, but several of these simply make it harder to track campaigns. Search engines have also placed restrictions on the number of keywords in an ad group, so you are usually better off combing through the list suggested by the search engine’s keyword tool. (You can paste your Google Adwords terms onto Yahoo Search Marketing and/or MSN Searchcenter, and vice versa.) We had one account which had over 40,000 keywords in Yahoo, but when we did a statistical analysis we found that less than 3,000 words got a single impression over the previous 2 years, so we made the customer more efficient by deleting all the unused phrases.
In rare cases with both SEO and PPC, a few clicks a month can create millions of dollars in revenue. There are certain items, like heavy equipment and industrial machinery, that don’t have the short-tail search volume that consumer products get. Nonetheless, the company that is optimized for its product or service is going to be the one that gets clicked, visited, and called. This kind of sales opportunity can’t be underestimated, even for companies with a 2-year sales cycle on an esoteric industrial process. For many companies, the investment of a few thousand dollars on long-tail SEO phrases can return millions in profits.
How do you measure long-tail effectiveness? This is often a tough question. Short-tail terms can be measured in the space of a few weeks based on goal conversion rates. If you have several thousand visits, a 5% conversion rate on a single term makes for an easy decision. On the other side of the coin, if you haven’t gotten 20 visits for a certain keyword, you don’t have enough information to see if the term is doing you any good. Here, you are better off evaluating the performance of the entire ad group, and determining which ads are getting the best results. If you see that keywords with certain short-tail compound phrases aren’t getting results, you can probably turn most of those words off. For the best PPC terms, you should consider building SEO pages that explore the topic (or phrase) in more detail and get a few external links for these terms.
As a tip for our readers, Google Shopping (AKA Froogle) is a great place to test out long-tail terms for products. If you can convert your shopping cart database into a Google Base feed, then upload it to Google shopping, you can profit off the many different kinds of searches that people make every day. As a rule, relevant information (product number, description, color, size, price) will help you pick up on the wide variety of searches people make each day.
Executing a long-tail SEO strategy takes a certain amount of work, but it can be highly rewarding. Since many of the terms involved are not as competitive, there is a potential for cost savings, especially if you are a new business trying to break into established online fields. You can also use the long-tail strategy if you are a small business with a limited budget, and want to carve out a profitable niche among huge retail sites that may not even notice yo
ur presence. Even if you are a large business, you may have a small percentage of highly profitable products that would benefit from a better search engine presence. In any case, ignoring the potential of long-tail search, even for companies that have locked up the short-tail, is a way of leaving money on the table for someone else.
Tags: long tail
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July 21st, 2009 by Patrick Hare
Sometimes customers refuse to take our advice because for an odd reason. In order to get their Web sites found on search engines, we recommend eliminating duplicate content, adding new text to important website pages, improving link popularity, and fixing code errors that prevent search engine spiders from reading their site. However, these customers won’t follow through on our recommendations because “everyone else” is getting away with practices that we are advising against.
For example, we have customers who point out competitors who are holding on to #1 spots based on reciprocal links, sites with barely a sentence of content, spammy text, irrelevant page titles (like “home”), bad code, poor URL formatting, text embedded in Flash, and a minuscule link profile. It can be a challenge to recommend expensive and time consuming solutions to someone who sees a trend in the other direction. Since we want our clients to succeed, we need to counsel them to avoid the temptations that come with sloppy SEO.
At some point, most people have heard the motherly question “if everyone else jumped off a cliff, would you do it too?” Most kids who hear this question are usually in trouble for something minor that the “other kids” were caught doing at the same time. Customers who have this mentality usually don’t have all the facts, and it is our job to illustrate them, since (as a search optimization and marketing agency) we would be the first to take the blame if we did not actively prevent our clients from jumping off a search engine rankings cliff.
In some cases, your competitors can break search engine rules with impunity. There are a variety of reasons that badly optimized sites show up at the top of search engine rankings. A site that has been around for a long time has a certain degree of credibility. A site with a lot of backlinks for relevant subject matter can rank well. Some sites hold top spots because they have nothing more than a domain name that exactly matches the search term. A heavyweight site, like the official website of a popular magazine or newspaper, can even present (or “cloak”) material one way for search engines and another way for readers, without getting pulled out of the listings. Search engine algorithms also treat different lines of business with separate rules, so you could conceivably violate a slew of search engine guidelines without losing a spot in Google’s rankings, and you may even get ahead, until your business vertical gets noticed.
A reputable search engine optimization or marketing agency will always recommend against following the crowd if that means violating best practices. For one thing, a robust SEO program is going to involve link building, code, and content changes that are designed to get lasting results. Additionally, your assumption should be that search engines are going to be more skeptical and judgmental of your site than that of your “neighbor.”
Another motherly phrase which you’ve probably heard is that “life isn’t fair” which is doubly true for search engines. We have seen people hold on to rankings they don’t deserve, while great sites which follow the rules languish for several months before moving up. Just like in real life, some people seem to prosper by making questionable and illegal choices, while you can’t get away with anything. At some point, the search engines generally come through and wipe out the people who have been using black hat tactics. We would not have been a search agency for 12 years if we hadn’t recommended the path with the fewest penalties. Every once in a while, Google and the media will profile companies who got their customers taken out of the search engines, and we want to ensure that your site isn’t among the group that disappears when the bad gets separated from the good.
Tags: search engine best practices, seo best practices
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July 20th, 2009 by Patrick Hare
The subject of keyword density has been open to debate for a long time. In the early days of search engine optimization, high keyword density was the order of the day, to the extent that you would have the same keyword repeated several thousand times on the page, in small print that matched the background color of the site. Alternatively, you might have several hundred doorway pages that had a single phrase on them, for a 100% keyword density score. On today’s search engines, sites like these are almost guaranteed to be penalized for exceeding keyword density levels. Depending on who you ask, the best keyword density could be between 2% and 9% of your on-page content.
For people who write their own web content, keyword density can be problematic. Naturally, you don’t want to trip any filters in the search engines, but at the same time you shouldn’t have to pad your content with fluff and filler. One of our general rules is that you should be able to read your content out loud without sounding repetitive, but in some cases there are a few profitable keyword variations that would all do well on the same page, so the language can get a bit stilted. Generally, we try for a 4% density, but there are numerous outside factors that can move this figure up or down by a few percent.
First and foremost, your content should be useful to a real customer, even if it isn’t likely to be read. Second, you should make sure that your page’s best keywords are being represented in the body text, since your competitors who use SEO techniques are likely to do the same thing, and you want to be on a level playing field. Third, you should make sure you are optimizing enough pages to spread your keywords out efficiently. Normally you should be hitting a maximum of 3-4 keyword phrases per page.
If you have more high volume keywords that fall in the same category, consider creating subtopic and detail pages which examine the various permutations of each word. For example, if you have a page about cat food, it might reference detail pages about dry cat food and moist cat food. Even though you will reference both keywords from a top-level page, using anchor texts to the detail pages will ensure that they will get properly classified for each type. You will then have an advantage in the search engines, since you have a general topic and two subtopics in a hierarchy, and more specific related words on each page.
Do you need to how dense your content is? For text that’s already on a site, here are two free keyword density tools:
http://www.webconfs.com/keyword-density-checker.php
http://www.gorank.com/analyze.php
The webconfs.com keyword density checker also gives you a keyword cloud which illustrates which words are most prevalent. In addition to showing density, it also lets you see if your content overuses common words or phrases. Another advantage of tools like this one is that you can see what your competitors are doing. Even if you see that someone else has very high density, we do not recommend following suit, since rankings are based on multiple factors, and some sites can get away with behavior that would get your site penalized.
If you want to check a piece of content that hasn’t yet been published, this tool lets you paste in content and check it against 3 keywords. If your keyword density is too high, consider using synonyms or pronouns to cut down on repetition. You should also note that on-page density checkers may be considering alt tags and navigation menus as content, so text that looks good on its own could have a high score when it gets added to the page.
Many of our customers come to us with sites that have had SEO done on them in the past. In most cases, our first task involves reducing the on-page keyword density to a manageable level to prevent the appearance of over-optimization. For customers who haven’t had any SEO work done, the same can be true because they may have pages with one or two sentences of content, and a small amount of repetition can create density levels that are too high.
If you are creating new content for a web page, you shouldn’t necessarily panic about keyword density, unless you are becoming overly repetitive with your word choices. SEO content writers use advanced tools to make sure they aren’t over-optimizing pages, but there are plenty of high ranking pages on the search engines which haven’t been run through a keyword density analyzer. There is a lot to be said for using natural language, and as search engines evolve the consideration will move from density to semantics, so a site that follows grammatical rules may have advantages over one that was edited too heavily for search engine spiders.
Tags: keyword density
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July 16th, 2009 by Patrick Hare
Cheap search engine optimization (SEO) works, up to a certain point. If you have a website in a field that isn’t competitive, such as a specialized business in a limited geographic area, then a few directories and some changes to your meta tags might work wonders, even if you have a new website. For instance, if you’re a neurosurgeon in Crab Apple Cove, Maine, then you probably don’t have too many brain specialists in the general area to contend with, so your website will show up for all kinds of searches (if there are any) related to what it is that you do.
Cheap SEO fails miserably in any competitive environment. Why? Because your competitors are using the same cheap technique that you are, albeit as a small component of a more aggressive campaign. Whether or not your competition is using an SEO expert or has spent enough time to become advanced in optimization, your inexpensive approach is going to get limited traction. Even worse, if you invest in spammy techniques (like multiple submissions or buying links on sites that already have multiple other links to questionable companies) you may find yourself in a worse position than if you did nothing at all.
Low-budget optimization usually gets poor results because it can’t build an internet presence that is worth a search engine’s time. Cheap backlinks are only enough to tell a search engine that you exist, but trusted links (which cost more) are going to be an endorsement of your product or service. While SEO outsourcing is not necessarily a bad thing in itself, a 100% offshore optimization program may not get be the best match for semantic rules designed for US English results. Some of the better optimization programs incorporate content editing with title and description creation, and all of these should be matched up by native speakers whenever possible. Likewise, if you are doing search engine marketing for European sites, you should get foreign language speakers who know how to match up the site with the most relevant idioms and phrases for the language.
Cheap SEO techniques also don’t get a lot of credibility in search engines. Giants like Google, Bing, and Yahoo have a vested interest in keeping up their market share and stock price, so they want to provide highly relevant results to users, who in turn keep coming back, and will click on sponsored ads as well as the natural search results. Low quality links to poorly optimized sites are a sign that the website may not be a good value for the search engine’s audience. Part of a premium SEO package will include advice on making your site a better resource for its subject matter, while acquiring top level links to show the search engines that you are worth indexing in the top 10. Very few cheap or DIY SEO packages will even include human support, let alone advanced optimization advice.
Good SEO is worth the investment. This is not to say that you shouldn’t shop around, compare pricing, and see what you’re getting for the money. You might be overpaying for cheap SEO without even knowing it. Any SEO program worth its salt will have reporting, account management, and link building features that are consistent with search engine best practices. You should also get realistic advice about what you can expect for your budget, and scalable campaigns that can get you local results or an international search engine presence, depending on what your goals are. For a few thousand dollars, you can get traffic to your website every month that is worth many times that amount, and you can make quite a bit of money online. However, if you are looking at an SEO program that costs less than $100 per month, you should not expect measurable results, and may want to re-think your business strategy.
Tags: cheap search engine optimization, cheap seo
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July 16th, 2009 by Patrick Hare
Over the past month several of our customers have been interested in how Microsoft’s advertising push for Bing has affected their site traffic. Overall, there have been more Bing searches, but this doesn’t mean that overall search engine volume has gone up. This is because Bing is siphoning market share from its rival Yahoo, but it is not necessarily adding to search volume. This is because search engine use is demand driven, so people have to have something in mind before they make a query. Bing has made itself newsworthy through an advertising push that even includes buying Pay-Per-Click on Google for the term “search engine” and recent media reports indicate that its initiatives are succeeding.
How can the average ecommerce company profit from this news? If you haven’t established natural search engine positions on Bing (which are somewhat volatile on a week-to-week basis) then you can take advantage of the relatively low cost of pay-per-click advertising on MSN Adcenter.
Over the past few years, online stores with limited budget have put most or all of their dollars into the Google Adwords program. By expanding out into Yahoo Search Marketing and MSN Adcenter, which places paid ads on Bing, there is an opportunity to get a foothold on search traffic that similar sized competitors may have neglected. There are even some very large companies who aren’t buying Yahoo and MSN ads, so small and medium B2B and B2C enterprises can get good conversions for a comparatively lower cost. Overall, Web.com Search Agency customers experience a higher conversion rate on Yahoo and MSN PPC platforms, due to a variety of demographic factors.
As a recent CNN report shows, Google dominated 65% of the search engine market for June 2009. However, this means that 35% of search engine traffic was being served through other channels. Bing and Yahoo comprised a combined 28% of online searches in the US, which is still a huge opportunity for big and small businesses. (Bing had 8.4% and Yahoo had 19.6%) Considering that competitive terms may get millions of searches every month, a presence on these engines makes economic sense. Even if you are going after terms that only get a few thousand searches a month, missing 35% of them could be the difference between prosperity and bankruptcy. There are some nuances to each platform that take time to learn, but any qualified search engine marketing agency should have no problem setting up a campaign for all major search engines.
Tags: adcenter, bing, yahoo search marketing
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July 14th, 2009 by Patrick Hare
A recent CNET article about link exchanges got picked up by CNN.com. The article referenced them as the “poor man’s SEO” which is accurate in the sense that they are a low budget way of getting site links. Unfortunately, most of the savvier “poor men” have also abandoned link exchanges because they are not effective. If you read the entire article, you will even see that link exchange is not a recommended method of optimization. Given that link exchange practices have been devalued for several years, posting an article like this one is akin to recommending adjustable rate mortgages as the “poor man’s path to home ownership.”
Until about October of 2005, link exchanges were a great way of improving link popularity and PageRank. (Note that PageRank is not an effective measurement of rankings because link popularity needs to be tied to relevance to be useful.) You could use off-the-shelf software or a service to solicit link exchanges, and they would be posted on your site through a dynamic script. Usually the links would appear on a page called “links” or “resources.” Some of the smarter and less ethical people running exchanges would use rules to ensure that the search engine did not see the link listing on their own site, so all the links would appear to be “one way” links, which have more value. The October 2005 update to Google left a lot of people without search engine rankings because their entire linking strategy involved link exchanges, so they suddenly noticed a drop in search engine traffic right before Christmas. SEO conspiracy theorists everywhere once again noted that this was the perfect excuse for Google to make money off Adwords for anyone running an ecommerce site that depended on search traffic.
By the way, if you are still running non-relevant links on your site through outdated links pages, you should probably delete them from your site. Removing the link to a link exchange pages does not take them out of the search engine listings, since the engine already knows where the page is, and no longer needs navigational help finding it. If you have people in your field who are worth linking to, you can always create a specialized page called “partners” or “related sites” with those links. Trading links with relevant sites and linking to resources is a good way to make your site look like a better resource.
As the article mentioned, many people find out about link exchanges through emails. Most of these emails are poorly written, or come from a template, and start out with sentences like “I saw your site on …” If you’ve gotten an email like this, you should know that several hundred other sites like yours got the same one, so you may as well ignore it. Most link exchange software starts by scraping top results in search engines for a word or phrase, then spidering relevant sites for email addresses. They then send out mass emails to all of the webmaster emails on the list, dynamically inserting your site name into the body of the message.
Some link exchange emails propose 3 or 4 way link exchanges, but usually these are the most suspect. In exchange for a low quality link from a questionable web directory, you are expected to send a high quality link from your site to someone else. In almost every case, you are getting less than you are giving. Third party linking can still potentially be discovered by search engines, but the value of the link to you probably isn’t worth penalizing. Even so, there are some theories about “co-citation” where your site may be getting defined by links from other sites, so you are better off not taking the risk.
As a disclaimer, we wanted to point out that link exchanges don’t necessarily get you penalized, but they aren’t well known for adding value. When people lost ranking in 2005 due to Google’s Jagger Update, they thought that a penalty was in place, but search engine penalties tend to do more than just take away link value. It turned out that the value of exchanged links dropped to near zero, and people who had diversified linking strategies were able to recover quickly, or even excel against competitors who were getting all of their site rankings from link exchanges. Any linking strategy should include various link sources, in the event that one channel or link group becomes discredited as time goes on. Even if you rely on 100% white hat linking, you can still take a hit in the search engines if your inbound link sources lose their own value, so you should make sure your white hat link building does not depend on a single method.
If you have a limited budget but still need search engine optimization for your website, there are better ways to spend your money. When it comes to SEO, you may want to acknowledge that link exchanges are the “poor man’s optimization” because you will be just about as poor tomorrow as you are today if you don’t invest in good search engine optimization. Good links from places like the Yahoo Directory, Business.com, and recognized directories are a great first step that cost about the same as link exchange software. If you shop around, a search engine optimization agency (like ours, the Web.com Search Agency) can get you started on SEO with growth in mind, so you can concentrate on a limited set of keywords and funnel your revenue growth back into search marketing. In any case, using an outdated SEO method is not recommended since it may not hurt your rankings, but it won’t do anything for them either.
Tags: link exchange, link exchanges
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July 9th, 2009 by Patrick Hare
Lots of people out there are trying to make money by blogging, with varying degrees of success. For bloggers who have already gotten a small foothold in the search engines, the question of building an audience becomes the next big challenge. One of the true keys to success in blogging involves building a critical mass of readers who will recommend your blog, so it gets a market share that attracts advertisers or syndicators who are willing to pay you for your work.
One of the better ways to get an audience is through market research, and the top free market research tool online is the Google Keyword Tool (AKA the Google Adwords Keyword Tool). This tool actually tells you what people are looking for, and even gives seasonal search trends information if you know how to look for it. The keyword tool also suggests alternative keywords that may get you an even bigger audience, or new set of topics with a guaranteed interest base.
For example, let’s say that you want to get more readers who are interested in “online marketing.” Using the Google keyword tool, you would type in the phrase, and make sure to click the box for “use synonyms.” After waiting about 10 seconds for results, you should get two lists. The first will be more relevant matches, and the second will have related terms. There are also columns for local and global search volume. If you click on the top of either column, the results are sorted by popularity.
Our search revealed the top 10 terms to be:
online marketing
online marketing business
online advertising marketing
online marketing promotion
online marketing services
online marketing company
online marketing media
online marketing search
online marketing strategy
online marketing agency
Meanwhile, the top 10 related terms were:
marketing
internet marketing
business marketing
marketing advertising
website marketing
branding
email marketing
internet marketing tools
marketing services
web marketing
For a blogger, the keyword tool can be a goldmine, since the June 2009 results from this tool showed that “internet marketing” gets 1.8 million searches per month vs. 673,000 for “online marketing.” For a power blogger who is looking for an audience, either one of these terms would be fine for inclusion into a blog, but one term gets nearly 3 times the audience of the other one. Aside from the small sample of results here, there are also several dozen keywords and variations in the rest of the list that make for good blog topics.
The keyword tool also lets you see a diverse selection of ideas and desires built around these words. You can look through the list of search results and find out how many people in your sample base are thinking about something else when they type in “online marketing,” and you can hone your subject to capture the audience that is best for you. If you are blogging about “online marketing strategies” you can feed the keyword back into the search tool, un-check the synonyms box, and see more relevant results.
There are also ways to use the keyword tool to see the relative value of a word or phrase. For people who make money off their blogs with Google Adsense, this can be a critical way of increasing the average payment for every click. Under the dropdown that says “choose columns to display” you can pick the “show estimated average CPC” column, and you will see a relative keyword cost next to each phrase. In the June 2009 results, “online marketing programs” has an average cost per click of $13.72, so that may be an attractive one to go after. Conversely, if you are an eccentric billionaire and want someone to visit your blog, you can actually buy this term on Adwords and send people there.
The “Search Volume Trends” column is also quite valuable for people who are blogging about seasonal topics. (You should always mouse over the months on the graph, because they are not presented in a January to December format.) It would appear that marketing terms peak in May and June, but drop in August. Given that blog postings sometimes take a few weeks to get traction in the search engines, you can plan out your topics so they get cached and indexed in the search engines during these peak periods. If your blog gets picked up and indexed more quickly, you could even have a series based around a topic that keeps people interested and gets more search saturation.
Prior to keyword tools like Google, research was based on surveys and focus groups. The problem these information gathering methods is that they can be skewed by the way questions are written, the presence of dominant focus group members, or even the attractiveness of the person asking the questions. People might even be afraid of expressing their true opinions to someone on the other end of a phone. In some cases, a market research firm may be told to come back with a certain conclusion, and it can structure questions and focus groups to return the “right” answer. Search engine queries, for the time being, are based on actual user interests. Nobody feels the need to impress a search engine or lie to it , because the engine is delivering results that they “want.” When it comes to picking an audience for your blog, of finding out a level of interest, keyword research tools will likely give you a better sample than any opinion poll, and give your real numbers at the same time.
Once your blog gets a respectable audience, you can also use keyword research to measure your own popularity. For instance, you could put your own name, or the name of your blog, into the tool to see how many people are looking for you. Just remember that your core audience already remembers your URL or has you bookmarked, so the results you see are more likely to be people who have heard about you and want to know more. Even better, you can track the popularity of your ideas if you have original topics that are not based on current keyword trends. Every day, people read blogs and then go back to the search engines to research concepts that they have learned about, and you can go back into the tool the next month to see if your concepts are gaining a market share. For people who are blogging to change the world “one reader at a time,” there is a lot to be said for this kind of intellectual market intelligence.
Tags: blog visitors, blogging, keyword tool
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