Merry Christmas everyone!

Ed

And why shouldn’t you take advantage of your size connections and resources?  In every school yard altercation I’ve ever seen the big kid always used their size tot heir advantage.  Why shouldn’t you?

Here are 6  link building strategies that large enterprises can use to get links on their own.

1: Get Franchisees to link to you.

If you’re a Franchisor then you’re sitting pretty when it comes to getting links from Franchisees.  You could simply make franchisees link to your website as part of the franchise agreement.  Better yet create some valuable resources that they will want to link to for the benefit of their own customers.

And if there is any pushback then you have the valid justification that those links help rank the franchise brand nationally which then helps drive traffic to the local franchisee. A win win in my book.

2: Get two way testimonials from happy customers

Many companies always tread lightly when requesting testimonials but if you have happy customers then you’re doing them and yourself a disservice by not asking for a testimonial.

However instead of asking for them to link back to you, make it a two way testimonial where on your site you write about how frickin awesome they were in the use or implementation of your product or service and in return ask them to write about their experiences with your product and service.

By going first you are leveraging the rule of reciprocity where they may very well feel obligated to give you that testimonial and link with little fuss.

Don’t forget to give them a heads up first, be authentic (that is don’t make up fake stuff just for the link) and don’t forget to help them link to you by providing the link target or link code.  Sometimes you just gotta help people along.

3: Be Newsworthy and let the right people know about it.

If you are a fast growing company and you are doing anything interesting at all then you probably have a bunch of business blogs, news websites and forums following what you do. Do a google search of your business name or your competitors name and see who is writing about you or them.

Then it’s simply a process of blogger and or writer outreach to start the conversation and the ball rolling.

If you want some ideas why don’t you check out Smart Company, Anthill, Business Spectator and Flying Solo.  Looking for specific industry opportunities?  What about CIO, CNet  for IT,  Asia Pacific Centre for Franchising Excellence for franchising info, and Power Retail for Online and multi channel retail. Just do a google search for Your Industry + news and start connecting with people and be interesting.

Bigger businesses have an advantage in that people want to know what you are doing and what you have to say.  Take advantage of these websites unquenchable thirst for interesting news to get them talking about and linking to you.

 4: Get Social and start engaging

If you are a big business then you should be implementing a social media strategy.  You have the budget and this is where your customers are going to be talking about you and too you.

Remember social media works like this.  Build relationships, engage and then get links.  The idea is that social media channels are currently the #1 way that you can share your content and encourage others to re share it and hopefully link to it.

Yes social media may very well influence organic rankings once Google figures out how to stop the spammers but right now it is the #1 tool for connecting with people who are going to link to you, share your stuff and talk about you. Dive in.

5: Sponsorships

This strategy is as old as the hills.  If you do local store marketing then allocate a percentage of your marketing budget to sponsoring local community organisations, schools, colleges and charities and request that they list you on their website.  Make sure you or your seo company gets the links though.

6: Get links from partners

Big companies have lots of partners.  Depending on the type of relationship many of these will be willing to link to you in some way shape or form.  Brainstorm with your marketing team and put together a list of prospects.  The obvious ones are suppliers, customers, your accountant, lawyer, bank, advertising agency.

Then its simply a process of pitting on the thinking cap and working out how to get a link that makes sense.

Oh and finally, in the old days your SEO company would tell you to ask for links with “MAGIC KEYWORD” as the anchor text and you would sensibly argue back that it was going to be a hell of a job getting your customer to link to you with the keyword “Best Insurance Ever”.

Don’t stress about it.  Google’s over reliance on exact match anchor text to rank pages, whilst its still works like gang busters is coming to an end.

Just ask for the link with your company name or URL.

The process of getting these links is about building diversity, gaining authority and hopefully a natural looking back link profile.

Got any great tips you would like to add?  Please comment below.

There is a storm brewing in the online marketing world that threatens to make the jobs of seos in particular and marketers in general that much more difficult.

That storm is Google’s recent implementation of encrypted search for those users logged into a Google service conducting searches from Google.com.  This announcement was made under the guise of providing a more secure browsing experience and has attracted the outrage of many online marketers due to the impact on search referrer data.

What has changed?

When you conduct a search online and click on the search result,  the url that takes you to your destination contains information about the keyword that you used to get there.  This data appears in your analytics software of choice and is critical information to help you assess how well your organic search campaigns are performing.

However, with google enforcing encrypted search on google.com, none of this information is passed on to the website owner.

You will basically know that a user came from Google.com and little else.  This data shows up in your Google Analytics referrer data as (not provided).

Below you can see a screenshot from one of my sites in Australia.  I am already starting to get (not provided) appearing in my keyword search referral data form US searchers using Google.com.

As of November 17 2011, users logged into a Google account are still able to conduct non encrypted searches but it is only a matter of time before the encrypted search is tolled out internationally.

google (not provided) referral screenshot

So Why all the Fuss?

With the removal of a large percentage of the referring organic keyword data, Google has made it much more difficult to measure the effectiveness of  your seo campaigns.

How can you determine whether the visits to my site were as a result of a #1 ranking  achieved for a specific keyword if Google is now going to hide this data from you?

When asked by Danny Sullivan of Searchengineland.com about the impact on search referral data, Matt Cutts, the head of Google’s Spam team said:

Google software engineer Matt Cutts, who’s been involved with the privacy changes, wouldn’t give an exact figure but told me he estimated even at full roll-out, this would still be in the single-digit percentages of all Google searchers on Google.com

Most of the anger in the online marketing community stems from the fact that Matt Cutts seems to have downplayed the impact by stating that it would be in single digits when people are starting to report much higher percentages of (not provided) search referrer numbers.

What makes the privacy argument difficult to swallow is that Google is still making the keyword referrer data available to Advertisers using their Google Adwords platform.  So they are effectively putting a price on referrer data.  This alone has sent traditional Google stalwarts off the wall with frustration.

Today SEOmoz released some additional sample data of 5,000 sites showing that many were in fact seeing (not provided) referrer figures in much higher percentages than Google indicated.

So What do you do?

At Traffika we are going to be keeping a close eye on the keyword referrer data of our clients analytics data.  If and when the search referrer data of our client sites moves into significantly high percentages then it is going to make it much more important to provide them with a range of performance measures that demonstrate that our seo efforts are resulting in better overall outcomes, even if we can’t tell you the keyword that was responsible.

In addition I believe it is going accelerate the take-up of a broader range of traffic strategies such as Facebook Advertising and Google adwords for those clients not already using them, so that they have more traffic sources and measurable data with which to make marketing decisions.

Do you have any experience with this issue on your sites yet?  I’d love to hear about your experiences or perspective in the comments below.

No doubt you would have already:

1. Ensured sufficient inventory for the expected Christmas rush
2. Reviewed the latest ship by dates and advised customers of when they need to order by to expect delivery before Christmas
3. Integrated your offline marketing campaigns with your online campaigns
4. Prepped your dispatch team to make sure you can get your orders out in time.

However there are 3 simple techniques that you can implement on your website to help your products get found and increase traffic during the busy period.

1) Identify product pages without Title tags and meta descriptions

Product pages  without keyword rich titles and well written meta descriptions will not rank or convert browsers to visitors.

The strength of Ecommerce stores is that they typically have many product pages, each of which adds to the overall amount of PageRank or Google authority that the website can accumulate.

In addition each page is an opportunity to rank for a specific keyword phrase and bring traffic to the website.

In the rush to  photograph,  catalog and add new stock items into inventory sometimes a proper title tag and meta description are not written for new products.

Many Ecommerce shopping cart’s automatically use the product name as the title tag,  but many shopping carts default to the store name.  In the latter situation the problem is that the page now targets the keyword phrase “Shop Name’ along with many other pages.

Meta descriptions are the short snippet’s of text that appear in each listing on a search results page.  Their goal is to sell the click, to encourage the searcher to click through and visit the page.  If a proper meta description is not written describing your product well then Google will simply select a snippet of text to use which may not do your product description any favours.

How to identify missing title tags and meta descriptions

You can identify product pages that do not have  title tags or meta descriptions by using a free spidering tool like Optispider to crawl your website and display pages or you can simply use the Google “site command by entering “site:www.domain.com” in the  Google search box to list all of the pages that Google has in its index.

Simply identify those pages without a targeted title tag and meta description and rewrite them accordingly.

2) Link to Products or Categories that you want to Promote

One simple strategy that many new to E commerce fail to implement is to utilise home page links to products or categories to increase both the traffic from the home page as well as the traffic from increased rankings.

Back links are the fuel for search engine rankings and internal links, that is links within your own website are a very powerful way of helping internal pages to get ranked.  You see, internal links are effectively the same as external links except  that you can control both where you link and the anchor text that you use.

The main menu links are already a start but you can add many more targeted internal links in addition to the menus.

You often see these internal links in the form of footer links on sites or blocks of links to “More Products”, “Featured Products” or “Promoted Products”.

Prior to the Christmas rush, you should be identifying whether there are any new product categories or pages that could  do with some some extra promotion and link to them using the keyword phrases that you want the pages to rank for.

3) Use your RSS feed to Improve  Product Discoverability

RSS or Really Simply Syndication is most often seen as a tool to allow you to read blogs using an RSS reader without the need to visit a the blog in person.  It is a syndication tool basically helping you get your content published elsewhere.

RSS is an effective way to get new content on a website “discovered” by search engine spiders as the spiders follow where your content is published on other websites back to your pages.  Once they get discovered they can get ranked in the search engines.

Many new shopping cart systems provide RSS feeds for “New Products” or “Popular Products”.

Typically during busy periods you are often so busy cataloging and uploading new products to the website  that you forget to promote them.  You can use RSS to get these new products discovered and ranked by simply submitting your ecommerce RSS feeds to places which accept them.  For example:

1. You can republish your E commerce products feed automatically  to your blog pages using tools that allow blogs to publish content automatically using RSS
2. You can republish your E commerce products feed automatically to your Facebook page
3. You can republish your E commerce products feed automatically to RSS directories designed to help discover new and interesting feeds

These three techniques will help improve discoverability, increase rankings and traffic to your E Commerce pages.

Google's New Mega Site Links

Site links are the secondary links that appear below the main link to a website and are typically only provided to a site once that site has demonstrated a certain level of trustworthiness.

In the past they have been quite small but as of yesterday we noticed Google testing them on a number of sites.

They are only appearing when you search for a specific brand or business name and the listing has multiple sub links with what seems to be a small meta description beneath the link.  Interestingly they do not appear when you do a keyword research.

In addition they only seem to be appearing when you are logged into a Google service an Google Instant is on.

The implication is clear.  If Google thinks that you are looking for a specific business or brand they are giving you as many links as possible to the internal pages on the target site in an effort to get you to your destination as quickly as possible.

The result is a complete ownership of the top half of the search results page.  Pity the company who’s trying to rank for a brand name either in the organic or paid search markets.

Takeaways

1. Work on being a brand.  Figure out how to increase the level of brand searches in the organic results as a signal to Google that people are looking for you and that you are worthy of site wide links.
2. Choose a domain name that is as unique or related to your business or brand name as possible and that can’t be confused with another high volume keyword search.

In addition to the SEO work I do for Traffika, I do SEO on a number of personal sites as well as test sites that I will build to test link building strategies or markets.  The data that is provided below comes from these sites and not from client sites..just so you know.

I am going to show you what the impact of securing a #1 ranking in Google was for one of my target keywords.

The Myth of Page 1 Rankings

Before we start I need to take a moment to discuss the myth of page 1 rankings.  The standard pitch by unscrupulous seo firms is that they will rank your website for 100 keywords and will guarantee page 1 rankings for these keywords in the search engines.  What they fail to tell you is that:

• They select crappy keywords around which there is very little search volume and relevance
• They also include rankings on obscure search engines  that provide little in the way of search volume.

In our work whilst we may optimise a website to rank for a specific number of keywords, that is to draft custom title tags and meta descriptions targeting those keywords, we will typically focus our link acquisition efforts on those keywords that display those characteristics of high search volume and relevance so that when a high ranking is achieved for that keyword, the site should see increased site visits and goal conversions.

So the key takeaway is yes, page 1 rankings are important but you need to ensure the keywords you choose to rank for have sufficient search volume to make the effort worth while and are relevant to your business or offering.

The Value of Google Rankings

We all chase Page 1 rankings but the real gold in them rivers is to be had in the top 3 spots.  SEOBook.com has a great summary of Google Ranking Value and the key graph that you should be looking at is the pie chart of AOL’s leaked Search Data that shows the traffic by google rank.

Traffic by Google Rank

Of course since July of 2010 Google is now showing this data for free in Google Webmaster Tools.

The Data

I run a niche ecommerce website with my partner which has # 1 rankings for several of its target keywords. However one keyword was firmly stuck in the #2 position for a long time.  In the last three weeks the ranking for this keyword phrase moved into the #1 position from #2.

Here is some of the key data around the keyword.

Keyword Search Volumes

• Phrase Match Monthly search volume – 12,100 searches
• Exact Match Monthly search volume – 2,400 searches

Immediately I know that the difference between the phrase match and exact match volumes indicates that there are a large number of other long tail searches that include my keyword phrase.  So hopefully by ranking for the main phrase we will pick up some of the other phrase matched search volume as well.

Source: Google Adwords Keyword Tool

Keyword Rankings

The target keyword recently moved to #1 and has been there for three weeks as per the Raven Tools rank tracking table below.

Keyword Rankings

Source: Raven Tools

Google Webmaster Tools

Google Webmaster Tools is an awesome source of data on how your site is performing.  In addition to all of the technical information it provides, of real value is the data it now provides on impressions and click throughs down to a keyword level at various rankings.

Stop for a second and think about that.  Google is now giving you information about how well your keywords are performing at different rankings!

In my Google Webmaster Tools account I looked at the data from 25th July 2011 to 5th August 2011 which was the most recent date that was shown.  I wanted to see what the change in daily average impressions and click through rates was for the time after the ranking movement as compared to the time before.

• Impressions were up 11% to 1000 impressions
• Clicks were up 67% to 150 clicks
• The Click through Rate was 17% now that the site was in #1.

Next I reset the date range to the full month to give me more data on the activity across all of the ranking positions for this keyword. The table below covers the month from July 6th 2011 to August 5th 2011.

Click Throughs at different ranking positions

The big takeaway from this data is the click through rates at the various positions.  You can see that in position #2 my site was being displayed only 900 times for a keyword that is searched on 2,400 times a month (Exact match) and that it was only getting 90 clicks.

With this data I can make a more accurate assessment of what I am willing to spend to improve my rankings.

Google Analytics

As best I can determine the #1 ranking was achieved on 25th July 2011 and from the traffic report below you can see that this date signals a general increase in the number of visits for the target keyword.

#1 Ranking on 25th July 2011

Looking for more specific data I then analysed the numbers comparing the two trading weeks after the ranking increase, that is from Monday July 25th to Sunday August 7th to the previous two trading weeks, that is from Monday July 11th to Sunday July 24th, ensuring I was comparing apples with apples to see what the numbers showed.

Google Analytics - Detailed Data

So we can see that the result of moving the ranking from #2 to #1 is:

1. An increase in visits to the site of over 34%
2. An increase in the number of pages per visit of over 12%
3. An increase in the number of new visits to the site of over 7%
4. An increase in the CTR from 10% to 17%
5. An increase in the time on site of over 1%
6. A reduction in the bounce rate of over 27%

With this data at hand you are better able to make a determination of  what you are willing to spend to get to #1 and what it might be worth to you.  This type of data guides us in our seo work for clients as to which keywords we should be focusing out link acquisition resources on.

At the end of the day SEO is a resources game, whether that is your time or money, and you need to be making educated decisions where to invest both.

Hopefully this post has given you some insight into this process.  If you have any questions or comments please feel free to comment below.

Image via Wikipedia

On an regular basis Google updates it search engine algorithm to improve its search results.  The majority of these changes are so small that we don’t really notice them. However  two recent updates have just been released that are getting a lot of press and Google themselves indicate that these changes are likely to impact up to 12% of US results.

On January 21st Google announced on their blog that they had tweaked their algorithm in an update that is coming to be known as the Scraper Update.  Matt Cutts elaborated on his own blog that this update implemented changes that

primarily affects sites that copy others’ content and sites with low levels of original content.

This change only affected slightly over 2% of queries.

A more agressive  update just announced on February 24th in a blog post called Finding more high-quality sites in search is expected ti change up to 12% of US  results.

This update which Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Land has taken upon himself to name the Farmer Update is designed to reduce rankings for low-quality sites—sites which are low-value add for users, copy content from other websites or sites that are just not very useful. At the same time, it will provide better rankings for high-quality sites—sites with original content and information such as research, in-depth reports, thoughtful analysis and so on.

Content Farms the target?

So what does that all mean?  Officially the update is not aimed at any market sector in particular but the general consensus is that this update was targeted at so called “content  farms” like Demand Media and who publish highly targeted pieces of content that have been  designed to target very specific search queries.

What frustrates people who then complain about the state of Google’s search results is that most of this stuff is just pure crap.

No one seems to have a problem with content being created to match a search phrase; it’s the lack of time and money that have been put into creating this content that is causing the ruckus and the current moaning about  Google’s search results quality in the blogosphere and the press.

What does this mean for you?

The primary way to look at these changes that Google implements is to think about where they are moving in the mid to long term.  Changes like this are often designed to fix aspects of the search algorithm that are being exploited by spammers or  more publicly, businesses like Demand Media who are exploiting the way their algorithm works for public profit.

If you really want to ensure your business acquires solid search rankings for now and into the future then the best strategy is to give Google what it wants and promote the living heck out of it.

Here’s my (not so) secret sauce.

Create quality content that meets the information needs of prospective customers; that is designed to get found by people using very targeted search phrases that relate to their business pain and needs and your business proposition or products and services.

Make it viral, unique and sharable; make it something people want to tweet about and post to facebook and show to their boss, partner, peers. Make the process of sharing make the sharer look cool.

Promote it using all available social media channels.  Identify relevant social media influencers and start an outreach campaign.  Show those influencers how cool, interesting and important your stuff is to their audience and how good it will make them look to share it with them.

Track the results, watch the tweets in your social media monitoring tool of choice, track the inbound links and then tweak and do it all again.

The reality is that Google is getting ranking signals from all over the place and it is getting  easier to invest the time and money to do this properly than too look for loopholes that Google is simply going to close down soon.

Related articles

• Google Declares War on Content Farms (mashable.com)
• In Latest Anti-’Content Farm’ Move, Google Changes Its Search Algorithm (paidcontent.org)

That problem is solved by the team at Traffika who will be searching out and curating the best video content on the wide range of digital marketing topics that you may wish to know about. Not to be left out, we have created a range of our own short videos to help educate our clients on specific topics.

We purposely kept the videos short, about 1 1/2 minutes long. Just long enough to give you a general understanding of the topics on hand.

Here is my first one – An Introduction to Search Engine Optimization.

Click here to view the embedded video.

This awesome design was created by an amazing WordPress designer @mattbrett.  It is a customisation of his Video Wave theme.  Working with Matt was a real pleasure.