Category Archives: Online Marketing

Everything you need to know about SEO but were afraid to ask

One of my favourite sites, Search Engine Journal has put together a brilliant list of the blogs and sites you should pay attention to if you want to really understand SEO.

One of the weirder ones is Bill Slawski’s SEO By The Sea, where he covers what the search engines try to protect by way of patents. If you are in any way techy, grab yourself a large latte and get stuck in.

There is also Aaron Wall’s SEO Book, something that every respectful SEOer should be reading and taking notice of, as well as the die-hards like SEO Moz and Search Engine Land.

There’s also mention of a few forums worth checking out such as Webmaster World.

And just to show there’s no bias, SEO Black Hat is also included.

Anyway, sign up to the newsletters and keep abreast of the changes going on every day in SEO Land.

http://www.searchenginejournal.com/free-seo-resources/15336/

How Many Backlinks Do I have?

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Want to know how many backlinks you have, and how that compares with your competition? I show you exactly what you need to know…

Backlinking is probably one of the great myths of Internet Marketing. There are tens of thousands (literally) of products, books and articles on the subject.

The advice ranges from ‘no backlinks necessary’ to ‘get as many as you can as quickly as possible’. So what is the best advice?

Before we go down that route, here’s a new online tool where you can check your own site(s) and your competitors (it is in beta at the time of writing so may disappear or cost money sometime in the future):

http://www.backlinkfinder.com/backlink-checker.html

Most people used Yahoo site explorer to research backlinks in the past, but it was rumoured it would be turned off in 2011, so there was a need to find alternative tools.

However, Microsoft came to the rescue with their Yahoo! and Microsoft Search Alliance. As I write this, the original Site Explorer site is still up as they are busy incorporating it into Microsoft Webmaster Tools (the MS version of Google Webmaster Tools).

One site I like is this: http://website.informer.com

Enter any URL and depending on how popular it is, you will get a ton of information. It uses a mashup to bring together information from Yahoo, Compete, Alexa, Site Advisor, Mywot and others depending on the site. It will also tell you about the owner of the site, and even shows other popular sites from the same owner. Very revealing.

SEO Moz is another well known and respected tool and has been used by many as a good alternative, but it is quite costly (it is aimed at webmasters rather than business owners).

So, back to backlinking. First up. The truth! No one knows how the search engine algorithms are tweaked. You can look up Google’s patents or see what Google spokespeople like Matt Cutts has to say on the subject, but we are talking here about many hundreds of different metrics that make up a search engine’s idea of page relevancy.

And those metrics are constantly changing. In other words it’s pretty much anyone’s guess as to what works today and what will work tomorrow.

Google are fairly transparent about this, which is a good thing in my view. The massive changes made in 2011 (Panda etc) and the new social metrics introduced in 2012 (Google’s ‘Search Plus Your World’) have changed things even further.

What the search engines are after of course is completely natural backlinks. They absolutely do depend on them in order to test relevancy. The basics of this relevancy is called PageRank (PR). Each page is given PR and if that page links to another page, some of that PR is passed along to it (the original page doesn’t lose any PR, it is just accumulated along the path).

So if you have a page with a PR of 2 that has lots of outgoing links, each link will have a very diluted portion of 2. Or to put it another way, the more outgoing links there are on a page, the less important the PR from that page is (note that the page itself is obviously still relevant as it has a PR of 2).

So, imagine you have a page you want to rank for the keyword ‘best sausages’. It makes sense that if other pages have a link to it, and those other pages have something to do with sausages, then your pages PR will increase. Right?

Well, not necessarily. Those other pages may have links pointing to them that are not about sausages (i.e. not relevant). They may also have pages that a search engine may consider spammy (negative PR anyone?).

Links to your page may also not be relevant, or they may be spammy. So would you lose PR because of this? Well, again, no necessarily. If that were the case, then as has been stated before, you could kill off a competitor site.

So, the SE’s algorithms have to be extremely robust. And they do this in many ways, including tracking activity over time. This is one reason why it is possible to get a brand new site on to page 1 of an SE within 24 hours (it is very easy to do BTW).

But unless you have a very strategic plan, there is a good chance your new site will just as suddenly disappear.

Here’s a simple blueprint to follow to give you a rough idea of what to do:

Pick the keyword you want to target
Type it into an SE
Research the top 10 sites that show up (for backlinks and other metrics such as keyword in title etc,)
Research the PR of the pages linking to those top sites
Make a decision on whether it is now worth chasing
Build your plan to ‘naturally’ out do the competition

I will go into far more detail with this in the future with examples. Make sure you join my Inner Circle by filling in the form on the right so you get the latest information on internet marketing tactics that work.

Meanwhile you may like to check out some interesting things about the Google Penguin update and how you should think about linking and ranking: read it here…

Also, Matt Cutts of Google announced in a tweet in October 2012 that another tweak of the search engine algorithm had been implemented (actually, this is along with well over 60 updates in September) to stop thin sites that use exact match domains (EMD) ranking so highly.

See my post on the Google Freshness Project.

How Do I Get More People To Open My Email Blasts?

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How much spam do you get? Do you recognise it immediately? Which emails do you open on sight? Which do you delete instantly? And the most important question of all… why?

And here’s a few more. Why do some emails get through the spam bots? Why are some marked as spam instantly? What is blacklisting? Am I on a blacklist? How do I get off that list? And the $64m question, what should I use to send email so I never gat blacklisted again?

OK, so let’s take a look. The first thing you need to do (so you ‘get’ it and it sticks) is to analyse what you do when you view your email.

What’s the first thing you look at? Is it the subject line or the sender name? Maybe it’s the snippet from the email if your email client shows that (eg. Gmail).

I can tell you that for the majority of people it is the sender name. Now of course this may not be your personal habit here, but research shows the vast majority of people always check who it’s from before they look anywhere else, and it’s those people that matter when it comes to internet marketing (ie. the ‘vast majority’). Everything starts with targeting, and this one little point is often overlooked.

So make sure you put your name as the sender. Anything else will look either spammy or just as bad, commercial. If you see an email from Virgin, for example, you know immediately it will be something to do with some product. Suppose, however, it came from ‘Richard Branson’. Would you open it?

Next up is the Subject line. These have been tested to death by internet marketers and the following points are the important ones to take on board:

Must be original. ‘Get 10% off today’ will only work if you trust AND BUY from the seller (otherwise it’s straight in the trash – or worse marked as Spam).

Must be enticing or plain simple. And that does not mean ‘Did you hear this amazing news!!!’ (it’s not just the overuse of exclamation marks that give this obviously spammy title away – the only way you are going to open this is if you REALLY trust the sender). Plain simple is exactly that. Tell it like it is. ‘Just to say thank you for ordering xxx’. They can see who it is from, the title is non-threatening, so there is a chance they will open it. So, what is ‘enticing’ then? I’m glad you asked that. ’Thanks for signing up to my newsletter. I have something special for you’.

Don’t use the word FREE. Don’t even use it in the body text of your email either. It is a red flag to spam bots. Many internet marketers will break the word up (eg. f ree or fr ee etc.) but these will be spotted sooner or later and once they are, they look even spammier. So what do I use then? Use ‘Gratis’ or ‘no cost’ or ‘zero cost’ or even ’100% off’.

Make sure the first line of the body text of the email also grabs attention or interest. This is because it is shown in many email clients. The people receiving your email will most likely look at who it’s from first, then the subject, and if that isn’t enough for them to make the decision to open, they look at a snippet of the content.

And what happens if none of the above is interesting enough? They file it ‘for later’ (which means never) or mark it as spam.

Worse though, their email client may mark it as spam automatically. This can be for far too many reasons to list here, but one of those reasons is that it has come from a sender who has been blacklisted. You can use this online tool if you are worried email from your domain is being blacklisted. Just enter your domain name into the tool: http://www.mxtoolbox.com/SuperTool.aspx

The only real way to avoid your email blasts being blacklisted is to use a bona-fide email service like Aweber. There are lots of services like this, but I have found them to be about the best all things considered. They also have incredible help. For example, we have used them over at Accountz.com in order to split people into two separate lists from a single optin form.

To conclude, getting your domain or email address banned by spam bots is the last thing you need to do. So if you want to communicate via email to more than one customer at a time, you must use a dedicated email service.

The Secrets of Guest Blogging (and how to get noticed for free)

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Guest blogging is the way to get noticed and very targeted visitors. But how on earth do you go about getting some great blogger to let you post on his/her blog?

The usual way is write a very polite email saying you love what they are saying and you yourself are an expert in their field and would love to help contribute great content, for which the only thing you want back is a simple acknowledgement by way of an Author Resource Box including a link back to your site.

They will of course want to see proof of your expertise and writing style so make sure you give them the opportunity (i.e. pro-actively say if they are interested let me know and I will send a brand new article). They will also ask to see your site so they can prove to themselves you are legitimate.

Or…..

How about this. Open a spreadsheet and enter into it every blog you come across in your niche or related niche (it has to be a blog for this to work as you will see later). To find these blogs search for your niche or related niches in Google and click on the ‘Blog’ option in the column on the left of the results page. Yes it’s that simple.

Now click on each found blog and see if they allow comments on posts. Check using a plug in like SEO Quake to see if it is ‘follow’ or ‘no-follow’. It doesn’t matter which it is, but you need to know the difference when posting if you want to maximise the effect.

‘Follow’ blogs. These are great because you will not only pick up direct traffic from visitors to the blog, you will also get link juice to your site.

‘No Follow’ blogs. As mentioned, these are also fine, but *mostly* you will only get direct traffic (however not all search engines use the ‘no follow’ flag so you may pick up a little link juice here and there).

OK. Enter these blog addresses into your spreadsheet so you can track your progress as you go along.

The next step is to add comments to the posts these bloggers are putting up. You need to do this to recent articles rather than older ones (though older ones are fine too if they are ‘follow’ types).

Great Quentin, but what do we put in the comment?

Something VERY relevant to the article you are commenting on and likely to be of great value to the reader AND author of the blog.

The length of the comment doesn’t matter too much, but obviously the more info you supply, the greater the value. And that means the greater the likelihood someone will read it and click your link to see what else you are saying.

The blog’s author will also start to take notice of you. In time you will be able to contact them with a good probability that they will accept guest posts from you.

But that is not the immediate point here! No. The best part about this is that you are going to get links on top blogs AND direct traffic from that blog’s audience. It’s laser targeted too. And best of all it wont cost you a penny. Enjoy.