Successful SEO Tactics: Off-Site Optimization

The large majority of external factors that influence organic rankings fall within the classification oflink building. There have been great debates in recent months that the ranking impact that can be derived through social media signals falls outside of “traditional” link building. That is valid, and will continue to be debated.

It seems there are few topics within SEO or digital marketing that are as highly contested and controversial as link building. As the SEO Tactics chart was developed, it became obvious that off-site influences would be a core pillar.

This article focuses more on the strategies that surround link building as opposed to the tactics. The space is flooded with these tactics already, yet little attention is paid to the strategies that guide successful link building campaigns.

You are simply burning time and money when a thoughtful link building strategy is absent. Hopefully some of the concepts conveyed in this article will translate well into the programs you're managing.

Keywords, Anchor Text & the Value of Diversification

You absolutely must have a data-driven keyword strategy in place to drive results from your link building efforts. If you’re not driving revenue or leads then what’s the point?

Identify keywords that have the highest likelihood of driving incremental online conversions, and set those terms as your target. Here’s some good information on identifying the right keywords.

These keywords become the genesis of your anchor text, but don’t fall into the trap that many SEOs do. Here’s a common problem – I want to rank for “men’s jackets” and in doing so I’ve determined that all of the links that I will attain will be targeted with “men’s jackets” as the anchor text. This is a mistake. While you certainly need some focus on the primary keywords within your anchor text it’s equally as important to work with derivatives of that keyword.

Moderation and diversification are important principles in anchor text selection. Do your homework and identify a set of valuable derivates such as “men’s winter jackets” and “cheap men’s jackets.” Diversifying the keywords within your link profile will help it appear natural.

An anchor text usage rule of thumb that we’ve seen success with looks something like this:

• 50 percent containing the exact match keyword.
• 30 percent to 40 percent containing keyword derivatives.
• 10 percent to 20 percent containing brand terms/URL.

Diversification not only relates to the anchor text but to the proportion of “follow” and “nofollow” links within your profile. Many link builders make the mistake of acquiring an abundance of “follow” links to the point where it makes up nearly 100 percent of the profile. Does this look natural? No.

While the direct value of a “nofollow” link will be less than a “follow,” the indirect value of diversifying your overall link profile will make it well worth the time.

Aiming at the Right Target – Destination URL Selection

The link building components of an SEO campaign shouldn't occur in a vacuum. They should be complimenting a larger and more holistic approach to SEO. When determining the URL that you will be pointing to your anchor text, you should follow the same methodology that your internal linking structure follows.

This consistency is important and will help signal the engines as to which specific URL should rank for a given term. Mapping your keywords to specific URLs from the start is a worthwhile exercise and can be used as a guide for both internal and off-site linking. Here’s some good information related to keyword mapping and on-site optimization elements that should be considered as part of your holistic plan.

Avoid pointing links to the home page when link building to non-brand terms. Diversification again comes into play here and you want URLs that have the best chance of converting to be the page that ranks for a given term.

Strive for a healthy mix of links coming in at you category pages, sub-category pages, and product-level pages. If you are link building with the anchor text “men’s jackets” this should be pointing into your category level page that is optimized for “men’s jackets” with an internal linking structure that is supporting the URL for that keyword.

Sub-category-targeted link building can be quite successful within ecommerce sites. Utilizing a sub-category-specific derivative such as “men’s winter jackets” that is pointed to its mapped sub category URL can be beneficial for both that term and the head term that it is a derivative of. This is where the power of proper internal linking can benefit your link building efforts as weight can be transferred both upstream to the category page and downstream to product-level pages via site navigation, breadcrumbs, etc.

Penalized vs. Devalued – Panda Paranoia

It’s hard to have a discussion on link building without talking about Google’s Panda update. Plenty of ecommerce webmasters are afraid that Google is or will penalize their site because they have links coming in from what they believe is a low quality content site that has been penalized.

Unless you're creating massive amounts of low quality content on your own site, the chances of you receiving stiff penalties from Google because of a few inbound links is quite low (although a small degree of paranoia is a good thing when it comes to SEO). However, it's quite likely those inbound links will be devalued. This is a much different scenario than your site being penalized though - so keep things in perspective.

source by:- http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2107974/Successful-SEO-Tactics-Off-Site-Optimization

10 Ugly SEO Tools that Actually Rock

1. Shared Count

Why it Rocks - Introduced to us by Tom Critchlow, Shared Count has a permanent place on my bookmarks bar. Not only does it track the social sharing statistics of any page you desire, including Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+ and raw Twitter counts. In addition, Shared Count has an open API, so you can build your own tools on top of it.

2. IETester

Why it Rocks - Whenever you check cross browser compatibility, 9 times out of 10 Internet Explorer throws you for a loop. IETester is a free, downloadable web browser that allows you to render different versions of IE in side-by-side windows and check for errors. There’s also a cool debugging option to root out tough-to-find problems.

3. Blogscape

Why it Rocks - The hidden gem of the SEOmoz toolset, Blogscape allows you to monitor the popularity of any keyword, brand or url on a daily basis. Simply enter a term or domain and see a list of all mentions of that phrase taken from a list of 1000s of RSS feeds and more.

In addition, advanced query operators allow you to track only posts containing a link to a specific domain –great for tracking new link discovery. We use it in-house at SEOmoz weekly to help measure the success of our SEO efforts.

4. URI Valet

Why It Rocks - URI Valet combines over 10 structural tools in one to perform technical audits, site reviews and more. You can see behind the scenes of any web page by checking server headers, text to HTML ratio, download speed, object details and quick links to W3C Validators. One of my favorite features not only lists all the internal and external links on a page, but validates them as well.

5-6. Robots.txt Checkers

http://tool.motoricerca.info/robots-checker.phtml
http://www.frobee.com/robots-txt-check

Why They Rock - I couldn’t decide which of these tools I liked more - it’s good to bookmark them both. When I worked on the help team at SEOmoz, these tools were essential for finding hidden problems with robots.txt files, even when no error was visible. They even account for hidden code in your files that can trip up your average search spider. I guarantee at least 1 out of 5 readers will discover robots.txt errors they never knew existed.

7. Wayback Machine

Why it Rocks - The Wayback Machine has a giant archive of website pages going back 15 years. If you want to research older links that may have disappeared or track website modifications that resulted in traffic changes, the Wayback machine lets you peer into the past, sometimes with dramatic results. It’s hard to believe this is what SEOmoz looked like just 2 years ago.

Some grey hat SEOs buy expired domains, then reconstruct the previously existing website page-by-page from the Machine’s archives. By doing so they hope to preserve the allusion of continuity to Google. (In my opinion, the jury’s still out.)

8. SEO Browser

Why it Rocks - Quickly see all of a webpage’s important SEO structure in one view, starting with the title tag and working your way down. Does the page have a robots.txt file? How about analytics installed? Often I use the SEO Toolbar for a quick look at page structure information, but the SEO Browser is an old favorite and great when I want to see the entire text copy laid out on a single, readable page.

9. Rank Checker

Why it Rocks - Sometimes you want to check a bunch of rankings…. fast. The Rank Checker from SEObook runs on your browser so you don’t have to wait for a third party to check your rankings for you. Beware, because it runs on your browser it’s much harder to control for the effects of localization and other mitigating factors, but it’s still handy when speed is more important than absolute accuracy.

10. Xenu’s Link Sleuth

Why it Rocks - While Screaming Frog is winning over the hearts and minds of many SEOs, Xenu’s Link Sleuth takes the award as the original ugly SEO tool that rocks. Most think of it as a link checker that runs on your desktop, but its dead simple interface and easy-to-understand reporting makes it a must have when running quick site audits. It’s also brilliant when mining for link opportunities.

source by: - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/seo-tools-that-rock

5 Simple Ways to Make Your Blog Links Better

Blog links can be amazing. Links from real, powerful blogs that have a strong subscriber base and an active community are worth their weight in gold. Not just in the usual way links are useful, but they are great for increasing brand awareness and industry authority.

But sometimes the natural format of a blog can dampen their power.

For example, over time blog posts move deeper into a site. They fall off the homepage and they get pushed out of category main pages as newer posts take their place. This natural progression results in most blog posts having limited internal linking from archive pages.

Sure there are plenty of add-ons and plug-ins to help keep posts interlinked and out of archive obscurity. There are plug-ins to help with interlinking and related posts plug-ins. But not every blogger utilizes these tools and you can’t twist their arm to make their blog more SEO friendly for you.

What you can do though is use a few proactive and preventative measures to help fight the natural dampening of link velocity from blog links.

Recommend Some Good Plug-Ins

If you have a link from a blog, and especially if you had a hand in making it happen, why not make a recommendation? If you asked for this link, or wrote for this link then you have an existing relationship. If a blogger isn’t interlinking their blog posts in any significant way, a little friendly advice might be warranted.

Try not to talk about SEO though. Instead suggest that interlinking could help their readers stay more engaged. Sure if they know about SEO they might appreciate the sentiment. But if they don’t, you might find yourself teaching a 101 via email.

Keep it simple and focused on the one thing every blogger cares about: their readers.

Build Links

Like it’s not hard enough to get links, now you have to build links to your links? Hey I didn’t invent the system, I just make observations.

If your blog post link doesn’t get some external link attention it’s not going to give you as much benefit as it could. Whether you wrote a guest post or got mentioned in a collection of useful links, if that page only has internal links, then it’s a minor league player in your profile. But if that page picks up a few outside links then at least it becomes Double-A.

Don’t leave the social media just up to the blog owner who hosts your link. They have tomorrow’s post to think about. Make sure you pitch in on the social promotion and help the post containing your link gain as much traction as possible. And when it comes to building links getting people to link to someone else’s content, that already links to you, is often easier than begging for links to your landing pages.

Title Tags

Optimizing title tags is a big part of on-page SEO work. But sometimes it can be useful in off-page SEO too.

If you’re doing content placement, or you’re featured in an interview or review, then you may be able to impact the title tag of the blog post holding your link. Do you want that blog post to rank for your keywords? Not necessarily. But a targeted title tag can add a bit of extra contextual relevance to the blog post and your link.

If your link has keyword anchor text and the page title contains relevant keywords as well, that’s a great combination. You’re sending a double whammy of signals to search engines about what this page is about, and also what your site is about. And those signals are incredibly important when Google or any other engine is trying to figure out who should rank for what.

Vary Your Bios

Guest posting is becoming a highly popular way to build links. If you’re doing it right you spend a fair amount of time pitching bloggers and creating content.

Obviously getting your link right in the content of the post is a little better than just having a bio link. But not everyone is game for that and you have to play by the rules.

Fortunately, the bio link is pretty standard on the guest posting circuit; you can at least impact that. Mix up the pages you target, the keywords you use and the text of your bio. These kinds of links are an excellent opportunity to target sub-pages which don’t get a lot of love and not using a boilerplate bio on every post helps keep each guest post free of any duplicate content.

Skip the Bad Blogs

Seriously, the best way to make your blog links more powerful is to be more selective about which blogs you get links from. You can’t control the links you pick up at random without asking. But if you’re going to actively pursue blog links through guest posting, outreach, or reviews, make it truly worth your while.

Settling for the bottom of the barrel links is almost as bad as not getting links at all. Why not really invest the time and talent to score placement on a truly great blog?

Getting a review for your electronics site on a blog that reviews everything from cheap office furniture to the best credit card offers isn’t really all that useful. Be honest with yourself, will the blog in question review anyone or publish anything? Does anyone even read these posts let alone comment on them or share them? If not, skip it. Ten of those links aren’t as good as 1 link from a blog that genuinely takes pride in its content and community.

Source by:- http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2106492/5-Simple-Ways-to-Make-Your-Blog-Links-Better

5 Ways SEOs Can Work with Social Media Managers

As social media gets widely adopted across organizations of all sizes we’re starting to see social media and search marketing teams operating in silos. That is already the case in many organizations. It isn’t unusual to have a 5:1 ratio where there are five community managers for every search marketer.

Due to nature of daily social media management, it’s natural that social media teams will outnumber small search teams (including one man teams!). This puts the onus on SEOs to reach out to their social media counterparts and ensure SEO is part of social media process as well.

An in-house SEO invests a lot of their time into creating an enterprise-wide process to work with developers, IT, and other important stakeholders. SEOs should also create a process for social media teams since they create a huge amount of content on a daily basis.

One of the first steps to get SEO integrated into any existing process is SEO training. But there are additional ways SEOs can work with social media team on an ongoing basis to ensure that even social media team members integrate SEO and leverage their daily community management efforts. Let’s jump in into what I think are the top 5 ways SEO’s can work with their social media counterparts:

1. Train Social Media Managers on SEO Essentials

SEO, especially in-house SEO, is a lot about demystifying the SEO myths across the organization and to me that starts with a ground level SEO training. I like to call this “Essential SEO Training” as the goal here is not to make SEO experts out of your social media managers but just enough to ensure that SEO is built into the social media process (most importantly not missed out on).

Many community managers come from a non-technical background so if you start with technical jargons like server response codes, faceted navigation, etc. then you will lose them. Instead, focus more on meta tags, H1 tags, alt text, page titles, and so on.

It is also assumed that you as an SEO would be working with IT or developers on the technical side of SEO so better to keep it simple for social media team members. Reaching out and offering to train them can be a good icebreaker of sorts and is also a great way to make an impression with the social media group.

Remember, most of the times blogging responsibilities also fall under social media team. Training them on how to write optimized blog posts can benefit your SEO performance a great deal.

2. Show Them the “Whys” and “Hows” of Keyword Research

Search marketers understand that keywords are the cornerstone of SEO. But not everyone understands that, so driving that point across to social media team members should be your goal.

Besides the obvious importance of keywords, you can show them how to use the various keyword tools.

One common mistake people make is picking keywords with highest number of searches. Instead, you want to train them on why that may not be the right approach.

It’s important that they learn how various keyword tools employ different data collection methodology. The other advantage of empowering them with tools is they are self-sufficient thus allowing you to focus on more strategic initiatives.

3. Optimizing Tweets For Visibility

As engines start integrating more tweets in their SERPs, we’ll see an increasing number of tweets show up for normal keyword queries. Twitter too is constantly updating their internal search engine, so getting found inside Twitter searches becomes critical as well.

Inserting one good keyword in each tweet is a good tip to share with social media managers. Think about the search impact social media managers can create if they target the same keyword while writing a blog post, creating few tweets, posting on Facebook fan page all the while using the same keyword.

I’m always amazed at the amount of content a social media team ends up creating on a daily basis. It is not just the original tweets but the retweets, mentions, etc. that makes up the lifecycle of a tweet.

Think of the SEO opportunity if you can take that content and house it in your domain – something to the effect that Zappos has done at twitter.zappos.com. I talked about this last year during SES Chicago in one of my in-house SEO panel. Again, SEOs are well suited for this kind of initiatives.

4. Optimizing Facebook Fan Page

A tremendous amount of time and resources are poured into building a company’s Facebook community that it makes sense if we start optimizing that content on fan pages for SEO.

Jeff Widman and team at PageLever recently did an interesting study on the referral traffic that search engines send to Facebook fan pages. They looked at almost 1,000 Facebook fan pages and found that almost one-third of external traffic is sent by search engines.

The key takeaway here: optimize your Facebook page just like you would any web property. It would be a hard battle convincing social media managers to allow you to make changes on Fan pages (it’s their baby!) but looking at back end analytics (Facebook insights for starters) and then making an “SEO case” can help you win this battle.

You can customize your training session to tackle Facebook posts while keeping your SEO process transparent. This way social media team can integrate SEO on an ongoing basis without you being involved.

This is another social media property where so much content (and engagement) is created that it makes perfect sense to leverage it for SEO. This can also be another source by which SEO can attribute the gains to their performance.

5. Teach Them the Importance of Conversion Metrics

The science of measuring conversion metrics like a search marketer doesn’t come naturally to “many” social media managers. Most of the time, search marketers create campaigns with end conversions in mind. They launch campaigns only if the ROI makes sense.

Not so with social media as collectively we are still in the “figuring out mode.” On top of that, the social media customer conversion funnel is slightly longer with more emphasis on fan engagement.

It’s easy to get carried away with the “coolness factor” of social media like number of fans, followers, design, apps, and so on that folks forget the purpose of a business is to create customers, as Peter Drucker said.

True, direct marketers can get little disappointed with social media as there is no straightforward “input X amount of dollars to get Y number of customers” ratio on social media. This is where SEO’s can help social media team understand common performance metrics the “search world” follows.

Search marketers should realize the engagement factor of social media so search marketers can also do with some unlearning of their own. Collaborating and coming up with common set of metrics is the way forward.

Source by:- http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2109664/5-Ways-SEOs-Can-Work-with-Social-Media-Managers