Long-Term Perspective in SEO

When you read the news and opinions of the experts in the preceding
section, you’ll find very few instances of exaggerated, hyperbolic claims
that some new policy or algorithmic change is going to turn SEO on its
head or somehow drastically alter the way we do business in the industry.
In the history of SEO, tactics frequently change, but strategy rarely does.
In other words, the specific techniques you implement will evolve, but the
goal is always—and probably always will be—to increase the number of
qualified visitors to your site. Here are some additional examples:
The tactic may have changed from directory submission to linkbait,
but the strategy is still focused on accruing new links.

The tactic may have changed from repeated site submission to XML
sitemap generation and RSS pings, but the strategy remains getting
your site’s changes crawled as quickly as possible.

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Low-Risk Link Building Technique

Start a blog: Your life is a story. Building a blog is extremely easy,
and if you are able to find a way to differentiate yourself, you will have
a limitless supply of link opportunities. Find something that you think
other people (not just yourself) will find interesting and share it with
the world. (Creating a business blog is similarly helpful if you are part
of a large organization. Getting content approved adds some
bureaucratic headaches, but it can be worth it if you stick with it. An
honest, insightful blog about the inside of a corporation is relatively
rare and is rewarded with quality links.)

Help bloggers: Bloggers are great link suppliers. It is a natural part
of their job. You can tap into this by helping them find the information
they need. The easiest way to do this is to find recent articles where
the blogger has made a mistake and send a polite e-mail with the
correction. Many times the blogger will choose to link back to you out
of appreciation.

Sign up for HARO (Help A Reporter Out): Similarly, you can help
online reporters do their job. This service connects reporters and
content producers with the people who can answer their questions.
You can be the expert they are looking to interview.

Contact business partners: If you are running a business, you will
undoubtedly have business partners. These partners will likely have
links. Consider taking a link rather than payment for a simple task
with a partner.
You can make this process easier by providing customers with the
code to do this.

Ask customers: No one likes your products more than your
customers (after all, they paid money for them). Many times these
customers have websites or blogs of their own. Try including a polite
request for a link in receipts and confirmation e-mails.
Ask friends and family: Just like your customers, your friends and
family likely have websites or blogs. These are some of the easiest
links to acquire because the providers are likely to be more willing to
help than general strangers.

Find links that your competition has and request linkers to
consider your site: This tactic is good for two reasons.
First, the links are easy to find with tools like HubFinder and
SEOmoz PRO.
Second, these links will be considered relevant by the search
engines because they are all from the same Internet
neighborhood.

Write articles and submit them to content aggregators: Many
services online need content. Specifically, I have heard good things
about About.com. After building up a reputation at these websites,
feel free to include some links to your website when relevant.

Offer to write a guest blog post: In my experience, professional
bloggers always feel the need to post new content. Many times, they
are willing to post other people’s guest posts to fill this need. This
has the benefit of building your credibility and link profile.
Do charity work and ask for a link in return: This is a win-win
situation. You get to help a charity with its website and you get a link
from a trusted domain.

Link building infographic.

Code a simple calculator: Calculators are deceptively simple to
code in either JavaScript or PHP. Pick an equation that you know
(human years to dog years, weeks to plant petunias, time to cook the
perfect turkey based on size, price of a car after depreciation, and
so on), build or contract someone to build the calculator, and
optimize the page so it ranks for the term. People love to link to
helpful resources.

Write a how-to: Odds are you know how to do something that other
people don’t. Be it sewing a button, or optimizing engines, how-tos
are great link getters.

Write a tutorial: Similarly, to how-tos, tutorials are excellent link
getting sources. Tutorials tend to be more technical than how-tos,
which is great because more technical readers are more likely to
link.
Make a screencast: Screencasts are the lazy man’s tutorial. They
are easy to create (Quicktime 10 has a screen recorder built in) and
even easier to consume. Also, due to their file size, they are more
likely to be linked to rather than flat out copied.
Make or host a funny video: This is easy to do and has the
potential to spread virally.

NOTE Don’t host the video on Vimeo or YouTube, because you won’t
get the link benefits. Instead, sign up for Amazon Web Services
(relatively inexpensive cloud computing) and host it yourself. Make sure
that the video is embedded on a URL you own, not one owned by
Amazon. (Amazon doesn’t need any more links.)

Make or host a funny image: Making and/or hosting an image is
easier than doing the same for a video. Many reasonably priced
hosting plans can handle the bandwidth, and for many funny pictures,
the image editing quality doesn’t matter.

Create a best-of list: Even better than creating your own picture or
video content is finding the best that other people have made. This is
better for two reasons. First, it is easier because you don’t have to
come up with original ideas.

 Second, “best-of” lists attract more links
because they are more useful than a simple list of resources.
Interview someone noteworthy: If you have the resources to get
in contact with someone famous or someone with a particularly
interesting job or experience, you have the makings of a great blog
post or article. These are great link sources because they tend to
rank for the term that makes them interesting and thus drive a lot of
traffic of potential linkers.

Aggregate helpful content: Have you encountered a problem that
after a lot of effort you were able to fix? 
Aggregate helpful content: Have you encountered a problem that
after a lot of effort you were able to fix? If you have, post the solution
online! It is surprising how many times people reinvent the wheel
simply because the solution to the given problem is not readily
available.

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E-Branding

The 5-Minute Brand Reputation Audit

When it comes to branding on internet,we have to differentiate ourselves
from plenty of other brands.Internet marketing is giving us chance to find
right and simply way for making brand of our site.






Many years ago branding was simply the act of marking one’s cattle with a unique identifier so that they could quickly be sorted and would be difficult to steal.
 With the arrival of big corporations and the maturation of
marketing, branding has evolved into something much more. Today,
companies like Pepsi Cola spend hundreds of millions annually on their
branding and marketing campaigns. With the popularity of search engines
growing, SEO and Pay Per Click (PPC) have started to gain ground in
these budgets. The following is a guide on how to perform an online brand
reputation audit, which is necessary for measuring these growing
resources.

Using the Brand Search Engine Result Page

Whenever I see top search query lists, I am always surprised at how often
people search for exact domain names or brands. It is for this reason that
the brand search engine result page (SERP) is so useful. The following
actions can help you identify what improvements might be necessary for a
branded term search result page.

Search for the brand name in the major search engines.

To complete the first action item all you need to search for is the brand
name of the given company. This will bring up a results page with about
10 results and some ads. This is one of the most important pages about
the given company, and many otherwise smart company executives don’t
pay attention to it. For many searchers, this will be the front door to
information about the company. Google knows this fact and has crafted
algorithms to take advantage of it. Upon analyzing the SERP for a wellknown
brand name, you may notice some seemingly unusual results. This
is because Google’s brand-specific algorithms intentionally show more
diverse results than they do for a normal search. These results tend to
include reviews and websites that share opposing views.

An ideal brand search result page means no matter which link
searchers click, they end up on a company-approved page.
The main domain would have Sitelinks, a group of Google chosen
links to primary sections of the given website in search engine
results. 

The end result of a result page like this is that no matter which link the
searchers click, they end up on a company-approved page. Although this
isn’t necessarily the best experience for the user, it is the best business
tactic.
Search all of the following and identify potential problems
(this is not a comprehensive list):

Brand Name Sucks
Brand Name Scam
Brand Name Cult
Brand Name Problems
Brand Name Issues
Brand Name Support
Brand Name Broken
Brand Name Error
Brand Name Review

The second and last action item on this list requires you to run a series of
directed search queries to see if you can identify any problematic
webpages. This list is not comprehensive and is only intended to be a
starting point. I use this list in my work and customize it to my clients
based on their product or service. (For example, if I was working for an
oil company, I would run queries for topical negative queries such as
“Brand Name environmental impact”) This step is important both
because it helps identify problematic sites early and because it mimics
behavior that a skeptical user might do. Remember, if potential
customers read even one negative review about a given company, they
are significantly less likely to buy its product regardless of the source of
the content.

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Useful Search Engine Querie

The search engines have been gracious enough to give us special search
commands for understanding their vast amount of data. The commands
that I find the most useful are:

cache:
site:

inurl:
intitle:
+-|

These commands, when used in combination, are powerful and
sometimes prove essential for diagnosing SEO problems. To the search engineers that created these commands, I send my sincerest gratitude.
You make my job much easier. (It should be noted that I have intentionally
left out the search engine commands that I don’t use. Because of this
decision, I recommend that you don’t treat this as a comprehensive list. It
details only the commands that I find essential for SEOs.)
These commands are useful for filtering search results to show only
pages that contain certain attributes. This means if you find a webpage
that has an issue like a misspelling in a title tag, you can use the search
engines to find all of the occurrences of this on your website and use this
information to fix the problem.

Another example of this is for checking the effectiveness of keyword
targeting. It is a common SEO problem to have multiple pages targeting
the same keyword. This is a problem because then all of these pages must
compete with each other for rankings rather than the best practice that
would have all of these pages combined and one more powerful page
competing for rankings. 

You can query a search engine in the following ways to yield some useful
data points:

Normal search: What is the best way to see how the search
engines will act? Run a normal search. According to my web history I
search using Google about 17 times a day. This does not include the
internal searches I do on Google properties like Gmail and YouTube
or the searches I do on my phone. I have found that the best way to
better understand Google is to continually and constantly use it. After
all, our goal as SEOs is to improve our clients’ rankings. What better
way to do this than studying search results every day?

Quotes: As I am sure you are aware, putting search queries in
quotes limits results to exact matches. This extremely helpful when
you want to see if a random page is in the Google index. Simply find
a random sentence in the content, wrap it in quotes, and search for it.
If it is long enough, odds are it has only been written once on the
Internet and should return only one result. If it doesn’t appear it means
it isn’t indexed. If it appears more than once, it means your client has
duplicate content issues.

Cache: Cache is a copy of the file Googlebot downloads when it
visits a website. As an SEO, this information is extremely important
because it shows you exactly what Google sees. This is especially
useful for determining crawl rate and diagnosing potential geolocation
issues.


When viewing the cached version of a website, try clicking the link
labeled “Text-only version.” This shows a much better representation of
what Google sees. I can’t count how many hidden links I have found by
using this trick.

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SEO Copywriting Tips (infographic)

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