October is a Good Month for Linking Info

October 2008 is a good month for anyone interested in Link Building for SEO. Three things have caught my attention:

1) A "public secret" for almost year (previously referred to with the codename "carhole"*), SEOMoz has unveiled their flagship SEO product on October 6th. And it's good. In fact, I'll say it's milestone event in the field SEO. It's called linkscape.

2) Google's Announced "Link Week" on their WebMaster Central Blog. Basic, but interesting reading for SEO professionals considering the source.

3) All three Search Engines confirm at an SMX East panel discussion that Links are #1

Here are the details:

SeoMoz's LinkScape:
What is it? Basically, these guys have built an application to save the entire web on some really big hard drives, and then analyze the entire linking structure of the Internet. No Kidding! They've actually tried to recreate the system that Google (and those there search engines) use to index and rank sites but keep so tight to their chests, so that SEOs like us can figure out how to manipulate site rankings better.

They haven't saved the entire Internet (yet), but they do have a database of over 30 billion of the most linked pages on the web. The index is already very similar to the ones used by the major search engines. They're updating the whole thing every three weeks or so, and they say they're working to make it bigger and refresh faster. It's a really useful tool for us because it exposes greater granularity and information about links and link graph based metrics.

Here are a few interesting pieces of Internet linking trivia they've pulled from the data so far:

• Across the web, 58% of all links are to internal pages on the same domain, 42% point to pages off the linking site.

• 1.83% of all links on the web are nofollowed and of these, 61% are external-pointing, while 39% link to pages on their own site. While those percentages may seem small, that's a massive number (~2 billion links) that are leveraging nofollow for link juice "sculpting."

• While 0.08% of pages on the web use the 301 redirect, 0.12% (nearly twice as many) employ 302 redirects. Another 0.005% use the meta refresh.

• About 1.5% of all pages use the meta noindex tag (which is a lot of content the engines don't get to see) and 0.87% of all pages use the meta nofollow tag.

• From our entire index of pages, the median page received about 77 links (both internal and external), while the average page gets 32. If your pages have more than 32 links, congratulations! You're above average :-)

Now that data is interesting, but it's nothing compared to what you get when you analyze your own site compared to your competitors! We're already using it to our client's advantage by:

• Finding the juiciest links of our competitors that we can get, too
  
• Finding out which of the links we've purchased, rented or acquired through any other means have the most value so we can focus on the most effective link building techniques
• Learning which of the links that we have direct control over have the most value so we can channel the Google juice more effectively

Congratulations to SEOMoz on building a great tool.

Google's Link Week
The Google webmaster Tools team decided to declare "link Week" and spill some beans on what they think about links. Here are links to all of the related posts:

• Linking Overview
• Linking Out
• Internal Link Architecture
• Inbound Links
  

Top Three Search Engines Agree: Links are Number one.
During the search engine panel at SMX East, all three search engines concurred that links are the number one indicator for the importance of websites when ranking them: (Another quote from Rand Fishkin's blog for this one):

When asked if links are the primary signal for search engine rankings, the engineers generally agreed that, yes, it probably is. Aaron noted that links are a far less noisy signal than many others, including some forms of on-page keyword use and clicks in the SERPs. Sean from Yahoo! said that while it may not be the "most important signal" by itself, it's more important than, for example, title tags (which SEOs generally agree are critical to the SEO process). There was no mention that links would be fading away anytime soon - or that any competing signals had yet entered the marketplace as a potential usurper.

So Until Next Time, Keep on Linking....

* Carhole is a reference to the simpsons - it's what Moe called Homer's garage in the episode where Homer was running a counterfeit Jeans operation out of his.

Beautiful Visual Link Exploration Tool

Neato. I am not sure where I can across this but it is really cool to play with.

http://walk2web.com/

Just type in a URL and it will give you a visual map of 6 related links. Incoming links are green, outgoing links are blue. Just click on any of those links and it will map the 6 inbound/outbound links for that page. Any links on that page that link back to previous pages will be mapped too.

What a cool way to visualize how neighborhoods are linked together. You could spend hours on this.

You can change the number and ratio of links if you want. I think I'll continue to play with this for a white to see if any real useful process can come out of it. Maybe not, but it is fun anyways.

Search Optimized Online Press Release Case Study

Here's how online media releases (press releases) help your search engine optimization program:

We just completed a project for Wild Apricot redeveloping and relaunching their Membership Management Software web site. As part of a larger search marketing program we planned and wrote a media release announcing the re-launch of their site. We planned and optimized the content and links in the release for their ideal key phrases and distributed it through PR Web.

The goal of a search optimized online media release is a little different from a traditional media release. Traditional releases are intended solely to get the attention of journalists who might be able to write or air a story related to the release. Internet distributed releases can do that, too, but are also intended to be indexed and rank in the popular online news search engines (Google News, Yahoo News) so that consumers searching for news on the topic will find and read the releases directly. The other benefit of online distributed releases - the benefit that helps your search engine optimization program - are the links generated from the release.

Online media releases are generally made available through RSS feeds. There are thousands of web sites that filter and re-publish these feeds on their web site, frequently with the original links intact.

At the highest level of payment through PR Web, it is possible to insert many links into the content and control the link anchor text of each link. If you have well defined key phrases for your search marketing program, this is an ideal opportunity to get links out there on the net that point back to your site with the words you choose.

The final release targeted several high value phrases. The most important phrases to our search optimization campaign, such as membership database management, event management, and association management were linked to appropriate sections of the site using the link anchor text we wanted.

The results? A quick search in Google for a unique phrase in the release shows 350+ pages displaying the press release. A few examples can be found here, here, and here.

Toronto News Release Optimization Success Story

Finally, PR companies are seeing the value in optimizing for the online news search engines:
We just optimized a release for a PR company that is working for a skin care company. This company found us through Google, looking for "Toronto news release optimization". (We are number three if you select 'pages from Canada'... hmmm, I'll have to take another look at that because we can definitely do better there.)

Anyways, this is how it worked:

The first thing we did was research on the 20 or 30 appropriate terms to do wit their press release. Most of the terms are searched less than 10 times per day. One is searched more that 3000 times per day. So we chose the top 3 most searched terms and optimized for those. The release went out yesterday and here are the ranking results so far:

Google.ca News:
"skin care" - position #7
"lip liner" - position #1
"anti-aging" - position #1

Yahoo.com news:
"Skincare" - position #1 and #2
"Lip liner" - position #1 and #2
"Lipstick" - position #4
"Anti-aging" - position #1, #2

I cannot seem to find it in Yahoo Canada yet, which is strange. We'll check again later today. The results overall look very good so far! With the strong search traffic on the terms we chose it should be a huge success. Let's see what the traffic numbers look like in a few days.

If you are sending press releases, I highly recommend news release optimization and submission to Google and Yahoo news. The last release we did for ourselves quadrupled our daily traffic for several days, and we got a few very good leads in the first few days.

Links: How to Get Links for SEO

I checked out Stundubl today and saw he posted a great article on the 12 different types of links and how to get them.

This is actually a more useful article than the 101 ways to get links (from SEO Book) that I blogged about the other day. Here's what I liked in Todd's article:

#1: Authority Links: Going through the Google directory in your niche - duh, what a great idea! I am shocked at myself for not trying this one. It sure beats searching for "keyword phrase + add url, add a site, submit link, submit site, etc". Not that the searching isn't a great method, but the directory method here offers some fast quick hit ideas.

#11: Comment and Profile links: Matt Cutts shows us a cool method of obtaining x-ray vision for no-follow links (It's a hack for Firefox). So it makes sense to use this if you are big on commenting on blogs (a great way to build profile and get backlinks to your blog.)

The other ideas were pretty straightforward, but kudos to Todd for creating a no-nonsense list of the 12 different types of links.

Free Internet Marketing Tool Collection: Part One

I've been finding more and SEO / Internet marketing tools on sites these days, so just for fun I've decided to start a list. I've named this post "Part One" because I am sure there are PLENTY more out there, and I don't want to make this first post an exhaustive list. Here goes:

http://www.urltrends.com
Interesting trending idea upgrade for them to make some money.

http://www.linkhounds.com/link-harvester/
Linkhounds seems to be trying to create an all over linking resource site. Cool that their software is open-source. This requires some more looking in to.

http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/keywords/
Keyword ranking trending. Requires free login, but nice charts.

http://www.marketleap.com/publinkpop/default.htm
Nice link popularity, search engine saturation and keyword ranking tools with many industry benchmarks.

http://www.submitexpress.com/tools.html
Really cool meta tag checker that shows keyword density and tag relevance to page content.

http://www.bruceclay.com/seo/tools.htm
One of the more in-depth keyword density and prominence tool I've seen. The free access link is near the bottom of the page.

If any of my thousands of readers knows of any more, please feel free to add them to the comments. :-)

Update: September 4th: The Big List of SEO Tools:
Ok, these guys at seocompany.ca seem to have the biggest list of all:
http://www.seocompany.ca/tool/18-toolbars.html

SEO: Search Engines to adopt new link tags

Want a laugh? It's about time all of the search engines got together and released some standards on linking that we can all use.

SEO: Link Building in 2006

Aaron Wall posted a great set of tips for link building in 2006 here.

Here's a one I like:

20. Create your own topical directory about your field of interest. Obviously link to your own site, deeplinking to important content where possible. Of course, if you make it into a truly useful resource, it will attract links on its own.

This is still an opportunuty in many industries, but don't underestimate the investment required to make a great quality portal. Our own new business networking events portal, BizNetworkNews.com, increased it's own search engine traffic by 250% last month.

But of course that's nothing to the guy that is making a killing selling Viagra (through affiliate links) because his hilarious Viagra prank ranks number 8 in Google for Viagra, a very, VERY, competitive term due to all of the back links from the Viral nature of his site.

A classic example of link bait that I don't see on Aaron's list.

Don't bother with automated link programs unless you only care about MSN

We found a way to get to the top of MSN very easily by using a program that gets you about 4000 backlinks measured by MSN within a few months.

The service asks you to post a link directory on your site that they populate - and then you get back links from about 5000 other sites using the same program instantly. It takes about 3 months for all of the backlinks to start appearing in a link popularity test. We found the results are really good in MSN, but Google seems to ignore the links altogether. The sites we used it on got good rankings in MSN but no movement in Google at all.

I am starting to think that it actually hurts the Google ranks because Google is smart enough to know that the majority of the sites are 'non-trustworthy' and therefore your links to them hurt you, and their links to you hurt you.

We are taking it off the sites that we are currently using it on and continuing with the more 'white hat' method of manually searching for and requesting good quality, relevant links. It is definitely a lot slower and more labour intensive, but if Google is what you want (which we do) I can't see any other way at the moment.