I find myself often on the hunt for that one great link. Many people simply do not realize the impact one text link could have on your website, its natural search ranking, and trust and authority of your website as viewed by the search engines.
Wherever I am around people — community functions, industry events, sporting events, ANYWHERE pretty much—a constant thought is “Hmm, I wonder if this person could help me get a link, or do they know someone who can help me get a link.” It is unfortunate but Matt Cutts is right: the best links are not bought or sold or gained by email spam. They are ones you network long and hard to get, and they are not easily accessible.
Pardon me for a moment to clarify:  we all know that one link is not going to make your website the next Amazon.com. But what this one great link can do is make everything else you have done to your website become much more important.  If you get the one great link you have been looking, for guess what happens? Every other link to your site typically becomes more valuable, every updated title tag on your website becomes that much more relevant, those hours of perfecting your internal link structure all seems to be coming together.
These great links are not easy to find, even a creative full time link builder like myself can typically only produce a few of these per month, and this includes 12 years of experience, and 12 years of relationships. The average webmaster might only find one link like this per year! Some webmasters  pass up link opportunities because usually it comes with a bunch of red tape, prerequisites and potentially gift giving to obtain it, so they procrastinate and just say no way. (And if you run across one of these great links and aren’t going to jump through the hoops to get it, email me, I will take it. )
However the value can be supreme: I have personally seen one link take a website in a somewhat competitive niche to number one after being in place for a period of 120 days. I’m not saying there’s a magic bullet, but the effects of your hard link building work pay off when powerful links come into place. Also this link continues to pay dividends as it grows more important over time.
You probably now want to know what this great text link looks like, so when it comes around you will be prepared to grab it. It will be from a website that has been online since the late 80’s usually around 1986-1988. It will have a minimum of a Google Tool Bar Page Rank of 7 but typically the great ones are PR8’s +. It will be in the top 5000 in Alexa Ranking and have VERY few external links. As for backlinks, it should have so many that no one could possibly count, but if you do a link:www.thegreatsitelocation.com you will see Google showing somewhere in the 10K range and in Yahoo you will see 250K plus.
It may not be on a directly related website, as I am sure there are not many PR8 websites on the net selling baby strollers, but you can work around this when it comes to a fantastic link. These are not the only prerequisites of course, you’ll need your own intuition built from your own link building experience, and I usually have a gut feeling when I find one. What any SEO will fully agree on is a link that fits this profile is very valuable and if you are serious about your internet marketing, then you better get out your check book or your scissors (so you can cut through all the red tape that is going to be involved) and get this link.
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Hope everyone’s having a great weekend, short and sweet post today of 7 tips to become a better SEO.
A search engine optimization specialist is a dime in a dozen nowadays, everyone from designers, developers to your marketing executives are calling themselves SEOs. There is a misconception that been an SEO simply involves some knowledge of how search engines work and getting links.
1. SEO for glory not for money. What separates the good from the bad is that great SEO work for the results. If your sole focus to become an SEO is for the money, than my last 9 tips will seem like a nuance. Great SEO work for the glory of the results. The pride of seeing their hard work bare fruition is something most people don’t understand, sure you shouldn’t get too emotionally attached to your work. But the driving force of good SEO is their passion to deliver the results.
2. Willingness to learn. No great SEO will claim they know everything there is about search engine optimization, those that do should be questioned about their knowledge and proof be shown. SEO has been and in my opinion will continue to be an evolving industry. As the world demands better search results from search engines, companies like Microsoft and Google will continue to change their services to fill the demand. It is a pre-requist for any SEO to constantly educate themselves. A simple question to ask when hiring an SEO. ( what publications, blogs, websites do they frequent and contribute to )
3. Willingness to share. SEO is a community based industry, a lot of work comes from referrals. And if you are unwilling to share your ideas with others and join discussions. You will find yourself a very lonely SEO with no work. I am not implying that to divulge your company secrets or all your knowledge to the world, once you become part of the community and build solid relationships with other SEO’s that you trust, this is where sharing of ideas can really bring great benefits.
4. Under sale, over deliver. We have all come across the loud mouth, Cr*p talkin salesmen that promise the world but can’t deliver the product. Don’t be that person, if you are in a client facing role, a great SEO presentation will include facts, accurate projections and great presentation skills. Always be honest with your clients when dealing with deliverables and results, sure most client won’t understand what it is exactly us SEO’s do but a great SEO should have the ability to ‘dumb’ down the answers. Be conservative in your traffic projections because when you over deliver results, everyone is happy.
5. Develop your analytical skills. A great SEO needs to possess an analytical mind, be able to gather data from different sources and combine / analysis the data to determine a favourable outcome. How can you perform an accurate keyword analysis, traffic projection or simply how many backlinks to acquire if you don’t have good analytical skills.
6. Learn to use these tools. Your job as an SEO will often require you to use these programs. Don’t rely on sys admins or designers to do the work, otherwise you could be waiting a long time, SEO is a time dependent service. The quicker you start, the faster you will see results.
7. Develop your creative mind. No one likes a robot or a drone, SEO is a creative process that requires you to create solutions for many different clients in different markets. If you are a freelance or inhouse SEO, having a creative mind will help you with your sales pitch, if you can consistently put forward new ideas to your clients that will increase their traffic, they will love you for it. Ideas can be big or small, such as these simple creative link-building concept.
I hope you have enjoyed these tips and have taken away some ideas to help you on your SEO journey. As always, if you agree or disagree with my views, please share them in the comments.
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Ask yourself, why are there so many wannabes in the SEO industry and why do they appear to be a brainless army of zombies dwelling in the realm of repetitive and low value activity.
Think about all the blog commenting, forum signatures, cheap and fluffy article distribution, countless directories and paid reviews. The answer could be in the fact that a lot of these processes seem very easy to replicate.
Let’s look at online directories. There used to be a few, fairly well moderated, carrying a reasonable link value. Naturally some genius thought –
‘ Hey, why don’t we make more directories and give ourselves more links!? ‘
Soon after that, link directories were popping up like mushrooms after rain. What did search engines do next? Devalue! Great. Thanks guys.
The above mentioned scenario replicated in countless other cases, and all of them exhibited one common element – they were easy to do, and easy to replicate.
Let’s face it, there is no long-term shortcut to easy SEO results. Instead, we can hope occasionally catch a wave of a new strategy that search engines have not caught on yet, or we can choose to do it the other way – the hard way. The reason this strategy is worth adopting is the fact that people are lazy and only true professionals will bother with hard work and high quality. By eliminating about a ninety percent of spammers leaves us with true SEO professionals. Wouldn’t you want to belong to that category? The crop of the cream!
These are just a few key elements that characterize a unique link building strategy and all of them result in contributing to the quality of the web content. Not all links are difficult to get this way, at Dejan SEO we’ve been using these methods to stay ahead of the competition and it has paid off.
It’s not only our clients who benefit here but also our staff who are able to bypass the monotony of link building and enjoy their daily tasks knowing that every next day brings a new challenge.
Please comment on this post by sharing your creative building strategy or experience with other readers. Share this post http://bit.ly/TJV6g
This is a Li’l Engine guest post by Dejan Petrovic of Dejan SEO – Follow Dejan on Twitter if you like to get more tips on link building strategies.
Next time you perform a search in Google, note how many results appear on page one?
Out of millions of hits there are only 10 results on page one. as research indicates 89% will click page 1 results. and 4% on page 2, 6% page 3.
In the world of Search Engine Optimization competitor research plays a very important part to a successful campaign. By knowing who is on the top 10 result, and digging deeper to find out how they achieved this, you will be able to budget and plan your campaign. To be on page 1, you have to beat the other 10 results.
In the world of online business, knowing your competition is the key to success. From knowing who your top competitors are, why they are at the top and finding out when a new competitor appears will help your business grow and prosper.
Knowledge is power, here are some great tools I use on a daily basis to help my clients and to spy on my competitors. I will be covering each tool in separate posts to keep reading at a minimum.
My company ( Clear-A-Face ) sales a fast acting acne removal cream, recently a new competitor ( Super Clear-A-Face ) has launched a similar product claiming to remove acne twice as fast. Been a smart business man, I want to know what this new competitor is up to and how they are marketing the product.
Imagine if you had a personal assistant that was scouring the internet for information about your competitors 24hrs a day, 7 days a week. No overtime pay, no holiday leave and best of all , they work for free and deliver their research to you without fail, everyday.
Google Alerts
This is Google Alerts. A free service provided by Google which delivers to you in the latest customised topics from ;
Use this great tool to gather intelligence about your competitors products, their online marketing efforts and the markets interests on your competitors products. There are of course many other websites that offer a similar service, but to be able to see the news from Google’s eyes is great for SEO.
Using Google alerts I can setup as many campaigns based on keywords related to my competition.
Google News alerts will let me know if my competitor appears on major news networks or official press releases
Google Blogs alerts for possible product reviews by their customers, or any new competitors on the scene.
Google web search alerts to inform me of their SEO / online marketing efforts. I will see when their new website has appeared in Google’s index, any new pages they may have added, websites selling their products, websites possibly been used for link building purposes and research websites / forums dealing with acne.
I can also find out what products are gaining popularity by following discussions and forums found in my alerts.
You can really build a great overview of your competitor’s SEO and marketing strategy, the markets interests and awareness in your competitors products. Any interesting alerts should be bookmarked and filed for reference. After a few weeks you should have enough data to make a calculated decision whether this competitor poses a serious threat.
If you are reading this, stop. Click here and setup a Google alert campaign for your own keywords. Currently I have Google alerts tracking keywords such as SEO, SEM, search engine optimization, search engine marketing, Google Caffeine, Caffeine, Goobinghoo, lil engine, li’l engine, little engine.
I really can’t stress how useful this tool is, if you are already a Google Alerts user let us know how you have benefited.
As always if you have any questions feel free to post them in the comments section, or discuss it on our forum. Please pass on this article if you found it to be useful. ( http://bit.ly/Gripp )
In the next few posts I will be introducing competitor research tools like Google Ad Planner, Real-time search monitoring and link analysis, keyword scraping tools.
Follow us on twitter or subscribe to our RSS and get notified of new posts.
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I was asked by a friend today if posting comments on blogs with no follows is a good way to build links for SEO. When I asked him what other strategies he had for acquiring links he mentioned this was going to be primary source of link building!
Just like the good old days where keyword stuffing and meta tag stuff used to work quiet well, search engines and especially Google are now catching on to comment spamming.
Links in comments are now devalued regardless whether or not if they have no follows. This is a direct response to the huge amount of spam comments now appearing on blogs, if you have ever ran a blog of your own, you will know what I mean, even the most obscure, hard to find blogs on the strangest topics can attract spam comments.
Its actually not hard for search engines to determine if a link is from the comments section of a blog, a quick look at the code in wordpress.
<ol class=”commentlist”>
<li id=”comment-1372″>
<a id=”comments”>
Not hard for search engines to look for these tags and devalue the link-juice within them is it?
While comments are no longer useful for link-juice / reputation passing, they are still useful for the following reasons;
Driving qualified traffic
Lets say you own a fishing / lure store and you come across a blog post from someone complaining he isn’t catching any fish. This would be a perfect opportunity for you to leave a comment with fishing tips and suggest some lures he could use; at the end of the comment, be honest and say you own a fishing store where they purchase these products, with one link to your website, not ten!
You already have the target audience thanks to the blog post, now its simply putting together a well constructed comment.
Be mindful how you structure the reply, comments that look like a cut and paste job or advertising fluff will be deleted. Trust me, these type of comments are not hard to spot.
Ask yourself, are you providing any added value to the post, if a friend came to you with a complaint that he isn’t catching any fish. Are you going to give him a bunch of random lure names without telling him why he should use them? Of course not, be conversational. don’t write your comments like robots, because they will be treated like one.
Quicker Indexing
Comment links can also be used to get your website indexed quicker by search engines, if your website is new and not showing up in Google index; it is most likely in Google’s Sandbox.
A method I have found to be useful is using blog comments on popular blogs to naturally drive Googlebot to your sand boxed website.
Follow the advise above with comment structure and don’t spam. You will find once you have a few decent comments approved on blogs, it will move out of the sandbox faster, in most cases I have found this process to be faster than manually submitting your website to Google.
( Don’t forget to setup a Google webmasters account, if your sites not been found it could be other issues causing it, don’t assume its just been sandboxed, I will be posting about Google Webmaster Tool soon, stay tuned )
Making Connections
Blog commenting is one of the simplest form of Social Media Marketing! Good comments generate discussion, and this is what every blog owner wants. Subscribe to comment updates via email so you know when someone else has responded to your comment, this is where you can really engage with your target audience and offer your services / products.
Good comments can still land you juicy backlinks, most blog owners appreciate good comments and will reward you with a link from an actual post perhaps mentioning how your fishing lure has helped him catch more fish!
Not only do you get a backlink from an actual post which would pass on the link juice, you have just gained yourself a loyal customer that will potentially refer others to your website.
So hopefully you will take my advice and stop comment spam once and for all on the internet!
But seriously, blog commenting is a great internet marketing tool, but for link building purposes they are clearly not as useful as they used to be. If you are solely focused on an SEO campaign, cross off blog comments please!
A compilation of the most newsworthy, ground breaking, interesting and useful stories that matters to the search and marketing industry, sourced from websites, blogs and tweets. Can’t wait for the weekly round-up? Follow us on Twitter @little_engine for the latest on search and marketing.
Google announces public testing for the new search infrastructure on Google webmaster blog.
Search quality engineer Matt Cutts updates and answers questions on Caffeine
Will Google Caffeine effect Google Local Listings – some thoughts and comparisons
Lil Engine evaluates and tests Google Caffeine –Â Exclusive overview and comparison
GooBingHoo.com – Compare side by side search results from Google, Yahoo, Bing and now also with Caffeine.
20 free keyword research tools – Excellent list of free to use keyword suggestion / volume comparison research tools.
FireFox Addon: Monitor the Page Size with View Dependencies – via SEJ
Optimize your crawling & indexing – Good tips provided by Google Webmasters blog , slideshow and text wrap up
Matt Cutts: Straight from Google – What You Need to Know about Word Press Optimisation, very good video for WordPress users that want to learn some simple optimisation tips [Video] 45 min
Small Google PageRank update – Mostly changes in internal pages, SEO’s reporting mostly drops in Pagerank for internal pages, especially those sites with a large index.
Matt Cutts on nofollow – The debate continues with this video with Jen Lopez ( SEOMoz ) and Matt Cutts ( Google ) @ SES San Jose 2009
Why are .com sites ranking highly in UK SERPs? – Matt Cutts on Google Webmaster YouTube
Pie chart of component’s of Google’s algorithm – via SEOMoz.org
Pie chart of component’s of Google’s algorithm
Google Adwords Conversion Rates Don’t Vary Much with Ad Position from Chief Economist at Google, Hal Varian.
Google Adwords – Sponsored search ads now displaying closer to organic results. Keep track of CTR’s in the next day or so. Advertisers reporting a 5 – 10 % increase in clicks.
Google Adwords – Googler’s have reported different text size / type and location changing on Sponsored Results Ads. Appears Google is doing quite a lot of A / B testing on Adwords.
Google Adwords – New Search Ads Quality Guide , Google adds some pretty useful resources to their Adwords help section, such as: how quality score affects your ranking and how quality score affects how much you pay.
Is Your Business Ready for Online Marketing? – Great 60min video of Warren Lanier, CEO of Bridge Point Marketing and David Kamatoy. Some really useful tips for business owners and entrepreneurs, covering the differences between traditional advertising, SEO and social media marketing.
10 Really Tangible Ways To Measure Social Media Success – nice tips on measuring the success of social media marketing campaigns with sites such as Twitter and facebook.
United Breaks Guitars Song 2: Yes, Dave is back with another YouTube music video on his broken guitar. Will he get as much exposure as his first hit? I doubt it, this song is pretty weak and really doesn’t bring anything new or fresh to his first song . Maybe my conspiracy theory is true, maybe Dave is working on a Viral campaign for United!
A new visualized web search engine, sleagle.com, was born today – 08/18/2009 : Join the Discussion
Thanks for checking out the first ever Li’l Engine weekly search roundup! I’d love to get some feedback on my writing style and also the topics covered, perhaps you may have more to add to this roundup? or want to see a particular topic covered more, let me have it 🙂 You can contact me directly via my personal twitter account or just leave a response in the comments.
The buzz within the search marketing industry is torn between 2 of this quarters biggest announcements:
1. First been the search partnership of Bing ( Microsoft ) and Yahoo! ( more )
2. Secondly Google has announced a major update to its search infrastructure code named #caffeine
[ don’t forget add our RSS or Twitter to get notified when part 2 is released ]
On August 10th, the Google Webmasterblog announced public testing of their new #caffeine search quoting :
For the last several months, a large team of Googlers has been working on a secret project: a next-generation architecture for Google’s web search. It’s the first step in a process that will let us push the envelope on size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness and other dimensions. The new infrastructure sits “under the hood” of Google’s search engine, which means that most users won’t notice a difference in search results. But web developers and power searchers might notice a few differences, so we’re opening up a web developer preview to collect feedback.
The caffeine update is been reported as a complete rewrite of Google’s search infrastructure – lets check out what this means;
The new infrastructure sits “under the hood” of Google’s search engine, which means that most users won’t notice a difference in search results
Yes most definitely, although Google is stating otherwise ( for now ). When we first heard about #Google #Caffeine I posted this question to Matt Cutts from Google.
john chen August 10, 2009 at 7:47 pm
Hi Matt,
Been sussing this out all morning, from the Google blog and your post its seems there are algo changes / updates on the current sandbox. I’ve noticed some definate changes in the how the SERP is different in the sandbox in my play this morning.
Could you confirm this?
Matts response was:
john chen and Daniel Sterling, most of the changes are in things like our core indexing, so there’s less changes for things like rankings. Lots of users won’t notice a big difference
From our own research and you can verify this yourself in the #caffeine sandbox, this is simply not the case! There are major differences in Caffeine SERP that will ultimately effect users, SEO and most of all companies that depend on their search positions.
These changes come from our initial research in comparing a sample data of searches, and by no means represent a concrete conclusion. Google caffeine is still under development, as such the algorithm and infrastructure will change and alter in the near future. These are just preliminary conclusions for your consideration ( food for thought ) and therefor I recommend that you make no immediate changes to your SEO strategies, but simply keep the above in mind.
Google has released #caffeine for general public testing here
If you are after a direct comparison tool between #caffeine and current #google search Try http://www.goobinghoo.com/
Goobinghoo - side by side SERP comparison
You can easily compare the search results side by side, but don’t forget to sign out of your Google account. ( otherwise you may see your own preferred results )
Part 2 of this Google Caffeine update post will expand further into our findings above and with real data + example comparisons, as well as some SEO tips that you can perform today.
Did you find this post informative? Have anything further to add? Please leave a response in the comments section.
I am honored to introduce myself as your new content editor and go-to guy for the revamp Li’l engine website and community.
During the next 6 months I will be working with top designers, programmers and writers together to bring you a better browsing experience, more SEM / SEO and internet marketing related news and online tools to help boost your productivity and sales.
Our little website is now into its 7th year, during this period we have evolved and grown alongside the SEM and internet marketing industry, which has now grown into a 23 billion dollar monster.
“They say a year in the Internet business is like a dog year.. equivalent to seven years in a regular person’s life. In other words, it’s evolving fast and faster.”
– Vint Cerf
As we start the 3 quarter of 2009 and well into the global financial crisis, the SEM industry continues to grow steadily as more corporations and business see SEM as a cheaper and more effective way of advertising.
While a major new player in the internet advertising market is breaking out and making businesses and marketers take notice. I am speaking of course about Social Media Marketing.
Lets take a look at some quick stats;
What is interesting from this graph when comparing SEO and Social Media Marketing is that only 8% of marketers counted SEO as not relevant / don’t know, where as 27% answered the same for Social Media Marketing.
This is great news for SEO’s as the market is now almost completely aware of the benefit of SEO, but the stat also introduces an uneducated / uncertain market for Social Media Marketing, perhaps where SEO was 7 years ago, what does this mean?
It means there is potential to convert the 27% of marketers who either don’t know about social media marketing or don’t care into the same 8% for SEO!
I see Social Media Marketing as a great potential for internet marketers in the next 2 – 3 quarters, but to achieve great results we must educate ourselves, the public and in particular the business owners / corporations to the benefits Social Media Marketing and most importantly how it alongside SEO and other internet marketing strategies will combine to generate more business and ultimately increase the bottom-line, more sales and revenue.
The goal of the new Lil Engine website is to continue to bring our readers the most up to date information on SEO and SEM but also to focus on new emerging strategies that are going to shape the future of internet marketing.
Whether you are a seasoned SEO looking for the latest search engine trends or a novice SEO, Li’l Engine will give you the in-depth insight along with clear explanations.
O’dear, I’ve gone and said the D word… Truth be told there are many capable web designers out there that are interested in SEO and internet marketing. Why? Because it is an added value to their clients and employers, designers that can provide a stylish, search engine friendly and conversion driven websites are hard to find, but are desperately needed within the industry.
Are you still wondering what all the fuss is about with internet marketing? Consider my post above, internet advertising is worth $23 billion dollars and growing, can you afford not to educate yourself?
A little knowledge goes a very long way, next time you are approached by an SEO company, you will be armed with a certain amount of knowledge that will help you judge the competency of the SEO and you might just save yourself some $$$ at the same time! Those that are a little adventurous and curious can also try out some of our strategies themselves, the discussion forum will be a great place to network with other business owners and to get advice from seasoned SEO’s.
My name is John Chen, a creative director and accounts manager for a large E-business firm in Brisbane, Australia. My day to day duties include web design, following up on SEO campaigns, traffic and conversion ROI analysis and speaking with my clients whom are generally small to medium business owners.
My background in internet marketing begun by way of fire, a start-up eshop for consumer electronics, I had knowledge in web and graphic design but little knowledge in internet marketing.
It was a steep learning curve to find out why my website wasn’t making any sales, but luckily for me, I had 2 great mentors that were prepared to answer my dumb questions and always pointed me in the right direction. They were Napoleon Pham from evrsoft and Dejan Petrovic from DejanSEO.
But I realize not everybody is as privileged to have access to mentors, this is one of the major motivations that I decided to take on the role as the new editor of Li’l Engine, to help build a community where experts and novices may share and learn.
I am very much looking forward to bringing about the changes in Li’l Engine outlined above as well as chatting and participating in discussions with you on our blog and forum.
In the mean time, please feel free to leave a comment if you have any questions for me or just want to say hi, I would love to hear from some of our regular readers. Alternatively if you want to contact me directly, I can be reached on info [at] johnchen.com.au .
To start following the progress of our development on twitter @little_engine head to
http://twitter.com/little_engine
– John
Charles Darwin has taught us that competition is part of nature. In fact, it’s an integral part of evolution, and drives all of us to come up with creative ways to survive, or even dominate. The same is, of course, true in the context of business. You have to always be aware of what your rivals are doing in order to plot your next move and measure your own success. There are many competitor-analysis tools out there, but there’s one that’s tailor-fit for blogs and other online business, and it’s called Competitous. (more…)
While the world’s economies reel and Wall Street struggles to keep afloat, how will the online world be affected? Whether you’re a pro-blogger, an Internet marketer, or an online retailer, the state of e-commerce is an important barometer (more purchases means more ad spending, and more profit for everyone). Knowing this, E-consultancy came out with its Online Shopping and Credit Crunch Survey Report a while back. Surprisingly, the results show that online spending will suffer less than traditional retail. (more…)
