Notes from the Hive

Backlinks are often overlooked as a critical part of getting your website to rank well organically. Search engines use a multitude of factors when rating a page for relevancy in response to a search query and backlinks are one of those factors – a rather critical one actually.

Search engines often use the number of backlinks that a website has for determining that website's search engine ranking. Google's description of their PageRank system notes “Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B.”

With this bit of awareness, a zillion gurus and companies emerged promising to deliver tons of links back to your website for a monthly fee. Seems simple enough. Lay your money down and sit back and wait for inbound links and SERP success. Well as soon as these internet wheeler-dealers figure something out Google is already 10 steps ahead of them. So before you plunk your money down, investigate thoroughly what you are going to get for your hard earned cash. Google does not like link spam.

What Google wants to know is: Are the links relevant to your business? Are the sites that are linking to you reputable? What you need to know is: will a rapid linking campaign trigger a negative message to Google that you are buying credibility rather than earning it?

I am not a backlink guru and I don’t offer backlink acquisition as part of our business model. I do study the topic and stay abreast of the trends in order to offer my clients some best practice advice and assistance. So I am pleased to share with you some suggestions and information.

First, I recommend that you check your backlinks on a regular basis. There are a few websites that offer a free backlink checking service and here are two that I use.
http://www.iwebtool.com/backlink_checker
http://www.backlinkwatch.com/

A neat feature of iwebtool is that it also gives you the page rank for the site that is linking back to you. I find that backlinkwatch often provides more linking data than iwebtool.

Another way to check your backlinks – free of charge – is to use Google. Google can be searched using link:yourdomainname.com but Google only shows a small number of links pointing to a site even though it credits more backlinks than it shows. You can use this same feature “link:__” on Yahoo as well. There are some sophisticated paid services but for starting out these free sites should do just fine.

Obtaining valued and authoritative links should be part of your ongoing marketing efforts. What determines the value of a backlink? When both sites have content geared toward the keyword topic the backlink is considered relevant and believed to have strong influence on the search engine rankings of the webpage granted the backlink. Search engines consider this an editorial vote. An example would be if your website content and keywords are centered around “software solutions” and you have a backlink from “softwarestandards.org” (I am making this up) then that is both a valued link and has higher credibility as a result of its standing as a “.org” site.

Even more impressive to a search engine is anchor text backlink. Anchor text is the descriptive labeling of the hyperlink as it appears on a webpage. Search engine bots (i.e., spiders, crawlers, etc.) examine the anchor text to evaluate how relevant it is to the content on a webpage. So if we go back to our example above and on the make believe site softwarestands.org there is a paragraph that uses the term ‘software solutions’ and that is a hyper link back to your site, well you have just earned yourself big points with the search engine-rating machine.

Other sources of valued backlinks are professional associations, respected media with press releases, business directories such as chambers and the BBB and even some Internet directories.

One directory that had an excellent reputation is DMOZ, or the "Open Directory". There is a lot of controversy with DMOZ and its value, but that aside, it is still worth submitting your site. Be patient as it takes a long time to get listed. Best of the Web (BOW) is another valued site to list your website with and don’t forget the Google and Yahoo directories.

Most are free, many are not, and some require membership so factor these expenses into your budgeting.

Another way to build backlinks is to use Social Bookmarking sites. Some examples are StumbleUpon, Digg, and Reddit.

Also pay attention to Rating sites such as Yelp – these not only offer backlinks, but as a business you will want to pay attention to any positive or negative feedback and respond quickly. To viewers this will reflect positively on you, and besides it’s just good customer service.

Backlinks are easier than ever now to obtain by engaging on social media sites and blogging, so be sure to incorporate these into your overall marketing strategy. What is important to note, using social media plays a strong factor as search engines are now rating real time search and recency of a link with more weight.

So if you are going to invest in on line marketing you might want to consider this as a higher priority than obtaining oodles of irrelevant links from link farms.

Let me know your thoughts and feel free to share some of your linking strategies and successes.

I spent last evening at an EONY event where Gary Vaynerchuk spoke. I really wanted to see Gary speak, as he is a marketing person that I respect, primarily because he is a trailblazer and mold breaker. Second reason I really wanted to go is because after reading his book CRUSH IT I knew his vision and wisdom were not to be missed.

Gary’s energy is a turbo boost of reality delivered in passionate and caring verbal smack downs. I absolutely love it! He has a get real attitude about understanding and verbalizing what is in play now and although it might be hard to hear, it is the bucket of ice water that we all need flying in our face.

I want to share some of the points that he made so that you can understand the brilliance of what he has to share. I know that you may not want to hear some of these and may not agree with some of his views but maybe it will sink in enough that you can begin to incorporate this into your marketing and businesses. Also please understand that I am paraphrasing but I am making an honest effort to share his message.

1. SEO is dead and a waste of time. I know that seems hard to believe and you might not just disagree but be bewildered by such a statement and yet if you look at what is going on in the SEO world, it is in complete turmoil. Read my blog post on Google Caffeine.

2. Customer expectations are increasing and customer service is the game changer. Gary speaks to the amazing story of ZAPPOS and how that model of creating a culture where customer service is first and foremost built a business of an unlikely solution – selling shoes on line – to a billion dollar business in less than 9 years.

3. Word of mouth converts 80% while traditional marketing converts at 12%. I have not personally researched those statistics but from my own business experience I know that I close sales faster and more often when it is a referral over any marketing efforts.

4. Small Town Rules is a phrase he used repeatedly. Get up close and personal with your customers and prospects. Treat them well; remember their name, respond, share, and CARE.

5. The Internet is dominating. If you are marketing then you want to be where the eyeballs are and they are on the Internet. He gave an example that if you buy ad space on bus stops; look at the people walking by or standing waiting for a bus. They aren’t even looking up – they are on their mobile phones either emailing, texting, tweeting or doing facebook updates.

6. Mobile marketing has started to take hold and he projects that this is the next big play. This comes as no surprise and yet designs and applications are only now just beginning to emerge to address this issue. Just as interesting, no one ever asks us ‘so how does my website look on a mobile device?’ And few if any folks are getting ready for mobile marketing and advertising in their planning. Yet, look around you and what do you see? That’s right – everyone is on his or her mobile phones.

7. Content – create content daily. He urges that you follow your passion and your brand DNA. If you are a good writer, write a blog daily and write anywhere and everywhere you can. If you are better at talking then it is time for you to start a podcast or video blog. He assures the audience that it is not about the polish it is about the passion.

He passionately urges everyone to start now building your content. He notes that this shift is being underestimated and that if you don’t go out and get it – someone else will!

8. He is driven by gratitude. Be grateful for everything, be open enough to share your gratitude and make it apart of your brand experience any way that you can and instill this into your corporate culture. Not insincere gratitude but genuine passion to care for the customer more than anything else.

And so I suggest you buy his book CRUSH IT and check out his blogs – he has several. Just Google his name, Gary Vaynerchuk and you will find them all. Let it sink in and then pull out your keyboard or your flip cam and get started right away.