Above is a recording of the show courtesy of WebmasterRadio.FM and these are just a few tease takeaways from this excellent episode:
Loren Baker: Links should be built "with the mindset these links are going to bring in targeted traffic" not getting a top ranking.
Question: Say a person has a blog and they want to build links but they don't have a lot of time. How would they do that? Loren Baker: Search for authority blog directories like Best of the Web and Bloggeries, and get your blog added to the category most relevant to your service.
Question: If a person doesn't have a blog where should they go to find links for their website? Loren Baker: Best of the Web and the Yahoo Directory are great starting points because they give a little juice AND they provide relevance. Also don't forget the Open Directory Project at DMOZ.org. Look for targeted directories for your vertical. You don't have to have a blog to get a listing that applies great relevance to your site and can potentially offer traffic. You can often find directories by searching in Google or Yahoo for the phrase "submit url" or "add URL".
Question: With so many directories out there how can they all really help and how can you figure out which ones are worth paying for? Loren Baker: There are 100's of thousands of directories but probably only .005% have enough value to warrant a link. So find the directories that have the most appeal by looking at their backlinks. Also check the quality of the sites listed in your target category and see if they are of a high enough quality. If they seem spammy forget the directory because it is highly unlikely to pass on any worthwhile relevance.
Here is an example of the other link building-related topics Loren Baker tackled over the rest of this extended show:
If not directories, where else can people get links?
What problems do people run into getting links?
Learn about Loren's famous "trickle-down link-o-nomics"
How to manage the workload of link building.
And much more.
A big thanks to Loren Baker of Search Engine Journal for being on the show. And a further congrats to Eric Lander of EricLander.com who did a wonderful job on his first episode of SEO 101; Eric is the new co-host on SEO 101 and is sure to add a great deal of value into the future.
Next week we plan on featuring keyword-guru Dan Thies to discuss the process of finding the best keywords to target online.
In the following interview, world renown Internet marketer Ralph Wilson of Web Marketing Today interviews Ross Dunn from StepForth Web Marketing about Reputation Enhancement and how important it is for businesses of every type on the Internet.
At Search Engine Strategies San Jose I had the pleasure of interviewing my friend and mentor Dr. Ralph Wilson. Ralph is one of those amazing people who always seems to stay on top of his formidable workload while managing writers and his well known web site Web Marketing Today.
In this interview I asked Ralph how he keeps on top of his enormous workload while still writing ebooks and articles and as I expected he had some great tips to share.
I met up with Ralph Wilson at the Search Engine Strategies San Jose conference a couple of weeks ago and had a great time as always doing interviews. Ralph Wilson's Web Marketing Today is one of the oldest (since 1995) most respected web marketing resources in the world and as one of Ralph's hand-picked writers for SEO I feel very privileged to work with him.
In the following interview, Ralph and I discuss the advantages of blogging for building valuable links and reputation online.
Note: we had some trouble with the recording device so you might notice Ralph looking sternly at his camera occasionally... that was to make sure it was still recording :-) We had to re-record parts of this interview about 4 times.
Today I was kindly offered the opportunity to participate in Webcology on WebmasterRadio.fm with Jim Hedger and Dave Davies. The discussion we had was all about what it takes to keep rankings high in search engine results after successfully attaining them. Here is a link to the episode on the Webcology page where our show will be archived and to Jim's article on Keeping it Up and here are a few tips from me on the essentials of maintaining rankings:
Keep adding content to your website in the form of a blog or informational pages and where appropriate provide relevant textual links to the pages you want to maintain rankings. Check out our comprehensive tutorial on how to create, market and manage your own blog.
If you write articles for your blog(s) try submitting them to article sites like ezinearticles.com. If your article includes links to your website these external sites will provide link juice to your content and help you maintain visibility.
PRWeb is a great tool for telling the world about your company's accomplishments; see this video interview on link building and publicity with PR Web. By submitting a carefully written press release to PRWeb you can (depending on the service you choose) attain a large number of incoming links. These links will not necessarily provide long term impact because they tend to devalue after a week or two but inevitably you will get additional long-term links out of the process. By the way, if you don't know of a topic to create a blog about consider creating one that just offers company news releases - there is nothing wrong with that.
Submit your blog's RSS feed to the multitude of RSS aggregation sites (news sites) online. These sites will help pump up the visibility of the content you write. This is particularly important if you rarely have time to write new content for your blog because it will give you the most bang for your effort.
Keep in tune with the changes at search engines by monitoring sites like Search Engine Guide, Search Engine Journal, Search Engine Land, and of course StepForth's SEO News Blog. If you hear of a pending or current algorithmic update on a key search engine find out all you can about it and prepare your website to bear the change - if necessary. If you find you aren't sure what to do in response to an algorithmic update just contact a reputable SEO and get their opinion. You can find reputable SEOs in many places but to be sure you know who you are asking do a little digging to find out just how long they have been practicing SEO.
These are just a few tips but they cover the main points that everyone should know about maintaining rankings. If you have any SEO questions just use our Free SEO Questions submission form.
On Feb 28th at SMX West I was fortunate to spend some time with Jeremiah Andrick, Program Manager of Live Search Webmaster Center. To start I let Jeremiah give an introduction to Live Webmaster Tools and soon after we began discussing some of the latest additions to the tools and he gave an inkling that some major stuff is coming down the line. I hope you enjoy the interview because I had a lot of fun doing it. Microsoft is very lucky to have a talented down-to-earth guy like Jeremiah on the team. I am surely going to hit him up for more interviews in the future but he won't get off quite so easily... I will have more pointed questions next time around ;-) This, however, is a great introduction to Jeremiah and the tools that Live Search Webmaster Center provides.
Yesterday I had the good fortune to be invited to speak on the Webcology Webmasterradio.FM radio show with Jim Hedger and Dave Davies about my experience with competitor analysis. The show was a part of a 10 part SEO series where experts in their select field of SEO are invited to discuss their artform. In my case I discussed some of the most interesting tactics involved in competitor analysis and some of the other tactics I didn't have space to cover in the companion article on competitor analysis in the WebProNews Expert's column.
Near the end of the interview, as a final touch, I asked a website analytics analyst by the name of Andres Galdames to come onto the show to discuss the other side of improving website visibility; using website analytics to improve performance of your site instead of focusing on a competitor. In addition, Andres and I touched on how analytics plays a major role in tracking the success of web promotion strategies implemented on a website as a result of a competitor analysis. We had more to discuss at this point but unfortunately Andres lost his connection to the radio show and Jim and Dave wrapped up the show.
All-in-all it was an exciting experience and I look forward to being invited again onto Webcology. A big thanks goes out to Jim Hedger and Dave Davies for the opportunity to discuss competitor analysis - a field I am so passionate about.
The following was the second interview I did with Dr. Ralph Wilson of Web Marketing Today while I was at PubCon Las Vegas. In this interview we discussed the horror stories I have seen over my 10 years of SEO. The focus was on how important it is to involve an SEO in the initial planning of a new website because you never know if you are going to use a technology that may hamper or completely block search engines. A SEO consultant doesn't need much time to tell you if you are on the right track and it will save you a lot of headache down the line.
Back in December I attended the PubCon conference in Las Vegas and I was fortunate enough to meet my friend and Internet celebrity Ralph Wilson for an interview. Ralph has me regularly contributing tutorials and articles to the SEO section of his popular Web Marketing Today website and decided to interview me for a feature video on the website. The competitor analysis interview turned out pretty well I think - thank you Ralph!
The following interview was conducted at PubCon Las Vegas and it focused on StepForth competitor analysis/competitor intelligence services. In hindsight I didn't give much away in the terms of competitive analysis and frankly the interview could have gone better (what with the sun glare and a lil'memory loss). So feel free to view this and then follow it up with my notes below where I will provide a couple examples of the strategies/resources used in our basic and advanced competitor intelligence reports.
Additional Competitor Analysis Tips We provide a listing of our recommended competitor research tools which Mike McDonald kindly previewed the link to but let me give you a few more tips... it is the least I can do if you watched my interview ;-)
Use Technorati to determine the networks that publish your competitors content. Often I identify some great sites that are more than happy to publish the material my client has... which in turn can build valuable links.
Use Compete.com (the one I forgot in the interview) to get a hint of the keywords your competitors may be focusing on and to gauge their success in each one. Please note, however, that I definitely do not recommend accepting everything from Compete.com as writ; accept it with a grain of salt because their intelligence network is far from flawless.
Use OptiLink to create a maximum list of backlinks for each competitor using Yahoo and have the system fetch PageRank and Alexa ratings. Then copy the results into Excel and then sort the results from highest Alexa rating to lowest first and then highest PR to lowest as the secondary sort rule . Now you will have the beginnings of a very useful list of likely respectable sites. Review each to determine which ones may accept your content/links as well.
Note: I sort by Alexa first because Google's paid-link PR penalty has caused many high quality resources to falsely look like low quality ones.
Here is more information on StepForth's SEO research services that focus on competitor analysis.
On the 6th of December at Pubcon Las Vegas I was fortunate enough to speak with Karla and Lacy of PRWeb.com; two wonderful ladies who were running PRWeb's exhibit booth. After a short discussion I decided it was time to put Karla and Lacy in the spotlight. You see I have used PRWeb many times in the past and I have always been impressed by its excellent press release promotion network. PRWeb is the perfect vehicle to get the word out on your new products/services and the circulation of your press release can provide valuable incoming links to your website.
Back in August I wrote an article called "Is Wikipedia Corrupt?" which looked at the concerns caused by controversial editing in the popular Wikipedia online encyclopedia. In the closing section of that article I stressed that Google needed to move away from highlighting Wikipedia in favor of increasing the diversity of its encyclopedic references. In that regard I would like to introduce a great introduction to Citizendium written by Russ McGinn, a Citizendium Editor and former participant at Wikipedia.
Dear Ross,
Responding to your invitation at SiteProNews, I am an author at Citizendium (http://en.citizendium.org.)
We believe the world needs a more reliable free encyclopedia. We are creating a trusted general reference work by giving people a place to work under the direction of experts, and by expecting personal accountability, professionalism and by requiring the use of real names. Our goal is to capture humanity's multivariate understanding of reality, and thereby to paint a maximally broad and detailed portrait of our universe as accurately as we understand it. An indispensable means to this end is the involvement of many experts who will help guide and, ultimately, approve many of our articles. We expect our approved articles to be, in the long run, as authoritative, error-free, and well-written as encyclopedia articles can be expected to be.
As to quantity, we hope to grow to hundreds of thousands of articles within a few years, and millions a few years after that. This is not the traditional goal of encyclopedias, which has been to offer up only mainstream views of the most important aspects of the most important topics. Cheap disk space and bandwidth, and the potential of participation by ultimately millions of people, means that we can capture humanity's understanding of reality with far more nuance and detail.
We are also creating a new sort of online community. We welcome experts as well as the general public; we will be built not by top-down orders but as and where contributors wish to work; and we will be organized as a republic governed by a rule of law. This means that there will be no "dictators," but a regularly changing group of people tasked to manage a public trust in conformity with a relatively stable code of rules. It also means that we will have very little tolerance for the sort of immature disruption, abuse and gaming that plagues so many other Internet communities.
On a personal note, I left Wikipedia, because whilst there are a number of competent editors there, the combination of anonymity, people gaming the system, an overemphasis of 'style' over 'reliable content', and a lack of interest in the management to manage, leads to endless unproductive arguments. In part, it's success is due to exactly those factors - contributors start writing a few articles and are then seduced by the politics - see <this Wikipedia link> as just the latest appalling example - people either burn out become 'wikidrama' addicts.
Not for me I'm afraid.
Kind regards, Russ McGinn
Thank you Russ for your detailed description of the Citizendium and your thoughts on Wikipedia. The establishment of a comprehensive community-written encyclopedia is no doubt an incredibly difficult task; one that I cannot even pretend to grasp. That said, the values that Citizendium is trying to uphold are extremely worthwhile and I wish you and your fellow editors all of the luck and assistance in the world.
I would also like to turn some attention to Wikipedia; the current forerunner in the online encyclopedia landscape. I understand Wikipedia continues to sort out some complaints and dissent but that kind of controversy is bound to come with the enormous success it has gained over the past few years. The editors at Wikipedia deserve a lot of respect for their hard work and for keeping their heads above water and their spirits high.
Ultimately the best option for everyone would be to have a wide array of resources to consult in order to prevent a single entity from controlling public opinion and knowledge within the Internet.
A Call for More Introductions Again I request that any online encyclopedia contact me with a description of their site. Tell me why your site should stand out from the rest and I will be proud to post it for all to see. Mail me at ceo at stepforth dot com and I will review your submission for publishing ASAP.
The following video is an excerpt from the 2007 Search Engine Strategies Keynote discussion between Danny Sullivan and Windows Live Chief, Steve Berkowitz. In this excerpt Steve Berkowitz explains that "it is not ever satisfactory not to be number one" in the search engine industry. He further explains that Microsoft's first goal is to reach critical mass from an advertising standpoint and how Microsoft's search platform will continue to evolve.
At the 2007 SES New York, Google's Shuman Ghosemajumder responds to the question: (abbreviated) "How is it possible for Google to identify click fraud when an aggressor utilizes rotating proxies?". Shuman responds by discussing the Clickbot A botnet case and how Google deciphered the click fraud in that situation. This video was taken during the "Auditing Paid Listings and Click Fraud Issues" seminar that took place on April 12, 2007.
Introduction I have long been a fan of ClickTracks and it's professional line of analytics software. In my experience ClickTracks is leaps and bounds above its competition both for quality of software and quality of service. In the interests of full disclosure StepForth has been an advocate of ClickTracks since we bought our first copy in 2003 (or thereabouts) and I (Ross Dunn) recently completed my Professional ClickTracks Certification.
The following video interview was recorded at the ClickTracks presentation booth at the New York Search Engine Strategies Conference, yesterday, April 11th, 2007. To view the videos just click on the question and you will be taken to the appropriate YouTube page to view it. I hope you enjoy StepForth's first round of video journalism.
The Interview with John Marshall of ClickTracks Just click on a question to see John's answer on YouTube.