Buying Links? Make Sure You Have a Well-Rounded Link Profile

One of the most common questions I get about link building is what the best type of links are. While I’m partial to building natural links through linkbaiting and remarkable content I also like to throw a few paid links into my overall link building campaigns.

One of the reasons I like to use paid links with my link campaigns is that you can not only pick high authority sites that are relevant, but you can also pick the exact anchor text you want to use. Those are things you can’t always do with linkbaiting. You just can’t always dictate who will link to you or what anchor text they will use.

Although it might be a little hard to argue in favor of buying paid links after the latest from Matt Cutts you can’t deny that paid links are still effective, if done correctly.

In my opinion, Matt’s post can almost be interpreted as a sign of weakness on Google’s part. They’re fighting an unnecessary war they know they can’t win and itâs obvious they’re having a hard time finding paid links with their algorithms. But that’s not really what this post is about. Instead I want to give a little insight on strategies for buying links.

The biggest problem I see with people who get dinged for buying links is that they’re lazy. Instead of working on creating remarkable content that will naturally attract links they throw a bunch on money at buying links and call it a day. If you’re guilty of this then you’re asking for trouble.

Buying links effectively is all about staying away from patterns. If you’re whole campaign is entirely based around paid links that will create a very recognizable pattern that can be picked up by the algorithms and filtered out. It may even result in penalties.

Paid links aren’t bad as long as your overall link profile is clean with no recognizable patterns that lead back to the links you’re buying. When those paid links are mixed in with hundreds of natural links they won’t stick out. If you don’t have those natural links the paid links will stick out like a sore thumb.

As you can see by the images if you don’t balance your paid links with your whole campaign they will stick out and sooner or later big brother will find out what you’re up to and ding your for it.

Whether or not Google’s new defense against paid links will work or not is still up in the air. In the meantime I’ll continue to throw a few paid links into my link building campaigns. What about you?

How to Increase Your Search Traffic through Writing

We all know that search engines can drive thousands of visitors to a website within a short period of time, but very few of us actually get that kind of traffic. If you are looking for more organic search traffic for your blog, here are a few blogging tips that can help you:

The long tail

In the past I blogged about going after long tail keywords because they are a lot less competitive, but how many of you actually go after them? Programs like HitTail are great at helping you determine which non-competitive terms that you can go after that drive tons of traffic. For all the blogs that I optimized such as TechCrunch and Mashable the majority of their search traffic comes from long tail keywords. You would be surprised at how long tail keywords can add up to 10,000 or even 20,000 daily search engine hits for these blogs.

Product / Website reviews

If you are a blogger you probably hate getting hit up by people with products who are requesting a review. In most cases these products or websites will not get popular so if you rank for them you will not get much traffic at all, but some of these terms will turn into brand names and can drive thousands of visitors. Just look at terms like youtube, bebo, myspace, facebook, and ebuddy.

You don’t always want to blog on things just for traffic but the goal with reviews is to write on stuff that will benefit your readers as well as drive tons of search engine hits.

Breaking News

The thing with breaking news is that you have to blog about it right away or else you will not get much search love on the topic. If you have the time to blog on news right when it hits it will not only drive tons of traffic right then and there, but it will drive traffic months after the news is old. One good example of this is all of the people who blogged about Utube.com suing YouTube. They got tons of traffic for the phrase "Utube". On our company blog, Pronetadvertising.com, we get tons of search traffic for the term utube.com, even though the news is really old.

If you are having a hard time finding breaking news, you may want to check out sites like TechMeme.

Linkbait

Writing quality content for links and social sites is always a great way to improve search traffic. Sites like Digg, Del.icio.us and Netscape can drive thousands of visitors and more importantly thousands of links. If you write how to guides or lists you will have a great chance of getting tons of natural links which will improve your overall sites search traffic. An easy way to find out what works well on these social sites is to do some searches and look for what was popular in the past.

There are probably tons of other techniques you can use to increase search traffic to your blog, these are just the ones I use on a regular basis. What specific methods do you use to increase your search traffic?

Exclusive: Hagan’s Digg Ring

LBB Readers, wanted to pass on an update on the adventures of Andy Hagans.  He just got back from an SEO meet up in India and I couldn’t resist posting this picture from his trip because something about adding a monkey to anything makes it funny.

Using AdWords for Keyword Research

Here is a little tip about something I’ve found very useful over the years in regards to keyword research. I like to use Google AdWords to help me gather accurate data in regards to search volume and conversion rates for keywords.

You see, the problem is that just about all of the current keyword tools out there only give out information that’s based on a small portion of the total number of real searches. Because of this, the information that they give is often very inaccurate and incomplete. It’s possible that the numbers are completely off or maybe they just missing out on certain keywords altogether.

Assuming that you already have a good idea of what keywords you want to optimize your site for you can take that list and enter it into your Google AdWords account. I recommend using a combination of both exact match and broad match.

The reason I recommend using broad match is so you can find the keywords that people are searching for that you may not have thought of before. To do this accurately though you will need to watch your referrers in your server logs and analytics software. And once you have some good data from broad keywords you’ll need to enter those in as exact match so you can get exact data.

Now that you are gathering some data from your AdWords account you can start to narrow down the keywords that you will optimize your site for. It is important that you not only base decisions on the total traffic volume, but click-through and conversion rates as well. It’s possible that one keyword may have more volume than another but convert at a horrible rate. People often use different searching habits when they’re gathering information compared to when they actually want to make a purchase. So take those three things and calculate what a #1 ranking is worth to you and pick the appropriate keywords.

Using Google AdWords is very effective for keyword research as there is no other software or tool available that can give you this information quickly and accurately.

Don’t Forget About Branding

Many online companies concentrate on marketing tactics such as SEO because they think that it is the key to being the leader in a specific online segment, but there are really many things that cause someone to be seen as the leader in a specific segment. One of the things that can lead to great success on the web is branding. If you think about the leaders in specific industries, they are well branded.

If you want to increase the value of your company, you need to brand it. Here are 4 things to consider when creating a brand or trying to brand your company:

Identity

If your logo is not unique then it is going to be hard to brand yourself. You need to make sure it is different then the competition by using a different font as well as different colors. The last thing you want to happen is see all your branding efforts go to waste because no one can remember
your company.

Mascot

It is actually amazing that many companies don’t have a mascot. You don’t always have to have a company mascot, but it is a great way to stand out from the crowd and become more memorable. One company that has done a decent job of branding their mascot is BOTW.

If you look at the image above, it shows the many fox mascots BOTW uses for their directory categories. The reason why I feel the foxes are effective is because they match each one to represent a category within their directory.

Consistency

Tons of companies purchase banner ads to brand their company. It can actually be very effective. The problem with how most companies advertise is that they are not consistent with their banner ad designs. You want to use the same logo colors and stay consistent or else the branding impact will not be as effective. Granted, if you change the look or the colors on certain ads it may increase your clicks throughs but it probably won’t help as much when it comes to branding.

Creativity

Being perceived as industry leader is not an easy thing. If you really want to blow up you are going to have to get creative. A few companies have came up with creative ways to brand themselves such as CI Host and Half.com.

CI Host got tons of branding when they paid someone to put a CI Host logo on the back of their head.

Half.com also became very well branded when they got a city to change their name to "Half.com".

These are just 4 things that you can do to increase your chances of having a successful brand. Some of these things maybe tangible for you and others may not because of your budget. Either way if you get creative you can still brand your company on any budget. Just think of what Dish Network did… having a town change their name to "Dish Network" in exchange for free satellite TV, Brilliant!

Do you know of any other cool and creative examples of successful branding strategies?