Search Engine News from Piedmont Design

There’s a great case study on link bait at SEOmoz. The thing that really separates this is that he gives data on his results. Too often it’s general actions rather than specific ones. Still missing are the specific keywords he was targeting, but that doesn’t really change how you can take this case study and apply the specifics to your situation.

One great thing was that the topic of the linkbait: “8 Diseases That Give You Superhuman Powers”. You can completely see how this would garner attention. The page was buried on an inside page on a car dealership website. It was posted on Reddit and Digg and within five days, the site received almost 234,000 unique visitors.

“We knew from the beginning the traffic would absolutely be worthless… The purpose was to help a site that was relatively unknown get a little bit of authority. It was the backlinks we were interested in,”

Look at the links the site received…
Before the Digg: 207 backlinks
3 days after Digg: 1,270 backlinks
5 days after Digg: 2,642 backlinks
7 days after Digg: 3,545 backlinks

“We already know that untargeted backlinks are not nearly as effective as targeted ones from authority sites with similar content. The Digg did, however, produce links from many sites with authority in areas that are not entirely unrelated, and in some cases, from some sites with very high traffic and trust…

Google’s latest crawl (7 days after the Digg) resulted in a huge increase in our rankings for our targeted keywords. We jumped up anywhere from 20-300 places, with most of our most important keywords ranking in the top ten (many in the top 5). Furthermore, Google has increased its rate of indexing, has increased the number of our pages that appear in the index, and have released over a dozen important pages from the supplemental results.”

That really does validate all the talk SEO heavyweights give to linkbait. I need to get cracking…

This article (The True Value of a Resource Library for Your Website) does a great job advocating for sites to create a resource library of sorts to increase their link authority, percieved trust, indexed pages and stickiness. The risk (not mentioned in the article) is that you’ll spread your trustrank too thin. If you site is sufficiently trusted to rank well for 50 pages, and you add 100, it could hurt your search engine results for all the pages. That would be counterproductive if you recieve fewer sales leads to your store because you created a resource library. That said, the library will likely attract links and increase your trustrank, imporving your ranking (and for many more keywords)

About the Resource Library:

While it’s true that a resource library, on the surface, exists to benefit site visitors, it doesn’t end there — they also provide benefits that can directly impact any business. First of all, they spread goodwill among a business’s prospect base - and its non-prospect base as well. The site is seen by visitors as offering free information about important subject matter - and that makes it a more attractive site to return to in the future when a purchase will be made or a service established.

Second, with a solid resource library, the site puts itself in a great position to organically attract important inbound links. Outside sites will notice the offerings of important and unbiased information and link to individual articles or to the resource library as a whole. This will boost traffic and rankings overall.

Third, if the articles in the section are optimized properly, they will also boost rankings for popular and competitive keyphrases, driving additional targeted traffic to the site. The traffic may enter the site at the articles, but visitors are then likely to click for further information about the site itself.

I love this hittail… it give great suggestions for creating content. Not always great but it’s worht setting up and letting it gather data to make suggestions. I’ve had several instances where it’s given the same advice that I’ve come to after my more detailed research and testing. It’s a good tool. Anyhow, I wanted to point out a nice idea they had on their blog. It’s about scoring well in search engines for people looking for negative things about your company. The great thing about the idea (posting real complaints followed by how you resolved things) is that it’s ethical, effective at getting those hits and it seems like it might truely sway someone who is trying to figure out if you’re the type of company that they’d like to do business with. here’s a quote and the link:

World class customer service is a much more viable alternative to flogging. And if you want some miraculous free advice, take the successfully closed support cases, mark them up with “black-out” stripes to protect the identities involved, and publish them as successfully closed customer service cases. It will fill the search results on the same keywords, but every single one will be a mini-success-story. Yep, it works. Hooray!

more => HitTail: Of Sock Puppets and Public Relations

Tropical SEO » Andy Hagans’ Ultimate Guide to Linkbaiting and Social Media Marketing talks about linkbaiting. First he stresses the importance of the title with this jewel:

Want an example? Let’s run through the cheat sheet Andy Hagans style:

• Who Else Wants Build Links and Rank High in Google?
• The Secret of Link Baiting (It’s all in the title!)
• Here is a Method That is Helping Webmasters to Link Bait Better
• Little Known Ways to Link Bait Like an SEO Pro
• Get Rid of Your Backlink Problem Once and For All
• Here’s a Quick Way to Rank Highly in Google by Link Baiting
• Now You Can Have that #1 Rank in Google
• Learn to Link Bait like Andy Hagans
• Build a Backlink Structure You Can Be Proud Of
• What Everybody Ought to Know About Link Baiting

He then give great tips about content, including making it scannable, losing the ads and getting friendly bumbs from friends.

This has a great overview of web analytics and talks in depth about on eof the heavy-hitters: IndexTools.

Interview of IndexTools’ Dennis Mortensen on January 8, 2007:

What I try to pitch to our clients is, please don’t focus on any of the canned reports that are there - they are nice, you can use them as templates, but don’t use any of the canned reports. Focus on using the custom reporting capability to get reports based on metrics that you use to drive results for your business.

If you setup a custom report, it’s because you have a business question that you want an answer to. If you look at a canned report, it’s because you don’t really have anything else to do.

The above is why, for clients and sites who want to thrive online, you should use a for fee
analytics tool. If all you want / are looking for are the very basics, free tools are fine.

SEW’s “Weather.com’s SEO Efforts Rest Heavily on Analytics” does a good job descibing the thought process behind optimising for a keyword. I like the talk about selling the project internally as well. This is a good article for SEW… I want to boycott them for dissing Sullivan but if the content is valuable…????

Link Equity and Authority Consolidation : SEO Book.com

I agree with this concept but disagree with the example. Digg.com gets so very many backlinks that splitting their brand isn’t really hurting them. Digg is in the link business and does things like incenting people to link their blog to a digg ref rather than the news article. This gives them a good bit of authority and IMHO allows them to ignore “link authority” considerations and focus on what they think will be best from a human user standpoint. That’s the right focus to have I think.