Web Development Business Blogging Link Building Case Studies

Founder of In Perfect Order, Jessica Duquette is also a business blogger. In an interview with Netconcepts founder and president Stephan Spencer she encourages business bloggers to spend as much time connecting with other bloggers as you do on your own posts. “Visit their site, comment on specific postings that can then link back to your site, participate in blogging carnivals, quote excerpts from their sites and link to their sites and allow others to do the same from your posts,” she says. Smart business blogging involves making good connections.

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Rand Fishkin of SEOMoz has graciously shared 21 Tactics to Increase Blog Traffic, and there are some gems in there. I’d like to piggyback on a few of Rand’s points:

• 1. Choose the Right Blog Software (or Custom Build) — I’d say that over 95% of the time, WordPress will do the job and will be scalable for future needs. I have yet to come across a client blog project that necessitated a custom-built blog software.
• 2. Host Your Blog Directly on Your Domain — Rand makes a bold statement: “Hosting your blog on a different domain from your primary site is one of the worst mistakes you can make.” I disagree. I can think of numerous examples where the blog is more trusted, more buzzworthy, and/or more linkworthy because it’s at an arms length from the company’s site. Consider the hypothetical example of an insurance conglomerate authoring a blog about getting a healthier lifestyle, in order to attract prospects to sell insurance to. Such a blog at Gettinghealthy.com sounds helpful and unbiased, whereas having it at metlife.com/gettinghealthyblog (remember, hypothetical example… metlife is just used here to illustrate the point) comes off as salesy and self-serving.
• 4. Participate at Related Forums & Blogs — I’d just like to make it clear that you’re not doing this for link juice (most links in blog comments and forum posts have “link condoms” (rel=nofollow tags) automatically added). Instead, you’re doing this to increase your visibility to, and credibility with, bloggers who read those blogs and forums.
• 9. Invite Guest Bloggers — I really like this idea, and I’d like to add my suggestion that you also do phone or Skype interviews of guests and podcast those on your blog.
• 15. Archive Effectively — Rand highlights a tough balancing act: “For search traffic (particularly long tail terms), it can be best to offer the full content of every post in a category on the archive pages, but from a usability standpoint, just linking to each post is far better (possibly with a very short snippet). ” I find the “Optional Excerpt” in WordPress to be invaluable for achieving this balance. The Optional Excerpt is one of the fields in the Write Post form that most bloggers ignore, but if you use it, you can code your non-permalink pages (like your category pages) to display the excerpt instead of the full post or instead of the paragraphs proceeding a “more” tag in your post copy. That’s exactly what we’ve done on my company’s corporate site, which runs on WordPress — for example, all the testimonials listed on our Testimonials tag page display excerpts. That gives you more flexibility to summarize and highlight particular sections or keywords from the full post.
• 16. Implement Smart URLs — Rand says that “just re-writing a ?ID=450 to /450 has improved search traffic considerably on several blogs we’ve worked with.” I would definitely agree with that. We too have evidence that a blog or site with rewritten URLs flows PageRank more efficiently throughout the site. So don’t rest on your laurels if you have a blog with dynamic URLs, even if your blog is fully indexed by the engines. Your pages will rank better if you rewrite the URLs.
• 19. Make Effective Use of High Traffic Days — What a great idea, to watch your traffic and increase your posting frequency and posting quality on days where your traffic is highest! It makes the best use of the traffic spikes. In fact, you might even want to hold back on publishing your very best posts and instead save them for high-traffic days.

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In this article written by Patricia Moore, author for NZ Marketing Magazine, Netconcepts makes the public scene, not for SEO, but for their marketing success.

Moore discusses how companies have had remarkable success in the competitive New Zealand export market. How are companies succeeding in this market? What or, perhaps more importantly, who should companies turn to in order to fuel their global success.

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This session explores how specialized blog and feed (RSS/Atom) search engines gather content and provides tips on tapping into these growing forms of traffic.

Speakers:
Stephan Spencer, Founder and President, Netconcepts, LLC
Rick Klau, Vice President of Publisher Services, FeedBurner
Amanda Watlington, Ph.D., APR, Searching for Profit

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• On page 1 for “website hosting” in Google within first 8 weeks
• Hosts over 12 million members
• Sustained high search engine rankings since early 2004

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• Turned a loss making site into a profit center
• Now generates over $5000 per month in Google AdSense revenue
• Over 86,000 pages in Google
• Traffic levels in the hundreds of thousands of visitors per month

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Link building is not all about transferring PageRank. Don’t get caught in the trap of basing your decision on high PageRank score alone. There are other considerations to be taken into account.

For example, your backlinks need to represent a range of importance scores (PageRank) so that Google doesn’t construe your link network as unnatural. Building links exclusively or mostly from high PageRank endowed sites may flag your site for artificially trying to boost your PageRank. And do you really want to attract additional scrutiny?

For long term benefit and security, sites that are selected for inbound links should be from an on-topic neighborhood, have aged domains, and if possible, have .edu and .gov sites in there. The list of sites needs to be analyzed to ensure that there are no technical limitations that slow the flow of “link gain” (e.g. PageRank). For example, the directory Gimpsy.com has let pages with session IDs (”PHPSESSID”) in the URLs slip into the indices, which makes it less ideal as a backlink.

In general, all links help (unless from “bad neighborhoods”), regardless of their PageRank. Some of the links NEED to be topically-relevant or your site is going to appear unfocused and the links won’t appear to have been “earned,” but instead bought, borrowed, bartered or stolen.

Directory submissions should be a component of your link building strategy, but don’t put too much emphasis on them. As Stuntdubl says, you need to balance the link equation and not rely too heavily on directories, and you need to spread your submissions out over time.

Certain directories are considered to be “hubs” or “authorities” or both (unfortunately only the search engines know which ones, so try to cover your bases as best you can), in which case it may be used by a search engine as an indicator of the topically-relevant neighborhood that your site belongs in.

Bear in mind that toolbar PR scores are months old and can’t really be trusted. The REAL PageRank is outside of our grasp, locked up within the Googleplex.

Also bear in mind that PageRank is Google-specific. That’s not to say that you can’t use PageRank to make some inferences about the importance of a page in the eyes of Yahoo! and MSN Search. The concept of “link gain” or weighted link popularity is alive and well at Yahoo and Microsoft, they just have different ways of calculating it and names for it. At Yahoo it’s been referred to as “Web Rank” and “link flux” (a term from their days at Inktomi). I don’t know what MSN calls it. The higher the PageRank, the more useful it is as an indicator of a powerfully important site across all 3 engines. For example, I’d have little doubt that a PageRank 9 link would be an amazing link opportunity that would reap benefits across Google, Yahoo, and MSN Search.

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