Link Building Paid Search Blogs

Neil Patel is a leading practitioner of social media optimization, the new art of weilding tools, strategies, and influence for the purpose of gaining visibility on social media networks and websites like Digg.com, del.icio.us, reddit, NewsVine, Netscape.com, MySpace and even Wikipedia. Featured in the Wall Street Journal as one of the top influencers on Digg, Neil has is a sought after speaker at conferences such as Search Engine Strategies, PubCon, and the AMA’s Hot Topic: Search Engine Marketing. In this interview with our founder and president Stephan Spencer, Neil shares his thoughts on the best social media sites, how to gain traffic and visibility on them, and much more…

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In this presentation to The Wisconsin Publishers’ Production Club’s (WPPC) Catalog Innovations meeting in January, Netconcepts’ Director of E-Business, Hershel Reese explains how Web 2.0 has great implications for catalogers and publishers online.

RSS feeds are changing the way people are consuming their media. You need to stay on top of this channel in order to remain competitive online.

Web 2.0 is also changing the way people interact with web properties. The user generated content phenomena is helping site owners to actively engage an audience and build community online.

This presentation will also discuss how one online publisher, www.dmnews.com, is leveraging the Web 2.0 tool kit.

Social Media Sites are emerging as a channel to be reckoned with online. If you are not participating in these communities you are missing opportunities for increased brand recognition and traffic to your sites.

You Will Discover:

• Best practices for RSS usage
• The benefits of user generated content
• Why tagging matters for website owners
• How industry leaders are leveraging Web 2.0
• How social media can bump up your traffic and impressions

This presentation was originally held on Tuesday, January 30, 2007 at The Country Springs Hotel in Pewaukee, WI.

 

 Interview with Hershel Reese and Web 2.0 [37:12m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

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If Google engineer Matt Cutts had his druthers, buying links would become an extinct SEO practice.

Cutts has addressed the topic of link-buying on a number of occasions on his blog (Mattcutts.com/blog) and in blog comments elsewhere. He’s admonished webmasters who buy links for PageRank and encouraged webmasters instead to buy only links that have been “nofollowed” — in other words, where the rel=nofollow attribute has been added to the link so that the search engines do not count that link as a vote. He has stated in no uncertain terms that Google considers “buying text links for PageRank purposes to be outside our quality guidelines.”

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Join our founder and president, Stephan Spencer, in this archived webinar of an information-packed 90-minutes of link building secrets. The webinar, for MarketingProfs.com, was called “Google in the Real World: How Links Boost Your Ranking”.

Watch it as a streaming Flash video »

Or, alternatively download/watch as a Quicktime movie (72 MB).

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The biggest challenge (and opportunity) facing retailers in Paid Search is complexity and the speed of innovation. In an interview with Netconcepts founder and president Stephan Spencer, direct marketing guru Alan Rimm-Kaufman said every week brings new innovations, more options and more complexity, and retailers and agencies alike need to scramble every week to keep up. He doesn’t see this trend slowing – if anything, it may be accelerating. If you’re into thinking about future, he encourages you to check out …”

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“We are very happy with the growth in sales online, and Netconcepts’ management of our online media campaigning and paid search program has been a key driver of that….Netconcepts have very strong core competencies around the technical aspects of web
development and search engine optimisation…”

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Abny Santicola, Editor, FundRaising Success Advisor, calls on the expertise of Netconcepts’ Founder and President, Stephan Spencer last week at Direct Marketing Association’s (DMA) Annual Conference & Expo in San Francisco. Abny caught up with Spencer after his “Blogs, Podcasts and RSS: New Tools for Customer Acquisition and CRM” conference session.

In this article, Spencer discusses how blogs can serve as great marketing tools for non-profit organizations as well. Spencer also shares his success with, humanitarian organization and personal blog of former President Jimmy Carter, The Carter Center.

Spencer closes with 5 insider-tips for making the most of a blog.

Read this entire article and learn key blog concepts to put your non-profit on the blogosphere map.

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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 part 2 of this article for ClickZ, Netconcepts’ lead search strategist Pat Fusco goes on to say that while PPC advertising and SEO strategies may have the common foundation of keyword research, that’s where the similarities end.

Should you hire an in-house SEM, external agency, or both? Pat says it primarily depends on your online marketing goals, marketing budget and risk management mindset.

What about buying your way into top rankings? There are seven fundamentals of any PPC campaign as Pat highlights…

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Have you considered incorporating content partners and marketing partners into your online strategy? For example, partnering with content providers who could augment your own content with additional related content? Or partering with sites whose visitors match your target market?… If, for example, you wanted to reach women online, you could partner with a site like iVillage.com and build a microsite together, then have them promote it through their site and subscription lists.

Think about the sites you advertise on as potential partners. Join forces and create a microsite together and then promote it to a joint captive audience. Or make a deal with them and syndicate some useful content onto their site. For example, you could develop a whole library of useful tips and, rather than doing standard banner ads, you could provide these tips to your partner, who would then fold it with the rest of their content. Et voila!… “Sponsored content”!

Even better if, between the two of you, you can develop some sort of “hook” or viral component, such as a funny video, an addictive game, a downloadable ebook, worksheet, calculator, widget, etc…

Got an example to share of a site where the whole is greater than the sum of the partners? Post a comment!

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