Twelve months after its website redesign, House of Travel saw its onsite sales grow six-fold - results that can be measured in increased traffic to the site and in keyword ranking.
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Twelve months after its website redesign, House of Travel saw its onsite sales grow six-fold - results that can be measured in increased traffic to the site and in keyword ranking.
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School Kids Healthcare offers a complete line of school nurse supplies and school nurse equipment to help school nurses fulfill their mission.
The company came to Netconcepts to establish a complete ebusiness presence. The site we created for them offers more than great nursing supplies and equipment. It offers the latest school kids news and a separate nursing blog, authored by a local school nurse.
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Visit the site: School Kids Healthcare
“As a new venture, it was vitally important that clear outcomes and costs were identified and monitored. This is something I found Netconcepts to be excellent at…”
Last month I discussed links and their importance in search engine optimization. Now let’s get acquainted with some powerful tools to aide us in our link building efforts. Yahoo! Site Explorer (http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com) offers a quick way to review competitors’ and your own inbound links. PageRank Search is…
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“When a leading search engine recommended Netconcepts, I knew they were the kind of SEO experts JiWire needed to be working with.”
Links are the currency of the web. Not only do their drive traffic in their own right, but they also are essential to high search engine rankings. Without good inbound links to your web site, your search engine optimization (SEO) efforts won’t get off the ground.
Continue reading »There’s an art to making an effective link request. For starters, you should not propose a reciprocal link, for 2 reasons: 1) the reciprocal nature of the link will basically nullify the SEO benefit you would have gotten, and 2) all the link request spams flooding webmasters’ inboxes are of a reciprocal nature and you need to differentiate yourself as much as possible from that rubbish. Say these sorts of things and rest assured that your link request will go straight into the recipient’s Trash:
When requesting links, think and act like a PR professional or a biz dev director, not an SEO. Or even think and act like an end-user of their site. “Hi, I found a broken link on _____. Have you thought about adding features like _____ to your ______ on your site? BTW, you might want to add xyz.com and abc.com as links.” Just don’t be disingenuous; provide real value with your suggestions. Even suggest links to competitors or sites that you have no vested interest in.
We all get link request spams, even Google engineers! (such as this one posted by Matt Cutts). Here’s one I got recently:
Subject: Quality link request
Hello,
I found your website www.stephanspencer.com on Google.
We have a quality website at www.ace-mobility.com that will be well ranked on Google.
We are happy to upload a link onto this website in any way you request in exchange for a return link. I’m sure you appreciate that this would be of great benefit to us both.
To go ahead with this exchange please upload our link information below to your links page.
Please reply to to say where you have uploaded it.
If you would like your return link presenting in a particular way please include this information in your email.
I will then arrange for your link to be uploaded and email you again to let you know.
Thank you.
Regards
JessicaPlease note, the link needs to be set out as below in order for it to be returned.
[rest of email ommitted]
All I’ve got to say to that is, “Yeah, right!”
Eric Ward shared some secrets on how he crafts link requests that work in Thursday’s link building webinar for MarketingProfs which Eric and I co-presented. MarketingProfs will post the archive of the webinar in their Premium Library soon. And for those of you who aren’t MarketingProfs premium subscribers (you should join, btw, it’s well worth it!), I’ll see if I can get permission from MarketingProfs to post an archive of the webinar here on my blog.
MarketingProfs virtual seminar series — online (webcast)
Everyone seems to be in a frenzy to get links to their sites. Usually for the wrong reasons and from the wrong sites. Terms like Link Popularity, PageRank, Hubs, Authorities, Hilltop, Sandbox, Anchor Text, etc. are being bandied about and discussed ad nauseam. Marketers obsess over concepts like link leakage, bleeding PageRank, nofollow tags, triangular links, link architecture, link equity. There are many companies selling linking services that are absolutely 100% worthless.
Get past all the misinformation and disinformation and join two of the top-most experts on link building, as they share their favorite tips, lessons learned, tools, and success stories.
This seminar will be rich with case study examples.
This seminar is for you if you:
Successful link builders take an active role in the process. They don’t just sit back and hope that links happen. They make them happen! Take the first step by registering for this virtual seminar today.
You will learn:
The 90-minute seminar will include an extended Q&A.
ABOUT THE PROF EXPERTS
Eric Ward founded the Web’s first service for publicizing Web content back in 1994, and he still offers these services today. His client list is a who’s who of online brands. Eric is best known as the person behind the original linking campaigns for Amazon.com Books, The Link Exchange, Microsoft.com, Rodney Dangerfield, WarnerBros, The Discovery Channel, the AMA, and The Weather Channel. His services won the 1995 Tenagra Award for Internet Marketing Excellence, and he was selected as one of the Web’s 100 most influential people by Websight magazine in 1997. Eric also wrote the Link Building column for ClickZ, the NetSense column for Ad Age magazine, and is a 4-star speaker at major industry conferences.
Stephan Spencer is founder and President at Netconcepts, a 9-year-old, multi-national interactive agency specializing in search engine optimization, web redesign, usability, e-commerce, website auditing and email marketing. Clients include Verizon, REI, Gorton’s, Cabela’s, InfoSpace, The Sharper Image, Wella, Northern Tool, Sara Lee Direct, Midwest Airlines, Guild.com, and MP3.com. He has contributed to magazines such as Catalog Age, Unlimited, Building Online Business, and NZ Marketing. Stephan is a frequent speaker on Internet marketing topics for organizations such as the DMA, the AMA, Internet World, and IIR.
If your blog isn’t linkworthy, it’s not going to get very far in the blogosphere. Indeed, links are the currency of the Web, at least as far as search engines are concerned. No links = no rankings, and lousy links = lousy rankings.
One might even go so far as to valuate a business blog on its links (at least in part). For fun you might try out the free tool at the Business Opportunities Weblog and see how much your blog is worth. The computation is based on the link-to-dollar ratio of the AOL-Weblogs Inc deal. According to the tool, this blog is worth $200,000. Anyone want to buy it from Rick?
So how do you make linkworthy posts? In The Art of Linkbaiting, Nick Wilson and commenters offer some great suggestions:
Building links is both art and science. It requires a great toolkit as well as loads of creative ideas.
MarketingProfs is holding a webinar on Feb. 16 on the topic: “Inside Secrets to Building Links for Online Publicity, Buzz and Search Engine Optimization”. The undisputed link guru Eric Ward and I (Stephan Spencer) are both presenting. Sign up here.
HomeVisions is a brand of DMSI (Direct Marketing Services Inc.). If you are not familiar with HomeVisions, you might be familiar with some of DMSI’s other brands, including Montgomery Wards.
DesignTalk is a retail blog that strives to educate and add value on the topic of interior design and home decor. The blog is chock full of creative ideas and tips for home decorating organized in many ways, including by room and by application. The blog encourages you to ask a question which could be answered as a blog post, as well as posting a comment. The blog includes a newsletter and, of course, an RSS feed.
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Visit The Site: DesignTalk
HEADQUARTERS
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Madison, WI 53718 USA
Phone: (608) 285-6600
Toll-free: 888 207-1109
REGIONAL OFFICE
36 Anzac Rd., Browns Bay
Auckland, New Zealand
Phone: (+64) 9 476-4601
infodesk@netconcepts.com