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Zearth.com’s staff operates a blog at zearth.blogspot.com, although they are relatively new to the concept. They signed up for a free Blogger.com blog, which wasn’t ideal as you’ll soon discover. The traffic into the blog is only a trickle, but they have received a couple thousand dollars in sales because of it, so it’s a start.
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Even though I’ve received dozens of requests for site gradings, this month I’ve decided to pick a site that didn’t ask for it. Why? Because this month I’m going to air some poor, unsuspecting black-hat SEO’s dirty laundry in order that you might learn from their mistakes and indiscretions, rather than subject a loyal Practical eCommerce reader to potential intense and unwanted scrutiny by search engine reps reading this article. There are so many sites out there committing search engine sins, it was really hard to settle on one.
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AirTroductions (www.airtroductions.com) is an ecommerce-enabled matchmaking service for road warriors (currently over 11,000 of them) who are looking for someone interesting to sit next to on their next trip. It could be for companionship, a date, business networking, or just shared cab fare. What a great business idea! And they’ve got a solid website to back it up.
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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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Golf equipment seller Golfgods.com was undergoing a site revamp – with numerous SEO and usability improvements, along with a shift in ecommerce platforms. Jason Mischel, President of Golfgods.com explains: “We currently receive about 5,000 - 6,000 unique visitors per day to our site but much of it is of very poor quality because of the search-engine-optimization tactics employed by the previous regime.
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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.”
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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.
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Stayleaner.com, the ecommerce site for J & J Health Foods, sells vitamins, herbs and supplements for sports nutrition and body building. Fred Evaristo of J & J Health Foods states: “I rely heavily on pay-per-click advertising as I can’t get ranked in the natural searches no matter what I do.” We feel your pain, Fred! Let’s see if we can’t help Fred and his team…
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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.
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