Web Site Design Specialists

by Brian Clark

We’ve seen that the real secret to SEO Copywriting 2.0 is creating compelling content that naturally attracts links, rather than begging for links to our keyword-stuffed web page. In other words, SEO copywriting is now all about response-oriented copy concepts and words that ultimately result in a favorable action from the reader.

Since the popularity of our content depends on the reaction to it off-page, it makes sense that we might also need to step outside the confines of the page itself to get the word out. Luckily, the same copywriting skills you use to conceive and create your content apply to promoting it as well.

The way to create compelling content is to focus on “what’s” in it for the reader. Likewise, no one is going to link to you unless doing so gives them a benefit as well.

The key is the same as to understand who you’re talking to and then figure out what will catch their attention and convince them to take action. Here are 5 ways to go about it.

1. Social Media Sites

The quickest way for an exceptional piece of content to get a lot of attention that results in secondary links is to make the home page of Digg or Delicious Popular. There are scores of similar sites that can drive quality traffic as well, such as Reddit, TechMeme, and Magnolia. For more offbeat content, Fark will shake your server. Plus there are dozens of aggregator sites such as PopURLS that also drive traffic based on your inclusion at the primary site.

If you’ve done a great job with your headline, it should magnetically draw people in. However, you need to understand the audience of each social media site. What works as a headline for Digg often won’t work for Reddit. Tweak accordingly, but try to retain your keywords in the title if at all possible, because most of the resulting links will simply regurgitate that title.

Another key element for success on Digg is the summary description, because many people will vote for content based soley on the headline and the brief copy that describes it. Sometimes this may simply be your existing opening paragraph, but you might craft a specialized description that best appeals to the culture of the site.

Submitting your own content to social media sites is looked down upon (at least with your real name), so it makes sense to have a friend submit for you. When specifically targeting a social news site, you want to control the headline and summary copy, because the exact same content submitted with poor headline and description copy may go absolutely nowhere.

2. Linking Out

Linking out to attract links? Yep.

Engaging in dialogue with the relevant blogs in your niche is a great way to get noticed, and it can lead to links back. Bloggers definitely watch who is linking to them thanks to Technorati, and you can take the initiative by linking out first before looking for one in return.

Simply linking out for the sake of linking won’t accomplish much, especially with bloggers who gets lots of links. The key is to be strategic about how you link and what your say.

It’s just like any other conversation. Join in and add your two cents, but make sure you’ve got something substantive to say that will reflect well on you. Use a great headline to make sure you are noticed, and then deliver the goods. And since your cornerstone content is the foundation of what the conversation is likely about, finding a way to mention it in the context of the dialogue will naturally bring it to the attention of influencers in your field.

3. Networking Emails

The days of flat out link begging are fading, but you can still reach out to other bloggers as a way to raise your own profile. Again, can you figure out what’s in it for them?

More than one-off link requests, networking via email and instant messaging is about establishing and growing relationships with others in the social media space. These are the linkeratis prominent bloggers in your niche, top Digg users, web journalists, and prominent web forum contributors.

Write your introductory emails from a copywriting perspective. Catch attention, gain interest, and create a desire to help you in the future by offering something that benefits them first.

4. Guest Appearances

Another benefit of networking within your niche is that it creates opportunities to make a guest writing appearance. You can contribute content that not only allows you to raise your profile, but allows for links back to your own site. Once again, creating killer original content will open doors for you, especially when it’s created for the benefit of someone else. And you can use that killer cornerstone content you’ve already produced as an example of the quality you can deliver.

Depending on your relationship with the site owner, you may be able to link to your cornerstone content from within the body of the content itself, but only if the citation is extremely relevant to the content and beneficial to the reader. Otherwise, your link will need to appear in your byline.

Most people tend to link to their site or blog URL in the byline of contributed content. Turn it around by focusing the byline on the reader instead of yourself, and feature your cornerstone content instead of your home page.

For example, if I were to guest blog somewhere about strategies for attracting links, which byline is more attractive to the reader when finishing my article?

NO: Brian Clark writes about online copywriting at Copyblogger.

YES: Check out Brian Clark’s free SEO Copywriting 2.0 tutorial, which is all about the new style of online writing that helps your web site rank well in search engines.

5. Article Directories

At one point in time, submitting about 20 articles to a directory like Ezine Articles with the right anchor text would get you a really good ranking for some search terms, at least in Yahoo and MSN. However, because the engines discount duplicate content, having dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of sites republish your article (and linked byline) no longer does the trick by itself.

However, a site like Ezine Articles is still excellent for creating exposure to your cornerstone content. Having a link to your multi-part tutorial displayed on hundreds of web pages drives direct traffic, and can lead to your content being referenced in other posts and articles that do pass on link authority.

The strategy is much the same as with guest posting on a blog. Write original content that does not appear on your site, and submit to one or more reputable directories. Repeat until you get results.

Conclusion

The words you put on a web page have no life of their own until they get read. And those same words will not gain prominence in search engines until the words are linked to by relevant, authoritative sources.

Search engines can still be gamed, just like offline real-world systems can be exploited. However, the goals of the search engines are similar to society at large, and they are getting very good at finding rule breakers and dispensing punishment. Creating compelling content and beneficial relationships are strategies that won’t get you banned or penalized, and add value to your overall goal of converting site visits into revenue.

By Eric Enge, Search Engine Watch

Restructuring a site can present some major SEO challenges. It’s one thing to make simple changes, where a page on the new site corresponds exactly to every page on your old site. But it’s much tougher when you’re making more fundamental changes to the layout, organization, and content of your site.

If you have a reasonably popular site, it has several assets that are put at risk when you change its structure:

1. Users will have bookmarked pages on your site. When they attempt to go to that bookmark, you want to make sure they still get to the content they want.
2. Pages from your site show up in search engine results. When users click on these, you’ll want them to find the right pages on your site.
3. Other Web sites link to your site. Yes, you want people who click on those links to get to the right pages in the new structure. But more importantly, you want the search engines to continue to map those links to the most relevant pages on your Web site. Much of this is because search engines count links to your site as votes. You don’t want to lose the votes. The contextual relevance of the links are also a big factor. While a 301 redirect will pass the raw link juice through (in the classical PageRank sense), you still want those inbound links to point to highly relevant pages. Lose the relevance of an inbound link by redirecting it to a generic page, and you’ve lost a lot of its value. Similarly, search engines expend a lot of effort to determine how much they trust a Web site. Much of this relates to the trust and authority they associate with the sites and pages that link to you. Mess with that trust and you put your historical traffic at risk.

Bottom line: there’s a lot at stake when you restructure a Web site. Success requires a full understanding of how to map the content from the new site to the old site, and building a 301 redirect map that thoroughly maps links from the old site to the new one.

Don’t skimp on this process! It’s tempting to apply the 80-20 rule here, especially if you have a large site, but that could be the most expensive 20 percent you’ve ever passed on. Let’s break down the approach to doing this well:

1. Wherever possible, create a one-to-one mapping of pages from the old site to the new site. This means finding pages that are identical, or substantially similar to the old ones.
2. Analyze all the remaining pages to find ones that you can redirect to the correct category. An example of this might be individual product pages you had on the old site, but on the new site you offer only a higher-level page for that category of products on the new site. In that case, map the product pages on the old site to the surviving category page.
3. Make sure that all the remaining pages are redirected somewhere. For most sites, the place where you should send this redirect will be the home page. Note that if you also change the domain in this process, you may also want to implement a catchall redirect that sends all pages not covered by your explicit redirect rules to the home page of the new site.

When you must prioritize, here are a few techniques you can use to make sure you’ve truly covered the most important pages:

• Go into your Web analytics tool and identify the top pages receiving traffic.
• Go into Google Webmaster Tools and get a list of your external links, so you can identify all pages that have received external links.
• Use Yahoo Site Explorer to identify the top pages listed there. Site Explorer tends to list the most important pages first.

Next, make sure that the search engines find your 301 redirects. While it’s common advice to update your sitemap to the new site on day one, consider leaving the old site’s sitemap in place for a period of time, to help the search engines see the 301 redirects (hat tip to Stephan Spencer for this idea).

How long should you leave it that way? That depends primarily on the size of your site and the number of pages that the search engines crawl on a daily basis. At a minimum, make sure that the prioritized pages list we developed above has been thoroughly crawled.

Lastly, use Google Webmaster Tools and Live Search Webmaster Tools to see what 404 errors they report after the move. This can be a sign that they tried to access a page on the old version of the site that’s no longer there, and that isn’t properly redirected.

Use this to give you clues as to mistakes you made in the process. Also, monitor key SERPs and traffic levels.

Ultimately, though, success depends on the work you do up front. Don’t take it lightly. This is a case where it’s far easier to do it right the first time, rather than trying to fix it later.

By Sage Lewis, Search Engine Watch

There’s no doubt link building is a win-win. The only way to acquire relevant and meaningful links is to provide some value to the Internet community.

The value may come in the form of information and entertainment. Visitors may find value in unique positioning that makes a Web site stand out from the crowd.

The longer I ponder the world of link building, the more I love it. It’s the ultimate social approval process. To attract attention, you must resonate with an online community.

The question is not, “How do I get links?” The right question is, “How do I become interesting and valuable to an online community?” or, “How do I differentiate myself in a sea of sameness?”

One Idea In Action

Social and ecological sustainability, or long-lasting, low-impact business ecosystems, will be a major factor for successful growth in the next 50 years. People are realizing resources aren’t endless, and they have options — where they work and who they buy from, for example.

While clearly a challenge, it’s also a great opportunity for the global business community to align business values with online communities. The opportunity to stand out and resonate with key demographics may be the best-kept secret of link building.

Which companies have found the secret of sustainability and link building? Here are a few great examples.

AISO.net: A Natural Internet Success

Check out AISO.net: Affordable Internet Services Online Inc. Their tag line is: “Web Hosting As Nature Intended.” They’re touting an environmentally-friendly way to host Web sites.

Server farms are notorious for sucking down extreme amounts of energy. Here’s what the company has to say about protecting the environment:

“AISO.net is a reliable and responsible green Web hosting company. We have made a strong commitment to help fight pollution and preserving our natural resources. Solar panels run our data center and office, not energy credits. Solar tubes bring in natural light from the outside providing light during the day. AMD Opteron powered servers use 60 percent less energy and generate 50 percent less heat.”

AISO.net has taken an otherwise extremely saturated industry and instantly changed the conversation. Hosting has always been about speed, reliability, and cost. These folks have stood out in a highly creative way that adds value to the entire Web community.

Plus, they have a Google PageRank of 6/10 and 4,821 links according to Yahoo. Many of the links and clients come from companies that want to be associated with a socially responsible company. Plus, AISO.net attracts the interest of journalists from great sites such as PC World and Wired.

Crown Jewels: Brilliant Earth

Jewelry is another intensely competitive arena. Brilliant Earth has come up with a way to stand out from the crowd. Their motto is: “Conflict Free Canadian Diamond Jewelry.” They promote “Fine Jewelry from Ethical Sources.”

They have a Google PageRank of 5/10 and 721 links according to Yahoo. Not bad for a domain purchased in April 2005.

If you were troubled by the bloodshed of the mainstream diamond trade, wouldn’t you rather do business with Brilliant Earth?

Clorox and Burt’s Bees

Nobody’s saying bleach is the bee’s knees. Yet, Clorox just bought Burt’s Bees for $925 million in cash. “[Clorox] says it’s looking to green its image and plans to acquire companies aligned with consumer ‘megatrends’ in health and wellness, sustainability, convenience and a more multicultural marketplace.”

From the Clorox values page: “Helping Ensure The Greater Good for All – To us, achieving The Greater Good means creating a world where people have the information and tools they need to make the highest ethical choices and do the best for themselves, their family and the environment.”

A nice-sized company like Burt’s Bees ought to have a considerable number of links. The company does: 7,879 according to Yahoo.

What’s unique? Many of the links come from like-minded people and companies such as Victoria E.; Deep Ellum Arts Festival; Transform The Earth Foundation; and Sustainable is Good.

This is why I love link building. If you want to succeed, you simply must love and care for something. When you do, others who love and care for the same thing will happily share recognition with you by giving you a link.

By Sage Lewis, Search Engine Watch

Each month, we give away a $25 Amazon gift certificate to the SageRocker (as we are affectionately called) who gets the most traffic to their blog post in a single day. April’s winner was Brian Augsburger.

This interests me a great deal because Brian isn’t in our production team. While he knows a lot about Web marketing, many others know it in more depth than he does. His understanding of it is more big picture. Brian is our business development guy.

In April, he blew everyone else out of the water. On April 10 he got 419 views for his article: “Increase Web Traffic: Part 1 of 4.” No one was even close… me included.

The reason he did so well is because he has a passion… he has a true love. Brian loves design.

Brian is a fanatic when it comes to all things design. He loves Web design, car design, home design. If it has the word “design” in it, I’m pretty sure Brian is all about it.

So, naturally, Brian is an avid reader and participant on design blogs. He particularly likes Creattica.

So, after Brian wrote his article, he sent an e-mail to an editor at Creattica asking if they might like to link to his article. He explained that it was original, unique content. He also pointed out that, because he’s an avid Creattica participant, he believed their Web design audience would find the information particularly interesting.

He also knew that they would probably like the SageRock blog because it’s designed quite well.

Brian was right. He got the link here. That one link from a major blog made all the difference.

On top of this, Brian also had an underlying strategy. He wanted the article to do well for the phrase: “increase Web traffic.” If you notice, all four parts of his four-part series are titled with the phrase “Increase Web Traffic.” And the Creattica page that links to his article is titled “Increase Web Traffic.”

As of the writing of this column, Brian’s article was result 31 in Google for the phrase “increase Web traffic.” There are 249,000 other pages in Google that have that exact phrase somewhere on the page. That’s a pretty impressive showing for such a competitive phrase.

Brian’s link building strategy was flawless.

The optimization of the page for the phrase “increase Web traffic” came from his knowledge of SEO principles. But the way he went about getting his link was genius because he truly understood his target and cared about them.

So, I happen to be a fanatic of digital photography. What if I wrote an article about how to market your photography business through SEO? Don’t you think I would have a relatively easy time asking to get a link to the article on a photography blog? Wouldn’t I have an easier time if I had already participated in the blog by commenting and so forth?

Think about what you love and then see how you might be able to create some content that would be of interest to the people in that community.

Love is the secret ingredient to link building.

By Steve Haar, Search Engine Watch

I started a hunt last week. I am looking for a good Search Engine Optimization (SEO) book to give to those decision-makers who will never actually do SEO, but who cut the check or approve the time spent for SEO. I haven’t found it yet…but I just started.

Too often, I have seen companies “approve” SEO only to treat it as a one-time hit, or a short-term project. Months or years later, when they asked someone else to “do” SEO for them, it is discovered that the company had laid none of the basic foundation for SEO, and it is clear that even the implementation was done incorrectly. Unfortunately, no follow-up or long-term measurement plan is in place that would catch this. From what I hear, this is not uncommon.

So, absent a book and being too impatient to wait for one, I thought I would come up with some guidelines for those who approve SEO.

But first, for clarity, when I write SEO I am referring to web page optimizing against organic search. Optimizing paid search is a closely related, but different animal.

So, if you are going to embark on organic SEO…

1. Plan to keep in it for the long haul. Line up the resources to engage SEO for at least 6 months. An entire year would be better. This is not the long haul, this is just the time you need to validate the program for the longer term. These resources will come from many parts of the company; from your marketing and sales to finance and IT. Be ready to go after them before you start.
2. Be patient. SEO can take time to generate results depending on your starting point. You may not see your sales (or other target metric) increase right away. Unlike most other online efforts, there is no immediacy about organic SEO.
3. Set objectives. The goals for SEO must be clear and the benchmarks to achieving them agreed upon. This means setting up measurement capabilities that may not currently exist as well standard reporting procedures. At the start, there may be no ‘measured’ metric to report, no changes. Reporting should be done anyway and include the steps taken to improve the metric, not just the metrics themselves.Brace yourself; the SEO folks may appear to be goofing off. They will be surfing the net, looking at SERPs, looking at web pages, and reading blogs or articles. These are necessary parts of the program. Earlier, I mentioned monthly reporting. This helps you know the progress of the project and gives you an idea of what is accomplished with the daily activity that may seem a little out of the ordinary for typical business operations.
4. Keep people informed. They need to know your plans and those of the company. Any new products or product changes impact your web site. With enough fore-planning, your SEO team can help generate the traffic early on. And just as importantly, they can plan to gracefully handle traffic currently going to pages for phased-out products. Well informed SEO teams can add value and prevent surprises. Leverage them.
5. Set expectations. If you outsource SEO, don’t jump for promises of absolutes. There are none.

A Final thought: nothing is free, especially clicks. Enter into SEO knowing that there is a cost. It may be outsourcing costs, new people, or the opportunity costs of current people being refocused. I get very concerned when I hear organic SEO talked about as a way to get free clicks. It blinds people to the commitment needed and the value of SEO. Like everything else, tie the increases in target metrics to the cost of the SEO activity. This gives you a view into SEO ROI.

By Jennifer Kyrnin

One of the most common complaints that new writers have about weblogs or blogs is that they are too personal or informal. But it is very possible to have a business and still use a weblog to get more promotion, more pageviews, and more customers.

Why Blog for Promotion?
Blogging is very popular right now. And having a business weblog that provides good information for your customers while being timely and fun can add a new dimension to your Web site.

Blogs are a powerful tool for marketing and promotion. Because the entries are short, and often full of links, they are more keyword heavy than standard articles often are. Plus, being short, they are easy for your customers to read (and you to write), so they are more likely to come back daily to see what you might have to say on that day.

If your company is very formal, a blog is a place to show your customers that it is made up of people just like them. You can do this without becoming too personal or diary-like.

Using a Blog for Business
There are lots of ways you could use a blog in a business:

• Frequently Asked Questions
  If you get a lot of mail to your webmaster account, you can post the common questions up on a blog. This will provide your customers a place to go to see questions and answers, and as new questions come in, you can post them to help more people.
• Promotions
  If you do promotions every week or few days, you can use a blog to highlight them.
• Contests
  Daily contests and games are a great promo in a blog. They are fun, and bring your customers back.
• What’s New Pages
  If you add lots of new articles, information, or products regularly, sometimes it can be difficult for your customers to find out what’s new. A quick blog entry can show them what’s updated on your site.
• What’s Coming
  You can use a blog to peak interest in future products or projects. It’s also a great way to keep notes about what you’re planning for your customers, the entries are archived so nothing is lost either for you or your customers. Plus, if your blog tool has a comments feature, you can use that to judge interest before it goes live.
• Photo Blog
  Rather than writing, you could put up a daily photo for your customers. A photo and a short description can be very compelling.
• Developer Notes
  If you’re a software company, this can often be fascinating for your customers, to see what the software developers are doing and how new projects might be moving forward.
• News
  The most common use for business blogs is news, usually about the specific topic relevant to the company.

Why bother exploring social media as a marketing channel for your website or business? After all, you could stick to link exchanges, search advertising or the purchase of banner and editorial ads on relevant sites.

Here are some reasons why you should consider using social media:

1. It’s natural. Not only do you get natural links without any discernible pattern, your website is exposed to large groups of people in a spontaneous fashion. This differs from paid advertising which has overt commercial overtones.
2. It’s defensible. Once successfully mastered, social communities can be a great source of web traffic on top of any traffic you are already receiving from search engines. While you can’t easily increase your search engine traffic, social media traffic can be very easily controlled through strategic marketing.
3. It’s low-cost/high returns. If done by yourself, costs are limited to only time and perhaps the expenses involved in hiring a freelance programmer/designer. The benefits will often exceed the cost. It would take you thousands of dollars to buy many links; social media has the ability to give you that for free.
4. It complements other efforts. Social media optimization and marketing is usually community-specific. It doesn’t interfere with any other methods of getting traffic to your website. It can and will fit perfectly with an advertising campaign targeting other websites or search engines.

For those who don’t understand or see the value of social media websites, let’s take a look at the benefits of creating viral content and effectively promoting them through social media channels.

Developing link baits and successfully getting it popular on various social media websites like Digg and StumbleUpon will lead to multiple benefits for any website:

• Primary and Secondary Traffic. Primary traffic is the large amount of visitors who come directly from social media websites. Secondary traffic is referral traffic from websites which link to and send you visitors, after they come across your content through the social sites.
• High Quality Links. Becoming popular on social news websites like Digg or Reddit will get you a large number of links, some of which may be topically relevant, some not. A good story can realistically acquire a large number of high quality editorial links, most of which cannot be easily bought.

Now let’s translate this into tangible benefits for your website:

1. Links = Better Search Engine Rankings.

When a website receives a large number of natural, permanent links from trusted domains, it develops authority. Search engines trust it. If you optimize your linkbait and website structure properly, you can easily start ranking for competitive keywords, which will in turn bring in search engine visitors.

Do this often enough and your search traffic will undoubtedly increase. In a sense, you are obtaining these quality links through borrowed trust. Many bloggers and webmaster still think that if an article is on the Digg or del.icio.us homepage, then it’s probably worth checking out and referencing through a citation link.

A new website may find it difficult to gain links from a critical mass that is not familiar with it but a trusted social news resource makes it easier for links to come in, because the community and buzz has somewhat certified the value of the site. Note that the actual strength of the article is still of utmost importance for all.

2. Primary + Secondary Traffic = Community/Supporters.

Some people claim that social news websites only send useless traffic, visitors that will often just view a specific webpage and click away. Yes, that’s usually the case. Sites like Digg are notorious for their poor bounce rates: many visitors drop in for the article and then leave after reading it. StumbleUpon is much better in this aspect.

But don’t mistake this with a lack of interest. Your subscriber figures will often take big jump up and then stabilize after a few days. If your entire site is relevant to the general interests of the social media website, there will always be a handful of social users who will start to track your site in order to submit future content.

Detractors also ignore the power of ultra targeted secondary traffic. General sites or blogs in the same niche will link to a story that’s popular on social sites, because it adds value for their readers or users. This is done naturally on a daily basis for many.

While primary traffic usually comes in a larger volume, I would argue that secondary traffic is more valuable. Why? Because links from other websites bring visitors who are very likely to be interested in your content. These citation links demonstrate recognition of your site in the eyes of others. It builds your brand.

Think of the social news site as a platform or a soapbox. As something that gives you a chance to be heard or read, even for a brief moment of a few hours. The people who are drawn to your message will visit your site and recommend it to others.

by Jason Stewart

Wrapping up a thwirlwind (if you’re on Twitter or saw Tim Ferriss’s presentation, you’ll get it) two days of the Inbound Marketing Summit. Holy cow! What a great conference! Chris Brogan, president of New Marketing Labs organized a breakneck-paced non-stop buffet of new marketing information and best practices and general “deep thoughts.” Easily one of the most informative and exhilarating conferences ever. Even the sponsor presentations were worth watching! Here are some highlights, followed by today’s best tweets and a list of really cool links I heard about at the show…

1. Build detailed buyer personas for your social marketing efforts, then decide on appropriate messaging for those personas.Speak to them in their language, not yours.
2. Nobody cares about your product except you. They care about their problems. Don’t worry about what your product does, worry about how it can help your buyers solve those problems.
3. Don’t be afraid to relinquish control of your content or message. Think about how it helped The Grateful Dead.
4. The overwhelming fear regarding starting a community is: if I build it, will they come?
5. When you are building a community, focus on small groups and then expand outward.
6. Anybody can complain, but if the complaint is backed by constructive suggestions on how to make things better don’t you want to hear them?
7. Make sure the things you measure match the goals you set.
8. Regarding your website…how do people find it, and how do they find what they are looking for when they get there?
9. My landing pages have too much “friction”
10. Outbound Marketing is not dead, it just needs to be really, really, really targeted and specific.
11. TweetDeck is not all that different from my Outlook inbox, when you think about it.
12. If you “suck” then people tell everyone. If you don’t they will tell two people. You need to be there and be aware of people who say you “suck.”
13. Simple recipe for driving organic web traffic: create unique content, make sure it is valuable, create it often, and make it available to people for free
14. Listen to your customers and feature requests, but always keep a few product innovations up your sleeve to be a “surprise”
15. Chris Brogan enjoys beer, scotch and Canadian Club.He also knows a TON about inbound marketing.
16. Not the end of the world if a blogger or user posts something negative, it’s an opportunity!
17. The first step in building a social marketing strategy is deciding who you are as a company. Businesses need to find their humanity if they want to do social media properly.
18. Social media is big on tactics, short on strategy.
19. Jeans and a jacket are the official uniform of inbound marketing.