Real Web Marketing Blog

Attack of the Googleheads

by John Eberhard

Last week I discussed a book I am reading called “Inbound Marketing, Get Found Using Google, Social Media and Blogs” by Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah. In it I discussed how I felt that the authors’ assertion that outbound marketing, or what they and others call “interruption marketing,” which includes things like display advertising, direct mail, cold calling, radio and TV ads, is broken and that the era of outbound marketing is over.

In that article last week I said that that assertion doesn’t work in practice and that you have to have a combination of both inbound marketing (search engine traffic, pay per click, blogs, social media) and outbound marketing in order to be viable.

Now in fairness I do want to say that I think the book has good stuff in it such as how to run your blog and how to put calls to action on your web pages and so on, but there is another glaring falsehood in this book which I think has gained some widespread agreement in the Internet marketing field.

This is a falsehood that is promoted by Google, and in this case the authors have taken up the baton and are promoting this falsehood.

The idea is that in order for you to gain lots of links to your web site and thereby gain good search engine rankings, you should create “remarkable content” and put it up on your site, and then wait for people to notice it and then link to it. Here’s what they say:

“Remarkable content attracts links from other web sites pointing to your web site. In other words, you want your content to prompt other content producers on the Web to ‘remark’ about your products and services and link back to your site.”

“It’s important to recognize that spending lots of time creating content on other people’s web sites with the sole purpose of getting SEO (i.e. link building) doesn’t work very well.”

“You should avoid SEO practices that rely on tricking Google and distorting search results. Here’s out rule of thumb: if a given technique is not improving the experience for a user, and it can be detected by a human doing a review, then it’s probably a bad idea.”

I’ll translate. What they are saying is that you should create really good content and put it up on your web site and/or blog, then wait for others to notice it and link to it. You should not engage in any proactive link building of any kind, such as article marketing or press releases or putting links on your blogs to your main site. This is what Matt Cutts of Google has been promoting for 4-5 years. He stresses that this creates a “natural link pattern.”

(Actually the authors do recommend one type of proactive link building, called reciprocal link building, which Google discounted the value of over two years ago. They spend a whole page on that. Book was published in 2010. Hmm.)

While this idea from Google and that the authors of this book (and quite a few other Internet marketing consultants) have adopted and promoted may sound appealing or make some sort of sense, I will explain why it is COMPLETELY FALSE and does not work in the real world (where we all live I think), and will actually hurt you and your company if you follow it.

I think that the only way this strategy would work is if:

1. You are already a well known company or person, or
2. Your company is in an industry or field or niche that contains less than 10 competitors

ALL of my clients are in competitive markets, some with hundreds or thousands of competing companies. How about you? Do you have less than 10 competitors in the whole country?

If you are in a competitive market, and you follow their advice here regarding link building, putting up remarkable content on your web site and then waiting for people to notice it, I can say with fair certainty that no one will notice it and no one or hardly anyone will link to it. Certainly not enough people to give you a competitive number of links.

I have drawn an analogy to this idea before. It is like telling a pretty girl to dress up really nice and put on makeup, then sit in her living room. Don’t go outside. Don’t use the phone. Guys will start calling you up and asking you out. Maybe they will see you through the living room window or something.

Not only have a lot of Internet marketers adopted this crazy idea, the idea has to some extent been equated with “ethics,” like it is ethical to do this and unethical to do anything else, like proactive link building. Some “experts” don’t even ever question anything Google says, as if to say that Google says it so that makes it right.

A few years ago I saw an article by someone who discussed this issue and said that you have to differentiate what is ethical from what is good for Google. I think that the reason Google has disseminated this idea is that it is good for them. It is easier for them if a few companies make it to the top, and nobody tries to mess with that by adding a lot of links through various techniques themselves. Because if people do things to add links on other web sites to their sites, it sort of upsets the apple cart and Google has to decide whether they should do something to discount that technique.

But is it good for you? Well, I have seen companies put up lots of great content, and literally nothing happened. I suppose we could discuss whether or not the content was “remarkable” enough, but I think you get the point. My point is:

You have to be proactive with link building if you want your site to have a competitive number of links, to rank well for keywords and to get traffic.

And that’s good for YOU.

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Inbound vs Outbound Marketing

by John Eberhard

I am reading a book now called “Inbound Marketing, Get Found Using Google, Social Media and Blogs” by Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah. The authors are founders of HubSpot, makers of online marketing software.

The book has some really good stuff in it. Good advice about how to run your blog and things like that. I’m about a third of the way through.

But their second acknowledgement in the beginning is to Seth Godin, author of several books including “Permission Marketing.” I have written about him before. Let’s summarize by saying that I consider Godin’s assertion that you have to have permission from someone before you can send a marketing message to him to be nonsense, equivalent to saying “Oh pleeeeeaaaaase Mr. Prospect, would it be OK with you if I communicate?” Since I don’t consider the sending of a marketing message to someone to be offensive or bad or a crime, I don’t think we have to bend over backwards to get permission to do so.

Back to “Inbound Marketing.” The concept of the book is that we now have two types of marketing. One is called “inbound marketing,” and that is when you have someone actually reaching or looking for the type of product or service that you offer. So you put your message out there where he will see it when he starts looking. In the category of “inbound marketing” we find search engine organic (non paid) listings, pay per click advertising, blogs, and social media.

The other is “outbound marketing,” or “interruption marketing,” and this is where a marketer puts his message out there and it “interrupts” the prospect who is currently doing something else. In this category we find such things as display advertising, direct mail, radio and TV advertising, promotional emails, and even banner advertising online.

The authors write “Our conclusion was that interruption-based, outbound marketing techniques were fundamentally broken and in order to successfully break through the noise and connect to people, companies needed to rethink the way they marketed from the bottom up. In other words, they had to ensure their customers could find them using inbound marketing.”

“… The outbound marketing era is over. The next 50 years will be the era of inbound marketing.”

They go on to say that ten years ago, you could use all these various outbound marketing techniques and they worked great. But now they’re all bombing.

I agree with this assertion only up to a point. First of all, I agree that the Internet has changed the way people interact with companies. The Internet basically brought about this type of marketing which the authors call “inbound marketing.” If you can put your message in front of someone who is actively looking for your product or service right then, that’s great.

So I think inbound marketing is important and that nearly all companies should have an inbound marketing component in their marketing approach.

The problem with saying that the outbound marketing era is over, is that I don’t think that it works in actual practice. All the clients that I have use a combination of inbound marketing and outbound marketing. But if they tried to rely only on inbound marketing, I don’t think they would get enough business to be viable.

Businesses, in order to be viable today, particularly in the current economic scene, have to do everything they can to generate new leads and sales. I particularly think that with new businesses or small businesses, that you have to incorporate more “interruption” type media in order to establish yourself and survive.

Is it true that most outbound marketing methods don’t work today the way they used to? Yes, I would say so. One of the biggest challenges in marketing today is to find the type of promotional media (ads, magazines, Google AdWords, email, radio, TV, etc.) that will be productive and cost effective for a given type of business. My experience over the last five years has been that sometimes we try new things and the results are mixed.

So it is a major challenge in marketing, not only to find the right message that will motivate people, but also to find the right medium in which to communicate that message.

I believe that the best way is to utilize a combination of inbound and outbound marketing methods. Is the outbound marketing era over? No, I think that is a premature statement. Is it on the way out? Maybe. Time will tell. But for right now, I believe it is vital to utilize both.

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Statistics for Measuring Link Building and SEO

by John Eberhard

When one is engaged on a campaign to do search engine optimization and build up links to a web site, how do you tell if you’re doing a good job?

The purpose of SEO and a link building campaign, first of all, is to create thousands of links to a web site from other web sites, so that the ranking of that site will improve on Google and other search engines. Google has stated that its main criteria for deciding how high to rank your site is the number of links to your site from other sites.

And we want the rankings to improve ultimately in order to increase the amount of traffic to a web site coming from search engines. So unfortunately it’s a little indirect. We build links, so we can improve search engine rankings, so we can get more traffic. And we of course want more traffic so we can get more leads or sales from the web site.

So the first thing we use to measure whether we are doing a good job is the number of links to your web site. With my major link building clients I measure this monthly. The way to do this is to go to Google and enter a string like this:

“realwebmarketing.net” -site:realwebmarketing.net

That’s your web address, in quotes, a space, a dash, a colon, and the web address again, not in quotes. Every time I talk about how to do this I get complaints that it doesn’t work. But if you do it exactly the way I explain above it will work. Make sure the dash doesn’t get turned into an em dash.

I frequently get asked “How many links do I need?” That depends on what industry you are in and how many links your competitors have. In some industries you might do really well to have 3,000 links, while in others you might need 20,000 or 30,000 or more to compete effectively.

Google makes constant changes in how they count links, so it is not unusual for the number of links to drop off dramatically occasionally. The correct action is to continue the link building campaign and the number of links will shortly come back up to where it was and continue higher.

The next step in determining the success of a link building campaign is to take your list of keywords that you are targeting, i.e. that you want to be ranking well for, and checking how well you rank for them on Google, Yahoo and MSN.

I run a report on this monthly for clients, usually checking 100 or more keywords.
And no, I don’t sit there checking each keyword manually. I use software called Market Samurai for this. The final report looks like this:

Keyword – Monthly Searches	Google Mar 11	Yahoo Mar  11	Bing Mar  11
Keyword 1	Not top 500	Not top 500	Not top 500
Keyword 2	Not top 500	Not top 500	Not top 500
Keyword 3	5	7	62
Keyword 4	1	1	1
Keyword 5	1	1	1
Keyword 6	6	23	24
Keyword 7	Not top 500	Not top 500	Not top 500
Keyword 8	16	50	50
Keyword 9	1	8	8

Then I count up the total number of #1 positions, top 10 positions, top 20, top 100 and top 500 positions. I track these month to month. Some people wonder why I bother to check the top 100 and top 500 positions, as anything lower than say position 20 is not going to result in additional traffic. That’s true, but by tracking it this way I can see the results of the campaign, and if the number in each category is improving each month I know the campaign is going well. If you only tracked the top 20, there would be all this improvement occurring that you’d never see until those keywords arrived in the top 20 down the line.

Finally, we make sure when we start with a client that he has Google Analytics on his site and we then track the number of visitors and page views on his site month to month. And we want to see that traffic steadily increasing over time.

That’s what we look for to tell us how well the SEO and link building is working.

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Marketing With Article Directories

by John Eberhard

An article directory, also called a content hub, is a type of web site that has lots of informational articles on it. A person with a web site, who needs article content for their site, can go to an article directory and download articles for free on a wide variety of topics, and then post them on their own web site. These article directories allow you to search by topic or category or by keyword.

Writers can post articles on the content hubs. The benefit for the writer is that he can mention his company and include his web site address in the article. And that provides in-bound links to his web site, from the content hubs themselves, and from every web site where that article is posted. In-bound links, meaning links from other web sites that link to yours, increase link popularity, which is the main criteria used by Google and other search engines to determine web site ranking.

So the article directories service both writers who want to get the word out on their company or products or services, and people who have web sites who need article content.

The key, for a writer, is to write something that will appeal to the general public, or at least to a sizable specific niche public, so that the article gets downloaded and used on lots of sites in need of content.

It is also key to include the name of the company, and links to the company web address in the writer bio at the end. Most article directories will allow you to include up to three links in the bio box. But most will not allow you to put links into the content of the article.

The article itself should not be written in such a way that it is just a blatant promo piece for your company. It has to be written so that it is about a topic that your company deals with or you are an expert on, and it mentions your company, but it doesn't say "call us now at 1-800-222-2222 for a great deal on tires" at the end. In other words, what in marketing is called a "call to action," where you tell your prospect to contact you or to respond for more information or to buy now, should not be included in articles for article directories.

If you have a list of keywords that you are targeting, where you are trying to rank well for those keywords, then find a way to include those words or phrases in your article, preferably near the beginning of the article.

It's a good idea to look over the type of articles that are currently being accepted on article directories, to get a better idea of what works there, and so you can write articles that will fit this medium. Some good article directories to look at are:
http://www.goarticles.com
http://www.isnare.com/
http://www.articlecity.com/
http://ezinearticles.com/

There are currently over 700 article directories on the Internet.

Most of the article directories require that you register with them before they will allow you to post an article there. Some of the sites have your article reviewed by a live person before it goes up. Some will just post it without review.

Once you get registered on a number of article directories, it is best to post one article, then post more articles at intervals of about once a week. Make sure you include your company name and URL in the bio box.

If your company has any articles written already that were written for other purposes, you may be able to convert them into a form that will work for the article directories. The key is to read the types of articles that are already appearing on the hubs and convert your content into a similar form. Also, many article directories will reject articles of less than 400 words, so make sure they are at least that long.

I have been submitting client articles to article directories for about four years, and have found this to be an excellent way of building up the number of links to the client’s web site. I have built up the number of links to a client’s site from near zero to over 2,000 in 2-3 months. But I recommend doing this for 6-12 months at least.

I have observed that some search engine optimization (SEO) companies seem to look down on article directories or not consider it a valid form of link building. I have never been able to figure out why this is, since I have been doing it and seeing very valid, positive results for 4 years now.

Article directories are a great way to get out information on your company, and promoting on the net.

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Building Quality Links with Online PR in 2011

by John Eberhard

Having links to your web site from other sites is very important. In fact, it is the primary factor used by Google in deciding your site's ranking for any given keyword.

In other articles I have discussed submitting articles to "article directories," also called "content hubs." This is a great way to build quantity links to your web site, as your articles appear on the content hubs themselves and they count as a link to you, plus your articles get downloaded and posted on other web sites and blogs.

Optimized press releases are a great way to build quality links to your web site. I recommend doing this in conjunction with submitting articles to article directories. That way, you're getting the quantity and quality links.

Online PR consists of writing optimized press releases, putting them out on a blog, and also submitting them to online PR or press release sites.

There are a fair number of web sites now that are public relations sites, where you can register, then submit press releases to them. These online PR sites serve several purposes:

a.Journalists can use them to find interesting news stories, which they will then print in other news outlets, including web sites, magazines, newspapers, radio and TV stations.

b.When you submit a press release to an online PR site, the content from these press releases can get into Google News and other big news sites, where it then influences the search engine rankings for your web site.

c. These online PR sites rank really well on search engines, so your release will rank highly.

Optimized Press Releases

An "optimized press release" is a press release which announces an event of some kind, and which contains your selected high priority keywords. These are the keywords that you would like your web site to rank highly for in the regular search engine results pages (SERPs).

By writing press releases that are optimized for the keywords you would like to rank for, and then submitting these to online PR sites, these releases will get listed in Google News, and will then move over into regular Google listings.

It is ideal to write an optimized press release and send it out on online PR sites once a week, and continue doing this over a several month period. But if you can’t do this every week, once or twice a month is still very helpful.

Blogs: How They Work

One important thing to do with a press release is to put it on your blog. Blogs are treated as more important than a regular web site by the search engines, as they tend to be updated more regularly with new information. And the people running the major search engines consider fresh content to be very important.

I used to take new articles on my site and client sites and put them into an RSS feed, which stands for “really simple syndication.” However, I don’t bother with this anymore because all blogs create an RSS feed automatically and update it every time you put a new post on the blog. But for people who are interested, they can pull your RSS feed into an RSS feed reader, which is a handy way to review new content from selected sources that you want to follow.

After you post a new press release on your blog, you want to ping (send a notification out to) the blog search engines. There are about 30 of these specialized search engines. This then gets your latest article or release listed in the blog search engines. Wordpress blogs can be configured to do this automatically every time you post something. For other blogs you can use the site www.pingomatic.com which only takes a minute and is free.

The key things to keep in mind with online PR and optimized press releases are:

1. Write a new release frequently. Weekly is best.

2. Use the keywords in the release that you want to be ranking highly for.

3. Submit the press release to at least one free online PR site. Select one that will get the content into Google News. We submit client releases to 5 sites.

4. Put the article up onto your blog.

5. Ping the blog search engines.

6. Repeat the process each week and keep it up for several months. This will really start to raise your rankings for the keywords you are targeting in your optimized press releases.

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SEO and Link Building

by John Eberhard

I recently was communicating to a client and realized he had a confusion between the terms "SEO" (search engine optimization) and "Link Building."

This prompted me to write an article recently with various definitions related to Internet marketing, which I thought was going to be dry and boring but I got several positive comments on the article.

I've decided there is a bit more to say about the relationship between these two internet marketing actions. Here are the definitions again:

SEO: Stands for search engine optimization. This is the process of selecting the best keywords, according to high traffic and low competition, and then placing these keywords in the appropriate places on the website. SEO is a one-time action, not something one tinkers with month by month. It should be redone every 2-3 years, as keyword traffic and competition can change significantly.

LinkBuilding: I have observed some people have glommed this activity into SEO and use the term SEO to refer to both SEO and link building. For the purposes of clarity I think it is best to keep them as separate terms. Link building is the action of creating links on other websites linking back to yours. Google states that the number of links to your site from other sites is its primary criteria for deciding the ranking of a site. So link building is a vital activity if you want your site to rank well on search engines and thus get increased traffic.

Some people get the idea that SEO is like some magic wand and all they have to do is get SEO done to their site and watch the traffic flood in. This is not correct. SEO is an action one does to a website that basically makes it possible for the site to rank well for the keywords that you select during the keyword research process.

But in order for the site to really rank well, you have to then do a program of link building. The ideal program is to do SEO, which is a one-time process, then do link building for at least 6-12 months. The best actions I have found for building links are:

1. Article Marketing: You write a 400-500 word article, then submit it to article directories. You include a "bio box" at the end of the article that includes brief info on you, your company and your website address. Each directory then counts as a link back to your site. Great for building quantity of links. Using this method I can build up links to thousands in just a few months.
2. Optimized Press Releases: Write press releases that contain some of your target keywords, and then submit them to online PR sites. Great for building quality links.
3. Blogs: Take both your articles and press releases and put them up on a blog, and take the keywords in the articles and releases and make them into a link pointing back to appropriate pages on your site.

Just as it is not as effective to just do SEO without doing link building, it is not as effective to do just link building without SEO. Why? Because one of the steps of SEO is to do research on keywords and select the best ones. Then you take those selected keywords and utilize them in your articles and press releases.

When doing a full program of SEO and link building, then each month I check the ranking of the website for all of the keywords I’m targeting. I use software called Market Samurai to do this, as it would take forever manually. Then I count up how many #1 keywords I have, how many in the top 10, top 20, top 100, and top 500. As you continue the link building program, you will see the number of your keywords in each of these categories go up month to month.

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34 Tips on Building Links to Your Website

by John Eberhard

1. Submit articles to article directories, including a “bio box” at the end with your website address. I see article directories getting zero comment from other so-called SEO experts and yet I have been doing them for 5 years and have seen them consistently get results in terms of building high quantity links in a short time.

2. Write optimized press releases with your targeted keywords in them and submit them to online PR sites.

3. When you submit a press release to online PR sites, submit it to several because they each have arbitrary rules about what press releases they will accept.

4. Put up a Facebook fan page, with links to all your websites and blogs. These rank highly on search engines.

5. Put up a blog and write regular articles and posts that include links back to your main website.

6. Include sidebars on your blog with links back to your main site, including links to any offers you have, books you sell, eBooks you’re giving away, etc.

7. Put up a free blog on free blogging site Wordpress.com. Write regular articles that include links back to your main website.

8. Put up a free blog on free blogging site Blogger.com. Write regular articles that include links back to your main website.

9. Put up a free blog on free blogging site Posterous.com. Write regular articles that include links back to your main website.

10. Put up a free blog on free blogging site Tumblr.com. Write regular articles that include links back to your main website.

11. Put up a free blog on free blogging site LiveJournal.com. Write regular articles that include links back to your main website.

12. Use Posterous.com and hook up all your blogs to it, then post your content to Posterous.com and it will go out to all your blogs.

13. Don’t worry about “duplicate content” penalties. This is a myth. Check what Google says if you don’t believe me.

14. Every time you post something on your blog or blogs, go to www.pingomatic.com and send a notification, called a “ping,” to all the blog search engines. If you use multiple blogs, ping for each one except Wordpress.com.

15. When you put out a press release on the online PR sites, also post it on your blog.

16. Post status updates on Facebook and Twitter that include links to interesting stuff on your website.

17. Set up accounts on social media business directories like Hotfrog.com and About.org, including a blurb on your company and links back to your website. I’ve identified 21 sites like this that are effective.

18. Start an account on LinkedIn. List your website address.

19. Start an account on MySpace. List your website address.

20. Produce a video about your company and post it on YouTube and other video sharing sites. Be sure to include your website address.

21. Ignore Google’s advice to simply put up great content on your site and wait for others to link to you. You will become old and gray before you get rich this way. You need to be more proactive than that.

22. If you have multiple websites for different businesses, figure out a logical way to have them all link to each other.

23. Take your articles and put each one up as a “lens” (basically just a page) on Squidoo.com. Include links to your website and blogs.

24. Take your articles and put each one up as a page on HubPages.com. Include one link to your website (HubPages is not as friendly to marketing as Squidoo).

25. Forget about “reciprocal linking,” where you email someone and ask them to link to you and you link to them. This used to be the primary method of link building but Google devalued this about two years ago and you get little benefit from it anymore. (Some “experts” still recommend it though).

26. Despite the fact that Google’s advice to “just put up great content and people will link to you” is pretty anti-marketing, you should still come up with great content and put it up on your site as well as plastering it far and wide.

27. Find bloggers that write about your topic and pitch them on writing something about you. Or offer to guest-write something for their blog.

28. Submit your site to directories that allow free submissions.

29. Set up accounts on bookmarking sites like Digg, Delicious, and StumbleUpon, and bookmark various pages from your site.

30. Put up a free listing on Yelp.com.

31. Avoid link farms, defined as a group of websites that all link to every other site in the group. Most of these are created with some automated setup. Link farms are considered a form of spamming by search engines. You might notice that the word “spam” has evolved to not just mean unsolicited email but anything any techie now considers bad.

32. Put up free ads on Craigslist.com.

33. In your own blog posts mention other people in your field occasionally who have stuff of interest and link to them. What goes around comes around.

34. Hire a brilliant website marketing consultant to do all or most of this website marketing stuff for you, allowing you time to get out more of your own product or service.

Some Excellent High-Ranking Sites For Linking to Your Site

by John Eberhard

As I have discussed in past articles, Google considers the number of links coming to your site from other sites, called “inbound links,” to be the most important criteria in ranking your site for any given keyword. So the job then became, if you wanted to be able to rank well on Google, link building.

If the site that links to you is highly ranked itself, that gives you more “link juice” than one that is not highly ranked.

Search engine marketing professionals used to do this by writing to owners of other sites and asking them to link to the site they were trying to get to rank well. Often the search engine marketer would promise to link back to the other site as well, so the whole activity became known as reciprocal linking. This practice has been dying out as Google has given decreasing value to reciprocal links, until word was they finally took away ALL value from them in May 2008.

In my past articles I have listed out many actions that you can do to build links to your site:

1. Putting up a blog and linking to your main site in the sidebars and in the body of your articles
2. Submitting articles to article directories, also called content hubs
3. Putting up a separate blog for press releases, and also submitting the releases to online PR sites
4. Putting up content on social media sites
5. Social bookmarking

In this article I’m going to list several specific sites where you can put up content that will link back to your site, that I know rank well and will show up high in search engines, thus giving you better link juice.

1. HotFrog.com: This is a business listing site. You can open up a free account there and list your site, and it ranks really well. Right now this comes up as the #1 site when I check for links to my own site.

2. A Corporate Page on Facebook: Put up a corporate page for your business on Facebook, and this will also rank really well on search engines. First open up a personal account on Facebook and then add a listing under “Pages.” I recommend the book “Facebook for Dummies” which gives insight into how to use Facebook to best advantage for marketing and not do dumb things that are considered not OK and that will piss off other users. You can see my Facebook corporate page here.

3. PR.com: This is an online PR site where you can open an account and submit press releases about your company. They won’t accept everything you submit but ones that get in rank highly.

4. GoArticles.com: This is one of the top article directory sites. Open an account and submit articles which include a bio box at the bottom with links to your site.

5. AboutUs.org: This is another business directory that is set up as a Wiki, meaning anyone can go up there and add comments. But if you open a free account and put up a listing for your business, it will rank very well.

Adding content to all the above sites will give you inbound links to your site, coming from high ranking sites.