link building

The SEO consultant - a job / process description - a bit of a rant

Marketing Fan — Mon, 14 May 2007 22:23:47 +0200

Now when I was in New York City last month for the SES I met, among a ton of other friends, partners and clients – Avi, a New Yorkian SEO ...

And you know what’s best about meeting good ole’ friends at those events? Yeah, meeting them, having booze and getting introduced to THEIR friends… it’s about networking and actually the non-plus-ultra is if your friends actually do the “elevator pitch” for you, so all you have to do is stand there are smile, hand out some cards and then get back to those folks actually :-)

Shimon Sandler was introduced to me, and while I didn’t recall the name I found that this is actually a really respected SEO consultant in the scene … well- in fact I read on his blog and a ton of this comments eg on Jim Boykin’s link building blog.

One of Shimon’s interesting posts on his blog is that Job-Definition of what an SEO actually does… I love those posts (just like Todd/Stuntdubl also ALWAYS releases those posts where I just think RESOURCE... it’s a RESOURCE... man, it’s great and I’ll be back)

You know when I look at Shimons definition of what an SEO consultant does I actually have to remind myself to finally revamp, rewrite and (hell) get rid of the typos in the copy of my own SEO company site – and yes sure – I want to sync the content in AT LEAST two languages english and german, after all that’s one of my USPs here… and I even got some spain and italian domains for Cemper.Com as well last week …

Shimons’ definition will serve me well as a blueprint, an information architecture for my new copy… 16 points that describe the basis SEO process… very nice..

and best of all, Shimon even gives away a “standard proposal” he sends out to his clients, including specifications for deliverables and EVEN the charging model … he starts with a retainer fee of $2000 for his services, that’s 20 hours work … but still charges what is above that.. I think that’s pretty cool to buy… after all that’s just 4-5 hours a week … half a day… I bet he spends HALF of that already for communication and reporting on some clients…

(hint hint hint to all clients and managers – let your people work :-)

What I’m missing there is some detailled spec on WHAT/WHEN Shimon reports on his link building, link buys, etc… my impression in general is that link building is a bit under-sized in the whole post – after all links are 95% of the game, once you made sure in the first month that the site-structure and content does not suck as it usually does in the beginning when an “agency” created that nice ALL-FLASH loaded site…

But where do these clients come from? ... hehe.. Shimon is a nice guy… giving away a “sales blueprint” with some sort of checklists to ask prospective clients is definately worth a read…

The “questions for SEO clients” are even a bit sophisticated… assuming you KNOW you have an SEO client… you know which question saved me HUNDREDS OF WASTED hours over the last 3 years?

christoph to a prospective SEO client that calls him up wrote:

Nice site you got, promoting all your products, services, etc. blabla

So – what would it do in the bottom line for your business when you get from NOWHERE to number1 in Google? do you know much you actually make per sale? and how much can you spend to increase the number of sales?

Oh – you don’t know?

Frankly, I met/got called up by so many folks that do “internet marketing” just for some sort of “branding value” or their ego to be up in ranks that they have NO CLUE if they can spend 1000, 10,000 or 100,000 EUR per time interval… well – that’s where I usually end the call… sorry – but people that got no idea on their spends usually have no idea on their goals, or just don’t care… neither of these is a reason to do business…

But anyway, you know it’s REALLY funny – bumping into friends on conferences is one thing, but getting to know the next “indirection” of the network just by chance is in fact the MAJOR reason for me to go to these conferences and to to spend $350+ a night for that sneazy little room in the hilton… Staying as close as possible to the even gives you those extra 15 minutes AT LEAST twice a day where you can meet up with a lot more people that if you would stay ANYWHERE...

Too bad I’ll miss out on the SMX in June and the SES In August – but I’ll then have my studies and master’s finished (be sure to checkout the online survey !)

After this bit longer break I’ll do these

- DrupalCon in Barcelona (September) – NICE weather :-)

- SMX social media special (October) in New York City again, YEAH – rocks

- WMW in Las Vegas (the classic in November)

and then maybe even some SES in chicago… or I might just hang out with my friends there… not sure

Then I’ll sing – “I just can’t get enough…” :-D

High Quality Link Building

Marketing Fan — Wed, 13 Dec 2006 14:33:54 +0100

The last days a couple of great resources for link building were released, so I think it’s time to round-up and put some of them together – completed with my thoughts and comments on the various sources

For novice link builders

SeoLogs Father’s link building guide —- Badi Jones put together a nice roundup to start explaining your old daddy how to build some traffic to site … worth a read and a digg, and while it’s not 100+ ways to build links it’s something you can READ and talk about easily to non-SEOs

Why Link Reciprocation Kills your Ranks is a bit lenghty but greatly detailled post about why doing recip link exchange not only is worthless but can kill your rankings

Linking out is important and was just confirmed again by Matt Cutts and Rand Fishkin as they took care of where their users link out to .. Jim re-visited the whole co-citations and outlinking as he already explained it in big detail last summer… now everybody should be aware that outlinks are important for a site’s trust rank ... the times of page rank hording are really over, I agree with Jim

For advanced link builders

Blog post services not detectable is the common sense of Rand’s post about a Chicago session… well frankly that’s only true for THOSE blogs that are REAL blogs and not only setup to feed PayPerPost, blogvertise and other “pay per blogpost” services

Aaron chimes in suggesting to get high quality reviews at ReviewMe – a service I still have to try.

Quality Score the new pagerank – thoughts about publishing the Adwords Quality Score to advertisers… that’s the next big thing in Link Valuation IMHO... and I agree with Aaron that the Quality Score is influenced by the organic results… Amazon and ebay DO pay less for advertising their products than any PPC arbitrager … makes sense to me

Indirect linking is a concept I’ve been talking about for months to my clients – and since Chris want’s to talk about better natural link building anyway, I felt can talk about this idea in public anyway … after all the audience of this blog is pretty limited anyway – so enjoy if you haven’t already

Domain Trust concept vs. page trust – with presell pages on .edu domains being sold for some time (and I heard they sell like hot cake) it becomes obvious that the concept ob using an old domains trust to power your younger site is some that simply works!... Aaron Wall thinks the concept of domain trust will be lowered or narrowed down pages on those domains that are REALLY old and got a lot of links…

Aaron Wall wrote:

I think Google is going to have to reduce their weighting on domain trust and place more on how well the individual page is integrated into the site and integrated into the web as a whole.

Well frankly that’s how it already works today – the more links the better, the older the page, the better it is if you get a link there… I think Aaron’s point is (and I agree) is that the overall influence of an old domain is SO strong, that it creates a real incentive to buy old sites as Jim and others do on a large scale

Getting links from .edu and .gov sites is a very valuable thing, as even the SEJ talks about recommendations for .gov link hunting —- however I wouldn’t call using pages like this and this for paying money to get a .gov link under the radar ... I’m sure none of these sites pass any link value

For the black hats

Forum spammer software – while I don’t link to it, you should know that there’s software out there that cracks captcha security , fakes user accounts by auto-registering that on free-mail services and of course does all that crap via 100s of anonymous proxies … and that’s just the start … oh – and of course blog spamming software that cracks CAPTCHAs and other protection is out as well – but IMHO there’s more attention on fighting blog spam than forum spam… does PHPBB and Vbulleting have an akismet plugin? I assume no.

Forum Private Mail spammer software – the end of spam free forums is near – software to send out MASS-PMs to all registered users is available and it’s the same principle as with email spam… send out 1,000,000 PMs to get 10 or 20 buys…

Video spam – again something I won’t endorse with a link, but the cat’s out of the bag that posting stuff on YouTube helps your rankings – no wonder – it’s a great trusted domain … getting a link from there is like getting a link from Yahoo or an old .edu site… and if it’s not for the link juice, it’s for human traffic… there are companies out there selling this service already

(note – all these blackhattish things won’t result in high quality links, despite the title… it’s more a high-tech armed link spamming toolkit I would put such stuff into … DO NOT USE SUCH STUFF AT HOME OR GET YOUR SITES BANNED)

New link Builder tools for all

Of course you have to checkout Jim’s new updated SEO tools

Michael provides a couple of handy bookmarklets – reminds me I need to reveal and update my own “SEO Bookmarklets”: once again (heck I couldn’t even find the page they are located on… how could YOU ? ... TODO)

If you ever wondered about the perfect link then Jim’s team member wrote a little story about his experiences with Jim’s take on it… :-)