Archive for July, 2010

10 Link Building Tools You Would Never Have Thought Of!

Jul 27th

Today we collect ten of the most original ideas for building links on the net. You may not be able to integrate all of them into your SEO campaign, but even a couple will give your link popularity score a lot of momentum.

1 . Offer free samples of your product in exchange for reviews
If you have a truly awesome product or service, this will get you a lot of love in the web community. Offer people free samples of your product or service (if appropriate), and ask them to leave a review on a site of your choice. Some might not bother – but plenty will. Choose a site that follows its review links for best search engine optimisation effect!

2 . Create ‘real’ relationships that could turn into linking relationships
Go to industry conferences and mingle with the people you’d like to get links from. You’ll be much more memorable and linkable if you meet them in person, instead of just as an email signature.

3 . Become a sponsor
A way to feel good about getting links! If you donate to a school, you may be able to get some authority .edu links to really bolster your SEO long-term.

4 . Buy an old authority site
Google likes older domains better – buy a site that already has a good link profile, and start building links on it to your site as an SEO side project.

5 . Make sure you are W3C complaint
Government sites are more likely to link to standards compliant sites, and you can also get a link from the directories of W3C compliant websites.

6 . Leave testimonials
When your business finds a great product, send a testimonial off to the site owner. Ask if they’d mind linking to you, if they end up using it on the site. For best SEO effect, choose a website that doesn’t already have an enormous testimonial list.

7 . Make people feel important
One survey by a salary-oriented site looked at how underpaid mothers were, and gained a veritable flood of links from across the web! In SEO, you definitely catch more flies with honey.

8 . Put photos on your site
Sites that have pictures of the owners often seem more trustworthy, people are more inclined to link to them, and your search engine optimisation strategy benefits. Personally, I prefer the author photographs that aren’t too polished and perfect, but show people in a ‘real’ light.

9 . Interview somebody
People LOVE to read interviews … and they love to link to interviews from their pages, because they are information ‘straight from the horse’s
mouth’. For the time they take to do, interviews are great SEO value.

10 .Offer tools in your industry
Many mortgage brokers offer their own mortgage calculators. Finance oriented sites offer their own currency converters. Project Managers use Gantt Chart templates for project management with Excel. Check out Apple’s list of Dashboard widgets for inspiration for an idea you could have built for your own SEO campaign.

PPC VS SEO part 1

Jul 7th

Posted by admin in Advertising

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There has been very intense disagreements between which of Pay Per Click(PPC) or Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is more effective for a company.

PPC offers many advantages such as near instantaneous flow of traffic, pay on performance, precise keyword targeting, budget control and time control just listing a few. Since results are instantaneous, most SEO companies tend to keep using PPC. Since there are more people using PPC, costs have risen considerably as there are more competitors bidding for the same keyword.

SEO requires more planning and if conducted well, minimizes cost significantly. SEO can be a timely process and may cost a significant initial cost, usually in the form of link buying. SEO can also improve your websites value. A good example is imagining your website as a property such as your house. With an SEO targeted approach, you would purchase land or other houses around it out expand your existing business. On the other hand, PPC could mean renting the land around you.

By 2013, a CNN report suggests, internet advertising will grow from USD$9.1 billion in 2007 to USD$21 billion. Surprisingly, out for the billions spent on advertising, only 11% is from SEO and 87% from PPC.

In determining which approach suits best depends on your business or the product you’re trying to sell. For example, if it’s a seasonal item, and the popularity is only during this period of time, you would want instant results, thus PPC would be the better option.

The image bellow shows the distribution of clicks by internet users in the US. You can see that most people click on the organic search section compared to the Paid, ‘sponsored’ area.
You decide which is better? Or you can consult an Internet Marketing expert regards to whether SEO or PPC is right for you.

A mobile version of your site is important

Jul 7th

Posted by admin in Google

A recent survey conducted by the Australian Interactive Media Industry Association (AIMIA) of 3710 respondents found 21 per cent browsed internet websites in the past 12 months at least once a day. It is predicted in over the next 2 years with better value mobile internet packages; over 52% of mobile phone users will browse the internet.

These figures suggest mobile websites has become a crucial part of websites to increase their traffic. Currently, nearly all major websites such as CNBC, CNN, The Age and more, have a mobile version.

Most might not be aware that Google has a crawler called the “Googlebot-Mobile”. A very relevant post can be found on the following link, which gives you a basic idea on how different mobile sites are. The Google blog also suggests tips on how enhance the chances of your mobile site getting indexed. Here’s the link Google Blog about mobile sites

The cost of developing a mobile version of differs depending on the complexity required. A mobile site costs around $2,000 for a very basic version to $40,000+ for a site which customizes all pages and tools. The market is still considerably young, thus there are less competition, so the prices are still quite high. I would recommend a mobile website programmer company called Appscore. We’ve had a few mobile websites developed by them and cannot be more pleased with their service. There pricing are also very reasonable.

Most websites do work on mobile phone browsers but for me, it sometimes is annoying to scroll sideways, zoom in or out. Sites which require constant zooming in and out causes hassles to browsers and in some cases, browsers leave. The aim of the game is to gain more viewers, but most importantly returning viewers. By providing them with a pleasant browsing experience, at home while browsing on their computer or while they are out on their mobile phone.

Increase the pages being indexed by Google

Jul 7th

Posted by admin in Google

Getting your page indexed by Google is the foundation to get traffic to your site. The site map is a easy way how Google can crawl the pages on your site as all your page links are contained within the site map. However, providing Google with the links does not necessarily mean all your website pages being indexed.

Providing pages in the sitemap is not necessarily enough for it to be listed in Google. Google intends only to index quality pages and this is usually determined by sites being linked to the website or page. As more websites get linked to the page or website, it suggests it is quality, thus getting indexed.

In general, the more quality links that are linked (especially authority links) to the website or page, the higher chances other pages on the site will be crawled by Google and benefiting your SEO.

A good example on how Google crawls for new pages can be seen bellow.