Search Marketing InsiderPay Per Click, Social Media and SEO Strategies – An Internet Marketing Institute Publication

Accruing high-quality links is vital to improving your company’s SEO results over time. But traditional manual link building alone is time-consuming, expensive, and often delivers diminishing results if overused. The recent JC Penney link buying scandal has put black hat link building in the spotlight, but there are plenty of ethical ways to attract new links and stay ahead of the fast-changing SEO game.

Here are 8 link building techniques we’re seeing great results with for our clients that we expect will continue to grow in effectiveness in 2011 and beyond.

Link Building Techniques for 2011

1. Vanity URL / Outdated URL Redirects – With all the effort that gets poured into SEO and link building, we still see websites all the time with hundreds or even thousands of links going to outdated URLs, or vanity URLs that don’t pass along their SEO value. Implementing a proper 301 redirect can recapture this value, often saving months’ worth of link building efforts to create the equivalent value. If your company has recently undergone a website redesign without involving an experienced SEO team, or if you do a lot of marketing campaigns using microsites and/or vanity URLs, this will likely be the most important SEO effort you do all year.
2. Strategic Partnerships – Leveraging existing relationships with vendors, partners, suppliers, and customers is an easy and mutually beneficial way to build links. Companies naturally want to display these relationships on their website to showcase their standing within the industry. Review their websites to identify potential link opportunities (Links pages, partner sections, etc.) and then reach out to your contacts at the business to request a link. Be prepared to provide a link back from your own company’s website if requested to seal the deal.
3. Online PR – For companies that send out frequent news and press releases, adding online PR is great way to generate links and additional media pickups at a low incremental cost. Following the rise of PRWeb, major wire services PRNewswire, BusinessWire, and MarketWire have all upgraded their service offerings in recent years to offer online PR distribution.  Just be sure to add SEO-friendly links to your releases and you’re building links!
4. Contests & Promotions – Contests and promotions are an inexpensive way for companies to build links while also engaging their target audience and current customer base. If your company doesn’t have a large following, partner with a prominent publication or blogger to launch the contest and build awareness.
5. Social Media Outreach – Social Media offers numerous opportunities to grow the inbound links, traffic, and authority of your company’s website. To make the most of this strategy, look to create long-term partnerships that lend themselves to ongoing awareness and inbound links. For example, B2B companies with a strong industry presence can offer key employees (e.g. CEO, Product VP/Director) to do “expert interviews”. Product companies and retailers can send products to prominent bloggers for product reviews.
6. Cause Marketing – Social responsibility is a growing trend among both consumers and companies. Cause marketing is a way your business or brand can showcase its social responsibility by partnering with a social or charitable cause that is closely aligned with your business, product, or target market. Examples such as American Express’ Members Project or Toms Shoes One for One initiative have generated tens of thousands of inbound links as a side-effect of the promoting positive social impact.
7. Event Marketing – Marketing seasonal or one-time events is fantastic form of outreach that also generates inbound links. Examples range from big conferences like CES to an informal local meetup. Even if your business can’t host its own event, hosting a vendor booth or speaking at an event will usually result in a link back from the event’s site.
8. Embeddable Widgets – Develop useful tools and resources that can be shared and embedded on third-party sites or in social media – this can be a scalable way to generate inbound links. Look for ways to showcase your company’s expertise, products, or proprietary data in ways that also appeal to a wide community of website/blog owners. Common embeddable widget examples include calculators, news tickers, and stock quotes.

Which of these techniques (or others) have worked best for your company?

Image via Idea Launch

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Ben Krull is a Sr. SEO Manager at Point It, the largest independent search marketing agency in Seattle. He leads strategy, recommendations and implementation for Point It’s SEO business, as well as supporting Point It departments on SEO best practices. Prior to joining Point It, Ben led the SEO practice at space150, a digital agency based in Minneapolis.

by Jon Rognerud, Entrepreneur.com

Why do you have a hard time getting (converting) web traffic when it’s *this* easy?

The lifeblood of all businesses online is traffic. I mean – targeted traffic that you can begin to test for conversions.

#1: Keyword Research
Keyword research should be #1 on your list – always. Try tools like Google Keyword Tool, SEO Book Keyword Tool, Market Samurai (free trial). Get more ideas using the search based tool. If running PPC (you should), look at PPC data and keyword portfolio overall that is most closely aligned to your market need: write and optimize for those terms. The most competitive should be in focus, but the higher converting term is most often not the most highly trafficked term. Discover how they search the web and target your terms accordingly. (Informational, Transactional or Navigational)? “Armani black leather jackets for women” is better than “leather jackets,” for example. Use search engine optimization (SEO) to create a set of themed pages to match your findings.

#2: Social Media & Link building
Most know and agree that the Google algorithm relies heavily on links for ranking, especially in competitive markets. Most of these tactics are low cost entry points. Offering quality, and something of value will create link opportunities by default, and should always be your goal. Spend more time thinking about this and submit to quality properties than the useless “300 directories for $49.99” approach.
a. Article Marketing - 400-600 words with real value. Think about the users and webmasters (who    may use the information) first. Make sure to include at least 2 links in the resources box. One could be the actual company name, another, an anchor text keyword. Think users, and then search engines. Make sure to submit to top article directories within your category and sub-category. You can use Yahoo directory and DMOZ to get a sense for activity and relevancy in your marketplace. Use EzineArticles to start.
b. Answering questions - Providing value to your community is always a good thing. See the top answer search engines and get started. I have used Yahoo Answers and Yedda, they are all pretty easy to use. Remember to not “pitch” your own business. Provide real, useful answers. Of course, you’ll get a link back to your site, but the “value” is more important long term. If one of the answers (example Yahoo) appears high and gets you more traffic, you can target additional ads on that page too. (Sponsored Results). If you cannot spend the time yourself, an expert author or an outsourced model works well for an hour a week to work on this.
c. Activate the social communities and start sharing your (quality) content
        a. Start with one of two at first. Look at what your competition might be doing. Then, check – Digg, Reddit, Linkedin, Twitter, Facebook, Delicious, Youtube, Technorati, Stumbleupon. But – don’t forget to look at: Squidoo.com, Hubpages.com, Zimbio.com, Scribd.com, Docstoc.com, Slideshare.net, eHow & Wetpaint.com. For competitive terms you can get to first page ranking using these trusted web properties. It certainly can build your brand and company reputation much quicker. All this for free (outside of your time, of course)! Use socialmarker.com to bookmark your best content across multiple accounts easy and fast. However, do not spam – and try to keep the various content channels unique, not just duplicate content.
        b. Distribute your videos via tubemogul.com, and for a paid fee, try trafficgeyser.com.
        c. Use budurl.com to track your clicks and visitors from Twitter, and use ping.fm to distribute your “tweets” across multiple social platforms – in seconds! Remember! Creating your trust and authority using relevant link building is a “never-ending” task for you.

d. Blog Strategies
      a. A little more advanced topic, but creating PR or Traffic pumper sites with (WordPress) blogs that are relevant to your business, can work very well. Create newsworthy sites and promote them. Use an inter-linking strategy to feed traffic and PR juice to the destination sites of more “core” (money) sites that you own.
e. Directories
      a. Get Yahoo (paid), DMOZ (free) listings established. Look at goguides, gimpsy, skaffe and botw.org as well (not free). This strategy will yield more link/authority juice than 100’s of low quality directories.

#3: SEO
SEO – Search Engine Optimization is the art and science of crafting keyword rich copy and building search friendly websites to appear high in the rankings in the natural search results pages. Consider the power of blended search in all your doings where video, news, podcasts, images, maps all display into one “Universal Search,” as Google calls it.
     a. TAGS: TITLE, DESCRIPTION, H1, ALTs – Make sure to describe your page using keywords in these tags.
     b. LOCAL SEO: If you are a local business, make sure you get your listings into the big three search engines (Google, Yahoo, Bing/Microsoft). You can use getlisted.org to check your listings, and ease the process of submission. Do NOT spam by faking multiple listings and phone numbers. See Google Local for more details, and the steps you can take. Make sure to read David Mihms Local ranking success factors.
    c. Google Webmaster Tools: Make sure to set up a free account here. Look at the diagnostics, links, what Googlebot sees, and terms that Google qualifies. Do they match your major topics and keywords? Tune accordingly and continue to build links, as mentioned.
    d. Analytics: Google Analytics, Getclicky (free/paid) – to make sure each page is getting the right keywords and traffic that you had planned for each topic and subtopic.

#4: Plan to Fail? Or…
…fail to plan. Be clear on your strategic plan for all online endeavors. Make sure you have short and long term goals in mind. A SWOT plan can really help you. Look at the competition using (free/paid) SpyFu.com, Compete.com and SEMrush.com tools. If you want a quick overview of your competition that includes social popularity and traffic measures, try quarkbase.com. However, it’s important not to over-obsess on the competition. And, think about conversions as your end goal, not rankings.

Summary
Using the above tactics – along with tracking your competition’s URL and keywords in your space via Google alerts (www.google.com/alerts) will get you ahead of your competition and the search engines. 
 
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Jon Rognerud is Entrepreneur.com’s SEO columnist, an SEO consultant and the author of The Ultimate Guide to Search Engine Optimization, in bookstores now. He has more than 20 years experience building software and marketing projects, including creating content and application solutions at Yahoo!/Overture. His SEO company provides search marketing solutions for small to midsize businesses.