1.  Submit your site to directories.

If you aren’t already doing this as part of your link building efforts, then directory submissions can be a quick and easy way to help with your SEO efforts.  As long as you train your staff member on the basics (following submission guidelines, varying anchor text) there’s not really anything that can go wrong.

Lists of directories to submit to can be found easily enough via search engines.

2.  Participate on forums

Don’t do this simply for link building – that can lead to a world of pain.  Just look at the negative publicity Jobsite got after spamming one of my forums!

But good, solid community participation can be a great way to gain exposure for your business and brand name, while at the same time helping a little with link building from your signature links.

The aim should be to build the reputation of your company, and not simply to whore yourself for links.  Don’t drop links in posts unless they are relevant – try to offer advice to offers where appropriate and generally conduct yourself as if you were attending a networking event.

Added bonus – any forums that display thread view counts can be a great way to find new keywords to target!  Unusually large thread view counts can suggest that the thread is receiving a lot of traffic from somewhere (and not just the normal forum browsing traffic).

3.  Contribute to the company blog

Even the opinions and thoughts of a junior member of staff can make an interesting read and can also be a good part of their training.  You will need to carefully focus your staff member’s efforts and not simply let them loose on your site, but done well and it can add valuable content to your blog.

4.  Monitor social networking sites / forums / competitors

If there are active communities within your niche, then it is worthwhile keeping up to date on what’s going on in them.  It might give you ideas for new features for your site, or new markets to target.

While the forum participation is an active role within these areas, monitoring them is more of a passive activity – this is information gathering for internal use, rather than participation to improve the outward value of your company.

5.  Link request emails

I’m not a fan of this – it needs to be done right.  You really don’t want to spam other sites with automated link requests – that’s bad for your reputation.  However, sending a few select link requests can be considered a more public relations role – you build a relationship with the site, not just try to get something from them.

For example, getting in touch with local newspapers for a link can lead to conversations about your business and possibly some free exposure.  Treat your link requests in this manner.

6.  Competitor SEO analysis

Scrape their keywords (grab them from title tags) and do some keyword research on what you find.  Are you missing out on some juicy keyword markets?

Ditto for backlink counts – are you missing some nice link sources?  You can usually forget all the directories and crap like that, but finding news site links on the back of some exposure can give your marketing team some ideas that will eventually help with SEO.

7.  Social networking

Get your staff registering accounts with the likes of Linkedin and so on.  Set up a company Facebook account – perhaps advertise them via any forums you participate on.  Over time this will build up a nice portfolio of contacts.

8.  Rankings analysis

Do you have any rankings bringing in traffic that aren’t number 1?  Then perhaps these are worth attention – perhaps your on page optimisation isn’t quite geared towards that term – perhaps some deep links will do the trick!

9.  Find online marketing opportunities

Small sites offering banner advertising or larger sites offering newsletter sponsorship – these are great ways to expand your marketing activities.  A staff member with some time on their hands can easily compile a master list of sites with advertising options for you to look at later on.

———–

I might update this list at a later date (feel free to comment with any suggestions).  The key here is that all this stuff doesn’t require much experience to do well – it’s all about common sense (with a little guidance from more senior staff where appropriate).  It’s good for your staff to be getting involved as well – particularly junior staff.  Just doing this stuff will not only benefit the company, but will help new staff familiarise themselves with your industry more quickly than the usual training manuals, etc.

The key areas that grabbed my attention were comments like “it’s not my business” and “I don’t taddle tale” – I find it incredible that in this day and age there are still businesses out there that still feel that somehow Karma will come back and bite them on the rear end if they do something like reporting paid links!

Why is reporting paid links to Google any different from reporting spam elsewhere?

Sphinn has a “report as spam” button for each post and only today they introduced a “Desphinn” button.  Why is using that any different from reporting a competitor for buying paid links?

The Sphinn spammer is just another business trying to market their product or services – they just choose to do it a different way than you might agree with.

How about using the Digg bury feature?  Lots of people use that, including many businesses who also use Digg to promote their business in one way or another. 

Askimet then?  Comes as default in Wordpress and loads of people use that to stop spam.  But the same people also promote their blogs by commenting on other blogs.  OK, you may do it by leaving good comments and not just what we would call “spam”, but the principle is just the same – you are commenting to promote your business.

Perhaps forums are different?  Maybe every person who has run a forum and deleted some link spam suddenly doesn’t have the right to post on other forums using their signature or profile to promote their sites?

Maybe some offline examples?  Would you report a company dumping rubbish outside your premises?  Or a competitor flaunting ASA guidelines in their adverts?  Or a competitor using sub par materials in their products?

What about some extremes?

Perhaps your own personal ethics won’t let you report paid links to Google, but where do you draw the line with your “I don’t taddle tale” / “It’s not my business” philosophy?

Would you report a business to Trading Standards if they were ripping off their customers?  I would (and have).  Not because I particularly want to interfere with their business, but because MY BUSINESS can be negatively affected by their actions.  If dodgy Internet marketing services are ripping off customers, then the industry gets a bad name and it makes it tougher to convert new sales.  Even that aside, I do feel some responsibility to take action in certain (extreme) cases - could you sit back and do nothing while you know someone is about to be ripped off?

There is no hypocrisy in marketing!

One of the core arguments against reporting paid links is that it makes you something of a hypocrite if you buy paid links, but also report competitors for doing the same.

That’s nonsense.  Why?  Re-read the last line and pick out the keyword – “competitors” – people you are in competition with.  If you are in business or marketing then your are playing the game to make money.

Yes – do that within the realms of the law and your own personal (or society’s) ethical guidelines, but I think people really need to take stock of what exactly falls within those “rules” and what doesn’t.

Competitive business is about leveraging what you can to succeed.  On the whole that involves taking positive steps to improve your situation (like marketing your business or building a quality site) – but there are times where taking negative actions towards your competition can be a perfectly acceptable approach.

SEOs have one thing in common…

…we all want to be number 1!

We do that within the rules of whichever battleground we happen to be competing on.  On social media type sites that means ensuring your submissions meet their guidelines (and for some it means using loads of fake accounts to get to the front page) – there are no ethics involved there – it’s just down to your personal preferences.

Google has many more fronts to fight on and each offer a number of options for us all.  Reporting paid links is just one of them.

I’m not saying that we should form some kind of “Google paid link brigade” to police the web – the people that comment saying that Google should sort out their own algorithm are completely right.  But the reality of the situation is that we have the option to wait (possibly for a long time) for Google to find our competitors trying dodgy techniques, or we can make a move to speed up the process.

I don’t know about you, but I prefer to have as much control over the success of my business ventures as possible – waiting for Google to catch the competition when I could give them a hat tip doesn’t really make business sense to me.

Bitterness towards Google

I get the impression that more and more SEOs view Google in the way that people used to (and still) view Microsoft.   Perhaps they have been burned by past Google updates or maybe they are just getting sick of seeing dodgy SEO techniques win over good old fashioned “white hat” techniques?

Our industry has been so focused on Google for so long, I think we’re losing sight of how that relationship should really fit into our business models.  Google isn’t the enemy regardless of how badly you may have been burned in the past.  Google is a source of a lot of business, sales, exposure and opportunities for us all.  I’m no Google fanboi – the ‘plex has been as big a source of pain for me as it has any other SEO out there!   I just think we need to step back a little and take stock of the situation.

We have no problem reporting spam on Sphinn.  We don’t ignore it and say, “well that’s Danny’s job to clear all that up”.  We don’t look at it and think we will be considered a hypocrite if we report it (yet we are probably closer to the people spamming Sphinn than we are to competitors in Google SERPs).  Same goes for any forum, blog or social media site we come across.

The exception to the rule

The one argument I can understand is that if you are buying links yourself and you don’t to report competitors just incase it brings a little too much attention to particular SERPs.  Fair enough.  That’s a sound business decision – you weight up the risks and make a choice based on that – no more could be asked of a savvy business person.  I think more of us need to make decisions based on solid business risk assessments and not some odd view of ethics or bitterness towards Google.

Do I, don’t I?

Just to clarify, I’m not presenting myself here as some champion of paid link reporting – I have reported a handful in my time, but not a particularly large amount.  Mostly sites with strong rankings who are pushing the paid link thing a little too far (thousands of links – in one case over one hundred thousand!).

I still prefer the strategy of building a good site so I’ll leave you with a quote from David Wallace’s article as I don’t think I could possibly word it any better:

“Do I think paid links should be a site’s only strategy? No I don’t. The bottom line really comes down to this – if we would spend more time making our sites the very best they can be, we might not have to worry about what the competition is doing because we will be so far ahead of them to even notice them in the first place.”

When does it become your business and why does reporting paid links fall outside that category?  Are you worried that Karma will end up reporting you?  Sorry to say it, but I really think you are kidding yourself if you think that closing your eyes and hoping it won’t happen will remove the risk of it actually happening.  If you are doing something that carries a risk, then whether or not you report your competitors for the same won’t increase or remove that risk.  It just might give you a competitive advantage for a while though.

Scott

ADDED:  Welcome SmallBusinessNews readers!  Just an advanced warning that this article contains a range of profanities.  But seeing you already read the article over at SBN or by email that’s too little too late ain’t it?  Perhaps that should be the motto for the SEO industry? Ho-hum.

I read an article over at SEW today by Justilien Gaspard, which gives reasons why companies should keep their link building efforts in-house (hat tip to Sphinn).  While I agree with the points made, I do think the general argument only really applies to a minority of companies – so I thought a post showing the flip side was in order.

First of all, the core of my argument here is that SEO professionals are like doctors.  Experienced and knowledgeable, they can diagnose a variety of problems from limited information – they can spot hidden solutions and don’t necessarily jump to conclusions.

And with that in mind, I would label absolutely every other person who flirts with SEO as the biggest fucking hypochondriacs in the world.  And this is why…

I’d class a SEO professional as someone who has a reasonably wide scope of success in SEO.  That might be through their own sites, or managing client sites – the point is that the hands on experience over a number of projects arms them with the knowledge to be able to adapt to most future projects that come their way.  Basically, it takes more than optimising a single 20 page site for a low competition term to really consider yourself as a professional.

The problem is that the first barrier to overcome when understanding the industry is first getting your head around the concept (on page optimisation / link weight).  It just seems too easy for a lot of people when they get to this point and that gives them a kind of self confidence that I would guess doctors see every day when they have to address people self diagnosing their own ailments.

An arrogant belief that they must be right because SEO is oh-so simple – the kind of arrogance that means SEO agencies and consultants get a lot of work fixing DIY SEO problems – the kind of arrogance that enables marketing agencies to demand “100 PR4 deep links” for their client’s site – the kind of arrogance that leads to corporate websites losing all organic traffic because their newbie in-house SEO doesn’t know shit.

There are loads of reasons why in-house link building simply isn’t a practical approach from the majority of businesses (of all sizes) out there – these are just a few:

Where you going to recruit a link builder from?

There are no link builders.  It’s not a career.  Sure – agencies will have link building teams – these people are trained internally and very rarely arrive at their job with experience (of course this will change over time though).  There are link building specialists, but the money they can make there’s no chance you’ll get them working for you.

Link building is a boring, shit job on the whole.  It can be very repetitive – lots of admin work involved.   Generally an entry / graduate level position agency side.

There is little scope for career progression as an in-house link building – you will be a team of one in most companies so no chance of a promotion to manager (that’s why your job title probably already has “manager” in it! ).  You could perhaps move to a different company, but your job will basically be the same (just a different industry).  And when you get experienced enough, it’s time to move into the consultancy to see your pay cheque and add a few zeros to it! 

The only prospect of recruiting an experienced staff member to take on a link building role would be to focus on the industry experience rather than the link building experience – that would be an effective approach, but obviously has some pitfalls.

I don’t mean disrespect to any link building professionals out there.  My point here is that as happy in their job as people may be just now, I would imagine most would be early in their career and would expect to be in a more challenging position in 5 years time.  In-house link building can’t offer that – agency link building can to a certain extent (larger team, more clients, more work, more experience).

If you can’t offer your employee a future with your company, how do you expect their function in the company to be part of an effective long term strategy?

Perhaps you will simply have a member of staff “do link building as well”?

Seriously?  Then your chance of them have any link building experience is reduced and they won’t be focused on the task.  Not a big deal – smaller companies commonly have staff members undertaking multiple roles and this can work very well.  It also has the bonus that you can combine industry / company experience with the job role.

But it is a short term solution.  Either their “other job” will take more of their time up or the link building will.  At that point, your company needs to consider a longer term strategy – simply juggling link building isn’t giving it the importance it should have (if you are considering in-house link building in the first place).

The main problem is experience

Recruitment and staff retention concerns aside, what if your staff member screws up?  Remember the hypochondriacs who took that mild headache and jumped aboard the “OMG BRAIN TUMOUR” ship?  That’s your newbie link builder that is.

SEO is full of chains of thought that lead to the wrong conclusions.  Ooh – I added more keywords to the page and it ranks better – let’s add even more!  Shit, Google didn’t like that – I know, let’s make the text the same colour as the background.  Nope, OK can we just push it off page with CSS?  No?  Damn…OK hire the consultant to fix this…

Everything in moderation – this applies to link building as well.  Just because your new recruit knows “links = rankings” and has some previous experience on their CV, doesn’t mean they are fully versed in the more advanced areas of link building.  Not applicable to all candidates of course, but there’s a reason that hiring someone full time may be less expensive than outsourcing!

So what does outsourcing your link building bring to the table?

Let’s run down the list:

• Experience – to do the right thing.
• Peace of mind – that the right thing is being done.
• Stability – agencies and professional link building services usually have teams so even if someone moves on or is off ill you still get the work done.

It seems like a short list doesn’t it?  But that’s what you pay for and I don’t think I need to elaborate on this anymore.

Bottom line

If you are considering hiring someone to do your link building in-house, then consider this.  If you don’t know enough about the job to do it yourself, then you don’t know enough to know how well they are doing their job or how much risk your business is at.

OK, that sounded way more melodramatic that it should – if things go wrong, it isn’t the end of the world.  But as a conscious business owner / manager, you do need to know about the possible issues that you could be facing. 

If I had to sit here and develop an ideal strategy for a large company / website, then of course that would include someone in-house, full time dealing with link building and related areas.  However, the reality of business, careers and the SEO industry means that simply isn’t a practical solution for many companies.

Long term strategies NEED to be grounded in reality – otherwise they just become bollocks marketing documents with no real purpose.

MG

More info on John’s blog here.

Best of luck with the new venture John!

ADDED :-

Dear God what an uproar!  Nice link bait John – shame Matt was a bit tight linking out.  Kudos where it’s due though – he managed to dive onto an “OMG spam is bad” anecdote pretty fast and managed to get a flock of newbies agreeing that this could get them banned from Google!  Lol!

The comments on the Problogger post range from relatively well thought out to downright stupid.  In fairness to Darren, that isn’t a negative towards Problogger which always churns out great content, but some of them are just ridiculous:

Ken Cheung says (referring to Matt’s post):

“This morning I read a post on Matt Cutts blog about V7N and “undetectable” links/spam. You’ll get banned when you get caught”

Uh no, Ken it doesn’t say that.  Matt simply (actually, cleverly) cited an example where he caught someone spamming.  The guy was using doorway pages on his client’s sites and got caught.  All Matt was saying about V7N Contextual was that some things are more “detectable” than most people would think.

That of course assumes that people…think.

Another commentor, Ken, says:

“Yes, it is clearly BlackHat.”

Uh no.  Doorway pages are black hat.  Autogenerated content is black hat.  Buying links?  Grey hay maybe – but a light shade of grey at best.  Maybe if Google was a little better at clamping down on spam then regular businesses wouldn’t have to push the limit of what is considered “white hat”?  Hmmm?

My favourite so far is Nick who says:

“But, most importantly, your readers… you develop a good relationship with your readers, and in turn you lie right in front of their face…

RED FLAG!!! THIS IS NOT A GOOD COMPANY!!!”

I read this and I picture Nick shaking his fist at the monitor in sheer outrage.  WTG Nick!  It’s great to see someone take such a staunch moral stance against the evils we all face in daily life.  Er, like link buying.

In fairness thought there are a few geniune and well thought out concerns about link buying in general, which should serve as good feedback for everyone involved.  Isn’t it interesting though, how the “ethical” debate has moved on from SEO and settled nicely on the lap of the blogging community?

The TW thread was slightly more diplomatic (as tends to be the trend in the SEO community these days), but again no link love?  And I thought they had a “link out generously” policy?  Oh well.

MG

Noticing some TB PR updates too.

UPDATE – there’s some chatter about “PR Outages” – sites showing PR0 for no (apparent) reason.  Some posters on DaveN’s blog speculate that old PR could be getting dumped to make way for an update.

A lot of well known sites are being hit with TB PR0, including DaveN, Problogger, TheBestOf, Radio Times, ITV, v7n forums, HighRankings and Syndk8, so it isn’t panick stations for the PR0 crowd just yet!

Matt confirms this is the quarterly Google data push (which updates link:, info: and related: data as well as exporting new values to the toolbar for PR).  A reminder to any newbies reading this – any changes in toolbar PR doesn’t mean rankings will change as these PageRank values will have been used for some time now.

MG

MG

Basically the original poster asks a question about duplicate content based on a blog post he read (I assume it was this topic from Pubcon):

“No two links should point to the same page”

Why not?  Anyone expand on this?

A reasonable request based on a topic which is pretty complicated.  However the resulting “discussion” made me laugh – it’s so typical of the SEO community to take something at face value and run a mile with it without looking into a little bit deeper…

The confusion has arisen from the terminology used in the original blog post, where the panel members at the Pubcon roundtable (Duplicate content issues):

Types of dup include multiple URLs going to same page, similar content on different pages, syndicated content, manufacturers’ databases, printable pages, different languages or countries, different domains and scraped content.

A “page” here is refered to as a piece of content.  The “URL” is the direct URL used to reach the content.  So a simple example would be http://example.com and http://www.example.com both leading to your homepage – 2 URLs, both leading to the same “page”.

However, this was misinterpreted by the good folks over at WMW (shocker!) who took the statement to mean that multiple links to any URL could cause duplicate content.  Ie, if you had a 10 page site, every page linked to “Home” and caused 10 duplicate version.

OK, fair enough some of the folks may not have read the report on the WebmasterWorld Pubcon session…but then maybe think before posting comments such as…

• This is pure nonsense
• I hate to say it in such strong terms but this is BS.

Hat tip to moderator jdMorgan for stepping in and clarifying the situation with a perfect explanation / clarification and a statement that I think should preceed every comment posted on every forum on the net:

“Reading earlier posts in this thread may save some embarassment to those who wish to assume the worst….”

Now here’s a thought for the forum junkies out there.  For every stupid comment made without thought that is subsequently brought to light – how many aren’t?  Worth considering while you base the future of your business on information you read on forums.

MG

Link exchanges have had a bad rap, but generally aren’t as effective as they once were.  Even so, exchanging links on a small scale with related sites as part of a larger link building campaign is fine and won’t hurt you.

Think about it this way – your site links to the BBC, then some time later the BBC run an article about your business (with a link to your site) – as far as Google is concerned this is a “reciprocal link”.  But it isn’t as cut and dry as that is it?  You also link to loads of other people, and other people link to you – the same goes for the BBC.

What is bad for search engine optimisation (or rather, ineffective and a waste of time) is exchanging links with anyone who will accept them.  As has been mention, if you link to blatantly random sites then it won’t help (and they link to you), it won’t help.

Another example of legitimate link exchanges are blogrolls – this is the term used to describe “related blogs” links on blogs.  Many bloggers know each other (within their own industries) from various networking medium (forums, conferences, trade shows, etc) and will happily link to each other.  There is still some effectiveness there (for SEO and for generic traffic / exposure).

Other methods of link building have varying levels of effectiveness:

Directories
Less and less effective these days – basic link directories are easy to create and there are literally hundreds of thousands of them out there.  Search engines tend to favour directories that have some form of editorial control – ie, they don’t let in any old riff raff!  Examples of good link directories:  DMOZ, Yahoo directory, BOTW, SevenSeek, etc

Articles
Writing articles for your subject area and getting them published on related sites (with a short bio and link at the end) is a great way to build links and get some good traffic.  However this shouldn’t be confused with mass article distribution (via article directories), which clone your article and allow anyone to publish them – this is less effective (mainly because the quality of the sites publishing them tends to be lower, and the subject area is more broad).

Press Releases
Pretty much same issues as articles.

Link Baiting
This is the term used to writing great articles (or information) for your own site that is so good that people will want to link to it naturally.  The hard part is getting people to find out about it in the first place, so its a lot easier to accomplish if you have a good user base on your site (people read new stuff you post and link to it from other sites they know / own).  You can also use news style sites to promote the article (places like Digg or Slashdot), but you face community moderation on places like this (ie, your article has to face the public “vote” in order to be really successful).

Forum signatures and profiles
Great way to build links, but it is important not to spam.  Read the forum rules first – for example, some forums only allow one or two links per signature and others don’t like you dropping URLs in posts, using affiliate links or encouraging people to “contact you” privately.  I run a few forums and I have no objections to labelling a company as a spammer for link dropping on the forums!

Conversely, if your posts add quality information to the thread then not only do you get the link benefit, you also could get the traffic and business benefit as well.   In terms of SEO forums links aren’t brilliant – threads get buried several pages deep over time which lowers the impact of the link.

Just ask nicely
Sometimes if you ask nicely enough, people will be happy to put a link on their site to yours without a link back.  Brilliant!  These are good links.

Stuff to watch out for…

3 way link exchanges
This usually occurs when someone asks you to link to their site (site A) and offers you a link back from another site (site B).  Usually it is a SEO agency trying to build “one way” links to their client (site A) and linking back from a quickly created directory (site B).

This holds no value for you whatsoever.

It surprises me how often people try this and in fact how many big brands let their SEO agencies get away with it.  I run 15 of my own sites just now so I get a lot of junk mail – I’ve had major UK job sites asking me for 3 way link exchanges…

Blog comment spamming
When you comment on a blog you can usually include a link in a post (it is similar to writing a forum post).  This used to be a way that unethical SEOs would generate links using automated programs to post comments on blogs.

To combat this, most blog software now uses the tag rel=”nofollow” on any URL posted in comments.  This tells search engines to ignore the link (and it gives the site no benefit).  The tag was originally used so people who sold text links (for SEO) didn’t get penalised by search engines (ie they had to sell the “traffic benefit” instead).

MG

Also getting some decent referrals from UK Business Directory – TheBestOf for some other sites (more expensive at £10 per month, but worth the business referrals!).

MG

eflaunt has been around for about 18 months now in one form or another – the company largely focused on a variety of internal projects and managed campaigns for a select few clients.  I’ve developed quite a few unique techniques for Internet Marketing services over the years (been in the industry for over 5 years now) – eflaunt operate a very unique approach to SEO which I haven’t seen other SEO agencies able to offer over the years.

If you’re looking for Internet Marketing services, then please feel free to contact eflaunt on:  business (at) eflaunt.com.

MG