Search Marketing Insomniac…The Blog of Adam Henige

Life isn’t a beauty contest.  Plenty of ugly people can be successful (even *I* earn a living), and I’ve seen some horrific websites make money for companies.  One thing that I’ve learned in the SEO business over the last few years is that sometimes it pays to say no to a hideous website when someone asks you to market it.

The nice thing about being your own boss is that you don’t have to say yes all the time, but at the same time, you don’t want to turn down business when you’re still relatively young.  Thus the conundrum of being an SEO that needs to eat.  But if you’re in this situation, and you can financially say no, sometimes it’s the right thing to do when someone offers you a website that’s just downright wretched.

Paddles without holes = good.

Sadly, when people think of the negative impact of a poorly constructed/butt ugly website they usually just think of higher bounce rates and lower conversion.  But if you’re an SEO/link builder, you’ve essentially been handed an oar with a hole in it.  You can still paddle, but you do twice the work for half the results.  What do I mean?

Link building is a sales job.  At the end of the day as a link builder you’re out networking and selling others on the value of your content and why they should link to it.  If you’ve ever worked in sales at all, you’ll know that selling an inferior product is a nightmare, and you genuinely don’t feel confident in pushing it.  That not only leads to poor outcomes, but it leads to a defeatist attitude.  Now, even if the site functions well, but is just ugly, you’re still left pitching a brown Zune.

This guy chose to rock the brown Zune. Did anyone else?

Don’t know the Zune?  It’s Microsoft’s foray into the mp3 player realm…they launched a brown version of it when they first rolled them out.  Seriously.  I own a Zune, it’s a pretty nice player, but there’s no way I would buy a brown one (and this is coming from a guy who owns a pink iPod mini).  I wouldn’t want to be seen with something that ugly…which is the same scenario you’ll run into when requesting links.

“Well…uh…yeah, your site has some good info, but I don’t think I want my super expensive, uber-sexy website being associated with your…umm…ugly one.”

That’s a conversation you don’t want to be on the receiving end of.

Image credits:

I’m sure this last could be a whole lot longer, but since I find myself doling out a lot of advice to SEOas and budding SEOs these days and while a lot of times people are on the right track, they tend to overlook little details that can make a big difference.  Here’s a short list I find myself saying often -

1. Don’t waste time getting links from bad pages.  Check to see if the page you’re linking to has some value.  Is it indexed?  Check by doing a Google search - info:siteyouwanttocheck.com and you’ll see if you get a result, and if it’s been cached.  Does the page have PageRank?  If it passes these tests, that’s a good start.  If there are too many outbound links on a page, you’re sharing juice and your links aren’t going to be worth much.  You also might want to do a quick search for the page title, or the website’s page title to see if it’s experienced any Google penalties (hint: if you can’t find the pages anywhere in the rankings for their exact titles, it’s probably worth staying away from)
2. Don’t overdo the anchor text, especially on deep pages.  If you own a site that doesn’t get many links, Google will probably notice if you get 50 consecutive links to a seemingly obscure subpage with a very specific anchor text.  You’ll also want to get links to a variety of pages.  For better or worse, Google wants you to make your links look like they’re occurring naturally…even though they sure know you’re out there building links.  See no evil, hear no evil I guess…
3. Don’t focus on numbers.  Quantity might not get you to the top.  You can spend a ton of time getting massive amounts of low quality links, or that same amount of time getting a few great links.  The latter will often win.
4. Don’t get reciprocal links from less authoritative domains.  If they don’t have any PageRank or links pointing in, why do you want to share a link.  If your glass is half full and someone else’s is a quarter full, what’s the point in sharing?
   

   You might want to compare before you share.

5. Don’t be myopic.  Try different tactics.  Too many of one type of link stops the creative juices from inspiring you to find new ways to get links.  Plus, depending on your tactics, you might also be tipping Google off to your “evil” activities.  Don’t put Google in a corner!

Any other mistakes to avoid?  Please feel free to email me or add a comment.

As I dig around the web on a daily quest for information, I’ve found an immense amount of information on tactics for building links.  Email requests, linkbait, widgets, and many more ideas are sprinkled all over the web and are certainly excellent means to build links.  But for a lot of small businesses, their staff is not always in front of a computer.  This, however, does not mean you can’t still be building links.

Heresy?  Hell no.  Think about it for a second.  All you need to do when you’re at a function is try to find the active web users.  Whether it’s someone who’s active on Twitter, blogs regularly, is in the media or has a media contact, or has control over a website.  Then what do you do?  Make an impression!  This can be as genuine or (if done properly) as contrived as you want to be.

If people don’t know about your company, you have a chance to get yourself noticed, and by proxy your company.  Rand Fishkin, of SEOMoz fame, doesn’t need any further help in building links, but his fashion statements most certainly land him all kinds of links.  For those not in the know, Rand became known for his brighly colored footwear, and with his outgoing personality ends up generating links to his site whenever he’s at an event.

Yellow Pumas, my brother will be jealous.

If you’re headed to an event about a certain topic, try to develop some unique content beforehand that relates to the event and offers some sort of unique value to those in attendance (some nifty tool, interesting picture, article, etc.) and then pitch it while you’re there!  Ask for other people’s blog addresses and Twitter accounts because you’re interested in following them, and then tell them about your content - and tell them why they need to see it. It doesn’t hurt to write the URL of your resource on the back of a business card, either).

In a lot of ways it’s just good old fashioned networking, but it’s about seeking out the right people who will follow up and build links with you.  You don’t need to be annoying or disingenuous, you just need to be interesting and persistent.  So turn off your computer, get out there and build some links!

I don’t know what everyone else’s client roster looks like, but for us it’s all over the map, both literally and figuratively.  Not only have our clients allowed us to fulfill our dream of manifest destiny (almost), but they range from billion dollar corporations to one person start ups and everything in between.  Obviously, the means and the goals of these types of businesses are drastically different, and from our standpoint they each require us to use different “SEO muscles”.

For our smaller clients that don’t have the budget or resources to do consistent content development, a large burden falls on building links through relationships.  Now there’s nothing I hate more than people talking about “relationship building”.  It makes my skin crawl.  It reminds me of this financial planner I met recently who was so obviously phony, but just kept saying “building relationships” until you either got sick of him or decided to buy into his shtick.  I chose the former.

But as much as I hate this cliched term, there’s definitely something to be said for it when it comes to effective link building.  It can be so easy to fall into the trap of thinking about links transactionally.  Do what you need to do to get the link, then on to the next target.  This is a pretty limiting approach for both you and your client, however.

Recently I’ve been doing a lot of this type of work, and particularly in the world of small to mid sized business, there’s a lot of education that needs to take place as you approach link targets in adjacent markets.  People want to know why you want a link and what the value is.  If you’re experienced in the game, you can likely give these folks a fairly canned but convincing response get the link and move on.  However, I’ve been pushing increasingly to help educate my targets as to what I’m doing, the benefit for my client, and the benefit for them.  Most often, I find that they appreciate the knowledge passed along, and in some instances, it even opens the door to opportunities for gaining a new client, either the link target themselves or one of their business contacts.  Even without that benefit, I’ve found some of my targets become increasingly willing to refer me to other good link targets, and having established that relationship makes gaining that next link that much easier.

This is terribly fundamental, but sometimes fundamentals are the easiest things to forget.  I played a basketball game the other night and halfway through the game we were really struggling on offense and we called timeout.  Everyone started throwing out ideas of what to do and someone finally said, “Why don’t we just run a pick and roll?”  One of the oldest and simplest plays in basketball.  We all shrugged and agreed to give it a shot.  The result?  The easiest two points of the night.  The moral of the story?  Sometimes revisiting the fundamentals can really reap some great rewards, and I think that definitely holds true for link building.