Marketing News
SES San Jose 2005 - Day 3
August 10, 2005
Day 3: "Show Time"
I decided to sleep in a little on Wednesday, in order to ensure I was well rested for the Advanced Linking session at 11:00 that I would be participating in as a Q&A speaker. I showed up for that session at about 10:45 and met with other panelists Debra Mastaler, Greg Boser, Mike Grehan, and Eric Ward. Poor Eric had finally arrived after a truly slapstick sounding comedy of travel errors… culminating in his having to spend a large amount of money to pay someone from his hotel to drive him to the convention center. His room at one of the conference center hotels had been given away when he missed his arrival due to the prior travel snafus. Danny Sullivan showed up to moderate and briefly gave us instructions before we started. Although I did not take notes (Ben -aka “Phoenix-” covered the session for Seroundtable), I will give a brief synopsis of the session. I was seated between Debra and Eric, and felt far less nervous than I had thought I would.
Greg Boser, who operates WebGuerilla.com, spoke first, and highlighted the importance of proper link building in order to gain good search engine rankings. He provided insight into a very effective way to gain relevant links: research your competitors’ links. Eric Ward spoke next, and reinforced the idea that links are not just for helping to gain search engine rankings, but are invaluable in terms of delivering qualified and relevant traffic to at website. He spoke of the importance of trying to get links in newsletters and blogs, especially if they are very popular, in order to gain this traffic. He provided a few examples of sites that would help in this effort. His sessions, including hot links to his examples, are always available at ericward.com/ses/.
After Eric finished, Debra Mastaler of Alliance Link was introduced. She reiterated the importance of linking between topically-relevant sites, and provided excellent examples of successful linking strategy. She explained the great importance of using keyword-rich anchor text to link to a page, instead of simply “read more” or “click here.” She also described the value of placing links within content areas instead of the footer bar or other “advertising space.” She also talked about the importance of linking out to relevant sites. I was preparing at this time for my informal remarks, so I apologize about not being more specific.
Finally, it was my turn. It was a little surreal at first, speaking at a conference of this magnitude, but fortunately I only had between 2 to 3 minutes for “informal remarks.” I started by saying that it was an honor to be a part of this all-star team of linking experts. I briefly described G3 Group and its properties Instantposition.com and Targetware.com, and then spoke on the subject of internal linking. I suggested that it was important to not forget to build good anchor text links when adding new content to a website. I provided a generic example of a website we had worked with that had gained number one rankings for a particular two-word search phrase with over 2.5 million competing websites at Google. This page only had two inbound links from other domains, and yet had achieved and maintained first place rankings for this term for over four months, now.
I then described a situation that Danny Sullivan had brought up in the moderator area of the Search Engine Watch forums, describing a particular website that was appearing number one for a term highly relevant to the loan industry. This website was actually the portal of a web marketing company that provided website design and marketing. Apparently, from research that I did to confirm something that Danny had suggested, the site was ranking for the term because it had created (presumably for one of its clients) and submitted-to a variety of loan-related directories and had included its link using the domain name as the anchor text within at least. Since links are often given weight due to the topic of the page, this site had “accidentally” gained first place rankings for that particular keyword. This is an example of a sort of linking-caused “mutation” in the rankings. By the way, I checked the same term in Google that morning, and the site was still ranked number five at Google for the particular term.
Last to speak, also with informal remarks, was Mike Grehan. He also reiterated the importance of anchor text as well as inbound links from relevant sites and directories, and repeated his well known definition of Google PageRank as being useless “green fairy dust.” His idea is not to be a collector of links, but rather focus on overall business development.
After the session I was in, it was “back to work” reporting on other sessions. I attended the “Buying and Selling Links,” which was also paneled by Eric Ward, Debra Mastaler, and Greg Boser. In addition, Patrick Gavin from text Link Ads spoke, as well as Thomas Bindl of OPTOP. Patrick started with an excellent review of methodology to use when buying links. Described the importance of remaining within the same theme as the pages you are linking to. Also emphasized the use past metrics from your web analytics system to help identify desirable links. He has had success in finding “pockets” of traffic coming from particular sites that may be mentioning your site or linking to it (for free) within its content. Suggests that it may be wise to contact those sites and seek a more prominent link, and that offering money can help ease this process.
Eric Ward spoke next and added that it is wise to avoid email offers of 750,000 inbound links for $39.95. He also said to use other places to buy links that sometimes are not considered, including blogs, Internet magazines, newsletters, auto-responders, RSS feeds, and PDF documents such as white papers and other information that may be more highly distributed. He suggested using a PR Firm to buy backlinks within publications with high readership.
Thomas Bindl warned the attendees about the technical pitfalls sometimes associated with links. He stressed that you need to make certain that the link you are buying will actually be seen and counted by a search engine, if you plan on using it mostly to help increase your link popularity. Redirects are a big problem, since the link is actually to another page hosted on the same site instead of directly to yours. Thomas provided some good methods to check for the validity of links including doing searches of cached copies of the pages, and looking for no cache or a changed cache. Using archive.org is a good way to find out about past versions of the page in question. Lastly, he commented about PageRank being a good indicator that something is wrong if the linked-to page doesn’t have the PageRank (minus one) of the page being linked-from.
Greg Boser followed with a short comment about the fact that he is pleased that this is now an actual session topic at SES, since link buying used to be considered so bad. Debra also had brief comments, and suggested the use of auto-responders within a sales system or automated contact-reply to ask for links. For example: “Thank you for signing up for our newsletter, if you find it interesting, please feel free to link to our site, etc…” The panelists then took some questions. The best one was “how much to spend on links?” Patrick Gavin said that the value of the link for both search engine weight and traffic has to be considered. Anywhere from $25 per month to even $5000 a month could return significantly on the investment, depending on the circumstances involved.
The last session I attended on Tuesday was the “Usability Clinic.” This session offered website proprietors the opportunity to receive candid feedback on the usability of their websites from Shari Thurow and Mathew Bailey, picked by Danny Sullivan to provide expert advice. The session was moderated by Elisabeth Osmeloski, the editor of the Search Engine Watch Forums, who did an admirable job of managing questions from the audience and trying to cut-off a few long winded people. More detailed information about his session can be found here: http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/002370.html, but the main points that were brought up seemed to be common mistakes. There seemed to be a lack of “cohesion” on many of the sites, making it hard for people to navigate to particular areas and then easily “back out” to more general topics. Shari explained the value of using a “bread crumb” navigation bar at the top of each page showing “main category>sub category>subcategory>topic,” for example.
Shari also suggested the use of a usability testing company to help analyze a site for better performance. These companies can help to setup discussion groups and usability testers to perform various types of testing such as “card sorting,” and “reverse card sorting” assignments and “visual affordance tests.” Another topic often discussed were the “calls to action,” something very important especially for those counting on their websites to draw leads (contact forms) or actual sales. Also important was the method sites used to extract information at the point of sale. Both Mathew and Shari discussed potential annoyances that may cause someone to leave the site before they have completed a transaction. These included asking for too much information too soon, and also not making it clear to people where they are in the checkout process. At one point the audience was polled by Elisabeth how many people would leave a particular site because the first step in completing the sale was asking for a name and contact information, or forcing the customer to have a login name to make a purchase. About 90% raised their hands.
The usability clinic is certainly a great hands-on real time look at how sophisticated search marketers look at more than keywords and popular links in order to make a site successful. Having someone involved in the redesign of a website that has a marketing background is especially helpful in making a site “work.” Testing conducted by usability firms can be an investment that pays off very quickly once suggested changes are effected.
That’s it for day three, another long one.
Chris Boggs.
