April fools day is coming and I know about a lot of great hoaxes coming up. Are you preparing some great stuff to get publicity and mainly “links”?
The first of April poses a great opportunity to create a safe viral. Fairly safe because you can always revert to stating it was a joke. But what makes a great April fools joke? What ingredients are required for success? Here are some tips to give you a bigger chance of success…
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As most of you probably know, link building is a time consuming activity and manually requesting links can be the most boring SEO activity. Although this requesting needs to be done to get a good link basis, most of the time it is just too expensive to do it yourself. So when do you hire someone and who do you hire for which job? In this article I will give my opinion and hopefully you will all comment to give me your thoughts.
After a long discussion with a few fellow SEOs I think I made my point. They said: “You cannot get every site you’d like, to link to you. Most authorities and competitors won’t give their linklove.” and my opinion is: “You can get all the best authority links. Sometimes you just need an intermediate site.”
The best way to get any link, is to create content specifically as linkbait for that link or website. Normally a competitor will not intentionally link to you directly, but here’s where an intermediate site comes in. Use an existing intermediate or create your own one for full controll how the linkjuice is transfered.
The Google algorithm changes slightly every day. Most of their very small algorithm changes are implemented to look for new signs of SEO spam. Most of the times when a new spam tactic is detected, it is verified manually and its characteristics are then fed to the algorithm. Google spamcops can also roundup all your spam manually aided by cool Google tools for internal use. So: “Don’t leave your fingerprints everywhere!” When one of your projects is caught, sacrifice it and save everything else you’ve build. (I type with my fingers, so I won’t call them footprints)
So far Google was all about reading what normal users could read. If you made your website accessible to all visitors (including visually impaired), you had a perfect site for Google. Every guideline in the Webmaster guidelines has always been focussed on making a good website for users and forgetting about (spamming) search engines.
But now Google wants us to do the complete opposite. If links are extremely relevant to your users, but not contextual enough to search engines, you need to nofollow them or completely remove them to be able to score. Matt Cutts has written a few blog posts on nofollowing paid links.
What will they think of next? From now on you have to make your website for search engines and hope that it is ok for your visitors?!
A valuable link has Relevant Authority Transfer or RAT. This means it should convey authority on a particular subject to the website it is linking to. When searching for the right links, you can assess the value of a link by using the following checklist.
Yeah! At last Google shows most or all backlinks to sites I control. Webmaster central (a.k.a. Google Sitemaps) gives a relatively good impression of the links to your website. This is what most SEO’s should have been waiting for.
Read Matt Cutts his blog:
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/google-provides-backlink-tool-for-site-owners/
Quickly add all your (legal) sites that you want to be associated to you and to each other:
https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/
update:
Yesterday Google accidentally made it possible to check backlinks to pages outside the verified domain, just by entering the url in the address bar. After this beginner mistake Google took down the backlinks checker and fixed it. I just got time to check about twenty websites and download the CSV, but the data was definitely better than that of the Yahoo! backlink checker. Thanks Google!
A nofollow attribute within the code of your website tells search engines not to follow certain links. This way you indicate that you have links on your website, which you don’t want your website to be associated with. Is this a safe way to have contextual intercourse? In this article I will try to explain the nofollow tag and I will show better condoms for safe linklove.
There are several software packages that help you find link posibilities and request the links. I only use link building software to administrate everything my linkbuilding team does. Link building software is useful when you do a lot of manual link requests. Here’s how we use it.
Viral marketing requires alot of creativity. You can always copy good ideas that have been used in other industries and apply them to your business. As long as it is something new to your audience it doesn´t matter if the idea isn´t unique.
In this article I will give a few examples and tips that may inspire you to create your own campaign.
