Google Links
By David Golding
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Ever wonder how many links you ought to shoot for when optimizing for Google’s search engine? Well, I’ve been working on a program that can analyze that for you. It’s in beta version, but you ought to be able to toy around with it enough for it to be useful.
Google Links Tool retrieves a random sample of web sites for a given query and gives you the actual count of links picked up by Google. You’ll have to keep the number of results low, or otherwise the program will crash on you (i.e. 20 or less). But you can repeat the process for large samples, I suppose.
Anyway, I hope you give it a test drive. Randomized sampling can be powerful and this will save you time when trying to gather data from Google.
Offline Promotions
By David Golding
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This week, I worked with a client on a site that needed to debut within a matter of hours. The group had already secured a 3-minute spot in Thursday’s BYU vs. Wyoming game which would air 20 minutes before kickoff and they wanted a site to be ready because of the ad message. It’s been nearly a day since that ad aired and the site stats show that there has been very little traffic as a result.
The key to offline promotions of a website is in general branding principles. Folks usually can remember the ad and what it was about. But give them less than an hour most of the time, and they can’t tell you what the web address was, even if it’s a good one. The same rules apply to branding in general of new products. There have been some seriously funny Super Bowl ads in the past that everyone can recite verbatim—except for the part about the company’s name. It takes a lot of money and time to get a brand name off the ground.
I was commuting along the freeway here in Utah everyday during the summer and I passed by a billboard that read simply:
“Google what?” doba.com
It was a well-targeted ad, I thought, if they are going after people like me. I was curious, who would act so audacious in an ad when Google is the obvious leader for all things internet? But for the life of me, by the time I got to work just 20 minutes later, I couldn’t remember the address. I tried variations, but never had the time or patience to try enough.
You can’t do much better than that ad. But it was a new company I hadn’t heard of before and it took a few days of seeing the sign to get the company name right. So in offline promoting of online content, remember to create frequency. Run that ad many times before you expect to see a rise in any traffic.
And, for an even better solution, do more online promoting of your site than offline.
Quality Linking Strategies
By David Golding
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I recently posted on how linking doesn’t affect ranking in Google’s engine. My research shows that there exists no correlation between quantity of links and rank position for any given keyphrase. However, in this post, I’d like to pick up where I left off and discuss quality linking strategy.
Quality of links is vital to your site’s rank in Google’s search engine. Here’s how you can tell quality of other sites’ links. Wikipedia has an article on how Google’s PageRank system works. In general, Google considers links from other websites like we’d consider votes; when I link to a site, I’m casting a vote in favor of that site. The more that legitimate human beings with intelligence and know-how vote on a particular site, the more relevance is assigned to it, therefore pushing the ranking higher. This understanding of Google’s algorithm has led many to believe that all you have to do is run around gaining links from people.
I don’t discourage that. Links drive traffic and they are always a good idea. But nine times out of ten, you will have limited resources: budget, manpower, expertise, etc. You will have to make trade-offs. When a trade-off appears, don’t sacrifice quality of links for quantity.
My rule of thumb: put together your marketing strategy for your organization using sound principles. Think of things you would do offline to drive traffic. Once there’s a coherent marketing strategy in place, it’s much easier to adapt that strategy to the internet. For example, one strategy would be to create a newsletter on a bi-monthly basis. Okay, well, just find a way to publish that newsletter on the web as well. Another idea is to build a large network of contacts. Have you heard of LinkedIn? What if direct mail is your promotional strategy? Well, reference your site in the ad and run some online ads with the same message. You’ll find that as you participate on the internet as a live citizen, the links will come. And as your site builds and grows and is able to offer a legitimate online contribution, visitors will find value and link back to it in one way or another.
There are some other targeted linking strategies. If you’ve run into a wall, give me a buzz.
