Link building, when done correctly, is advantageous. Not only does it build connections that lead to higher rankings in major search engines, but it also makes the internet a more navigable system. However, due to Google’s continued evolution and progress, link building as an SEO strategy is becoming increasingly dependent on quality over quantity.

Webmaster’s note: This is a guest post by Clay Christeson

A link builder needs to be calculated and genuine. The methods of spray and pray have been replaced by relevancy-first tactics. To acquire a link that impresses Google’s algorithms while simultaneously helping the users of the internet, a link builder needs to possess and utilize certain skills:

1. Have a Relevant-First Mentality

Non-relevant and spammy links are being devalued more and more by Google with each new update. They should be. Not only do they complicate the purpose of the internet, they are deceitful and pointless. A quality link builder should always be relevant with both intent and content. Both resource link builders and content link builders should only be building links to their website from relevant domains. Relevancy impresses Google and makes sense to the end user.

If you build links, regardless of how you do it, make sure your processes are relevant. Even ignoring the increased ranking potential, the principle of morality applies within the SEO industry as well. The internet is built from links, and if you plan on contributing to the construction of the World Wide Web, make it worthwhile. Just as it’s a common expectation for people to contribute to society in their lifetime, you should strive to improve the internet as well. It’s a service that has totally changed our perspective on the world and our ability to communicate. Don’t hamper it with irrelevancy.

Takeaway: To make sure your link is relevant, put yourself in the position of the end user. Would the link help you in a click through situation? Does the link (in any way) try to take advantage of Google’s algorithms? Is the landing page that your link leads to, a legitimate, genuine page, full of great content? Does the content of your landing page match the hyperlink text in relevancy? These guide questions can help ensure your relevance. The important thing is to avoid settling. When links are concerned, anything shy of relevance could be dangerous or useless. Take your time and really analyze deep down whether your link building efforts make sense. If they do, good for you and good for the internet.

2. Possesses a Knack for Communicating Effectively

Most situations in life require communication, and link building is no different. A person who wants to succeed in this specific SEO niche needs to be an effective communicator, but more so in the sense that they understand how to converse effectively in a plethora of varying situations. For instance, a link builder attempting to guest post will need to outreach much differently than a link builder trying to get a resource link. The two separate strategies require innovative outreach, but with differing angles and purpose.

If you build links, make sure that you not only utilize effective communication, but that you do so in a way that tailors to your specific task. If you are reaching out to write content with the goal of providing a useful article and acquiring an author bio link, show your contact that you are a trained writer. List down particular reasons the host website would benefit from if you write for them. Provide published samples that will showcase your authority.

Strive to be multifaceted as a link builder. As the internet evolves, the need to do so will only increase.

Takeaway: Link building is a process that requires you to communicate with a variety of webmasters, oftentimes from all over the world. To do this effectively you must, and I mean must, take this information to your next outreach:

-          Who you are

Any webmaster needs to understand who you are. This doesn’t just mean a name, but rather exactly where your identity fits within the niche you are building links for. If you’re a real estate agent that wants to write about DIY home improvement to acquire a link back to a certain domain, make it clear to the webmaster that you know what you’re talking about. They would rather have a real estate agent writing about roof renovation than a cosmetology guru. Show them that you are a human being that knows what you’re talking about.

-          Your intentions

Most webmasters know your intentions even if you don’t tell them. It’s better to be up front and tell them what you want. A great idea is to send the webmaster the URL that you want your link to point to before they even ask for it. This eliminates several emails from the process and makes the acquisition of a link much more efficient for everyone. The most actionable advice is to tell any webmaster that you’re in communication with why you reached out in the first place. Be clear, concise and honest.

 -          Follow up mentality

Just like you, webmasters that run blogs and business websites are busy people. They’re also human. Busy people have a hard time juggling all of the emails and phone calls they receive. If you genuinely want to build links for a specific domain, be prepared to follow up several times. Four emails are usually the maximum recommended before it becomes interrupting. The more information you provide, the less follow up you will have to do overall. Keep it succinct and to the point.

3. Has Legitimate Knowledge in the Niche

A successful link builder should be more knowledgeable than the average person when it comes to the specific niche they are building for. If someone is building for a golf course website, they better understand the industry. It takes knowledge to acquire links. A wealth of knowledge on a subject is particularly critical when acquiring links through content writing because people don’t want to read unfounded material.

Spreading legitimate and well researched information makes the internet a better place.

Takeaway:A great way to acquire quality links is to earn it. If you’re an industry guru, provide professional-grade advice. If you’re not, do some serious research. You have to know what you’re talking about to teach people anything. It’s up to you to come up with adequate ideas that people can actually utilize in their daily lives.

The SEO industry treads in the footsteps of major search engines like Google. Updates and algorithms pushed out periodically that require SEOs to adapt are designed to decrease SPAM and manipulative processes while concurrently increasing legitimate linking. You can do your part as a link builder by staying relevant, communicating effectively and being knowledgeable.

The world is certainly not how it used to be. The internet eats up chunks of hours in our everyday lives. We spend at least 1 hour online each day. There isn’t a mall without a Wifi hotspot. Life is getting faster and faster and we all have to keep up. So how do you write for a world of 36-hours-a-day readers?

This entry is part of the Breaking Down Content Marketing Series.

How the World is Today

Fast food, instant coffee, you name it. Everything’s quick. In the internet, things move even quicker. People give you a few handful of seconds for you to present something that would interest them. If you’re not able to grab their attention within that time span, they will probably move on to the next result in the search engine.

Don’t think for a second that you’re the best, only resource around even for a very specific niche – you’re not. There are tons of content on the web. I agree that most of them are full of ‘Crap’ (Check out the powerpoint deck below) but then there are the thought leaders, the uncommon voices of exceptional writers, the awesome presentation of data of marketers – and you still have to compete with all of them.

So there’s that little tinge of bright light with creating something worth publishing amidst the ton of crap going around. The question is, how do you write them really? How do you do an outline for it? How do you lay it out?

Where Greatness Begins

A great post doesn’t start with you on your keyboard staring on your blog editor. It starts with an idea. Mine usually starts with a pen and paper or my cellphone. When a light bulb flashes on top of my head, I immediately write it down. I try to gauge if it is something that will intrigue my audience (of course, it should intrigue myself first) and then I write an outline.

Tip: Click here to Check out how to write awesome outlines.

You’ve got 2 Seconds

This is the average time you have as a publisher to grab your reader’s attention through your title. Any more than that and you’re risking them going for another person’s website. Probably your competitor. Make sure your title is straight to the point and spells out ‘time-saver’ to your readers. Examples of great how-to titles are:

“5 Tips For Raising Baby Tortoises” – It’s easy to gauge the article’s length immediately because it says how many tips there are in the title itself

“6 Actionable Steps to Overcoming Pornography“ – The title leverages on an interest that most of the world is experiencing today (overcoming pornography) plus it summarizes it in 6 steps so that it tells the reader “I’m not long or theoretical. I’m actionable and summarized!”

“Sexy Forever: How to Fight Fat after Forty” – It immediately tells you something that you want. Who doesn’t want to stay sexy? And forever? That’s just too awesome. Then it contains the first part of the title of the article to ‘how to fight fat after 40′ – a more specific approach to contain its content.

Tip: Click here to find out about what strong eye-catching words you can use on your article title and how this all affects SEO.

People Skim

We’re all looking out for the best, most credible stuff that will answer our questions. That being said, everyone has adopted this habit of skimming. That’s life. Even I skim… sometimes. We don’t have a lot of time to spend in just one article. There’s tons of content to behold. We are curious beings. We want to KNOW. And we want to KNOW everything.

We, as writers, have to realize that we have to adopt to our reader’s skimming habit. How do we do this?

Through headings.

If you haven’t noticed, I use headings a lot. In this post, I’ve already used four so far:

1. How the World is Today
2. Where Greatness Begins
3. You’ve got 2 Seconds
4. People Skim

Headings are important because it guides skimmers. It grabs the eyes because of its nature. Headings are one-liner, usually comprised of a phrase or a sentence, and are emphasized with a bold or bigger-sized font.

Tip: When you create headings, you should give your users an idea to the extent that, even if they just read the headings, they would have an understanding of what your whole article is about.

24 Hours a Day – NOT

Does it feel like you’re living 24 hours a day? I know, I know – there’s that common time when you tell yourself “I need more time”, or “I’m too busy”, or “I wish I had more than just 24 hours”. As much as I want to tell you that you’ve got more than just 24 hours, I can’t. Everyone has the same amount of time everyday. For your readers to give you some of that un-replaceable resource, it is a priceless privilege to behold.

So you will have to try to ‘give’ your users more time – by having them spend less time rummaging through your stuff. How do you do this?

Create a simple, actionable take-away in each and every one of your articles. Thus far, in this entry alone, you’ve already got 3 powerful takeaways:

1. Greatness can come in an instant and doesn’t start when you’re on your editor – always write down great ideas
2. Awesome, intriguing titles are your gateway to being read
3. When you create headings, keep in mind that it should spell out what your article is about

These takeaways are appreciated, remembered and practiced. You should get to them and make them as loud as possible in your article.

Make it Worth their Whiled

People’s eyes will always look for beauty. People’s minds will always hunger for data. Give them both.There’s a website that’s intricately beautiful but that’s it – just design and no data. Yes the website looks nice but the content is crap. Nah. Next!

Then there’s this data-rich website but the way the text is outlined, the way the design is taken care of – it spells out boring, old and dusty. Nope. That just won’t do.

People will tell themselves: “There might be a better one somewhere else on the web.”

And so they move on.

You have to make it worth your reader’s while. SEO Hacker might not be the best looking website out there but we do try. We fix our layout, we mind our fonts, we do our research and write our content with the best data we can find. Just recently, we’ve updated our SEO Services page.

You should do the same.

The Thinner the Better

Don’t bunch sentences into thick paragraphs. Only grade school students do that (or do they?) It makes it hard to read, skim, and focus. Not to mention it is distracting, unelegant, boring and old – especially to 36-hours-a-day readers. Chop up your sentences whenever you can. You don’t need to pile up sentences to seem like a guru. You need to make your stuff easier and nicer to read. That’s all there is to it.

Tell them WHAT to do!

Making a how-to article is well and good but sometimes people just need someone to tell them what to do. At the end of your article, always remember to give quick, specific instructions for your readers to immediately write down on their to-do list. Besides, people are busy – you have to push them to make a move that will benefit them. And perhaps a move that will benefit you as well.

Tips for Keeps: Write for  the 36-hours-a-day reader. Because they ARE the majority.

Google’s has been very clear about their feelings regarding unnatural links.  Their recent actions resounded deeply within the SEO community and have inspired a higher level of discourse around things like content, quality and scalability.

In the wake of Penguin, most SEOs have abandoned their efforts with public blog networks, article galleries, link purchases, directory submissions and automated tools.  Most SEO advice now includes concepts like “link earning” and focuses on “content marketing” as the preferred method of acquiring links.  Upon closer evaluation, however, these new buzzwords don’t stand up to scrutiny.

Webmaster’s Note: This entry is a Guest Post by Jarrod Wright. Click here if you want to submit a guest post for SEO Hacker.

For one thing, content marketing is a concept that is fairly broad and can refer to a wide variety of implementations. Some use it to mean developing great onsite content in order to attract links, while others use it to refer to thin infographics or mass article distribution.

As far as I can tell, most firms are simply relying on guest blogging as a way to build links.  There is a lot of talk of esoteric strategies and anecdotal stories of success, but my research suggests that the vast majority of SEO companies are doing little more than cranking out guest posts as fast as they can.

The History of Guest Blogging*

*From what I understand.

Guest blogging started as a way to establish a following – a precursor to social networking.  The concept was simple.  Two “quality bloggers” from related – but not competing – industries would exchange content.  They would both benefit from the cross promotion and exposure.

As SEO evolved and the importance of backlinks became widely understood, the focus shifted away from simply gaining exposure.  Guest bloggers were much more interested in the links that would accompany their article.

Even with links being the primary motivator, guest blogging was widely considered to be a very respectable method of linkbuilding. Finding blogs that would accept your content was a bit of a challenge and the quality requirements of blogs was typically pretty high.

Guest blogging was far too expensive and time consuming for fly-by-night SEO firms or low-quality affiliate marketers who, up until last year, could post hundreds of articles with the push of a button.

Where Things Went Wrong

The deindexation of the major blog networks and the release of Penguin comprised the highly telegraphed but somehow unexpected 1-2 punch that Google delivered last spring.  Those actions instantly outlawed a whole host of previously effective activities, leaving a void that, in many ways, guest blogging has been cooped to fill.

The millions of articles that were being poured into blog networks like buildmyrank.com (and article directories before that) are now being funneled into networks of individually edited blogs as “guest articles”.  The tactic has changed and the workload has increased, but it’s essentially the same model.

Not only has there been an explosion of people pitching guest posts, there has also been a parallel surge in the number of blogs seeking guest authors. These blogs are springing up at an alarming rate. Many are the repurposed blogs of disassembled link networks.  Others are built atop expired domains in order to simulate a history of authority.

As the manager of a dozen blogs that accept guest posts, I have to say the dynamic is pretty great.  Turning some of my old affiliate sites into guest blogs has worked really well so far.  As the webmaster, not only am I no longer struggling to develop decent content, but I’ve also been able to virtually abandon link building for those sites. Most decent bloggers share and build links to their articles once they are posted. Modify the articles just enough to throw in a couple of internal keyword links and I’m off to the races.

In doing this, however, I have learned a few things…

1. Everybody is doing this. Even the firms who claim they don’t.
2. Many (probably most) SEO companies are still offshoring their writers.

I have, on many occasions, rejected articles written for fortune 500 firms because of obscenely broken English or ridiculous grammar. I have to assume these large companies are using fairly well known firms to do their bidding.   The low quality issues are not just something the “spammers” are causing.  From what I can tell, almost everyone is on the guest blog train and many of them are trying to push barely worthwhile content.

Things around guest blogging have become so systemized and automated that it is starting to feel reminiscent of this time last year – before Google dropped the hammer.  Most SEOs seem to agree things won’t last as they are. The question is: will Google be as punitive as they were with Penguin? Would it even be possible for them to duplicate the precision they demonstrated with Penguin?

How to Do it Right

As is the case with just about everything Google does, there is a bit of uncertainty regarding their feelings on the topic.  Basically, it boils down to this:  if done “right,” Google supposedly won’t give blog owners or writers too much trouble.  However, that begs the question:  what is “right?”

Some of the only guidance we have on this matter comes from of the following videos Matt recoded for Webmaster Central.

Matt Cutts does make it clear that Google disapproves of guest blogging that exists for the sole purpose of link love.  They frown on spinning and repurposing until all that’s left is “low quality article bank sort of stuff”.  He suggests the high quality bloggers like Lisa Barone, Vanessa Fox, Danny Sullivan are fine.  However, he acknowledges things can be taken to an extreme.

A few weeks later, he released this second video.  It likely an attempt to try and clarify some of his points.

In both, videos Matt uses his signature vague language in order to make it very difficult to discern much from his answers.  Instead of saying, “this will hurt you,” he’ll say, “this may be something we would want to take action on.” And instead of saying, “this is safe,” he says, “this can be something that is ok.”

Essentially these videos do a good job of outlining the extreme cases, but offer little guidance to the vast majority of SEOs.  Apparently, if you’re one of the aforementioned bloggers, you’re all set. If you’re spinning hundreds of 300-word articles, you might have some problems.

The question is: what about EVERYONE else.

Another problem I have with these videos is the use of the ill-defined term “article spinning.”  Those of us versed in the darker SEO arts understand exactly what article spinning is. But many – including the current Wikipedia entry on the subject – seem to believe the phrase refers to simply rewriting of articles.  True article spinning, from what I have seen, is very uncommon in guest blogging.  But article rewriting is almost ubiquitous.

{I wonder if|I wonder does|Does} Matt {understand|know} what {article|content} spinning {actually|really} is.

The Authorship Paradox

The last variable that provides a lot of uncertainty is how to effectively use authorship markup.  There has been a lot of talk about “author rank” in recent months and Google’s former CEO Eric Schmidt fueled the speculation surrounding authorship markup with the following quote in the Wall Street Journal.

“Within search results, information tied to verified online profiles will be ranked higher than content without such verification, which will result in most users naturally clicking on the top (verified) results. The true cost of remaining anonymous, then, might be irrelevance.”

These thoughts about authorship seem, in some ways, to be at odds with Google’s stance on unnatural links and guest blogging.  On one hand, it makes sense to work towards establishing an authoritative author profile so that Google might consider you a “quality author”.  It certainly seems like the authority of the author is going to be very important.  By labeling all your articles, however, you may be providing Google with a simple way to devalue all your self-built links.   After all, isn’t voting for yourself exactly the type of unnatural linking they don’t like?

The Future of Guest Blogging

It’s fairly obvious that guest blogging, in its current state, is in Google’s cross hairs. The problem is it’s difficult to know what, when, and how severe their actions will be. Google has several challenges that will be difficult for them to solve.

Their first problem is that as long as they feel guest blogging is a “time honored tradition,” they can’t discourage the practice entirely.  This makes it a lot harder for them to take action without seeming like they are being brand-biased or making subjective quality judgments.

Their next problem is that, unlike link networks, article galleries and other previously devalued tactics, Google may not have clear signals to determine who the bad guys are. Algorithmically identifying “quality articles” and “quality blogs” is going to be difficult to do with any precision. As someone who contributes a lot of content on behalf of my clients, I can tell you that evaluating an opportunity, even with all 5 of my senses, can be difficult.

My Take on the Matter

It is my personal opinion (and probably wrong) that Google will not take any specific action on guest blogging as a whole anytime soon.  I also doubt that they’ll involve penalties in their solution when they implement one.

I think their punitive actions last spring were anomalies and that Google is unlikely to take a similarly drastic stance against guest blogging.   I believe they will continue to evolve algorithms like Panda to weed out low quality sites as their primary method of addressing the issues surrounding guest blogging.

I do not believe that networks like myblogguest.com, who have automated a lot of the guest blogging process, are immediately at risk. But if Google decides things have gotten too far out of hand, then this might be a good place for them to start.

To be clear… In our firm, we do a lot of guest blogging.  We manage a dozen blogs that accept guest posts and submit articles to other blogs on behalf of our clients.  We always seek the highest quality opportunities, but have certainly settled for less.  We use a combination of valid authorship markup, invented author profiles, and random pen names for the articles. Our writers are all American (and one Canadian), and I generally stand by the research and quality that goes into the articles we write.

This article was not meant to denigrate guest blogging or advise anyone to avoid the practice…I just wanted to clearly define the problem.

AuthorRank has been the talk of the town. It’s gotten the attention of all SEOs from content creators, all the way to linkbuilders. Google Authorship is here to stay and has populated the search engines with faces of old and new writers who have been evangelized to AuthorRank believers. Here’s the thing, can there be such a thing as Co-AuthorRank?

A Little Background

Google is trying make search results more relevant. Afterall, that’s the reason why they’re the number 1 search engine today. The short story is: In light of all the crap that’s going around in the internet today, they figured that real authors would make real content. And so AuthorRank was born.

AuthorRank is basically a metric that Google uses based on your recorded authorship in its database to help verify your rankings. To break it down, it is assumed that Google AuthorRank helps verify your PageRank score. Here’s my post on how to set up your Google Authorship and how it affects your SEO.

Note: I was supposed to write on this a while back. I was just waiting for that smack-down case study that would help prove a point in the possibility of Co-AuthorRank. It already came in the form of Jeffalytics’ post about Why You Need to Establish Yourself as an Authority on Google+. The data-driven case studies he made on Google+ were so powerful that if you didn’t have a Google+ account, you’d immediately sign up for one.

Somehow Overlooked

Co-AuthorRank is not something new. AJ Kohn already talked about Google citing multi-author pages in their rich snippets tool. However, Google’s way of detecting the Authorship snippet is not yet as polished. They try to gather a post’s Authorship by using the post’s crawled by-line.

If you noticed, there’s 2 extracted author names in the picture: Matt McGee and Step Guide. Who the heck is Step Guide?

It turns out that “Step Guide” came from this:

So you see, Google ain’t perfect. But hey, at least they DO TRY to index who the authors are.

In the Real World

It happens. Sometimes an article is written by just one person, sometimes it’s two. In any case, it’s not really uncommon to read an article by 2 or more authors. You could say that sometimes the more authors you have, the better.

•  More data
•  Flexible writing voice
•  Conversational tone
•  Better editing
•  Etc.

Given that it doesn’t always mean the more authors, the better the article, but two all-star authors who can work together? Say Dr. Pete and Brian Clark?

You see Jason Mraz and James Morrison singing a duet.

Why can’t we?

(If you wanted to know the title of the song, it’s “Details in the Fabric”)

Leveraging on Authority

Hypothetically speaking, getting a post with an author who has a supposedly higher AuthorRank , can mean a quick dab in that person’s authority – increasing yours. (Disclaimer: there’s no real, automated, concrete way to measure AuthorRank yet aside from the quality and quantity of his/her posts – which takes a really long time to go through)

2 Quick Wins:

1. You get to publish a great post from an authoritative co-author
2. You get that post socially shared by that co-author

The Experiment – Who wants to be my Co-Author?

I’ve been wanting to do this but I haven’t had the chance to do so yet. Here’s what I have in mind:

• Duo post case study with shared/compared data
• Interview going back and forth with questions to and from both authors
• Etc.

Requirements:

1. Put SEO Hacker in your ‘Contributor To’ in your Google Plus Profile
2. Answer Comments on our Co-Authored post

I’ll be screening all interested Co-Authors. If you’re interested in Co-Authoring with me, please contact me here.

Again, this is just a Possibility

Google is trying to feed us more relevance in their SERPs and they implemented AuthorRank which had its run of success in increasing overall quality of Search results. Will implementing Co-AuthorRank make the results any better? Tell me your thoughts in the comments section below.

Eight seconds. That is all the time you have to capture a person’s attention, according to The Associated Press. Busy schedules and non-stop media barrage are quickly taking up your potential customers’ attention. You have just eight seconds to make a solid impression and get them to your next step. In the digital world, this super, most important first impression is called your landing page.

Webmaster’s Note: This is a guest post by Alicia Lawrence

What is a landing page and why do I need one

A landing page is a tailored webpage that appears after a user has clicked on an advertisement or inbound link. It is more specific than your homepage and contains a strong call to action. Landing pages have a proven track record of increasing conversions. But you are going to need more than one to do the trick. In fact, you should have a landing page for every campaign you run. When companies increased their number of landing pages from 10 to 15 they saw a 55% increase in leads, according to HubSpot’s Marketing Benchmarks report.

Landing pages should include:

1. Logo
2. Brief but direct description and call to action
3. Clear and enticing headline
4. Supporting image
5. Reviews or social endorsements
6. Clean, brand-consistent format with contrasting colors
7. Sign up button or contact form
8. Centralizes on User Experience

Take for example the landing page for SEO Hacker School. Sean did a great job making sure his landing page format is consistent with his branding using the contrasting red and white colors to grab the user’s attention. Instead of an image he has a video, which is great as long as it’s not set to automatically start causing the user to be annoyed and click off.

Notice the headline is as large as his logo drawing his readers to the brief description below that urges them to enroll in SEO Hacker School (the obvious call to action). Besides the button to Enroll Now is the Free Demo, an excellent choice to include when the real call to action requires money.

All the information a reader would need to click for a conversion can be found above the fold. Sean uses a long landing page, which is currently the trend, and repeats his call to action further down the page. The call to action should always be seen wherever the user is on the landing page. Towards the bottom of the landing page are a few great reviews of his program, further convincing his potential customers to sign up.

There are other links on the landing page, such as the sneak peak to the lessons, login, register and the SEO Hacker blog. While the login and register tabs won’t distract the potential customer, the sneak peak and blog should open up in a new window if clicked. Especially for the blog, since its content is time consuming and distracts from the main call to action.

How to optimize your landing page

After you’ve created a landing page or decided to go with an applicable existing page. Use A/B testing to make it as effective as possible in turning over conversions. Don’t make the two pages drastically different when testing, instead use small changes so you can see what works and what doesn’t.

Continue to monitor your landing page and make changes as necessary even after it has gone live. Set up Google Analytics conversion goals to monitor your landing page’s success. A big signifier if your landing page is performing correctly will be the bounce rate. Bounce rates vary from site to site; perhaps you are attracting the wrong traffic, but a high bounce rate also could mean your reader found exactly what he or she was looking for and hence does not need to stay on your page.

Since landing pages have a direct call to action to click or sign-up, a high bounce rate means the user wasn’t interested in your offer and left. A normal webpage bounce rate is around 40%. If your landing page does not have any navigation, besides that one call to action, the average bounce rate is around 80%.

Tips for lowering your bounce rate:

-Keywords: Have relevant anchor text so the user knows what to expect when they click the link.

-Navigation: Consider leaving out your navigation bar, which will distract your visitor from the call to action. You can put the navigation on the “thank you” page after the reader has completed the action.

-Decluttering: Remember you only have eight seconds to get your potential customers’ attention, so design your landing page with a simple and attractive format with text that is easy to read.

-Load speed: Not only is this a ranking factor and part of your Adwords quality score, but also a one-second delay in load time results in a possible 7% loss in conversions. Your landing page should load in under three seconds.

-Open external links in a new window: If you do decide to have other links on your site besides your call to action, open them in a new window by setting the link target to “_blank”.

Landing pages have too much potential to ignore them any longer. One of the biggest reason people don’t use landing pages is because they are too busy to create and test them. Having a freelancer or outside company design a simple template to use for all your landing pages would definitely be worth your investment in the long run.

Content Marketing and SEO are becoming tighter and tighter buddies. Special thanks to Google. And hey, it’s not so bad when you’re the end-user. There’s more relevant, high-quality content because of all the content marketing that’s happening. If you think you have great content that people should read and it’s not happening, this post is what you are missing.

Ever had that experience when you’re walking and you see a tree with low-hanging fruit? Your favorite fruit. Did you let it pass you by?

Nah.

You probably plucked it and took it home to eat.

Easy does it.

Keywords for Sale

There are tons of searches happening every second. Last I heard it was around 33,000+ searches / second. That’s incredibly huge! If you are able to get even 1% of that search market, you are made for life!

That can happen, you know.

Here’s how:

Do a Little Research

First, go to Google Adwords Keyword Tool. Think of the keyword/s you want to target for your next article. You can target any and all sorts of keywords in your articles, but if no one is really searching for it, why bother?

Pursue your idea, write your outline, spell out your title – all with the intention of ranking well because that piece of content you’re writing is a superstar in the making. If your keywords are wrong, if they don’t hold numbers – it won’t attract the best source of relevant, perpetual and free traffic.

Search traffic.

Guidelines to remember when targeting keywords:

• Make sure it is highly relevant to your article
• Avoid overly competitive keywords
• The more specific the keyword, the better your chance of converting
• Limit yourself to target just one main keyword per article
• Make sure that there is ample search volume to make it worth your while

 Optimize your Article

When you’re putting in your keywords, you should put it in the best places possible for it to be most effective. No, don’t spam your article with repeated versions of your target keyword – that’s not the way to go.

1. Put it as the page Title
2. Put it on your article Title
3. Put it in the first paragraph of your article

Check out how I applied this in our Content Strategy series:

All the while, you have to keep your journalistic integrity in tact. Write how you write – if you couldn’t insert your keywords there, that’s fine. One of these would already make it work. If you could put it in all three spots, all the better.

You don’t need to put in a lot of keywords a lot of times.

You just have to be smart.

Put your keywords in the best places possible.

This will increase the chances of you ranking higher. Great content marketing starts with picking out low-hanging keywords. High search volume, high relevance, low competition.

Get your keywords right, be smart about it, apply – and you should be getting that search traffic you’ve always been looking for.

If you own your own blog or you’re the SEO that manages and markets one company’s website, you have a big advantage:

Control.

But what if you’re a linkbuilder working for an SEO agency with several clients, most of them from different niche markets  – verticals, in the advertising world – with different types of websites, different SEO experiences, different profit goals, and you can’t always reach them whenever you want because they’re busy?

Oh, by the way, it’s post-Panda / Penguin.  And every month you have to deliver a report to them.

Welcome to my world. It’s a world that some of you work in, too.

Webmaster’s Note: This is a guest post by Gina Jennings

Going For That Link

Well, your job is no different than any other blogger or webmaster. But having a content strategy is really the best way to go. Figure out what type of content you want to put on the other person’s blog who will be willing to link back to your website.

By the way, each website is going to be different. Each vertical has its own culture. Within each blog culture is the individual blogger’s own criteria. It’s their property. Their house. Their rules.

And you want in.

How do you get in?

Study the culture. Study the blog. Study the readers. Come up with content and then ask.

But…don’t forget about your client.

Assessing Your Client’s Website

You should start first with your client’s needs. After all, they’re paying for you. Your responsibility is first to THEM. Next, you go looking for sites that would support them. If you don’t correctly assess what they’re about, you could inadvertently waste time veering off into an avenue that’s not even relevant.

However, sometimes you’ve got to go wide and broader because there’s simply not much out there you can tap.

What if you ended up with a client with an interesting niche, with a unique service, limited to certain types of customers?

Let’s take an example: Terracom Wireless and Yourtel Wireless.

Ask the Client First

If you have time or can get a hold of the owner, do so. Ask them about what kind of customers they are targeting. That can give you a better gauge of where to find their prospective customers. If you can’t get a hold of the owner, do the best you can by gleaning from the content on their website.

With the two companies I mentioned above, I at first tried tech blogs and cell phone blogs. Those seemed like the obvious choices. They didn’t work.

Why?

Think about it. Tech blogs and cell phone blogs deal with the latest technology, apps, smartphones. Readers want to know about NEW technology, not old technology. My client’s business had to do with the use of old technology needed for those who needed affordable communication and cannot afford the common $70+ phone bill at today’s prices.

So you go broader. Think government assistance programs. Money saving blogs. Frugal blogs.

I got an article posted at Stretcher.com. It was a simple list post about ways to save on your phone bill.

The frugal blog seemed to work best because these days people want to know how to save money. It didn’t matter if they were on government assistance or didn’t want to give away more of their hard-earned money away to taxes. How can they save the pennies?

Go Broad

So you might find that you start off your linkbuilding campaign one way and end up going in another direction. That’s what drives your content to be relevant, to be unique. And when I say unique, I mean unique to THAT blog only.

At the end of the day, though, a link is a link.

Who’s Talking About Your Client?

SEOMoz pro users have access now to their Freshweb Mentions Tool. This allows you to enter your clients name in quotes and see who has mentioned your client within the last four weeks.

Here’s the broke person’s way of doing the same thing:

1. Go to the Google Search Bar
2. Type your client’s name in quotes
3. Go down the list

Check out the post or article. If you see the client’s name and there’s no link to it, email the editor and asked them kindly for the link. Thank them for mentioning your client. This method has worked for me every time.

Manta, Man

You got a local client? Don’t forget about directories. What’s cool about Manta is that you can sign up for free and state you’re working on behalf of that client. So you can list several clients in that directory.  If your client is already listed, but there’s not much info on them, claim the business if no one else has and make their profile look nice. Put in the proper address, phone number, email and website URL. So you can list more than one client. It does your client a favor, for one, and it makes it easier for local customers to get a hold of them.

In today’s Post-Panda world, you have to think outside of the box. You can, after a while, get into a guest posting rut. Like Sean Si was saying about the new SEO, it’s an ever changing industry. What used to work before could be obsolete later or not valued as much. So you have to be flexible.

Share the Love

Tweet your post! Google plus it. Something. I often forget to do this because social media is not really my thing, but it’s a major way to get the word out. If your content is good, people will read it and share it out. More links for your client.

The more often you practice different types of linkbuilding methods, the more adept you become at determining which types are better for certain clients than others. It takes months of practice. For some, it’ll be quicker. I learn a little slower than most, but overtime, you will improve at it.

What kind of linkbuilding issues did you encounter? Share with us how you solved it in the comments section below.

Ever had that moment when you thought you had all you need to write your masterpiece – just to be stopped point-blank by what people would often attribute as a ‘writer’s block’? Oh it happens. Brilliant ideas do fly away. Outlines are how to pull them own from the sky – to be written out in a grand, orderly manner.

Bullet… Points?

Shakespeare didn’t have a computer before. He didn’t have a typewriter either. He had a pen (probably a quill pen), a piece of paper, a brilliant idea, and brain to organize it all and write it out.

He had an outline.

You should too.

Free Fingers

Typing paragraphs on a blank page is not easy. Unless you’re inspired… or high. The point is, those times rarely come. And even when they do, it’s not too easy to make a harmonious write-up.

Freely typing your ideas just won’t work. You will keep going back – editing your stuff.

Probably even re-write the whole thing.

Structuring your Thoughts

Writing an outline is crucial – it dictates the flow of your story, it creates order in your words, it emanates logic sense in your article. It gives your readers that smack-down approach to what you want to bring to their table.

So how do you do it?

Know your Readers

Your outline resonates to your writing voice throughout the whole article. Knowing your readers is an excellent way of knowing how to write your article. If you didn’t know yet, the world is full of picky people. And the fact of the matter is, these people have tons and tons of choices – and those choices are just a click away.

Knowing who your readers are enables you to cater your outline to them – catering your entire story to tailor-fit their wants.

Then their choices would be limited to you.

Structure your outline to who your readers are.

Ask yourself what you Want

There is a ‘want’ that exists with your readers. The reason why you are writing is to cater to that ‘want’. So the best thing to do is to wear your reader’s hat and ask yourself questions like: “What would I want to read about?” , “Does this interest me?”, “What am I looking for?”

The reason why I came up with this content marketing series is because there is a huge ‘want’ in this area right now with a lot of up-coming SEO specialists.

You should do the same with your audience.

People are looking for free info for the simple reason that it exists. I’m sorry to bring this up to you but you’re not the only brilliant writer out there who can write about what you’re good at. There are tons of other people who can do the same.

The difference between you and them is how well you can cater to your audience. How well you can ask yourself what you want – and write an outline that caters to it.

Kid Audience

There is that magical “Step 1″ that so often eludes us. That “Step 1″ is critical – especially when writing your outline. How well you roll-out “Step 1″ directs the rest of your audience’s learning. Oftentimes Content Marketers make the mistake of starting in the middle of a process or a tutorial. They can’t be more wrong.

When you write your outline, write it like you’re telling your content to a kid. Start with Step 1. If you can’t finish it to the last step, that’s okay, you can write it on the next entry. Please, for Don’t start in the middle.

Give them a Takeaway

A great outline should end with a powerful way to leverage call its intended audience to action. Content that does not have a key takeaway is content that is passive. You don’t want passive content. You want content that can move people.

Great content doesn’t start when you’re already typing in your keyboard. It starts with an outline.

Want more tips on writing content? Check out our Content Strategy Tutorial over at SEO School!

Content Marketing is becoming the topic to talk about – some even claim it to replace SEO. That’s a bold statement. What’s with all the fuzz anyway? For the next few weeks we’ll be breaking down content marketing to bits and pieces – from writing solid content, targeting the right audience, and providing awesome experience – to how to get it out to the world with a bang.

How I started

I didn’t start out as an SEO Specialist. No. They don’t teach SEO at school. Heck, they don’t even teach us how to build our first website (and I took up ICTM – Information and Communications, Technology Management). Imagine that!

So where did I start?

It was when I got my first pen and paper and I started writing. Writing, writing and writing. I wrote my first stories on a long sheet of yellow paper.

“Really Sean? You became an SEO specialist through a long sheet of yellow paper?”

Well…. Not really. But it sooner took me to blogging because no one really read my yellow sheet stories but my mom.

And blogging gave me a chance to step up on the platform and show my writing to the world.

Now here I am.

And you’re reading my stuff.

Where Content Marketing Starts

Content Marketing does not start with an awesome brand. It does not start with a lot of readers. It does not start with social media and SEO. It starts with you – with who you are and what you can bring to the world stage.

It deals with your voice – how you write. It deals with your conviction – how well you make people say “yes” with what you believe in. It deals with your ability to converse – with how you are able to touch base with people at an emotional level.

You don’t have to be a writing diva to be a great content marketer. If I could still find my first sheets of yellow paper, you’d sooner tell me that I suck at writing.

So what happened between that and now?

That’s what I’m about to teach you.

For this Content Marketing Series: “Breaking Down Content Marketing” this is what we’re going to be talking about:

• How to Write Powerful Outlines and Why you should give a Fluff
• How to Integrate Low-Hanging Keywords from the Global Market
• Writing for a World of 36-hours-a-day readers
• Assembling Booby-Trap Content for your Audience
• The World Above the Fold: Don’t be  a Mermaid/man
• Where’s the Beef? How to Cook your Content Right
• Closing the Lid: Keeping their Eyes Stuck on your Tail
• The Modern Mix: Effective Content, Layouting and Design
• How to Increase the Memory Retention Rate of your Readers by 55%
• Walking the Ramp: Bringing your Content out with a Bang
• Put a little cheese on it: Your Content Marketing’s Final Moments

It’s going to be an exciting series so stay with me as I take you through these topics. The main goal is for you to be an Exceptional Content Marketer at least and a Content Marketing Star at best!

If you are concerned about the privacy of your website and you do not want the search engine crawlers or bots to crawl certain pages of your website, then “Robots.txt” is the one-stop solution that will keep the crawlers away from the ‘No Entry’ zone.

Webmaster’s Note: This is a guest post by Sarah Bruce

Confused? Probably, you are wondering about the need of keeping the search engine bots away from the pages, when everyone wants their website to be indexed in the search engines. Sure.

Reason for stopping the bots from entering certain pages of a website

If yours is an e-commerce website and you store your database on it, would you like to disclose the database of your clients’ information to the entire world? Definitely not! But, if you do not take any precautionary measures to indicate the crawlers not to crawl those pages with vital information, then search engine spiders will crawl them eventually and index those pages in the search engine results. From there, anybody can view the detail of your clients and use it unethically, to put you and your clients in a position of legal nightmare.

To avoid such disaster, you should use robots.txt.‘Robots.txt’ plays the similar role as a bouncer in a club. Like how bouncers do not allow certain guests to enter private sections of the club, so does robots.txt. Consider it as a file which includes the directories that shouldn’t be entered by specific or all crawlers.

Now, this question arises: Are your pages safe with robots.txt?

Search Engine crawlers are built from artificial intelligence and before visiting any page of the website, these bots look out for the existence of robots.txt file, where they can see the pages that they are prevented from accessing.

Don’t worry about search engine bots violating the robots.txt file of your website. If they do so, they have to face severe legal consequences, which is why they have no option but to respect your robots.txt file.

The Bad news is that there are malicious spammers who also make use of robots to crawl the website’s ‘private’ pages, which you pretty much can’t do anything about. So, it is highly recommended to use firewalls, encryption methods, password protection and other security services besides robots.txt.

In and out of ‘robots.txt’!

Not everyone needs robots.txt. Unless you have some serious content in your website, which you do not want anybody to look into, there is no mandatory need to upload a robots.txt file and not even an empty one.

Robots.txt file contains a set of instructions for the search engine crawlers, as in the files and directories that are not supposed to be crawled. A noteworthy point here is that this file should be installed in the highest level directory of your website because crawlers search for robot.txt file in the root domain of your website and not in any sub-domain.

For example, http://www.abc.com/robots.txt is a valid location, but http://www.abc.com/mysite/robots.txt is invalid.

How to create a robots.txt file?

There are two important parts of a robots.txt file:

User-agent: It symbolizes a search engine bot. You can indicate either all the search engine bots or a specific bot.

Disallow: This is the field, which allows or disallows the search engines to crawl specific files or directories.

If you want all search engines not to crawl a directory, then use a * on the User-Agent section then follow the directory name with a forward slash:

1. User-agent: *

Disallow: /directoryA/

If you want particularly, Bingbot not to crawl a directory, then follow the directory name with a forward slash:

1. User-agent: Bingbot

Disallow: / directoryA /

If you want all search engines not to crawl the complete website, then:

1. User-agent: *

Disallow: /

If you want to restrict the search engine bots from crawling a page, then:

1. User-agent: *

Disallow: /abc_file.html

Google uses many bots, such as Googlebot-Image and Googlebot-Mobile, however the conditions applied to Googlebot will be applied to all, but the case is not vice-versa. You can set specific rules for the specific bots, as well.

To block an image from Google Images, use the following:

1. User-agent: Googlebot-Image

Disallow: /images/ watch.jpg

To remove all images from Googlebot Images, use:

1. User-agent: Googlebot-Image

Disallow: /

If you want to block a specific file type, for example—.png, then:

1. User-agent: Googlebot

Disallow: /.png

You can be certain of the pages not crawled by search engine bots, if you have indicated them in your robots.txt. However, if the URLs of those pages are found in other pages of your website, then there’s a certain narrow chance that those pages will also be indexed.

To avoid such kind of trouble, it is recommended that you use ‘robots meta tag’, to restrict any kind of access to the specific page. Let us dig out little information about robots Meta tag, to understand it better.

Robots Meta Tag: In Depth

‘Index’ and ‘noindex’ are the two major instructions of a Meta tag, as it allows you to have a control on the indexing page-by-page. If you do not want the search engine bot to index a specific page, then put the following Meta tag at the head section of your page:

<meta name=”robots” content=”noindex”>

If you do not want a specific bot to index a page, for example—Googlebot, then:

<meta name=”Googlebot” content=”noindex”>

Search engine crawlers will only crawl the pages that they are allowed to. But, if they find the links on other pages, they may not overlook those URLs and end up in indexing those pages. It is not necessary that the bots will index the pages, where you have used the Meta tag to ‘index’. However, the certain thing is that search engine bots will abruptly drop the pages, which are asked to “noindex”, even if they have been linked to other pages.

Remember that if you have included a ‘noindex’ meta tag in a page, but that page is not included in the robots.txt, search engine bots will crawl that page and the moment it comes across ‘noindex’ tag, it will drop it.

There could be a possibility that despite of adding a ‘noindex’ Meta tag, the page still appears in the search result. Don’t panic – the reason could be: the crawlers didn’t appear back to crawl your page since you have added the Meta tag. It will be definitely removed the next time the crawler crawls your page.

To speed up the index removal process, you can also make use of Google’s URL removal tool.

Final Touch: Test your robots.txt file through Google Webmaster Tools

This test is advised to be performed on a ‘Test robots.txt’ tool, before you upload the robots.txt file in your website’s root domain. This test will give you the actual result, as it reads the website as Googlebot does.

Performing this test is a plus, as you will know if the robots.txt file is blocking or permitting a page, accidentally. Accordingly, you can fix the problems, if any found. Let us see, how to use the tool:

¨     Click on the website that you want to check, in the Webmaster Tools home page.

¨     Under ‘Health’ section, click ‘Blocked URLs.

¨     ‘Test robots.txt’ tab must be selected, by default. If it is not, then click on the tab.

¨     You need to copy the content of your robots.txt file and paste it in the first box.

¨     Copy and paste the sites that need to be tested in the ‘URLs’ box

¨     List the user-agents in the ‘User-agents’ box.

Do remember that you cannot make any change from within the tool, but you need to edit the content of the robots.txt file.