I’m live blogging the panel discussion and presentation at Affilicon Israel 2009 entitled “Effective Link Building.” Why am I attending this panel? Because I hope to learn how too  use links to bring visitors to a website, for social media campaign success and to increase web traffic for many worthy nonprofits and businesses. I am not a link-building or marketing specialist, but I believe anyone working on the web should understand the basics of utilizing the web for business. And so should you!

First presenter is Gilad Sasson, Search Marketer, Nekuda. (More information from his presentation will be available at tools.algoholic.com.)

There are many (many!) tools that profile incoming links:  SEO chat (arranges results by page rank), Solo SEO (called Link Search Tool to find sites that can link to your website by clicking in a keyword), Majestic SEO, Seomoz.org (a great community for finding tools), Linkscape (a good tool to analyze links), Yahoo! Site Explorer (the best link exploring tool to allow you to see what sites link to other sites and is simple to use), Google Webmaster Tools (to verify what links drive the best traffic to your site), and many more.

The best tool is having a great site with good content that adds value to your site!

Useful activities (not tools) to build links: social networking links (Facebook, Twitter, etc.), directories/article submissions, comment on blog posts, associations and clients link to your site, create badges/widgets, internal links and putting “no-follow” tags on your site to help search engines understand what pages are the most important pages on your site.

Ophir Cohen (CEO, Compucall) uses Google Alerts to notify his company whenever new content is being indexed by Google relevant to what his companies are looking for regarding links. This offers fresh, new information that you can utilize. (My note: a great tip is to use Google Alerts for any real-time information that your organization needs).)

Amir Yarkoni, Co-CEI of Easynet search marketing: think of links as an “unbiased vote of approval” for your content and product. Google searches the content you want people to see on your site, but links are votes of approval.

Links are an unbiased vote of approval!

Also think about being creative to develop a certain utility (a document, a widget, etc) that will naturally create an interest in others to link to your site.

Elroei Buchman, CEO of K-Logic is the moderator of the panel.

Gary Beal (@scubagary) – Managing Director of VanguardSEO also on the panel.

Ofer Dascalu, CEO of WiseImpact is also on the panel: There are at least 1,000 free link building tools – pick one or two at most and begin working with them. Don’t spend too much time on tools! There are no real “secrets” – just begin working. Advice is to create a one-year plan stating your link strategy and work on that the first year.  Most important is to have a long-term plan, pick a strategy, do it all year.

Question: what is  one case study of creative link building? Answer: Ophir Cohen. He had a client with attractive content who wanted to launch a new product. He approached leading bloggers (such as Wire.com, BoingBoing) by sending them packages with brochures, DVD, and models of new product. He communicated with the key bloggers. One of the bloggers was granted “exclusivity” to publish the information about 12 hours before anyone else could publish it. (12 hours is a big lead time online.) He then became a ‘de facto’ affiliate of the product, and approached his friends and news sites with the information. Result: about 100 new links, considerable website traffic, and the effect has lasted almost a year after the launch of the campaign.

Gary Beal suggests searching SEOchat to look for the forum about LinkBuilding 101 – it’s a great discussion about basics of linkbuilding.

Another example of an effective linkbuilding campaign: one of the clients of Easynet wanted to leverage its existing customers in order to gain links. How to do this? Analyze the customer’s client base and look at their returning customers. Easynet sent a personal message to all of these returning customers asking them to write a review of the new product. Most of the reviews were great reviews because they were happy customers.

Many social sites like Facebook. Twitter, and others have great authority, are very powerful and create higher rankings for websites as a result of the linking.

Another case study: a translation service put part of its software for free on the internet that anyone could use, linked to the service’s website.  It was free, easy to use. These pages helped many people with translating keywords. They sent the free service to many translating sites and potential users. Many, many people linked back to the free translation pages.

Mistakes:

Link profiling is trying to create an unnatural set of links to your website. Example: if you are selling hot widgets and 89% are pointing to the same page then that is a bit fishy. Using and repeating the same anchor text is bad. It’s easy to detect because all the “new” links are originating from the same text. Try to develop the most natural way of linking. (Confession: I am not a website developer and didn’t really understand this part of the discussion so my notes are naturally unclear.)

Buying links from sites not relevant to your own. Don’t just buy links to buy them. Will the links add value to the user?

Don’t host all of your sites on the same server. Don’t use the same network ID. Google will figure it out.

Really check the site you are trying to get links for and find out if it has a good ranking for the terms that you target!

Remember: the amount of links that you add to your site should seem “natural” and not out of the ordinary.

Question is about shorter versus longer links – (like tiny URL or bitly). It’s more for viral use, but not for permanent links. Make sure that the service that you are using is using a “301 redirection” to make sure all your links go where you want them to go. Check whether or not short URLs expire.

My takeaways:

1. Inbound links are important to your website: they help your website reach higher web search ranking and that can only help your organization/business get exposure.

2. Social media use (commenting on blogs, posting on twitter, etc.) is a great way to gain natural links. A real life example: yesterday I followed a discussion on Twitter about nonprofit CEOs on Twitter. I then tweeted that I had recently posted about the same subject. A nice benefit was that my blog post then received an inbound link from the blog pots about CEOs that Twitter. The unexpected benefits of social media in action!

3. Understanding the importance of inbound links when designing social media campaigns can really help a campaign succeed.

Do you think about inbound links? Did this post help you at all? I’d love to hear your thoughts!

Image by luc legay

I’m live blogging the Affilicon Israel 2009 session entitled “Social Media Strategies.”

The first speaker is Sam Goldfarb of TradiMax. His company specializes in Facebook marketing.

Facebook Facts: users upload 850 mil. photos/mo, over 200 million users, and FB spends $25 mil yearly on server space, 50% of users are over 30 years of age, big companies are using FB. The number one brand? Barack Obama. An older brand, Coca Cola, is #6.

Mentions that there will soon be a payment system on Facebook – it’s social, and not yet public. When you buy something on FB, your friends will be notified. He tentatively is calling is “social PayPal.” (My note: Can you turn off the social sharing part?)

Second speaker: Miriam Schwab, Illuminea, speaking about Five Things Social Media is NOT.

1. It is not a ticket to millions of leads. Example: Twitter has 32.1 million users now (up from 1 million a year ago). If you are on Twitter you do NOT have a “direct line” to everyone. Ashton Kutcher, the most popular user, has only 1.9 million users. You have to compete for interest on Twitter and you have to connect, and compete for attention.

2. It is not for everyone. For example, if you are trying to market to other Middle Eastern countries besides Israel, Internet penetration is very low. You have to know where people are online, and if they are online at all.

3. It is not free. Not really. Time is money and it takes a lot of time to create, promote and respond to content.

4. It is not the “end of the road.” Geocities used to the hottest thing. (Lycos used to be the hottest search engines!) Facebook just surpassed MySpace. The web is fleeting and changing.

5. It is not enough on its own. Example – Skittles has a website that is only embedded social media sites. Skittles video goes to YouTube. Skittles chatter goes directly to twitter comments. Does it help them achieve their goal.

Third speaker: Oren Todoros, HYPick. Video blogger. Speaking about the Social Marketing Arsenal.

Can a brand be social? Yes. Example: WD40 brand has its own Ning community at we40uses.com where people upload lots of photos and discuss the brand.

You should do what you love – anyone can use social media well talking about what they love.  Gary Vaynerchuck (wine review blog) speaks about wine on video daily. iJustine a.k.a. Justine Ezarik is a freelance graphic/web designer and video editor, who became the AT&T spokesperson. Locals that leverage new media: Kfir Pravda (Pravdam.com), Hillel Fuld (technmarketing.com), Ayelet Noff (blonde2dot0.com) and Ezra Butler (1938 media.com) – they all do what they love and do it on social media.

New Media Methods:

1. Guy Kawasaki Approach: accumulate as many followers as possible while being nice enough not to be a spammer.

2. Targeted Approach: follow who you want, targeted approach, become an industry leader.

If on Twitter:

Use Ping.com to simultaneously post to many site, use wefollow.com to find followers, tweetlater.com to time tweets later, or tubemogul.com to upload a video once and it broadcasts to all video tube sites.

How to track the conversation?

1. Use Friendfeed.com to build a customized content feed based on your friends

2. Google Blog Search/Google Alerts – search Blogosphere

3. Boardtracker.com – what people are talking about on message boards.

Social media is SOCIAL and NOT Sales. Learn from others, socialize with your base, get involved in other blogs and sites with comments, and don’t forget You Tube is a very large search engine.

Predicted (by Oren Todoros) Up and Coming Social Networks:

1. Multiply.com: focus on sharing media

2. Blip.fm – music sharing

3. Qik.com – life casting/video streaming

4. Seesmic.com – video based discussion

5. HYPick.com (Oren’s network)

Own your Brand- search on namechk and take it on all the sites.

Other panelist: Arik Czerniak, Entrepreneur, former CEO of Metacafe, who added value to the panel discussion.

The Future of Social Media Predictions: next stage is aggregating activity into one place.Google Wave is also considered to be the next stage – it is an email updating/embedding and conversation tool for sending/receiving email in real time. Google Wave is still in demo.

Image by Denis Collette

I’m live blogging the presentation by Monty Cahn, Founder and President of Moniker.com, SnapNames.com and DomainSponsor.com. He is speaking about online branding, building traffic from domain names, and domain name registration.

SnapNames catches expired or dropped names. If you see a name that you want, you can put a reservation on it and be one of the first to get the name.

Moniker manages 3 million names worldwide. Moniker’s customers are investors in domain names (his customers own, on average, 100 names per person). Moniker also sells domain names through a third party so the seller doesn’t know who is buying. Vice-versa as well. Sells premium domain names as well. Hosts weekly show, Domain Masters on webmaster radio FM, about people who have successfully made money off of domain names sales.

Why Domains Matter:

177 million domain names registered worldwide. Continues to grow: 16% growth rate last year. Domain names are ranked by size: .com, .cn, .de, .net, .org, .uk, .info, .nl, .eu, and .biz.

The sales and aftersales of registered domain names continue to grow at 20% a year.

Why? Domain names are an asset – they are donated to charity, written off on taxes, sold and bought. Growth of social networking (everyone wants an unique identity), growth of broadband cable networks.

Direct navigation is one of the most important vehicles to drive traffic to your site.

Choosing a domain name:

Defensive Strategy: By registering a key word or name in an industry, you can block a competitor.

Offensive Strategy: look at most popular keyword searches associates with your product/service, category top keywords, mistyped brand and domain names. Tip – have friends/staff type the brand name 50 times on the computer and register any mistyped names.

Buy and redirect! Popular example: Books.com redirects to BarnesAndNobel.com. You can by new brands to redirect, rebrand your business, or create a sub-brand for your company.

SEO Impact: if you have a top-ranked site in Google, competitors have to spend a lot of money on ads to get the same traffic.

When register a domain name – register for at least 3 years. Google will look at your registration and how long you are invested in the name. Renew for multiple years for higher SEO. Alternatively, buy a domain name that has been registered in the past with an older registration date. An old name will offer instant advantages in terms of page ranking, traffic, inbound links, etc. Look up at archive.org to find out if a domain name has been used in the past. The stronger and more relevant the keywords, the higher the page rank you will get.

Make sure the domain name is not blacklisted with Google! How to find out: look at archive.org to see if there is bad content from the past. You can look at previous page ranks through the Google Pagerank bar. Also, check Yahoo, MSN and other search engines.

The big winner in a “tie breaker” between you and a competitor are the keywords in your domain name. Think about two word domain names that are “long tail” names that drive traffic, such as LookYounger.com for directed and qualified traffic. Long tail names convert views to customers at higher rate than others.

What is the value in registering another extension? #1 extension is .com,  and most people will search for that extension first, unless coming from a country of origin such as Germany or UK. If you are doing business outside of the US, buy those country’s domain extensions as both offensive and defensive strategies.

Never launch a brand with a dash in the middle (e.g. books-local.com). However, for search engines MSN and Yahoo, the dash does increase SEO ranking.

Use fun, humor and interactivity to generate “free” viral traffic. Buy the domain name that is associated with your viral campaign. Example: mytalkingstain.com (Tide-to-go stain remover).

How to acquire a domain name? If not available, look at online auctions (keywords that are coming up for $60 for sale, etc), live domain auctions, online listing services, expired and deleted domain services, private brokerage and stealth acquisitions.

Remember: cover your brands whenever and wherever possible: Misspelling, word and phrase variations, singular and plural, foreign languages (you may want the variation of the word in another language where you have a lot of customers), dashes/hyphens for search relevance, register various extensions.

I’m live blogging the Affilicon Israel 2009 conference session on Video Sharing and Ranking. Arik Czerniak, Entrepreneur, former CEO of Metacafe is the speaker for this session. He tweets at @arikcz.

If you upload your videos using TubeMogul to all different sites, to syndicate the videos, then you will double your views.

Here are some very interesting statistics:

Video audience attention span:

• after 20 secs, 20% leave
• after 1 min, 50% leave
• over 2 min (75% leave), and
• only 9.5% stay for a video over 5 minutes.

Make it SHORT and DRAMATIC. Implications for advertising? Do it within first 15 seconds.
Life span of a video: 35% of views made it first 4 days. 50% of views in first 14 days.75% if views in first 44 days. Most of the views are in the first two months.

Takeaway: Viral videos are a RARITY. They rarely snowball to gain more and more. “Evergreen” video (generate same number of views continuously)  are just as rare.

How do make the video viral? No “magic bullet.”

What constitutes an “actual view?” As soon as it loads.

Ingredients:

• Make awesome content
• Choose a right thumbnail: the small picture to be displayed
• SEO the tags and metadata: don’t be stingy when adding tags and metadata
• Promote it like crazy

Content:

• Make it short
• Inject interesting “passable” content: humor, celebrities, animals, cute kids, and sex

Promote:

• Let it bubble to the top
• Web 2.o: submit to sharing  sites
• You can utilize guerrilla marketing tactics
• You can “buy” views (he didn’t explain this very well)
• Use a through-broker to go viral

Landing pages: with video works better than without. Rich media improves click through rates (flash).

Optimize videos by analyzing traffic sources. Look at where people drop off the video and test the video with revisions to see if people will drop off less  than previously.

Case Study: etoro

How did they get 2.9 million views on their video: Forex Tracking Online? There is no sound on the video. The speaker thinks that they used an affiliate to market the video. Here is the first:

Then they made a funny video, that included humor and sex.

Spent 20K They used KetaKeta to market it and got 160K vies. High cost, but high branding impact and B2B. Hard to track the ROI.

Summary:

• It’s really hard to make a viral video. If you want to, follow the tips above.
• Video marketing is still brand oriented
• Video does improve landing page conversions for a product
• Still in the exploration stage.

Image courtesy of bionicteaching

What is the future of Search Engine Optimization? I am not a search engine optimization (SEO) expert, or even very knowledgeable about how to optimize websites, but I know that SEO is critical to the success of any web-based site. That is why I’m live blogging Affilicon Israel 2009 and listening to a panel discussion about the future of SEO  technology.

Do you want people to find your site on the web? Will your organization be able to help more people if more online visitors found your site? Do you want to be the first name to appear when possible stakeholders (clients, customers, funders, collaborators) search for businesses in your industry or geographic area? If you do, then your organization should utilize SEO to raise your company’s organic search rankings in a Google search. Effective SEO can do that.

Here are the comments from the panel I attended today at Affilicon Israel 2009 about SEO (presentation by Elroy Buckman, K Logic):

PPC (pay per click) technologies have evolved from: tools for keyword list generations (rules-based for bidding on keywords) and has evolved into Portfolio Management (don’t look at single keywords, but look at the portfolio of keywords instead to predict performance) and eventually evolved into comprehensive optimization platforms (multiple solutions to direct keywords campaigns include landing pages, creative bidding, etc). Thus we can see that PPC has evolved into multiple dimensions.

Current state of SEO:

• dynamic and evolving
• common SEO practices are a commodity (keywords, titles, text vs. flash, etc) and is not enough anymore to get great organic traffic
• old artificial link-building practices are now questionable, and Google now detects artificial link building patterns quickly
• Big brands have a higher ability to generate more traffic from SEO

Want to build effective SEO to measure real business impact, to find real Return on Investment (ROI) from discreet SEO investments, implement best practices across business development.

The future – a “killer” SEO application will be able to identify an alert for high and low-performing keywords, landing pages, internal lining schemes, new incoming links, title description..and their combinations.

In other words – the killer app will be PREDICTIVE and influence MANY DIMENTIONS.

“The ‘killer system’ will be a decision-making tool for optimizers/managers based on real data.”

Another panelist believes: the issue isn’t specific tools, but thinking about change. What has changed? The rankings, the SERPs, search engine popularity. What has not changed? The workflow, the principles. This is where you “win” the SEO game. Tools and gadgets don’t seem to be that effective to manage time – too much information. To “win” – you need to control time, workflow and monitoring tests. Then, choose a tool or create your own that does this.

Lots of talk about new tools that will work for you. Best tools give you concrete information that you can use and allow you to decide what to do with the information. Make sure the data is complete and not biased for some industries.

Thoughts on the future of Google algorithms and what may affect search rankings (from Branko Rihtman, http://www.whiteweb.com):

1. Landing pages need to load higher for a higher quality score – Google wants you to serve your users betters.

2. Personalized search (the check/x button next to google search results) – doesn’t affect general search engine results yet, but will customize the results you will see as a user in your Google account when you sign in. This is a hint of the future: integrating social search with organic search.

3. Bounce rate may affect Google organic traffic. If you have a high bounce rate for certain pages, you may be penalized by Google. Could be a hint that Google/search engines are looking at bounce rates.

4. Other behaviors on the website that are more interesting to search engines? On-site navigation paths, major exit pages, pages that are read more may have more valuable links, what is the position of the URL when it is clicked, queries with title correspondence, and all other user pattern information.

5. Google does a lot of academic research – so look at what they are researching now.

6. Look at sores by how users browse between pages – the links between pages.

How can we utilize this info? Test, test, test what users are doing on the website. Crazyegg, Google Website Optimizer, Clickdensity, Google Analytics, Yahoo! Web Analytics, ClickTale, and more.

Take advantage of other search engine products to build up your site. Example: using You Tube, Adwords, can help your Google rank.

Think that brand reputation is increasingly important. Google has started to increase rankings on big brands.

What did I take away from this?

1. Build your website for the user – make it as user-friendly to navigate and try to keep your users on the site as long as possible. In the future, Google will place more value on user experiences onsite.
2. Build your brand – this may also grow in importance for Google ranks.
3. Hire a website optimizer that is looking at all your data (not biased to one industry), is thinking about the future of SEO, and is thinking about predictive technology.
4. What I thought I knew about SEO (the “old way”) is now a commodity. Google is always looking for new ways to determine rank. Find someone who can advise you on the latest SEO trends.
5. Begin by looking at your own website data from Google Analytics, Google Trends, Google Insight to get a sense of existing user patterns. Learn a little about how your users are using your site right now.

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