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 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.