So much hoola-hoop about backlinks! Most SEO companies have ‘link-building’ as their primary deliverable in their service agreement.That suggests that a lot of SEO people consider backlinking as the chunk of their service activity. Is it as easy as that- just link to as many sites you can and over a period of time you rise up the rankings? I am sure we all know the answer to that. Its a resounding NO!We have a mature enough audience here so I need not get into the ‘backlinking’ 101 here. Still, a reference point can be accessed. Lets see what the Wikipedia says:-

“Backlinks (or back-links [UK]) are incoming links to a website or web page. Inbound links were originally important (prior to the emergence of search engines) as a primary means of web navigation; today their significance lies in search engine optimization (SEO). The number of backlinks is one indication of the popularity or importance of that website or page (though other measures, such as PageRank, are likely to be more important). Outside of SEO, the backlinks of a webpage may be of significant personal, cultural or semantic interest: they indicate who is paying attention to that page.”

For me as a marketer, backlinks are a way of ascertaining the authority of a site and in effect your business within your niche/industry. As it says above, ‘ who is paying attention to that page’ is a great indicator of how to define a backlink strategy. ‘Who’ is important. Defining ‘target audience’ is important.  So ideally where would you go looking for backlinks-

• Sites where your target audience can be found.
• Non-competing industry sites that respect your authority.

From marketing standpoint a well-defined backlinks strategy must incorporate the following thoughts-

• Define and locate target audience online.
• Find ways of reaching the target audience.
• Once you meet your target audience mid-way you bring them to your site( by backlinking)

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• Find out how much duplicate content are you using within your site.
• If you find multiple URL’s within your sitemap with similar content, volunteer and be willing to choose one over another. Smart huh, Google! But wait…
• Use rel=canonical tag to tell Google which URL you’d prefer them to crawl, index and rank.

Rest of the post is about using 301 redirects and using Webmaster Tools URL parameter handling tool.

Now, this week Google came out to address the heart of the duplicate content issue- duplication across multiple domains. This is something most article marketers and grey-hatters are worried about. You can check the duplicate content cross-domain issue post yourself.

Reading and making sense of the whole thing, I reckon this will be helpful to both Google and genuine webmasters being penalized for dupe content unknowingly.

While this will help a lot of people, the canonical tag will mostly be debated by content marketers. Can Google convince article marketers to tag one source over the other?Well, this will surely make G’s task easy but what’s the advantage to those who distribute their articles to hundreds of directories? The non-tagged URL’s will not make it to SERP’s but will they pass on link juice? Will they themselves have ANY value at all?

This is one of the FAQ regarding this topic which Google played rather diplomatically-

“Q: I’m offering my content / product descriptions for syndication. Do my publishers need to use rel=”canonical”?
A: We leave this up to you and your publishers. If the content is similar enough, it might make sense to use rel=”canonical”, if both parties agree”

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If you’re giving away same stuff, are you not creating spam?

What’s the point of duplicate article syndication, when in the first place article directories are supposed to be information powerhouses?

Will your be banned by Google?

What’s the best way forward, where you don;t have to write an original article for each directory and still you escape the ‘ban’?

Find out all the duplicate content issue debate here in my very first podcast.


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I received a mail from one of my forum mates the other day. We had a lot of discussion about internet marketing in general. Here is a little excerpt from our conversation. I thought it’ll help a lot of people.

Q-How do I pick a good niche to promote? (In this very thread, Robert said about one of the niches: “that niche is almost dead now”. How do I avoid picking a niche that’s dead and choose one that is popular?)
Me: A niche is not a fashion trend that’ll come and go. In internet marketing and especially within affiliate marketing, a niche is simply a very specific area of interest that will be profitable. So, two things- ’specific area of interest’ for consumers, and it should be ‘profitable’ to you as a product seller/promoter. Affiliates talk about some niches to be ‘dead’ meaning they are saturated with far too many products and affiliates promoting them. Any product getting too much attention looses it sheen over time, as every tom, dick and harry is out there with a one-page sales site to promote it. A niche is magical when there is a specific interest in it but few providers. For example, ‘career and employment prospects for ex-cons’.

Q-How do I pick the “long tail keywords” around which to write the articles? Some e-books suggest picking keywords with over 5000 search results in Google but not too much competition. Still have no idea how to tell if a keyword has too much competition
Me- You have to rely upon a good keyword research tool for this. Wordtracker is pretty good. There is no one tool that gives exact data on search engine numbers but Wordtracker gives a decent estimate. Now, to evaluate profitability of any keyword a term is used- Keyword Effectiveness Index. Higher the KEI, better the keyword, they say.

Q-If you take the total dollar amount you’ve made writing articles and divide it by the actual number of articles you’ve written, how much do you get?
Me-It’s pretty hard to work out the ROI for article marketing. It’s only possible if you ONLY employ article marketing in generating sales/traffic.Still, you’d have to take into account web-site maintainance and basic SEO-hours-spent costs.If you can somehow track every article you wrote and published. If you could follow and track that article wherever it’s published further and work out how much it made for you, same tracking can be done with all the articles and you’ll have a ROI. It can be done with Analytics, just never felt the need to do it myself yet.

Q-Top Internet Marketing expert suggests submitting articles to EZA and bookmarking them for long-term traffic. What specific actions do I take to “bookmark them for long-term traffic”? Is this process really necessary? (doubt raised – see next question)
Me- This is not an unusual approach. Article marketing is not just about writing and publishing articles, but is also about creating multiple entry points to your site via all those places where the article gets.Now, the onus is upon you to give legs to those articles. Whether you publish them on EZA or Goarticles, smart marketers never rely simply on the traffic generation methods of article directories. You have to do your bit and promote your article. Simple bookmarking can include- Stumble Upon, Digg, Reddit, Propeller, posting on your Facebook and Twitter accounts. The point is to spread the word from your end.

Q- A seasoned Internet Marketer disagrees with the previous statement: “When you build those backlinks all you’re doing is generating a lot of adsense revenue for EzineArticles or GoArticles. Your time is better spent elsewhere”. Who is right? I need to have a system in place before I start.

Me-True, but then what.Think about this- if you generate enough traffic that increases Adsense revenue from the content of your article what does that mean? All those coming to that page are coming via your ‘bookmarking’ after having heard about your article, wouldn’t they read and pay attention to the article first. Or, they’ll simply click on Adsense ads as if they are paid to do that.

Q- Top Internet Marketing expert says: “Do solid keyword research, find 10 high traffic and low competition keywords”.
What is the criteria that defines a “high traffic but low competition keyword”??? I need to define this, otherwise I could waste a lot of time.
Me-Nobody will give a figure for that..The term ‘credit card’ has close to 95 million web results in Google search. Still most affiliates have at least one credit-card program in their portfolio.KEI is the best bet to find out. Generally, a keyword with KEI above 100 is okay to work with.Again, you have to treat each case separately.See KEI is only a ratio between ‘keyword searches’ and ‘available web-resources’, so you can  have different keywords with same KEI but different potential.

Q-Top Internet Marketing expert says: <<Write 10 SEOed keyword specific articles around 400-450 words each.>>
Before I start writing, what is the definion of a Search Engine Optimized article?

Me-Keywords in hand. Sprinkle them in title, heading and body of the article. Keep it within 2% density. Write a killer title and include keywords. Resource-box/author-bio is your elevator-pitch. All the links in the bio should have your keywords as the anchor text.

Q-HOW DO I PICK THE “LONG-TAIL KEYWORDS” to write about and how many keywords should be targeted in a typical article?
Refer to the Wordtracker question above. You can target between 1-3 keywords per article. Normally, I use one main and two long-tail derived from the main.For example, ‘credit card’, “interest free credit card”, “no fee credit card”.

Q-HOW DOES A TYPICAL PROFESSIONAL ARTICLE WRITER actually come up with the content? Is it mainly reading other articles and wikipedia(if available) and completely rephrasing the information? This question assumes the writer has no knowledge of the niche in question.
Me- Internet research is paramount. Making yourself familiar with the content is the first step. Being a pro writer, you’d know how to structure any writing quickly. For example, I work with a summary, an intro paragraph, 5-8 bullet points and a conclusion. Any structuring that you use can be employed to format the info that you have gathered via research.

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Woke up, it was a Chelsea morning and the first thing that I knew,
There was milk and toast and honey, and a bowl of oranges, too.
The sun poured in like butterscotch, and stuck to all my senses,
Won’t you stay, we’ll put on the day, and talk in present tenses?

Above lines from Joni Mitchell’s Chelsea Morning highlight the significance of ‘now’- the ‘present tense’. Steve Yastrow wrote a full post talking about Joni’s song. Of course Steve is a customer-relationships expert and he found and understood the wisdom from Joni’s song thus:-

“One of the key components of a relationship-building encounter is that you and your customer need to both be fully present, engaged in the present moment. As I wrote in this recent post on tompeters.com, one of the easiest ways to kill a sales conversation is to be focused on the next step in the sales process, ignoring the opportunity to create an encounter RIGHT NOW, in the present moment.”

This post has been my favorite for its modest simplicity and acuteness of message. It hits home the point. So does Joni’s song.

What’s the ultimate purpose of any business transaction? To provide a best suited solution to your customer’s problem. A transaction is deemed complete when both parties are satisfied. In the present tense. Do you make a lasting relationship in that moment of encounter? That’s what counts. Does every moment of interaction a relationship-builder? That can only happen when you don’t jump the bogey. Trying to get their email even before they have explored your site well. Trying to sell that extra year’s hosting while they are still comparing prices. Pushing your newsletter even before they know who you are. These are some examples of  jumping-the-bogey in online business world .

When you visit your doctor the first thing that needs doing is your doc putting the stethoscope on your chest and asking you to take a deep breath. The first question will never be about where you buy your medicines from, or, would you buy a health policy from a friend of his. Let him make you feel a little better first. That’s the whole point. Isn’t it.

This ‘making you feel better’ idea always brings me to Sheryl Crow’s eternal song.

Jump in, let’s go
Lay back, enjoy the show
Everybody gets high, everybody gets low
These are the days when anything goes

Everyday is a winding road
I get a little bit closer
Everyday is a faded sign
I get a little bit closer to feeling fine

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But when I was asked this question recently, I found myself speaking for 20 minutes in a vacuum. It didn;t help that the questioner was a person with over 40 years offline-marketing experience. He has been heading a reputed educational institution. I preached around the following points( not in the order as written below):-
Brand Enhancement?
Leads?
Web-Presence?
Unavoidable Trend?

And ya, I have not included off the table options, such as, using  the website primarily as an institutional newsletter, or, essentially an information point etc.

What would be your elevator pitch to convince a web-atheist to sign your web-design/marketing agency?

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The 4 Ps of web marketing will provide you enough knowledge to be able to perceive and approach your web-based business in a better, more holistic, way. This gives a concise way of understanding a subject, which is normally outlined by a random array of tips and techniques.

Lets start with the first P- Proficiency. Within the context of our study here, Proficiency has these two faces:-

• Proficiency = Expertise that you need to apply to build your business;
• Proficiency = Skillfulness that you need to demonstrate in order to build credibility and trust online

Now, it must be understood how the above two definitions define the same concept in two different ways. Lets take an example. Suppose you sell wines online. You would need a good knowledge of wines to be able to identify, negotiate, and, purchase your stock of wines. That requires ‘expertise that you need to apply to build your business’.

While a prospective customer visits your site looking for a good red wine to gift to his fiancé, he relies upon your (site-owner’s) recommendation (expertise). Basically, every wine that you are selling on the site is actually chosen by you, hence you are in effect saying to people to trust your choice by buying those wines.

But, would a visitor trust your choice/recommendation if he/she thinks you are not an expert? Of course not! May be you have stocked best wines in whole of Europe, but if you/your site is not deemed as a trusted/expert source, you won’t even sell a wee cork.

So, how do you build credibility and trust online?

The 4Ps of web marketing whitepaper is a good starting point, doesn’t matter at what stage your business is at. It will help you grasp the four key principles.

Thanks,

Hersh Bhardwaj

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