Introduction – the link phenomenon

One of the important factors in ranking well on search engines such as Google is ensuring that you have a number of links pointing from other websites to your website. Website links can be a confusing thing, there are many terms used to describe them including one way links, reciprocal links, backlinks, inbound links but to explain what I’m talking about here – lets say you own ACME Shoe Sales, and you are on another website say www.great-aussie-footwear.com and you see a link that says “Visit ACME Shoe Sales” and you click on it – and it takes you to the ACME Shoe Sales, then this helps the ranking of ACME Shoe Sales.

This type of link is called an “inbound link” to ACME, or confusingly, is sometimes referred to as a Backlink for the ACME website. These backlinks or inbound links tell Google that someone else thinks that your website is worth linking to. If lots of people think your website is important enough to create a link to, then this tells the search engines that your website must be important. Fundamentally this is because when someone writes an article about your website or product, they often link to it. Google know about this phenominon (links which attribute you credit, or give you recognition for something), and so recognise it as a thing of value.

So how do you get these links to your website?

Well, there are many ways to do this including posting messages to forums with links to your website, listing your business in online directory websites, getting business partners to link to you, paying people for links (a risky practice these days), general off-line PR activities, and “Reciprocal Links” where you agree to link to someone if they link to you. This Reciprocal linking is also called “Link Exchange”. Many people still exchange links with others hoping that they will rocket to the top of the search results because “their cousin who’s an IT guy told them that was how to get ranked on Google”.

Reciprocal links – will they help?

The answer is yes and no. A few years ago, reciprocal linking alone would get you ranked well on the search engines. The problem was that everyone figured this out and so many professional SEO companies abused the practice and setup massive reciprocal linking programmes – have you ever got one of those spammy emails from people asking you to link to them if they link to you? The practice is still alive and well. Given the disproportionate number of links that various websites ended up obtaining by the practice, the search engine companies caught on that most of this was an artificial practice, and they started to discount the value of links pointing to websites where that website linked back to the linking partner.

So they wont help?

The answer is yes, and no. There are two benefits you get from a link from someone else’s website that points to your website.

a) Referral benefit
b) Ranking benefit

Referral Benefit

By this we’re talking about the fact that if someone is on the other website, and they come across your link and they click on it – well they arrive at your website. If the place they found your link was on a site that is somehow related to your business (if you sell shoes, they may have been on an othopaedics website, or an price comparison website showing differnt footwear available for purchase in your country) then they may well be interested in shoes and so this could be a valuable website visitor. If they found your link on an online gambling website and clicked on it by mistake – well clearly there is limited benefit you receive from their visit.So typically speaking, referral benefit is strong when the link comes from a related website that is not competetive in your field (if you sell pillows, think bedding websites, if you sell tyres, think car websites etc)

Ranking Benefit

Ranking benefit is what we discussed earlier where the search engines will recognise this link as a vote of your websites importance and give you weighting / ranking for this.

So back to Reciprocal Links – will they help?

The answer is yes and no….but this time, we’ll try to really answer the question I promise! If a website owner approaches you who has a website that is related to your industry but not competetive to your business, and you think that people on their website may be the right sort of target audience who you’d like to have come to your website, then by all means exchange links with them.

Forget about the search engine ranking issues – if this business attracts people who are the sort of people who would buy or deal with your organisation (ie same area, same interests, same product category) then having a link from their site to yours has enough inherent value to exchange links. Same applies to whether a link should go on your website. Are your visitors going to find it interesting? Will it add value to their experience of your website? If so – go for it.

If a website from an overseas website approaches you but you don’t sell to overseas customers, or if a website from an unrelated industry approaches you, then don’t exchange links in the hope they will deliver strong rankings. On the issue of ranking, there is still much debate in the SEO industry about whether any rank is achieved from exchanging links. My personal view based on our SEO experience is that a small number of link exchanges with high quality “authorititive” websites in your industry will help to some extent. Be careful though, as linking out to a range of useless link partners who have sites filled with thousands of spammy links could actually hurt your rankings. If the person asking you to exchange links fits this category don’t do it.

This article, was written by Phil Baddock, Salsa Internet’s Search Marketing Director. If any of this didn’t make sense, or if you need help with building high quality links to your website, Phil can be contacted on phil@salsainternet.com.au , or read the Free Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) eBook.

A lot of our customers use POS systems to manage inventory, front of store transactions, etc.  The providers of this software are great at creating Point of Sale solutions – that’s what they do.   Some of these providers offer eCommerce software platforms (which integrate with their POS solution.  This is fine for customers with a need for a very simple eCommerce website.  For large companies wanting a professional approach to eCommerce, unfortunately these providers will sometimes be a bit opportunistic and over state the capabilities of these POS eCommerce solutions.   In short, it’s often the case that these eCommerce “add-on”s to a POS solution, are unsuitable for a professional eCommerce sites.

Apart from the fact that these eCommerce solutions are proprietary (see my post about the problems with this), they pose the following advantages and disadvantages.

Advantages of an eCommerce solution offered by a POS provider

• They integrate seamlessly with the POS system – they’re created by the same vendor, so obviously work very well together.
• They’re typically much cheaper to setup.  The solutions are usually rather simple, and quick to setup, with a few configuration files, and few  template files to be edited to suit.

Disadvantages of an eCommerce solution offered by a POS provider

• They’re typically not SEO friendly (they may have some basic SEO capabilities) and they’re not built with SEO in mind.  They’re built with integration in mind, and the software vendors expertise is in POS systems, not eCommerce, so SEO is overlooked or given limited focus.
• Closed platform (proprietary).  As mentioned already, this makes it hard to customise, and almost impossible to partner with an expert eCommerce agency, as they’ll know almost nothing about the vendor’s system, and are unable to modify it to maximise your ROI.
• License costs – as with most proprietary software, there will be license costs.
• Product evolution – since the software has been written by a POS company – whose expertise and main focus is selling more POS systems, the product evolution will be slow in comparison to a dedicated eCommerce platform provider.
• Addons & customisations – if you need a new component built, or changes to the standard product, you need to pay the provider to do it – which is likely to take a while since they’re busy writing and selling POS solutions and may have many large customers – are you big enough to be a priority in their product development stream?

All of this is important to consider, however the overwhelming issue we see with most POS based proprietary eCommerce solutions is that they are an afterthought of the POS software;  they’re created to fill a perceived hole in the market, and while you may end up with a “suitable” software solution, you can often miss out on a “business changing”, well thought out, professionally executed, eCommerce solution that opens up a new channel to market for your business – which is what a good eCommerce solutoin is all about.

SEO takes a little time to take effect – usually a few months after you commence work (some limited results are immediate, but strong success is a process that needs a few months to gain momentum), and also Google traffic comes from users who type a huge myriad of keyword combinations into Google.  Ranking highly for 1 or 2 obvious keywords is not necessarily the be all, and end all of your SEO success.  Often ranking strongly across 100′s of more specific keyword searches can work just as well, or even better !

The real measure of success of your SEO investment is whether your traffic, and your sales/inquiries are increasing!  Sounds obvious right?   You’d think so, but it’s amazing how often people obsess over a few ranks for a small number of specific keywords, or how their competitors ranks for these words, without looking at how their overall visitor traffic, or sales / leads are travelling.

Ask your SEO company to run a Google Analytics graph over the last 6 months showing Google Organic traffic only (that’s the visitors who come to your website after clicking on your listing on the left hand side of Google, not the sponsored links……these are the listings that are affected by SEO and Google optimisation).   This will show how your overall traffic levels are trending, and give you a view of your visitors arriving based on ALL the keywords typed into Google, and not just a few.   If your SEO provider is doing their job, then you should be seeing traffic trends heading upwards.

It’s vital that this isolates only Organic / Natural search traffic, as looking at all of your website visitors can hide upward or downward trends in individual sources of traffic (3rd party referring websites, paid advertisements or directories etc) leading you to think all is ok, when in fact your organic traffic may have collapsed while other traffic sources have leapt up to compensate.

Ask them to run a report of “conversions” over the past 6 months (conversions are the actions that you want a user to take on your site, such as contacting you, or buying something, or signing up for a newsletter), and review the results in detail to ensure your conversion numbers are being maintained, or growing.  Typically, the % of users who go on to perform your “conversion” action, once they are at your website is purely a function of page layout, and clarity of message and navigation, and prompts or “call’s to action” to get users to take this action.

So if your website has a prevailing conversion % of 3% for example (3 in every 100 who arrives, go on to convert) then naturally, once you know this – usually after that point, it becomes a numbers game.  You need to get as many people coming to your site (who’ve typed something relevant into google) as you can….if you double your visitors, you’ll double your conversions……so SEO success is achieved by seeing increasing numbers of visitors.  If you suddenly rocket to #1 position for your favourite keyword, but don’t see overall increases in traffic – then this wont help you in the way that you are hoping for.  And yes, if you move to position #1 for 1 specific keyword, this definately isn’t a guarantee that your overall site traffic is on the increase…..it could be a reflection of a narrow, one dimensional SEO campaign that ignores the breadth of your product offerings.

To see the trends in these reports, you can use Analytics to switch to “week” view or “month” view to show you the numbers aggregated across these time periods.   This makes it easier to spot the trends as you compare results week to week, or month to month.

These are some basic, but crucial metrics in ensuring your SEO programme is doing its job.    If you aren’t getting that sort of information from your SEO provider, you should contact them and arrange to review this, to ensure you’re getting value for your SEO investment!

Clients often wonder how “Link Building” works, why they need to have it, and how to get the most out of Link Building. There are a few basic guidelines that you need to follow to get positive results from Link Building campaigns and we’ll have a look at them in this post.

There are two main categories to consider when Link Building, On-page factors and Off-page factors.

On-page factors include the following:

The key here is volume of links and links that take advantage of targeted keywords.

Recently Google have placed a strong emphasis on frequency of content updates on a site as well as freshness of links.

When it comes down to the page rank for incoming links you have a number of choices. Typically, you’re able to get lots of links which have varying page rank at an affordable rate OR you’re able to get fewer links which have relatively better page rank at a higher cost.

Typically high pagerank links come via:

• privately negotiated paid links or;
• naturally occurring incentives for other high profile sites to link to you based on the value of your website or its information, or tools, or relevance to their audience or;
• paid links (text-link-ads or similar), or;
• link triangulation deals or reciprocation deals

It is very rare to be able to simply request a link to your site from a very high page rank 3rd party site or page – and get the link with nothing offered in return (who would have thought, there’s always a catch!).  We don’t engage in paid link strategies for clients, as if found out – Google may penalise you.

When you sit back and look at the way Link Building works, it does indeed make sense. Search engines such as google will review all the links coming into your site, along with the content on your site and give you a rank compared to other sites on the web. There are many factors that come into play to determine who should appear first, second, third etc but the main message still holds true…

Build targeted links to your site, do it on a regular basis, with content on your site which is keyword-rich and updated as often as possible. The more links, the better, and the more you can hone in on your keyword niche the better.

Happy Googling!

When we launched a version of our website about 2 years ago, we made some fairly important changes, which increased our enquiries online by about 35%!  The changes were mostly aesthetic, but we knew that our prospects were looking to learn more about our client base, and how we differentiate ourselves, so we created a short flash animation to tell a bit of a story, and also improved the aesthetic.   You can see the difference below between the old site, and the new.

http://old.salsainternet.com.au

www.salsainternet.com.au

Recently we also implemented a new home page design for www.equusconnect.com.au (recruitment website for the horse racing industry), and their online registrations for job seekers went up by about 60% overnight!  Imagine what that could do for your business!

In most cases, the changes are only aesthetic – you don’t need to change the structure of the site, or the layout.  Just give it a ‘refresh’, if you like, and you’ll likely see an improve in results. And it will be much, much cheaper than just about any online marketing campaign.

Then, if you still need more business (let’s face it, who doesn’t), then consider investing in online marketing.

Google site links appear in two main forms.  A full/large panel of sitelinks, which looks like this:

And a smaller mini panel of sitelinks:

If you are keen to achieve sitelinks for your business, there’s some things you’re going to want to understand about them:

1.    The links are displayed, or not – at Google’s sole discretion.
2.    They are not linked to your business listing in Google (i.e. they are not displayed consistently to all users), but instead are shown depending on the keyword the user searches on, and how “authoritative” your website is considered to be.

For example, if you type in “Salsa Internet” into Google.com.au, you will see our Salsa Internet listing show up with the full spread of sitelinks shown, as our business is considered to be an authority in Google’s eyes in relation to that keyword phrase.  If however you type in “Google Adwords Melbourne” then you’ll see us ranking at position #1 also, but with no sitelinks, as Google recognise we offer this service, but don’t attribute enough “authority” to us in relation to that keyword.

So this begs the obvious question – what, in Google’s eyes – determines “authority” ?

Your site’s authority in relation to a keyword is typically determined by:
a)    How many times that keyword, or words related to / on the same topic of that keyword, appear on your homepage, and throughout your website
b)    The number, quality and type of inbound links to your website (ie an inbound link is where another website contains a link to your website from their website), which contain words in the link that are match the keyword, or are related to that keyword

If you want to achieve these types of sitelinks, you need to engage in link building targeting for the keyword in question or words related to that word, in the link text.  You’re going to want to have a lot of strong / high ranking inbound links for that keyword in order to achieve sitelinks.   Sounds like hard work ay?   Well achieving sitelinks for your business name, is often readily achievable, but achieving sitelinks for popular common keyword phrases on Google – takes a lot of effort.

1.    How competitive your industry is online

Are you competing against other big brands, with huge budgets, or do you have an opportunity to really create a strong presence in the search engines, with little competition? A few years ago we found a client that sells synthetic turf had an enormous opportunity to rank well in the search engines.  There was little competition, and it was a strong growing industry.  They took advantage of that, are now leading their industry.  You can check how competitive your industry is by doing some keyword research using Googles Keyword Tool.

Google Keyword Tool

This gives you an idea of how many searches there are for the words you enter, and also how much competition there is.  You should also run some Google searches of course, and run your eyes down the listings to see what you’re up against.
2.    What keywords you would like your site to rank for?

Some words will be more popular of course, and will deliver the most traffic, however if your competition is too tough, you’re never likely to rank at the top of the engines.  In industries such as mortgage broking or car loans, you’re up against the big banks, who have fairly significant marketing budgets!! In these cases you can depend on long tail traffic – which is really any other traffic related to mortgage broking but not based on the really high ranking keywords.  Instead of mortgages melbourne, for example, you may end up ranking for “low cost mortgages” or “mortgage broker brunswick”, for example.

If you don’t have all that much heavy competition, then you can just go for the top ranking keywords – knock yourself out.
3.    The design/structure of the site you want to promote online

It’s important to ensure that your site is capable of converting visitors to enquiries or customers – no point sending customers to a poorly designed website!  We often have new customers asking us to optimise a terribly designed site.  We do ourselves out of a job, but will recommend they go back to their designers and get a new site built first… or we try and sell them a new site of course!  Have a read of example 3 on the Online Strategy page of our website for a good example of how this worked for Album Works.

Album Printer new design

4.    Your strategy & budget

There are a multitude of services available; how much you would like to spend will ultimately allow you to choose the most suitable strategy for your online marketing.  Choose what mediums you like (SEO, SEM, Social Media, etc), then get some professional advice on what’s required.