Yes. If you can afford it!

Here’s why:

• Prospects are much more likely to enquire/buy from a local site.  I.e. Americans are much more likely to enquire/buy from a .com site rather than a .au site
• Google will rank your site higher in America if it is on a .com TLD (Top Level Domain), likewise a .au site will rank higher in Australia, etc
• The IP address of your site (while minor) does go someway to affecting your Google search results – so ideally the site would also be hosted in that country
• Content is king – and should be localised to the country you’re targeting.   Content is such a critical aspect of your SEO, and needs to be considered for each country individually
• Credibility – if you can get your hands on a US phone number and address to plaster all over your .com website – all the better – even if diverting to a messaging service
• In-bound links – another critical aspect of SEO is in-bound links.  If your local site gets links from other local sites, you’re also creating much Google love

Some things to consider:

• It can be expensive to build several websites, so try to ensure they’re very similar, and also use a CMS platform that supports multiple sites (I.e. Drupal for websites, Magento for eCommerce) to minimise development and maintenance costs
• Each of these sites requires their own SEO strategy, link building efforts, etc – which can be expensive.  Look to get discounts from your provider for bulk link building
• If you can’t afford all of this, then consider using sub domains or sub directories for country specific “satellite sites” that are optimised for those countries, then send the traffic back to your main site
• There are compromises you can consider – talk to your agency for some advice

I wrote this article a few years ago, but it still applies. Anything other than sensible link exchange where you are thinking of the user experience, and NOT your site’s optimisation – doesn’t make sense. Anyway, here it is again to explain why:

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.

Who doesn’t love mobile apps? No question, they’re changing the way we do a lot of things – particularly communicate (have you seen heytell.com? Unbelievable!).  But does your business really need one?

I’m now starting to see apps made for the wrong reasons.  We’ve had customers ask us to build apps for things that just don’t need apps – I have to hose them down a little and help them understand why.

There is no doubt that mobile is huge – your website should have a mobile version – our new brand is being launched on July 1, and we’ll certainly have a specific mobile version of our site.  Nielson reported recently that smartphones account for 63% of the mobile market now, and as this continues to grow, users will require a more powerful mobile experience from the websites they visit on their phone.

mCommerce is also an incredibly fast growing industry.  Of PayPal 3.6 million active customers, 400,000 (over 10%) used PayPal on their phones in 2010, purchasing 2.5 million items from a mobile device – up from 1% in 2009… 1000% growth!

It’s crucial to understand however, that many brands and businesses just don’t need an actual app – a mobile enabled version of your website is fine, and in many cases, even more suitable, than an app.  Who, for example would download an app of the salsainternet.com.au website (except me!)? Apps are great if they actually provide extra functionality, that a person is actually likely to use, such as interacting with the phones camera or address book, for example.  Even GPS can be integrated with the site (as you can see on our customers mobile site – m.oovie.com.au).

Once you build an app, you’ve at the mercy of the platforms of the distributors – Apple, Google & Blackberry are often altering their systems, requiring further investment in updating apps to suit.  95% of what most people want to do on an app, is available on a mobile website.  In fact, business that are considering an app may want to consider a mobile site as a first step – it’s quicker, cheaper, and will give you some exposure into the mobile use of your brand before you take the plunge into an app. If you build it correctly, you can also leverage existing site content, so you only update content in one place, which is then reflected in your main site, and your mobile site.

Online retailers may benefit from actually having both a website and an app – I think this could only work if you’re a big brand, that users use for regular, repeat purchases!  oo.com.au (only online) have both, and believe that having the oo logo in the palm of the shoppers hand is priceless.  I’m not sure I agree,  since you can setup a mobile site to popup a message asking you to add an icon to your home screen – which effectively then has the same effect as an app icon.

Roses Only also have an app and mobile site – again, given the brand, and it’s likelihood for repeat purchases, running an app may very well be worth it – it’s also likely to make the purchase process incredibly simple for the user.  I can imagine getting a popup on your phone when it’s a week before your wife’s birthday, with a simple one click purchase to send her the same bouquet you sent her last time.  Awesome use of an app for a well established, popular retail brand.  Founder and CEO of Roses Only, James Stevens does agree however, that apps are not suitable for all brands – you wouldn’t necessarily buy large ticket items from an app, for example.

The take-out: If your app is just about delivering simplistic content – create a mobile site instead – not an app.  If you can actually deliver more useful, smart functionality that needs to either integrate with the phones technology, or something that can’t be done via the web browser, then you may very well need an app.

I’ve love to hear your thoughts, or of any other apps that you think are note worthy for our readers.

Thanks to BRW for some of the inspiration/stats in this article.

There are a bunch of new technologies popping up (is it just me, or do they sound like ice-cream flavours? Just me? OK).

My head is spinning trying to keep up with all the latest and greatest.  I’m enjoying it; loving learning new things.  I’ve included a few items in this post, with my understanding of what they do, and some opinions on how useful they are/not, or might become…

Quora.com. Their home page describes it nicely – “A continually improving collection of questions and answers created, edited, and organized by everyone who uses it.”.  Basically someone posts a question, and people answer it.  Others then comment on, or vote for the answer.  The goal is that it will eventually create a useful body of content for people to use to find answers to common questions.  I guess it’s kind of like Google, except utilises the “crowd sourcing” concept to gather comments and votes to determine what is ranked higher, compared to Google which uses in-bound links & content to determine which results are given priority.

RockMelt.com. ANOTHER web browser!  If it is as good as it claims, I think it will be awesome (except for their terrible logo). I already run 3 browsers – Firefox for business, Chrome for personal, Safari to run my Google calendar. I’d likely drop Safari and use Chrome for Google Calendar, and perhaps rockmelt for personal if its good enough.  I’m waiting for my early access invite to arrive, but from watching the video on their site.  It appears to do something I’ve been whining about for ages – bringing all your social experiences together.  LOVE that idea. Can’t wait to try it.

blekko.com. (still in beta).  A new search engine. Are they bloody crazy?  Actually, it’s pretty cool.  Will it last? Who knows, it’s pretty out there!  The CEO seems like a nice guy (watch his demo video), so I hope they do.  Pretty tough competition – they’re striving to become “the 3rd biggest search engine” (to Google & YouTube I guess).  The short of it: each site in the search index is tagged with keywords. When you do a search, you can use a slash ‘/’ to refine or order your results based on those tags.  For example, search for “web developer”, then add /design to find those that also have a design team.  You can use /date to sort chronologically.  Blekko also has some pretty cool SEO features – allowing you to easily view links into a site and also SEO information.

If you have experience with any of these tools, and/or have an opinion on them, I’d love to hear it.

Our rates are so high because *this* guy goes through bananas like you wouldn’t believe!!

There is an old adage that goes something like “if you pay peanuts, you get monkeys”… and this one … “You get what you pay for!”.  Ah, the cliches are endless.

Seriously though, we get this question a lot.  There are a lot of ways to answer the question, and a lot of theories around what a website is worth. After being in the industry for about 12 years now, I believe you get what you pay for (well that’s not true if you deal with a really big over-priced agency that can demand any price they like) … AND also believe that some businesses don’t need to spend a fortune on their website!

If your business is very small, doesn’t have a huge marketing budget, or doesn’t see the web as a strategic part of the business growth, and is a strong offline business (accounting firms are a good example of this), then it’s not likely you need to invest heavily in a web presence, and can get away with having it built by a freelancer or a small agency, however be warned…

I’ve compared digital agencies and freelancers in another post.

As the owner of a mid-tier agency, I can tell you categorically that we charge what we do, to survive.  If we charged less, we’d have to provide a less superior service (and compete with the commodity end of the market), or disappear.  Here is why:

1. Experience - what a surprise huh? Building websites isn’t just about slapping together a design and crunching out a few pages of code.  Anyone that’s had a bad website built knows that there are endless amounts of pain associated with a site that has been built poorly: It doesn’t render properly in the browsers it should; hosted in an unreliable environment; CMS wasn’t setup correctly so you can’t edit all the things you should be able to; the site doesn’t appear in the search engines; it looks unprofessional; usability is poor!  We’ve learnt all these lessons the only way – the hard way!

2. Staff – you’re buying a service, not a product.  The quality of the service you receive depends solely on the quality of the staff that are providing the service.  It’s all about the people you’re dealing with.  The larger, and more professional the agency, the more talented and expensive their staff will be.  There’s a reason more experienced staff are more expensive!  It’s like choosing an accountant – if you go to an inexperienced accountant straight out of school, they’ll be cheaper, and you’ll most likely get poorer advice than from an Accountant that has been working in the field for years.  Probably not a great idea considering the difference that could make to your tax return – why make the same mistake on your website?

3. Infrastructure – Salsa has a dedicated Program Manager who’s sole responsibility is to ensure projects are run to schedule, and to the highest standards.  Our support team is dedicated purely to helping customers maintain their sites after they go live (as opposed to trying to get our developers to support client sites while they’re busy on building new ones). We also ensure the staff are well looked after – we have someone that manages the office, the beer fridge is stocked, the coffee machine is ready for our next client meeting, organises team events, & client xmas parties.  Happy staff make great websites, which makes happy customers.

4. Quality assurance – about 3 years ago we heard a story from a client of ours that had a website built by another agency, which was lost about 90% way through the build cycle.  They had a server problem, and the site that had been worked on for 3 months, disappeared over night – no backup, no copy on a local machine. Nothing. They had to start from scratch.  More professional agencies have backup systems, version control mechanisms, project management tools, development-production synchronisation processes, testing infrastructures… the list goes on.

5. ROI – a site that doesn’t return any customers isn’t a lot of value.  There is a LOT to learn about creating websites that work.  From design (read Blog posts from our Creative Director to appreciate how important good design is – yet another example of amazing staff) to prominence in the search engines, to integration with back-end sales systems – they’re all important aspects of creating websites that work.  It’s not too hard to do the math on what a good website will return for you when compared with other marketing medium, but it’s futile if the site isn’t built with ROI in mind.

6. Your professionalism online – this may sound pretentious, but have you ever driven a BMW, then gotten into a Hyundai?  Not that Hyundai’s are bad cars – I actually think they’re exceptional value for money, but you’d obviously notice the difference in quality and experience if you had the M3?.   If your potential clients look at your Hyundai website, and your competitors BMW website, who do you think they’ll choose?  We’ve found that making a BMW quality website, while more expensive, ends up returning far more to customers in leads, inquiries and sales, and so we focus on delivering quality websites that sell.

BUT I JUST WANT A WEBSITE – WHAT’S THE DIFFERENCE?!

Here is how you can decide – checkout the portfolio of the providers. Are they of the quality you would like?  Are they BMW’s or Hyundai’s?  Are their customers of a similar size/level of professionalism to you?  Maybe even call a couple of the customers – get some honest feedback.

Bottom line, if you get a price that is considerably lower, you should expect a compromise on some or all of the above.  That doesn’t mean you can’t get a cheaper website, but (wait for the Cleche) “You get what you pay for!”.  When ever we compete against agencies of a similar size to us, the prices are always comparable.

When we compete against smaller agencies, they’re always cheaper.  The clients that understand the difference, are the ones that we love to work with.

First thing to mention, is that it’s not often I see a business succeed with little or no money invested to get things started.  However it usually takes someone at least one try to learn this truth – and hopefully this Blog post will help save some time and pain in that learning process.

I always recommend engaging a professional agency (like us) to help execute a web project, as it’s often an important part of getting a new business up and running successfully.  This article is aimed at those that don’t want to spend that sort of money, and instead are looking for a cheap & nasty solution to help get them started.  Salsa doesn’t provide these services, but here is what we’ve learnt over the years.

Sorry I know it sounds cynical.

Once you’ve taken care of the paperwork (register a business name – https://online.justice.vic.gov.au/cav/br-home, and register your domain name – Google “cheap domain names”), you need to get a website built.

If you have $1,000 – $2,000 to spend on a website.

The cheapest way to get this done is to use a pre-existing Content Management System (CMS) such as WordPress, or Joomla, or Magento or OSCommerce for an eCommerce website.  You should then look to download free, or buy a template for the site, instead of paying for a custom design.

Some places to get templates from:

WordPress – http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/

Joomla – http://www.joomlashack.com/

Magento – http://www.silverthemes.com/

www.templatemonster.com is also a source of hundreds of themes, but the quality is inconsistent.

Once this is done, you need to then get someone to build it for you.  www.nachomedia.com.au can help put together a template website at low cost.  Or if you know a freelance developer, have them do it for you – should be around $1,000 for a WordPress/Joomla site, and $2,000 for an Magento/OSCommerce site.

They can probably help you with hosting also.

Credibility is important – so perhaps set up a 1300 number if you can – and have it direct to your mobile phone or land line – makes you look more professional, and doesn’t cost much.

If you have nothing to spend on a website!

Try setting up a Facebook page.  It costs nothing. See this post on how to do that: http://lazarus.salsainternet.com.au/2010/06/howwhy-to-create-a-facebook-page/

Take a look at Twitter also, if you have the time.

You can also redirect your domain name to your facebook page if you want to advertise the domain name, instead of the facebook page in your marketing collateral.

Get people to find you.

Once you’ve setup some sort of online presence as above, people need to find it.  To be honest, this is often the hardest part.

First, you should run a Google Adwords campaign (ads on the right side of a Google search results screen), as this is relatively low cost, and works instantly – you can setup a campaign, and get it running in a couple of hours – gets traffic to your site immediately.  You can check keywords, etc  at https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

You can also read about how to setup a campaign here: http://www.salsainternet.com.au/adwords-explained.html

Once you’ve proven the model works online, you can start to work on getting the site to rank well in the free/organic listings in Google (left side of Google search results screen).  There are 3 things that make this work – Structure, Content & Links. More info on how this works here: http://www.salsainternet.com.au/search-engine-optimisation.html

You also want to put your web address on your business card, flyers, email signature, etc to help get the word out.

As mentioned, this approach in my opinion is speculative at best, but costs very little, so maybe it’s worth a shot for those that haven’t tried before.

Good luck!

Many people look at Google on a daily basis to check where they are ranking for a particular keyword or a few keywords, and obsess over competitor rankings for that word, but with online marketing, measuring success doesn’t have to be based on limited comparisons of only a few popular or obvious keywords.   It’s not uncommon after we start working with a client, to get a phone call a few weeks later asking why they are still at a particular spot in the google results for one or two keywords – with the client deeply concerned that their SEO investment isn’t being effective.

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!

I had a discussion about this with a client last week – he’s a marketing manager for a large IT services mob in Melbourne.

We spoke about whether the basics of marketing have really changed.  BRW said in an article recently “the underlying theme for good marketing is knowledge: know your business, know your products and services, know your customers and know what your objectives are.” Amen.

Here is the definition of marketing from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marketing:

“Marketing is the process by which companies create customer interest in products or services. It generates the strategy that underlies sales techniques, business communication, and business development. It is an integrated process through which companies build strong customer relationships and create value for their customers and for themselves.”

It also goes on to explain the trends in marketing over recent history – and suggests the marketing orientation from “1970 to present day” is still the same!

If I was to read this 6 months ago, I’d have thought it was ridiculous – with the introduction of the Internet (on a side note – ever wondered what we did with our time before the internet? Anyway…), surely marketing fundamentals are now completely different compared to 40 years ago?  I’m certainly no marketing expert (far from it), but have learnt something about it over the years of helping run & grow Salsa – I sometimes wondered whether the fundamentals of marketing have changed at all?  I recently decided they haven’t. Even though the tools are different, all marketers are still trying to achieve the same result.

Here’s why:

If you’re a marketing manager, for example, don’t you need to still adhere to the same rules? Here are some simplistic examples of how the principles haven’t really changed.

Communicate clearly – the same goal applies today as it has in recent history.  If you can’t clearly communicate what you do, you’ll quickly turn prospects away to someone who can.  We used to use radio, tv & newspapers.  We now also use websites.

Build relationships - a marketers goal is often to get a sales person in front of a prospect to start to build rapport.  The call to action of most marketing media (whether it’s radio, tv, websites, or whatever) is to have someone call, or visit a showroom, or a website (which often then sends them to a phone call!!).  Get in front of someone, build a relationship, sell them something – still the same.

Create value for customers – facebook, Twitter, Blogs, Websites, whatever – the most successful are designed to actually serve a purpose.  Educate the prospect, allow them to gain value from reading what you have to say.

The list goes on – the fundamentals of marketing haven’t changed.  There are a load more tools to use to drive traffic to your marketing material (Google Adwords is a revolutionary tool for generating traffic), but the basics haven’t changed.  Marketers don’t need to intimately understand how Google Analytics works – they need to pay an Adwords professional to run a campaign for them that gets them loads of relevant traffic.

The marketer then needs to worry about what happens when the client finds their website, and makes the phone call – how well is the prospect communicated to, how good is the person on the phone at building instant rapport, and what value can they add right away?

So don’t obsess on learning every detail on how online marketing works.  I say leave that to “online marketers” and worry about the marketing basics of your own business – for a maximising outcome.

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!

We have had a few clients recently, eyeing off the big panel of links that appear under some Google search result listings, and asking how they can set these up for their business.   In this article, I’m going to briefly outline what sitelinks are, and what the factors are that help you get some!

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.