Eight tips for promoting your content to help obtain backlinks for SEO

Even if you create outstanding, quality content, if you don’t promote it fully, it will not give you the full value you need from your investment. Regardless of how shareable content is, to get the most valuable, relevant links requires online promotion through a variety of different channels. You may send a few tweets about your latest blog, but if no one is listening to begin with, your content assets are likely to be lost in the ether. This is content marketing without the marketing...  There are a number of things you can do to promote your site content effectively and drive high quality traffic to your site; here I'll highlight eight.

Tip 1: Social media promotion

Social Media platforms are one of the most popular and effective methods for promoting your…

Widely expected (and useful) new tool introduced

Google have recently launched a new tool to its Webmaster toolkit, giving you the ability to identify and remove (at least in Googles eyes) unnatural or spam inbound links (from other sites to yours). Google have become more active in notifying webmasters of problems with inbound links, this now enables you to remove the offending link(s) from Google's link graph without contacting the owner of the other site. You may have received a message from Google in the past saying that they have identified unnatural, spam or paid links to your website, this usually left you having to identify the potential problem links and approaching each website to get the links removed. Not a massively effective process and neither is it a good use of your time. Bing also launched a similar tool earlier this year.

Here is an explanation of this new tool from Googles, Matt Cutts

…

Our review of backlink analysis software tools and web services

Link analysis has always been an integral part to search marketing efforts. As with all marketing, you need to benchmark where you are and what your competitors are doing in order to put the right work in place and also to track performance. Within the last two years this process has become easier with a wider range of tools now available to aid you.

Search specialists will definitely know all of these and many more, but this list is aimed more at client-side marketers who want to benchmark their link quality against competitors, review SEO agency performance and spot opportunities for partnering with other sites, for example blogger outreach.

Comparison of data quality of backlink analysis tools

Added references to this excellent review of data quality from backlink analysis tools from Richard Baxter at SEOGadget. Don't purchase a subscription or use…

Analysing  link effectiveness using web analytics tools

This is part 2 of a post advising on how to identify quality domains for SEO Link-building. In Part 1, I introduced an approach for identifying domains using specific link analysis tools. In part 2, I'll look specifically at using Google Analytics. Since it’s also important to turn your eye inwards and use your web analytics data to identify which domains are providing valuable links. If you aren’t already, consider start using campaign tracking codes to ensure that you are measuring the impact of each link and not just reliant on domain level information. If you rely on the referral data, you can only see landing page level detail, not individual links. Use a taxonomy for your campaign tracking (and make sure everyone in the team knows about it) so you get consistent data. For example, consider the following: utm_medium = seo utm_source= links utm_campaign = domain name utm_content =…

Using SEO analysis tools to identify linking opportunities

In the latest article in this series on how to use analytics techniques for better SEO we look at the importance of targeting relevant domains for your link building. I'll start by introducing what you should look for in quality link sources and then in Part 1 of this two part article, I'll cover how to select domains to target through link-building tools. In Part 2 I'll drill down to cover how to analyse existing links using web analytics tools.

Not all links are born equal

You'll know this! The impact of a link rests on several factors, not least the reputation of the website it resides on. Search engines place a great deal of importance on quality, relevance and trust. This is a deliberately simplified explanation, but the three signals combined make a heady cocktail of link love. My advice is that if you focus on these…

Google Targets Low Quality Sites Again

Source : Google Inside Search Blog Importance : [rating=4]

Our Commentary

Google has started the rollout of a small algorithm update targeting poor quality websites. It's been dubbed Penguin by SearchEngineLand. The techniques Google are targeting as part of this update are not new and Google has been combating them for years already. In their blog post announcing the change Google explain they are targeting both anchor text of links and quality of content on a page as primary focus. When looking at the examples used to explain the the type of spam they are targeting - you can see it  is very keyword heavy copy or irrelevant links as part of the content as this image shows. It's from an example of a site Google calls out which it is…

Using nofollow tags to support SEO

Nofollow tags are important in SEO, but I find many marketers I speak to haven't heard of the approach. That's understandable since you would only expect SEO specialists to be aware of them. However, I think they are a useful concept to understand as a "hands-on" marketer, since they will effect conversations you have about buying media or understanding the way links in social media work.

Nofollow tags explained

A nofollow tag is a basic piece of HTML. Appended to a hyperlink, it allows webmasters to control whether search engines follow a link or not. For example, the following URL on a page of another site allows search engines to visit Smart Insights’ website and credit the website with the link; each link is scored by the search engines, supporting SEO: <a href="http://www.smartinsights.com/" title="Smart Insights">Visit Smart Insights</a> Here's the same hyperlink,…

A new in-depth guide from Distilled

Value/Importance: [rating=4] Recommended link: http://www.distilled.net/linkbait-guide/

Our commentary

We think this is one of one of the most useful free guides and workbooks for marketers published this year. Particularly relevant to SEO and E-PR it's an in-depth guide from Distilled, complete with a workbook for running brainstorm sessions specifically for Linkbait ideas. If you haven't encountered the term, linkbaiting is just a short way of describing the creation of amazing pieces of content (blogs, ebooks, info-graphics, videos etc) that are inherently valuable & that other websites, bloggers etc will want to link to. Essentially you are earning the right to get links to your website, something Seth Godin would call Permission marketing. The intern used by Distilled (interesting approach) does a fantastic job in this guide, going through the process right from the beginning in…

What is Stumbleupon and what are its benefits?

StumbleUpon is another way of finding & consuming content online, just as Twitter, LinkedIn news, Facebook sharing / likes & Google do. Since web users are likely to use a number of tools as way of finding and sharing information, StumbleUpon may be worth a look. [Editors note: by chance as we published this, a new report suggested that StumbleUpon sends more traffic to US websites than Facebook. I'd have to say treat this caution - this is only for sites with Statcounter installed, which won't be representative of larger sites]. If your audience is active on StumbleUpon, then it makes sense that your business is active on StumbleUpon. During this blog post I'll cover, what StumbleUpon is, who uses it, why & how your business can be active on the service. Here's an intro to the scale of StumbleUpon which shows its scale

…

A review of Majestic SEO Site Explorer

In a previous post I compared what I think are the 5 best tools to review backlinks. These show the strength of your all important backlinks against competitors. In this review we took a brief look at the Majestic SEO Backlink history which we find useful for comparing clients against competitors at a top-level. But since this time Majestic now have a new tool - the Majestic Site Explorer. Now into its 4th month of public Beta, for me, Majestic Site Explorer is a really useful tool to use when completing top level reviews of competitors. I'd also recommend it can be use d for regulary monthly or quarterly health checks for your own business and the SEO efforts of the agency. It's often compared to the similar and I think, better known tool available from SEOmoz (www.opensitexplorer.com). So I thought it…