Off page SEO Techniques are very important for any website, blog or otherwise that wants to harness the power of organic traffic from the big search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a process that includes a number of elements to insure a more favorable position for your website in search engine result pages like those of Google, Yahoo and Bing. The success of your online marketing is greatly enhanced when you can boost the ratio of your organic traffic to 80%. This traffic is free and very valuable.
There are two kinds of SEO, on page and off page SEO techniques. We will only discus off page SEO techniques in this article. Off page SEO are the things you need to do to get a higher page rank (PR) and a good position in the search engines like Google for your website after you launch the website.
What are the off page SEO techniques? Off page SEO techniques are always connected to building your link popularity. Link popularity represents the number of back links or links back to your website from other websites. To check your website's current link popularity, go to Link Popularity and use the free tool to check your website's link popularity. The higher your link popularity, the higher your page rank (PR) will be. To build your link popularity you need to raise the number of websites that link back to your website.
There are a number of off page SEO techniques:
1. Email
Email webmasters that are responsible for websites similar to yours in content and ask them for a link that you will reciprocate. There are sites that have a page full of links and the links are not relevant to each other as far as content is concerned. Link Farms can damage the reputation of your website with Google instead of helping it. These link farms are easy to join and get links on but this is not advisable. Link schemes are not approved by Google and before you take what may appear to be an easy route for getting back links you should read information on Google's site about illegitimate linking methods, this will assure you of more success with Google. Some companies will create a number of bogus sites to get lots of reciprocal links but as Google changes their algorithms these sites will lose popularity and could even be blacklisted.
2. Content
The best way to conduct your off page SEO techniques then is to insure that you have unique, highly informative content. When you have great content other webmasters will want to link to your site. If they just copy and paste your content on their website that is a violation of intellectual property copyright laws. Make people want to link to your website. This is the best of all off page SEO techniques to grow the number of websites linking to yours.
3. Article Marketing
There are hundreds if not thousands of article directories on the Internet. You can submit articles to these sites and for every submission, you will be allotted a resource box in which you can introduce yourself and share a link to your website. Some of these article directories have high page ranks. If your articles are accepted, they will be included in their pages. Having a website with high PR linking to yours goes a long way in increasing your page rank. Additionally, if you will submít just one article to a thousand directoríes, you'd have a thousand pages linking to your website! Sounds like a daunting task? There are services detailed on my blog that you can use for monthly fees or software that is automated.
4. Forum Marketing
There are online communities that are dedicated to the subject of your website. Find those forums, join them and become part of the community. It is important to become a part of the community and not just post something irrelevant to the topic. You will be seen as a spammer just there to post a link and you could be banned from that forum. In the forum you will be able to have a signature box that will accompany every post or comment that you make in the forum. In your signature box, you can have a link to your website. For every post you make, you will have a link to your website.
5. Craigslist
Craigslist is a well-known classifieds website with a PR7. A PR7 score is very high! Having a link on a website with a PR7 will give a boost to your website. To have a link on Craigslist go to the site, choose the category that is relevant to your website, post your advertisement with your link of course and see what happens. It doesn't matter if anyone reads your ad. The object is to have a link to your website on Craigslist. Your ad will expire so you should have a way to remind yourself to post there on expiry to maintain a constant link.
6. Partners
Look for partners who are willing to include your site in their pages. The easiest way to do this is to use the free tool at Webconfs.
7. Triangular Linking
Google does not like reciprocal linking, but triangular linking is one way of getting around this limitation. Look for webmasters who will work with you on this one. Webmaster A posts a link to Webmaster B's website. Webmaster B posts a link to Webmaster C's website. Webmaster C posts a link to Webmaster A's website. It is the same principle as reciprocal linking, but the search engine spiders are not programmed to identify this type of linking.
Thursday, February 18, 2010
Organic Search & Paid Search: Are They Synergistic Or Cannibalistic?
One aspect to search marketing that I feel doesn’t get enough attention and indeed is misunderstood by the SEO practitioner is the interaction between organic search and paid search.
For years when teaching SEO workshops, I touted the synergistic effect of being at the top of both organic and paid results. I would encourage attendees to invest in both SEO and PPC on the promise of symbiosis between the two marketing channels. I would cite research showing that you can increase the clickthrough rate of your #1 (organic) ranking if you also have a sponsored ad above it or in the right column, and that showing up twice on the same page in the results makes your #1 ranking get 20% more clicks.
I gave short shrift to the thought that engaging in both sides of search marketing could lead to an adverse effect, i.e. negative synergy — whereby your paid search program cannibalizes your organic search derived visits, or vice versa. That is, until just a couple weeks ago.
What shifted my thinking was a session at the recent Silicon Valley Search Engine Roundtable’s “Rockstar” conference (ironically named, given the “Covariopalooza” rock-themed customer conference that Covario put on earlier in the week!) Also ironic was the fact there was a presentation given by one of my company’s own “rock stars”, namely our Chief Analytics Officer Dr. Matthias Blume. The premise of the talk was how the organic and paid results interact and how flawed attribution modeling can misrepresent ROI, associating sales/conversions with the wrong marketing program (i.e. SEO when PPC should have gotten the credit, PPC when SEO should have gotten the credit).
The cannibalization of organic search by PPC is clearly demonstrated by the following (inadvertent) experiment where paid search was shut off completely for a time. As evidenced by the graph below, there’s an increase in organic traffic commensurate with the decrease in PPC derived traffic. (Note that measurement of this effect is confounded by other factors such as cyclical patterns, other marketing actions taken by both you and your competitors, the economy, the weather, and so on.)
How does this sort of thing happen? Consider a multi-touch situation where a first-time visitor enters via an organic listing but leaves without buying anything; the visitor returns days later via a paid listing, this time making a purchase. If your organization assigns 100% of the value of that transaction to the last click, then the paid listing gets the credit when in fact the organic listing did most of the heavy lifting. Conversely, if your organization’s policy is to recognize the first click, organic gets too much credit.
Consider also the opposite scenario where the paid click is the visitor’s first point of entry. Then later an organic click is what leads to the purchase. “Last click” would overstate the value attributable to SEO, “first click” would overstate the value attributable to PPC.
The best option would be to assign a portion of the value across all touchpoints, with greater emphasis on the first click.
The ROI of PPC is further exaggerated by the fact that URLs in paid ads are invariably tagged with tracking parameters, whereas organic listings are not. This is regardless of where in the buying cycle the user interacts with the paid listings. That’s because analytics packages tend to favor tracking parameters over the referrer (which is passed in the HTTP header) as an indicator of the lead source. Tracking parameters in organic URLs are, as you may already know, considered bad SEO practice: they lead to duplicate content and PageRank dilution.
Consequently, the SEO must rely on the referrer string to supply the visitor’s point of origin, despite the fact that it is the inferior measure. (Inferior for many reasons, not the least of which is the fact that privacy/security tools installed on the user’s PC such as Norton Internet Security wipe the referring URL from user’s requests yet thankfully leave tracking parameters intact.)
These attribution inaccuracies obscure what’s really going on: the paid listing is cannibalizing the organic listing, i.e. drawing searchers away from the organic listing which would have otherwise been clicked on. This can happen, for instance, when you have a particularly effective paid ad creative, e.g. that calls out in the ad copy that it’s the “Official Site.”
Matthias also made the point that there’s a greater degree of cannibalization (negative synergy) when there is a combination of the following: a high organic ranking, a strong brand, and when the paid and organic listings are similar to one another but differentiated from competitors. But by the same token, the cost per click is the lowest for search terms that fit those criteria. Matthias’ advice to the PPC specialist (and this is particularly applicable if those who are budget-limited): reallocate your paid search spend to maximize true ROI.
If your SEO work is stealing clicks away from your paid counterpart, you may be inclined to think that is a good thing. It will, after all, save on some click charges. Actually, it’s a wash. As alluded to in the previous paragraph, Google will make up the lost revenue by charging a higher cost per click as a consequence of a lower clickthrough rate and thus a lower Quality Score. So in the end, Google still makes its money.
Given all this, what actions should you, the SEO practitioner, take?
For one, get a better handle on the true ROI of organic search, at the keyword level. That requires computing the synergy. How? You could pause your ads on certain queries and then analyze the resulting plots akin to the one above. Or use Covario’s paid/organic synergy score (POSS) methodology. In this case, you ask your PPC counterpart to reduce his/her actual CPCs on keywords with high organic conversion and high paid cost by 60% — no need to pause the ads. In the process, by looking at conversion and synergy at the search query level, the PPC advertiser will also hone in on the most effective terms through better use of negative keywords and greater use of exact match.
Then use 1+synergy as a multiplier on the value as determined by click-based attribution. ROI = ((1+POSS)*value – cost) / cost. This doesn’t go as far as Covario’s “True Value of Display” methodology, but it’s vastly better than ignoring paid/organic interaction. In our research we measured synergy from -95% to +25%. That’s quite a range. Obviously you’ll want to favor ads with positive synergy over those with negative synergy (all else being equal).
Another set of dials you can turn is what is displayed in your paid search ad. Test calls-to-action, mentioning specific product features, branding, “official site”, etc. and measure the impact on synergy.
The ultimate goal should be optimizing your ad creative and rebalancing your company’s paid search spend based on the true, adjusted ROAS where synergy is taken into account.
For years when teaching SEO workshops, I touted the synergistic effect of being at the top of both organic and paid results. I would encourage attendees to invest in both SEO and PPC on the promise of symbiosis between the two marketing channels. I would cite research showing that you can increase the clickthrough rate of your #1 (organic) ranking if you also have a sponsored ad above it or in the right column, and that showing up twice on the same page in the results makes your #1 ranking get 20% more clicks.
I gave short shrift to the thought that engaging in both sides of search marketing could lead to an adverse effect, i.e. negative synergy — whereby your paid search program cannibalizes your organic search derived visits, or vice versa. That is, until just a couple weeks ago.
What shifted my thinking was a session at the recent Silicon Valley Search Engine Roundtable’s “Rockstar” conference (ironically named, given the “Covariopalooza” rock-themed customer conference that Covario put on earlier in the week!) Also ironic was the fact there was a presentation given by one of my company’s own “rock stars”, namely our Chief Analytics Officer Dr. Matthias Blume. The premise of the talk was how the organic and paid results interact and how flawed attribution modeling can misrepresent ROI, associating sales/conversions with the wrong marketing program (i.e. SEO when PPC should have gotten the credit, PPC when SEO should have gotten the credit).
The cannibalization of organic search by PPC is clearly demonstrated by the following (inadvertent) experiment where paid search was shut off completely for a time. As evidenced by the graph below, there’s an increase in organic traffic commensurate with the decrease in PPC derived traffic. (Note that measurement of this effect is confounded by other factors such as cyclical patterns, other marketing actions taken by both you and your competitors, the economy, the weather, and so on.)
How does this sort of thing happen? Consider a multi-touch situation where a first-time visitor enters via an organic listing but leaves without buying anything; the visitor returns days later via a paid listing, this time making a purchase. If your organization assigns 100% of the value of that transaction to the last click, then the paid listing gets the credit when in fact the organic listing did most of the heavy lifting. Conversely, if your organization’s policy is to recognize the first click, organic gets too much credit.
Consider also the opposite scenario where the paid click is the visitor’s first point of entry. Then later an organic click is what leads to the purchase. “Last click” would overstate the value attributable to SEO, “first click” would overstate the value attributable to PPC.
The best option would be to assign a portion of the value across all touchpoints, with greater emphasis on the first click.
The ROI of PPC is further exaggerated by the fact that URLs in paid ads are invariably tagged with tracking parameters, whereas organic listings are not. This is regardless of where in the buying cycle the user interacts with the paid listings. That’s because analytics packages tend to favor tracking parameters over the referrer (which is passed in the HTTP header) as an indicator of the lead source. Tracking parameters in organic URLs are, as you may already know, considered bad SEO practice: they lead to duplicate content and PageRank dilution.
Consequently, the SEO must rely on the referrer string to supply the visitor’s point of origin, despite the fact that it is the inferior measure. (Inferior for many reasons, not the least of which is the fact that privacy/security tools installed on the user’s PC such as Norton Internet Security wipe the referring URL from user’s requests yet thankfully leave tracking parameters intact.)
These attribution inaccuracies obscure what’s really going on: the paid listing is cannibalizing the organic listing, i.e. drawing searchers away from the organic listing which would have otherwise been clicked on. This can happen, for instance, when you have a particularly effective paid ad creative, e.g. that calls out in the ad copy that it’s the “Official Site.”
Matthias also made the point that there’s a greater degree of cannibalization (negative synergy) when there is a combination of the following: a high organic ranking, a strong brand, and when the paid and organic listings are similar to one another but differentiated from competitors. But by the same token, the cost per click is the lowest for search terms that fit those criteria. Matthias’ advice to the PPC specialist (and this is particularly applicable if those who are budget-limited): reallocate your paid search spend to maximize true ROI.
If your SEO work is stealing clicks away from your paid counterpart, you may be inclined to think that is a good thing. It will, after all, save on some click charges. Actually, it’s a wash. As alluded to in the previous paragraph, Google will make up the lost revenue by charging a higher cost per click as a consequence of a lower clickthrough rate and thus a lower Quality Score. So in the end, Google still makes its money.
Given all this, what actions should you, the SEO practitioner, take?
For one, get a better handle on the true ROI of organic search, at the keyword level. That requires computing the synergy. How? You could pause your ads on certain queries and then analyze the resulting plots akin to the one above. Or use Covario’s paid/organic synergy score (POSS) methodology. In this case, you ask your PPC counterpart to reduce his/her actual CPCs on keywords with high organic conversion and high paid cost by 60% — no need to pause the ads. In the process, by looking at conversion and synergy at the search query level, the PPC advertiser will also hone in on the most effective terms through better use of negative keywords and greater use of exact match.
Then use 1+synergy as a multiplier on the value as determined by click-based attribution. ROI = ((1+POSS)*value – cost) / cost. This doesn’t go as far as Covario’s “True Value of Display” methodology, but it’s vastly better than ignoring paid/organic interaction. In our research we measured synergy from -95% to +25%. That’s quite a range. Obviously you’ll want to favor ads with positive synergy over those with negative synergy (all else being equal).
Another set of dials you can turn is what is displayed in your paid search ad. Test calls-to-action, mentioning specific product features, branding, “official site”, etc. and measure the impact on synergy.
The ultimate goal should be optimizing your ad creative and rebalancing your company’s paid search spend based on the true, adjusted ROAS where synergy is taken into account.
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