SEO Strategy: Link Building Tips, Part II

Sure-fire Ways to Bring Links in for a Landing

In Part One of this post, I gave you five tips for building inbound links to your site. In this post, you’ll find four more proven ways to develop high-quality links that can improve page rank in natural search results for your site.

Tip # 5: Get quoted – Seeing your company name (and a link back to your site) in a publication such as The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal is fabulous, of course – as is the resulting link juice from such authoritative sites.

Getting quoted in these publications is not so easy. (One thing you can do to help the media contact you is to ensure your press room is up-to-date and that it includes a contact name and number for journalists who are on a deadline.…

SEO Strategy: Tips for Link Building

Part One: Do the Basic Stuff First

Debra Mastaler, author of the Link Spiel blog, recently wrote that after she gives presentations about link building, someone inevitably approaches her to say something along the lines of: “Come on, what are the ‘insider secrets’ to building links? Everyone already knows those you talked about.”

Never mind the fact that, as she says, she just spent 45 minutes “sharing how [her team] use the media, customer surveys, website elements, RSS, directories, content development and offline sources to build quality links.”

I had the opportunity to attend Debra’s link-building presentation at Search Engine Strategies–San Jose a couple of weeks ago, and she’s right: she gives you the basic methods for building links – as well as some really creative methods even I hadn’t considered.

As Debra states, “The easy part of link…

Three Big PPC Mistakes, Part II

. . . And How Newbies Can Avoid Them

In Part One of this article, I talked about the mistakes small business owners and marketers make when they first begin using pay-per-click campaigns. In Part Two, I cover the third biggest mistake people make: sending all PPC traffic to your home page.

Why is this a mistake? Simply put, you seriously lower conversions because you give people too many options to “explore” or you make them click around searching for the product or service featured in your ad – which usually causes them to click right back out of your site.

A better method is to send searchers to landing pages developed specifically for each ad in your campaign. “Advanced search marketers,” says our own Dudley Chamberlain, one of Yield Software’s customer success reps, “create their ad groups, ads, and…

Getting into the Google 10-Pack

SES Show Update and Three 10-Pack Strategies

We’ve been at Search Engine Strategies–San Jose since Tuesday. The themes we’re hearing repeatedly: mobile is going to be huge, review sites are going to be huger, and social media is now part and parcel of the SEO / search fabric.

Because we love you, our small and mid-sized business customers, we attended the session, “Search Engine Optimization on a Dime,” and pricked-up our ears when we heard this stat from David Mihm, Director and COO of GetListed.org: more than 40% of all searches had a local (or geographic) intent.

What was eye-opening was his statement that Google sees potentially 500 million local searches per month! (No one is quite sure of the exact number.)

Local search is when someone uses a search phrase, such as “plumbers” plus a city, region, or…

New eBook on Link Economy Debuts

Comprehensive Strategies for Growth

All of us here at Yield Software have worked hard to provide useful, easy-to-understand information on the full range of Web marketing possibilities on this blog, through our tweets on Twitter and the like. And, based on feedback, it seems the many small and growing businesses we serve (and tons more we don’t) really appreciate the information.

Which is why we were inspired to pull together our first eBook, “The Link Economy and Why It Matters to Small and Growing Businesses,” a limited-edition print run of which will be distributed from our booth at the annual Search Engine Strategies (SES) 2009 Conference & Expo August 11 and 12, 2009 at the San Jose Convention Center.

Addressing the concerns of business leaders who have limited or no experience with Web marketing, our new eBook provides an…

Three Big PPC Mistakes Newbies Make…

… And How to Avoid Them (Part I)

Like any new kid on the block, it would not be surprising if you’re losing money on your PPC (pay-per-click) ad spend and seeing little, if any return. That’s because many beginner and intermediate PPC advertisers routinely make three common errors when it comes to setting up campaigns.

In this Part One of a two-part post, I cover these errors in detail.

Huge mistake #1: Using keywords that are too general.

The problem here is that while “too general” keywords (for example, “women’s flip flops”) get lots of impressions and maybe even lots of clicks, they typically generate little in the way of conversions, which costs you big money.

When you neglect “long-tail” keywords (keywords that get less traffic but are highly targeted), you stand to lose significant leads and/or sales.

Suffice to…

It’s New to You Series: Setting up PPC Campaigns

Best Practice Tips for Newbies

Whether you run pay-per-click (PPC) ads on Google only or across the three major U.S. search engines (including Yahoo! Search and Microsoft’s Bing until the two merge their platforms), setting up a pay-per-click campaign is fairly straight-forward. That is, until you have the campaign up and running and realize you’re shelling out a ton of money for little or no return.

Because we work so often with small and mid-sized businesses just beginning to dip their toes into the PPC waters, we’re introducing a new series — the “It’s New to You” Series — and we’ll be covering how to set up a campaign for the first time, including methods for getting started, making keyword lists, developing your first ads, setting up groups, and how to focus on keywords in each group.

There are a number…