Personalize Your Link Building

The ethnographic method is an approach of studying a person or group of people by participating in the culture of interest while still remaining a bit of an outsider. At its core is the focus on cultural relativism, which is seeing something through the eyes of the involved. Thus, to get to know someone or a group of people, you have to lose your own set of beliefs and views and start from scratch as you seek out the functional reasons why things happen.

This method is critical for successfully connecting to people, especially online when you have no physical cues to tell you about a person. In essence, you have to lose your own identity at first, in order to get a better idea of how to best connect to someone new. When you approach a potential link partner, you know very little about that person except for a few clues picked up in the analysis of the site that he or she controls. Your best bet is to pick up that information as quickly as possible, because you have a very limited amount of time to make or break that connection. Personas makes use of the ethnographic method in SEO and are intensely valuable. This process helps you learn about your audience and mindset, and the resulting personas can help you to compare the output of your efforts to the target market in question. It’s commonplace to use personas in areas like usability and social media, but they also can be a tremendous help when written specifically for link development. An audience IS an audience, after all.

Writing personas

To get started on writing a few personas, you have to think about your target audience for link building, in the same way that you’d think about it for anything else related to marketing. Who are these people, what are their age groups, what is their “culture”, what will speak to them and open up the connection in a positive manner? If you’re in doubt about your target audience, talk to the owner of the site you’re working on. Once you get basic information, start to dream up a few actual people who fit the profiles that you have, and flesh them out as much as you can.

A typical persona should contain as much identifying information as possible without being so unique that it cannot be used to speak to a larger group. That’s the tricky part, but you can overcome it by imagining common characteristics of users (they like punk rock) rather than specifics that will only fit a tiny percentage of your audience (they like early Avail). Start out by identifying a few different segments of your audience, writing a persona for each. Once you have these, take one and read it until you can get into the mindset of it, and write your link request accordingly. Remember that this persona represents your target link partners, so make use of language and references that this group will respond to, and adjust as needed.

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Brands need a ‘search relations’ strategy in times of trouble

“Glass, china and reputation are easily cracked and never mended well”.

Benjamin Franklin’s words are particularly appropriate in these turbulent times, when it’s more important than ever for companies to consider every opportunity to protect and manage their hard won reputation and brand value.

But as Paul Mead writes, it is interesting to see that one of the largest media channels - online - is more often than not completely neglected from a communications point of view in times of strife.

Yet search engines and Google, in particular, have such an enormous audience (over 28m people per month in the UK) and are such a part of our everyday lives that it’s astonishing how many brands can get this channel so badly wrong in times of crisis.

Over the last few weeks, for instance, Bradford and Bingley has rarely been out of the news as speculation reached fever pitch that the UK mortgage lender would become the next Northern Rock.

During this period of intensive media and market interest, the volume of searches for ‘Bradford & Bingley’ on Google has increased dramatically as clearly shown on the Google trends graph below.

And here’s where the current marketing and communications set up of most major brands in the UK breaks down.

Search is considered by most CEOs and their cohorts as a direct response channel and is, therefore, looked after by the media agency.

Media agencies will always deny this but, with very few exceptions, paid search will be poorly understood and natural search even less so in these organisations.

This set up will also mean there will be little or no liaison or integration with the PR agency in order to develop a wider strategy for the search channel.

An interesting question would be to consider what percentage of this huge increase in brand-related searches might be consumers looking to open a new account with Bradford & Bingley?

It’s impossible to say for sure but I will take a guess at very close tozero.

And what did concerned shareholders or worried customers of the bank see when they reacted to the news flow and Googled ‘Bradford & Bingley’ to find out what was going on?

Well they did see Bradford & Bingley at the top of the paid search and natural search listings, which is one thing at least.

However, more worrying was the site’s prominent message to all the stakeholders:

"Internet Saver 6.51% p.a. gross/AER. Open today with £1."

Mmmm. Thanks but I think I’ll leave that one.

I might be able to open an account today, but before nationalisation most consumers would have been more concerned about whether the bank would be around for much longer than the 24 hours required to open an account.

A look at the Google search results page shows no attempt to understand what people are looking for and regain some brand equity by delivering the right message at the right time - or to address the concerns posed by an Adwords ad run by The Telegraph to target worried consumers.

I am picking on Bradford & Bingley here, but it was the same with Northern Rock.

And it’s the same today with Alitalia, with MFI, with JD Sports and probably with most of the businesses at the centre of credit crunch-related speculation today.

Online is the modern channel of choice for information and search engines are most people’s starting point in that journey.

The search engine results page should therefore be considered as the frontline in modern communications and brands need to think more seriously about their ‘search relations’ programme.

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The Hidden Secret to Search Engine Optimization is in the Design

While mystery surrounds what’s search engines such as Google use to rank websites there are fundamentals. If you have ever played a sport you have learned the fundamentals and hopefully used them to play your sport of choice. Search Engine Optimization has such fundamentals, not clearly stated in guidelines for webmasters that search engines include.

I want to make it clear that search engine optimization is not "magic", nor is it tricking search engines, it's the practice of following the fundamentals within a logical and "ethical" manner. Before considering the leap into search engine optimization you have to understand there is going to be allot of reading involved. Your duty as an SEO is to stay on top of the industry and looking for those hidden gems that can increase traffic and popularity in search engines.

This article is meant for the absolute beginner. If you have been optimizing websites for awhile then this is not for you, but you are more than welcome to read on if interested.

The art of SEO is more complex but there are the main aspects. I will go over each one to give you an entry level idea of what you have in store for you.

Designing a search engine friendly website is the most crucial aspect of SEO. First you have to consider the fact search engines are not people. They are computer programs designed to mimic human behavior. There are two core technologies search engines have a hard time with and why you should use them as little as possible.

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Hosting a Contest for Link Building and Buzz

Most of link building / linkbaiting techniques are used so often that they lost their effectiveness long ago. Unfortunately, hosting a contest is one such technique: that has become a common fashion to create a contest for the sake of creating a contest without much thinking behind it.

However the tactic may be still effective when done right. Your contest may be rather successful:

• if you are popular enough to get enough attention for your contest boost;
• if you are creative enough to earn the attention you deserve;
• if you have carefully planned your contest.

MGH Word of Mouth blog lists very good points to consider when planning a good contest:

• Take time to consider the users’ motivation. Why would anyone enter the contest? Would you join it? User’s motivation may vary:
  • An established / well-known brand can be a good motivation in itself. People might want to enter your contest just because they care about you and your company.
  • Valuable prizes are the strongest incentive for people to join any contest. Making sure the prizes are relevant to the society group your contest is targeting is also very important. I would probably never care to take part if the prize is “How to quit smoking” guide, no matter how popular it might be among people who smoke and want to quit.
  • Innovative idea / creative approach is the great motivation too. If you offer something completely new and exciting, people will be eager to join.

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Best practice for SEO

According to software solutions provider CoreSense, three areas are critical to the success of your search engine optimisation (SEO) programme: site structure, on-page and off-page. In its white paper “A Guide to Search Engine Marketing for Retailers”, it outlines best practice for each area. Among its suggestions:

Site structure optimisation

• Use a crawlable navigation. Avoid JavaScript and form-based structures if possible, as search engine spiders can’t crawl them. If you can’t avoid using them, include hyperlink navigation on each page.

• Remove unnecessary code. CoreSense suggests using a well-regarded design and development tools such as Dreamweaver, along with style sheets.

• Include a breadcrumb trail as a navigation option.

• Opt for page URLs that consist of keywords (www.johns-store.com/plaid_mens_shirt) rather than session IDs, punctuation and other variables (www.johns-store.com/productdetail.asp?productcatalogue=470).

• Use a 301 redirect for pages that have moved or have new file names.

• Make sure that all database-generated pages have unique URLs.

• Include a user-navigated site map and an XML site page; the latter is for submission to Google, MSN and Yahoo!

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