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Ride New Verticals or Go Against the Trends of the Web

A friend of mine just posted about trying to build a business by creating 5,000 sites. Everything I know about the trends of the web tells me that there are far easier ways to make money online, especially if you are willing to grow with the latest trends.

You Can’t Bring Back the Past

Why would anyone who deeply understands the web start a traditional book publishing business when web formats are so much more profitable and books are becoming irrelevant? Static boring content sites created without passion are, like books, growing irrelevant.

The reason smaller sites could work in the past is because many of them are set and forget. Virtually no incremental cost of upkeep. But the big issue is that they all have some set amount of work required to set them up. And if you are doing something 5,000 times you are going to start automating. And when you start automating you leave footprints. Even if your content is of average quality today, in a year that same content might be considered useless noise and/or spam. At some point a few of the sites get nuked, an engineer does a bit of research, and then the whole network tanks. Then you just lost a year of work and most of your investment.

New Verticals Are Stealing Market-share From the Generalist Web

The problem with set and forget is that there are many new TYPES of content coming online, working to back-fill the organic search results. How uncomfortable is it creating average quality or garbage content when you see half of some search results dominated by books? If you want to do a set and forget approach to marketing I think traditional websites or blogs might be the wrong approach, especially if done in bulk. If I were to try to profit from bulk and was to create something new today I would look at some of the information formats that are just starting to get more aggressively integrated into the search results.

Average Content Has No Sustainable Advantage

The problem with average plain Jane content is that being average is not enough to build permission, gain subscribers, and create a real brand. If you are starting out today you are up against companies with a decade of experience, traction, capital, leverage and market feedback.

The long tail queries that went to garbage content are now sending visitors to large businesses that are becoming more aware of SEO and other vertical searches that are creeping into the traditional organic search results. It is getting easier for competitors to buy your keyword stats for next to nothing, and competitive research is only getting cheaper by the day. When you have virtually no authority, a business model search engineers hate, and are easy to clone then where is your sustainable competitive advantage? Why build anything that lacks a solid foundation?

Dominate Newer Verticals

If it were within my power, and I was scaling this type of bulk content operation, I would have at least one site in Google news. The value of being listed there just went up because they are filtering out many of the duplicate wire service stories that dominated the results in the past. You could also think of videos as easy pickings, at least for now.

Are there other verticals that will become popular? Sure, but you have to be creative and use the word vertical loosely. Remember that in the Google Florida update commercial intent pages were demoted in favor of informational content pages. With Universal search Google has many ways to define verticals and filter irrelevant or lower quality ones. Here is a quote from a recent brilliant post by Tedster

Search terms themselves can also be sorted into various taxonomies, especially the 1-word and 2-word queries. … With the advent of Universal Search, Google now has the infrastructure to force integrate selections from any class of websites onto the first page. So the implications of Universal Search can go well past the obvious and publicised taxonomies of images, video, news, books, maps, blogs. Even more than a simple “commercial” and “informational” taxonomy, there could also be classes like brochureware sites, trademark holders, businesses with a physical world presence, manufacturers, B2B, multi-topic (encyclopedic) and on and on. One factor Google could then tweak would be which classes of sites to force integrate into the results for which kinds of search terms.

Create a New Vertical

If you rush to find new verticals, change how people use language, or define a page as fitting an alternate meaning of a word then perhaps all this vertical stuff presents an arbitrage opportunity for you. If you create the same type of crap that is already saturated then it is working against you.

SEO Book was not a popular search query until after I created this site. Search engines follow people. Google recommends my brand name and my name in their ad links. The easiest and most sustainable way to dominate a high value vertical is to create a new one, which is something I hope to do in a big way before the year is out.

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AltaVista is a Leading SEO Site, According to Google

As noted in a recent WebmasterWorld thread, Google is reshuffling top ranking sites for single word queries (and shuffling their understanding of language and word relationships). I recently searched Google for SEO and was surprised to see the search engine Altavista coming in at #8 [screenshot].

Darren Rowse also emailed me to let me know that he saw the Matt Cutts blog ranking at #4 in Google for blog. As Google gets better at understanding word relationships even more traffic will go to the large authoritative websites.

Yahoo Keyword Suggestion Tool Blunder

Yahoo / Overture had the default status as THE keyword tool for about a decade. They lost that last year when Google started opening up their data a bit more. Now Microsoft is getting into the game offering more useful tools and more data. How does Yahoo respond? They stop supporting their keyword tool. No results, no 301 redirect, no rebrand, no description of why it is broke, no anything. Since my keyword tool is powered by their keyword tool I am getting 10 to 20 emails a day. How many people are not emailing? How much more traffic is Yahoo getting than I am? Tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars of shareholder value are wasted each day with that move.

The best spot to market yourself is on your own site. As long as Yahoo continues to undermine their own assets without regard or thought their marketplace will remain inefficient, and each day they will continue to lose marketshare. They paid $350 million for Zimbria, but what are the odds of them not screwing that up? They have too many half done projects that do not gel together.

3 Ways to Get Screwed by Social Media Marketing

Since linkbait is recommended by search engineers as a good strategy to market a site, it is probably pretty safe, right? Not always true.

The link bait advice is a bit disingenuous. Not only is linkbait expensive and unpredictable, and sometimes undermines the brand value of the site publishing it, but there are also times when sites get penalized for being too successful with it. Brian Turner mentioned that viral links could kill your Google presence, and I though it makes sense to share a couple specific examples of how linkbait can leave you looking (or at least feeling) like a sucker who took the bait.

Successful Link Bait Marketing, But Too Successful

Months ago one of my friends created and marketed a piece of content that got thousands of mentions. It made the Digg homepage, was referenced on a site as big as Wired, and made Life Hacker. This sounds like a linkbait gone perfect, right? Nope.

It got too much exposure relative to the link growth rate and link profile of the 5 year old site. The blog portion of the site associated with said article is no longer indexed in Google. For a while Google allowed that one linkbait page to get indexed and show PageRank, but it never ranked for its own title and it doesn’t pass PageRank through to the rest of the site.

Before launching said linkbait, this blog section of the site actually ranked for a few keywords that it no longer ranks for. Now in Google it is as though the blog does not exist. Virtually the equivalent of when Google accidentally nuked their own AdSense blog.

It doesn’t matter if this was done algorithmically or by hand. What matters is that if your viral link marketing is too good you are going to get screwed unless you have a way to keep attention and have enough leverage to make Google decide it would be best to relist your site.

Successful Link Bait Marketing, But Now You Are a Reciprocal Link Spammer

Many months ago another friend created and marketed a piece of linkbait. It was successful beyond her wildest dreams. Because of how it was structured, that linkbait linked at many of the sites linking back and the idea did not spread beyond the sites linked to on the page. Thousands of inbound links, but to a search relevancy algorithm it probably looks like a spammy reciprocal link farm. That linkbait was even offset by getting mainstream media exposure by targeting the media with AdWords ads, but it was not enough, as the site does not rank anywhere near as well as it should.

Successful Link Bait Marketing, But We Don’t Like Seeing YOUR Site Ranking That Well

Another friend spend ~ $100,000 on linkbait creation and marketing. His site got exceptionally successful, aggressively grew for about a year, he hired a bunch of employees, then a leading Google engineer hand edited the site out of the search results.

Linkbait can do a great job of helping you build high authority citations, but it still needs to be offset with directory links, community links, media links, and any other type of quality link you can get.

Interview of Debra Mastaler, the Link Guru

While being much less self promotional than others in the same field, Debra Mastaler is nonetheless one of the most well known and creative link builders in the industry. I have wanted to interview her for a long time since she has a unique way of working but she s hard to pin down and not very good about returning interview questions

How long have you been doing link building? What did you do before link building?

First, thank you for the nice intro and sorry to have been such a deadbeat about responding. Alliance-Link has been in operation since late 2000, it came about while I owned and operated a directory featuring organic food and clothing. When I started to rank well for a large number of money terms, business owners advertising in my directory asked if I could I help them do SEO on their sites. Well, I had no clue what SEO was so I started looking around for information and found the now defunct Rank Write newsletter by Jill Whalen and Heather Lloyd Martin. Jill took the time to explain what I was doing and how it influenced a website s visibility in the search engines and from there, Alliance-Link was born.

Before that I spent 15 years in the marketing department of Anheuser-Busch and four years before that in the Civil Service. Both jobs provided valuable experience in all three of the main marketing segments sales, promotions and publicity. It was an invaluable experience and a large part of why I work the way I do today. It s also the reason why I won t drink anything but A-B products. Buy Bud! Support my 401K!

Do you tend to build links in spurts or at a steadier pace?

Depends on the industry I m working in. I use a tiered approach where one part of the linking service dovetails into the next or two services work in tandem. That way I increase my chances of attracting more links from different sources and can use the resources from whatever promotion I ve created multiple times.

For example, if we re focused on distributing link embedded content I d build out the host site with a detailed version of the content (complete with photos, video, downloads etc). Much shorter versions would be sent to topical bloggers with a redeemable incentive or freebie for their readers. At the same time we ll contact key media and announce the new resource. Once both the bloggers and media have been notified we ll launch a standard press release and email the client s customer base with an announcement and link incentive. All four tactics run either simultaneously or within days of each other. I am less concerned with attracting large numbers of links in a short period than I am of attracting many of the SAME type links. I try to avoid that.

Are you a fan of paid links?

I m a fan of good solid links. If I need to pay to get them, then yes, I m a fan.

But I m definitely not a fan of the paid links are evil discussions going on all over. Google has its guidelines and either you choose to follow them or you don t. I believe it s that simple. If you don t and feel paid links are worth the risk then buyer and seller beware. Search engines aren t the only link police on the block anymore.

What are the most effective ways to buy links?

Anyway you can that keeps you under the radar!

LOL It s trite but true. I like to buy advertising links from large membership based organizations and associations and negotiate their email and mailing lists as part of the deal. This is especially effective for new product launches or rebranding since you can incorporate a special sales offer as part of the link request. Since you re marketing to businesses belonging to a membership based association, you ll end up with topically focused links from established companies. It s the ultimate link within your industry tactic.

I also do a lot with paid and traded sponsorships. Find a publicity vehicle in your industry and buy a top sponsor position taking care to negotiate for options like mailing lists and viral email campaigns. A lot of people talk about this tactic in terms of finding a charity to sponsor and that s FINE but unless the charity has a national presence you ll see little return in residual linking. Charities don t give out donor lists and don t include private business in mailings and auto responders. Basically, there is little opportunity for viral reach.
I wrote about finding sponsors recently, how to use them to build links and a couple of sources to mine for partnership leads. It might help if you re interested in this type of link marketing.

Is anchor text still a big deal? Do you ever buy low quality links just for anchor text?

Yes I believe anchor text is still a big deal and yes occasionally I use low quality links for anchors. There are always handfuls on the lists I buy, I can t help that. As long as they re in Google s and Yahoo s index, its fine and I ll use them.
I know there is a thought process out there that says get links from a wide variety of sites since it emulates a natural linking pattern but I don t purposely design a strategy to include a certain number of low quality links. I figure the scrapers will be by in due time and I ll see some links from them so that s enough junk for me.

That said I do keep an eye on the types of sites I m extending my special promotions to and will eliminate a site from my list if it s not indexed or hosts links to an objectionable site. For me, this is one of the most time consuming parts of link building checking partner sites for compatibility.

How do you get focused anchor text while keeping the link profile looking fairly natural?

You make it sound conversational. It s why using blogs to build links works so well. It s much easier to embed links into a conversation than a static page.

Do you ever create content as a link building strategy? How do you know which webmasters to target and what ideas are likely to spread?

Well I personally don t create the content but I do write the marketing plan that recommends what content should be written and the tactics used to promote it. I m lucky to work with a couple of gifted women writers who NEVER let me get involved with that part of the linking program. I stick to research and linking and let them write.

When I start a job I never know which websites to target, that comes as a result of hours of research and review work before the first link is ever negotiated. I spend almost half my time researching the client s industry looking for trendsetters as well as the sites getting the most attention and ranking well. The bigger the site the more keywords they have and the longer you have to look.

It s probably easier to hit the Powerball than to figure out what ideas will spread and net links for a website. I ve been wrong my fair share of times, sometimes it s more about being first than being creative.

It s not beyond me to look at what s been done before and try to tweak it to fit my client s products and services. I look for old press releases and articles printed in offline publications for leads as well as scour YouTube for old video. Ideas are only lacking if you give up looking for them.

How do free samples work to build links? If I don’t have anything worth talking about how can I get people to want to link to my site

I am always amazed at what people will do for a free tee shirt. I had a client who offered a free company tee shirt to anyone linking to their site. We ran the promotion through their newsletter, email and snail mail list and converted over 22% of the membership. It was a substantial numbers of links.

The offer was simple. Link to us and we ll send you a shirt. After a year, over half of the links were still in place using the targeted, anchor variations we provided. All for a beefy tee. Go figure!

Getting people to link to a site that has little linkable content means you need to know a good deal about the people who use your products. You might not have anything worthwhile on the site but if you know what motivates your customers you can create a deal and provide it as an incentive to link. Talk to your customers and ask what it would take to get them to link to you.

Do you ever recommend going to trade shows or doing anything else offline to build linkage data? What do you do if an industry exists mostly offline?

I ve never recommended a client attend a trade show as a way to increase their inbound link counts but after thinking about it, it s not a half bad idea. Anytime you have face-to-face opportunities with the people buying your products you have opportunities to capture links. It could be as simple as saying hey, link to us and we ll give you $100 bucks off our widget or some other incentive. It s a passive approach but then you re not expending any energy or money to get the link so why not?

Industries that exist mostly offline have online counterparts and that s where I d start looking for opportunities. Where s the media covering their niche? Where are the how- to sites and the reference sites covering what they sell? Find those and you ll find spots to secure links from.

If a client is unwilling to change their site how do you make their site more linkworthy?

If a client refuses to make recommended changes there isn t much you can do overall except buy your link love. This happens more than you think, a lot of big companies have rules and CEO s that make it hard if not impossible to change content. I try not to work with these types of accounts, linking is hard enough as it is. Sites like this can also add themselves to the directories and do a little utility linking for inbound links.

Do press releases still work? Are there better ways to garner media exposure?

Yes and yes. Press releases still work at attracting attention, and some are indexed in various media portals but overall they provide little link popularity weight.

I recommend clients buy a subscription from one of the media relations companies like Burrells Luce or Bacon s. They provide media lists that are constantly updated and categorized by industry making it easy to find the right journalists. They also have a list of editorial calendars for many trade and consumer publications which allows you to submit content for consideration or reserve advertising space in a timely manner.

I also recommend you mine Topix on a continual basis for media contacts as well as basic sales and marketing opportunities. I get more from that site than many others!

Has link building changed at all since web2.0 came about, or are more people now aware of some of the techniques you have been using for many years?

Yes, I believe both linking and society as a whole has changed since Web2.0 has come about. The timing was right for the technology to morph and for the younger generation to be drawn in to push the growth forward. Google became a verb, MySpace the corner hangout and LinkedIn the company water cooler. Throw in the blogosphere as a pastime second only to baseball and yeah, I d say linking has changed.

Funny thing is the way I link hasn t changed. I have more resources at my fingertips and more people to target but in the end, I still have to write the promotion, ask for the link and add it to the site in order for it to count. Even newer tactics like link bait need research and review before the first article can be written. So the principles haven t changed but the vehicles have.

Are there directories media members look for when searching for a contact for a story?

Yes, there are resources out there the media uses when looking for experts in specific fields. Here s an example:
SheSource.org - an online braintrust of female experts on diverse topics designed to serve journalists, producers and bookers who need female guests and sources.

If you re a verifiable expert in something find resources like the one above and add yourself to them. And I stress verifiable ; you need work experience, references and education to be considered so get your resume together before you run out beating your chest. No member of the media will use a resource (meaning you) unless they can verify their expertise.

What are 3 of the easiest things a webmaster can do to improve their site credibility and linkability?

There are hundreds but since you asked for 3 of the easiest, here s what I do:

1. Survey your customers and ask what they d like to see on the site and then give it to them. Once you ve upgraded the site, ask the same customers to link to it.
2. Add an incentivized link to us request in all correspondence (auto responders, confirmation emails, reminders etc). Make the incentive a bounce back to stimulate further sales.
3. Develop a fully functional resource center. Include all the information about your company and your industry you d expect to find in an encyclopedia and then add photos, videos and podcasts. Look up what s been written about your company by others and include that as well. Alert those authors and the media once the resource center is up and running..

I ve been doing the last one since I started in this business; I call it building a link library on your site. It s a corny old term but it s the most effective linking attraction tactic I use.

When do link exchange partnerships make sense?

They make sense when you want to deep link using a specific term or if you want to launch an awareness campaign. I ve always said the power in reciprocal linking isn t the link as much as it s the control you have on what it says and where it points. If someone wants to swap links and you agree, look at the page the link will sit on to be sure it s not one of a hundred. Give the partner site a well worded anchor text link surrounded by carefully crafted verbiage that points to an internal money making page. If the partner site balks at giving you the additional real estate then I say pass on the link. Even well crafted anchor text links can benefit from intro or explanation paragraph around it.

Reciprocal linking also makes sense when it s done outside the box . There are times I ll offer link space on a client s site in exchange for space in a mailing (online or off) to introduce a new section/product/service on a site. In this case I ve swapped placement for exposure. Invariably I ll see a link or two out of it but the purpose behind that promotion isn t to build links but to build awareness.

When do business partnerships make sense for link building? How do you leverage someone else’s brand to build links for your site?

I just blogged about how to leverage brand to build links on The Link Spiel, the partnership between the two sites mentioned is a classic case of targeted co-promotion. Partnerships can be as simple as donating time to a forum in exchange for signature/content links or can be more structured and formalized like the companies Wallstrip and optionsXpress mentioned in my blog post.

Consider creating an advisory board and invite people you know and respect to be part of a business partnership. Credit their work as you promote yours and you ll find they ll link to you.

Directories have fallen out of favor amongst many people on SEO forums. Do they still hold any weight? How do you tell if a directory is worth listing your site in?

Yeah, directory bashing by SEO s seems to be the rage these days which is funny since so many of the newer ones have been developed by SEO s.

The concept of merit based inclusion is what makes securing links in the better directories desirable. It s reasoned that search engines bestow hub authority on these sites because human review is necessary before a site is included. And since human review is part of the co citation process search engines are programmed to reward, it stands to reason these types of sites would pass link popularity.

I use directories as a standard part of every link building service I offer and look at a number of things before I ll submit:

• Is the page my link will sit on in the Yahoo and Google index? If not, why? Is it something simple like it s a new page or is something blocking that spider?
• Does the home page of the directory show PageRank but not the internal pages?
• Do the directory pages host an inordinate amount of adsense? If they do, I pass. Same applies for site wide links. If there is more than a handful of site wides, I walk.
• If it s a paid directory, is it a lifetime or annual submission fee? I go for lifetime with the exception of the Yahoo! Directory which I advocate using if you re a new business.
• Do you have to use the name of your business in the anchor text link or will they allow descriptive keywords? If they do, I mix up the keywords and the descriptions.
• Does the directory allow deep linking?
• How long has the directory been online? My threshold is two years.
• Does the directory have an RSS embedded on its category pages? This is a bonus for me as I can keep tabs via keyword settings on new sites being added.
• And lastly does the directory allow you to edit submissions? It s helpful to be able to change your descriptions/anchors to reflect the changes in your business.

I always submit to the tried and true directories such as JoeAnt, Ezilon, GoGuides, BOTW, UnCoverThe Net and RubberStamped as well as any niche directories I can find.

And yes, I still try to get into DMOZ provided I find a category editor on the page I want to submit to. Otherwise I don t bother anymore.

One last tip about using directories You ll find a lot of the niche and local directories are hobby sites run by enthusiasts or business owners. Look around these sites for email signup boxes or an indication they publish a newsletter. If they do, write the owner and ask if he ll resell his mailing list or allow you to place a text link ad in their newsletter. You ll find it s an inexpensive way to reach a targeted audience.

When should a company build links in-house? What amount of the link building should they do and when does it make sense to outsource?

A company should be building links the minute their site hits the Web! I recommend a new company use an experienced link building firm to develop a link marketing plan and a detailed analysis of the linking landscape. (Both crucial to move forward). The idea here is to research the linking structures of well ranked sites and determine what helped get them there. Whether you hire a consultant or use in-house staff shouldn t matter at this point, both would have a first rate link marketing plan to work from.

That said I do believe it s a good idea to bring in a link building consultant every nine to 12 months to refresh your in-house staff and bring them up to date on what s working and what s not. Or - at the very least, keep one on retainer and schedule monthly updates.

Thanks Debra. If you want to learn more about link building check out Debra’s blog, The Link Spiel.

New Seo Book Homepage: Need Your Feedback Please

In a recent post I stated that one of the biggest flaws from a conversion perspective with this site was that the homepage was a blog. I just made a new homepage that features more of the site’s content. I think it is a bit text heavy still, but I wanted to get your feedback on what you think of the new homepage.

Comment Spammer Hold Up Link Requests

Werty just sent me this. Pretty ruthless, sad, and funny:

hello , my name is Richard and I know you get a lot of spammy comments,

I can help you with this problem. I know a lot of spammers and I will ask them not to post on your site. It will reduce the volume of spam by 30-50% .In return Id like to ask you to put a link to my site on the index page of your site. The link will be small and your visitors will hardly notice it , its just done for higher rankings in search engines. Contact me icq _________ or write me _______(at)yahoo.com, i will give you my site url and you will give me yours if you are interested. thank you

Sponsored Content Hosting & Renting Subdomains

Ads becoming content is not only true from a thin affiliate site perspective, but also on larger more traditional ad buys. Selling content hosting is going mainstream. About.com has been selling custom branded sponsored content for about a year. This WSJ page hawking Accenture is a PageRank 4, and this BizJournals lead generation page is also an indication of where sponsored content hosting is heading. How long will it be before you can log on to the WSJ ad platform and just buy a topic and upload a page?

A few months back Threadwatch had a post about Yahoo selling subdomains. Yesterday I stumbled across an AdSense ad for a company selling subdomains that they forward to other sites. I don’t believe it is smart to build a big site on someone else’s domain, but if you wanted to fling up a bunch of spam or create a single targeted ad page that goes after a competitive phrase why not leech of their authority and let them assume the risks?

There are no search engine guidelines on hosting advertisements for third parties because it is not an idea Google wants people thinking about or talking publicly about, and they can’t edit out WSJ.com if they will want the WSJ to spread their public relations messages and business interests.