Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram, Google, Yahoo and more all are, or have, social networking components. Many brands, shops and individuals are jumping on the social media bandwagon and trying to market as best as they can through the next biggest thing on many on these platforms. What often isn’t being taken into account is the harm social media could be doing to your brand.

Social media is fun, engaging and deceptively easy to get in to but difficult to market over effectively. Due to the ease and simplicity of the platform, it can seem at times as though everyone who can log on has become a social media marketing expert. The ease of entry belies the difficulty in engaging appropriately which has been exemplified in the past with Habitat UK, Vodafone UK and countless other social media gaffes that do sometimes irreparable brand damage.

Social media brand damage can go on to impact your brand online as CNN and Eurostar both experienced. When searching on “Welsh couple Mumbai” and related terms, the false story that CNN put a couple’s life at risk dominated the search results. Even though this was false, social media enabled the fake story to be picked up and repeated as commentary and news in countless other blogs. Search results for both brands became affected.

Social media problems resulting in unfavourable search results then becomes a reputation management issue, sometimes even requiring professional SEO help as the search results become polluted with negative messages about your brand. In this way, and others, social media can harm your SEO efforts, making it even harder to present a clean brand image in the SERPs (search engine result pages).

Social media can also help your brand. Engaging over social media, including commenting on blogs, tweeting, blogging and other methods of social media engagement can not only improve SEO but also help build positive brand engagement, creating passionate advocates who can be activated when something does go wrong. Having a bloggers launch of a product as well as a media one can result in more column inches, more buzz and higher rankings. This also helps with cleaning up bad search results as positive buzz pushes out negative buzz.

Social media itself also helps SEO through link building and citations. Each mention without a link as well as each link all goes into the big algorithm on calculation and results in higher rankings. While a link helps more, a mention still helps with relevancy, trust and authority. Links from social media do help and count so positive buzz about your brand will help your SEO, rather than harming it.

Ensuring your social media efforts are targeted and focused is important as well. Creating relevancy or relationships with unrelated products or words will not help your SEO efforts. If you sell biscuits and you target your content at people interested in caravans, while people who caravan may eat biscuits, you will not rank higher for biscuits no matter how many caravan-related links you get.

Social media marketing requires a plan before engaging just as SEO does. Keyword research is the most important thing any site can have done for it in order to better focus efforts and targeting. This keyword list should then be used then engaging through social media. This type of focused targeting means instead of harming your SEO, social media can help your SEO.

Don’t sweat the small stuff with SEO though. Focus on the low hanging fruit and after you have done your keyword research, change title tags to be more targeted, add to your on-page content and ensure links in to the site have keywords where possible. Citations are growing in importance so don’t worry if you don’t get a link – a mention will help.

Social mdia can be as much boon as bane but if you plan properly it can be a huge help.

Even though we’ve seen massive shakeups in the link building world lately, links are still what a lot of clients want. Link building is our main business (so that’s lucky for us) but when we have quoted projects where link building takes a backseat, no one is interested. Due to excessive client demand, more and more SEOs (and people with zero experience who see the chance to get in there by doing something that honestly does not require excessive knowledge) are getting into links. In many cases this means that they say they build links, but in reality, they outsource that to someone like us. In some cases, it’s a lot of idle talk from people who think that it’s easy work and stop doing it after they get a proper link building job. In other cases, we’re hearing a lot of chatter from people who don’t have any real link building clients.

I am here to tell you that link building is a practice, not a theory. It’s maddeningly tedious work and I never intended to run a link agency, but hey, here I am, and I do quite love it. I just don’t like to see something so difficult and painstaking become glamorous because I don’t think that it’s an honest portrayal of the reality of working as a link builder or running an agency.

For example, there’s the issue with my own beliefs and opinions vs keeping people employed. I’ve turned down one client due to thinking that what he wanted me to promote was extremely unethical, but I also take on clients that might bother someone else but don’t happen to bother me. We are extremely lucky to have enough work to keep all of us employed but if I lost half of my revenue, would I take on a client like the one I turned down, if it meant keeping all of my people employed? He’s a bad example as what he does for a living is something that I consider to be life-threatening behavior, but let’s say I didn’t believe in the politics of a certain group (like the Republican Party.) If they offered me $10k a month and the alternative to taking that client was firing 4 link builders, I’d like to think that I would take it. It would make my dad happy at least.

Managing an agency like this is also quite different to doing the link building itself, as I’m lucky in many ways that my days are not spent chasing link targets. However, the idea of not having to bear the responsibility for all of it is quite appealing at times. I have a great office manager and some seriously kick-ass staff, but I still can’t truly turn off when I go on vacation. Clients still email me, people still have questions about their hours/need time off/want my opinion, and the buck definitely stops here. I’ve worked for people who would throw me under a bus to make themselves look blame-free but I’m not that kind of person, which means I usually stress out over just about everything. I’m the one a client will bitch to if they hate what we’ve done, and I’m the one who will lose money if they refuse to pay. I’m the one whose reputation is screwed if I really mess up.

How much to educate? How to recruit? These are tough questions. We don’t hire experienced link builders because, well, we’ve never actually interviewed anyone with link building experience. We train everyone in-house and everyone gets the exact same basic training whether they go to work for our link team or our content team. Some of them are interested in SEO, some of them don’t give a crap. As long as they perform to the standards we’ve set for each person, I truly don’t care. I LOVE it when someone expresses an interest in SEO though, and I love answering their questions and seeing them get excited about something that I feel quite passionately about, but I also understand that to some people, a job is just a job. Recruiting, when we work this way, is also a bit tricky as it’s hard for us to know what to look for until the person walks in the door and talks to us. Sadly, we aren’t a profitable enough agency where I could offer a competitive experienced SEO salary, but hey, why would anyone like that want to crank out link requests and write guest posts all day? Our hiring, even though I complain here and there, is one of the things that I am happiest with, as while I could not lay out what it is about a person that makes me want to hire him or her, I just kind of feel it.

And ah, all that extra time for me to spend researching since I have to keep 20 people plus the clients informed…yeah that is fun. Honestly, it IS fun, but it’s a lot of work. If a client calls my mobile and asks about the latest update that was just written about 30 minutes ago, I better know about it. If we do anything that gets totally devalued by an algorithmic update, I need to put the brakes on asap and regroup. I sometimes spend 75% of my day reading articles, talking to other SEOs about things, or writing (and doing my best to make sure no one else has just written the exact same thing.)

Being responsible for the brand when I am not the only one controlling it is also problematic at times. I’m very lucky that this is not a current issue but we’ve had clients who worked with other agencies for various things (including different types of link building other than what we were doing) but when rankings dropped, guess who got blamed? That’s right. We’ve been blamed, we’ve had clients leave in a huff, and we’ve had to figure out problems caused by OTHER people working on the accounts. It’s hard enough to figure out where you’ve gone wrong, but figuring out where someone else did…that’s a serious pain, and it eats up loads of time.

Lest you think it’s all sadness and rain here, I will say that running an agency is still something that I love. At its worst, it’s still not as bad for working for someone else who’s a total jerk. I recently had dinner with a friend and former colleague at a place where we used to work, and she said that she had no idea of how bad that place was until she was free of it. It was honestly like an abusive relationship where you later wonder why you let that guy smack you around. If our kids have a school performance, we’re there. If we need to do something non-work related on a Friday, we can do it (although we usually pay for it Saturday or Sunday nights) and that is very important to me, having children and a dog and a cat and a rabbit and chickens. Something is almost always going wrong somewhere, and if we had to work a strict 9 to 5 M-F schedule, there’s no way we could survive. To me, all the hard work pays off. It’s just not easy. We’ve made massively stupid decisions, had horrible tax issues our second year (due to not knowing what we were doing the first year), had personal financial stress because we’re self-employed and even though the company does very well, we’re still SELF-EMPLOYED, which seems to kind of screw you in the eyes of some banks. (I’m not sure how that is any worse than working for a company where you have no say and can easily be fired, but whatever.) None of us have formal business training (actually one of my employees is about to get her MBA so I may hassle her a bit more) but we’ve learned as we’ve gone along, and we’re still learning.

If that’s the kind of life you want, go for it…just don’t underestimate what it takes to succeed and to stay successful.

Have you ever listened to the news reporting the latest study about how dreadful things have become or what the latest item likely to kill you is and found yourself thinking how can that be true?

Did you ever then consider the elements behind the report? Or did you, like the journalists and talk show hosts, wonder how it’s all come to this?

I think it’s time we all started thinking more critically about numbers and rocking the right ones! Whether it’s numbers in the news, or, more importantly, numbers in the reports you’re looking at in another window right now, have a second thought about them and see what you think.

Here are some of my favourite examples of statistics that can be misleading without any context:

Are our children really this uneducated about Christmas? Or was it a comedy multiple choice?

Less than half of very few women agree, is that enough to convince you?

Either we should all be drip fed red wine, or the Daily Mail has an affiliate scheme with a wine provider!

This one may not have been reported in the papers but it is flawed! Thanks for the laughs Anchorman.

And let’s take a closer look at one particular example.

It has to be noted that tabloid press has probably paid a large part in the fear mongering from misunderstood and out of content statistics.

This example states that eating beef is ‘not much healthier than drinking arsenic’.

Say that again?

Beef = arsenic (a poison!)

Here’s how:

“Harvard Medical School has studied the dietary habits of 120,000 people over 30 years. Its researchers conclude that those who tuck into big steaks, rare lamb and, worse still, processed meats such as sausages and hamburgers, dramatically increase their prospects of contracting cancer or heart disease.”

Now watch the world’s media run with this and ruin the beef farming industry and all our Sunday lunches…

But wait!

The next day I heard a news report on the radio by the BBC (who also ran a story on the statistics, albeit much less dramatically), who wanted to clarify that the research was done in the US where beef portions are bigger. Ok, they might stop us Brits worrying by planting a picture of massive beef burgers and steak in our heads and comparing this to our Sunday Roast, but this doesn’t really disprove anything, other than the fact that even the BBC conform to stereotypes.

As it was the radio they didn’t have time to explain everything but they did however, explain themselves further with this article which looks at the details more closely and concludes that:

“The person who eats more meat is expected to live one year less than the person who doesn’t eat so much meat”

So much for beef being like arsenic! Thanks Daily Mail…

Enough about meat, how can you improve your numbers? I like to make sure I understand the following three things before using any provided statistic:

• Accuracy
• Authority
• Argument

Accuracy – think about how much data was used to draw the conclusions, 90% of ten is not as conclusive as 90% of a hundred. The more data you can use to draw a conclusion the more accurate it will be, this is particularly important when split testing.

Authority – who is represented in the data and who put the data together, would any of them be biased in any way or was it a true representation? Most often in SEO we take our data from sources like Google Analytics which aren’t really the greatest authority.

Argument – what is the reason for the data? Is it trying to prove one side of an argument or could it be used to prove the other side too? Is it likely the numbers have been looked at with a biased view? And mainly, what can you do with the data?

So now that we know what to look for in numbers you can start thinking about how to improve reporting and use this to improve your results. Let’s take a look at organic keywords.

Rather than reporting on, for example, how many visits each keyword has brought to your site, compare this with other statistics that give a bigger picture to each keyword and help you understand the true value of each so that you know which ones are your most valuable targets.

This data (pictured), shows us which keywords have led to the most visits but shows us little else.

One simple improvement is to use a date comparison so that you know how things have changed and where to focus next.

To gain a much more significant insight in to which keywords are working for your website, create a custom report to analyse how good each keywords is for you by looking at how the visitors they generate interact with the site and how well they convert.

Get your own custom report that shows interaction and conversions for organic keywords here.

To help see what the numbers mean, I recommend using this Chrome Extension, Table Booster for Google Analytics that can add a colour scale to each column:

Unfortunately, by using any web analytics platform you are limited to a certain level of accuracy. The new sampling method in Google Analytics has an even lower of accuracy due to the results it uses in each sample in order to ‘speed up load times’. Don’t get me started on what Google have been doing with Analytics data recently!

The best way to get accurate Google Analytics data when the interface adds sampling is to use the API data export tool. An easy way to implement this is to use SEO Tools for Excel or Excellent Analytics which both pull un-sampled data from Google Analytics in to a spreadsheet where you can then manipulate the data to your heart’s content.

There are plenty of other ways to improve data, but the main point is to think critically about it so that you can make the most of it and get the best results from your website. Working with the right data is always the best route forwards, but if all else fails, you could always turn to the red wine – apparently it’s good for every health condition you might ever have!

I would like to officially welcome Anna Lewis to the SEO Chicks blogging team. Anna is a Digital Marketing Executive at Koozai, she has a degree in Advertising and a passion for SEO and particularly analytics. This girls gets numbers! When I first met her at a meet up event in London it soon became clear that Anna LOVES what she does, she is super enthusiastic and passionate. Just the kind we like at SEO Chicks. She is also the right kind of crazy, which is a must to be on this blogging crew.

We are honoured to have her in our blogging team and we’re looking forward to reading her posts. Welcome Anna!

Follow Anna on Twitter and G+

As SEOs we optimise for many things (clue’s in the job title, right?) – but increasingly it occurs to me that we’re missing a trick or two when it comes to link building.

I don’t want to get into a paid linking debate here – whether you choose to buy links or not is up to you. But the truth is, if no one will link to you unless you pay them, then you have problems.

Big-ass ones.

Here’s a little Smörgåsbord of issues that I frequently see that make sites sub-optimal for link building.

1) Your site is so ugly it makes my eyes bleed…

Yep, I said it. I’m shallow. Human beings are.

Psychologists at the University of Pennsylvania studied data from over 10,000 speed daters and found that most people make a decision regarding a person’s attraction within three seconds of meeting.

I’m guessing that post your beautifully personalised, witty and clever outreach email – should you reach first base (in this instance let’s say first base is your lovely link target clicking through to go visit your site) your site has approximately 3 seconds to woo said target.

Now of course beauty is in the eye of the beholder. As such you may be unable to see quite how ugly your site really is. Alternatively you may be fully aware of just how ugly your site is, it’s just your boss / client doesn’t.

Go get yourself some data:

Do a quick coffee shop test – take your laptop to your coffee house of choice and ask some people to rate the design of your website and your competitors. (NB don’t tell them which site is yours, you may get falsely positive results). Alternatively you could use Feedback Army, or go straight to Mechanical Turk.

But some might cry – Wikipedia is fugly and they get links!

Yes darling, they do. But Wikipedia you are not.

2) Your site content sucks…

Actually sucks is a little flippant. What I really mean is that your site lacks ‘good’ content. ‘Good’ might mean authoritative or trustworthy, or content that’s so damn awesome my head might explode if I don’t get to share it.

Remember linking to something or sharing something (in most instances at least) is still a kind of endorsement. NB there are of course links which are in no way an endorsement. But unless you’re desperate for ‘asshat’ anchor text links I’m guessing we can park those here.

So, perhaps your site is pretty enough to pass the 3 second test and your lovely link target wants to get to know you a little better. But is your site a triumph of style over substance? Is your site like, totally clueless?

“I think that the film Clueless was very deep. I think it was deep in the way that it was very light. I think lightness has to come from a very deep place if it’s true lightness.” Alicia Silverstone

Don’t be *that* girl website.

The relative suck-worthy-ness of content can be difficult to quantify – but fortunately you don’t have to. Google have already done this for you in the form of their Panda questionnaire. Questions like these might help you understand what other people think of your content:

• Would you trust information from this website?
• Is this website written by experts?
• Do the pages on this site have obvious errors?
• Does the website provide original content or information?
• Would you recognise this site as an authority?
• Does this website contain insightful analysis?
• Would you consider bookmarking pages on this site?
• Could pages from this site appear in print?

Here’s an added extra from me:

• Would you share this site with your friends via social media or email?

Not sure if your site’s content sucks? Well I’d recommend you find out – again coffee shop tests, Feedback Army – pick your poison.

3) Your site is overly-commercial

But I need to sell stuff! Sure you do. But know that your hideous squeeze page is unlikely to yield you tons of links.

Now that might suit you just fine, but if you’re creating lovely link-worthy content you might want to tone down the commercial nature of the page (or indeed pages) where that content sits. Time and time again I see content that’s actually pretty good fail to attract the links that it might have done due to the commercial nature of the page.

If you want to go down the content strategy route (and FYI – it’s a route which I strongly recommend), create a home for that content. Mint.com do this really nicely. Their blog has some information about their products in the header, however when you launch one of their infographics all that information disappears.

Blog post:

Launched infographic:

Nice huh? The commercial content has auto-magically disappeared. I’m guessing they have less issues in persuading people to link when the page looks like this.

But what if you’re a publisher and you make your money via advertising?

Just be sensible, please. Remember this question from the panda questionnaire:

• Are there excessive adverts on this website?

You know what to do if you’re not sure, right? Yep coffee shop, Feedback Army, blah, blah, blah.

4) Your site has no human face…

Humans like humans. Well, they like some humans in any case.

Now I’m not talking about sticking some horrible stock images of humans on your site, instead I’d prefer if you included some pictures of the people who work there. As a minimum I’d like to see the pictures of the people who write on your blog. Plus of course Google may be putting more weight towards ‘whom’ rather than ‘which site’ is linking to whom – rel-author anyone?

As a minimum I’d like it to be really damn easy to get in contact with you. Email addresses, bricks and mortar addresses, telephone numbers.

Why? It’s a trust thing. Sites with no contact details and no obvious clue as to who’s behind the operation look shady. And people don’t like linking to places that look shady – unless they’re using asshat as anchor text. ‘Nuff said.

5) Your domain name reeks of spamtastic porky-ness…

This one is tough to solve.

But nevertheless I think it warrants mention here. Most of what I’ve been talking about within this post is about your potential link target’s perceptions of your site. If you’re trying to build links for a very obviously commercial domain (I think we all know what they look like) then you will struggle.

How do you solve this?

I’d be inclined in this instance to (at least think about) getting a less spamtastic domain and starting to build that up now. I know exact match domains still work well in lots of niches. However, you might like to think of it as a back up plan for when / if exact match domains are devalued in the SERPs. Of course this may not be an appropriate solution for all business models – but for some it might be worthwhile.

Are you still here?

Well done, you made it to the end

To sum up – I recognise that what I’m suggesting here is in no way an easy fix. These sorts of changes can be really difficult to push through whether you work in house or for an agency. But there are added benefits if you do manage to get some of this stuff through. Not only will your link building efforts reap higher rewards, but there are really great reasons for sorting out this stuff outside of link building. For one you might be able to dodge that pesky panda.

If you are planning to gather a little feedback on your site I’d also strongly recommend including the following question (yep it’s from the panda questionnaire):

• Would you give this site your credit card details?

If lots of people are saying ‘no’ chances are the website you’re working on is missing out on a whole lot more than links.

Just sayin’

Image credits:

Clueless

Hat tip to Phil Nottingham who has to tolerate my ranting and raving on this subject more than any human should and who suggested I write this post. Also a further hat tip to Will who came up with replicating the Panda Questionnaire originally.

If you’re immersed in a particular industry it can be difficult sometimes to see outside of your own bubble. At theMediaFlow we’re a very small, self-funded SEO agency and because of that we’ve always gotten our business entirely by referral or by incoming enquiries from customers who have found us through search or by reputation. In all those cases of course we’re “preaching to the converted”. What I mean by that is that our customers come to us already aware of the benefits of investing in SEO. Forgive me then for forgetting that in many businesses and in many sectors, SEO is still relatively untried, unknown and yet to feature on the marketing agenda.

Last week I chaired a number of round table discussions at Econsultancy Digital Cream B2B. A recurrent theme from participants to the Integrated Search discussions, was the difficulty in quantifying and justifying budget for organic search, when already using paid search. Paid search is instantly quantifiable, with clear and immediate ROI data. In organisations that may have some history, are primarily “bricks and mortar” or may have numerous and diverse routes to market; organic search may seem like an intangible spend in comparison. Of course that’s not the case, so I thought it would be useful to present some solid data-driven cases for investing in SEO for those using paid search.

Organic Search Is a Lasting Investment

A good SEO campaign, delivered by a good SEO agency is a lasting investment. Particularly in a business to business environment you’re likely to be producing specialist products that serve a particular business need. Whilst your competition may be tough comparatively within your industry it ain’t car insurance, and provided that your website is fairly solid and your business has a story to tell, there is no reason why a good SEO agency cannot significantly improve your visibility in organic search as a lasting investment. Whilst click-thru rates on organic search results have been declining compared to paid search over the years, most recent studies show that at 52% of clicks this is still the majority. That means that if your budget holders will only approve paid search budget, there’s an additional 52% share of clicks that your business is not even in the running for. My fellow SEO-Chick Julie Joyce of Linkfish Media recommends graphing the rising costs of PPC for your main industry keywords over time so you can quantify the rising costs of participating purely in the paid search pool. This is quite a powerful argument to consider an investment in SEO as this is a much more lasting spend.

Illustrating Value

Of course saying that “SEO is a lasting investment” is all well and good but of course your financial director needs more than the assurances of someone who has made a living out of this for eight years. If you’re already spending on paid search you already have some great data on the keywords that work and convert for your business, plus the ability to demonstrate how click-thru rate increases based on the position of your paid listings. You can either be super cautious and use an average click-thru rate for your paid listings to demonstrate the additional share of clicks available once you have attained the top three spots, or if you happen to already have some organic search presence (perhaps in the less competitive “tail” terms for your sector, or on your brand terms) then you can use Google Webmaster Tools data to look at the organic search click-thru ranges on any terms in which you are already ranking well for.

PPC and SEO Work Best Together

In addition to the “me too” benefits to be had from also participating in SEO, there’s some solid case study data on the additional bump in performance metrics across both paid and organic search, when both are used in conjunction. My fellow SEO-Chick Hannah Smith of Distilled agrees that paid and organic search work better together, and pointed me to a talk delivered by Melanie Mitchell of Digitas speaking at Mozcon 2011. In the session Mitchell said that contrary to some conventional wisdom, rather than “switching off” PPC when you rank #1 for a core term there’s actually more bang for the buck to be hand in continued participation in both organic and paid search. In fact in the study she referenced “32% CTR and 420% increase in brand recall when doing organic and PPC together.”

Conclusion

Whilst paid search may deliver instant ROI and quantifiable performance data from the get-go this is a constant click-level cost, which is ongoing and increasing. In most cases if your business has never embarked on a programme of organic search marketing, then the investment required will often tend to decrease over time as the bulk of a lot of technical and on-page optimisation activities will take place in the first months. Your ongoing spend will therefore be related to the technical marketing aspects of organic search, such as linkbuilding, getting your content in front of the right online sources and audiences, and dovetailing your social media presence with your social media strategy. Although it will differ from sector to sector in most B2B sectors the first six months of an organic search campaign will be negative in terms of ROI, as your site begins to gain traction in the search engines, however by around six months onwards your investment will begin to return and to grow significantly for often the same rate of monthly spend. In fact a good SEO agency should be able to help you quantify spend vs return once they know enough about your business, competition and target keywords though beware any agency that offer guaranteed timings, positions and ROI; as that’s just not scientifically possible.

I like to think of myself as a happy, sunny person but in reality, I’m really not…I am usually the first person to say “no, that won’t work” when someone has an idea. I expect all restaurants to be out of everything that I want to order and to offer me fennel stew. I think gas will increase to $95 a gallon this summer, and I always have a hat with me in case of rain. I think it’s always going to freaking rain even if the sky is a clear cobalt. I think these guys look like they’d be fun:

I was once a goth, but now I’m a boss, a lot like Richmond on the IT Crowd. Oddly, I was indeed a sunny goth I think, but now that I drive a minivan and wear (fake) fur boots I think my outlet for negativity has suffered, and since I don’t look like the walking dead anymore (just a misplaced Inuit), I think like they must. However, this can totally be used to my advantage when building links. Hahahahahaha. Who’s got the last laugh now Mom?

(photoshopped image courtesy of the amazing Peter Attia)

So try thinking like a Goth.

1. Type in your regular happy terms to find the negative pieces that show up in the SERPS, read them, offer the writer an opposing piece or write one on your site and link out. Rain on someone’s parade. Perhaps searching for your brand and adding “sucks” to the end will help identify these. However, if you search for “Link Fish Media sucks” you get our company playlist, which is completely unintentional yet somehow incredibly amusing. Obviously it’s the Sting track that’s driving that result. Sting sucks. Search for that and you’ll be busy all day.

2. Wordstream’s awesome Negative Keyword Thingy lets you search for negative keywords so that you won’t waste money on worthless paid ads, and can therefore afford to buy that mint condition seminal Christian Death album.

(See how I have 7 out of 10 free searches left? To me, that means I’m screwed.)

Now, if you did PPC you’d enter these into the system so they would not be shown for these search terms of course. For link building, I’d search and use them to prevent irrelevant SERPs from clouding my head even further like this:

(Because I am also a bit lazy at times, it’s one I pulled from Google ( jaguar -cars -football -os) The best thing about this is that the first result is one for cars. Well done Google!!!)

3. Cussing. If you like Deadwood you like cussin’. They all wear very death-rock outfits on that show too. (There’s the tie-in to goth finally…um plus there was that band called The Damned which of course you know.) Anyway, we’ve had some amazing finds when we used curse words with a term. Here’s an example:

By searching for “damned organic soda” because I’m listening to Sisters of Mercy and not The Grateful Dead (like that would ever happen), I see this totally awesome result:

I hadn’t even thought about the potential to use organic soda for cleaning dog urine, so that’s opened up a rainbow of possibilities. Using curse words can lead to some off-the-wall sites and, even if they aren’t good link targets, you may still get some great ideas for discovery. (sounds almost positive doesn’t it?)

I don’t mean to imply that all goths are negative and cursey. Actually all the ones that I’ve ever met are, but I still shouldn’t stereotype. Plenty of cheerleaders curse and bitch a lot too. Just use that negativity for something other than thinking your black hair dye is going to make your hair fall out soon.

In my years of working in SEO, I’ve seen a lot of weirdness. Some of that weirdness is related to links and link building. There was the time we discovered 50,000 links built overnight or the time a carefully plotted strategy was ruined by spammers and scrapers. But what do you do when good link building goes bad?

There are a lot of reasons why good links go bad. I’m not talking about link farms harming your rankings (naughty) or anything like buying a link on a specific site known to search engines for selling links. I’m talking about when good links go bad. There are lots of good links from valuable sources that you can get and sometimes acquisition of those links, while in general being helpful, can be harmful.

For some time, I have been an advocate of *not* getting blogroll links for rankings. Not only does the value of these links tend towards 0, the blogs they are on are usually valueless. I once worked on a site where for some reason we suddenly gained 50,000 site-wide blogroll links. What it looked like was a spammy site where non-client sites were being used to pretend to be natural. Our rankings took a dip across the board for a couple of months. Nothing too dramatic in ranking drop and the effect was only 60 days but still demonstrated to us how bad blog roll links could be.

But good links can go bad. Good links from news sites or links from sites that have been penalised for some reason – what happens when someone gets caught for selling links (but you weren’t buying) or something else goes wrong? This can and has happened to me and here is what I did.

First thing to do is – DON’T PANIC. If you panic at this point and start turning off links then it could go even more badly wrong. You (hopefully) have weekly or monthly visibility on the number and source of links pointing in to the website and will be able to trace what links were unexpected and tipped the balance.

Map out how bad the damage is – is it a few keywords, a lot or is the whole domain missing from the SERPs. If the whole site is missing it may be more than just good links gone bad. If rankings have dropped for a handful of related terms it might be some good links gone bad.

Check for new inbound links you haven’t previously accounted for. One case I had was down to a series of things all happening at once including a press release going out, a news story being scraped and republished a significant number of times and other totally normal, natural link building. It could be new links coming in to the site in a volume you had not accounted for.

When all else fails, check the mozRank and PageRank of the affected sites. Where Google says it is worthless and SEOMoz says it is valuable, you may have found a penalised site. This could be hindering rather than helping. When asking for a link to be removed, I am always thankful and polite. I express gratitude for them placing the link and explain that while I do appreciate it, the link seems to have confused Google and could you please trouble them to remove it in an attempt to correct the trouble. Don’t pull a JC Penny and as one audience member at a conference I spoke at experienced, ask for all links to be removed regardless of legitimacy.

When good links go bad the cardinal rule is *DON’T PANIC*. There are a number of changes to the algorithm happening and I hope you’re engaging in a number of activities which build traffic and are not purely for ranking. Keep pressing forward, check, examine, research and keep building links as you correct. Do not react by pulling everything you can because instead of plugging a leak you’ll be sledgehammering the hull.

Hello there, I’m the newest chick. Should you care to you can read more about me here.

Today I’d like to talk linkbait. There are plenty of blog posts out there about successful linkbait, but I think us SEOs have a tendency to keep our mistakes on the down low. The truth is we don’t always get it right and I think that actually there’s more to be learned from the projects that have gone awry than from the runaway successes.

Before we get right into it, it’s probably worth giving some context – the linkbait projects that I work on are all to commercial sites. I’m typically after a combination of links from news outlets (either national or trade press), high end online-only publishers and bloggers. I use a variety of linkbait tactics – written content (from resource guides to press releases), publishing research, data visualisation, competitions, awards, collaborative content, etc.

So these are some of the lessons I’ve learned over the past 18 months or so of doing this stuff – hopefully this will save you some heartache

Ensure you’re using ‘Trusted’ Data Sources

Ignore this at your peril. This is a peculiarity of news outlets in particular, but isn’t exclusive to them. Journalists tend to stick fast to trusted data sources when their writing or researching. Examples include the ONS for the UK, Data.gov in the US - plus there are trusted niche data sources – for tourism there’s the WTTC; I could go on all day here listing sources but I’m sure you get the picture.

If you’re doing something with data (NB not just data visualisation – this could be a press release) – you need to make sure that you’re referencing or using a trusted source. Proprietary data from the company you’re working for may not cut it, and whatever you’re working on could well be dismissed as being unreliable either because your data isn’t robust enough – or just because it’s not a trusted source.

Now of course this might not mean abject failure – you can still get lots of lovely links with sub-optimal data, but bear in mind that if you’re main target is these news outlets you’re going to have a much harder time selling the story in and as such you might lose out on the sorts of links that really excite your clients (if you’re agency-side) or your boss (if you’re in-house).

Surveys often Don’t Cut it

Puppy just got told his survey was unrepresentative

This is very similar to the trusted data source issue – again it’s more common in news outlets – but can and does extend way beyond that. Press releases that details the results of surveys can be very hard to sell in.

Why? Because often the data isn’t robust.

Or if the data is robust it still might not actually be representative. I’m not a market research expert, but I’d strongly advise getting in some outside expertise if you really want to make something like this fly. As a rule of thumb a news outlet won’t touch a survey with fewer than a thousand respondents. Also expect to be quizzed heavily on your methodology – for example, did you get a representative spread of respondents based on geographic location, age, sex, demographic? Running a survey via a blog or similar likely won’t yield you a representative sample as your respondents are self-selecting to take part.

Again, there are exceptions to this rule. Sometimes surveys with embarrassingly weak data sets get amazing coverage – but do you really want to take that risk?

Up to the Minute versus Evergreen Content

Huh?

This is really about different types of content. Something which is very topical and front-of-mind for people can offer amazing returns in terms of links and coverage – provided it lands in front of the right people, at the right time. The problem is when it doesn’t. As Burns said – “The best laid schemes of mice and men often go awry.”

The issue with very topical content is that people move on very quickly, and if you’re giving yourself only a very small window of opportunity then you’re exponentially increasing your chances of failure. The nice thing about evergreen content? You can go on promoting it – by definition it’s got a long shelf-life.

What am I saying here? Just be aware of it. In no way am I suggesting you should avoid doing anything topical (that would be dumb) – but be mindful of the potential risks involved.

It’s not about what YOU like

You might *love* gherkins in ice cream cones, others might not share your enthusiasm

Perhaps the toughest lesson of all. It’s all too easy to fall in love with your own ideas. But it’s very dangerous to do so – particularly if you are nothing like the people who you’d like to share and link to your content.

Always keep your target audience in mind. Do they love long-form, highly researched, wordy content? Then that’s what you should create. Not the latest, shiniest, over-engineered piece of interactive crap which is ultimately shallow and un-substantiated, albeit beautiful.

There’s plenty of stuff on the internet already that’s ‘really great’ but doesn’t actually appeal to any particular audience.

Don’t be afraid to kill a bad idea

Darth wasn't famed for his sense of humour

So you had this great idea. Everyone else thought it was great too. Then you started doing some research, fleshing out the idea. You decide to do some pre-outreach – this thing isn’t finished yet, not by a long-shot – but you want to check you really are the genius that you think you are. You reach out to a few people who you thought were bound to love it.

They didn’t.

You figure they’re wrong and you reach out to a few more. They don’t love it either.

Kill it.

Seriously, kill it right there. Sure you’ve done loads of work and you’ve come  a long way, but you can still turn back. There’s still time. Saying you were wrong now and figuring out something else to do instead is the best thing you can do here. If you persevere you may still succeed but it’s really not looking likely is it? It hurts to lose that time and that work, but you will lose a lot more time and and cost yourself a lot more work if you continue.

So that’s the lessons for today done, go get yourself a cupcake or something

Hopefully you’ve found them useful. Got some lessons of your own to share? I’d love to hear about them.

Image credits:

Data, Puppy, Clock, Gherkin, Darth Vader.

Next week Search Engine Strategies (SES) is in London, and seeing as 80% (actually it’s more like 70% but Julie is always in London in spirit) of the SEO Chicks are based in London quite a few of us are speaking and attending. Judith is speaking on day 1 and 2 on the subjects: “Introduction to SEO” and “SEO is dead, long live SEO” respectively. And I have two sessions on day 1 covering “Key Link building strategies” and “SEO means business”.  Nichola and Annabel will be attending and covering the event for Stateofsearch.com and Hannah will be covering the conference here on SEO Chicks. So, if you see us around the conference centre, please make sure you say hi, and preferably emulate how you look in your twitter avatar (we don’t see “real” people often and find it difficult to grasp that people don’t look like their avatars).

In addition, and in true SEO-Chicks fassion, we have also got involved with some party organising. Along with the awesome marketing team at SES London we have been planning an awesome SES NETWORKING PARTY on Wednesday 22nd Feb (Day 2 of the conference) + Our awesome friends at Linkdex are sponsoring the party and are putting money behind the bar to quench our thirst.

Where
The party will take place at: The Old Monk Exchange (61-71 Victoria Street, Westminster, London SW1H 0HW) only 5 min walk from the conference centre! We’ve been told that the pub serves a fine selection of real ales, ciders and all that jazz.

When
Wednesday 22nd February (Day 2 of SES London 2012). The party starts straight after the Black Hat Vs White Hat unconference conference drinky thingy bob (that’s obviously techncial speak), around 7:30 ish.

Will we be seeing you there?