~Issue Number Eighteen~
August 26, 2011 [Next Issue: September 2, 2011]
Hello Friend,
When you are building your online business, there are some things that are pretty clear cut. Once you build your website you can install analytics that will give a good idea of how much traffic your website is getting and where it's coming from.
When you start adding social media, you can see how many fans or followers you are getting and by what percentage you are increasing. You can also see how much they are engaging with the social media aspect of your site.
Link building is not as clear cut. If you are running a robust link building campaign, it's often times hard to tell which links are working and which ones are not.
The common side effect is that online business owners tend to either a) throw a lot of money in to their link building and hope SOMETHING works or b) give up on link building all together.
Neither one is the correct answer for a smart online business owner! Read our Stomper Intelligence Report: "The Building Block of Link Building: Save Time and Money by Tracking the Cost and Value of Your Links". You'll get valuable tips on making the most of your link building campaigns. Read the report, then make a plan to implement what you learn.
Lee Collins
Managing Director
StomperNet, LLC
"There's been so much fear pushed around the web about reciprocal link exchanges and link trading programs that the message has been muddled up into the completely nonsensical 'never link to someone who links to you.' To my mind, that's a touch of lunacy."
~ Rand Fishkin - SEOmoz
By Sam Goddard
It can take time to build your presence in the search engines using link-building, and there is often a disconnect between when we make the effort to gain links and when those links begin to pass influence to our site. This can cause us to overlook time-efficient means of getting links as unsuccessful and give up on the idea of link-building as too dark, difficult and confusing. This does not have to be the case, however. We just have to recognize what is important about links and keep track of these important elements for our different link-building methods.
There are a number of factors that can affect the quality of a link-building campaign, and it is important that you can analyze your links in a way that will enable you to get as many of the links that give you the best return. Furthermore, there are hundreds of different methods of link-building, and you should be aware of how long it takes to get a link using each of these methods, how much it costs, and how much value you get from each of these different sources in order that you can get to where you want to go as quickly as possible.
Lets take a look at the factors that affect the cost and value of links, and although I can't provide you with a simple piece of analytics software to help you account for each of your links, I can give you a few ideas that will help you track what is most important and get a more accurate picture of what you should be doing more of.
Cost & Value:
In order to run a successful link-building campaign, it is important to have a means of analyzing the cost and value of your links over time. Without it, you won't be able to focus on the link-building methods that give your site and your business the greatest return.
There are a number of ways of doing this that will depend upon the way you work, but here are a few things that you might like to take into account:
Cost per link:
- What has it cost to get this link in terms of domain registration and hosting?
- What did it cost to research this particular link in terms of tools, subscriptions and staff time?
- Is this link still being indexed after any given period (six months, a year)?
- What are the costs of keeping the link indexed over time (juicers, pumpers, etc.)?
Over time, we should be looking to get as many links for as cheaply as possible. In order to do that, it is important to keep track of the costs associated with link-building. There are many different methods of link-building, and each of them involve different amounts of time and infrastructure.
A round of directory submissions might not take long, but they might not get into the index or remain in the Google index over time. Links from web 2.0 sites like Hubpages, by contrast, won't cost anything in terms of hosting, but it will take time for someone to write the Hub and to maintain it in order for the link to be able to pass influence. Finally, it might take a long time to get a guest post on a good blog, and it might take time to prepare a relevant article that interests the audience, but the influence should keep your link in the index for many years to come.
When evaluating links, we can't just get hung up on the cost of a link; however, as we might limit ourselves to going after the cheapest links from places with little PageRank. We also need to have a means of taking into account the value of links from any given source.
Value per link:
The value of a link is what it gives you in return for the time and money you have spent getting it. This value depends upon the quality of the link. This quality is ultimately determined by its ability to improve your search engine rankings. There are a number of factors that can affect the ability of a link to do these, and here are a few questions that you can ask in order to help you assess these factors:
- What is the page rank of the domain you are getting a link from?
- How many other outbound links are on the page that links to your site?
- How many links are coming into the page & domain that you are getting links from?
- How many links are coming into the page & domain from different domains?
- When was & how often is the page that is linking to you cached?
- How long does the page that links to yours stay in the index?
- Does the anchor text of your link relate to your keyword?
- Is the domain linking to yours relevant to your website?
Not all links are born equal. Although it's great to get a link from anywhere, Google's corporate information tells us that links are analyzed like votes in a democratic ranking system. As well as just counting the number of votes:
"PageRank also considers the importance of each page that casts a vote, as votes from some pages are considered to have greater value, thus giving the linked page greater value."
One useful way to work out the quality of your links is to analyze their PageRank. This is not easy to do as Google's PageRank toolbar is infamously out-of-date and can sometimes be very misleading. Yet there are other ways of analyzing the importance of a page! SEOmoz has a toolbar that gives its own analysis of the importance of any web page by analyzing the number and quality of inbound links from different, unique domains. This can serve as a useful comparison with the Google toolbar. There are other factors, too.
When the infamous Google algorithm was originally created, it used the idea of a 'wondering drunk', suggesting that a web surfer starting from any given point has an 85% chance of continuing. The influence of each link of that page is 85% of the influence of the page divided by the number of links (so, if there are 100 links on the page, it's 85% divided by 100).
Although the Google algorithm changes over time, there is a lot of sense in this and it is possible to see that the more links on a given page, the less value is passed along each link. In this way, a link from a page with a PageRank of 5 from a page with 10 outbound links will be 10 times as valuable as a link from a PageRank 5 page with 100 outbound links. This can cause a great difference in how you decide to invest your time as it might seem worthwhile to pay for links from directories or sites that have a high PageRank until you realize that many of these places have hundreds of outbound links that cause the influence of that page to leak away.
Taking the 'wondering drunk' theory further, this is an argument for getting more links into any articles that you post on other websites. If you manage to get one link into an article on a page with 9 other links, your link is worth 1/10 of the influence available on that page. If you get 2 links into that article, however, your links will get 1/5 of the value available.
Other factors that can affect the value of a link to your website are the relevance of the site that is linking to yours and the anchor text of your link. A link to your website that contains the anchor text 'www.yoursite.com' won't help your ranking for the keyword 'blue widget' as much as a link that contains the anchor text 'blue widget'.
Conclusion
Although link-building can take time and effort, and the results from link-building can take an even greater amount of time to show (it's not as easy to get a sense of the cost and value of your links as it is to pull information out of Google Analytics) keeping track of the cost and value of each of your link-building efforts can help you to make better decisions about which link-building methods give your business the best long-term value.
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Ask yourself these questions:
COST PER LINK:
- What has it cost to get this link in terms of domain registration and hosting?
- What did it cost to research this particular link in terms of tools, subscriptions and staff time?
- Is this link still being indexed after any given period (six months, a year)?
- What are the costs of keeping the link indexed over time (juicers, pumpers, etc)?
VALUE PER LINK:
- What is the page rank of the domain you are getting a link from?
- How many other outbound links are on the page that links to your site?
- How many links are coming into the page and domain that you are getting links from?
- How long does the page that links to yours stay in the index?
- Does the anchor text of your link relate to your keyword?
- Is the domain linking to yours relevant to your website?
Remember: Next Stomper Intelligence Report:
Friday, September 2, 2011
Next Week's Focus: Video
FACULTY OFFICE HOUR NEXT WEEK:
THURSDAY, September 1st @ 3pm Eastern
Video Marketing: A Thousand Foot View with Vin Montello Join Vin as he discusses video marketing with a bird's eye view of everything from creating viral videos to... the style, length and tone of your sales videos. StomperNet Members: Register Now!
FREE LIVE WEBINARS NEXT WEEK:
WEDNESDAY, August 31st @ 1pm Eastern
How To Create Effective Video If You've Never Done It Before & Have No Money with Rick Howard
If you think you need to be a professional videographer with tons of money to create your own video...then this webinar is NOT for you! Join Rick Howard as he shows how YOU can create your own video...with little or no expertise or expense! Register Now!
THURSDAY, September 1st @ 7pm Eastern
"License to Print Money" with Access to The World's Largest eProducts Library with Mark Nathwani
Learn the exact ingredients for Internet Success. Learn how to make invaluable savings on 2 of your businesses most valuable assets: "Time & Money". Learn the POWER of eproducts and how you can use easy strategies to make huge impact on your business - be it on / off line. Register Now!
*NEW* "StomperNet Open Forum" Fridays at 11EDT
We know everyone has questions about their business or different stumbling blocks. Well we invite you to bring them to the table during our Open Forum. With the combined training and experience of our Coaches you will get the direction you need to get you back on your road to success!
The next StomperNet Open Forum Call with our Professional Coaches happens next Friday at 11am EDT and we hope to see you there! These calls are intended to be live Q&A sessions and playback will not be available. | StomperNet. Empowering Your Online Success.
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