This post is a republished version of a guest post I did for www.linkbuildingblog.com over a year ago. I recently went looking for the post but unfortunately the site no longer seems to exist therefore I’ve decided to re-publish the content and here seemed the best place for it! Here’s a link to the original content in archive.org

1) Ensure you pick up all pages that mention your site but don’t link to you.

I’m going to let you in on a secret here…. Not everyone on the internet links to external websites, and when they blog about your site or mention your site they may not link to you. That’s right, some people don’t know how to, some people don’t feel the need to, some people haven’t even thought about it and some people are just plain lazy. This means that if you can find these people that talk about (but don’t link to) your site then contact them, ask them to simply add a link to your site where they have mentioned it and hey presto, you have a nice relevant and topical link! Getting these links is like taking candy from a baby and in some cases you can even get decent anchor text.

So how do you go about finding these pages which mention you but don’t link to you? The manual way is to run searches such as:

http://www.sitename.com

www.sitename.com

“sitename.com”

“sitename”

Don’t forget to run these searches in Google, Yahoo, MSN and Technorati (and anywhere else with a search function!). Just remember that often the top results will all link to you anyway (especially with the full url searches) so be sure to crawl all the way through the results.

You can also set up some automation to automatically find new pages/blog posts about your company. Google Alerts is one way, I prefer our Reputation Monitor which is a tool for monitoring your online reputation but has some interesting applications as a link building tool.

2) Gain links from people trying to hot-link your images.

If you run a site of any size or any worth then you will almost certainly have plenty of images on your site which people will want to steal, borrow, pilfer or just blog about.

Patrick Altoft has written a fantastic script which allows you to gain links from anyone who is looking to use your images. Go read the post here. Just try it for yourself, click the link then right click the image at the top!

Note: This script doesn’t prevent people hot-linking images, in fact it actively encourages it but makes sure that people give you a link back at the same time. For sites with many images, and in particular sites with striking images it’s a must to install this script Patrick recommends only showing this script to people who come via Google images, I think it depends on what kind of site you’re running. You could probably build an entire site around image optimisation and using this script to generate back-links. Read more about image optimisation from Caydel.

3) Keep your friends close, your enemies closer.

This tip comes courtesy of SEOmoz. The idea is very simple and plays on people’s ego’s. In a nutshell, the sites which already rank for your target key phrases are the holy-grail of links, but it can often be difficult to get links from them since you are by definition in competition with them (in the SERPs at least!). So how about creating a competition, or award and handing it out to the top ranking sites in your sector? Everyone loves awards and the chances are that people will then link back to the source of the awards. If you want to get a bit more crafty about this you can even host the awards on a separate domain, to make it look like you’re not affiliated with it then simply 301 the domain back to your site at a later date.

Matt was the first one to publicly announce this trick in one of the whiteboard Friday’s but it’s clearly been something SEOmoz have been doing for a while… Case in point? Which built over 100,000 backlinks. Wow!

4) Flamebait – like linkbait only flame grilled.

This one is slightly more left-field than the others and I wouldn’t recommend doing this unless you were sure what you’re doing and also don’t mind a bit of a word-fight! The basic premise? Find a way to get sued. Working on the any PR is good PR (and equivalently, any links are good links) Andy Beal blogs about the subject in more depth here. The holy-grail for this tactic is to get sued by a company who no-one likes, that way you can get the social media crowd on your side! Other, slightly less dangerous, ways of doing this are to just be controversial or get threatened by someone who doesn’t understand the internet.

Aaron Wall also mentions this tactic briefly here. Number 63 on the list.

5) Keep it funny schmuck.

I’ll leave you on a high note with a little bit of humour. Next time someone famous in your industry makes a big announcement spend 30 mins with your favourite photo-manipulation software (mine’s the gimp) and come up with (something funny).

Note that to make this work you need to ensure that the you don’t offend the original poster (unless you’re looking for a fight, see point 4) and to keep it light-hearted. Spread the word about your post and as the original announcement grows, so does word of your amusing pictures. The ideal candidate for this is a blogger who likes to have a chuckle – aiming this at someone serious probably wouldn’t have as much of an impact (that’s why we picked Rand )

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This will only be a short post and many many apologies if this is old news (I’ve been away on holiday for a few days so I’m a little behind with my reading) - judging by a quick search though it appears no-one has reported this yet. That means I’m part of a new Google test - awesome! I love it when that happens.

Right now, any search I run on Google.com shows me a page like this:

On the right I see two options that I’ve never seen before, “sort by relevance” and “top results sorted by date”:

Clicking the “sort by date” shows me a ‘fresh’ results page like this:

The URL changes when I click either of the two options to append a sortbydate parameter:

Sort by relevance (regular Google results):

http://www.google.com/search?q=tom+critchlow&sortbydate=0

Sort by date (fresh Google results):

http://www.google.com/search?q=tom+critchlow&sortbydate=1

Without delving into this too deeply it appears that the ’sort by date’ results are similar to google blogsearch results though the two results pages differ and in fact right now I’m seeing the same “sort by relevance”, “sort by date” options on blogsearch results pages too:

The URL changes in a different way for blogsearch with “sort by relevance” just using the regular URL and “sort by date” using an “&scoring=d” parameter:

http://blogsearch.google.com/blogsearch?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&q=tom+critchlow&scoring=d

Interestingly, I don’t get the same option for google images (where I think this feature would be pretty handy - assuming of course that google image search results didn’t suck!)…

Anyone else seeing this? What are your thoughts on this?

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First of all, a big thank you to everyone who entered the competition. The response was excellent and you can be sure that your efforts will have been of real benefit in assisting World Vision in their Relief work.

After the cull last month, we were left with four adverts battling it out for top spot. Here I should make the admission that the volume of traffic was so low for the original keyword, that we had to add more keywords to raise traffic levels and see significant results. As the top two spots were taken by DKI titled adverts, I think it is fair to assume that this gave them an advantage. Third and fourth spots were taken by ads with titles that matched exactly the original keyword choice – Myanmar cyclone appeal. I am sure that had you all known that more keywords were going to be added then a few more of you would have used DKI, so apologies for that.

Also if you looked at your adverts during the competition and noticed that there were some differences to what you had sent, we did have to run them by World Vision so there were minor editorial changes.

It was interesting to see the different styles that made up the top four. Fourth place was this effort from Stu. A simple but effective appeal with a mixture of capitalised and lower case words, strong call to action phrases, so that the overall effect is an ad that is easy on the eye and allows the ‘Donate Now’ call to action plenty of space on that second description line.

Myanmar Cyclone Appeal
Help those affected by Cyclone
Nargis - Donate Now
www.WorldVision.org.uk

Clickthrough rate: 0.38%

Third place was this advert from Kinoti. Only Myanmar is capitalised, every other word is lower case which, with so many heavily capitalised adverts out there, will surely have made it stand out. The call to action phrases are very strong and again they are given plenty of space, each getting a line to themselves. Of all the adverts this one was the shortest, on both lines, and stood out by being low-key in appearance. I think this was an excellent use of a different appearance as well as a beautifully written body of text.

Myanmar cyclone appeal
help rebuild lives now
make a contribution
www.WorldVision.org.uk

Clickthrough rate: 0.46%

Second place went to this advert from Jon Clark. This was the only advert to put a figure on a donation amount and I would love to see conversion data for this advert in particular. Did people donating follow the advice of £25? Unlike the last two adverts this one went for almost all-capitalised words and longer sentences, using almost every character possible. The use of the charity’s name, World Vision, within the body of the text was also interesting. Only three adverts used this tactic and two of them were in the top two, while the other was the highest ranked advert that didn’t get through the cull. The lesson from this would seem to be that if you have a brand which is highly recognised then it is a very useful tool in the PPC armoury and shouldn’t be ignored.

{KeyWord:Myanmar Cyclone Aid}
Help World Vision Rebuild Lives in
Myanmar with Just £25. Donate Today
www.WorldVision.org.uk

Clickthrough rate: 0.85%

But, [drumroll] in the end the winner was…Leslie Chacon with this effort. DKI title again, the World Vision name appearing in the body of the text, and the affirmation that they are ‘trusted experts’ all build up to the very strong call to action phrase of ‘Make A Life-Changing Impact’. I think that all factors are important in the success of PPC ads but the call to action phrase is the bedrock of a winning advert and this one is a beauty. This advert led the way almost from the start and, using the marvel of statistical significance, we can be 90% confident that it would have beaten the second placed advert over time. With such close competition, this was a handsome victory.

{KeyWord:Myanmar Cyclone Relief}
World Vision, Trusted Experts in
Relief. Make A Life-Changing Impact
www.WorldVision.org.uk

Clickthrough rate: 1.04%

There may be some of you looking at the clickthrough rates and thinking ‘If those were the CTR’s for the ones that got through the cull, what were the others like?’ but in truth all CTR’s went down after the cull, even our winner. The lapse in time since the Cyclone will no doubt have led to the lower traffic levels and lower clickthrough.

Leslie is our very worthy winner and gets the bundle of goodies, as well as our admiration for some outstanding ad writing. Congratulations and thank you to every one for getting involved.

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Following on from my previous conversion rate posts, I’ve been checking out the suggestions made by our friends The Conversion Rate Experts - who always have good advice for turning visitors into paying customers.

They have recently redesigned their website, and - from this designer’s point of view - it’s looking great. The website is certainly very easy to navigate, the text is large and the generous leading (line height) makes it even easier to read. The use of lime green for the elements they really want the visitor to pay attention to works well too. Aside from all the usual optimised design elements they also have a large number of squirrel images, which I think is especially nice. We have often used hand drawn images for the distilled website to add a little fun, my personal favourite is the comically out of proportion illustration of Will on the contact form page.

An example of one of the many Conversion Rate Experts squirrel illustrations.

Will, as featured on our contact form!

To find out more about the less obvious tricks they have used, I have been reading their review of Google’s Website Optimiser, which boasts 108 ways to improve a website’s profits. Conversion Rate Experts were one of the first companies to use the tool, so it will be interesting to see what they have discovered.

I found the ‘Having a kick-ass layout’ section the most interesting.

In particular, I can relate to point 38, which mentions the importance of a company’s tagline and how it positions you in the marketplace. A tag line should be found quickly: the grey rule that is adjacent to the Distilled tag line helps to lead the eye to this important text, making it easily recognisable in a subtle way, see below:

As point 42 advises, our reputation monitor tool has varying levels of service: Individual, professional and agency levels helping to cater for everyone’s needs consequently widening our target audience and ensuring there is a service for everyone’s budget.

Also point 57 – (putting the best stuff above the fold) is a point that we have fully adhered to here at Distilled, the top elements just below the menu are all bold ‘call to actions’ helping visitors locate the sector they want to learn more about with minimal effort.

One point that initially excited me about the Google website Optimiser specifically is the way the tool manages to speed up the often time consuming A/B split test, by testing more than one item at a time. So you can effectively test two entirely different pages; for example - testing which colour button works best, and any number of other elements on the page. Each visitor will see a different selection of the tested elements.

My one concern with this process is the dramatic change customers must witness if they visit on a regular basis, surely many elements changing even over a short period of time must be disorientating to the regular visitor? Perhaps an alternative method of multivariate testing is less disruptive.

People in general don’t like change, so could this rapid testing process have a negative affect causing a higher bounce rate? An example of when just a small change caused much controversy was Google’s recent introduction of their lower case ‘g’ favicon as apposed to the more widely recognised capital letter ‘G’. This small 16px change certainly annoyed me. Why on earth should the simplest expression of a logo form be a character that is found half way through the word Goo’g'le? The capital ‘G’ certainly made a lot more sense to me.

Google’s new favicon

One way to get feedback on any number of changes to your website is to install Kampyle. This tool basically makes the process of giving website feedback more accessible and perhaps even fun! It enables you to track your customers thoughts, so you can find out why people aren’t converting (or if they hate the new favicon). Kampyle is probably so successful because of the ease with which visitors can use it. Firstly, visitors can rate the website in general by choosing from a series of smiley faces, and then select a category for their feedback. In as little as 30 seconds the user has sent their feedback via Kamplye, and it doesn’t feel like a chore at all. An example of the interface is below:

Looks appealing right?

It is definitely worth visiting the Conversion Rate Experts website for a look yourself at what Google Website Optimizer has to offer, and indeed signing up to Kamplye.

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I love the internet marketing industry. It’s so open and full of love. To that end - this post is all about promoting the blog of my former company Bloom Media.

Now obviously I’m biased since I’m still friends with the guys but although their blog is less than a week old they’ve already put out some great content.

Firstly, Alex (the MD) has written a fascinating piece about how the agency model for implementing web strategies is broken:

I think the problem we face is a consequence of the fact that our industry is still young and consequently there is a gulf in understanding this between the maturing leaders of digital agencies (such as myself) who are now experienced enough to understand business, and the leaders of our clients’ organisations who cut their teeth in business in a totally different age…

… We find ourselves increasingly looking for new ways in which to approach clients to try to drive this change within their organisation and often that means looking beyond the fee based model to payment on results/commission based structures linked to a win-win. Essentially this is a cock-on-the-block gesture from us to the client to show them we really believe in what we are pitching, and this is what it takes to convince them we are worth listening to. If they engage with this approach then we have a platform for a true partnership and can insist on measures such as board/senior exec representation.

While the payment-on-results model has been around for some time it’s interesting to think how this applies to large enterprise clients and how when you’re talking about enough money (which some of these contracts are) the next logical step is for board/senior exec representation for someone from the web agency. If you’re interested you should read the full post here: time for a new agency model

Not content with one good post though, Ketan has already written a killer post on email marketing and in particular I think this flow chart/timeline (warning: PDF) is definitely worth your time.

In short - I think you should subscribe to their blog, they’re fun guys and smart cookies to boot!

Welcome to the social media age guys

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