Here we have another post in our series of young SEO interviews. If you haven’t seen them yet, check out previous ones with Paul Rogers, Anna Lewis and Illiya Vjestica. The idea being to get insight into the minds of young UK SEOs and see what they think about the industry and the future of search.
Today we have Peter Unitt who has been good enough to guest post here before and agreed to answer a few SEO questions. Peter is the Managing Director of Polished Media which is an online marketing company helping small businesses across the UK.
Tell us a bit about your background, how did you get into SEO?
I guess I’ve been involved with computers and the internet since I was a teenager so I was always destined to go into a career which involved one or the other. A degree in Web Media Management from Leeds Met helped me along the way but the first real contact I had with SEO was at my first job for a small website design/software company. I was handed the task to read up on SEO and implement it to company websites. I soon caught the bug and decided to use the knowledge I had gained to join a marketing company with its own SEO department, it was there where SEO became my full time job and it has continued ever since.
If you could go back in time to the start of your SEO career and tell yourself something you know now, what would it be?
I’d tell myself to keep an open mind because things can change rapidly in SEO. In the early days I spent a long time learning different SEO strategies and to be honest the majority of those I have long forgotten about. It’s not a matter of cramming strategies and sticking with those, things change and will continue to so don’t think you know it all, you never will!
Lots of SEOs have the problem of balancing client work and learning new skills and keeping up with blog posts, do you have any tips of making sure you find the right balance?
You’re right it is a big problem and something that I have been guilty of myself. It is important to keep up to date with all things SEO and it didn’t take me long to realise that I needed to spend a fair amount of time reading SEO blogs and learning off others too. Twitter is a great place to keep up to date with things and if you follow the right people you will learn a lot in no time at all and if there is one single thing that you should do then it’s create a Twitter account and get following. Client work should always take priority but if you find that you have no time to do anything else then you need to re-consider your work load. I would say you need to spend a minimum of 15% of your time keeping up to date, whether that is through twitter, blogs or conferences.
When someone asks you what you do for a job, what do you say?
I get asked this a lot in my position and my favourite answer is “Online Marketing” I can then expand a bit on exactly what aspects I work on. Sometimes it takes a while for people to understand it completely so it can be quite a chore sometimes. I don’t often expand any further if I see people losing interest.
What advice would you give to an SEO who is just getting into the industry?
Listen to other SEO’s they will be your best friends when you start out. Gaining experience in SEO takes a long time and you will need to gain second opinions so make sure you have people you know and trust to support you. You’ll find many SEO’s are friendly people and they are not afraid to share what they know.
A non(ish) SEO question, what tips do you have for working better with clients?
Always make sure you keep them up to date on what you are doing and explain things if they don’t understand why you are doing what you are doing. There is nothing worse than having a client left in the dark, this causes trust issues and it is very important that a client can trust you. Communicate!
Finally, how do you see SEO changing over the next few years? If at all.
SEO has changed massively over the last year or two alone, I don’t expect it to continue at that rate it has been but already I’ve seen the need for SEO’s to become more of an all-rounder (perhaps something Google and co were hoping to achieve). You can’t simply employ a certain tactic and expect it to work on all clients, you need to be creative and know your clients business extremely well. In the future I can see that social media will continue to influence and there will be need for even more creative linking strategies, so start getting creative now.
Thanks a lot to Peter for taking the time to take part in this interview, if you want to follow him on Twitter, you can here.
Next up in this series of SEO interviews is Illiya Vjestica. I’m cheating a little here at Illiya probably wouldn’t describe himself as an SEO, which is why I asked him to take part in these interviews – its always great to get different perspectives on the industry.
Illiya Vjestica is MD at Smartdog Digital an Online Marketing Consultancy company based in Yorkshire, who specialise in Web Analytics & Paid Search Marketing. At 25 Illiya setup Smartdog digital, having previously worked for various digital agencies and web design companies in the Yorkshire region. With over 5 years experience in the online marketing industry, Illiya has worked with clients across all sectors from Retail to Engineering.
Tell us a bit about your background, how did you get into online marketing and social?
I have always been messing about with computers and technology since I was about 7 years old, this is the time I had my first Apple Acorn PC. I also have very fond memories of High School being the ‘go to’ Geek if anyone had a computer question or tech problem that they needed solving. It was my one special talent.
During my teen years, I dabbled in a bit of freelance website design work. It didn’t last long however as I didn’t have the patience for coding which was a real shame because there was one point in my life when I actually enjoyed it. As the age old saying goes ‘you can’t be good at everything’ and compared to my other techie friends I was a much more gifted designer, a talent that I still employ to today for my clients, personal work and when doing presentation design.
I got my first break at a Digital Agency in Leeds a few months after I graduated from Uni, funnily enough mere weeks before I had just been offered a rather good job in Bath to become a ‘Studio Manager’ at a Games Development Studio. I didn’t take the job in the end and I am glad I ended up in the online marketing industry instead! It is what I was born to do.
If you could go back in time to the start of your online career and tell yourself something you know now, what would it be?
Don’t believe everything you are told or read in a blog post, it isn’t always A: the truth or B: It might not work for your situation. When I started as an Account Executive, I would probably get through reading about 10-15 blog posts a day. Naively, I used to believe everything that was written as law, especially as I was an enthusiastic, keen, sponge for knowledge. I would tell myself to not to get carried away and test things more before trying out various recommended techniques that I had previously read about.
Lots of SEOs and online marketers have the problem of balancing client work and learning new skills and keeping up with blog posts, do you have any tips of making sure you find the right balance?
Now that is one of the great questions to my life! OK, if I’m being honest with everyone there is no one way to combat this problem, it comes with the territory of the job. My best piece of advice is to try and read one blog post a day about something you don’t know and save the major learning for the weekends.
Twitter can be a great way to keep in contact with everyone in the industry but when I was using it regularly I found myself reading far too many blog posts. The key to juggling this is to put your priorities in order. Focus on your most important tasks first and when they are completed, then you can reward yourself with a bit of Twitter time or catch up with that blog post tutorial you were wanting to learn.
For people who are just getting into SEO and Online Marketing, the best way to learn is to actually throw yourself into the deep end on a client project and learn as you go along. If you are not confident that you can pick it up so quickly, then I suggest shadowing a Senior member of your team and absorbing as much as you can from them.
My first day at a Digital agency consisted with ‘Here’s your phone, account management, time tracking & scheduling software….off you go” it is a steep learning curve but if your passionate about marketing and technology, you will enjoy learning in your spare time, I know I do!
When someone asks you what you do for a job, what do you say?
This is fairly easy to explain to my friends in the industry, however for my ‘non-tech’ friends and family this is what I say. My job is basically like being a Forensic Scientist, instead of analysing crime scenes, I anaylse website data instead. If you imagine the website data as the heart of the website, I look at said data and help clients to measure their marketing campaigns more effectively, advising them what areas they should improve on their website and what traffic sources are generating the best return on investment.
I also help businesses make better business decisions because of that data by making the information easier for them to understand and more relevant to their marketing objectives.
A non(ish) SEO question, what tips do you have for working better with clients?
Here are my quick-fire tips for working better with clients:
Manage expectations clearly at the ouset of the job.
Always document your communication and outcomes with your clients.
Try to educate your clients as much as you can.
Look after your clients and they will look after you.
Don’t always use e-mail for communicating, sometimes it is better to call.
Sometimes you just have to say ‘No’. Don’t agree to do everything.
Finally, how do you see online marketing and social changing over the next 5 years?
Wow, what a great question! I could write a whole article on this myself, but for the sake of this blog post I’ll keep it short.
A number of businesses in the UK currently are still learning and understanding what online marketing is and how it can benefit their companies. Technology has moved on so quickly over the last five years, a lot of businesses are struggling to keep pace. Over the next five years I see this knowledge gap being reduced and more and more companies will be willing to invest their budgets into the Internet. This I believe, will bring with it a greater need for measurement and reporting.
In terms of social, I see it growing even bigger than it currently is. The last time I checked Facebook had 30 million active members in the UK alone and as more businesses and individuals discover the benefits of marketing their business on such communication channels it can only be set to rise.
I wouldn’t be surprised if e-mail and social begin to merge as Google and other companies push for a more integrated online experience, marketing on social media may well overtake other traditional online marketing methods such as paid search as the primary method for generating new customers and traffic.
With such emphasis on social, content is going to be a powerful asset for any business or individual that can ulitise it properly over the next few years. Visual media and video will also increase even further as services like Youtube grow as a viable alternative to researching products and services instead of search engines.
We will also have to be aware of growing online markets such as Russia and China, who’s own social networks and search engines are growing at a rapid rate. This could very much change the way businesses and marketers approach SEO and how they will get their content out to places beyond the UK & US.
So we all know whats going on here, we’re all taking part in a competition to rank for a4uexpo Bavarian Beer and Sausage on stand 50 on Google. But what I’m going to do is tell you why you should go to A4U and maybe why you should go to SEO conferences in general.
There are some awesome speakers at the event including Distilled’s very own Will Critchlow and David Sottimano and Will Critchlow:
As well as other great speakers including Patrick Altoft and Richard Baxter. Here is some footage from last year -
Here are some tips for making the most of A4U as a delegate.
Network, network, network
Whilst the sessions themselves can be great, most of the value from a conference comes from chatting to people around the sessions and in the pub afterwards. So make sure you make an effort to go along to any networking events that are being run.
If you are going on your own, reach out to people on Twitter and see who else is going, then arrange to meetup with people at the event.
Go and speak to the speakers
Quite often, people are worried about approaching speakers after their talks, but there really is no need to be. I’ve not come across any speakers who have not wanted to talk to people after their talks. So if you have any questions, make sure you go and ask them!
Plan in advance
Take a look at the agenda and try to plan out who you want to go and see, if you there are two sessions on at the same time that you’d like to see, try and find someone going to the other session and offer to trade notes afterwards.
There are also going to be lots of people live tweeting and blogging, so try to get hold of the official hashtags and keep an eye on them for anything you may have missed.
Take business cards!
I always forget this one. If you are going to a conference and want to network, make sure you take along some business cards! Particularly if you are looking to find an SEO job or even hire an SEO or an agency. It just makes you look that bit more professional and saves you having to fiddle with your phone to store someones details.
Following on from last weeks young SEO interview with Paul Rogers, today we have Anna Lewis talking to us about SEO. I first met Anna at Brighton SEO back in the day when it was just 30 people on the top floor of a pub. Suffice to say, Kelvin has made it a bit bigger since then!
Anna is a Digital Marketing Executive working for Koozai, a digital marketing agency with offices in Southampton and London. You can follow her on Twitter here.
Tell us a bit about your background, how did you get into SEO?
I had no idea what SEO stood for when I went for a job as a Junior Online Marketing Assistant, which in reality was a link building role. During the interview SEO was explained and I knew it was exactly what I wanted to do. I’d touched on search marketing during my degree in Advertising but had no idea you could have a career in it. All I’d done was work on an advertising brief given by a friend at Unicycle.com to improve his website results – this mainly involved working on his AdWords account and suggesting he include keywords in the Meta on his site.
Having an interest in the online world and being techy, analytical and creative managed to get me the job, I was taught some basics but joined Twitter and found it to be an invaluable resource which has enabled me to learn a massive amount and meet some awesome people in the industry.
You are very into Analytics, what is it that makes it such an interesting area for you?
The first time I saw a positive uplift in the traffic statistics for the keywords I’d been targeting was probably a life changing moment for me. Ok, that’s a bit melodramatic, but I’m sure anyone who’s seen traffic or ROI increase as a direct result of something they have done will be familiar with the pride and satisfaction of your hard work. From the first time I clearly saw this I wanted to understand the numbers more, in order to be able to make them increase even more. I started playing around with all the areas in Google Analytics that most people in the office left untouched. I also combined this with Excel and increased my capabilities in order to work with the data more effectively. I also loved that however much I learn and implemented there is always a lot more to learn and try out, working on new ways to get websites to make more money and be more successful.
Soon after I started at Koozai and they found out how enthusiastic I was about spreadsheets and data I was given the role of managing the Analytics for our website and helping others if they ever got stuck with analytics or spreadsheets. For a while I was the geekiest in an office of geeks, until another geek joined and we combined brain power to make clever spreadsheets using the Google Analytics API to save everyone time. Building a report interface with the data you choose and knowing how to pull it all together is something I’m proud of, and I’m sure my parents would be proud too if they understood a word I was saying.
If you could go back in time to the start of your SEO career and tell yourself something you know now, what would it be?
Make the most of every opportunity to learn and meet new people in the industry. Our industry is so fast moving and friendly that you have to stay on your toes and there are so many great people that it’s a very enjoyable industry to work in if you join in actively.
The other advice for myself would be to get over my fear of using the phone sooner, I’m ok with it now but used to really dread it.
Lots of SEOs have the problem of balancing client work and learning new skills and keeping up with blog posts, do you have any tips of making sure you find the right balance?
I often need distractions from big tasks to keep me on track, it sounds strange but my brain can’t do one task for too long without taking in other things. So for me when I start to lose concentration I have a quick look at emails and twitter and open a few links to resources. I often won’t read everything I open, it’s more like building up a library of bookmarks to go through when I have more time later in the day. It doesn’t work for everyone but it keeps me up to date and productive all day long.
Koozai are great in that we have time for development and projects every month, so if I learn something that I want to have a go at implementing but can’t do it on a client initially I know that I can schedule it in to my dev time.
When someone asks you what you do for a job, what do you say?
“I work on websites to help them get better results in the search engines, which involves tweaking the code of my clients sites and identifying other website which might be able to link to my clients.”
If the person I’m talking to nods along with a look of understanding I might even mention the term SEO!
What advice would you give to an SEO who is just getting into the industry?
Never believe everything you read, but make sure you read a lot and ask lots of questions.
Also, always understand what your client wants to get out of the project at every stage, if you don’t know their objective you can’t succeed. Once you do know their objective, it is always important to manage the expectations and explain how your actions will help achieve their objective as there’s a lot of stuff happening between building links and making more money and so many different things a client might want to use to monitor success.
A non(ish) SEO question, what tips do you have for working better with clients?
As above, make sure you know the expectations and objectives of your client and each person you speak to within the company as they will all have slightly different main objectives.
It’s also good to expand on the question Hi How are you?, your clients are human too so it’s good to be friendly before talking business, it only takes a couple of extra words, for people who started their career afraid of the phone it can take a while to get used to, but a bit of small talk goes a long way. I also make sure I speak to every client on the phone at least twice a month, where possible. If you have that target you’ll never get to the stage where you realise you haven’t spoken to them for ages, you’ll always be up to date and they’ll always be reassured that you’re thinking about them. The larger the clients the more you will need to speak to them though, so keep two as your absolute minimum.
Finally, how do you see SEO changing over the next few years? If at all.
More and more people are understanding technology, so SEO is attracting people with more marketing and communication strengths which is helping it converge with full advertising campaigns. I think the increased awareness and interest in the internet and modern technology is helping the industry gain awareness and it’s also creating new opportunities for our clients. Personally, I think it’s an exciting time for our industry and I can see it continuing to grow, I just hope that we can maintain the friendly network that we have now.
This post is part of a series of posts which were partly inspired by the Young SEO of 2011 vote run by Dan Taylor on Search Bloggers. I’d been thinking of doing some interview style posts for a while and this gave me the idea for an angle.
Basically I’m looking to get some insights from young SEOs who are doing SEO day to day in their roles. So here is the first interview which is with Paul Rogers of GPMD.
Tell us a bit about your background, how did you get into SEO?
When I left education, I worked in an in-house marketing/PR role which required me to work closely with a web agency called GPMD (the agency that I currently work for), who taught me the basics principles of SEO, which I loved! Following a relocation to Warwickshire, I left this position (after just 7 months) and went to work in a copywriting role for a PR agency, who ignored my frequent suggestions of providing online PR and SEO services to our clients – so I began searching for an in-house SEO role where I could develop my understanding of the industry.
After around 8 months working for the PR agency, I was offered an E-Marketing Executive role in a small but ambitious outdoor toys and sports equipment retailer based in Oxfordshire. Having been offered two roles on the same day, I chose to take this job because they offered me freedom to do what I wanted (SEO-related) with their 10-15 ecommerce websites.
In January 2011, the agency that I worked alongside in my first job (GPMD) contacted me and asked me if I wanted to come in for an interview, as they were recruiting for a new Online Marketing Specialist – I then accepted their job offer the next day. I am now working for GPMD as a Senior Online Marketing Strategist, having been promoted in August 2011.
If you could go back in time to the start of your SEO career and tell yourself something you know now, what would it be?
Do fewer projects/campaigns, but spend more time reaching out in the right way to the right people. Also, think more long-term with strategies and only work with people that are fully behind what you’re doing.
Lots of SEOs have the problem of balancing client work and learning new skills and keeping up with blog posts, do you have any tips of making sure you find the right balance?
I have learnt a huge amount about SEO over the last 12 months, mostly because I’ve spent more time following blogs, paid closer attention to Twitter and attended conferences and meetup events more frequently. I would always recommend getting your colleagues on-side early on – justify spending that 15-30 minutes every day following what people are saying, and explain how it will ultimately influence the ROI that you provide to clients.
In addition to this, I would also advise any SEO to dedicate a similar amount of time to learning and developing their skill-set in their own time – this could be learning to code, conducting SEO-related experiments, blogging or even just talking to people.
When someone asks you what you do for a job, what do you say?
Once we’ve got the whole “what’s SEO?” thing out the way, I will generally say something like “I make websites more visible within search engines and generate more traffic and sales” – although I do often try to talk about it in more detail, but people tend to get bored pretty early on.
What advice would you give to an SEO who is just getting into the industry?
Whether in your own time, lunchtimes or at work – speak to people and ask lots of questions (on Twitter, at events/meetups in the SEOmoz community etc), identify and follow the right blogs, make your own blog and dont get too worked up if you don’t see results straight away (something I was definitely guilty of).
A non(ish) SEO question, what tips do you have for working better with clients?
I have taught all of my clients the basic principles of SEO, and have tried to get as many people as possible involved in link-building and content-writing – so they can see what I’m doing. Not only does this help to keep them on-side, but their experience and existing relationships are great for generating links and linkworthy content.
I also find that if I’m honest with my clients, ask their opinions on things and make sure they know what I’m doing, they’re more open to investing additional time and money into new projects and strategies.
Finally, how do you see SEO changing over the next few years? If at all.
I would like to think that some of the less natural techniques that people apply will become less effective – as I frequently find myself battling for number one spots with websites that don’t have a single decent, related link. I would also like to see Google using other signals to determine brands and putting less emphasis on exact-match keyword domains.
Thanks a lot to Paul for taking the time to answer these questions, you can follow him on Twitter here.
Google are testing so much right now, I may have just missed this and it may have been out a while. But I’ve just noticed them pulling out the number of products on a page and displaying that number in the search snippet. Here is an example from a search I did for “air con units” -
Here is the bit of the page Google are pulling that information from -
Its interesting that Google seem to have ignored the brackets as it makes the snippet not quite 100% correct. Time will tell if Google are rolling this out more, I’ve not seen it on any other sites yet.
I’ve been meaning to write this post for a while now and I’m sure the title will grab the attention of any remaining PageRank lovers out there. This post isn’t intended to provoke a reaction from anyone (although I’d love to hear your opinions), this post is meant to save people time on worrying about something that you can’t accurately measure.
I want to slip in a quick caveat before people jump straight to the comments and shoot me down. I think that PageRank can be a useful metric to keep an eye on, I’ve been the same as everyone else and when talk of a PageRank update surface, I’ll go and check some of my sites. I’ll also use it sometimes when doing some top level analysis of a sites structure and architecture. But I certainly do not rely on it as a metric to influence my decisions for SEO campaigns and tactics. I can probably sum it up by saying the following -
I use PageRank as an indicator of what Google thinks of page, I don’t use it as the truth
The prompt to write this post came about when someofmy team at Distilled were discussing running a test on the flow of PageRank. I love hearing them talk about testing stuff, I’ve done my own PageRank tests in the past. But I had to voice my opinion which was that any test that involves the use of PageRank as a key metric is ultimately flawed. Why?
Because you do not know what the PageRank of any given page is at the current (or when the test finishes) point in time
But what about this:
That is NOT the Google PageRank of the page you are looking at. It is a snapshot of what the Google PageRank was at the time of Google pushing the data out to their Toolbar. It has also been rounded off – real PageRank is in fact the output of a complex calculation that does not nicely equal a whole number.
Part of me is actually hoping that someone out there can prove me wrong and show me that PageRank can be reliably and accurately measured. I’d love to see an example.
PageRank is also a fluid metric, it changes constantly and the only people who see this are Google themselves – and probably Matt Cutt’s cat
Think about it this way. If, shortly after I publish this post, I get a link from the homepage of the BBC and a link from the homepage of NASA, what will my PageRank be? According to the Google Toolbar, it will probably be N/A or 0. But both of these pages are PR9. But whenever Google next crawl the links to this blog post, they could give it an immediate ranking boost by flowing the PageRank. But I’d have no idea what my PageRank actually is until the next Toolbar update which could be months away.
So when you cannot reliably measure a metric, you cannot use it as the basis for testing. Yes you can use it as an indicator, but in my opinion, you can’t use it to backup your claims on certain SEO tactics.
Something you CAN measure which is almost the same and more useful
Crawl stats. Matt Cutts confirmed that your PageRank can influence how often and how deeply Google crawl your site:
“There is also not a hard limit on our crawl. The best way to think about it is that the number of pages that we crawl is roughly proportional to your PageRank. So if you have a lot of incoming links on your root page, we’ll definitely crawl that. Then your root page may link to other pages, and those will get PageRank and we’ll crawl those as well. As you get deeper and deeper in your site, however, PageRank tends to decline.”
Why not use your own crawl stats as a measure of which pages Google see as most important? It makes sense that Google crawl more important pages more often because of the sheer links pointing at them. You can then take this data and cross reference it with the pages that are getting organic traffic from Google.
Even better, you can see which pages Google are NOT crawling as much and see why. Perhaps they are not linked to well internally, perhaps they have no external links. Either way, you can take reliable data from a test such as this and be pretty confident in the results and your chosen action.
I’d love to hear everyones opinions on this and if someone can prove they can measure PageRank accurately and reliably enough to make it the basis of an SEO test, please let me know!
I’m a big fan of Buzzstream. I’ve been using it for a few years now and have seen it improve year on year. I’ve written a more generic Buzzstream review if you want to get an overview of the tool. This post is more focused on the practical uses of Buzzstream, in particular using Buzzstream as a searchable database of link targets for your link building team.
There are two ways to populate Buzzstream with link targets, you can use the Buzzmarker to add links one at a time, or you can import a spreadsheet of link targets in one go. I’ll discuss both methods and share some tips on the best way to use each one. Before that, we need to understand how the Custom Fields section of Buzzstream works, as we will rely upon these later.
Buzzstream Custom Fields
By default, you can add lots of attributes to the links targets to add to Buzzstream. Here are some examples of the things you can tag a link with when you add it to Buzzstream -
These are fine to start off with, but for am efficient, searchable database of links, we need to get a bit more detailed with the way we tag links. This is where custom fields come in.
Buzzstream allows you to add custom fields on three levels – a person, link partner (which is the domain) and the link itself. Which can be a page on a domain. In this example, I’m going to use the link partner option as an example. A link partner could be one of the following -
Paid directory
Free directory
Social media profile
Blog Comment
Competition site
I can add a custom field for each of these, which then means I can filter the database by “competition site” and instantly get a list of competition sites that I can get links from.
Adding custom fields is really easy and really flexible in Buzzstream so I’d recommend it. Once you’ve added the custom fields that you want, you need to populate the database with each type of link. This is where the Buzzmarker and importing spreadsheets come in.
Adding Link Targets Using the Buzzmarker
When you first setup Buzzstream, you should add the Buzzmarker to your browser which allows you to add websites to Buzzstream as you browse the web.
It is important that when you add link targets to Buzzstream using the Buzzmarker, that you tag them with the appropriate custom fields. If you don’t, then they are not going to be searchable. This isn’t that difficult for a very small team of link builders to do. But if you have a large team of people in different offices, you need to make sure that everyone knows the importance of doing this. So its worth doing some internal training and videos to make sure everyone uses the Buzzmarker and custom fields correctly.
Adding Link Targets Using a Spreadsheet
This is great option for getting lots of link contacts into Buzzstream quickly. For example you can import a list of quality paid directories and add a custom field to all of them. Do this with each of the different custom fields and you’ll soon have a nice selection of link targets, all tagged and searchable by all of your link building team.
There have been numerousexperiments to see whether or not two links on the same page to the same URL, both pass anchor text value to the linked to page. In the true spirit of an SEO, I wanted to test this myself.
If you work in SEO, I’d highly encourage you to do your own testing. There are loads of great SEO blogs out there that give you great info, but you can’t beat doing your own thing and verifying what people say for yourself.
Before
29th December 2010 this is how the link looked:
As you can see, very simple. One text link saying “Andy J Davies” which linked to the URL:
http://www.andyjamesdavies.com/experiments/svg/
This page did NOT rank for this keyword before I put this link live. It is actually a very new page and doesn’t rank much for anything.
After the link went live, that exact page started ranking 8th in Google.co.uk for “andy j davies”:
What I did next -
I edited the blog post and inserted another link to the same page, but using different anchor text:
So both links are going to the same page.
After
So after a few weeks, the results changed. Andy’s site stopped ranking for “andy j davies” and started ranking for “a test on SVG images” -
For me, this is pretty conclusive. I know some may argue that this wasn’t that scientific. But I’m happy with this outcome.
So I’ve just verified what others have said, but the bottom line is that you should be testing this stuff yourself.
I often get asked what link building tools I use and some people are surprised when I say “not many”. Whilst I have definitely used a number of tools over the years, I genuinely struggle to think of tools that I use every day on client projects.
I do mention a few link building tools on my blog from time to time, so if you are looking for “real” link building tools, I’d suggest you start there. If you are looking for the Perfect Link Building Tool, I don’t think it exists – not publicly anyway.
There are so many link building tools out there, many of them are fantastic, but I’d never call any of them perfect. This isn’t a dig at the tools, its just we are all different, our approach to link building is different, a tool can’t possibly satisfy everyone enough to call it perfect.
What I think is the best link building tool – your mind.
I know that I’ve just disappointed a huge number of people, some won’t read any further than this, but meh, I’m being honest!
I’ve talked before about what I call the SEO gut feeling. I believe that the same principles apply to link building. You just can’t beat that instinct you have when you can look at a webpage and know the answers to two questions within a few seconds -
Is this site worth getting a link from?
Do I stand a chance of actually getting a link from this site?
If you can answer these two questions, you’ve just done something that a link building tool can’t. Sure, there are tools out there that can kind of answer the first question. I’m not aware of one that can answer the second question.
But think about it, these are the only two questions a link builder has to ask themselves right? What else is there? Yes you can get into more detail about anchor text, deep link possibilities, link metrics, but really, do you need to make it so complicated?
Some link building tools will be able to measure how strong a page is and filter out ones that you may not want a link from. This is a great time saver, however you still have to make a judgement call on the sites that are not filtered out. I’d be very wary of doing outreach to a bunch of sites that a tool finds which I don’t then look at manually.
When looking at link targets manually, there is a key problem – it takes time. Prospecting link targets manually is a big job and can take a lot of time. This is why having that gut instinct is so important, if you can answer my two questions within a minute or two, then you can actually get through quite a few in an hour.
This kind of gut instinct takes time, I’ve been doing SEO full time for over three years now and I’m still learning. However, I’m pretty confident in my ability to quickly answer the two questions above. You only get this by experience and working day in, day out in SEO.
The problem with this, is that many SEOs are still looking for that magic bullet, the quick fix or the secret to link building. One of my end points at Link Love was that there is no secret, its just a case of getting your hands dirty and getting shit done.
If you are one of these SEOs, spend a few days or however long you want doing the following -
Choose one site and get 10 links to them
Don’t use any link building tools
Use your personal email address and name
Make a judgement call as to whether the site you want a link from is a quality one
Developing your Skills and Gut Instinct
I still consider myself to be a bit old school when it comes to learning stuff. For example, I still believe that every SEO should go through the task of boring directory submissions and copywriting before being allowed anywhere near a tool or outsourcing service that can do these! I think its essential to do tasks manually so that you understand the fundamentals of what makes that task work. I also recommend that anyone in SEO builds a site using only Notepad and an FTP tool – trust me, you’ll learn more than you can imagine about the correct way to build a website.
In light of this, I wanted to give some actionable tips for anyone who is just starting out in SEO, or is just looking to improve their current skillset in link building.
1. Choose a site to get links for – don’t change a thing on it
It is absolutely vital to learn to link build without the ability to change a clients site. Yes it is hard, yes its not as effective, but if you can do this, you can link build to any site. Take a look around the site you have, see what you have to work with. There may be very little or nothing, so you may need to get creative with what sites you’re going to target to get links from.
2. Use the phone to link build
I hate using the phone, I’ve got better in recent years but deep down, I don’t like it. But it can be very effective when link building and much more efficient. In terms of building relationships, you really stand a better chance if you chat on the phone or meet in person.
Give it a try. Yes its hard but you can learn a lot by doing this.
3. Don’t obsess over anchor text
Whilst I still think anchor text rules, I think that over time, Google are dampening its effect. I wouldn’t be surprised if they are moving the needle more towards raw trust of a link rather than anchor text. I’m probably wrong, but anyway, the point here is not to obsess over it.
Don’t ruin your chances of getting a good quality link by being too cheeky and asking a link target to give you exact match anchor text. Just concentrate on getting good quality links.
If you are looking for more info on getting started in link building, then I’d also recommend taking a look at Wil Reynolds and Wiep.
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