Module VI: Moving up in the SERPS
1. Thought Leadership
A thought leader is a futurist or person who is recognized for innovative ideas and demonstrates the confidence to promote or share those ideas as actionable distilled insights.
Thought leadership marketing positions your website as an authority and resource on issues of importance to your readership. Thought leadership allows your to act as an “advisor” of sorts to your readership. Therefore, when you make reference to an affiliate link, your readers are more inclined to click it – you’re the expert, and they are looking for help.
You’ll need to appear fearless and bold, willing to make a claim and back it up. There will always be naysayers, but ultimately, even they will help your website. People will test the products you recommend (your affiliate links) to see who was right.
Building credibility and authority isn’t as hard as it may seem. I’ve created 13 steps that will help you prepare yourself and your blog.
a. The 9 Steps of Thought Leadership
1. Take a Stand:
Choose a position and stick with it. Refuse to back down. If someone posts a comment on your website regarding a recommendation you made in a blog, either be ready to argue with your visitor all the way, or simply ignore it. By constantly backing down, you’ll lose your status the expert.
2. Be as informative as possible:
In your content, offer up as much information as possible. Tell your audience something they don’t.
3. Capitalize off your competition’s weaknesses:
Analyze your competitor’s websites. Whatever they aren’t covering in your niche, cover yourself.
4. Have a unique “voice” and “personality”:
Give yourself a professional or casual delivery, and be consistent with it. One of the most popular gaming blogs on the web, Kotaku, gained popularity by allowing its writers to have their own, unique voice. Some of the writers are clearly biased against various companies, and the readership expects and loves it. They’ll flock to the articles created by the biased writer and argue directly with them. This interaction gives Kotaku a personality that feeds the readership and draws even more readers.
5. Start a newsletter
E-mail marketing is one of the oldest forms of marketing on the web.
6. Get a group of avid followers
7. Engage your readership
8. Utilize The Medici Effect in your PR
9. Stay focused, but don’t become stagnant
b. Informational Sites vs. Marketing Sites
The more informative your site, the more likely it is for a visitor to click an affiliate link. Informative sites gain authority with the search engines and rise to top positions in the SERPS. Your website’s top placement in the SERPS subsequently gives visitors the impression that your website is an authority on the topic. After all, someone that use a particular search engine trusts that search engine’s results. In effect, that visitor will be more inclined to trust recommendations (which we know are affiliate links) in the content of your writing.
You’ll want to limit marketing text, as that tends to turn people off immediately. The current consumer base has become increasingly anti-consumerist, meaning they want less “selling” and more “honesty.”
If your niche site’s topic is “blu-ray players,” and you place an affiliate link to a pricey blu-ray player on Amazon.Com, “selling” the product won’t be as effective as “reviewing” the product. Noting both the pros and cons of the product will yield a much higher response rate because you’re giving off a more honest vibe.
Now, don’t take this as a reason to outright lie. Obviously, it isn’t cost effective to purchase every item you want to recommend. Most websites will review the product based off the general consensus of the web. Read a few reviews from Amazon.Com, and note the common praises and gripes about the product and incorporate it into your own review. Some websites will disclose the fact that they never received an actual product to review, others won’t mention it at all. Journalistic integrity is always a grey subject, however, if your information is accurate, you’re giving the visitor what they were searching for in the first place.
ii. Why search engines rank information sites higher
The search engines have recently begun to penalize sites laced with heavy marketing. Why? Because that’s what their users are demanding. At the time of this writing, a search for “blu-ray player” at Google brings up the following listings in the SERP:
#1 – http://www.blu-ray.com – A website billing itself as “your source for everything related to Blu-ray and 3D Blu-ray. We offer Blu-ray reviews, release dates, news and announcements, guides and forums covering Blu-ray movies and releases, Blu-ray players and recorders, Blu-ray drives and media, 3D Blu-ray and 3D movies, home theater, and much more.”
Within each “blu-ray review,” there is a “buy now” button, allowing you to purchase the title you’re reading about. How thoughtful of blu-ray.com! Click the buy now button. It takes you to Amazon.Com. The “buy now” button is nothing more than an affiliate link to Amazon.Com. Every time someone clicks the “buy now” button and follows through with the purchase, the Blu-Ray.Com gets paid a commission.
Even though we know this site is an affiliate link laced site masquerading as a informational source, it still ranks high in the SERPS because the information on the source is most likely, well researched and accurate.
ii. How search engines make the link between a business / marketing site / informational source and how to avoid the penalty
Avoiding the “marketing/business site” penalty is quite easy.
#1. Have lots of relevant, accurate information on your website.
and
#2. If your website is a retail business – do NOT list your address on your website in text. Create an image with the text in it. Search engine spiders can’t decipher letters in an image just yet. Anywhere you want your address, create an image with your address in it and post it.
Every major search engine has a “business search” function. Google’s, for example, is called “Google Local.” Google’s search engine spiders automatically crawl the web, categorizing websites based off a number of parameters. If a business is listed in Google Local, and as the spider indexes your website, realizes an address listed on your site is the same as a business on Google Local, it will categorize your site as a business front and you’ll receive a slight penalty.
Why? Because business websites tend to be laced with marketing text, not the information that a visitor researching a product wants to see.
d. Using Press Releases to add organic power to pages
Well written, organic search optimized press releases can easily drive your website to the top rankings of the search engines and strength your site as a whole.
A press release usually consists of roughly 5 basic elements. Each element should be organic search friendly and contain the keywords you are targeting. Use your Tiered List to determine which keywords you should target.
The 5 parts of a press release are:
- Title
- Summary
- Body
- Company Information
- Press Contact
Title:
When writing the title, be sure to include your strongest keyword.
Summary:
For the summary, in 1-2 sentences, give a synopsis of the press release. Include 1-2 relevant keywords from your Tiered List. To reach a greater audience, you may want to use keywords from a lower tier than the one you pulled the keyword in the title from.
Body:
In the body of your press release, write at least 300 words and try to include 1 or 2 quotes. Choose 3-4 keywords from your Tiered List (possibly one from each tier) and incorporate them into the body.
Company Information:
Give your website’s “pitch” in the company information. Imagine you’re in an elevator listening to an audio advertisement for a website. What would it need to say to persuade you to check them out? Include a link to your website. If all possible, do it in ANCHOR TEXT.
VOCAB WORD: ANCHOR TEXT
The visible, clickable text in a hyper link.
Example: The actual hyperlink to your site reads: “Click here to visit our website.” “Click here to visit our website,” is the anchor text.
Also, you’ll want to include a keyword in your anchor text.
Example: If your website is on Blu-Ray technologies, and “best blu-ray players” is one of your keywords, you may want your anchor text to say: “Visit our website for more information on the best blu-ray players.”
Many PR firms, such as PR Web and Business Wire offer “SEO” package upgrades for releases submitted through them. While costly, these upgrades provide many benefits to assist in your site’s promotion such as backlinks from credible news sites, increased visibility in the search engines, submission to news aggregators like Google News, and potential media coverage.
If you cannot afford any upgrades, be sure to follow the guidelines to writing organic search friendly content discussed in Module IV. Use your tiered list and target your most searched keywords in your press releases.
If the wire service allows you to embed links, send as many links as possible back to relevant pages on your website.
2. Social Media and its Role in the Plan
Social media sites are quickly becoming a novel way to both market your website and connect with your fans in a unique way.
Social media, while a relatively new concept on the internet, has quickly become one of the most embraced new technologies by the search engines.
A quick search for “Coca-Cola” shows that both Coca-Cola, Inc.’s Twitter and Facebook pages both rank within the top 20 search listings.
Facebook has an astounding 1 billion pages indexed on Google – the result of “public profiles” for individuals and companies. These “public profiles” are automatically generated for every new Facebook user unless they specifically choose to opt-out. This was an intentional move by Facebook. They don’t necessarily need the public profiles to promote their site – Facebook can grow simply by word of mouth alone. The reason for creating public profiles is simple: The generation of massive amounts of relevant content and pages. The ingenuity of the public profile system is that the content is completely free. The users are doing all of the work. The public profile is automatically generated from the information the user populates into their private profile!
In a nutshell, every new user that signs up for Facebook gives them even more organic search power. We can capitalize off Facebook’s massive amount of organic search power by creating Facebook pages and profiles for our websites. Facebook recently allowed custom URLs for profiles, and we can use that functionality to target our most powerful keyword.
Example: If Blu-Ray.Com’s strongest target keyword is “blu-ray players,” they could set their URL as:
http://www.facebook.com/bluray.com.players.reviews.and.information/
The URL incorporates the keywords “blu-ray players,” “blu-ray player reviews,” and “blu-ray player information,” along with the name of the website – Blu-ray.Com. Since Facebook ranks high on the search engines, our page is almost guaranteed to show. We’ve successfully used Facebook’s power to pull visitors to a page operated by us, and everyone is happy. Facebook gets another user, Google gets another informative source for its users, and we get a high-ranking link to a page own – which we’ll monetize.
Twitter recently inked a deal with both Bing and Google to incorporate tweets in search results. This opens up a completely new strategies to drive traffic to your website. You can issue a new tweet every time you post new content to your website, which is already monetized. Or, you can micro-review or recommend a product and place the affiliate link directly in the tweet. By incorporating the keywords from your Tiered List, either strategy can be effective.
We’ll need to use bit.ly, a URL shortener because Twitter has a 150 character limit. Bit.ly is very easy to use. Navigate to http://bit.ly and enter the URL you wish to shorten. Click the “shorten” button and you’ll receive a much smaller URL that takes up fewer characters on the tweet and forwards you to the original URL. If you want to customize the bit.ly URL, you’ll need to sign up for an account. Now, Let’s take a look at two examples of using Twitter to drive traffic to your account:
Tweet #1: New Toshiba Blu-Ray Player – 5 Stars, great features – Read More: http://bit.ly/bray2
In this example, the bit.ly link would take us to a review of the Blu-Ray player on our website. The review is monetized via an affiliate link to Amazon.Com, or whatever affiliate program you choose.
Tweet #2: New Toshiba Blu-Ray Player – 5 Stars, great features – Purchase Here! http://bit.ly/bray2
Now, the bit.ly link would forward you directly to Amazon.Com.
Conduct simple A/B testing to discover which strategy works best for you. Sign up for a bit.ly account to track how many clicks each link gets.
3. Link Building
Link building is an often overlooked, yet essential task to moving your site up in the SERPs. As stated before, most search engines are a glorified popularity contest. The way search engine developers see it, the more links to your website, the more informative it must be. Otherwise, webmasters wouldn’t link to your website. Thus, more natural links equals higher placement in the SERPs.
Once upon a time, most link building was automated through programs with the functionality to submit your website to link directories (or link farms, if you’re being facetious).
Search engine engineers caught on, and began de-valuing or even worse, de-listing websites that participated in link farms. Why? The process of adding yourself to a link farm is too automatic – it lacked the human element. Without a human reviewing every link, one could easily submit spam links that appear legit and throw off the search engine’s algorithms.
Now, link building has become a much more difficult process, but it’s still possible.
Issuing press releases and linking back to your website from within the release is an easy, albeit potentially expensive method.
Seeking out other websites that are in your niche, but not particularly a competitor, and either commenting on their content and including a link to your site in the comment, or directly e-mailing the webmaster and asking to exchange links is a cheaper, yet time-consuming strategy. One variant of this strategy is commenting on products at large retailers like Amazon.Com. Find a product in your niche and review it. Post a link to your website at the end of the review.
Directories are easy to come by for some starter links. DMoz.org, Google.com/places, Yahoo.local, and Squidoo are a few listing sites that can be gleaned for their localized links.
Relationships rule when it comes to link building. When you build a reputation of authority in your niche, other sites wanting to promote your content will seek out your pages. Be sure to add content to your site on a regular basis, and promote very relative content of other sites on your site. If you do this right, those website administrators will most likely remember and return the favor when you have content that they want to promote. Interact with your niche or lose your relevancy to them. In another volume, we can discuss advanced link building techniques.
You can also join message boards, Facebook discussion threads, Digg, StumbleUpon, etc.
Use Raven’s “Link Building” tool to track your link building efforts. The link-building tool also comes with suggestions on where and how to build more links.
Anywhere you can drop a link without it appearing spammy, do it. Try and post 5 links a day. They’ll quickly build up.
4. The Finale
This is it.
Now for a recap of the entire process:
- Choose a niche – a topic you’re interested in.
- Locate a web host.
- Join KeywordSpy or find another keyword research tool.
- Choose a fitting domain for your niche.
- Purchase the domain.
- Install WordPress or another content management system you’re familiar with.
- Configure and Develop the Website
- Configure your organic search friendly URLs.
- Prepare your content
- Join an affiliate network or program(s).
- Add affiliate links to your website.
- Apply to Google Adsense
- (Optional) Blog for Profit and/or sell adspace
- Launch your social media campaigns
- Build your links.
- Enjoy the freedom of running a profitable website.
Congratulations! You’ve done what the majority of people in the world can’t – find a dream, pursue your dream, and strive to make your dream come true. The next step is to simply keep working at your website.
The boundaries are limitless. Yahoo! recently attempted to buy “The Huffington Post,” a political blog owned by Ariana Huffington for a rumored $700 million dollars.
The internet is a well oiled machine, and your website is a vital gear. The larger it is, the more efficient it is, the more informative it is, the more visitors you’ll receive and the more income you’ll earn.