In order for your target audience to be able to engage with your brand, they have to notice you first. As the number of messages, advertisements, and other communications we encounter on a daily basis continues to rise, getting your potential customers to pay attention is becoming increasingly difficult. So how can you create a message that cuts through the clutter to capture your audience’s attention, boost engagement, and ultimately increase conversions?

Break The Pattern.

The human brain is designed to notice changes, whether they are in our environment or between what we expect to happen and what actually happens. In his best-seller, All Marketers Are Liars, Seth Godin outlines the four steps in the process of human perception.

The first thing he says we do is look for a difference. If what we encounter matches our expectations, we ignore it. That means if you’re looking to get people to pay attention to you, your message has to be unexpected in order to stand out.

It may seem a little counter-intuitive at first, but the best way to break someone’s expectations is actually to start off by matching them. Because if you immediately show someone a message that challenges their beliefs, there’s no way they’re going to listen.

A Republican could have the most compelling argument and comprehensive set of facts supporting his case, but if he went to a Democrat and immediately said “You’re wrong, I’m right, and here is the proof,” there is no way the Democrat would suddenly become a Republican. The Democrat would find a way to spin the facts to support his side, discredit the information in the report, or come up with another way to justify not having to change his mind.

There’s a name for this, and it’s called Confirmation Bias. It’s a psychological phenomenon that says it’s almost impossible for people to change their minds, once they are made up. Instead, we will find an explanation that makes our experiences “confirm” (hence the name confirmation bias) what we already believe.

Returning to the example of the Democrat, because of his confirmation bias, he will come up with an explanation for the Republican’s report that will prevent him from having to change his mind. Whether it’s finding a flaw in the report itself, or even claiming that the Republican doctored the numbers, he will look for any possible explanation of the situation that fits what he already believes rather than having to change his mind.

So, in order to get someone’s attention we have to break his or her expectations. But if we challenge someone’s beliefs too strongly, or too soon, their confirmation bias kicks in and they will invent any possible excuse to say we are wrong and they are right. So how do you get around this?

How To Break The Pattern To Get Noticed

The key word being pattern, not expectation, and if you want to break a pattern first you have to establish one.

To get around the problem of the confirmation bias and get people to change their minds, you need them to agree with you first. By establishing a pattern that doesn’t challenge the potential customer’s expectations, but instead meets them, you will gain their trust. Instead of seeing you as a threat to their existing beliefs, they will see you as reinforcing them.

For example, you can ask a series of questions related to your product that are all designed to match your target market’s expectations and get them to answer “Yes.” Now their guard is down, they are not feeling threatened, they are actually feeling like your company has the same values and beliefs that they do because they’ve answered “Yes” to all of your questions…so far.

Then comes the punch line. At the end of the series of questions, right when the potential customer’s trust is highest, you ask a final question that gets them to answer in the negative. After answering yes to all of the other questions, they will be expecting to answer “Yes” to this question as well. When they can’t, you’ve broken the pattern, and now you’ve got their attention. And because you spent the time establishing the pattern and building trust with them, it will be much harder for them to ignore you at this point.

The final trick is to make sure that when your potential customers answer “No” to the last question, you can immediately offer them the solution to turn their “No” back into a “Yes.” Now that you’ve surprised them and made them aware of whatever it is they are missing, they will be in a state of severe mental discomfort. If you have a product or service ready to help them take away this pain, there’s no way they won’t seriously consider purchasing.

The Best Way To get Someone’s Attention Is To Do The Unexpected

While it may seem counter-intuitive, the best way to do this is to first create a pattern that is expected by your target market, before strategically breaking that pattern at the punch line.

Citations: The Non-Linking Link?

Before we get into co-citations, let’s define what a citation actually is. For online marketing purposes, a citation is a reference to or mention of a business on a website that can occur with or without an actual link to that business’s website. Think back to your high school English days: for any serious paper, you had to include references to outside sources within the paper. You’d quote a book, paraphrase some information from another source, and so on, usually mentioning where you got the information. Citations online are just like this, except there’s no annoying bibliography to format at the end.

For example, let’s say an online article includes a line saying, “Company A is a great place to buy shoes.” Search engines will see that text and deduce that Company A has something to do with selling shoes. If they continue to find other web content saying similar things like, “I got my shoes at Company A” or “Company A has a good selection of shoes for sale,” then they will be even more likely to rank Company A’s website for shoe-related keywords, even if Company A is not actively optimizing for that term and even if those references don’t link to Company A’s website. This last part is particularly important because traditionally, only linked citations were seen to be of any consequence.

Co-Citations: Birds of a Feather?

Now, the co-citation: Not only do search engines look at mentions (i.e. citations) of a company in the context of a page, but they also look at co-citations, meaning who else is being referenced on the same page. In terms of SEO, the word “co-citation” refers to the analysis of a website based on the popularity and content of other websites that are cited on the same page.

So for example: An article is written about pepperoni pizza, and three companies are mentioned in that article: Company A, Company B, and Company C. Search engines look at the content of that article, see that it is about pepperoni pizza, and assume that the three companies cited in the article must have something to do with pepperoni pizza as well. Furthermore, because companies A, B, and C are cited in the same article, search engines may assume that these companies, and their respective websites, are similar to one another, even if they don’t actually reference or link to each other. This assumption can be further cemented if companies A, B, and C are frequently cited together in other articles.

Capitalizing on Co-Citations

Knowing the importance and potential impact of co-citations, the next question is naturally, “How can I use this to my advantage?” There are precisely a million and one ways to leverage this factor, but fortunately, many of them are similar to common link building techniques. Here are a few ideas to get you started:

• Find articles that cite big players in your industry, and offer the author something that can improve the quality of that article. In return, simply ask that they cite your company as the source. This could be as simple as offering a tidbit of information that’s relevant to the topic, or it could be creating an infographic based on the information in the article. If you can get a link out of it, great, but if not, feel confident that an unlinked citation will help as well. If they’re not keen to go back and change the article, ask if they’ll at least share your contribution on their social media accounts, including of course a link back to the original article and a mention of your company. This technique brings into play some of the social media/SEO stuff we talked about recently.

• If you’re guest blogging to build links, have the post link out to your website, but also mention other highly reputable sites in your industry. For example, if your company sells gardening supplies, you might link out to or at least reference the National Gardening Association, the University of Maryland’s Home and Garden Information Center, and Fine Gardening Magazine.

• Look at your current citation partners. It’s important not only to build new co-citations, but to take a look at your existing ones. Who are you associated with? Is your company cited on any low-quality sites? Are the other companies cited near you related to your business?

• Make sure you’re in the appropriate directories, and that your listing is correct (and formatted properly). This factor is particularly important for local businesses, which benefit from being cited on pages having to do with their target geography.

As of now, citations and co-citations are not believed to be as important as anchor text. However, as with any ranking factor, that could change very quickly, and if you’re looking to prepare yourself for what’s ahead, building quality citations and co-citations is a great way to get a leg up on the competition.

It seems that it can. Way back in 2010 (that’s like the 1980’s in Internet time), Matt Cutts confirmed that Google does use social links a ranking signal. Back when he made that video, he mentioned that these signals were used “relatively lightly,” but he also mentioned the importance of connecting with quality users. Today, social signals are being used much more heavily than they were in 2010, and that idea of user quality has a formal name: AuthorRank.

The Changing Landscape of Link Building

An essential part of any SEO campaign, link building has traditionally focused on gaining links from other websites, meaning blogs, company sites, and personal websites. However, as social media signals have gained importance and influence, so have links coming from social media accounts, and these two traditionally separate areas have merged, as this article on searchenginewatch.com discusses. Social links may be nofollow for the most part, and they may not be as powerful as regular links just yet, but they can still be extremely valuable.

Finding High Value Authors

Knowing that social links can be helpful for link building, the natural next step is to ask, “How do you determine a person’s AuthorRank?” Similarly to evaluating a website for link potential, an author analysis can include a seemingly infinite number of variables. However, there are a few key traits that provide a good indication of their relevance and importance:

• Number of followers – How many people are following or “Like” the author’s Twitter, Facebook, Google+, and/or other social media accounts? On Twitter, you’ll also want to see how many people they are following; it’s best to have the number of followers exceed the number of follwees.

• Follower engagement – When this person posts something, how often does it get comments or retweets? How many comments does it get, and from how many different people? More people engaging with a post equals more importance.

• Posting frequency – This factor is a tough one because it’s somewhat gray. Does the author post/tweet a few times a week, daily, or do they blast their followers all day long? The “best” amount again depends on engagement. If an author can post multiple times a day and still get lots of replies or comments, then they are likely more valuable than someone who posts bi-weekly with little engagement. However, if someone posts less frequently and also gets high engagement, they could be even more valuable, since it will take longer for your shared link to get pushed down by their newer posts.

• Frequency of link sharing/tweeting – Is your link going to be one of a hundred, or is a share from this author a more exclusive privilege?

• Relevancy of posts to your industry – Is the author a thought leader in your industry, or is their specialty unrelated?

• Credentials – Does the author have any “official” credentials, like a PhD or MD? Are they the head of an organization or hold another important position?

• External Websites – Do they have a personal website? If so, how active is it? Are they referenced on any authority websites?

Where Do We Go from Here?

Marketers are already paying for tweets and shares as a method of advertising, but as social signals become a more important ranking variable, we believe that paying for links in social mentions will become as common a practice as buying links on other websites. However, since Google frowns upon buying links, we believe that they will also apply this standard to purchasing tweets or shares, and if an author is found to be essentially “for sale,” the value of links from their posts will decrease. When you’re evaluating an author, this is another factor that should be considered.

Developing relationships with thought leaders in your industry and getting them to share links to your site is one method of leveraging social media, but another and perhaps more effective one is to make yourself a thought leader in your industry (in addition to connecting with others).

Regardless of which way you choose to go, the bottom line is clear: The importance of social networks with regard to SEO is growing quickly, and if you want to have a successful link building campaign, these networks and particularly AuthorRank must be a part of your strategy.

It’s long been known that content “above the fold” is seen as more important to Google than what’s below, but a recent algorithm update has brought back to the forefront the impact that a page’s layout can have on your search rankings. Back in January 2012, Matt Cutts announced that Google had launched an algorithm change aptly named the “page layout algorithm change.” This update was aimed at sites that lack quality content above the fold, specifically those with excessive ads above the fold. On Oct 9, 2012, an update to this change was announced, which Google says only affects “~0.7% of English queries.” Before we get into potential solutions, though, let’s explore what exactly this update means.

What Is Above the Fold?

Remember newspapers? You know, those gray and black things that people used to read at the breakfast table? Well, the term “above the fold” refers to the top half of a newspaper, which is the only visible part of the paper when it’s displayed for sale. The paper’s best chance to catch a potential buyer’s eye is to have compelling content above its middle fold, so this section is a main focus for increasing sales. For websites, “above the fold” means the part of the webpage that is visible without having to scroll, and as with newspapers, it is your best chance to capture the visitor’s interest and keep them on the page.

Screen Resolution

Unlike newspapers, web browsers are not all the same size; the location of the “fold” depends on the user’s screen resolution. The question that arises with regard to the page layout algorithm change is this: How do you know where Google draws the line? The answer right now seems to be that you don’t, but Google does provide tools for measuring where most people see the fold. They currently still support the Browser Size Tool, but your best bet is to use the In-Page Analytics report in Google Analytics to test how your site looks at different resolutions. Both of these tools also allow you to get an idea of how many people are using each resolution, and what parts of the site they can see upon arrival.

What Can You Do?

If your site currently has ads above the fold, don’t panic. A few ads aren’t going to harm you; only the sites with ads dominating the top part of the page seem to be the ones targeted. Now that your heart rate has returned to a normal pace, here are a few things you can do to improve your site’s design with respect to both the recent page layout update and SEO in general:

• Keep ads reasonable – Confusingly for many webmasters, Google AdSense actually recommends putting ads above the fold for the greatest return. But, that doesn’t mean you can go crazy. Limit yourself to one or two ad blocks above the fold, make sure the layout is clear to users, and especially make sure that ads are clearly distinguished from other site content.

• Reduce your header size (maybe) – Depending on your industry, having a big header that pushes down text content may or may not be a good idea. When designing your site, consider what’s going to catch your client’s eye: images, headlines, or both? For example, a home builder may benefit from having a slideshow with pictures of the company’s work, but someone offering marketing services may be better served with a catchy headline. In the latter case, it would be advisable to make the header of that site small enough to allow the headline and good chunk of text visible above the fold.

• Perform Content Experiments – Not sure about a certain change? With Google Analytic’s Content Experiments tool, you can concurrently test user response to up to five different versions of the same page. In addition to testing different layouts, you can try out various headlines, marketing copy, images, and more to see which ones get the best response.

• Remember to connect conversions to page layout – If your page isn’t converting as highly as you would like, don’t assume it’s a problem with the page’s content. Check In-Page Analytics and you may find it’s a visibility issue. For example, if only 50% of visitors are able to see the purchase button on a page without scrolling, try moving it into a region which is “above the fold” for a larger percentage of users before you spend time and money reworking the copy.

These are just a few suggestions for improving your site’s design, and there are countless other techniques for improving a site’s layout. Regardless of what you do, incorporating design into your overall SEO strategy can help you not only improve rankings, but also boost your conversion rates and in turn your sales.

Google SERPs have evolved quite a bit over the years. First was simple text, then came images, videos, real-time results (for a while anyway), and shopping. In 2011, another addition to the Google SERP has cropped up: author information, complete with a link to the author’s Google+ profile and a thumbnail photo. So what is this development, and what could it mean for SEO?

It may seem like just another step in Google’s evolution, but it can also be seen as an indication of a larger shift in Google’s quest to rid its SERPs of spammy or even just low-quality content. Take a look at some of the changes that have occurred over the past year or so:

1: On June 7, 2011, Google announced they would support authorship markup, allowing sites to link their content to a specific author and connect that person’s work across domains.

2: On June 28, 2011, Google announced that they were introducing a new feature to their search results: highlighting content creators. Essentially, this feature expanded upon the previous update with one interesting detail: this time, Google specifically mentioned linking content to a person’s Google+ profile. Once the content is linked, a small thumbnail with a link to that author’s profile appears in the SERPs.

3: Ongoing since 2011, the Panda update particularly emphasized the importance of having high quality content. Aimed at sites with low-quality content, this algorithm update (or perhaps more accurately, deluge of updates and refreshes) increased the importance not only of having quality content, but of having quality authors. This has of course raised the question of what makes a quality author (we’ll get to that in a bit).

4: On April 24, 2012, Matt Cutts announced that they would be pushing out another update, which eventually became known as Penguin. This update targeted webspam, including keyword stuffing, content spinning, and link schemes. Penguin has an impact on authorship because it takes into account who you associate with. Think of it like a high school clique. If your group of friends gets caught stealing, your reputation can also suffer: guilty by association. Similarly, your site on its own may be full of great content, but if your link profile is stuffed with exact-match anchors and you have a high percentage of links from spammy sites, then Google isn’t going to trust you as much, and therefore won’t rank your site as highly. This of course opens the door to negative SEO, which we discussed in an earlier blog post.

5: On October 9, 2012, Matt Cutts tweeted a video explaining Google’s view on guest blogging for links and emphasized that the person doing the blogging can determine the value of the link and whether it’s worth the effort. If the person is an expert in that topic, it is valuable. If not, then not so much.

Based on these developments, it’s clear that Google has expanded the factors they consider when evaluating trust and relevancy to include not only websites but also the person (or people) behind those websites and their reputations. An April 2012 article from SEOMoz explored this concept and concluded that going forward, the power of a link to a certain page or site will be determined not only by PageRank but also by AuthorRank, or as the writer more simply put it: AuthorRank x PageRank = AuthoredPageRank, the “new standard” for determining the value of a link.

Where Does Author Authority Come From?

No one knows for sure how Google calculates authority, but there have been several clues provided:

• Social Signals – A key player in determining trust and authority. Facebook may be Google’s mortal enemy, but it still provides invaluable social signals that can indicate how active and trusted a person is in a certain industry or community. Since Facebook Pages are public, Google can see how many likes that person has, how frequently they post, the number of comments they get on that post, and how often they interact with others on the network. The same can be said for Twitter and of course Google+.

• Personal Websites or Blogs – Does a person have their own website or blog? If they do have a blog, how frequently do they post? How many comments do they get? And importantly, what do they write about? If Google sees that a person is consistently discussing a certain topic, and that others are turning to their website as an authority on that topic, then it stands to reason they would give that person precedence in SERPs over someone without such history.

• Third-Party Sites – Is the individual mentioned on other websites and referenced as an “authority”? On what types of sites are they found? A person who is referenced mostly on websites centered on the same topic will likely be given more authority on that topic than someone who is referenced on websites outside that niche, even if they’re found on a greater number of sites overall.

What Could Be Next?

Knowing the emphasis Google has placed on authorship and trust, what could be next? Based on past events, we think there are a few possibilities:

1: Links from social networks will increase in value, particularly those from industry leaders. Seeking to have your content tweeted by an authority in your niche as a link building technique may become just as prevalent as guest blogging is today.

2: As Google places more value on links from social networks and use the site to determine AuthorRank, Google will analyze social signals more closely. There’s been a lot of talk recently of fake Facebook accounts and fabricated interactions on social networks. If they aren’t already, we believe that Google will begin weeding out or even penalizing the websites that are involved in such schemes, similar to how Penguin pushed down sites engaged in link schemes.

3: Content will really have to “rock” to rank. If you don’t have a reputation already and want to establish yourself as trustworthy, the content you’re associated with is going to have to be great.

It’s impossible to predict what’s under development at Googleplex, and Google’s webspam team may very well change course again. Looking at the past few years, though, it seems safe to say that AuthorRank is here to stay, and any successful SEO needs to include this factor in their strategies in order to stay ahead.

Matt tweeted that the Google algorithm update is only supposed to affect about 0.6% of the English-US queries with the purpose of pushing sites with the following “low quality” attributes out of top rankings:

• Duplicate, redundant, or overlapping content.
• Content that has a high concentration of ads or images that interfere with the contextual content.
• Content that doesn’t provide substantial value to users.

Read more: http://www.webpronews.com/google-panda-update-rolls-out-alongside-emd-update-2012-10

The fact that Google is finally addressing high-ranking EMDs comes as a shock to few, but what is coming as a shock is the amount of webmasters speaking in outrage – or excitement – about the negative movement of their websites in the SERPs.

After analyzing the SERPs over the past few months and in the past week since the EMD update was rolled out, the team at The Link Builders came to understand why many sites are being affected.

Sites That Were Hit By The Google EMD Update

The EMD update at its core seems to be more or less a Penguin clean-up. The sites getting hit the hardest on this update are EMDs that may have slipped through the cracks during the Penguin refreshes.

Using data from our Microsite Masters account we learned the following about the sites hit by this update:

1) Many of these websites were created before April, 2012 (ergo, before the Penguin update)
2) These sites were not drastically hit by Penguin, or they’ve recently recovered from that update.
3) Still has qualities that should have been penalized by Penguin. (i.e. high % of EMD anchors)

As a result, all of the sites we were tracking which possessed the (3) attributes above dropped in ranking when the EMD update went live. In multiple instances sites dropped out of the top 100 positions on Google.

The graph below is for a particular campaign we’re tracking using an EMD for an exact match search query. The website in question has many of the elements that were penalized by the Penguin Update: mainly a high concentration of EMD anchors (60% as per Ahrefs), etc.

From ranking on Page 1 for the exact match term last week, this website stopped ranking in the top 100 SERP results since EMD update was rolled out for 100% of the terms that it was previously ranking for.

Just to clarify, the EMD and search term in the example above is for a competitive geo-based keyword.

Combined EMD and Panda Update

Another reason webmasters are complaining about losing keyword real estate in the SERPs is because the EMD update wasn’t the only major update Google recently made.

Those who don’t understand why their EMD domains/terms would get penalized also need to understand that a major Panda update was also rolled out. The new Panda update was estimated to hit 2.4% of English queries in the US. One big algorithm update right after another, seriously?

The graph below shows a site that wasn’t penalized from the both the original or rolling Panda updates. The content on this website is 99% images above the fold. When the EMD update went live, not only did the site feel it, but it again completely dropped out of the top 100 SERP results for the exact match term.

Additionally, the graph below demonstrates another EMD tracking an exact match query. Once again, this EMD isn’t ranking for 100% of the terms that it was previously ranking for and in this example the concentration of EMD anchor use is 21% as per Ahrefs for this particular domain.

As previously mentioned, although there has been some uproar over the EMD update not many people are surprised. In fact, the most common reason for surprise is the fact that it took Google so long to make an EMD algorithm update in the first place.

How To Get Your Rankings Back

The truth of the matter is that if your website hasn’t been updated to appease both the Panda and Penguin then there isn’t much that can be done, especially if it was an EMD. (Creative 301′s perhaps?)

However, if you have a new website on an EMD, the following measures can help you avoid getting hit by an existing update or increase the longevity of rankings for prevention against future updates.

• Make sure you’re not over-optimizing your anchors in terms of concentration.
• Refrain from excessive internal-linking using exact match anchors residing on EMD’s or sites in general.

Most important, use your head! You can still rank a great partial match domain (that’s branded) the same way you would go about ranking an EMD. When you’re placing less importance on the value of an EMD you’ll be 10 steps ahead of Google.

Don’t be afraid to try something you haven’t done before by experimenting with partial match domains.

On-page optimization and creating backlinks to “get the job done” are pivotal to maintaining visibility through Google’s Penguin and Panda (versions 1, 2, 3…) updates, but social media sites are another key player in gaining more visibility for branded queries.

We’re not talking about purchasing fabricated likes or tweets here. We’re talking about the simple act of maintaining your Twitter and Facebook accounts in addition to using the same backlink strategies you’re using to promote “money sites” and mirroring the same actions to promote social accounts too.

Every company wants to rank their “money site” as high as possible for their target keywords, especially their brand name. The goal is to be the first listing people see, and therefore the first listing they click.

What about the other nine spots on the front page? Do you want to leave it up to chance that consumers will click YOUR particular link out of the 10 presented in front of them? What if your company’s Twitter listing was also on the front page? What about if your Facebook page listing was a few spots below that?

Now you can take up 30% of the real estate on the front page, which is far stronger than only 10%!

Ranking Your Twitter Account

Ranking a Twitter account listing in the SERPs is not difficult. The main thing to remember is to stay active!

Having an inactive Twitter account will not necessarily push the ranking URL down; rather it often inhibits that ranking URL from moving up. When maintaining your Twitter accounts make sure your social media team does the following:

• Make frequent (daily, if possible!) updates to your account using original tweets.
• Retweet/respond to those who tweet at you in a timely manner.
• Follow those who you have something in common with to increase your follower count naturally.
• Use a Twitter handle that’s professional, easy to remember, and matches a desired search query.
• Write a Twitter description that includes keywords (geo-targeted, brand-targeted, product specific)
• Add a link to your website!
• Use a professional profile avatar that showcases your company, brand, or product.
• Update the background image to enhance the user experience by displaying contact info.

Don’t believe these tips will work? Take a look below at case study samples below:

The keyword monitored in the graph above was an exact match to the company name. On July 29^th, our network of Twitter accounts (to be discussed later) tweeted at or used the company name in conjunction with a hashtag to stimulate social activity.

The next day the social media team of that company tweeted back answering our questions and continuing the conversations we started. By the following week, their Twitter account was ranking on the first page of Google for the company’s name. When their social media team stopped responding back to users and posting new tweets, rankings fell back to the second page of Google.

If the conversation was maintained, the drop back to the second page could have been avoided. Explore who is discussing your brand, use industry hashtags when possible, and tweet at your competitors to increase both social and business activities for the brand you’re promoting.

Throw a competitors brand name into a Google search. If their Twitter account comes up see who they’re tweeting at, how often they’re tweeting, and what terms they’re using in their profile description. Learn from others so you can then outrank them at their own game!

Creating a Network Of Twitter Accounts

We mentioned using a network of Twitter accounts earlier in the post. This network is comprised of a group of stand-alone Twitter accounts with distinct likes and dislikes, both male and female, all races, ages, political affiliations, marital statuses, and religions. These Twitter accounts are by no way connected to one another – except that YOU control them all, and their personas.

A Twitter network is a link builder’s best friend. Once the different Twitter accounts are up and have been tweeting for a few weeks (preferably gaining a few followers naturally) then it’s time to create social interactions with the Twitter account you’re trying to promote.

Let’s say your client is a sports equipment company. You’ve made one of your Twitter personas a girl who plays intermural soccer in college. She could reply to Twitter users asking for advice on sports equipment where she can suggest the user checks out that particular sports company by including their Twitter ID in the response. Next, the sports equipment company can thank the intermural soccer player for her suggestion and follow up with the Twitter user who inquired about the sports equipment directly.

Building Links To Social Media Accounts

If creating conversation isn’t enough for you there are other ways of raising your social media account listings in SERPs. Link building is the easiest way of doing so. Creating a strong backlink profile for your social media pages while also updating them shows search engines that this site is reputable and being actively shared with others.

In the graph below our network of Twitter accounts was not used. The company simply tweeted industry facts once a week or so to keep their Twitter active, but abruptly stopped updating their account in the previous month. They did not engage with others who retweeted or actively search for users to converse with. All social activity came to a grinding halt as they were ranked 80^th in the SERPs.

We created high quality social bookmarks to our clients Twitter page on September 16^th.  Within the next two days we saw huge results; the Twitter account was now maintaining a position on the second page of Google’s SERPs after only half a week of building the social bookmarks.

Once again, there was little to no account owner generated activity on the page, yet building social bookmarks to the Facebook page URL that’s ranking was all that was needed influence the positive shift.

Scaling And Replicating

Don’t stop there! Using link building tactics to push authority through your other social media accounts will gain your business more visibility in the SERPs and allow you control more keyword real estate. Building links pointing to Pinterest accounts, LinkedIn listings, and Google+ pages are just a few ways that you can continue increasing visibility for your brand in the SERPs.

The reason negative SEO has suddenly become a hot topic is due to Google’s numerous updates surrounding link building and attempting to define what “unnatural links” are. Many faces from Google have claimed that negative SEO doesn’t work, but just in case… we’ll offer some case studies, how to recognize if you have been targeted by a negative SEO attack, and ways of protecting your site from future attacks.

How Does Negative SEO Work?

Negative SEO is considered a “black hat” SEO technique to attack a website using unethical (and sometimes illegal) means, and thereby having it penalized in SERPS, banned, de-indexed, or otherwise screwed by the search engines in terms of visibility or website performance in general.

There are a number of ways one can use negative SEO to sabotage a website. The following are not condoned by The Link Builders (we believe in karma and professionalism!) but they are helpful for you to be aware of so you can prevent your site from being the next negative SEO victim.

1. Malware/Hacks/Injections – Pretty self-explanatory. A competitor finds a security hole in your website and they exploit it, which in turn can negatively impact the rankings of your website.

2. Denial of Service Attacks – This method uses several different computers to simultaneously flood the target website with requests so that the volume of traffic takes over the website’s bandwidth and essentially blocks service. If the site is unavailable when Google tries to crawl it then it may negatively affect that website in terms of ranking.

3. Google Bowling – This makes Google thinks the site is too spammy by adding links from “bad neighborhoods”, link farms, etc. and finding pages on the site with dynamic URLs that feature the same (duplicate) content and build links liberally around the web pointing to the dynamic URL structures in an effort to draw attention to the duplicate content.

4. Black Social Bookmarking/Black Social Media Accounts – Using social media sites like Facebook and Twitter to create bogus accounts and use them to link back to the website using spammy (i.e. “viagra”, “gambling”, “free warez”, etc.) anchors. This can also be achieved by creating or purchasing an abnormally large amount of likes/tweets pushing an unnatural amount of links or attention to the target website.

5. Falsely Duplicated Content/Website – Create an entirely new website with the same content as your competitor. The trick is to get your website crawled before your competitors so Google thinks the other site is duplicate, not yours. For sites that update frequently, this can be difficult to defend yourself against.

Negative SEO Case Studies

There are a few public examples of negative SEO that occurred in the past year supporting the argument that negative SEO works. Below are the summaries from some of these studies:

• Beginning: Dan Thies publically congratulates Matt Cutts on “squishing all them blog networks”.

• Middle: Dan’s site was bombed with massive scrapebox blasts with the same anchor texts (“seo”, “seo service”, “seo book”, and “Dan Thies”) which in turn led to Google sending him notices of violating Google’s guidelines in the form of unnatural linking.

• End: Dan’s site tanked in the SERP rankings as a result of the unnatural links.

• Beginning: Client asking an SEO company to downgrade their competitors site (JustGoodCars.com) on Google.co.uk that had a PR5, was top 3 for multiple variations of the same keyword. The site had decent content but could have been designed/structured less aggressively in terms of internal linking.

• Middle: The SEO company started blasting the site with thousands of links, then bought Facebook likes, Tweets, paid blogroll links – the works. This was followed by hiring an outsourced SEO to create more spammy links, and forum profile links.

Additionally, they created a fake email account asking sites with good links pointed to JustGoodCars.com to remove them due to the site having a lot of links from “bad neighborhoods”.

• End: After months of throwing every negative SEO tactic they could dream of at JustGoodCars.com, the site was no longer ranking for ANY of its major keywords that it was previously ranking for.

Signs Your Site Has Been Victimized

Asking if you have anyone who would want to cause you harm or want revenge on you or your company is the first and most basic question when discussing negative SEO. If you’re a small to medium-sized business the answer will almost always be yes. There are always other small and medium-sized businesses waiting to take your prime SERP positions.

Keep an eye out for the following:

• If your backlink profile has increased dramatically (1000+ links in one day) where all the new links have the same anchor text or anchors that are completely unrelated to your site.

• Content from your site is now in other places on the web. Create searches from random sentences contained on your website using “quotation” queries. If the exact sentence can be found on article websites or random blogs then chances are you’re being targeted by competitor or a bot that’s scraping your site.

• Manufactured Tweets and/or Facebook Likes or “social signals” directed at your site in abnormal volumes.

• Fake, spammy, or “manufactured” reviews of your site, product, or company.

What can you do to prevent being hacked?

The simple answer is to be constantly diversifying your website, related properties such as social sites, and staying on top of the latest Google algorithm changes. You should also update your CMS when new updates are pushed. Make sure you have no duplicate content on your website, and set up Google Alerts to stay on top of monitoring your company, brand, and target keyword sets. Last, make sure there are no security breaches on your site such as old or outdated plugins lurking.

If you’ve been reading about SEO lately you’ve seen a million things about Author Rank with Google. I love Author Rank because it helps to build your brand since your picture is next to the SERP listing. It can also help you rank blog posts easier as well. Author Rank is also extremely easy to set up. The issue is that Author Rank could actually hurt you at the same time if you’re not aware certain considerations.

Link Farming: If you use Author Rank for all of your sites, especially within the same niche, you have now shown Google that you have a network of relevant sites. You have now shown them that you own these sites and could be using them to gain better rankings. If Google finds this, they can consider it a link farm or manipulative in nature and diminish the value from the links placed within those sites. This is something you definitely want to think about it with respect to Author Rank.

Circles Of Trust: Think about who’s in your circles and if you can trust them. One thing you also do by listing all of your sites in your Google+ account to set up your Author Rank is give them exposure to anyone in your circles. If they know you are successful or think you are, they now have access to all of your listed sites and some of them may try to scrape the content you have written or “scrutinize” your strategies. Not only can this hurt you, but you gave your sites away and may have influenced potential competitors to recognize a unique or profitable niche. Before you add your sites to Google+, think about who is in your circles and if you would be willing to risk your site being scraped, analyzed, etc.

Hurting Your Quality Sites: If you’re not worried about the two considerations listed above, the next thing you should think about is the quality of each of your sites and the content presented on the sites. If you write or post “spammy” articles or blog posts and mix those in with your quality sites, all of the sudden Author Rank may tell Google that although you are an expert in your field and write great content, you may also not be as good as they thought. This could potentially hurt you in the long run as you may not get to rank as well for your quality sites because of the lower quality sites you have in your account or have promoted in the past.

Author Rank is something that is tricky and you really have to consider when you are choosing what sites you want to list. It can definitely benefit you and help to build your brand, but it can also hurt you and your websites as it’s an “identity” platform that’s linked to you personally.

About The Author

Adam Riemer (http://www.adamriemer.me) is an online marketer with over 10 years experience. He’s an Affiliate and runs an Affiliate Management Company the helps companies with their marketing strategies.

Details:

• Duration of Internship: May 28^th (or ASAP) – August 31^st
• Payment: This is a paid internship. Compensation is based on experience.
• Hours: 9-5pm 5 days a week

Responsibilities:

Daily activities for this position will all be a subset of programming.

• Working directly with our development team to create and maintain innovative standalone tools as well as toolsets for multiple industries, occasionally working with an end-client’s website.
• Assist with mapping out projects from scratch, as well as adding features, bug fixes, and streamlining the project from development to production. With our organization there isn’t red tape when trying to get a bug fix out the door, or intentional delays on deployment of code. We think fast, act fast, and deploy even faster.
• Depending on the project, you’ll be working with ActiveRecord, Redis (specifically Resque for job management, but also Redis itself for other various uses), Git (specifically Github), Capistrano, Mechanize, and Typhoeus. Knowledge in each of these is not a requirement, but you must be willing to learn fast.

Qualifications:

• Bachelor’s degree preferred (or working toward one).
• A strong knowledge and comfort with Ruby on Rails.
• A general knowledge of PHP.
• A good grasp of MySQL, possibly also working with Redis or Mongo.
• An understanding of Linux servers. Predominantly Ubuntu-based NGINX/Passenger setups.
• Ability to thrive and excel in a fast paced environment.  Reacting under pressure is important.
• Attention to detail. Algorithmically, analytically, structurally, etc.
• The confidence to tackle larger datasets in various forms in terms of parsing & manipulation to produce an end-result.
• The ability to optimize his or her own workflows and routines to boost efficiency.
• Out-of-the-box thinking and creativity is a must.  We’re looking for the best and brightest!

Strong candidates should possess:

• A strong work ethic and a “whatever it takes” attitude.
• Self-motivation and ability to be a self-starter.
• An outgoing, friendly and enthusiastic personality.  Positivity is a must!
• The ability to break down pending tasks into a workflow & follow it with little direction.
• A passion for “all things Internet”.

We’ve set the bar high, can you reach it?  If you are passionate about development, solving complex problems, scaling code beyond what is normally considered the limit and enjoy being part of an energetic team where your contributions are valued and recognized, let’s talk!

If you are interested in learning more about this full-time internship opportunity, please send your resume and cover letter to Melissa Rubin at hr [at] thelinkbuilders[dot]com and we’ll be in touch soon.

The recent changes made by Google’s Panda update over the past year have changed the way many people strategize their SEO campaigns. What people have failed to realize, as pointed out by April’s Baltimore Affiliate Summit speaker Rob Adler, is that many of the changes that must be made to keep Panda away from your site (and destroying rankings!) are on-page related.

The more recent Penguin updates, are another matter – for now we’ll stick to Panda, which was the topic of Baltimore’s April Affiliate Meetup.

The April meetup marked the one-year anniversary of Affiliate Summit Meetups in Baltimore, which included faces who have been to all 12 meetings as well as marketers from Washington, D.C., Pennsylvania, and Canada! These meetups take place on the last Tuesday of every month at the Buy.at offices in Locust Point, Baltimore. They are open to anyone with an interest in affiliate marketing and online marketing in general. The topics change every month and we’re always looking for passionate individuals to join our conversations or volunteer to present.

Rob Adler, President of The Link Builders, discussed with the group the history of the Google Panda updates, how it has evolved, its purpose, and how individuals can prevent their websites from being caught in algorithm crossfires on Google.

Highlights from the presentation included:

1: Panda updates have been modified more than 10 times since it was released publicly in February 2011.

2: Panda (originally named the “Farmer Update”) was thought to be created for the purpose of taking article directory websites such as WikiHow, eHow, etc. off the front pages of SERPs. Google was attempting to make front page results more user-friendly with less in-content ads and a clearer representation of an answer to the search query.

3: Article “farm” sites like eHow did not lose the anticipated SERP positioning, whereas websites such as Ezine Articles lost the majority of of their front page rankings.

As Rob pointed out, Ezine Articles and other sites that were affected by the Panda Update lacked valuable contextual content “above the fold”. The websites that had huge banner ads, multiple ads and little to no content above the fold were penalized by Panda and deemed as lander or “bounce” pages.

These types of pages usually do not answer the users question and simply push the user to another page via an advertisement which may or may not benefit the user.

To prevent your website from falling victim to continued rounds of Panda on-page scrutiny, Rob proposed the following solutions:

- Take down advertisements scrolling across multiple areas of your homepage that are above the fold.

- Change sizes of ad blocks so they are not the typical sizes of banner space dimensions.

- Place valuable contextual content above the fold as well as below that’s relevant to the topic promoted.

- Remove any huge banners/scrollers/widgets, etc. that take up the majority of above the fold real estate.

Thank you to everyone who attended this month’s Meetup, and a big thank you to Rob Adler for his informative rundown of the Panda updates as of April 24th, 2012.

The Serendipity blogging CMS offers a lot more than what meets the eye. A blog interface with no “pages” (by default) might seem basic to some, but in reality Serendipity offers both the casual blogger as well as seasoned veterans an interface that can be optimized aesthetically as well as for search engines.

Let’s start with the basics; going through the major components that any blogger would want customized and demonstrate how Serendipity allows users the ability to update the look and feel of their blog.

Themes

Every blogger (or business!) wants a unique theme for their website to make it apart from other sites. Serendipity publicly offers over 80 templates, over 20 of which appear by default on the “Manage Styles” screen within the interface. Other templates can be found at the Serendipity Templates Download Center and can be searched by tags to find the style and colore theme that you’re looking for.

For the more advanced user, Serendipity offers “Smarty Templates”; templates that offer custom fields, specific plugins and modifiers, and offer options to allow for modification of PHP code. Serendipity is known for its simple and clean PHP code, which makes things easy for beginners but also allows coders and programmers the ability to make complex changes without much difficulty.

Plugins

Serendipity offers users a plugin/repository manager called “Spartacus”. Once downloaded, Spartacus allows users to simply search and manage all external plugins on Serendipity without having to put changes into effect using an FTP. The Spartacus platform was changed and updated in December of 2011.

The Spartacus plugin is still considered an “experimental” plugin, so users might find some difficulties using it, such as slow or unresponsive searches, and directory privilege changes that still might need to be modified manually.

The thing that makes Serendipity blogs so convenient is that many sidebar plugins are automatically downloaded into the admin interface. If you don’t want the pre-downloaded plugins, it’s a simple command of dragging them off the sidebar in the admin “Configure Plugins” view screen.

Content

The content features for Serendipity are as follows:

• The blog post editing interface offers a WYSIWYG editor as well as a HTML editor.
• Browsable image/media manager and a easy to use image uploading tool.
• Automated comment moderation based on the content contained within blog comments.
• Dynamically managed caching, advanced URL rewriting rules, and customizable permalink structures.
• Serendipity supports XHTML 1.1, CSS 2.0, RSS 0.93, 1.0, and 2.0, Atom 0.3 and 1.0.

The Serendipity website claims no hacks or problems during upgrades and boasts about their central plugin repository. They note these claims as reasons to choose Serendipity over the popular and widely used blog content management system, WordPress.

Serendipity offers bloggers everything they could want from a content management system. While the user interface is simple and plain, it gets the job done. What do you think?

In fact, WordPress.com hosts around 72,223,889 sites and as of August 2011, it’s estimated to host over 22% of all new websites! Other content management systems like b2evolution are simply pushed aside.

WordPress and b2ev have a lot of similar qualities; both offer numerous amounts of themes and plugins, are free for users, and are generally user friendly (although it can be argued that WordPress has an interface easier to manipulate and use).

After spending time on both systems we thought it would be beneficial to list the differences and the pros/cons of both platforms, and ask our readers: Which CMS do you prefer?

WordPress offers pretty basic designs for their themes and many custom themes can be accessed simply by entering search terms while logged-in. The WordPress theme library has one of the worst search functions we’ve ever seen, but if you know the author, theme name, amount of columns, color scheme, etc. you’ll have a good chance at being able to find the theme you want.

5. Multiple Blogs – This was actually an annoyance for us when setting up a b2evolution install (see #3) but in theory it’s a useful function. b2evolution has the capability to set up multiple blogs on different topics and aggregate a selection of the posts on those blogs. For example: if you have blogs A, B, C and D with C being your main blog it can aggregate the posts of A and B onto blog C or restrict content such as photos to remain on certain blogs.

6. Plugins – Both WordPress and b2evolution offer multiple plugins that support all the functionality you can dream of. Both content management systems offer flexibility in this area where integration is as simple as uploading the files through the interface.

The flexibility of b2evolution (by default) and their attention to on-page SEO elements, URL structuring, etc. is light years ahead of WordPress. The cartoon avatars and custom SEO settings are a really nice touch.

There really isn’t a definitive answer as to which CMS is “better” as it’s really determined by the needs of the user or business in terms of functionality, ease of use, and intended purpose. Many users feel that WordPress is more user-friendly, but b2evolution should be considered if having more control of on-page SEO features (by default) is desired.

Social media has evolved in the past fifteen years. It started with Six Degrees, Friendster, and MySpace, matured to Facebook, and now has an even wider reach with YouTube, Twitter, social bookmarking sites, and Google+. With the simplicity of tweeting or updating your status, many times blogging and micro-blogging networks like Tumblr aren’t utilized as much as they could be.

The Tumblr Truth

As with any micro-blogging site, there are pros and cons of using Tumblr as a promotional tactic. Tumblr offers users flexibility when it comes to design and styling options. From selecting a layout to uploading high-resolution images, the creative side of Tumblr is one not many other micro-blogging sites offer.

URL structures (at times) can be considered “questionable” with respect to optimization, although keyword elements are strong and clean for categorization, as is tag usage. Tumblr also lets users enjoy posting in specific time zones and adding links, text, photos, video, audio, and chat features.

Is Tumblr useful for SEO campaigns?

If your SEO strategy involves link building (as it should) then this should be a no-brainier. What Tumblr lacks in regards to integration with other micro-blogging platforms it makes up for with ease of user communication.

If your business has a Tumblr account use these tips to improve reach and visibility:

• Enable the “allow search engines to index your blog” and “promote me on Tumblr”.
• Allow your Tumblr to repost to your Facebook and Twitter accounts.
• Include RSS to incorporate feeds from your other blogs.
• When adding a “link post” add a description that contains a call to action.
• Themes are customizable, allowing you to optimize descriptions, alt tags, keywords etc.
• You can redirect your Tumblr URL to a domain of your choice at any time.
• Search for other Tumblr blogs with tags related to your blog and follow them.
• Be sure to include Twitter and Facebook profile links in the About section.
• Add links to your money site or company blog in the footer or sidebar.
• To better optimize your photos, upload them to text posts as opposed to photo posts.

Many of these tips can be made in the Advanced Settings area of your Tumblr blog. Tumblr might not be the greatest friend of Google, due to the lack of content depth in terms of post style, but it should still be considered a great link building and community building outlet to be used to enhance any well-rounded SEO campaign in addition to other social media platforms.

In addition to discussing Pinterest, everyone at the meeting entered their names to win a DVD of the Affiliate Summit West 2012 conference sessions. Nick Cuttonaro, Vice President of The Link Builders, won the DVD set, but promised to bring it back at next month’s meeting to share with others.

Pinterest is an image sharing and bookmarking site used by individuals all over the world. The big news lately has been on how affiliate markers, merchants, and SEO professionals can use their spike in popularity to develop ways to promote offers or monetize.

Amy Ely, ecommerce acquisition manager at Under Armour, put together a PowerPoint presentation on Pinterest and how different users can best use this new social media site.

Highlights from Pinterest Presentation

Social Elements: Pinterest is as simple to share as Facebook or Twitter. Once a log-in is created one can place the Pinterest icon on any blog next to other social sharing icons to reach broader audiences.

Why Consumers Use Pinterest?: Inspiration! Many people follow their friends, as well as strangers, to find inspiration for recipes, travel ideas, clothing combinations, a good quote, craft ideas, etc.

Affiliate Marketing on Pinterest: A lot of controversy has been surrounding the business relationship between Pinterest and Skimlinks. Amy and other participants of the Meetup discussed how some users pinned an item that has a pre-existing affiliate link and Pinterest used Skimlinks to swap out the original for its own.

In some cases, if an affiliate link was not present Pinterest would add one without the consent of the user. Pinterest is no longer working with Skimlinks as they are currently reassessing their monetization strategy.

Advertisers are also using Pinterest to gain followers by promoting pin competitions. Lands’ End challenged users to create a pin board of their favorite Lands’ End items. Winners received a $250.00 gift card.

Copyrights: What about copyrighted images? What about retail sites whose images are not pin-able? What about websites that simply do not want their images pinned on Pinterest? Amy discussed many ethical questions concerning Pinterest; Rob Adler and Adam Riemer discussed how images should not be direct-linked to an affiliate offer but could rather link to a landing page.

Rob also discussed the idea of watermarking images with copyrights like stock photo websites.

Helpful Pinterest Resources

Pinterest 101 Video: http://bit.ly/pinterestvideo
Pinterest Media Deck by Shauna Causey: http://www.slideshare.net/ShaunaCausey/pinterest-2012

Despite 2011 being another hard year in terms of the economy, social marketing trends continued to grow and rise, birthing new ways to spread news about your website, as well as new ways to track your social media presence. And don’t worry – even those tried and true social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter were swept away by the flow of innovations and upgrades.

Some of the big changes in 2011 surrounding social media were as follows:

• Pinterest came out of nowhere and instantly engaged the minds of women and men everywhere with their easy-to-use image capturing site.

• Google+ appeared on the market in June, although it didn’t offer brand pages until October. It’s still a bit hazy as to what the advantages are over Facebook, although once businesses really start circles (allowing them to key in on certain demographics, interest groups, etc.) there could be a huge growth in user participation.

• Although Twitter originally created their Promoted Trends and Tweets in 2010, the price and popularity skyrocketed around June of this year. The 160-character biz finally understood advertising!

Because of, or maybe in spite of, these 2011 trends, it’s not hard to see where some of the social media trends for 2012 will lie. Many lie around Twitter. The others seem to be around online videos and social media measurement tools.

Twitter’s taste of advertising in 2011 was sweet… and they’re coming back for seconds! With the expansion of the company’s first international office (located in London) for sales, the addition of political ads, the increase in pricing for Promoted Tweets, Trends, or Accounts (although Twitter refuses to publish exactly how much they charge), eMarketer researchers say Twitter will post an estimated $259.9 million in revenue for 2012 – that’s a 86.3% increase from 2011.

Online video popularity is another trend that seems like it will fully blossom in 2012. Did you know Justin Bieber was found by Usher simply from one of his amateur YouTube videos? Plus, who can forget that mind-numbing anthem by the teeny-bopper Rebecca Black that became a national sensation overnight originally found on YouTube.

Whereas most small businesses cannot produce a rap video with a catchy tune to pull in customers, the world of online videos is definitely shifting towards in the right direction for increased SEO benefits and to help increase conversions.

Megan O’Neill, a writer at Social Times and a self-professed web-video enthusiast told Kentucky.com columnist Ann Marie Van Den Hurk that while many online-video trends in 2011 were fun, the most important for next year could be more businesses getting involved. Just as the past couple of years have seen a mass acceptance of social media, with businesses and brands large and small taking to Twitter and Facebook to engage and interact, O’Neill says 2012 will be the year that more brands than ever before embrace online video.

The Rising Popularity of Klout

There’s only so much one can say about a program that came up with its own tagline: the standard of influence online. There was a bunch of issues individuals and businesses had with Klout in 2011, but I think 2012 is the year for them. They’ve finally created a stable algorithm to create Klout rankings, which is allowing businesses to see in real time how their reach, topic selection, and hashtag usage is really affecting their bottom line. With the addition of Perks and the +K’s you can give away to others who influenced you, I see nowhere but up for this measurement tool.

Some might argue that 2012 will begin the era of social media exhaustion, citing the fact that Facebook numbers have stabilized, Facebook ads are not really getting huge click-through rates, and Google+ isn’t making as big of a splash as it was anticipated originally.

What do you think?

Melissa Rubin is the Marketing Coordinator at The Link Builders. Ms. Rubin handles the day-to-day operations of running client campaigns and manages vendor communications. Additionally, she was asked to direct the company’s social media campaign. Her passion and insight with respect to social media has allowed The Link Builders social presence to reach new audiences with the focus of engaging new clients, agencies, and re-sellers.

Ms. Rubin has a B.A. degree in Journalism from the University of Maryland, College Park. After graduating from one of the top journalism schools in the country and working at multiple nationally recognized media publications, Ms. Rubin made the transition to online marketing in 2010.

At One to One Networks, Ms. Rubin’s responsibilities included: web copywriting, search engine optimization, managing social media campaigns, and link building. Ms. Rubin also founded the company’s first internship program. Melissa studied social media and link building trends while assisting with the optimization and growth of an internal network of web properties owned and operated by One to One Networks.

Ms. Rubin proves herself to be an asset at The Link Builders which resulted in Q4 growth in terms of revenue, expense reduction, and streamlining processes. The Link Builders recognize her hard work, dedication, and enthusiasm. We look forward to supporting Melissa’s growth within the Marketing Coordinator position as she takes on additional responsibilities that will come with company expansion.