This is a guest post from Tad Chef  (Onreact), you can check out more of his blogging on SEO 2.0 and over at SEOptimise.

Over the years Google has maintained that inbound links can’t hurt your site yet many webmasters get notified via Google Webmaster Tools of “unnatural links” when they get penalized. What are unnatural links and how can you spot them? Aren’t all links great? How to prevent an epic link building FAIL?

The bad news: Not all links are created equal, some of them are evil. The good news: We know how the evil links look and we can spot them. There are even tools which assist you with this task.

As we all know good natural links grow on trees, so to say.

As on the Web there are no trees, unless in games like Farmville, you have to grow your organic links on websites. Unlike organic food sadly websites do not have clear badges proving that a site has certified organic links. Some sites may boast they have such links but you have to check and find out yourself whether it’s true.

Here are 5 kinds of links you don’t want like you don’t want to feed your newborn genetically modified Frankenfood.

100.000 site wide footer links – Unless your name is WordPress or Joomla nobody will believe you 100k footer links are organic, not even Google.

out of context exact match anchor text links – Imagine somebody asking for your name and you answering “best SEO company London”. Does that sound natural? So consider not getting after artificially sounding anchor text links on places like your aunts yoga studio.

10.000 nofollow blog comment links – Do you like spam? Do you like reading blog comment saying things like “Hey, exceptional weblog. I like your design. I recently got carried out with cosmetic classes and want to initial my own personal site. Thank you for the truly great publish!” on a site that does have nothing to do with cosmetics? Now imagine how natural it looks when you spread them all over the place?

juicy xxx site links – Unless you sell these images of three legged bald teens showing off their feet you don’t really want to get links from adult sites. Also cheap herbal online poker won’t help you much and they might look just a bit unnatural when they link to your car dealership.

obvious paid links – Paid links are evil Google says. SEO practicioners aren’t so sure as they don not even know exactly what paid links are in some cases. I know, not everybody can be a famous SEO guru like myself and thus spot paid links from afar. Nonetheless you have to shun obvious paid links. Where the site says sponsors, or even donations, has PageRank 7 or higher and your rich anchor text link is in Bulgarian instead of English like the rest of the site the link is probably paid. I know it, you know it and everybody else who can see and report it does know it as well.

So now that you know what to look for how can you do it without having to spend ages on checking your links? Well, I use the impressive link building tools by cognitiveSEO. You can use a plethora filters to search for

• anchor texts
• xxx links
• footer links
• nofollow links
• high PageRank links

among others.

You may not yet get notifications for all of the above mentioned “unnatural links” but you can rest assured that they do not affect your site positively. So you better find out before Google does.

* CC image by Organic Nation.

This is a guest post from the elusive SebastianX , you can read more of his rants on his excellent blog Sebastian’s Pamphlets.

So Gareth James asked me to blather about the role of IP delivery in geo targeting. I answered “That’s a complex topic with gazillions of ‘depends’ lacking the potential of getting handled with a panacea”, and thought he’d just bugger off before I’ve to write a book published on his pathetic UK SEO blog. Unfortunately, it didn’t work according to plan A. This @seo_doctor dude is as persistent as a blowfly attacking a huge horse dump. He dared to reply “lol thats why I asked you!”. OMFG! Usually I throw insults at folks starting a sentence with “lol”, and I don’t communicate with native speakers who niggardly shorten “that’s” to “thats” and don’t capitalize any letter except off “I” for egomaniac purposes.

However, I didn’t annoy the Interwebz with a pamphlet for (perceived) ages, and the topic doesn’t exactly lacks controversial discussion, so read on. By the way, Gareth James is a decent guy. I’m just not fair making fun out of his interesting question for the sake of a somewhat funny opening. (That’s why you’ve read this pamphlet on his SEO blog earlier.)

How to increase your bounce rate and get your site tanked on search engine result pages with IP delivery in geo targeting

A sure fire way to make me use my browser’s back button is any sort of redirect based on my current latitude and longitude. If you try it, you can measure my blood pressure in comparision to an altitude some light-years above mother earth’s ground. You’ve seriously fucked up my surfing experience, therefore you’re blacklisted back to the stone age, and even a few stones farther just to make sure your shitty Internet outlet can’t make it to my browser’s rendering engine any more. Also, I’ll report your crappy attempt to make me sick of you to all major search engines for deceptive cloaking. Don’t screw red crabs. Related protip: Treat your visitors with due respect.

Geo targeted ads are annoying enough. When I’m in a Swiss airport’s transit area reading an article on any US news site about the congress’ latest fuck-up in foreign policy, most probably it’s not your best idea to plaster my cell phone’s limited screen real estate with ads recommending Zurich’s hottest brothel that offers a flat rate as low as 500 ‘fränkli’ (SFR) per night. It makes no sense to make me horny minutes before I enter a plane where I can’t smoke for fucking eight+ hours!

Then if you’re the popular search engine that in its almighty wisdom decides that I’ve to seek a reservation Web form of Boston’s best whorehouse for 10am local time (that’s ETA Logan + 2 hours) via google.ch in french language, you’re totally screwed. In other words, because it’s not Google, I go search for it at Bing. (The “goto Google.com” thingy is not exactly reliable, and a totally obsolete detour when I come by with a google.com cookie.)

The same goes for a popular shopping site that redirects me to its Swiss outlet based on my location, although I want to order a book to be delivered to the United States. I’ll place my order elsewhere.

Got it? It’s perfectly fine with me to ask “Do you want to visit our Swiss site? Click here for its version in French, German, Italian or English language”. Just do not force me to view crap I can’t read and didn’t expect to see when I clicked a link!

Regardless whether you redirect me server sided using a questionable ip2location lookup, or client sided evaluating the location I carelessly opened up to your HTML5 based code, you’re doomed coz I’m pissed. I’ve just increased your bounce rate in lightning speed, and trust me that’s not just yours truly alone who tells click tracking search engines that your site is scum.

How to fuck up your geo targeting with IP delivery, SEO-wise

Of course there’s no bullet proof way to obtain a visitor’s actual location based on the HTTP request’s IP address. Also, if the visitor is a search engine crawler, it requests your stuff from Mountain View, Redmond, or an undisclosed location in China, Russia, or some dubious banana republic. I bet that as a US based Internet marketer offering local services accross all states you can’t serve a meaningful ad targeting Berlin, Paris, Moscow or Canton. Not that Ms Googlebot appreciates cloaked content tailored for folks residing at 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, by the way.

There’s nothing wrong with delivering a cialis™ or viagra® dealer’s sales pitch to search engine users from a throwaway domain that appeared on a [how to enhance my sexual performance] SERP for undisclosable reasons, but you really shouldn’t do that (or something similar) from your bread and butter site.

When you’ve content in different languages and/or you’re targeting different countries, regions, or whatever, you shall link that content together by language and geographical targets, providing prominent but not obfuscating links to other areas of your site (or local domains) for visitors who –indicated by browser language settings, search terms taken from the query string of the referring page, detected (well, guessed) location, or other available signals– might be interested in these versions. You can and should group those site areas by sitemaps as well as reasonable internal linkage, and use other techniques that distribute link love to each localized version.

Thou shalt not serve more than one version of localized content under one URI! If you can’t resist, you’ll piss off your visitors and you’ll ask for troubles with search engines. This golden rule applies to IP delivery as well as to any other method that redirects users without explicit agreement. Don’t rely on cookies and such to determine the user’s preferred region or language, always provide visible alternatives when you serve localized content based on previously collected user decisions.

But …

Of course there are exceptions to this rule. For example it’s not exactly recommended to provide content featuring freedom of assembly and expression in fascist countries like Iran, Russia or China, and bare boobs as well as Web analytics or Facebook ‘like’ buttons can get you into deep shit in countries like Germany, where last century nazis make the Internat laws. So sometimes, IP delivery is the way to go.

The majority of link building posts I see focus on acquiring new links, but what about your existing links?  Once you have a strong link profile, this needs to be monitored and consolidated.  You don’t want your best links to drop off.  This post looks at ‘link decay’ also know as ‘web decay and ‘link rot’.

What is link decay

‘Web decay’ in information retrieval science refers to the loss of pages from the Internet.  Back in 2006 Bill Slawski blogged about a patent that looked at link decay, where web pages were found to disappear from the web at a rate of 0.5% per week.

Worldwidewebsize calculates total pages on the Internet at 19.64 Billion, while SEOmoz say the average page has 13.32 external links on it.  By my calculations that’s 1.3 Billion links being wiped out each week!

Here I want to split the terms. Web/link decay being the loss of pages from the Internet, but ‘link equity decay’ to mean the deterioration of link equity over time or the link being totally lost.

Link Equity, measuring the juice

“Link equity is the concept of the influence of links on a pages ability to rank for particular search queries. Link equity takes into account things like relevance, authority and trust, link placement and accessibility, the positive value of relevant outbound links, and the like”

(Eric Enge 6 ways to sculpt your Site link equity)

Measuring precisely link equity is difficult but a very very rough calculation is dividing a page’s toolbar Pagerank between the number of links (internal & outbound) on that page.  SEOmoz’s  Linkscape measures the raw Mozrank passed in a similar way.  I am hoping this will be tweaked and updated in the future versions of Open Site Explorer .  Once you download the csv from linkscape you end up with the raw figure.  Adam Feldstein, VP Product at SEOMoz explained how you convert this figure back to the cleaner version:

They are in fact the same values, but for some reason the raw number is showing in the .csv file vs. the ‘pretty’ value that you see in the online report. If you want to convert the raw value to the pretty value in the spreadsheet, you can use the following formula.

(m * ln(raw)) + b

Raw is the raw value, and m and b are constants. The current m and b constants for URL mozRank are 0.385005057627582 and 12.7260317160508, respectively. These constants change just a little bit from index to index, but not generally in any significant way.

You could also do your own calculations using Open Site Explorer.  Take the Page Authority (PA) figure and divide it my the number of links on the page.  You need to calculate the total number of links on the page, both internal and external (try this tool).

MajesticSEO uses ‘AC rank’ to order their links, though this is only a rough measure of the page strength where your link sits you could still use the above approach to get the AC per link.

It’s also important to note that some links will not be passing any equity from the start, you can see if they are working by running link tests.  See my Q&A inspired post by Rand Fishkin here.  The problem is measuring old links, its simply not viable to test every link in your profile.

How does link equity decay?

Links become broken

As discussed above, pages are lost from the web each day.  Webmasters continually tweak websites and make changes, which can often cause broken links, pages where your link sat can simply be deleted or moved creating 404 pages.

I tried to find the percentage of broken links on the web, but couldn’t find this figure anywhere so asked Dr Pete for the % of 404s in Linkscapes last crawled.

Out of 416,475,264,279 links crawled I asked how many were broken:

“9.155% of all URLs in our last index were 404′d specifically. 10.217% of URLs had an error code of some kind (4xx, 5xx, 7xx, etc.) ”

Algorithm Changes & External Factors

Google makes between 350 to 550 algorithm changes a year to improve search quality and reduce spam.  The majority of the changes will be undetectable, but links are continually being devalued.  Over time many types of links have been devalued such as directory links, reciprocal links and footer links.  Google also continually improves its ability to spot and devalue paid links.

If you are wondering why you have had a big rankings drop, the chances are it is not a penalty…you have just had links discounted or devalued.

Along with algorithm changes, Google is constantly finding link networks and sites that are created solely for link building. Links are continually being discounted on site by site basis directly and indirectly, would a link from a Panda hit site now pass less link equity?

Site Changes

Link equity decay can occur when sites have makeovers and are updated, the site/page redesign may add more internal links to the page for example.

Along with pages being redesigned, link equity decay can happen through added outbound links to a page.  You see this with directory links,  every time a new listing is added, link juice is taken away from your link.  Is it worth paying XXX amount  when your link is on a page with a hundred others?  Out of Linkscapes last web crawl the average page has 60.88 links on it, including interal pages which will still take link equity away from your link.

Poor website architecture can also cause your link juice to decay.   You see this with WordPress posts as they get pushed off the home page from the standard 10 posts, only crawlable via next/previous links.

Webmaster/Site Manipulation

Webmasters can easily manipulate your link to stop it passing any value, example being Linkedin profiles now sending external links through a redirect.  There are many ways besides just adding ‘Nofollow’ to block your link’s value, the entire page may later be blocked by the webmaster – a sneaky trick but this still happens.   I’ve seen even more cunning link scams like reciprocal link cloaking.  You get an email asking for a link exchange and they tell you your link has been added.  You click on the url provided which then causes a cookie drop or your ip is logged and your website ‘appears’ in their sidebar (nice ), as discussed above, make sure the link is passing equity from the offset!!

Webmaster Greed

Arrogance, Ignorance and Greed

Links being added to a page that are off topic will lower the trust metrics of the page/domain.  You will see this a lot if you are in the market for buying links.  Webmasters will add links to pharmacy, debt and sex sites if the price is right.  A good example is seen with the $5000 Wikipedia links, not only is your link on a page with 182 other sites but the page links out to casino and drug sites.  Do you really want your link to be on that page?

Link Buyers Stupidity

Many webmasters who buy/rent links will let their link expire through lack of organisation.  As you scale your link building you will need sytems in place to manage these link placements.

Rand argued that aged links do not add value, but I tend to disagree.  If your link is removed and the page is cached, then your link appears next time the page is cached isn’t that an obvious signal?  It may not have a direct impact but you have left a footprint.

Ways to stop link equity loss

1) Monitor your best links closely, especially if you have paid for them.  Here is a script I just got built for the job.  The script will check that your links are still live, just upload a spreadsheet with all your links that you want to track.  It’s also pretty handy if you are doing a few reciprocal niche link exchanges with some webmasters you don’t entirly trust.

SEO Doctor’s Link Tracking Script

To find out how to run, just go to my quick installation guide.

2) Use a Link Atrophy Tool – this one is good and powered by Linkscape, though you will have to wait for the update.

You can also discover your dropped links using MajesticSEO.   I have just tried it out on Beatthatquotes dropped links.  Let’s see what links Google removed from this sites link profile > removed links.

3) Control your own links.  Creating a powerful network of sites is expensive and time consuming.  I have seen SEOs cower at the term ‘network’ and associate them with badly thought out link networks by link brokers, but it doesn’t have to be this way.  There is nothing wrong with having a network of sites, just make sure you do right.   If you don’t have time, just  pay Fantomaster 500, 000 Euros and he’ll sort you out!

4) Keep linking to your good guest posts, especially if on authority domains.   A link on a strong domain will work better if you build links to the page.

6)Monitor OBLs and bad neighbours, especially if you are ‘renting links’.  Just keep checking the pages from time to time and make sure the webmaster is keeping his link sales on topic.  Remove your link when you start seeing and pharamacy, escort, casino or debt consolidation links. Try this Bad Neighborhood Checker:

7) Monitor the content quality of your link placement sites.  Often sites change hands and new webmasters may start publishing duplicate content which will lower the trust metrics of the site and the link equity passed.

8 ) Monitor the rate of link sales. Before you buy a link on a page, check the rate new links are added to that page and remember each one added will dilute your link equity.

9) Track changes to the Mozrank passed (mR passed) on the bulk of your quality links.  I  haven’t tried this yet, but it may be possible with the SEOmoz api.

10) Keep on top of Google’s algorithm changes, especially the ones that may devalue your links.  Also find out what industry leaders consider as link devaluation metrics.

11) As social metrics are now a ranking signal, I’m sure a link on a highly shared page will have more value.  The key is to find links on pages that are likely to be continually shared such as good resource pages, they will also be more likely to attract links over time.

Every professional link builder should think about link equity decay, especially if they are tracking link velocity closely against competitors.  If you have any thoughts or ideas on this topic let me know in the comments below.

Update: Since I started writing this post SEOmoz has totally turned off Linkscape and have not included any mozrank passed metrics into OSE, I’m hoping they have something up their sleeve that will be rolled out soon.

This is a guest post by Giuseppe Pastore, an SEO in an italian agency. In his personal blog, Posizionamento Zen, he eventually writes about Search Engine Optimization and Web Marketing in general. You can find him on Twitter too (@Zen2Seo). This post is a follow up on a post he did on SEOMoz.

Just 2 weeks ago, I run a test on the “First Link Counts” rule trying to understand if there are some effective ways to avoid that bad anchor texts can devalue our SEO efforts in internal link building. As I reported on my YouMoz post, I found there are at least 3 different ways to make Google associate different anchor texts when linking to the same url from the same page. This post generated an interesting discussion and some user asked about how Google handles images. This was an interesting question: we often see ecommerce sites with an image of a product and then a text link after it, or we can think to logos pointing to the site homepage… are ALT attributes counted as the first link anchor text (and so the following anchor text is ignored) or not?

I supposed images are treated in a different way, but I was not sure, so I run a new test that specifically was aiming at answering that question.   Again, I used my SEO site Posizionamento Zen as a testing theatre and this is how I proceeded.

Setup

I created a page named paginaA3.html, about the fantastic topic “Grisotelaio”. In the HTML code we have 2 links to paginaG.html and 2 links to paginaH.html.

PaginaG.html is about the term “bidognano” and the 2 links pointing to it are (in the order they appear in the code):

#1 – image link with ALT attribute: “bolufaretto”

#2 – text link with anchor text:”usportignazione”

None of these 2 words appear in paginaG.html text, so this page can be indexed for these two terms only if Google uses both the anchor text.

PaginaH.html is about the term “bidopolpetto” and receives the following 2 links:

#1 – text link with anchor text “mornuborato”

#2 – image link with ALT attribute: “gollomallo”

Again, none of these terms appears in paginaH.html text, so this page can appear in the relative SERPs only if Google counts the links.

Expected results

If the “First Link Counts” rule applies to images, paginaG.html has not to rank for “usportignazione”, as it is a second link text and paginaH.html has not to rank for “gollomallo”. If images are handled in a different way, maybe things can change if the image link appears before or after the textual one in the HTML code.

If the rule doesn’t apply to images, all the anchor text have to be counted.

Testing

I linked paginaA3.html in the footer of my site to make Google index it. paginaG.html and paginaH.html weren’t linked from any other page besides it.

After 2 weeks, paginaG.html and paginaH.html were indexed, and this is the situation:

paginaG.html ranking for “bolufaretto”

paginaG.html ranking for “usportignazione”

paginaH.html ranking for “mornuborato”

paginaH.html ranking for “gollomallo”

Conclusions

As the pictures above show, the first link rule doesn’t apply to image links, whatever the order they appear in the HTML code. Probably it can be interesting to see what happens if we have 2 or more images pointing to the same url (do all Alt attributes count?).

I think I’m going to test this too…

If you are interested in my tests, you can found them at my SEO test archive. Posts are in Italian, but images and code are an universally spoken language!

This is a guest post by Ben Morel, who is the search engine marketing specialist at a Surrey digital marketing agency. He has a background in marketing, offshore finance and radio astronomy.

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While Gareth and I were deciding on the subject of this guest post, we ended up discussing the differences between paid and natural search. Paid search has often been maligned: many of my clients have had bad experiences in the past with agencies who have sought to look at the number of people coming to the site. On the other hand, at the agency I work for we often recommend paid search to new clients as the easiest way of bringing new customers to the site. This has been made that bit more topical over on SEOMoz where the old question of “SEO vs PPC: which would win in a fight?” has recently been discussed. So, Gareth and I decided it could be interesting to look at site engagement and conversion rates for paid and non-paid search.

At the agency we have several clients for whom we do both PPC and SEO, from a variety of industries including:

• An online kitchen appliance store
• A New Zealand wine merchant
• An interior design and hardware showroom
• An overseas volunteering charity
• An outdoor e-commerce store
• A chain of tile showrooms.

The data for the above has been amalgamated over a six month period and analysed, and I shall try to explore what it means.

PPC vs SEO: The Rivalry

First of all the usual arguments for and against each. These are arguments that we certainly present to new clients. I won’t do a table of pros and cons because my opinion is that things are a bit more subtle than that

PPC Starts Quickly, SEO Takes Time To Build

For a business wanting to get off the mark today, this is definitely a pro for PPC. In the long term, however, the build up for SEO allows testing of on-page elements and application of conversion rate optimisation on a small audience so that when it finally starts pulling in traffic that traffic converts well. Of course you can also keep your PPC budget low while testing on-page factors before ramping it up to keep ROI high, but then you lose some of that initial acceleration of sales. So which is better? It depends: on a brand new site I would say PPC. On a mature site, though, both can be used to meet different objectives.

PPC Costs Every Time Someone Clicks, SEO Costs Are Initiative-Based

This means that it’s easy to count the cost of PPC: just take the amount you spent in a month and add the amount spent on your agency or in-house team. Calculating ROI then follows on smoothly, as long as your website tracking is set up properly. With SEO are a bit more difficult to track. We can track costs to build a certain number of links in the month, keep social media up to date, create articles for distribution and all the other things that take up our time as SEOs. But measuring ROI from each is a lot more difficult. So which is better? Well, in some ways PPC – you know your costs and returns immediately. But links will keep on giving juice, and visitors, for months to come, so ROI for a certain amount of resource spent on SEO keeps going up.

You Can Share Results between the Two

As Danny Dover comments on the SEOMoz Whiteboard Friday (see below), PPC best practices are very different to SEO best practices. PPC landing page tests generate huge amounts of duplicate content and cannibalise keywords from other pages, which is exactly the opposite of what you want in SEO. However, the results from those landing page tests can be very useful for SEOs as well, so both teams can derive benefits. Also, rel=canonical tags can be used to minimise overlap.

At least as important are the SEO and CRO benefits of ad testing. Now, you may think I’m slightly daft for saying this. But: the aim of ads is to entice people to your site as often as possible and get them engaged. The aim of meta titles and even the headlines on your landing pages are exactly the same, so if a PPC ad has a higher CTR for the headline “Blue Widgets 30% Off” than for “30% Off Blue Widgets” you can almost guarantee that using the text this way round for the page headline will result in improved ROI.

Engagement and ROI

Now that the question of which to implement is solved, that is campaigns for both if you can, what about results?

The New Zealand wine merchant makes a good case study. Over the past six months we have seen that for non-branded traffic natural search has a conversion rate 60% higher than paid search. However, the aims of this client are long term – getting the best lifetime customer value they can. For that they have their email list and both segments have around a 2.70% sign-up rate for the monthly newsletter, meaning that LCV will be very close in a couple of years time.

With the tile showroom, things are even more interesting. As you may expect, local search plays an important part in their campaigns and this importance is especially high for paid search, where local terms have a conversion rate four times greater than the rest of the PPC account. While conversion rates are again lower for PPC overall, conversion rates for local keywords are the same for paid and non-paid search.

So how do clients fair overall? The table below gives an impression of success by looking at conversion rates and using bounce rate as a measure of engagement. We have also included Google Product Search results out of interest and excluded keywords containing the clients’ brands.

As you can see, PPC advertising does have a place: engagement is higher than with other media, even if conversion rate is the lowest of the three. These PPC accounts do seem profitable, which can never be a bad thing, but they evidently need refinement.

This is perhaps the crux of the problem with PPC: although an account can be set up and set live in a day, it takes much longer to refine keyword lists, test ads and improve landing pages. In getting them up to speed, then, PPC and SEO are in many ways on a level footing and as the first section of this post postulates which is better depends on your short- and long-term goals, budget and how to please the person who pays you.

SEOmoz – SEO Software

Further to my local seo citations post, I wanted to take a look at Foursquare as a geo-marketing tool for local businesses and brands.

Foursquare is a game which “connects local businesses with it’s customers”. The game is based on unlocking badges, but Foursquare is far more than a game.  Users check into local places like bars, restaurants, hotels with their phones and give tips and share their location with friends.  Users with the most checkins to a venue become the “Mayor”, and can receive loyalty rewards from the venue  e.g. Domino’s Pizza offers their Foursquare Mayors free pizzas on Wednesday in all their locations.  Foursquare allows  businesses to carry out geo-marketing campaigns and reach people via mobile phones.

Foursquare was created by Dennis Crowley , recently crowned the new king of social media by Wired Magazine.  They recently raised $20 million and it has already been valued at an incredible $95 million, with nearly 1 million users ‘checking in’ every day.  Though Yelp (and soon probably Facebook) is to allow checkins on its apps, I feel Foursquare’s initial innovation and game context will win users. Foursquare will become a powerful social media marketing channel for businesses in the future.

But how can businesses benefit from Foursquare?  For local businesses, it’s a channel to get your customers to share and interact with your business. Foursquare checkins are becoming the new discount ‘coupons’ for local business and everyone loves a discount or freebie. But it’s not only local businesses that are marketing themselves on Foursquare. Content providers like newspapers and websites have found clever ways promote themselves on the Foursquare network.  Mashable for example do not only provide local tips, but ‘insider tips’ for cities all over the US.

Foursquare users love interacting with brands like Mashable, which is why they have over 13,000 followers, showing users are not afraid to add brands as ‘friends’ on this network.

Non-profit and educational institutions are also using Foursquare to their advantage. Harvard University use Foursquare to help orientate their freshers by giving them locations to checkin and rewarding them with prizes. I am not aware of any UK universities using Foursquare for orientation purposes, but it’s a great way of using the Foursquare platform.

Foursquare Marketing Tips

1. Ensure your business is listed.  If not, then fill in the “add this place” form and get listed. Like Google Places, many businesses are not claiming their listings, even when customers are checking in:

Somerset House unclaimed listing

Not sure if your business is already listed? Try my customized Google/Foursquare search engine:
enter your “business + city”

By claiming and actively promoting on Foursquare, your business may be  picked up by other sites using the Foursquare API like Misotrends, which shows trending places in cities.

2. Let your customers know you are on Foursquare, add a sticker somewhere on the premises. You want as many customers as possible to “checkin”.   One of the most powerful aspects of Foursquare is users status updates.

Each time they check into your venue, all their Foursquare friends are notified (and possibly Twitter and Facebook friends depending on their settings). This can potentially reach thousands of people from one user checking in.

Brand visibility from user checkin = Total sum of Foursquare Friends + Total Twitter followers + Total Facebook friends

3. Announce your Foursquare presence on your other social media channels like Facebook and Twitter. Convert these friends to Foursquare friends/followers.

4. Don’t allow your employees to check in at work.  You want your true loyal customers to be the mayors and compete against each other, continually checking in to oust each other.

5. Make sure you use the ‘Foursquare specials’ feature for your business.  If a customer is at a competing business around the corner, they will be notified of your special offer. This is where the geo-marketing genius of Foursquare lies.

6. Like Twitter, Foursquare can be used as a way to interact with your customers. Listen to what they are saying in the ‘tips’ and ‘shouts’. You will easy find ways to improve your business. This screenshot is from the London cult coffee shop, Bar Italia.

7. Give discounts to your loyal customers.  Even if they are not the ‘mayor’ – high checkin customers should be rewarded. In the future,  if the game element of Foursquare loses appeal, customers will want more than a badge for regular checkins.  This week Gap offered 25% discount to people who checked in on Foursquare for a 1 day promotion, they are not the only retailer using this tactic.

9. Though you want the majority of ‘tips’ to come from users/customers on standard accounts, you can still add a few yourself.  But be creative.

10. Look for 3rd party Foursquare apps that operate in your niche. e.g. Topguest offers travel reward points to customers who checkin to their partners’ hotels and already have Intercontinental, Holiday Inn and Crowne Plaza signed up.

11. If you have your own website make sure you have a Foursquare link or logo.  You could also display customer tips onto your webpages like testimonials/reviews through the Foursquare api.

12. Take advantage of the Foursquare analytics. Along with showing the top customers who ‘checkin’, Foursquare’s analytics also give you information on the number of shares to Twitter and Facebook, along with graphical representations of the data.

13. Encourage/reward customers to share their Foursquare interaction with your business:

14. Experiment and be creative with your Foursquare marketing, like using the Swarm badge (where 50+ users are checked in at the same time). Large Group checkins could be offered further discounts/incentives.  See the AJ Bombers Case study

Brand Accounts V Standard accounts, what’s the difference?  Brand accounts allow users to ‘follow’ them automatically, where standard accounts use a ‘add as friend’ button and have to be accepted by the other person.  Some brands are using Foursquare from standard accounts, like redbull.  This is great way to let customers get ‘closer’ to your brand.  To obtain a brand account you need to contact Foursquare directly.  I’ve been trying to set up a brand account for a client, but currently you need to set up an official partnership and Foursquare are only interested in the super brands.  Here is Foursquare’s response to my emails:

In regards to the branded page, we are currently working on a self-service solution in response to many similar requests, but we have not yet rolled that out. Stay tuned for more info from the team on the foursquare blog in the near future: blog.foursquare.com.

Thanks for your interest in foursquare!

Many of the big brands are now creating Foursquare campaigns, you can see those with the most followers on the Foursquare Leaderboard. Here are a few of the brands and what they are up to…

Louis Vuitton On Foursquare

Louis Vuitton London offer London Tips and have a huge interaction with their followers who tick if they have done the tips.

Starbucks on Foursquare

By checking in regularly to Starbucks, enables you to unlock the ‘Starbucks barista badge” – which will eventually lead to being rewarded.

“Starbucks recently announced a relationship with Foursquare, which enables us to engage with our customers in unique ways by breaking down barriers of digital and physical worlds. Foursquare is another way for Starbucks to take the pulse of the experience in physical stores in real time and hear feedback from our customers”

Domino’s Pizza on Foursquare

Dominos recently announced that Foursquare had a contributing factor to their recent pre-tax profit increases.  Dominos has been giving free pizzas to its local ‘Mayors’, a great incentive to use Foursquare and increases repeat visitors.

Bravo TV On Foursquare

Another example of non-location businesses using Foursquare really well.  Bravo on Foursquare give tips directly from their shows’ stars, like good places to eat etc.  Bravo then give people places to go and checkin, to unlock Bravo badges for prizes.

With the continual growth of smart phone sales worldwide, Foursquare will continue to expand it’s user base.  Providing next generation coupon marketing combined with geo/mobile targeting, Foursquare offers an opportunity not to missed.

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Related Exteral Foursquare Links

Foursquare 101 -  the lowdown on how foursquare works.

Videos Guides to Foursquare

This is post looks at UK specific citation places, but many will have sections for other countries.  For pure US citation sources try here.Local SEO is a hot topic this year, as marketers are realising the traffic potential of a good local ranking in certain industries.  One industry where Local SEO plays a big role in search marketing is Hotels.   A search for ‘London Hotels’ will bring up this 7 pack of local listings, which are now getting more clicks than the organic listings below them:

Google’s Local SEO algorithm has been greatly improved over that last year and listings are becoming harder to hijack and spam, though they still have work to do in pulling data for the reviews and citations:

What are the main factors of Local SEO?

• Reviews
• Star ratings
• Business address citations
• Total quantity of reviews and citations
• Trust/authority of the review & citation sources

(See David Mihm’s Local SEO ranking factors for more information on this area)

The citations are a key ranking factor and are seen as the new links:

In the Local algorithm, links can still bring direct traffic from the people who click on them. But the difference is that these “links” aren’t always links; sometimes they’re just an address and phone number associated with a particular business! In the Local algorithm, these references aren’t necessarily a “vote” for a particular business, but they serve to validate that business exists at a particular location, and in that sense, they make a business more relevant for a particular search.

Source: David Mihm

This list I provide is for general niches.  For specific niches you need to search competitor’s citations and find the best citation sources. e.g. for London Resturants:

-Search for ‘london restaurants’

-Click on ‘reviews’ or ‘more’ on the top local listing

-Go to the ‘more about this places’ section at the bottom.  These are the citations:

These citation places were discovered by devling into hundreds of local search listings across different niches and looking at the most referenced ‘places’ then looking at the site’s authority. Local SEO can be difficult, it’s not just about citations – but these will help you on your way to local domination.

Top 17 places for UK citations:

• Hotfrog

• Qype

• Local Data Search

• Thomson Local

• Yelp

• UpMyStreet

• Trusted Places

• Bview

• Tipped

• We Love Local

• Brown Book

• Infoserve

• Yell.com

• TouchLocal

• Scoot

• Ufindus

• SmileLocal

You will find that Google will also pull in reviews from these sites and mix them up with direct reviews from Google Places users.

Along with these top places to get listings you can also get address citations from many other authority sites, you just need to be a bit crafty sometimes .  Some other places where I have seen address citations being picked up by Google Places are uk.answersyahoo.com, ehow articles, meetup.com and uk.loadedweb.com.

If you are not sure whether you have listings in the top local directories, try David Mihm’s new UK local SEO tool which will search for your listings.

Related External Posts

Local Search Ranking Factors

SEOBook’s Local SEO Case Study

Distilled’s Local SEO Research Data

Related Videos

SEOmoz Whiteboard Friday – SEO for Local Search from Scott Willoughby on Vimeo.

If you think I have missed any good places for authority citations (or easy and quick citation sources), drop them in the comments below. If you are looking for a local seo service, please contact me.

Being a freelance seo, I was unable to attend SMX London – £1295 for 2 days could not be justified…besides I have Twitter!!  Here is a round up of the top SMX tips and news which came live from Twitter using the #smx tag. Thanks to all the live bloggers for sharing.  Also included are some slides shared by the presenters.

PPC

“Exact match is like a rifle, phrase like a shotgun, broad like a bomb and automatic like a black hole” (via @joristoonders)

“With broad match Google is in control of your money” (via@marteenloeff)

“Master google products for universal search – very few remember to search G product search directly” (via @kevgibbo)

“Make sure low quality score keywords are performing if you keep them – because they hurt whole account “(via @kevgibbo)

Misc

“Push your content to social websites and let Google do the hard work” (Via @searchcowboys)

“some ppl trying HTML links in twitter streams – sites that have twitter streams then conver these into links! Awesome” (via @jaamit)

Digital Assets

“A page with video is 50x more likely to rank than a static page?” (Via @shodowdaddy)

“Thumbnail in Universal search news result is important, to get a thumbnailin the SERP keep it in 300×250 or 180×50″ (via @triballm)

“Recommended Google news WordPress URL format: /post-name/001-postID/ “(via @kevgibbo)

“use multiple authors (or create them ). 1 news item per day for 7 days include this data in news sitemap (xml)” (via @martijnbeijk)

“says microformats help smaller sites gain advantage, coz few people are using that” (via @jammit)

“Video SEO: Use the authority of an existing page to boost a new video in the SERP” (via @tribalim)

Conversion

“Testing is the difference between a low or medium conversion rate and a high or extremely good conversion rate!” (via @klaasknook)

Link Building

“Link building philosophy: A good ranking often comes down to a handfull of links” (via @kverleg)

“MAJESTICSEO: Google hasn’t fully addressed the issue of quality links vs quantity” (via @blueclaw)

“Visualizing Anchor Texts: throw the list of anchor texts in Tagcrowd.com and get a nice view of your anchors” (via @searchcowboys)

“Reach out to bloggers… not all bloggers work from home in their pyjamas” (via @joristoonders)

“Link building tip: Give the university some good press coverage, they might reproduce it on their blog” (via @tribalim)

“another one in line of current presentation. have a look at European Union Sponsored Project Pages. These are often valuable links” (via @martijnbeijk)

“Link building tip: Bad publicity isn’t always bad for SEO because it can generate a lot of links” (via @tribalim)

“#3 If you want a link on government websites: look for business directories on .gov sites, they exist!” (via @searchcowboys)

“Don’t use pagerank as a signal to gather possible linkpartners, but use relevance and freshness” (via @searchcowboys)

“build relationships (for linking) that competition can’t COPY!” (via @merrymorud)

Keywords

“Google Suggest dataset is updated frequently to offer fresh & rising search queries. Great tool for Keyword Research” (via @iviney)

Tools

Influence Finder – you can find out more about this launch from Nichola Stott’s Post.

The tool is also reviewed by Wiep

Other tools that were greatly discussed were Radian6 for social monitoring and web data extraction tool Mozenda.

Day 2 SMX London

Social media

“64% of companies say they cant measure social media ROI as much as they’d like” (via @jaamit)

“Think ‘social media MARKETING’ – be disciplined (dont just fanny about) and get other depts to think about it” (@jaamit}

“A couple of people recommend Scout Labs as a good entry level social media monitoring tool” (via @digitalalex)

“Twitter like a book is *not* a sales tool, it s a communication tool”  ( Lyndoman -via @maxormark)

“Negative sentiment against Dell dropped 30% after they engaged with the blogosphere”

“65% of UK facebook members (out of 26M) visit every day and spend 30 min. WOW “(via @clickequations)

“My avatar is bright red because most Social Media sites use muted colors. Red stands out, provokes reaction” (Lyndoman via @maxormark )

Conversion

In Social Media Bootcamp! Those who engaged in a community had twice the standard conversion rate (via @blueclaw)

Misc

“Your experiments need to be continual otherwise your competitors will gain ground on you” (via @louisventer)

“Video is 50 times more likely to appear in search results” (via @searchcowboys)

“Martijn says the 1st thing to make sure of is that ur being found. He claims that 25% of searches lead to a purchase. Really? christ!” (via @Jaamit)

“Contact pages shouldn’t just be a contact form. Add address info, phone info, add Google maps and driving direction”s (via @searchcowboys)

Analytics

“data mine live chat transcripts to spot sales obstacles – and text fixes with AB/MV testing. “(via @duncanparry)

Youtube

“Video is 50 times more likely to appear in search results” (via @searchcowboys)

“youtube search volume tool https://ads.youtube.com/keyword_tool “  (via @oscacarreras)

@ciaranj great casestudy on viral by Ray Ban (obviously faked) guy tattoos glasses on face

“Avi Wilensky: viral video = killer linkbait (via @blueclaw)

Facebook

“If you can´t advertise on a group page, pay for the privilege” (via @joristooners_

“Facebook ads have a short shelf life, keep ‘em FRESH & crispy (via ‘merrymorud)

“facebook advertising: add extra copy to the pictures as FB cannot detect it, you can get away with it” (via @davidcarraon)

“Facebook has 100 million mobile users” (via @sweena)

“Facebooks offers a strong user engagement like fan pages, facebook ads, engagement ads, social ads, applications and social plugins”

“5,000,000 gays on Facebook. They’re marketing gold as they have tons of money to spend” (via @sweena)

Great Quotes

.@demib “there’s a saying: ‘Never fuck with an SEO’” (re reputation management)

“First click attribution is like giving your first girlfriend the credits for you current marriage”

Live streamed

Still available to view by @conversion_guru >>  SMX LIVE STREAM

Detailed SMX Blogposts

See Jaamit’s new site, he has been live blogging today – you’ll find more detailed explanations on the above tweets here, here and here.

Facebook UK Demographics from @aimclear

Shared SMX London Presentation Slides

SEO Ranking Factors 2010 SMX London

SMX Presentation

Critchlow Will, Top 10 Analytics Reports

After researching Linkbait, I wanted to share some of my findings.  I wanted to discover which posts/articles on some of my favourite blogs attracted the most raw links.  Some blog posts look like great linkbait pieces, but have failed to attract good link quantities.  Pure linkbait has to attract links or it has failed it’s SEO objective.

It’s the creation of compelling and seductive content that persuades you perform an action such as linking to it

Lyndon Antcliffe, Cornwall SEO

For anyone interested in link building,  blogging or general content creation, you should find this post interesting.  I first researched the link data a couple of months ago and the data was accurate at the time of writing.  These linkbait examples will be continually attracting links, along with retweet counts and comments.  This article assumes that the total amount of  external links are ‘naturally’ acquired.

Terms and Tools for the research:

• ULD: Unique Linking Domains according to Linkscape Metrics.
• YSE Inlinks: Total number of links to the page excluding  internal links as given by Yahoo! Site Explorer at the time of writing.
• Page Authority: Calculated by OpenSite Explorer metrics.
• RTs: Retweets if applicable.
• Comments: Taken from the post comment count.

100 Excellent Free WordPress Themes

• Author: Vitaly Friedman
• Date: 08/01/08
• UDL: 1021
• YSE Inlinks: 12,530
• RTs: N/A
• Comments: 374
• Page Authority: 79/100

————————————————-

Google Wave Guide

• Author: Ben Parr
• Date: 29/01/10
  • UDL:  565
  • YSE Inlinks: 3,111
  • RTs: 6053
  • Comments: 208
  • Page Authority:  79/100

————————————————-

How to Get Traffic

• Author: Seth Godin
• Date: 03/06/06
• ULD:  389
• YSE Inlinks: 3228
• RTs: 147
• Comments: N/A
• Page Authority: 70/100

—————————————————

How  to report Paid Links

• Author: Matt Cutts
• Date: 14/04/07
• Uld:  738
• YSE Inlinks: 3,419
• RTs:  N/A
• Comments: 836
• Page Authority: 84/100

————————————————-

20+ Mind-Blowing Social Media Statistics

• Author: Jill Hird
• Date: 29/01/10
• ULD:  117
• YSE:  986
• RTs: N/A
• Comments: 16
• Page Authority: 47/100

————————————————-

Magnetic Headlines

• Author: Brian Clarke
• Date: 10/07/06
• ULD: 349
• YSE: 2,007
• RTs: N/A
• Comments: N/A
• Page Authority: 73/100

————————————————-

Top 5 Group Writing Projects

• Author: Darren Rowse
• Date:  07/05/07
• ULD:  407
• YSE  Inlinks: 1,517
• RTs: NA
• Comments: 530
• Page Authority: 75/100

————————————————-

Picture of his large adsense cheque

• Author: Jeremy Shoemaker
• Date:  ?
• ULD:  222
• YSE  Inlinks: 973
• RTs: NA
• Comments: N/A
• Page Authority: 73/100

————————————————-

Google in late stage talks with Twitter

• Author: Michael Arrington
  
• Date:  02/04/09
• ULD:  690
• YSE  Inlinks: 5254
• RTs: 4884
• Comments: 997
• Page Authority: 77/100

————————————————-

Guide to WordPress SEO

• Author: Joost De Valk
• Date:  10/06/08
• ULD:  464
• YSE  Inlinks: 5,582
• RTs: NA
• Comments: N/A
• Page Authority: 76/100

————————————————-

101 Ways to build Link Authority

• Author: Aaron Wall
• Date:  16/08/06
• ULD:  705
• YSE  Inlinks: 5,432
• RTs: NA
• Comments: 181
• Page Authority: 80/100

————————————————-

Search Engine Ranking Factors

• Author: SEOMOz Team
• Date:
• ULD: 2,170
• YSE Inlinks – 15,607
• RTs: N/A
• Comments: N/A
• Page Authority: 84/100

————————————————-

Google Adds Filtered Pages

• Author: Danny Sullivan
• Date: 01/10/09
• ULD: 368
• YSE Inlinks: 183 links
• RTs: 86
• Comments: N/A
• Page Authority: 75/100

————————————————-

Reputation Management Guide

• Author: Andy Beal
• Date: 07/03/06
• ULD: 269
• YSE Inlinks: 1,333
• RTs: 15
• Comments: 301
• Page Authority: 74/100

————————————————-

Paid Links pagerank Update

• Author: Loren Baker
• Date: 10/29/07
• ULD: 175
• YSE Inlinks:  658
• RTs: N/A
• Comments: 132
• Page Authority: 74/100

————————————————-

The SEOmoz Ranking Factors post has attracted the most links, but they have used a clever tactic.  Each time the ranking report is updated it stays on the same url and the old report is shipped off to another url.  This tactic can also be used on standard webpages that have old content but good links, move the old content and add fresh content to the old link-rich url.

Smashing Magazine has highlighted that the ’100 best’ posts work really well, especially if you have taken the time to research the article and really provide the reader with a quality resource.  The post is 2 years old and is still being retweeted and gaining links.

I think the data also highlights Rand Fishkin’s view of Twitter cannibalizing the webs link graph.  Mashable’s top linked to post had an awesome 6,053 retweets, but attracted fewer links than expected.  People were tweeting the post rather than linking to it in a blog post.  Though the retweets get the traffic, I’m sure Mashable would prefer more links.

The data also shows good linkbait articles stand the test of time.  Aaron walls 101 ways to build link authority was posted in 2006, I’m pretty sure bloggers will still link to this article in the coming years.

I have really enjoyed writing and researching this post and would love to look at articles across different industries,  it’s just seriously time consuming…

Linkbait Tools

See how well your linkbait blogposts do with my tool ViralSPY. The tool monitors the social reactions to a post along with the total links acquired.

ViralSPY

Linkbaiting Resources

SEOsmarty’s guide to finding linkbait inspiration

Smashing Magazines Golden rules of linkbaiting

Lyndon’s 10 link bait tips

Link Baiting by Wiep

SEOMoz Viral Marketing

SEJ linkbuilding using linkbait

Linkbait by Jim Westergren

Matt Cutts on Linkbait

Basics of Linkbait from the Freshegg Blog

Stuntdubl’s Linkbaiting Playbook

]]> http://www.seo-doctor.co.uk/linkbait-most-linked-to-articles.html/feed 15 http://www.seo-doctor.co.uk/seo-doctor-firefox-extension.html http://www.seo-doctor.co.uk/seo-doctor-firefox-extension.html#comments Sat, 27 Mar 2010 08:07:14 +0000 Gareth http://www.seo-doctor.co.uk/?p=532 Tweet

This week the SEO Doctor Firefox Extension was released.  The tool gives you a mini SEO audit looking at H1 tags through to Robots.txt info.  The tool sits in your status bar below and gives you an SEO Score – this site scored 100% which was nice

The tools best feature (IMHO) is to examine a pages outgoing links. The tool shows this as a metric % , and helps you find the balance between outgoing links and good Pagerank flow.

Page rank flow is a number expressed in percentage of the links on the page going out of your domain, versus the total number of links. A page where all links are internal (going to the same domain) will have Page rank flow of 100% while the page where all links go to external sites will have page rank flow of 0%. In a nutshell this number represents how much of the incoming Page rank is kept on your site.

The tool also gives you a quick overview of some other data:

I  like the ‘nofollow’ highlighter, being nice and bright.  I’m colour-blind and the Quake highlighter is not very clear for me sometimes.  I also like the CSV export functionality, which is very useful.

The tool, developed by Vladimir Prelovac comes out at very poor timing, the same week as SEOmoz undated their killer tool bar.   SEO Doctor 1.0 is also competing in an already overcrowded market place.  The tool uses the name ‘SEO Doctor’, when there is already other SEO Tools on the market place with the same name.  Prelovac could have been a little more creative with his branding, but the tool is still good work.   Go and have a play and download the extension at Firefox Addons.

Related External Posts

http://www.garethjames.net/seo-chrome-extension/

Related Posts

http://www.seo-doctor.co.uk/best-firefox-social-media-extensions.html

SEO Doctor Tools

SEO Doctor Chrome Extension