Cornwall SEO

Content Marketing Blog

Lyndon Antcliff

Should I Buy Links to Improve my Rankings

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Mark Cook, over at Further.co.uk has written a thought provoking article on why buying links is a dumb idea

As someone who offers clients a linkbuilding service using web content it would be a “of course he would say that”, kinda thing if I said don’t buy links. I’m not an expert on buying and selling links so my opinion is coloured by that fact. But what Mark presents is a logical case for the case against links. Of course it is one of the weapons in the arsenal and does a specific job and you have to know how to handle the weapon to be able to maximise its efficiency. Anyone who has been banned selling links know this.

An interesting quote in the article is from Shaun Anderson,

“If buying links was ineffective, it wouldn?t be against Google TOS. Think about that.”

Another interesting passage from the article:

I love it when our competitors do this, I really do. By outlaying £6k a month, they are taking money away that they could be investing in enhancing their existing content, improving the conversion rate of their website, or investing the money in campaigns to create hooks, interest and engagement.

I’m always shocked when I hear the budget some websites pay for paid links. £6,000 a month can build you some very juicy linkbait. What I would add to this is that the links that are generated through linkbait are natural, organic and extremely hard for competitors to replicate. And as pointed SEO Chicks pointed out this week, there are ways to nobble paid links. Although how many people actually do this I am not sure, I don’t know of any.

You could pay to produce beautiful content such as this which I assume has resulted in buckets of links and rightly so. Most scratch their heads and let the dandruff fall on their keyboard whilst they explain why their insurance – credit card – kitchen worktop website can’t make use of such content. But, that’s where content agencies like mine come in, we look at what content fits your niche and create something that will in all probability get links.

The fact will always remain that fantastic content will go links, so all you have to do to build links is create fantastic content.

Social Media Myth No. 1 "It's about the conversation"

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“Social media is all about the conversation”, I think that phrase started to rankle me around last July and I couldn’t figure out why.

It’s something I have taught people in my training class for years, so it’s not like I haven’t agreed with it. Blog – people comment – you reply – they blog – you reply, blah blah blah, yada yada yada.

Also with twitter, you tweet, they tweet, we all tweet.

And round it goes.

But it may be that the thinking is wrong. After all, the objective is not to have a conversation, the objective is something else, be it:

  • Links
  • Exposure
  • Sales
  • Branding

The objective is not the conversation, that is merely a stepping stone and yes it is an important and useful stepping stone, but it is not the objective.

I realise this may get me kicked out of the Secret Social Media Marketing Society, but social media marketing is not about conversation, it’s about getting people to do what you want.

This guy, Niccolò di Bernardo dei Machiavelli…

Niccolò di Bernardo dei Machiavelli

…. probably has more to teach us on social media networking than Chris Brogan, Brian Sollis, David Meerman Scott, Robert Scoble, Darren Rowse, Mark Hughes, Josh Bernoff etc. Although I have learned from you all and you are all at the top of your game, I can’t help thinking that you need to dig down and get into the root nature of human interaction and manipulation to really understand the fundamentals of social media.

Sure Machiavelli is not going to teach us how to integrate a twitter feed onto our blog, but he is going to teach us something about the nature of mankind. And although we use a lot of technology to do what we do, at its core is the human being with all the ancient brilliance that that entails. It’s not until you understand people and their motivations and the way people are, that you can truly understand what social media is about.

The chaps above who I have mentioned all know this, they are all students of human nature and have simply used a technological interface (social media) to employ what they know.

Social media marketing is not about conversation, it’s about getting people to do what you want them to do.

Where is PRWSocial?

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There is a “PR & Social Media In Practice” on today.

I noticed it in my twitter feed, #PRWSocial, which is fine. But then I went to Google and did the search thing and had to wade through a bunch of twitter nonsense before I could get to the meat, which was the offical PRWSocial page.

Which is here if you are looking.

The point is they failed to optimise for the tweet tag before they launched.

Why is this important?

Well, if you have a bunch of PR people yammering on about social media whilst their fingers are leaving grease marks on their iPhones from the canapes tweeting about the conference, you need for people who stumble across the tweet stream to be able to bang the hashtag into Google and get to the page that tells you what it’s all about.

PR people must find it tricky to tweet from their iPhones, what with their wrists being weighed down by those really heavy Rolex watches 😉

So in future guys, know that social media must be integrated into your entire online marketing strategy and that includes SEO.

It’s the same if you are going to build a digital camera review blog, you must integrate to maximise the effect.

It’s interesting how the PR industry is so slow to really take advantage of social media. Meanwhile, it is the SEO professional who is the true master of this domain.

Getting Links for a Poker site is easier than you think

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How do you linkbait for poker or similar uber competitive terms?

In fact how do you go about getting success for mortgage linkbait or hotel linkbait. All apparently difficult topics to get links for, not because few people link to such subjects, but because so many want links for those niches.

It is important to know why it’s hard or why people think it’s hard. I’ve played around in these sectors a bit and the reality is, it’s not as hard as you think, In fact, it’s just has hard to get links to a non sexy niche such as marble flooring, although I have met some people who find the smooth, cold marble floor rather arousing. But I no longer have her number.

Consider this, how many poker websites do you think there are?
Narrow that down to websites that will link to other websites based on the content (rather than being paid)
Then look at the actually number who are worth getting a link from.
After that consider how many people are competing for links within the niche.

Self referential niche linking are not the only links that work.

Consider how much easier it is to get links outside of that burned niche?

Next question:

Why would a non poker website link to a poker website?

The answer is simple, “because they want to”.

If you answered, “because their prize winning Shitzu was being held hostage and would only be returned if a link was placed”, your partly right. The Shitzu provides the motivation and the reason they want to link. But ultimately it’s “because they want to”. The point being it’s the desire you want to create, it’s desire that is our focus.

The point being, you do not “get” the linker to link, but you create a desire in them to link. If you want to think you got them to link your wrong, they linked because they wanted to link. You gave them a reason to create the desire.

масиYou link because you want to, not because someone makes you.

Which leads to the next question:

How do you create the desire within a linker to link?

Lets stick with the poker theme. How do you get someone to link to a poker site?

You create the desire.

What is desirable?

To answer this we must be specific, we must focus on the the linker. I say “the linker” instead of linkers because my method involves picking a single target and developing a strategy for that one linker. You can go wide and gather info on the whole niche and that’s fine initially but to really get under the skin of the whole niche you need one person as a totem for the whole group. We can get into how you would do that in later blog posts.

Sure you do a wide niche study first, as it’s the only way to find that one target, as you want the target to have influence and authority.

Lets take a specific niche which we want to link to our poker website, soap making websites for example.
How do we get a soap making website to link to a poker website?
The answer is to identify what the particular individual web master desires to link to.

Are you thinking what I’m thinking? Maybe something along the lines of a bar of soap which looks like an Ace of Spades, or a poker chip. Doesn’t really matter what as long as it contains two components. One which sates the desire of the soap making web master to find and link to cool hand made soap content and another that retains the contextual integrity of the poker site.

Contextual integrity is important because you need to retain the linguistic semantics of the link.

Or in other words, follow the rules of how information and language interact and it will turn out fine.

We could delve a little further into semiotics and language but I kinda feel I’ve already lost you. But if you are interested, check out the Elements of Semiology, By Roland Barthes and Ways of Seeing by John Berger. They are the kind of books you only read if you have to, and I had to, but in my opinion if you are a link builder or an SEO these are the kind of books that will give you the edge.

May your links be many and aged.

UK SEO Company Goes Bust

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I first heard about Lattitude having problems from Dave Naylor’s blog

The Telegraph is also reporting the story.

I’ve worked with the Lattitude guys before and chat with the seo guys on a regular basis and I can say they know how to cook it. They didn’t go down because they were bad at seo, but rather seem to have been a credit crunch victim.

There are other very large SEO firms that I don’t rate, who seem to make their cash by pumping pretty pie charts for the clients top chomp on and being visited by well suited salesmen with ultra white teeth and an unhealthy fixation for reading the Art of War by Tsun Tzu.

But as Dave Naylor said in his post, if you really want the job done well you have to go for the “special ops” guys. And in a recent blog post by Econsultancy they brought up the Specialist Vs Agency debate.

Which is all very interesting. Especially for me as I specialise in one thing, creating content to be pushed over social media to get links.

If you need the other stuff, I can send you in the right direction.

I’m not too worried about the seo guys at Lattitude as they are experts at what they do and will always land on their feet. Not too sure about the whiter than white toothed salespeople though.

Update: Alex Hoye, the big cheese at Lattitude has issued a statement saying things are calm and it’s business as usual, which is good to hear. Also, spoke to a few guys at Lattitude and they are not worried at all. Sounds like there is going to be a smooth transition and a shedding of a lot of debt.