External Linking: 6 Reasons Why Linking Out is a Good Idea

External Linking: To Link Out or Not to Link Out, Is That the Question?

Many clients ask me why I recommend linking to content that is not on their own site. Why do I encourage external linking? To many business managers and chief marketing officers, linking external seems counter productive. The thinking is that linking to another site is encouraging a visitor to leave your own site and why would anyone want to do that? You want to keep people on your site for as long as possible and have them learn as much about your company and product or service offerings as possible, correct? Well, actually, the answer is No. Incorrect. Nada. Niente. Wrong.

Why bother external linking?

Let me explain: It looks like this. Wanting to keep people on your site as long as possible so that they will stay and learn everything you have to offer, is like inviting friends to dinner and then requiring that the conversation be only about you and your house. Or worse, you welcome your guests into your home, and then do not allow them to look at the beautiful view you have outside and you dominate the conversation without letting them share anything.

Remember that the web is a communications tool and your website exists in a medium that is constantly dynamic, fluid and open. With a print brochure you may have developed for your company, your audience members, i.e. the people looking at your brochure, are not expecting to be able to click on a link and learn more or be referred to another interesting article. They are familiar with the brochure format and read a bit, look at the pictures and then likely visit your website for more information.

When a visitor is on your website, a search engine is a click away and people can quickly lose focus on your site and go and look for other information via their own search methods. If you provide them with other interesting content, however, (content that is not just your own,) they actually have more respect for you, not less interest. They intrinsically appreciate that you are referring them to information that you have curated and deemed important. And by sending people off your site to another site, you seem less desperate to keep their visit. They will therefore likely come back again, because of the value you offered them.

Another external linking perspective: Think of it like a department store. If Target offered only target brand products, then shoppers might want to look at other stores for non-Target brands. Instead, Target offers both Target branded products as well as other brands, providing a lot of variety, freedom of choice for the customer and ultimately more reasons to shop at target.

Your website is the same. If all the content you offer is only that which you have created and you are not linking to the sites where you may have found the information, then people will feel like you don’t really care what else is out there. You will be perceived as not providing a good overall perspective on your industry and that you are desperate for your visitors to stay on your site. To encourage repeat visitors, the key is to provide value and value comes in offering the most complete and useful information available. Value can come in the form of education, inspiration or entertainment and it doesn’t have to be your own creation. We are now in a sharing economy, and the web is a platform that thrives on linking. External linking is a way to show your visitors you want them to succeed. External linking is a way for your to add value.

Think of what the Internet is. It’s a web of links really. One link leads to another and each link is a node on a vast web of information. If you believe in the power of connections, think about your LinkedIn profile and embrace community, you’ll want to nurture your relationships. That means connecting with people, and building your community.

Why Is External Linking Good?

1. Link Juice is Tasty

As mentioned above the web is all about linking. Search engines actually look at the number of inbound links, i.e. external links pointing back to your site, as a reference for how important your site is. This has a direct impact on your search engine ranking. The more inbound links you have, the higher your ranking opportunity. In order to be linkable, your site must offer great content and be considered an authority on the subject matter. In order to for that to happen, external linking is a best practice. Linking to other sites that offer more valuable information to your visitors and potential customers is a good.

External Linking will help you grow your business. Glass of juice making a chart.

External linking will help you grow your business

2. Always Add Value

Links to other sites show that you care about your visitor. Being willing to share a link that you think is valuable will earn you credibility with your visitors, customers and potential customers and also provide information about the relevance of your site to searchers. External linking allows you to add value. When you refer a friend to a vendor or product that you think is good, you are adding value to your friendship with that person. In the same way, external linking to great content is adding value to your relationship with your visitor and also adding value to your website.

3. Reciprocating

If you know a little about search engine optimization, you may have heard that reciprocal linking is no longer a valid strategy, because the engines can tell when two sites are linking to each other and may therefore negate any value. Link Building Jeddi Master, Eric Ward, says:

“You simply cannot make any sort of absolute statement as to what constitutes reciprocal link spam. Nor can you say that reciprocal links are always good, always bad, always suspicious, always helpful. They are never any of these and tey are always all of these. What you have to do is look at each case, at each site, and recognize the logical, natural linking potential and reciprocity tendencies.”

– Ultimate Guide to Link Building p 154.

It’s not a good idea to go out and ask every website owner you know to link to you regardless of the content they offer. However, if there is a site in your industry that adds value to your audience, then a reciprocal link is fine. The trick is to always be thinking of your audience and solving for “What’s In It For Them” – WIIFT.

4. Preciprocating

Instead of waiting for others to link to your site, consider preciprocating, i.e. performing a simple act of kindness before you need to ask for a favor later on. This works in social media as well as link building. If you comment on a blog and/or share a post, people feel like you have been kind to them. With this feeling they are much more likely to help you out in the future. There’s a great book by Gary Vaynerchuck called “Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook.” The concept here is to give, give, give, and then ask for something. Because you’ve given so much already, you’ll much more likely to get what you want when you finally ask for it. I talk about it in my classes and in my book as the L-O-V-E strategy: Listen-Offer-Visit-Engage. Give first and ask for what you want later. External linking is a L-O-V-E strategy.

5. Relevancy

Links to other sites show search engines and people more about the relevancy of your content. Just like citations in research papers indicate how much research has been done and the work that is behind the content of the article, external linking shows that you’ve done your homework and are citing your sources. Not only that, but you’re generously giving credit where credit is due and sharing even more valuable content with your audience.

6. Authority

Search engines place high value on the number of external links, also known as inbound links, that point to your site, so you want other sites to link to you. Like votes in politics or if you’re ever running for office, the more votes (think links) you have, the more respect and power you have in the search engine algorithm. Also, ponder this: Why would other sites link to your site, if you are not linking to any other site? Play by the rules. Sharing is caring. External linking should be part of your linking strategy.

Your turn: What do you think about external linking? Do you encourage it? Are you convinced you should do it? Please share your thoughts in the comments below.

How to Get Found with Search (and Hummingbird)

Google Search Updates, Algorithms, Pandas, Penguins and Hummingbirds

You may have heard of Google’s biggest most recent search engine update called Hummingbird, but do you know what it does and how it impacts your search engine results placement? In other words, how does Hummingbird affect your business?

This post covers a little history of algorithms, Hummingbird and what you need to do now to increase your search engine rankings.

Hummingbird | Google Search

First let’s understand what a search engine does. A good search engine will index all content available on the web and then serve up results based on any given search. So if you’re looking for organic blueberry chocolate (without quotes) the engine will provide you with what it considers to be the most appropriate results for your particular search. For a search on organic blueberry chocolate today, Google found about 37,900,000 results (in 0.32 seconds). That means there are 37,899,990 other web results competing for page one placement when people search for organic blueberry chocolate.

How does the engine know which sites to show the person searching (user)?
That’s where the algorithm comes in. An algorithm is a mathematical formula, which calculates the appropriateness of each search result based on each person’s search. So if someone searched for How to make organic blueberry chocolate we will see a different set of results, because Google understands that the search is different. The first search (for “Organic blueberry chocolate”) is likely being performed by someone interested in buying some chocolate and the other search is about learning how to make it. Those two things are quite different. Ponder on that for a minute.

I hope you’re starting to understand that the search engine is trying to be smart and doing it’s best to offer you as the user, the best experience by providing the most appropriate search results. So you want to know a couple of things.

1. How does the engine figure out which sites are the best ones to show?
And
2. How do you get your website or page to show on page one of Google?
Right?
Yes, well that’s where the Hummingbird comes in. Let’s dig a little deeper.

Before Hummingbird there were a few other updates that were talked about in search engine optimization and marketing circles. Most recently, these were Panda and Penguin. Both of them were Google’s way of getting rid of junk content or spammy websites that were cluttering up it’s index and muddying the search results. These were a couple of the bigger updates and gave the search engine marketing industry something to talk about, but in reality Google makes hundreds of algorithm changes per year. According to Moz, “Google makes 500 – 600 algorithm changes per year.”

What are these changes and why does Google make them you ask?
Sometimes the changes are small ones to shift the way the best quality search results are calculated and to keep search engine optimizers on their toes. Other times there are updates to penalize black hat (read unethical) SEOs for trying to game the engines. And yet other times there are major overhauls of the algorithm or engine to make it perform better in numerous ways. Hummingbird is such an update. It is like a replacement of the entire engine instead of just the replacement or repair of a part of it.

Danny Sullivan of SearchEngineLand.com says that one of the reasons for the name of the Hummingbird updates is because it is “precise and fast.” If you’ve ever seen a hummingbird, they are amazingly small birds with super powerful wings and thrust. They also seem to understand exactly where their food is based on color and scent and can quickly and efficiently retrieve the energy they need to sustain such an active little lifestyle.

While other updates focused on penalties to sites for keyword stuffing, bad inbound links and poor PageRank, Google’s Hummingbird’s main change is focused around understanding what the user wants. In search and web marketing this is known as user intent and a huge amount of energy has gone into being able to understand user intent in order to provide the most appropriate search results. According to Giselle Aguiar, “Hummingbird looks for natural language — well-written (no typos or grammatical errors), high-quality content on webpages.
Google’s goal in all this is to give the searcher exactly what they’re looking for. Google now wants fresh, relevant content written for the human reader.”

And in a recent case study, Giselle found a way to attract the Hummingbird to the feeder. How? She posted to a blog at least 3 times a week with one of them being a video. Because YouTube is the 2nd largest search engine after Google and YouTube is also owned by Google, “embedding video in a blog post combines the best of both worlds.” And Giselle is not a trailblazer there are many other SEOs backing her up. James Wedmore will tell you this as well. Just look at how many “How to…” articles he has posted on his homepage.

MarketingTypeGuys.com says “businesses that take the time to write content that addresses common questions from consumers, will find themselves naturally rising to the top of Google’s search results pages.”

And Salman Aslam writes: “This doesn’t change everything about the way we do SEO, but, we need to now put less focus on specific keywords and instead, think about what the user is thinking/needing/feeling when they’re searching – and then give them the most relevant content and experience possible. As a site owner, this is your responsibility too.”

Salman also brilliantly shows how there has been a significant increase in the number of “how” and “what” words in search queries over the last few years. Look at his chart here and read his thoughts on Hummingbird strategies.

Last but not least, we still have lots to learn from the pool salesman, Marcus Schneider who was able to sell tons of fiberglass pools in a dwindling economy just by understanding his audience’s needs.

So how do you get found with search?
In Summary:
1. Focus on good content that will be useful to your audience.
2. Answer questions that your customers are asking.
3. Write blog posts frequently and embed videos in them for your own Jab Jab, Right Hook combination.
4. Remember that SEO is a marathon and not a sprint. Content marketing takes time. Know your audience, understand your market and always provide value.
5. Help people find what they are looking for. Answer search questions.

Partnerships, the 6th P in Marketing

Partnerships are key in new media marketing.

What makes perfect partnerships in business?

To be social means to have and form partnerships of all kinds. Whether it’s a partnership in the form of becoming a fan or follower, a friendship with a high school classmate, a business partnership or simply a meetup group for learning and expanding your contacts, partnerships are prevalent in marketing today. They always have been, but if you look at the most successful businesses today, it’s those that have been most strategic and smart with their partnerships.

Google’s Larry Page and Sergei Brin were the original dream team who started Google. They then hired Eric Schmidt to create a partnership that resulted in the beginning of profits for the company. Google purchased many a young startup company including Blogger, Picasa, and YouTube and those partnerships even if they were acquisitions has served to increase profitability exponentially over time. Google also partners with its customers by helping them make money for themselves through their core product, Google AdWords. They provide many tips, tools and tutorials for advertisers and reward customers who are performing well with better pricing and higher rankings.

Facebook has partnered with several third party application developers, (such as Votigo and Involver) service providers (like Spotify and Instagram) and game developers (like Zynga) in order to keep their user base. We partner with twitter users every time we reciprocate a follow, retweet or enter into public conversations. No solitary person can exist in a vacuum and certainly no marketing can happen without anyone around. In the conversation economy, word of mouth is a world of mouth. People and partnerships are crucial for business and even more crucial in social media marketing.

What are your favorite examples of winning partnerships in business today or from the past? Please add your thoughts in the comments area below.

Success with Google AdWords

One of the services we offer at Susby Internet Strategy is Google AdWords search marketing. We have worked with several clients to improve their eCommerce business and web traffic with this tool.

Recently we compiled a case study chronicling the progress of one of our eCommerce clients.  We increased conversions and lowered cost-per-click for our client, who now has a thriving online business. Have a look!

Google AdWords Case Study: Improving Conversions and Lowering Cost

Challenge
Decrease monthly spend and cost-per-click for client’s Google AdWords advertising initiatives while increasing clicks and conversions.

Results
In 2010, our client never received more than 18 many-per-click conversions in a month. In 2011 the lowest amount of many-per-click conversions received was 35, with the highest being 123.

AdWords Conversions Graph

The chart below shows the improvement in click-through rate for our client:

Click Through Rate Graph

Our client’s click-through rate increased tremendously once we took over the campaign. It is important to experiment with new advertising ideas from time to time, however, and this practice is reflected in the lower click-through rate seen in September 2011.

We have also significantly reduced our client’s cost-per-click:

Cost Per Click Graph

Our client had a 40% reduction in cost-per-click in 2011, with an average 2010 cost-per-click of $2.19 and a 2011 average of $1.32.

Success Summary:
In a nine-month period we drastically increased our client’s click-through rate and number of conversions while significantly reducing their cost-per-click to make their Google AdWords advertising efforts remarkably more effective.

AdWords statistics

We are Google AdWords Qualified and are available to help your business achieve eCommerce and web visibility successes like this one. Give us a call today at 415.305.6403. We look forward to working with you!

Trends in Mobile Search

Mobile Search Trends
You probably use your mobile phone for the occasional web search. But have you thought about how much the search marketing landscape has changed since smartphones became ubiquitous?  Recent research on the difference in desktop and mobile search trends resulted in some fascinating statistics.

Desktop search peaks at 11 a.m. and 3 p.m. while mobile search peaks at lunchtime and in the evening between 9:00 p.m. and midnight. Despite the difference in time of day, topics searched are the same on both platforms. eMarketer, a daily eNewsletter, projects a 65% increase in mobile ad spending since 2010, which is expected to increase exponentially in future years.

Categories of mobile ad spending from highest to lowest are currently ranked:
1. SMS
2. Banner ads
3. PPC Search
4. Video ads

Spending for video and banners is expected to be equal to search spending in 2012, with banners and video spending surpassing search in years following.

Mobile search has increased five-fold in just two years! Users are searching with the intent to take action, making neighborhood-targeted ads very effective in some cases.

And what about the future of mobile search? Revenue for mobile gigabytes is projected to decrease from $25/GB (now) to $5/GB by 2015. Carriers will likely need to develop new pricing models at that point, which will very likely result in changes in how we use our mobile phones.

Google AdWords Certified

This is a belated announcement, but never-the-less important. We are proud to say that our very own Cariwyl Hebert is a Google AdWords Certified specialist. In order to achieve Google AdWords Certification one must study a series of lessons and then take a rigorous exam. Cariwyl passed the exam with flying colors and is our in-house AdWords specialist. We’re very proud of Cariwyl and very pleased to be able to offer this qualification to our valued clients.

If you are in need of Google AdWords assistance, please give us a call at 415.305.6403. Thank you!

When you love what you do…

When you love what you do, it doesn’t feel like work. In fact it feels more like being on vacation. Last week I was on vacation in Salt Lake City Utah. I was snowboarding at a fabulous resort called Snowbird. Snowboarding Snowbird! Lucky me indeed!

I snowboarded for three days and then took a day off from vacation to get some work done. If work is work for you, you’re probably thinking I’m crazy, but if you really love what you do, you understand the meaning of work being fun. When work is fun and fulfilling it makes you smile, it’s motivating, it can make you laugh and feel happy. Admittedly I was a bit concerned that I enjoyed my day off from vacation so much, but then I looked at this video created by Click to Play Media and saw how happy this work makes me.

Susan Barnes snowboarding at Snowbird, Utah

The video came out of an opportunity to consult with a very interesting start-up called iConfident. The make dental implant software to help dental professionals improve communication, build loyalty, and grow their practice. We looked at their website in terms of search engine optimization and discussed social media opportunities. Susby was collaborating with Click to Play Media who graciously produced this one minute video about Susby in the process. I think you can tell that how much fun it was. On days like this I really love my job.

BIG thank yous to Anna, Brad and Stephanie at Click to Play Media and also to Rob, Robbie and Karoline of iConfident for allowing us to shoot.

My advice to you if you’re not enjoying what you do: Find a way to play more. Do something that makes you smile, i.e. Do what you love, the money will follow. Connect, collaborate and start some conversations. The world revolves around relationships and communication and both are equally important.

Are you working or playing?

Good Google Beta Social Search

Amidst all the iPad (or as some say “iBad”) hype, Google announced that it’s social search is now out of labs and in it’s infamous beta testing phase. Beta for Google means it’s available to you to use while they test it, but for most of us, that means it’s ready. Yes, they will continue tweaking it before it is out of Beta, but they have been known to have products in Beta for several years. Gmail being no exception.

A moving picture is worth more than a thousand words, so take a look at Google’s introduction to keeping the web as social as it is below. Otherwise, see Google’s blogpost – how social!

Is Google trying to get you out of Facebook and back onto their site? Please leave a comment.

Susan Barnes

Hello, my name is Susan Barnes.

Since you’re reading this post, you either already know that I am Susan Barnes, or you found me through a search for “Susan Barnes.”

“So what?” you say. Well, as of the date of this post there are 1,130,000 results for a search on “Susan Barnes.” This number is likely to continue growing dramatically, so if you’re stumbling upon this post months or years after it was uploaded, look at the number of search results for Susan Barnes now.

1,130,000 search results for Susan Barnes on Google

How many search results does your name show on Google? Simply enter your name into the search box, and you’ll see either how common your name is, or how famous you are on Google. The higher the number of search results, the more common your name, and the more challenging it will be for you to get a first page ranking on Google or any other search engine for that matter, unless you control all the listings, because no-one else with your name is doing anything worth mentioning.

Since Susan Barnes is a very common name and there are several Susan Barnes’ with strong online presences (and also quite importantly that I am passionate about search engines,) I am intrigued by the phenomenon of getting a good ranking for your name on Google.

A recent book called Inbound Marketing by Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah of HubSpot recommend that if you are hiring anyone to do any web, social media or online marketing work for you, you must confirm that they have a good digital footprint. This means that if you were looking to hire Susan Barnes to help you with Internet Marketing or Social Media, you would want her name and profile to have a high ranking on the first page of Google.

Today (January 6, 2010) if you Google “Susan Barnes” you’ll see results for Susan Barnes the actress, Susan Barnes the author, who also has the Susan Barnes Twitter handle. There’s Susan Barnes the realtor in Orlando, Florida, Susan Barnes the Firegoddess jewelry maker, Susan Barnes the painter in Mendocino, California, (incidentally I used to do a lot of oil painting in college too,) Susan Barnes the writer, Susan Barnes the art historian, Susan Barnes the social media expert on the east coast, among 1,129,990 others. There’s even a Susan Barnes somewhere back east who has no period in her gmail account (susanbarnes @ gmail . com) where my personal email is susan . barnes @ gmail . com and for I frequently get her mail.  This is very disconcerting, since I’m sure she is likely getting my mail as well. When is Google going to fix this problem? Larry? Sergei?

As I write this post, the Susan Barnes that is me, is indeed listed on the first page of Google, but currently only because I have a Google profile. So lesson number one for those of you with common names like “Susan Barnes,” make sure you create your public Google profile.

Susan Barnes' Google Profile

Susan Barnes

Other ways to get your name listed at the top of a Google search:
2. Be someone that other people want to write about, i.e. get your name eg. Susan Barnes linked from websites that don’t belong to you. This is the same for keywords and search engine optimization. If your keyword appears in link text, it has more value to a search engine.
3. Use your name as your handle in Social Networks. This particular Susan Barnes did not do that, because there are too many Susan Barnes’ in the world (yes I am a bit bitter… grrrrrrr) and when I tried to get SusanBarnes on Facebook, SusanBarnes on Twitter they were already taken. I am Susan Barnes Internet Solutions Consultant on LinkedIn, where I was able to use my name as my handle. I am using Susby on Facebook, Susby on Twitter and Susan Barnes on LinkedIn.
For good examples/role models, see George Kao, Chris Brogan, or Brian Solis.
4. Write a blog post about yourself like this one.
5. Register a domain name with your name it, like susanbarnes.com, susanbarnes.net or susanbarnesauthor.com or susanbarneswriter.com.
6. Use your name in the title tag and meta description of your page or post.
7. Participate in social networks, because reputation is the new currency. Every time you post to Twitter for example, Google is still picking it up and indexing it. What does that tell those of you who can’t fathom why anyone would use Twitter?
8. If all else fails, start a new presence with a catchy name like Shoemoney, Daggle or Susby, but you’ll still need to spend a ton of time blogging, tweeting, updating and participating in order to be considered someone worth listing to Google.

Thank you for reading about the many Susan Barnes’.

Now it’s your turn:  What’s your name and how often do you appear in search results?

Search Meets Social

Google recognizes the power of the social connectors (aka social media) by showing real-time search results including content from Facebook and Twitter. Google is unveiling the “Latest Results” which will show tweets from Twitter streams, updates from Facebook, answers from YahooAnswers and more. To me this indicates the power of real-time results. The freshest content and opinions are what searchers are interested in. Google obviously respects the power of the crowd and continues to believe in us. After all, we are the people who power Google. Google both serves us and we serve them by clicking on ads. It’s a symbiotic relationship.  I wonder if they will start showing Aardvark results as well.

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