1. Start Early – Before we started this contest we tried to contact blog owners by email offering them a discounted service if they would publish a short post announcing our contest. About a week later when the contest was about to begin we had only heard back from one of the blog owners that we had contacted. We continued on with our contest announcing through other means we had previously decided on. The period of time we ran the contest was two weeks. By about a week and a half in we received a few more emails from the blog owners but by that time it was almost to late. We realized that some blog owners may not check their emails very frequently or that some were just busy and had more important things to do. If you are looking to run a contest I would suggest emailing those you wish to announce through early.

2. Do Your Research Before The Contest Starts - Another thing that we did before the contest started was research to find different forums that we could announce the contest on. We made a large list and then started registering to these forums so that we could post the topic of our contest. We discovered that with a lot of these forums you have to have to be a member for a certain period of time before they would allow you to post a new topic. So of the large list we compiled only a handful of them would allow us to post.

3. Make It Easy To Enter - When running a contest there are a few things that need to be done to have a successful contest. One thing that is very important is to make it easy to enter. If you have started early and had great success announcing your contest but the ways to enter are complicated or confusing chances are people are not going to waste their time on it. Even if the prize is something very appealing to the reader, they aren’t going to put in much time into figuring out what they need to do.  Also, depending on who your target audience is, you will want to gear your entry methods toward them and their general abilities and knowledge.

4. A Contest Run On A Blog Is Much Easier Than One Ran On A Website - The client, at this point in time, did not have blog associated with their business. We decided that we would run this contest by creating a new page on their website containing the information about the contest (prizes, rules, ways to enter, etc). The reason we found it easier to run a contest on a blog is because it is much easier to get readers to interact with a blog and enter a contest. Posting a comment on the blog was a huge success in our other contests. Also people who generally read and are associated with the blogging world are typically (not always) more familiar with the link building methods used to gain entries. To sum up our reasons for thinking it easier to run the contest on a blog, it is easier to put up the contest content and it is easier for the readers to interact and enter.

5.  Leverage The Losers - As we know, anytime there is competition there is a winner and a loser. In the case of a contest, often times there are many losers. These losers can be a great audience to target. For one, these losers have enough of an interest in the product or service that was being given away to have taken time out of their day to enter. One of the ways you could target this audience is by offering a small discount as thanks for participating.  This will not only help give you a good reputation but gives those that entered reason and incentive to come to you for your product or service. Also many times you will have their E-Mail addresses, You could occasionally send them a special offer or a product update to keep your company fresh on their mind for when they decide the time is right.

There is no instruction book that tells you exactly how to set up a contest, and there probably never will be. Every contest will be different because each contest is geared toward a variety of people. However, there are certain things that are general to every contest, and as you (and I) continue to run contests we will learn many things that will be beneficial to running a contest.

Let’s take a quick look at the different schools of thought regarding social media.

THE “SOCIAL MEDIA IS WORTHLESS” CAMP

Those who belong to the Social Media is Worthless Camp feel that social media is nothing more than a bubble and will recede into the sunset along with the other internet bubbles. Remember Friendster? Case in point.

Many in this camp feel that social media is the next big thing and, therefore, cannot last. They prefer to put their energies into time-tested, stable practices such as Search Engine Optimization, PPC, and SEM.

THE “I SEE VALUE IN SOCIAL MEDIA” CAMP

The folks in this camp are the most reasonable of the three camps, the happy medium, if you will. Albeit somewhat of a bunch of fence sitters, this group realizes that there is value to be had in social media and tries to tap into it.

The benefits of social media, from their perspectives, is that of research and announcements. Social media sites such as Facebook hold an enormous amount of information about your market segment and customer base. It is a window into the homes of your buyers and potential buyers. And they’ve left their window wide open.

Is it also a great place to spread the word about your company, a promotion, a contest, an event where friends share and invite their friends to join in the fun (if you’ve done your work and actually made your content fun and inviting).

There is value in social media, but is not the driving force of their SEO and marketing efforts.

THE “I (HEART) SOCIAL MEDIA” CAMP

Those who belong to this group spend more hours talking with their friends on Facebook than with real, live people. They believe a well-executed ad campaign on Facebook or a witty video on YouTube is the rainbow which will lead them to the pot of gold. One’s time is best spent on social media sites.

Their biggest argument for this are the rather large handful of cases of people experiencing huge ROIs and success from their social media efforts. Many artists have been discovered on YouTube, such as Zee Avi. Many companies have seen sales go up 100 fold after posting a video. So it’s possible.

There are lessons to be learned from all three camps. Social Media is a powerful tool bu it can also be a waste of time.

What sucks so many people into focusing all their efforts on social media is that the time spent doing it is rather pleasant and the rewards come with more warm fuzzies than, say, link building.

Social Media should be implemented along with a full blown SEO and SEM campaign. It should complement your advertising efforts, not be the main source. Think of Social Media as a crisp glass of Chardonnay with your meal; it complements, not sustains.

Things Social Media Can Do For You

1. Helps you get to know your audience

Social media is an incredibly powerful learning tool to help you find out more and understand your target audience.

Social media sites have forums, chat rooms, and fan pages that are filled with nuggets of information from people already interested in your industry. Join these groups and get in on the conversation as an investigator, a detective, NOT as a salesman. Ask questions and read what people are saying about certain products or companies. Social media has also given people the self-appointed power of being critical and all-knowing about everything and they have no qualms about sharing the opinions with the world.

2. Get Free Incoming Links at a Click of a Button

That magic button is the Digg, Reddit, or other kudos-type buttons you should have at the top of every post. If something likes what they read, they can Digg It and share it with friends. This generates links and even better, traffic.

3. Come Up First on SERPs

If you write a killer article and lots of people Digg it (in both senses of the word), that Digg article can come up high on the SERPs, even if your website doesn’t. And having an article with lots of Diggs generates loads of traffic.

There is great power in social media, however, don’t get carried away and spend all your time trying to add more friends to your profile. Social media can quickly eat away at all your time.

• Time Allocated: 90 mins
• Required Passing Score: 75%
• Number of Questions: 90
• What you get from the test: A cool Google certificate showing you are authentic and the right to claim you are a Google Analytic certified individual.
• Expiration Date: 18 months from test date

My Personal Opinion of the Test: It had a lot of application questions, which makes it more difficult but more fair at the same time. I wouldn’t even try the test if you haven’t watched the Conversion University videos, they hide a lot of good information in each video. When you study for the test don’t gloss over anything especially if you don’t really understand what Google is saying, odds are if you do that is what will be on the test.
The biggest thing I gained though from taking the test is just getting a better idea of where to look for answers to client problems. Even if in a few months if I don’t remember the exact name of the cookie Google embeds or how to write Regex character for character I have a base to go off of. I have a better idea of what analytics can do and I can use that to think of new solutions. All said and done I would recommend that any SEO professional should take the challenge, or at very least go through the Conversion University.

What is SEO?

Search Engine Optimization is part of a wider strategy to draw traffic from search engines called Search Engine Marketing (SEM). Pay-Per-Click (PPC), commonly referred to as paid search advertising is generally the other piece of the SEM pie. But that’s a topic for another day.

SEO consists of four main parts:

1. Researching phrases that your potential clients are using to search for businesses like yours
2. Optimizing your web content to include those keyword phrases
3. Getting keyword-rich links to your site with those phrases
4. Tracking your results

SEO often requires an upfront investment of time and money before solid results appear, but this ongoing process can bring you highly targeted traffic over time. (For a more detailed overview of the SEO process see Search Engine Optimization Training)

How can SEO increase the Value my Press Releases?

When considering the SEO benefits your Press Release can have, there are two areas you must consider: The ranking potential of your website AND the ranking potential of press release itself.

A well structured press release can rank well in the news search engines, stays visible longer to those searching news engines and if it’s not time sensitive you can even rank in the normal search engine results with a little link building effort. But, let’s not get ahead of ourselves. To optimize a press release here are some guidelines:

• Include keyword phrases in the title of the release. On many sites the press releases end up on, the title of the release becomes the title tag of the page, this is one of the most important factors in helping a page rank well.
• Include the keyword throughout the release, but especially in the first paragraph.
• If you include headings, naturally try include keywords there.

Helping a Press Release to reach a wider audience via SEO optimization is smart. However, with a little coordination with your search engine marketing company or team, every press release is also a chance to help your website rank better. Know the following items:

• Target keywords & keyword clusters
• Target pages (urls) on site
• Current search rankings for those keywords

Each release should include two to three keyword-rich links to different pages on your site. Each page on your site should be optimized to rank well for a handful of specific, related keyword phrases, a cluster. The keyword phrases you use to link to those pages should be the same keywords for which they are optimized. This combination of onsite optimization for specific phrases and related offsite links pointing to that page help it rank well for those phrases.

With these pieces of data in hand, you are armed with the information necessary to help your press release bring in traffic AND to contribute to your site’s overall search engine rankings.

What Online PR Tools Are Best?

Recently TopSEOs.com listed the top ten PR sites (Thanks @NewspaperGrl). A the top of their list was PRWeb.com, a site designed to help you specifically optimize your PR for SEO to get the largest reach possible. PRWeb & others have tools to help you know how many people saw your press release. In addition to this you should also be monitoring your own site’s stats to see how people are arriving on your site. You can tell this through your site’s referral statistics.

How Do I Assess the Effectiveness of My PR?

Every Press Release should have a call to action in it, an offer or a special discount. This doesn’t have to be the main focus of the release, but make sure to give the viewer something to act on. If this is in place, it’s one of the most important measures of effectiveness that you can monitor.

Other measures include views of the release, successful interviews from local or national news outlets as well as website traffic.

The Wrap-up: A Case for SEO in PR

As was stated at the outset of this article, a large majority of Press Releases go out every day and are NOT optimized for visibility on the web, let alone to help a company’s search engine rankings. With a little effort, you can drive targeted traffic to your website with the help of online Press Releases.

I hope these thoughts were helpful. If you have any questions, I’d love to write more on this topic, just leave a comment or shoot me an email and I’ll get back with you with an answer. Call me too if you’d like us to come present to your company and share with you how we could help you increase traffic & sales. Follow me on Twitter @ioVspaceMonkee or get our latest blog posts and free workshop announcements @ioVentures

Now that you know this, it is time to really dig in and understand blog commenting and how to use it effectively.  If you follow these steps that are layed out for you, you will start to see traffic and a boost in your organic search rankings.

1. Finding Related Blogs

This is important and not important at the same time.  There is a phrase in the SEO world that says, "a link is a link".  However, if you are commenting on blogs that are related to your niche or industry, you are much more likely to receive qualified buyers coming to your website to buy your products or services.  You can also comment on just about any blog and receive traffic, but they are not pre-qualified buyers.  Having a nice mix of both related and non-related blogs to comment on is a good idea.  You can find industry related blogs by doing a search on Technorati.

2. Using The Proper "Name" When Filling Out The Name Field

This will make or break your blog commenting efforts.  Using the proper name will not only help you with SEO link value, but it will help readers of that particular blog know what your website is about.  You will want to use your keywords that you are trying to rank for when selecting your name.  In addition to that, you will want to select the appropriate page of your website that is related to your keyword to use as your URL>  For example, if my website was about Blackberry Cell Phones, I would do the following…

• Name: Blackberry Cell Phones / URL: www.blackberry.com
• Name: Blackberry Bold / URL: http://www.blackberry.com/blackberrybold
• Name: Blackberry Storm / URL: http://www.blackberry.com/blackberrystorm

3. Don’t Spam Comment

This should be common sense, but for most people it is not.  They just want to rip out blog comments like nobodies business.  This is not how to blog comment!  You need to take time to read the post that you are going to comment on and then in the most professional manner, make an educated comment that adds value to the post and adds value to any readers to read your comment.  If you get lazy, even once, your comment could be marked as spam, reported to Askimet, and your comments will never see the light of day on any blog currently using the Askimet plugin.

Remember, you are a guest on other people’s blogs.  Don’t do anything that would make them mad or that would make them not like you.  You want to become friends with them, add value to their blog, and respectifully take their faithful readers and turn them into your customers.

Contacting bloggers is a powerful tactic, it can be a win-win situation for both parties. Many bloggers are looking for new good and intriguing content.  A good strategy is to approach them with and ask if they would be willing to trade. You write some good content for them using the skills you know if they would let you post a link or two in that post. The blogger is getting new and good content and you are getting some high quality links.

There are definitely things you shouldn’t do when contacting bloggers and by studying those we can better learn what we are suppose to do.

Never Send a Mass Email:

Mass emailing may save you time in the initial work it takes to send out emails but your response rate will be so low it won’t be worth your time in the end. Remember bloggers are really people with time constraints, goals, dreams and are putting some hard work into their blog. They will be able to tell that you really haven’t spent much time on their blog and that your offer was sent to hundreds of people. They won’t feel a desire to respond.

A better way to contact a blogger is to spend some time on their site, read their posts, and get to know their style. Then tailor your message to them as an individual person. Acknowledge their work and what you liked about it; also refer to something specific that they have done on their blog.

Never Just ask for a Link:

Blogging is a business just like your ecommerce business or corner grocey store or the consulting company you own. You wouldn’t just let someone advertise on the side of your business, or in your newsletter, or on your employee’s shirts for free. A blogger isn’t going to include your link on their site just because you asked. They have to feel at least these 3 things first

1. There has to be obvious value for their readers
2. They have to feel that there is a personal benefit for them (whether that is a comission on sales, broadening their resources for their readers, or even an exchange of resources. For instance if you want a link on their site offer to put one on your site.)
3. They have to feel recognized. Bloggers work hard at what they do and they want to be appreciated for those efforts.

Never Start a Conversation with How Good your Company is:

Nobody likes to hear how good you are until they know you like what they do. If you start your letter out with statements all about you and how you are amazing a lot of people will just skip over the email and move on to something else. Acknowledge their strengths and what about their work attracted you to their blog. Then proceed to explain to them how a partnership would be beneficial.

How to Find Blogs in Your Industry:

Go to one of the following blog search engines and type in some industry specific phrases.  You should be able to find quite a few that write about your industry.  Don’t forget to search for blogs in related industries as well.

1. technorati.com
2. blogsearch.google.com

Wrapping Up:

Contacting bloggers takes a lot of one on one effort but it is worth your time because of the link value it will give you. Who knows, a blogger may even be willing to post about you, your business, or review a product you offer allowing you to be introduced to all of their readers.

Any questions?

Most directories on the internet are non paid and are free to use by anyone who has a website they want to list.  There are however, some paid directories that have a great impact on your SEO efforts and you will even get some traffic from them.  The first of these is the Yahoo Directory.

The Yahoo Directory is a paid directory hosted and maintained by Yahoo.  It costs $299/year to list your website.  Backlinks coming from the Yahoo Directory are high quality links because of the amount of page rank that this particular directory has.  You just need to decide whether or not you can afford $299 a year.  (In the beginning if the marketing budget is tight, I would spend that money elsewhere, but eventually it is worth paying for).

Another great paid directory is the Best of the Web Directory.  The links coming from this directory are not as powerful as the Yahoo Directory, but they are still high quality backlinks.  This site has two pricing options, first, you can pay one lump sum up front for $249.95, or second, you can pay annually for $99.95.  If you can muster up the $250, I would suggest that option.

Now, as I said a few paragraphs up, most of the directories on the internet are non paid.  All you have to do is go to the site and submit all the information they ask for.  Your site will then be reviewed and either accepted or rejected into their directory.  You will be notified by email when this happens.  I will go into detail on how to submit to these directories and get the most SEO value that you can.

How To Submit

1. You need to locate as many of these directories as you can and start submitting to each of them.  You can find a good list of the top 100 directory submission sites on the internet by clicking here.
2. Go to each site and start submitting.  You will want to look for a link that says "Add Link", "Add Site", "Submit Site", Suggest URL", etc.  Click there and you are on your way.
3. This is the most important thing to remember, or all of your effort and time will be wasted.  When it asks for the "Title of the Site" or "Link Name" or "Link Title" (I think you get the picture), you need to use your keywords, since they become the anchor text of the link pointing to your website.  You will also want to make sure that you have a nice variation of anchor text when submitting to directories.

Before I finish up, I should also talk about one other directory that is nigh impossible to get into, but if you do, it is one of the best links you can get in terms of SEO.  It is called DMOZ.org.  You need to know that you should only submit to DMOZ once.  If you keep submitting, your links will definitely be rejected.  If you do get rejected, you can submit again, but I would strongly suggest that you wait at least one year before re-submitting.  When submitting, you need to ignore my guidelines above.  Instead of adding your keywords as your site title, you need to use the name of your site.  If you use keywords, your site will be rejected. (DMOZ is the only exception to guideline #3 above!)

I hope this has been helpful, if I were in your postion, I would start by submitting to DMOZ and then move on to the others.  To see instructions on how to submit to DMOZ, click here.

Internal Linking Strategy #1: Content Linking

If you own a blog, inter-linking within your posts is an excellent idea. Every post you write watch for the keywords you are focusing on. If you use a keyword in your post link that word to the landing page URL you are trying to rank for that phrase. Blogging with your keywords in mind will increase the power and effectiveness of your blog and the generation of new relevant links will increase your power within your given niche.

Also outside of blogging it is beneficial to strive for that same form of linking with in the general content of your site.  Any article or content page that you create can link phrases within the text to other landing pages that are focused around ranking for those phrases.  These links help tie all your content together, allowing Google to understand better what your site or blog is all about and more specefically, what each page/URL is about.

Internal Linking Strategy #2: Navigation Bar Links

On the navigation bar of your site is a great place to add optimized links. For instance one of our clients operates an ecommerce site that sells tool parts. Their key phrases are phrases such as ‘DeWalt Parts‘, ‘Makita Parts‘ and ‘Bosch Parts‘ (I just used method 1 for external links to my clients site, but you get the idea). Orginally their navigation bar was a series of image links of the tool brand logos. Although this enhanced the look of their site to the user it decreased its effectiveness in Google. Image links are good for the use-ability of a site. Just make sure you include text links beneath the image so that Google can read what your links are about. And don’t forget to "nofollow" those image links.

Internal Linking Strategy #3: Footer Links

On every site you have the ability to add links to the bottom. These links will show up on every page in your site and are known as footer links.

When you have your clusters formed, choose the main phrase from all of your main category pages to include in your footer links. Here is a good example that we added for one of our clients:

http://www.cmoe.com/

Creating internal links within your blog and site will increase your site’s search engine exposure. Starting with these basic tactics is a great way to optimize your site. If you have any questions as to how or what internal linking is just add a comment below this post. Also if you have any other methods that have worked for you let us know, we would love to hear what has been successful for you.

Anchor Text

Anchor text is one of the biggest factors that influence what keywords you are raking for in the search engines.  Anchor text is the text that is found in the actual link pointing to your website.  At ioVentures we are trying to rank for many different keywords such as search engine optimization company.  Search engine optimization company is our anchor text that links to our landing page that talks about search engine optimization. You see, the search engines use links pointing to your website to help determine what your website is about and what your site should be ranking for.  Imagine if your site was about making brownies and you had a hundred links pointing to your site that say "click here" or "making chocolate chip cookies".  First of all, your site probably wouldn’t rank very well since the anchor text doesn’t have anything to do with your site.  Second, if you managed to get ranked for a keyword that isn’t related to your site, your conversion would be horrible.

One other thing that I should probably mention about anchor text, you need to vary the keywords you use when you get links.  Unfortunately, I learned this one the hard way.  When I first started out doing SEO, I used the exact same anchor text in each of my links.  I couldn’t climb the rankings for even the easy keywords.  Come to find out, the search engines analyze the number of links, your anchor text, and dozens of  other factors to determine if your linking patterns look natural.  If you were a search engine looking at all of my links that say the exact same thing, would that look natural to you?  Of course not!  This is referred to as Google Bombing.

So, what you need to do instead is come up with some variations of your keyword (at least 5) and use them as your anchor text.  (Read our post about grouping your keyword phrases into clusters).  For a website about making brownies you might want to use the following variations, making brownies, making gourmet brownies, instructions on making brownies… well, you get the picture.  This will make your linking profile look as natural as possible.  You might also want to throw some "click here" or "visit our website" in the mix as well.  Anything you can do to make your links look natural will boost your rankings greatly.

Related Content

Another huge factor that determines how good of a link you have pointing back at your website is the type of content on the page that links to your site.  If at all possible, you want to find links that are coming from pages that are very similar to yours.  You can tell if a page has related content by looking at the keywords in the title tag, header tags, and body of the text on that page. 

Basically if the site has something to do with your site, those links are the best to be on the hunt for.  The reason for this is because the search engines will not only see your anchor text that is specific to your website, but they will also see that another site in your industry is saying that your site is recommended by them.  These types of links with the proper anchor text are powerful links.

So remember, the more relevant the better.

Page Rank

Although not as important, page rank helps you rank higher in the search engines.  If you are a beginner, you are probably asking, what is page rank?  Page rank is a ranking that Google allocates to every web page on the internet.

Every link pointing to a web page passes along some page rank points.  The more links a web page acquires, the greater its page rank will be over time.  Generally speaking, the higher the page rank of a page, the higher the authority of that page meaning any links acquired from that page to yours is of higher value.

So, you will want to find links from sites that have high page rank.  Page rank goes from 0-10 with ten obviously being the highest.  The higher the page rank, the more that will be passed to your site.

Number of Links Going To Other Websites On The Page

The number of links on a webpage is a factor of quality.  The more links on one web page, the more diluted the power of each link becomes.  Less page rank is passed on through each outgoing link because it is distributed between more links. 

Link Positioning

To tell you the truth, sometimes you really can’t control this factor.  It has been proven that links within the content of a web page or blog post hold more value than those in a footer or nav bar.  These types of links also hold more power the closer they are to the top of the content or in other words, toward the beginning of the content.  The first link that the search engines see on a web page, the more authority they give that link.

I hope that this will help you in your link building efforts.  If done properly, your link building will really influence your website rankings.  Remember that you can’t control all of these factors in every situation but do the best that you can. 

The key to a successful link building campaign is to ALWAYS BE GETTING LINKS!  Be consistent and persistent your link building efforts and it will pay of with top rankings eventually. 

If you have any questions or comments about this topic, please feel free to make a comment below.

The purpose of an article is to spread general information about an industry or a concept. It can give an overview of the situation of the industry at present, or it can be an analysis of certain parts of that industry. It might be a relevant story about some happening within that sphere of business. Whatever the topic may be, these articles are extended to the readers for the purpose of keeping them informed on what is happening in the industry.

Why then does an article help your website to become the authority for your industry? Whenever you write an article online, you have a chance to make a name for yourself as an author. You will be able to write an author’s biography and describe what you do. In this biography you have the chance to reference your website and place links to landing pages on your site. When you make these links, be sure to use your keywords from your selected clusters as the anchor text. If you don’t, you aren’t building effective links.

These links help your site to rank in the search engines for your keyword phrases therefore establishing you as an authority in your industry because you will be on the top the the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages).

General Article Marketing Steps:

1. Write article
2. Write author bio
3. Submit article to each of the following directories

• EzineArticles
• Article Dashboard
• GoArticles
• Article City
• Buzzle
• SearchWarp
• ArticlesBase
• IdeaMarketers
• ArticleAlley
• Amazines

The Nitty-Gritty Details:

Writing Your Article

• Your article needs to be at least 400 words long.  Once you reach 400 words, finish the article as soon as possible.  You don’t necessarily get more benefit from your links if the article is longer so my opinion is not to waste your time going much past 400 words.
• Create a catchy title but be sure to include one or two keyword phrases that you will be using as links in the author bio.

Writing Your Author Bio

•  2-3 sentences that include 3 links with each link pointing to a different landing page on your site
• Use HTML coding to create these links.  An example of an author bio the way it needs to look when pasting it into the author bio form submission field is as follows:
• John Smith wants to help people learn about the different types of <a href="http://www.fezzari.com/categories/view/Road_Bikes">road bikes</a> and <a href="http://www.fezzari.com/categories/view/Mountain_Bikes">mountain bikes</a>.  Visit Fezzari today to learn more about or to purchase one of their <a href="http://www.fezzari.com">mountain bikes</a>.

Submitting to Article Directories

• Each article directory asks you to create an author account.  It is free to do so.
• Create a new email address that you will use just for these article accounts so as to avoid filling up your other emails with a lot of junk mail.
• Try to use the same username and password for all article directories so you don’t have to memorize more than one.
• Submit on a regular basis.  I recommend one article a week.  At the very least, one article a month.
• After you have some article links under your belt, start using an automated submission service.  The best one in the market by far is Unique Article Wizard. It costs $67 a month but is one of the most important tools that we use to obtain back links and improve our rankings!

If you can take the time to continuously release articles on the web, you will soon find that you are building a strong ranking in the search engines and your traffic will increase. This tool is one of your keys to SEO success.