Email marketing seems like an easy win for your inbound marketing strategy. Write an awesome email, put in some snazzy images, fire it off to your opt-in list, and watch the customers roll in.

Even if it all was that easy, though, the step marketers often overlook is just how difficult it can be to actually get your email into a recipient’s inbox in the first place. Seems basic, but there are tons of moving parts involved in email deliverability, and a huge one is the reputation of the email sender. Luckily, there’s a service called Return Path that has a metric called Sender Score, which gives you insight into your reputation as an email sender. Have you checked your Sender Score? If you do know your Sender Score, do you know what it means for your reputation as an email marketer? If you’re interested in your reputation as an email sender, read on to learn everything you need to know about Sender Score.

What is Sender Score?

A free service of Return Path, the Sender Score algorithm rates the reputation of every outgoing mail server IP address on a scale from 0-100. Gathering data from over 60 million mailboxes at big ISPs like BellSouth and Comcast, Return Path records if people frequently unsubscribe or report spam from certain email senders, and then assigns you a Sender Score based on that monitoring. Your Sender Score will continue to change depending on your email sending habits and the responses of your recipients.

It’s a crucial number to stay on top of, because mail servers will often check your Sender Score before deciding what to do with your emails. The lower your Sender Score, the harder time you’ll have getting into someone’s inbox. There are plenty of things that can impact the deliverability of your email, but Return Path reports that 83% of the time an email is not delivered to an inbox, it is due to a poor sender reputation.

Even if an email network or ISP doesn’t query your Sender Score to determine whether they will deliver your email, the factors used in determining your Sender Score are similar to those used by email networks and ISPs to determine your sender reputation. As such, the score is a great, free email sender reputation tool to ensure you are aware of and have the opportunity to fix any deliverability problems.

How Do I Interpret My Score?

To check your Sender Score, visit Return Path’s registration page, and you’ll soon have a report that looks something like this (but with different data, of course!)

Scores are calculated on a rolling, 30-day average and represent the rank of an IP address against other IP addresses, much like a percentile ranking. The closer your score is to 0, the worse it is, and if you’re close to 100 like Return Path is in this sample report, well you’re in pretty great shape! Now let’s break down what each of the items you’re being scored on in this report mean:

• Complaints: How complaints about that IP address compare to all other IP addresses. Complaint rates are calculated as complaints divided by accepted mail, and complaint scores are a rank based on your complaint rates.
• Volume: While not an indication of a good or bad sender reputation alone, it is an important part of the overall reputation algorithm. For example, an IP address which sends 100 messages and receives 99 complaints is problematic, while an IP address which sends 100,000 messages and receives 99 complaints is probably okay. A higher score equates to larger volume monitored by the Sender Score Reputation Network.
• External Reputation: How the IP address compares to all other IP addresses on a variety of external blacklists and whitelists.
• Unknown Users: The rank of the IP address’ unknown user rate compared to all other IP addresses. Unknown user rates are taken directly from incoming SMTP logs of participating ISPs, tracking how often an IP address attempts to send a message to an address which does not exist.
• Rejected: This represents how often messages are bounced compared to other IP addresses.
• Accepted: The number of email messages accepted for delivery, this number is expressed as the number of messages seen minus the number of messages rejected.
• Accepted Rate: The ratio of email messages accepted for delivery compared to email messages attempted. This is the number of messages accepted for delivery, divided by the number of messages seen.
• Unknown User Rate: The ratio of unknown users, or invalid email addresses, compared to the amount of email seen.

So, what’s a good score? If your score is over 90, congratulations! That’s a very good Sender Score. If your score is between 50 and 80, something isn’t right — move on to the next section of this blog post to see what you could be doing wrong that’s impacting your email deliverability. If your score is less than 50, well… looks you’re probably a spammer.

What Do I Do If I Have a Bad Sender Score?

The first step is knowing, so good job on checking your score. It can take weeks or months to fix a low Sender Score, so the sooner you’re aware of the problem, the better. There are several aspects of your email marketing that you need to check and possibly change to improve your Sender Score and email delivery rates — here are the ones that Sender Score takes into serious account:

• Inconsistent Volume of Email Sends: See the graph in the top right corner of the Sender Score report? Their email send volume goes up at a pretty steady rate, and as a result, their score maintains a pretty even number. However, if you were to send 5,000 emails on Monday, 200 on Friday, nothing for a week, and then suddenly another 15,000, you would likely get dinged for sending inconsistent volumes of emails.
• Frequency of Sends: Just as the volume of sends should be consistent, so should the frequency with which you email recipients. Email every day, every other day, every week — whatever your needs are. Just make sure you don’t jump on the email marketing bandwagon, abandon it after a month, then hop back on and expect no deliverability penalties. As you perfect your email marketing machine, you’ll be able to test the optimal email sending frequency for your recipients.
• Cold IP Address: If you’re new to email marketing, you may have neglected to warm up your IP address. Start email marketing on a new IP address with small batches of the best people on your email list — you know, the ones who love you and won’t mark you as SPAM or unsubscribe from your communications. Progressively increase the amount of people you email to warm up your IP and prove you’re a safe sender.
• Being Blacklisted: There are about 50 known blacklists out there that denote which IPs are spammers. Return Path has a service that lets you see if you’re on a blacklist. Assuming you’re a legitimate email marketer who just didn’t know some of the rules for good email deliverability, visit the sites of those who have blacklisted you to consult their information for being removed from their blacklist. If you contact them for removal, they will help you understand why you were blacklisted in the first place and what you can do to improve your email marketing methods.
• Getting Caught in a Spam Trap: A spam trap is an email address that was once valid, but no longer is, and will thus garner a hard bounce notice when you email them. However, when a mail server sees consistent traffic going to the dead email, they can turn the email into a spam trap that will stop returning a hard bounce for the known bad address, and instead accept the message and report the sender as a spammer. The moral of the story here is, if you’re not monitoring your hard bounces and removing them from your active email list, you could be perceived as a spammer.
• SPAM reports: Finally, if your email recipients think you’re a spammer and identify you as such via a SPAM report, your sender reputation is going to suffer. Check the rate at which your emails are marked as SPAM — an acceptable rate is 1 in every 1000.

There are several other factors to getting your email into a recipient’s inbox — the content of your email, email infrastructure, recipients’ personal filtering preferences — more of which you can learn about in this email post about email deliverability. But if you’re looking to start email marketing on the right food, establishing and maintaining a reputable email sender reputation is one of the most important qualities of your email marketing program.

Do you know your Sender Score, or have a gauge on how good your email deliverability is?

Image Credit: 10ch

Connect with HubSpot:

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HubSpot’s Inbound Internet Marketing Blog

Posted by oline123

This post was originally in YouMoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author’s views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc.

One of my favourite SEO anecdotes goes like this: two men are walking through an African game reserve when they come across a lion, one of the men calmly puts down his backpack and slips on the running shoes he has been carrying.

The other man chuckles and says, “You’ll never outrun a lion."

To which the other man calmly responds, “I don’t need to outrun the lion; I just need to outrun you."

SEO, contrary to popular belief, is not about ‘beating Google’ or ‘cracking their enigma code’; it is about beating the competing websites on the keywords that matter to your business. This means SERP analysis and competitor analysis should be key components in shaping your SEO strategy.

I am not advocating creating a carbon copy link profile for your site by building competitor links like for like. This methodology is about learning from their site and link profile in order to close the natural search gap; understand what is working (and to a certain extent, the limits); and then eventually to outmanoeuvre them.

In this post, I am going to explore a number of different eCommerce verticals and identify what I think makes that SERP ‘tick’ as well as the different link building (posicionamiento web) tactics which can be utilised to ensure natural search dominance.  

I wholeheartedly believe that when it comes to link building (posicionamiento web), quality and sustainability are the ‘end game.’ Google will eventually fully understand the true quality of a link. However, different markets have different ‘requirements.’ If you understand what it takes to rank in the market you are trying to target then you can ensure you are working strategically rather than adopting the “throw links at the wall and see what sticks” approach.

I will also be exploring how analysing the counterpart market in a more SEO-advanced country can help you understand the future of your home market.

The Data

Far too often in the world of SEO, sweeping statements and all-encompassing judgements are made with little evidence or data to back it up. This is just a snippet of the research I carried out which helps to underpin the conclusions I make later in this post

SERP 1 – ‘online shopping’ Google.com.au

According to SEOmoz’s Keyword Difficulty tool, this keyword has a 71% difficulty rating.

On the face of it, this would seem like a highly competitive keyword to try and target.

The number 1 result (http://www.oo.com.au) has over 36,000 external links, a high domain authority (59), and a domain mozRank of 4.9. A seemingly challenging keyword target. Don’t get me wrong, it won’t be easy; however, if we dig below the surface, we can get a clearer picture of just how OO.com.au is ranking which can help shape our link building (posicionamiento web) strategy.

Link Quantity

Number of external links to the root domain according to OpenSiteExplorer

*The average of the remaining 7 top 10 results = 84,683

Anchor Text

Percentage of links with ‘online shopping’ as anchor text

*The average of the remaining 7 top 10 results = 7.35%

Link Quality

Percentage of links deemed to be of ‘low power’ by Link Research Tools. Cemper (the makers of Link Research Tools) guard their link power algorithm closely, but they have said that the link power is usually measured by looking at the number of links pointing at that page. A buried page in a rubbish web directory is likely to be considered low power as there will be very few links and certainly very few good quality links pointing at that page.

*The average of the remaining 7 top 10 results = 77.01%

Link Target

Percentage of links that point at the homepage according to Link Research T ools

*The average of the remaining 7 top 10 results = 73.37%

Link Status

Percentage of external followed links according to Link Research Tools

*The average of the remaining 7 top 10 results = 89.13%

Link Locality

Percentage of links from .au domains according to Link Research Tools

*The average of the remaining 7 top 10 results = 25.7%

Social Metrics

*The average of the remaining 7 top 10 results = 465 Facebook Shares and 10 Google +1s

*Note – with regards to the social metrics, the figures are for social signals pointing at the homepage of the sites and have just been included for comparison purposes. 

Analysis – how can we come out on top?

An immediate takeaway from this mini-study is that it would seem social signals aren’t weighted that heavily in this particular SERP.

Despite the furore around social media, this data right here proves that links should be your immediate focus and social should be a part of your SEO strategy in a long term sense. Google will undoubtedly get smarter on the social front; not only that, but also as competing websites become more social, there will be a natural progression towards social signals carrying more weight. No site wants to be left behind when/if this happens. Building links, certainly in this niche, is still the activity which delivers the results right now however.  

To rank for this particular keyword, it could be argued that two particular factors appear to be the most pertinent: link volume and anchor text. This would seem to go against common wisdom that link quality is the overriding factor as, in this scenario, and according to Link Research Tools’ automated analysis, the vast majority of links pointing at the websites which rank highly are of ‘low power.'    

Whilst some would say, high quality links are what you need to rank; for the keyword “online shopping,” you need to mix high-quality links that deliver longevity and stability with less powerful links that have the right anchor text in relatively large volumes.

Conclusion

In this scenario, suitable link building (posicionamiento web) tactics include:

• Thematic/ quality article submissions – despite Google’s Panda update, we still notch up good results utilising quality and thematic article submissions as a way of generating volume and anchor text specific links.
• Guest Posting – a proactive link development campaign which involves content placement on niche and relevant websites in return for a link.
• Infographic Promotion – developing an engaging linkable asset like an infographic can be a good way to generate high volumes of anchor text links by including an anchor text attribute link at the bottom of the graphic which automatically gets placed when somebody uses the embed code. Obviously, in some situations, this will be removed by a webmaster using the graphic on their website, but we have seen this work successfully.
• Shopping Directory Listings – numerous submissions to good quality general and shopping directories still provide value in conjunction with other link development tactics.
• Social Bookmarking – another link building (posicionamiento web) tactic which is seen as low quality, but when used with other methods can deliver the kinds of results you need.

Remember, the methods discussed above do not constitute recommendations across the board as they are very much SERP-specific; you will see the need to tailor your tactics as we explore other SERPs.

SERP 2 – ‘online shopping’ Google.co.uk

On to our second SERP. For this one, I have chosen the same keyword; but this time, we’ll look at the UK SERP.

According to SEOmoz’s keyword difficulty tool, this is a terrifying 87% difficulty score.

ASOS.com, which ranks #1 in the UK for the term ‘online shopping,’ is similar to OO.com.au in Australia. It's a real juggernaut of the retail world with over 157,000 external links pointing at the domain; a domain mozRank of 6.26; and domain authority of 85. How on earth do you go about competing in a SERP like that then?

Link building with strategy ensures you are focusing on the SERP-specific metrics that appear to matter.

Link Quantity

Number of external links to the root domain according to OpenSiteExplorer

*The average of the remaining 7 top 10 results = 2,678,561 (this is skewed by Amazon.co.uk which has a colossal 15million external followed links).

Anchor Text

Percentage of links with ‘online shopping’ as anchor text

*The average of the remaining 7 top 10 results = 0%

In this SERP, anchor text doesn’t appear to be a ranking factor at all. Indeed, to demonstrate this a little further, I continued with my research, and the 16^th result had 1.2% links containing the anchor text ‘online shopping.’ Other than this result, the others were 0% anchor text.

This in itself would make building a great deal of anchor text links very suspicious indeed and likely very ineffective if you are looking to target this particular keyword.

Link Quality

Percentage of links deemed to be of ‘low power’ by Link Research Tools

*The average of the remaining 7 top 10 results = 30.23%

Link Target

Percentage of links that point at the homepage according to Link Research Tools

*The average of the remaining 7 top 10 results = 61.73%

Link Status

Percentage of external followed links according to Link Research Tools

*The average of the remaining 7 top 10 results = 91.61%

Link Locality

Percentage of links from .uk domains according to Link Research Tools

*The average of the remaining 7 top 10 results = 28.46%

Social Metrics

*The average of the remaining 7 top 10 results = 1393 Facebook Shares and 73.85 Google +1s

In comparison to its Australian counterpart, this SERP has a much higher average number of Facebook shares and Google +1s.

This bigger social signal sample appears to allow Google to make ranking decisions which are much more closely aligned with what the social signals are telling them rather than weighting link metrics so heavily, as is the case with the Australian SERP we investigated above.

Does this mean social should form more of an integral part of efforts to rank for this term? Almost certainly, but that doesn’t mean link metrics should be forgotten about.

Analysis – how can we come out on top?

On the face of it, this SERP appears very brand heavy with limited options for a website looking to break into the top 10 for this keyword, so what can be done? And what kinds of tactics are likely to be effective?

We would look to deploy combination link development and social tactics in order to help clients rank for this term.

• Linkable assets – think Evolution of Western Dance Music,  why witty job titles are all the rage,  12 awful Christmas presents, and Why Bill Gates is selling nuclear power to China. Linkable assets or linkbait come in all shapes and forms, not just infographics as the above examples demonstrate. Even news stories can be turned into link generation machines with a great title and the right composition.
• Contests – great competitions and creative contests can generate a great deal of social attention and will usually attract links from blogs, forums, competition directories, and more.
• Discount codes – a well-planned and properly seeded discount code or saving coupon can have a dramatic impact on the number of links you generate and the social activity you see around your site.
• Blogger Partnerships – reaching out to bloggers and industry website owners by contributing your content, expertise, or even products for them to try can be a very effective way to build high numbers of good quality links; particularly as many bloggers read other blogs so the feature can very often have a viral effect.
• Online press – if you have a product that you can create an engaging story around then generating online press is often easier than you might think. 

This SERP is also a good example of a fast-paced environment where ongoing activities are vital in order to stay ahead of competing sites.

The chart above looks at the number of referring domains linking to some of the top 10 results in the UK SERP for the keyword ‘online shopping.’ It gives a snapshot of the quarterly growth or decline in links from unique referring domains. This helps to give a more accurate reflection of the link profile as number of backlinks can be misleading if, for example, there are multiple links from the same site. 

As I am sure you will notice, over the past 5 years, the sites have all followed near enough the same pattern. Only once or twice does a site rise or fall above the general trend: presumably as a site has a promotional push or something happens which causes a reduction in the number of unique referring domains.

This emphasises the importance of on-going link development and SEO campaigns. It also highlights an opportunity, because Google has recognised that there is, in some respects, a fault in their algorithm; there is nearly always a lag time between a page being important and useful enough to mean it should rank and when it has enough links to compete in that SERP.

In response to this, Google developed ‘Query Deserves Freshness’ or QDF which means a page doesn’t need as many links as the incumbent sites that rank if the page is generating a good number of fresh links. Google, logically, has determined that fresh links might indicate a more relevant page than thousands or even hundreds of thousands of stale links.

The internet is a dynamic place so it makes sense that a link profile should be constantly developing.

So in this particular scenario, we would also look at link building (posicionamiento web) tactics that deliver fresh links in great numbers as an attempt to beat the incumbent sites on velocity rather than volume.

This makes tactics like contests and linkable assets such as infographics highly suited to ranking for keywords like this. It also makes it that much more important to coordinate your efforts to ensure maximum link and social impact.

SERP 3 – ‘online shopping’ Google.com

The final SERP we will take a look at is ‘online shopping’ in the US which, according to SEOmoz’s Keyword Difficulty Tool, is extremely competitive and more challenging than any of the others we have looked at.

The top result, Overstock.com, has a domain authority of 90; a domain mozRank of 6.52; and nearly 300,000 external followed links, so this certainly looks the most challenging SERP to conquer.

As a side note, you might have seen the spot of bother Overstock.com got themselves into early on in 2011; it was encouraging links from college websites. Anyway, it cleaned up its act to the satisfaction of Google who released the retailer from the “sin bin” in late April 2011.

Link Quantity

Number of external links to the root domain according to OpenSiteExplorer

*The average of the remaining 7 top 10 results = 6,860,105 (this result is skewed by Ebay.com’s nearly 30million links)

Anchor Text

Percentage of links with ‘online shopping’ as anchor text

*The average of the remaining 7 top 10 results = 0%

Link Quality

Percentage of links deemed to be of ‘low power’ by Link Research Tools

*The average of the remaining 7 top 10 results = 3.75%

Link Target

Percentage of links that point at the homepage according to Link Research T ools

*The average of the remaining 7 top 10 results = 48.4%

Link Status

Percentage of external followed links according to Link Research Tools

*The average of the remaining 7 top 10 results =65.81%

Link Locality

Analysing the locality of the links is a little more challenging with US SERPs because of the worldwide nature of the .com domain. We don’t know whether the link originates from the USA or elsewhere in the world.

Social Metrics

*The average of the remaining 7 top 10 results = 19,708 Facebook Shares and 1441 Google +1s

Links over time

Similarly as we analysed the UK SERP of ‘online shopping’ for ongoing activity over time, below is a graph showing the non-cumulative view of referring domains pointing at the top 5 search results. You will note that Overstock.com and WalMart.com have largely mirrored each other in terms of link profile growth and decline over the past 5 years, and it could be argued, therefore, that they have been tussling in a competitive sense — vying for the top search engine positions.

This graph once again highlights the need for on-going activities to maintain and enhance positions as competitors react to your SEO. That isn’t to say that you need the same or even a greater volume of links in relation to your competitors. For example, Forever21.com ranks better than WalMart.com, but has fewer domains linking to it. But as the graph highlights, there is a need to be building or encouraging links on an ongoing basis. Overstock.com, at the start of 2011, acquired links with greater velocity than competing sites like Forever21.com and HSN.com, which likely contributed to their #1 position for this competitive keyword.

Analysis – how can we come out on top?

To come out on top in the US SERP – natural or certainly a natural appearance is the name of the game.

Link quality is paramount in order to rank for this keyword. There are next to no ‘low power’ links apparently contributing to the rankings of the top 10 results. This is different to the other SERPs we have analysed, because in the case of the UK and Australian SERPs, there are sites that are still very much enjoying prominent positions helped by low quality links.

Social is an equally important factor as we can see the top results have a much higher average Facebook share and Google +1 count — in terms of the remaining 7 top 10 results — than the other SERPs we looked at.

Also, in comparison to the other SERPs we have looked at, the distribution of links is also an important factor; it is natural for a website, particularly an eCommerce website, to have links to various sections and categories of the site rather than the majority of inbound links pointing at the homepage. Given this and the fact that Google is stepping up its efforts on unnatural linking patterns and communicating these warnings to site owners, I would think that HSN.com, which has a very high percentage of links to the homepage, is at least inviting a manual review from a Googler.

It could well be argued that the US SERP is the guinea-pig-lab-experiment for Google. This would seem to align with the way they roll out new features, e.g. US >> English Speaking Countries >> Rest of the world. If this is the case, the US SERP is probably the UK SERP of the future and so on.

It is also easier for Google to work more legitimate signals like social into the ranking algorithm and tuning down others in a Google.com SERP because there are more data points which would make the results more consistent with their quality expectations. In the Australian SERPs, there are sub-1000 social shares in most cases; whereas in the US SERPs, there are in most cases many thousands. Google, at this point, could not tune down link factors too much in the Australian SERPs because it would likely send the search results crazy as most sites that deserve to rank haven’t got the social signals in place to react to a switch of that kind.

My theory is that the difference in SERPs isn’t just down to a Google whim; it’s also the market as a whole.

What can we take-away from all this?

There is a trade-off that needs analysing…

Studying each of these SERPs as we have certainly raises the question of strategy.

As an SEO, you have to be strategic with your budget and resource allocation. Depending on your market and how ‘SEO-advanced’ it is, these factors will impact how and what you need to do to rank now and also continue to rank into the future.

It is a case of balancing appropriate financial investment, short term results, long term stability, and mitigating risks. Identifying not shortcuts, but fast and safe routes to the top is what any good SEO does.

Clients and agencies are fearful of low-quality link building (posicionamiento web); but as the data above suggests, in some markets, this is still a very effective tactic.

Although you don’t need me to tell you, only a fool is still freewheeling off the back of low-quality links alone.

From the above, we can deduce that in the US market — arguably a more ‘SEO advanced’ market — lower quality links are starting to wane in terms of effectiveness as the social signal dial gets turned up a little. So for anyone reading this in Australia, you could say that the US is our canary down the mine; and therefore, learning from what is working there and balancing it with what works here presently is the smartest strategy to adopt.

However, Wil Reynolds argued a strong case that — even in markets like the US – links are still the dominant factor and not necessarily good quality links either; in fact quality and social signals don’t appear to impact rankings as much as you might think.

Balance your link building (posicionamiento web) tactic portfolio – adopting a combination approach

You are likely familiar with the Boston Matrix, which is an established tool for analysing the product or service portfolio of a business.

Below is an adapted version of the Boston Matrix, which should help you to visualise and more effectively plan your link building (posicionamiento web) efforts. Thus, ensuring you are getting the results you seek now whilst being mindful of future developments.

A balanced ‘portfolio’ is essential. Too much in one area can be hampering short-term success; too much in another area could be jeopardising long-term stability.

It is a balancing act, and what might seem like extra ‘paperwork’ is actually a quick and effective planning tool that can also help clients to better understand your approach.

How to use the matrix

1. Understand the segments (see below).
2. Categorise your tactics (depending upon your market).
3. Assign a percentage of your budget to each one (understand your own or your client’s objectives and expectations and then assign accordingly).
4. Monitor regularly (SEO is a constantly changing environment, and as such tactics will likely move through all stages of the matrix at some point).

• New recipes

This is the ‘development kitchen’ for your link building (posicionamiento web) efforts – where you explore new tactics which might or might not be providing value.

By new tactics, I am not specifically talking about ‘unheard of in the industry,’ but perhaps just new to your market or your site. Some verticals still have very few infographics, for example.

• Consume in moderation

This segment is for tactics which offer medium to long-term value, but little in the way of short-term gains. So it should be consumed in moderation if you are looking to maximise return on investment.

• Staple diet

This is the bread and butter segment and likely to be where most resources are allocated. You know these tactics work, and they provide short-term gain without compromising medium to long-term stability.

• Fruitless

The graveyard of link building (posicionamiento web) tactics. Obviously, it is up to you when you feel that a certain tactic is no longer pulling its weight. It can be an idea to keep a track of the ‘fruitless’ tactics and perhaps a note as to why; then if things should change, you have the option of pulling it back into your portfolio via the ‘new recipes’ section.

Furthermore, Google’s crackdown on unnatural link patterns means that now is definitely the time to be varying your anchor text to ensure your site’s profile is as natural looking as it possibly can be.

Overall conclusion

The overall conclusion we can draw is that link building (posicionamiento web) is certainly not a one size fits all approach. Different SERPs, keywords, and markets require very different strategies.

You also need to be thinking SERP-specific when it comes to link building (posicionamiento web) tactics. Certainly, there are other ways to view link building (posicionamiento web), but this is just the way I look at it so as to make it more tactical. Some would argue that by looking at what competitors are doing, you are always going to be chasing their tail. I would say this isn’t the case; as with my proposed methodology outlined above, you are learning from their successes and their mistakes. Then you are executing, using your own well thought out tactics, which should close the natural search gap and then outpace the competition over time.

An interesting point, up for discussion and testing, would be whether a company can leap-frog the lower-end link building (posicionamiento web) and overcompensate with the more legitimate tactics and get this recognised and rewarded by Google. My instincts and research tell me no, but I would love to hear from you in the comments if you have any data or experiences that would go against this.

By David Klein, Founder and Director of Orange Line – SEO and online marketing (marketing online) specialists based in Sydney, Australia. Visit us for more information about our link building services and methodology.

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don’t have time to hunt down but want to read!

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Source
SEOmoz Daily SEO Blog

Here’s a challenge for all you marketers who are on top of your game: How do you make sure your marketing team is taken seriously within your own company?

One important step you should take is publishing a thorough, thoughtful, quantitative monthly report on your marketing team’s impact.

(more…)

The recent integration of social and search at Google marks a huge change in how information on the internet will be presented to us. When a logged in user now performs a search, they will be given two types of search results: the anonymous search results that we are all used to and personal search results, which are generated from information shared within that user’s network of Google+ circles. This new platform presents a major marketing opportunity for brands and it requires a developed strategy just like other social media platforms. It would be daft for brands to consider Google+ as just another fad, and, in the same breadth that brands define strategies for Facebook and Twitter, the same now needs to be done for Google+.

While it is apparent that Google+ is not yet fully developed, it would appear a good time for brands to set up their Google+ page, start uploading regular content and playing about with the different features on Google+. What should you as a brand be doing now?

1. Grow Your Circles

As we have seen, Google are placing more emphasis on people. People are going to share your content; they are your audience, so make sure they are interested in your market offering and develop trust with them. What can be done to grow circles? First and most importantly, the Google+1 button must be displayed on your site. This not only helps build contacts, it helps verify your site to your page. Ask employees and partners of the organisation to share the page within their circles. In the same way a brand would develop Twitter and Facebook campaigns, the same should be done on Google+. This could include giveaways, deals, offers – anything that is exclusive to Google+ will help you gain more followers. People’s pages at the moment have a higher weighting than brand pages. People need to add a page before the page can add them, so if a celebrity like Lady Gaga was to pick up your page, it could essentially drive a lot of people to your page. There is also a What’s Hot feature on Google+, so featuring on this would also increase the visibility of your page.

2. Segment Their Audience

Like in Google+ for personal pages, you can divide up your contacts into ‘friends’, ‘family’, ‘colleagues’ etc, the same can be done with your Google+ Page contacts. At the moment, a Google+ page’s circles are defined as ‘following’, ‘customers’, ‘VIPs’, and ‘team members’. This is a good place to start, and more circles can be added to further segment your audience. This provides brands with a wonderful marketing opportunity where they can target each segment with unique and specific messages. This is important, as it allows brands to develop trust with their audience… a key factor which will encourage users to share their content.

3.Develop A Content Strategy

Content creation will become more important for brands than ever before. A content strategy should take into consideration the latest Google algorithm updates, including Panda, which favours unique content that is relevant and fresh.  A regular flow of high quality content will raise your brand awareness and potentially drive traffic to your site through your Google+ page. However, the value of that content will drop if it is not ‘shareable’. Making content easy to share and to +1 will widen its reach across the internet, essentially helping that content appear in more personalised results. Having said that, creating shareable content is not always an easy task and brands will need to analyse their content and adapt it. ‘Ripples’ is a feature that will allow them to do so. It provides visual information on how content has rippled through the web. This insight could be invaluable to brands, as they are able to see who is sharing their content.

Now that Google+ allows multiple managers to log into a brand’s Google+ page, there is even more incentive for a brand to use this platform. Excluding the owner, a page can have up to 50 managers who can act on behalf of the organisation. While taking on another social platform may seem a lot of work, I believe that brands that implement and integrate their Google+ page well could really reap big rewards, not just in terms of brand awareness but also SEO. However, until the platform further develops, it will be hard to say exactly how SEO and Google+ pages will be intertwined. Google+ is about ‘connections, interactions and activity’ …people, essentially. Surely Google will reward in some way, brands that can prove they have quality, shareable content that has been publically approved (+1ed) by numerous people in their circles?

© SEOptimise – Download our free business guide to blogging whitepaper and sign-up for the SEOptimise monthly newsletter. What Brands Need To Know About Google+ Pages

Related posts:

1. Where is Google Going with Google+ Pages?
2. What Signals Are Google Sending About Image Search?
3. Top 10 Retail SEO Mistakes UK Brands Are Still Making

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SEOptimise » blog

The internet lets you reach billions of people around the globe, but if you’re like many small or local businesses, world domination isn’t really on your radar (not yet, anyway). What makes your business tick is your local community, whether on the town, city, county, or state level. So with all the choices consumers have nowadays for where to get their products and services, how do you ensure they find your local business first? You do everything in your power to get your website in the top search engine ranking positions! And luckily, there’s a lot you can do to tip the scales in your website’s favor. From on-page optimization to inbound link building (posicionamiento web) to social media involvement, here is the ultimate guide for how to optimize your website for local search (posicionamiento en buscadores) so you can dominate the SERPs.

Why Optimize for Local Search? It’s in the Numbers.

• Approximately 3 billion search queries contain local terms every month. (Source: comScore) Tweet This Stat!
• 70% of online searchers will use local search (posicionamiento en buscadores) to find offline businesses. (Source: Kelsey Group) Tweet This Stat!
• 20% of Google searches are for local information. (Source: HubSpot via Google) Tweet This Stat!

How to Optimize for Local Search on Your Website

• Blog, blog, blog. Every new blog is a new indexed page for your site, a new page on which to target a geographic search phrase, and a new opportunity to get found in the search engine results pages (SERPs). If you’re having trouble coming up with geo-targeted content, consider highlighting customer success stories and case studies.
• Write about complementary local services. If you sell screwdrivers, talk about someone in your area who sells screws. It lets you write helpful content about your geographic area in a relevant way so you’re not faced with awkward keyword stuffing that Google’s algorithm punishes. Plus, it builds good will with local businesses that can introduce you to new customers, and possibly result in an inbound link in the future.
• Optimize the 5 crucial on-page SEO elements. That means your page title, URL, header tags, image alt text, and page content should be optimized with local terms. Here’s an example of a page that is well optimized for local search (posicionamiento en buscadores). You can also make use of the vertical bar in page titles as an easy way of consistently indicating your location to search engines.

• Target long-tail keyword variations for your geographic area. If you’re selling unicorn costumes, you might want to cover unicorn costumes in Detroit, unicorn costumes in metro Detroit, and unicorn costumes in southeastern Michigan. Cover all the ways people might refer to your city in your keyword research so you can capitalize on all the different ways people find you on the web. You can perform long-tail keyword research in Google’s Keyword Tool, or if you use HubSpot software, use HubSpot’s Keyword Tool to help find variations you might not have thought of before.
• Write about local and industry news. Stay up to date on what’s happening in your community and in your industry for blog fodder. This will win you big points in the SERPs, as Google Panda’s recent freshness update started rewarding timely content more than it has in the past. Even if nothing has happened that directly relates to your industry or location, look for local spins on industry trends, and comment on how local events could affect your industry.
• Mobile-optimize your site. Local search and mobile search go hand in hand. 40% of Google Maps usage is on mobile devices, and it has a total of 150 million mobile users. Some of the most common ways people will use your site in a mobile environment is looking up reviews, finding directions to your location, and searching for contact information. Make it easy for them by making your site mobile friendly.

How to Optimize for Local Search Off Your Website

• Register your business with Google Places. According to Google, there are nearly 50 million Google Places pages, and just over 4 million of the business listings have been claimed by business owners. This is a huge opportunity for local businesses to appear in the Google Places results for a given search term. But to do so, you have to register your business on Google Places and have a well optimized site.
• Submit to local directories. The more local directories to which you submit your site, the more opportunities to get found and receive inbound links. Use this list of 50 business directories to get started!
• Be a celebrity. The more of a fixture you are in your community (both online and offline), the more people will talk about you. Be a guest blogger, talk to and about (positively, of course!) other people in your industry, and act as a resource provider for the community. If you’re an active participant in community conversations, the buzz around you grows in the form of inbound links, social media growth, and media coverage.
• Publish your content on social media outlets, especially Google+ business pages. Google considers content shared on social media more important now than ever before. And now that Google+ has business pages, social and search are even more closely aligned. Most importantly for local businesses, Google+ business pages are starting to show up in Google Places search results. If you haven’t started your Google+ business page yet, build one now.
• Be on local review sites. 77% of online shoppers use reviews to make a purchasing decision. If your customers are looking for opinions on you, make it easier for them to find out how awesome you are by embracing your presence on online review sites. Claim your listings. Ask customers to post about their great experiences with you. Yes, some negative reviews may slip in there, but wouldn’t you rather be an active participant in achieving a positive online reputation (reputacion online) than take a passive role in maintaining a lackluster one?

Local businesses do have the power to have a top presence in the SERPs, but like any effort to gain and maintain organic visibility, it’s hard work! If you can start checking a few of these tactics off your marketing to-do list every month, though, your website will see great improvements in online visibility.

What tactics have you used to increase your website’s visibility in the SERPs for local terms? Which ones worked, and which ones backfired?

Image credit: toastmonster

Connect with HubSpot:

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HubSpot’s Inbound Internet Marketing Blog

Why You Need Social Media in 7 Minutes for your small business

Why You Need Social Media In 7 Minutes For Your Small Business

Does social media marketing work?  Absolutely.  According to IBM, 9.2 percent of consumers who saw social media marketing campaigns made purchases, compared to the overall conversion rate for web purchases, which IBM pegged at 5.5 percent…As a whole, IBM expects mobile web access on retail websites to increase 15 percent in November 2011 compared to November 2010.  Businesses are taking note, and more and more businesses are implementing a social media marketing campaign.

In fact, almost all companies report that they are growing their spending on social media marketing techniques, according to the results of a Booz & Company and Buddy Media survey released in October 2011 (Campaigns to Capabilities: Social Media & Marketing 2011).  In fact, not a single respondent to the survey reported that they would spend less on social media, with only 5% stating that they would maintain the same budget.  That is a pretty incredible consensus.

The respondents identified the most critical success enablers for launching a social media marketing campaign:

• Education on what can be achieved via social media
• Training of staff who are not accustomed to using social media
• Ability to adapt and react quickly on social media
• Clearly communicated support from executive management
• Having a clear owner of the project

In summary, in order to implement a successful social media marketing plan, it is imperative that you have the ability to train your staff on how to effectively use social media and provide the technology needed to implement plan in a quick, simple, and efficient manner.

Providing knowledge to the small business owner on how to create and implement a social media marketing plan and the ability to implement efficiently and easily is the reason for the creation of Social Media in 7 Minutes.

Here are 7 reasons why you need Social Media in 7 Minutes for your small business

1. You Don’t Know what you Don’t Know- Is there a social media site for mobile and events?  Can you use video to promote your product or service?  How can you actually use a social media site for business if you’re limited to just 140 characters?  How can I improve my SEO without spending any money using social media?  Can I implement a social media marketing plan without a website?  Understanding the possibilities of what is available for social media marketing is the first step to creating any type of plan.
2. All in one info- Social Media in 7 Minutes is designed to be a one stop shop for your social media how to guides.  Social Media in 7 Minutes will show you how to create the Top 7 online local search (posicionamiento en buscadores) directory sites, how to create, interact, optimize, and properly engage with others on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook, how to set up and promote events, how to utilize mobile marketing, and how to implement video marketing as well.  This information is provided to you in both video and text formats.
3. Video How To- Most people prefer to learn ‘how to’ instructions via video, so all of our training is a recording of how to create, interact, optimize, and engage with others on specific social media sites.  Video tutorials are perhaps the most effective ways to teach people how to do something that they are otherwise not familiar.
4. Text Info- Sometimes video moves to fast for people, which is why each educational how to video is also accompanied by a written step-by-step process detailing the how-to of the video training.  Having access to both written and video training will allow the user the greatest opportunity for success to both learn and implement these strategies.
5. Constantly Updated- Perhaps the best part about using video training is that as things change, we can update accordingly.  Social media is a very dynamic market.  Since October, Facebook has created a new Timeline design and Google+ has launched.  That’s a pretty busy 30 days.   So when changes occur, like the Facebook Timeline, we can either create a new how to video or update and existing training video.  Because of our ability to do this, Social Media in 7 Minutes will always provide it users with the freshest, up to the minute detailed how to video training on social media.
6. Experienced- Social Media in 7 Minutes was created by Black Box Social Media who is a ‘done for you’ social media marketing company.  BBSM is constantly creating and implementing profitable social media marketing plans for high end clients.  As such, BBSM is a student of the social media marketing.  When things change, BBSM knows about it and will update and educate users of Social Media In 7 Minutes of these changes.
7. All in one DIY Software App for implementation- education is great, but if you can’t put it into action, then it does you no good.  Part of Social Media in 7 Minutes is the 7 Minute Dashboard, which is an all in one do it yourself software application that will allow you to perform many tasks from one location, such as scheduling and  updating all of your Facebook and LinkedIn profiles & groups, Tweeting, sending emails, autoresponders, newsletters, text messages, and blog posts all from one location.

If you liked ’7 Reasons You Need Social Media In 7 Minutes’, then you may also enjoy other articles about social media marketing available from Black Box Social Media

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Social Media Marketing And SEO For Business

Last month, I talked a little bit about some of the tactics you can use to increase response rates to your customer surveys. Today, I want to take a step back and cover some of the reasons you need to be surveying your customers. Maybe, you’re not yet getting feedback from your customers. If you’re not, you’re jeopardizing your success.

Here are 5 important reasons you need to survey your customers.

1. Measure customer loyalty—Customer retention should be a top priority for every business. It’s been said a thousand times, but it’s worth repeating—acquiring a new customer is far more expensive than keeping an existing customer. Surveying your customers gives you insight into the amount of loyalty they have for your company. If you don’t like the results, you can come up with a plan to improve your customer retention rates.
2. Develop ideas for new products—Adding to your product line is a good way to keep your company fresh and growing, but finding new ideas for products and services can be tough. Who better to turn to than your customers? They can tell you what they’re looking for, and if there’s enough of a demand for it, you can deliver it for them.
3. Training your staff—Customer feedback often provides good information about the effectiveness of your customer service. Whenever you identify the things customers like and dislike about their interactions with your company, you can use that information in training your employees.
4. Improving existing products and services—When I think about some of my favorite products (iPhone 4, Playstation 3, etc.), they have one thing in common—they’re always improving (or at least trying to). New updates are released to existing versions, and eventually, totally new and improved versions of the products are created. Ask your customers what improvements they’d like to see in your products and services so you can deliver the best product possible.
5. Demonstrate commitment to customer satisfaction—Asking for feedback shows your customers that you care about them and value their opinions. Just make sure you actually take the time to study their feedback and act upon it when necessary.

What are some other good reasons to conduct customer surveys? Share your thoughts by leaving a comment.

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SEO Hosting Blog

When it comes to social media marketing, one of the few “must-dos” is to actually listen to your network. Social media is a conversation, not a soap box for your brand. No one wants to be talked at, whether it is in a face-to-face conversation or an online one. Social networking has taught your customers that they have a voice and a right for their opinions to be heard, and they are expecting you to listen. But paying attention to what your network is (or isn’t) saying shouldn’t be important to you just because SEO and social media consultants tell you it should be. If you actually listen to your social connections and take what they say to heart, you’ll find you will better understand your customers, their needs and where your brand fits into their lives.

They will tell you what kind of content they want.
Content marketing is a critical component of a good SEO campaign, but the number one problem for many companies is coming up with topics. Social media is the perfect place to turn to for topic inspiration. What kind of questions are people posting on your Facebook walls or in industry forums? What blog posts get the most attention and “love” from your social network? Does your audience prefer videos to long articles? All these questions and more about content can be answered when you listen to your social networks.

They will let you know when you’re doing it wrong and when you get it right.
Social media is not a one-size-fits-all tool. It’s your duty to figure out the best sites to connect with your target audience, what kind of content they respond best to, when they are online and connected to those networks, when they want to talk and so forth. If you pay close enough attention, you can start to judge the effectiveness of your social media marketing based on their responses. Do links shared between 9-5 get the same kind of response as the ones between 8 PM and midnight? What kind of tone do the comments on your Facebook wall take? Keep in mind that 100 people may visit your blog post in a day, but only 2 bother to leave comments. Those two comments might represent majority opinion, or they might be the outliers.

They will let you know what they really think.
Social networking is nothing if not honest. Consumers turn to social networking sites to complain about poor customer service from the local cable company, rave about the new coffee shop that just opened up or ask their friends for great date ideas. If they love something, they’ll let everyone know. If they hate something, they’ll let everyone know. Social media gives everyone a chance to say what they want when they want to. If you’re paying attention, you’ll get access into the minds of your customers that no focus group or survey could ever give.

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Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Journal: SEO Articles, Tips and News

Google +1 for websites is here for a few days, and while some people are still (or again) skeptical, there are quite a lot of webmasters who have adopted the + 1 button almost immediately. The SEO industry has been especially quick to include the buttons. I am among them, while I still don’t use the Facebook like.

I’m not going to shout hooray because Google finally released a button, but nonetheless I can see that it’s the best and the hitherto most important attempt by Google at entering the social media arena. Most others failed miserably and Google has learned some lessons it seems.

The ease of use, for instance, and the quick announcement that the +1 votes will count as a ranking factor, are good signs that +1 will still be here a year from now.

It seems that Google is also adding up the best technologies from its former failed social services and products. I see features from Google SearchWiki, Google Bookmarks, Google Buzz etc. converging.

Google’s own +1 resources

Google +1 was introduced initially at the end of March, and I provided a list of 40 resources back then. Thus here I’ll add only those you need for the actual button. Most importantly, there is the code to include the website button, which is as easy to implement as Google Analytics or even more straightforward. So if you use Google Analytics already, inserting Google +1 is even easier to accomplish.

How to install Google +1 on WordPress, Blogger, Joomla etc.

You can of course add Google +1 buttons to your blog or CMS, either including the code yourself or using extensions, add-ons or plug ins. There are ways to do so on WordPress, WordPress and Thesis, Blogger, Joomla (both a how to and an extension), Magento, Open Cart… For those who want to add the button according to web standards (so that it validates), there is also a small tweak or a bigger workaround for HTML5.

Add your extension, tutorial or how to below in the comments.

Google +1 Extensions for WordPress

While you can include the +1 button manually as suggested above, there are already plenty of Google +1 WordPress extensions. I have tested several of them. There are simple ones, even one you have to save as PHP file to add-ons with multiple customisation options and features.

Choose the one that fits you best and that you trust the most to get updated in the future. I currently use the one by Alex Moss from Pleer SEO. For bloggers who already use a Google Buzz button, there seems to be a conflict and this extension has been suggested as a solution.

How to track Google +1 in Google Analytics and elsewhere

Yoast has quickly come up with a way to track Google +1 votes in Google Analytics. Others have expanded on this script with the actual URLs that got clicked and to consider negative clicks (when someone clicks +1 again to revoke the vote).

Several bloggers have come up with similar scripts. Google has already suggested that +1 votes will both get counted by Google Analytics by default and that +1 will get its own analytics suite, at least according to screenshots shown on a conference. Other analytics tools use their own hacks to allow +1 click tracking: Sitecatalyst.

I’m still on the lookout for Piwik, Woopra and other solutions.

How to use Google +1 on websites that don’t have a +1 button installed

While the quick adoption of +1 buttons on websites is quite impressive, and there are far more of them than Google Buzz buttons already, many sites don’t yet include the button. If you want to +1 them anyway, you need a bookmarklet or a browser extension for Chrome. Of course, you can still vote the site or article up in the search results as well. I haven’t found an extension for Firefox yet, but expect one to appear soon.

Why or why not use Google +1?

Many bloggers argue that it makes no sense to click the +1 button on websites because there is nobody you actually share your endorsement with, at least not directly. This may indeed be an advantage, as you can +1 twenty articles on the same topic in a row without alienating your friends or followers. Theoretically, there are many reasons to actually click +1 instead of liking or tweeting. On the other hand, privacy concerns get cited as a reason not to use Google +1 and Google forces you to join a social network again.

The single biggest reason to click +1 right now is, of course, that it is a ranking factor for Google.  So webmasters want visitors to click the button. Social Media B2B suggests informing all your existing connections. Also, Google users customise their search results using +1. They see their own votes and those by friends while searching. Logged out users also see the +1 votes. The first search results on Google for a given keyword displays the number of +1 votes, if there are any.

How does Google +1 affect your SEO and social media optimisation?

Judging from my own use of +1 buttons, I tend to click +1 instead of like on Facebook or tweet it. It easier than sharing on Twitter, and it prevents flooding your followers and friends with your numerous votes. So some people may vote more often now, while the number of likes and tweets may suffer. Another point to remember is that many people tweet just for the SEO of it. Now, with +1 they can go the direct way to improve their rankings – they don’t have to tweet.

Aside from my subjective musing, there have been two very impressive studies, one by SEO Effect to test the actual ranking and CTR impact and another one that analyses the performance of the Google +1 button and the scripts it uses. While the SEO is seemingly improving significantly, the website speed issues are a drawback right now. The Google engineers haven’t done their homework here. Also, there seem to be canonical issues.

I have to repeat here: Google has officially announced that +1 votes will count as a ranking factor. Many in the SEO industry doubt that the impact will be big, but as we see the actual tests show otherwise. So using +1 buttons on your site and encouraging your readers to click them will be a part of link building (posicionamiento web) from now on.

What else you need to know about the Google +1 button for websites

Google +1 buttons are also displayed on YouTube and Google Shopping (products) search results. As of now (June 8th, 2011) only Google.com users can see the +1 votes from their so-called social circle. These might be people connected to you via the various existing social sites like Twitter, Google Buzz, Quora, Friendfeed etc.

Still, so-called social search results seem to be separate from +1 votes right now. Both are connected to the same social circle you can manage on your Google Profile. While Android smartphones of course support +1, it seems that the buttons do not display on iPhones.

Additionally, WebProNews has compiled a list of things you have to know about Google +1. Kikolani has also a great guide.

© SEOptimise – Download our free business guide to blogging whitepaper and sign-up for the SEOptimise monthly newsletter. Everything Webmasters Need to Know About the Google +1 Button for Websites

Related posts:

1. The Google+ Honeymoon is Over: How to Deal With It
2. 40 Google +1 SEO Resources
3. 10 New Google Tools, Products and Services Every Business Person Has to Know About

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SEOptimise » blog

Mike Blumenthal dissects Google Places’ latest redesign:

According to Mike:

“They include a strong call to action (review, upload photos) and clear sense of priorities as to what is important going forward – even coupons now have a higher visibility - more user generated content, more understanding of your social circles intent and a greater desire, at least in the hotel industry, to use Places to “close” the sale.”

While reviews are still a big part of Places, my initial impression after checking out Mike’s screenshots is that Google thinks that reviews are a much lower priority than other elements such as coupons and social mentions.

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Local SEO Guide