Understanding Organic Link Building – Part 2: How?
August 5th, 2010
Posted in Part 1 of our series on organic link building discussed why this should be part of your marketing strategy. Today, lets cover what you really want to know, which is how to do it!
In short, the recipe for natural link building looks something like this:
* One part the most useful, relevant content that provides the best resources, tools, services, etc. in your industry .
* One part patiently waiting for others on the web to find and decide to link to you.
* Repeat, repeat, repeat!
If this sounds intimidating, that’s because it is. So it’s important to have a plan and stick to it. Utilize your blog to it’s full extent by writing (often) about what you know. Incorporate style and flair, and always try to consider what information your readers are looking for. Eventually, you will be gifted with those links and the traffic that is directed to your site and therefore through your office doors!
Understanding Organic Link Building – Part 1: Why?
I appreciate a nice single-malt Scotch. (Pique your interest?) Maybe for you it’s red wine, or a delicious meal prepared by a gourmet chef, or an interesting piece of artwork, but for me, definitely Scotch. In order for me to enjoy that smoky, caramel-colored goodness, years of effort and expertise have been expended. Malted barley and clean, pure spring water processed into mash, fermented, distilled, and then matured in oak casks for years, bottled, and shipped halfway across the world. If you’re thinking that I’m sitting at my desk on a dreary Washington Monday morning pining for my next drink, you’re only partly correct. So why are we talking about my love affair with Scotch?
Like my beverage-of-choice, organic link building takes time, patience, and effort, but it’s worth it! We know the end goal is directing traffic to your site so new clients can find you. Natural link building has real business value, you just have to have a long-term view and commitment.
Link building of course, is only a part of the SEO puzzle. So why put all the effort into it? Especially when you’ve got CE credits to keep up on, new technology to learn, and, oh yeah, dentistry to perform! Well, here at Roadside Multimedia, we think that link building as a means for directing traffic to your site and attaining an optimal page ranking is invaluable. We know this because natural link building is what powers most of the top sites on the internet. It’s a formula that takes consistent effort, but is proven to work!
So, whether you’re a client of RSMM already, or considering hiring us to create and market your site, contact us today to learn more about all aspects of SEO, including organic link building!
Yellow Page Advertising a Relic!
In a thought-provoking article published by the Seattle Times recently, it was revealed that the Seattle City Council is looking to cut down on the waste caused by unwanted phone directories, by allowing consumers to opt out of delivery. The article went so far as to call unwanted directories “a nuisance.”
Personally, I can think of about a hundred ways to use my phone directory, including but not limited to: booster seat, fire starter, door stop, protection from home invasion, Dustin Hoffman impressions, etc. The point is that the Seattle Times, and everyone here at RSMM agree that the Yellow Pages are no longer the relevant research aid they may have been years ago.
In decades past, it would have been simply ludicrous not include Yellow Page advertising in your dental marketing plan. However, as the majority of people are looking exclusively to the web to search for everything from dental offices to doggie day cares, money spent on Yellow Page advertising sits unviewed on kitchen counters and propping up table legs.
Marketing in the Yellow Pages was simple, step one: buy the biggest ad, step two: wait for phone to ring. Comparatively, on-line marketing seems so complex: SEO, the importance of links, page ranking, where do you start?! A great first step would be to contact Roadside Multimedia today, let us be your guide to dental web marketing!
Roadside’s Social Media Mentor is on Ice; Can Now Blog About Her Broken Leg!
Roadside Multimedia’s own Tynisha Mann, tour guide for many dentists on their voyage through social media, has broken her leg and will be out of the office for a couple weeks pending her recovery. For those of you who have upcoming appointments with Tynisha about blogging and your social media, don’t worry, we will be in touch with you. If you have not heard from us yet, a representative of RSMM will be rescheduling your appointments or rearranging your social media needs during this interm.
Tynisha was sharing her bubbly personality with some young girls by fostering an entertaining trip to the ice rink to celebrate school being out last Friday. The girls were starting off their Summer vacation right until Tynisha, masterful multi-tasker that she is, encountered an unexpected divot of ice. She was uncharacteristically taken off guard and unable to negotiate the ice. Her toe pick (every time I hear that term I think of The Cutting Edge!!!) got stuck and her momentum instantly shifted to her left ankle, breaking the bones and requiring surgery. She has survived the surgery and hospital stay and is now resting up at home.
Our office will miss Tynisha’s chipper personality while she is recovering, but will continue to handle all of our clients’ social media needs. When she is able to return, she will be ready to get back to work for you in helping your social media to rock!
Thanks for all your hard work, Tynisha. Get well soon!!
(P.S. Heather is lonely on her coffee runs….just sayin’…hurry up and heal already!!!)
Here she is smiling in her hospital bed…it might be the fun stuff coming through the IV that was bring that on though!
How Social Media is Changing Everything
Previous posts have discussed how to successfully build your Social Media Marketing (SMM), but in this post, we back track just a bit. Many of the dentist we here at Roadside Multimedia (RSMM) work with are already strong believers in the power of SMM, but if you still need some convincing, read on.
A study conducted by the Society for New Communications Research sheds light on how social media is affecting business and decision-making. No surprise to anyone here at RSMM, but to sum up, social media is having a tremendous impact on how professionals make and gain support for decisions. What this means to our readers: Failure to utilize social media outlets as a means to market your practice is simply not an option.
If you have time, please follow the link below to the blog of on the the study’s authors, Don Bulmer, and read the complete findings of the study. If not, here are some of the points we at RSMM thought were striking:
- Through the use of social media, customers and patients now have an instantaneous platform for discussion of their ideas, experiences and knowledge. Which means that the word-of-mouth advertising that you know brings in the best patients is now happening via social media sites, not just around office water-coolers.
- The professionals surveyed for this study trust online information from social media almost as much as information gotten in-person. Wow!
- Social Media uses patterns that are not pre-determined by age or organizational affiliation. A presence on social media sites can help you reach and influence potential patients of all ages and walks of life.
We know what you’re thinking; Facebook and Twitter were not subjects you covered in dental school, where do you start? Call our office today, we’d love to point you down the right path!
Click here to read Dan Bulmer’s blog!
SEO Myths #3- Effective On-Page Optimization
In my last post, I discussed the importance of links, and how there is a trend towards focusing on them nearly to the exclusion of everything else. While links are crucial to a successful SEO campaign, they are far from the only thing. Effective on-page optimization can make the difference between a #1 ranking- and page 2.
With that #1 rank goal in mind, how can you optimize your site to help you achieve it?
Have a plan: If you’ve heard that before, you may have read previous posts. But it applies to to every aspect of SEO. Develop a strong keyword strategy. Know what keywords and phrases apply to you that people are searching for. Be aggressive. Have a strong, well written landing page optimized for each of your phrases. Make sure the page is between 200 and 600 words long, and your keywords account for at least 3% of the total word count- try to stay below 10%, though- be wary of keyword spam (there are plenty of tools around to help with this).
Start early: The reason a lot of people are gun-shy about spending time on-page is that they do not address it early enough. If you write solid, optimized content while developing the site, it’ll save you time after the site is launched- which allows you to spend time on things like link building.
Watch the competition: Odds are you’re not #1 right now, but you want to be. So take some time and look at who is there right now. What are they doing right? What are they doing wrong?
In the case of the former, do it better than them. For the latter, do it right! This obviously is broader than just on-page, but if your competition has great links but shoddy content, they’re neglecting a large part of their SEO, not to mention conversions. If they’re going to leave that open, take advantage of it!
Stay ahead: SEO is an ongoing process, and the competitors you pass on your way to #1 aren’t going to be content to slip- just as you weren’t. For most, looking at ways to improve off-page is standard, as it should be. But few examine their on-page to see where they can improve. Remember: your competitors are probably looking at your site in order to figure out ways to beat you- Don’t let them! If you find think chinks in your armor first, you’ll maintain your ranking. It’s often surprising the opportunities a simple on-page analysis will reveal.
Stay fresh: Offer something new? A new product or service? Time for a new landing page! Don’t cram it onto existing ones- this will water down the strength of your current landing pages. Maintain a blog, and update it regularly- at least once a week. Search engines are always watching for new content- give it to them! A blog is a great way to do that, not to mention it is awesome for conversions, and much more (which I may have mentioned once or twice).
That covers the basics of on-page optimization, and hopefully dispels the myth that you shouldn’t spend time on it. Tomorrow, I’ll address some methods for using your on-page optimization in conjunction with link building to seriously improve your SEO.
SEO Myth Part 2- The Importance of Links
I think this should be a regular feature! There are a ton of myths out there, and if followed, they can be seriously detrimental to your SEO- and possibly your business. In this post, I am only going to tackle one, because it’s big enough- and important enough- to get its own post. There are a lot of opinions floating around about how important links are, versus on-page optimization, to the point that some don’t even feel on-page is important if you have enough links. But what it the truth about links?
Oftentimes, people will try to put percentages on the various aspects of SEO- “Links are 80% of your SEO”. That ignores the good- or at the very least minimizes- any on-page optimization. The truth is that there is no hard and fast rule or percentage for what part of SEO does what amount of good- because it all works together. If you had great links and horrible content, you won’t rank #1. And if you have great on-page and tens of thousands of Page Rank 1 or 2 links, you won’t rank #1 either. But if you have good on-page optimization, good links and it is well presented, you can rank #1. Please note two things in that sentence: 1: I say good, not great. You should aim for great, but when you finish, you should always look at your SEO and say “it can be better”- SEO is ongoing. And 2: I say you can rank #1, not that you will. I try not to make promises I can’t keep, so whether or not you rank #1 is up to you (or Roadside if you hire us…). So what constitutes a good link?
If you don’t have it already, get the Page Rank tool for your Google toolbar. Page Rank simply ranks a website, based on a variety of factors, on a scale of 1-10. In short, it measures how trustworthy a site is, and therefore how much importance to attach to links from it. The New York Times, SEOmoz (who have an awesome SEO toolbar) and Smashing Magazine are a few examples of high (9, 8 & 7 respectively) Page Rank sites, and therefore sites that a link from would be great for SEO (hint, hint to anyone from those sites reading this). In turn, Page Rank 1, 2 and sometimes 3 sites should be avoided. Case in point as to why: I am not even bothering to find PR 1,2 & 3 sites, and I came up with 3 high PR sites off the top of my head. Google is simply putting that kind of recognition and trust into a number. Incidentally, Roadside Multimedia currently resides at 4, which I hope to see go up as we get more links from sites like those mentioned above and we improve the on-page of our new site (coming soon!).
So when it comes to links, throw the little fish back- PR 1-3, land several medium sized fish- PR 4-6, and definitely try to hook a marlin- PR 7+. But don’t build links at the expense of other aspects of SEO- neglect your on-page and you will fall in the rankings- I will talk about ways to optimize on-page tomorrow!
Building Social Media Marketing
Last week I spoke with several of our dentists regarding their social media, and as I explained it, nearly all of them interrupted me and said “I’m a believer! I just need to know what to do!” Those words are music to my ears, and not only because it makes my job that much easier. In fact, it makes your job easier. Social media is kind of like Santa Claus- if you don’t believe in it, it doesn’t do you any good (maybe that’s a bad analogy, but you get the point). Hopefully if you’re reading this, you are a believer in social media marketing. If you’re not, that’s a subject for another post, but for the doubters: It works. This post, however, is for anyone who wants their social media marketing to work. Read on to find out how!
Bridging the Gap
Recent studies show that nearly 80% of people trust word of mouth, while a mere 14% trust advertising. When people visit your site, they know they are being advertised to- and that’s OK. It’s why they were looking for you in the first place. But given the above odds, they don’t trust it, even if they were looking for your dental website.
So how do you bridge the gap, and take them from the doubting 86% to the trusting 80%? You and I know that you’re honest, trustworthy and provide the best care around – but how will they know?
SEO Myths
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a fairly new practice, and like all facets of the internet, is constantly evolving. Contributing to this is the pure and unabashed dominance of Google. Google has achieved this status atop the search engine (in fact, the internet) due to the fact that it is constantly refining itself to better serve us a human beings, instead of the other way around.
It is because of this that SEO exists. Simply put, SEO is determining what Google- and therefore- people are looking for, and making your site findable (sound familiar? That’s why we say that). But because it is fairly new, there are widely varying theories, and many of them, to put it bluntly, are wrong. This can be for a variety of reasons. The most common is being misinformed. What worked in the 1990’s (remember them? Dot-com boom and all that?) will not work today- link farms, keyword spam are things of the past thanks to the efficiency of Google. So along those lines, I will put to rest some of the outdated practices and myths we hear, and explain why they don’t work- and best of all, offer solutions that do get your ranking up. Read on!