My slides from the event are below – any questions email me patrick @branded3.com. Please note that these slides have been edited slightly.

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My Link Building Slides from Searchlove 2011

The sites I mentioned in the presentation are the excellent SEOmoz and their Open Site Explorer tool.

Come and see us on our stand for some free SEO advice.

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My Internet World Presentation on Link Building for Ecommerce Sites

Internet World always has an excellent seminar programme with case studies and insights from big brands being the highlight of the show. My talk is going to be 100% non-salesy so if you want to learn about the link building strategies we use on a daily basis for ecommerce clients then this is the talk for you. It’s at 1.50pm on Tuesday 27th April in the eCommerce theatre.

If you’ve not been to an event such as Internet World before then I really recommend you give it a try. The event is free and you get access to over 180 seminars across 7 different topic areas. There are hundreds of exhibitors all under one roof and most are more than happy to give free tips and advice to people who visit their stand.

With keynote speakers including Ciao, Google, Discovery Channel, Stella Artois, Unilever & LinkedIn there are some big names to attract attention too.

We won’t be taking any sales people to the event so if you come to our stand you will get to meet and chat to the people who actually do the work at Branded3, whether it’s design, development or SEO.

If you can make it to the event please come and say hello, we’re on stand E5050.

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Link Building Seminar at Internet World 2010

A link profile is the single biggest SEO asset that a site can have and yet not many people stop to think about what their current profile looks like before trying to improve it.

Building links is time consuming and trying to replicate your competitors 10,000 links will probably take years. The key to success is to figure out where they are beating you in terms of authority and fix that first. If a competitor has a few trusted links then you won’t beat them by going after a load of links from low quality sites.

I’m a big fan of Open Site Explorer and we use this (and the other SEOmoz tools) a lot in our link analysis but only as a source of data, the actual analysis part is done in Excel using the power of the pivot table.

One of my favourite ways to visualise a link profile is to create a pivot chart showing the quality distribution of links across whatever metric you choose. The chart above uses Domain Authority from SEOmoz (a scale of 0 to 100 with the most authoritative sites having a domain authority of 100) to compare the link profiles of Blogstorm, SEO Book and SEOmoz.

The same analysis can be performed with metrics such as PageRank, mozRank, mozTrust. One thing to remember is that Domain Authority has a slight flaw (which hopefully will be fixed soon) because it treats .uk.com sites as sub-domains of www.uk.com and also treats blogs on WordPress.com & Blogspot.com sub-domains the same authority as the root domain.

Comparing your link profile against the top 10 competitors in your industry on metrics such as mozTrust and mozRank shows you where your site is performing badly – perhaps you have loads of trusted links but very few anchor text links from low trust type sites. Perhaps you loads of low trust links but no links from really top domains.

Once you have interpreted the data you can start to put things right.

Instructions

The first step is to download all the links from the domains you want to analyse. Open Site Explorer is good for this but you can use another tool if you prefer as long as you can populate a column with the metric you want to analyse.

Import all the links into the same sheet and add a final column called “Domain” which is the name of your site and your competitors sites so that you can identify the links to each.

Next you need to highlight the entire sheet and create a Pivot Table with the following fields:

Finally highlight the data and click on the Pivot Chart button in the options menu and you’re done.

Update: The chart above is a stacked area chart which is perhaps slightly misleading unless you are used to them, below is a non-stacked area chart which shows that the link distributions are quite similar.

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Using Pivot Charts to visually analyse competitor link profiles

Today I’ve removed Tynt and added a better script that allows me to add a link to the story page and a link to my homepage with the anchor text of my choice. The script is called Link Building Pro and you can download it for free here.

If you want to test it just try copy & pasting some content from this page into your WordPress editor or a Word document. There are a few options you can configure and the script is easy to edit if you want something a bit different.

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Amazing free link building script for your site

Today – after a delay of some months – I received my Hitwise (now called Experian Hitwise) newsletter. It is one of the very very that I actually remember signing up to. The other 100 a day never seem to get to my in-box now. Hitwise always use the newsletter to focus on on me as a UK user and choose an industry to give us some insight about the market share (in terms of traffic) about that industry and today chose to focus on the UK’s online property websites.

I have often thought it would be interesting to Map the link data onto the traffic data to see if there is a correlation between the links and the traffic. If we accept that Google is less of a “search engine” and more of a “popularity contest” then being able to analyse this correlation at the drop of a hat would be worth quite a lot to someone I would have thought.

For example, taking the top five companies listed in the Hitwise data, we can map their cumulative back-links over time:

Data from MajesticSEO Free backlink history checker

It is interesting to see that with the minor difference between the fourth and fifth positions, the inbound links (by domain) puts the sites in the same order as Hitwise does when it tracks traffic:

Data from Experian - Hitwise

What IS markedly different, however, is the copmparitively large market share that Rightmove gets compared to its competion – highlighted presumably accurately in the Hitwise data, even though Findaproperty have almost as many links on the internet.

What might this tell us?

For me, intuitively, it suggests that Rightmove have developed much of their traffic from offline branding. If you have been in the UK and seen adverts or looked in Newsagent windows, you’d probably not need data to back that up, but it does suggest that there may be some maths that could be used to show the power of a brand offline, by looking at the relative difference in traffic patterns, compared to links, online.

This may not be the only insight, however. One thing I tend to look at is the quality of the inbound links – particularly at the upper end – and I can tell you that “Findaproperty.com” has – on the surface – several more links from pages which have huge numbers of inbound links themselves. However – when we look further – many of those links come from the same domain. 8 out of 10 Findaproperty’s strongest links come from the “This Is” range of sites. By contrast, all 10 out of 10 of Rightmove’s strongest back-links come from different root domains. I would wager that their back-link profile is spread with a considerably larger standard deviation of IP addresses or class c domains than Findaproperty.

Further analysis would be required, but I think that’s my point – when you start to map two or more extremely large data sets together in this way, some really powerful new insights are available. This is why we use APIs do be able to securely share data. Whether it is Microsoft’s demographic profiling onto Majestic’s link data or Google’s analytics data onto its Adwords data ( which I am assured they don’t do by the way). The effect can be incredibly powerful and large companies are now starting to collaborate with these kinds of interrelationships.

Dixon Jones.

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Are Links a Good Proxy for Traffic?

As reported by Travolution:

KAYAK Chief Scientist, Giorgos Zacharia, an accomplished expert in predictive modeling, who developed the KAYAK Travel Indexâ„¢ added, “the index essentially models how much an average traveler is willing to pay to visit a given destination by analyzing search behavior and selection patterns across all destinations searched on KAYAK sites.”

Sweet. Here’s a screenshot of the tool:

So what’s this got to do with SEO? Giving this level of insight away free is such a smart move, from a competitive standpoint and a link acquisition perspective. Imagine the references and citations from the travel press and blogging community a data source like this can generate! It will be very interesting to watch how this URL attracts links in the coming months.

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Free Travel Search Data from Kayak – Brilliant Linkbait

How do you find out what PAGES are pulling rank on competitor’s website?

If you know what phrase you are chasing in the search engines, then it is easy to see who you are trying to beat. But how do you find out what nuggets your competitor has found, that you did not even know existed? Typically, these golden long tail terms are sending traffic to an inner page.

Any analysis of the home page will miss out on this understanding. I thought I would use my first Blogstorm article to show you just how easy it is to see what pages are getting to the top of Google and under search conditions. Let’s take Blogstorm.co.uk itself. Of course, the strongest link text will be it’s brand. But when we use Majesticseo’s Link Intelligence Tool to look at the top anchors for the whole domain, I see some interesting anchor text from referring domains:

(Above: Blogstorm’s strongest External Link Anchor text. Source: majesticseo)

Here from the MajesticSEO summary panel I can see that Patrick once wrote an article on how to launch a website. A quick check on Google confirms that Blogstorm is number 1 on Google for the phrase “launching a website”.

What’s more – the link is to an inner page which is highly targeted.  Of course, being written by Patrick Altoft, it links to his web design and development company.

So – before I started this article, I knew very little about Blogstorm. Now I know that they are number 1 on Google for a term that is highly targeted to their business.

The article was strong enough to get external backlinks with good anchor text. If I wanted more data, I could go through several thousand anchors, building up a good picture as to how and where Blogstorm was scoring on organic traffic.

Dixon Jones.

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Revealing a competitor’s long tail SEO success

At 9.30am on Day 2 I’m speaking alongside Christoph C. Cemper, Lyndon and Jon Myers about Killer Link Building Strategies.

The conference costs £349 for affiliates but you can get 10% off using the code SPKD10.

The official description is below but my talk will be quite specific and will explain the key steps to link building success and look at some case studies of affiliate link building success.

Want to learn how to build high-value link targets and how to acquire them? This is becoming more and more important with the recent changes on Google. This session will help you understand the different types of links that are available today to acquire, and share some of the best ways to make sure you get them.

We will help you understand the blend of links required to succeed be it government, university or the theories behind the so called “paid link”. Tools tips and tricks will be all shared in this session along with the panellist vast and varied experiences.

Link building is hard enough for “real” websites but for affiliates with few real life business relationships to leverage for links it can be extremely challenging. Without a scalable link building strategy most affiliate sites will be dead in the water.

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Killer Link Building Strategies at a4u Expo

Most people want to build links to their sites and on the face of it this seems like a scalable way to build links. Users have ultimate control over the links they display and the goal is to build a “quality network” rather than mass spamming.

Linktive takes the legwork out of searching for sites to link with. We’ll send you link recommendations for businesses that compliment yours, and at the same time, recommend your site to others. You may preview and submit requests for link exchanges at any time, keeping total control over your link network. You could say Linktive is your link building relationship manager.

The problem is that any scalable link building system will be squashed by Google as soon as it becomes widespread whether it’s within the guidelines or not. You could create the most ethical system in the world but Google will still squash it once it becomes too popular.

I’ve had first hand experience with link networks – in March 2006 I created Pyramid Linking.com a network that gave twice as many links back as you donated to the system. Users also got an extra 5 links for every person they referred.

The site started off quite well but soon people started hiding links, cloaking and using spammy donor sites to gain credits that could be passed to higher quality sites.

Any network like this will always end up full of people who want to extract maximum benefit with minimal input.

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Linktive intelligent link building network