Lists, Matt Cutts and Link Building

I was out of the country – but I’m back! Kind of a mixed bag, that. But it’s great news for you guys, cause you get my input again on what’s been up in the SEO world this week. A lot of people are still reeling from flightless birds and trying to figure out how to move forward from here – and the conference season is upon us – which means we get to overanalyze and parse out every word out of any Googler’s mouth, especially if it’s Matt Cutts.

Here’s what I’ve found enlightening this week:

Google Places Is Dead, Long Live Google Places

submitted by God

Google Places isn’t going to be Google Places anymore. Really. Just as the knowledge graph is rolling out, Google is finding more ways for users to “engage” with Google Plus. (Can you tell I’m a little bitter about G+?) Google Place is actually rolling out to a local specific tab for business pages in Google Plus.

Business owners will probably have a somewhat more difficult transition than consumers, as they’re compelled now to pay attention to Google+ — in a big way. They now ignore Google+ at their own peril.

So, business owners, brace yourself for a potentially painful transition to Google+, if you don’t have a page on the social network already.

15 Ways To Keep From Getting Stressed Out About Social Media

submitted by morganbarnhart

Mogan always seems to have some pretty good social media advice up her sleeve, and she’s back this week with some tips on how not to completely drown in a sea of tweets. For many business owners (or even just people looking to get their name out there) social media can be an all-consuming beast – I know, because I don’t really spend any time on social media just for that reason. The tips laid out here can help put things in perspective and give you a benchmark for how much time you should be dedicating. One of my favorite pieces of advice (that I wish more people would follow):

There are a lot of shiny new platforms that pop up every single day asking you to join because it’s the hot new thing. DON’T DO IT. Contrary to popular belief you DO NOT want to be everywhere. You want to be easily accessible in a few places so that you don’t overwhelm yourself for managing so many places and so you don’t overwhelm your audience for having to find you so many places.

RIP SEO Footer Links

submitted by God

Straight from the horses mouth – we hear from Matt Cutts that footer links for SEO purposes are pretty successfully ignored by Googlebot:

“We’ve done a good job of ignoring boilerplate, site wide links. In the last few months, we’ve been trying to make the point that not only is link buying like that not doing any good, we’re turning the dial up to let people know that certain link spam techniques are a waste of money.”

Link Building From Scratch

submitted by God

Julie Joyce is not only a mod here on My SEO Community, but she’s one of the foremost authorities on link building. So when she gives her opinion on what kind of link building to do after Penguin, you sit up and listen.

How do I get any links? Social media promotion of your site, sending content to bloggers and webmasters, asking for links, guest posting…there are tons of ways and I’d say figure out what works for you.

As IT people a lot of us aren’t fans of picking up the phone, but if you like to actually speak to someone, the phone’s a great way to get a link. Actually at my company when we have a webmaster ask to speak on the phone, we almost always get that link.

How do I find good sources to pursue? Good old-fashioned manual discovery works for me, but there are countless ways to do this. There are tools that generate search queries to use (my favorite is Solo SEO’s Link Search Tool) or you can enter some keywords into the search engine of your choice.

Can I really just ask a webmaster for a link? Yes you can. You can be turned down of course, but if you have a great resource to point a webmaster to, you can definitely ask. People ask for links without offering any value all the time anyway.

So…get started! Don’t be afraid to mix medium and get involved in other aspects of your client’s business.

This is What an SEO Spammer Looks Like

submitted by brickmarketing

Most of us who own websites have gotten emails like the one that is given as an example in this article. But if you haven’t seen one – well, here’s an example! This article is useful as a template for what to tell a lesser-internet-savvy customer who receives one of these emails why it’s spam, and why this person is completely wrong to say that their site isn’t indexed, or has no links, or doesn’t have any social media profiles. I actually ran into this with a client myself, once – I was pretty amazed that they actually opened it and took it seriously. Goes to show you!

Hi
I recently visited your website during a routine survey of sites which may be capable of higher search engine performance through Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Efficient SEO brings an increase in online sales or leads. I hope this information may be of use to you, if not then I apologies for any inconvenience caused.

So, here’s a summary of my findings on your site:
– Your Google Page rank is 0/10
– You have 0/10 back-links
– Your website has 0/15 pages indexed

Keep an eye out for these, and mark them as spam right away! (If they don’t already immediately go in with you Viagra and pyramid scheme emails.