Entries Tagged 'Marketing' ↓

Linkbait is widely regarded by many SEOs as the premier weapon in their quiver of marketing and promotional tools, and justifiably so. When linkbait is successful it can be incredibly powerful, driving an initial spike in (arguably entirely useless) traffic and links, followed by a long and steady stream of backlinks.

That’s the best case scenario. But what happens when your linkbait just doesn’t cut it? Digg, which is the granddaddy of social media sites, is where most linkbait gets peddled. Digg is also subject to random system maintenance and drastic algorithmic changes. Other popular social media sites such as Reddit and StumbleUpon can also be hit and miss: what works one day might have no hope the next.

Of course, it isn’t all dependent on where you distribute your linkbait. It may well be the case that your ‘101 Reasons For Choosing Acme Exhaust Manifolds’ just doesn’t appeal to the crowd and is destined to fail, even if it does get 275 diggs and all manner of thumbs up.

So what if this is where you find yourself? What should you do if your linkbait, on which your client has spent good money and you’ve invested copious amounts of time, goes nowhere? Well, for what it’s worth, here’s what I would do.

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Google have finally released a new Froogle Performance Tool which shows a host of useful data about your Froogle impressions, clicks and feed items. You can find it by logging into your Google Base account and clicking on the new Performance section.

Google Product Search, or Froogle as it’s far better known, is a price comparison site with a big difference – it’s completely free. This makes is an attractive channel to reach your customers; all you need is a product feed.

Like so many other digital marketers, I’ve been waiting on this tool to optimise Google Product Search for ages – I’d even gone as far as to previously develop a dirty Excel hack that queried Froogle data. The new froogle performance tool now provides all this data in a choice of slick graphs or CSV downloads.
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If your website has suffered a drop in rankings recently don’t panic, read through this guide and get a better picture of what is happening behind the scenes. Prepare yourself for any future search result hiccups with our 10 Emergency SEO First Aid Tips and avoid paying someone else to diagnose the problem.

Assess the damage

Check site:www.yourdomain.com on Google to see if your website is still in the index.

If you see nothing at all or just your homepage then it’s serious – you need to work fast to salvage your online presence, especially if your business is e-commerce. This is a good indication that your site has been banned from the Google index… have you been a naughty boy?

If you see lots of your pages in the Google index then you can breathe a small sigh of relief – it’s unlikely to require surgery, just a course of antibiotics and a bit of physio. Search for your domain name (but without the site: prefix) and if you’re not there you’ve probably had your wrist slapped for dodgy SEO tactics. Consider it a gentleman’s warning that your rankings have plummeted, and you should take the opportunity to fix things as soon as you can. Use tips on managing GMB listings to your advantage.

If you are in both the index and the normal search results, but you’ve still lost significant rankings on quite a few keywords, then it’s likely Google has devalued a bunch of high profile links to your website. Check any under-the-table paid links you might have purchased. If they’re of no value anymore then put the money to better use. Build local citations, as they help Internet users to discover local businesses and can also impact search engine rankings.

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What happens when your site is added to the Digg autobury list? Should you just give up on your social marketing campaign? No, absolutely not! Digg is undoubtedly an 800lb social media gorilla, but it is not the only place that can send traffic and generate links. Far from it!

Coming from an SEO background and wearing my stylish tinfoil hat, I am forever looking for ways to reduce reliance on any single distribution channel: being hooked on the Digg crack is just as bad as relying solely on free organic traffic from Google.

Are you wasting time?

Getting onto the prime patch of internet real estate that is the Digg front page is, of course, very desirable. But does it scale? Think carefully about the time you have to dedicate for the promotion of your submission, time that you could be using to create another linkbait.

Submitting your linkbait to Digg where highly volatile users bury content with the slightest sniff of being commercial can be a huge time-suck, and one that can do your linkbuilding campaign more harm than good. Preach that truth to yourself before wasting hours IMing, emailing, shouting and begging for Diggs only to get buried in the 23rd hour! I should know, I’ve been there.

Another option you have is making money online, so you don’t feel you’re wasting your time, but before you spend time taking paid online surveys, make sure you do your research.  Read reviews and find out what other user’s experiences were like.  Not all sites are great, but there are some decent ones like life points panel. The method is to get paid for your opinions via online surveys.

What’s best for your linkbuilding campaign?

My point is this: what would you rather base your marketing strategy on? Can you really depend on steady exposure to Digg’s infamously immature user base while dodging curveballs from their moody algorithm? Or should you break the habit and find more reliable methods of distribution? My money’s on the latter.

It could be said that I’ve spent a bit of time looking for alternatives to Digg, StumbleUpon, Delicious and Reddit. And yes, they do not send as much traffic but that doesn’t mean you still don’t get links and exposure. So here they are, in all their glory. Fire up your engines and spam submit your content!

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