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SEO, whatever you do in this game, you have to evolve.

I was talking to one of my valued friends amongst the SLS Community today and the subject came round to what we both felt was working for our respective business operations and especially with regards to current practices and the conversation swiftly moved round to the “why and how”?

The answer to this was obvious and it was this. Simply put, Simple Leveraging has evolved considerably over the past two and half years of its existence and it helps explain why the practices and methodology taught remains at the forefront of current SEO and Internet Marketing in general.

Now my philosophy behind this again is quite simple, you have to evolve in this game or you soon cease to exist in any meaningful manner and hence the reason for the constant exploration for new tools, techniques and utilities that make SLS still pack the punch it does.

Nowhere is this more so that in the area of taking SLS and really scoring with the use of Press Releases.

Now those of you who remember the various Skype Webinars we carried out in late summer will probably wonder what happened to the end product.

Well the initial studies of the project into the success of SLS and Press Releases made some pretty bold (but backed by fact) claims in that we did go through the nuts and bolts of a Campaign that went on to generate over $240,000 in four days.

Pretty bold huh? But nonetheless fact.

Well what I wanted to do was to take this approach and run it across various Client Campaigns over the past few months and see overall how it worked. These Campaigns were run during some of the busiest periods of the online year and I must confess the results were pretty amazing.

The first Campaign took place in the run up to Halloween and involved a Client in the Catering and Food Industry and using the techniques and practices we discussed, our Client saw an uptick in Traffic levels of 127% on last year with the Organic Search sector of their activities seeing a jump of 197%.

Using the same Client, we then analysed their promotional activities over Thanksgiving and the corresponding results were pretty amazing. Overall their traffic was up 192% on last year with the Organic Search sector of their promotional activities seeing a colossal increase of 440%.

Finally we analysed the first sector of their Christmas activities and again the results bear very interesting reading. So far with regards to overall activity, their traffic levels are up by 163% and again in Organic Search terms they are 443% up on last year.

As they say, the Jury is well and truly back in on this one and it is working with a vengeance.

Now I bring this subject up because one of the core components was linked to being able to produce and distribute a fair amount of Press Releases and this, if you are not very careful, costs.

However with our colleagues at Mass MediaSEO we are able to pass on to our SLS Members savings that if taken correctly will save them at least $480 over the next 12 months.

What you have to do to qualify these savings is to send me your membership details and I will pass these onto Dennis and his team and together we’ll get you sorted out and up and running.

Now what we’ve done is effectively waive our commissions on this Service with the aim of passing these savings directly onto you. It’s another way of us being able to say to you, “Thank You” for being one of our loyal members.

The Importance of a widespread IP base for Back Links

IP Diversity and Link Diversity are two often misunderstood terms in conventional Link Building methodology.

First up, when you ask most folks as to what exactly an IP is they look at you with an expression that roughly translates to “ask me one about last night’s football?”

What exactly is an IP address?

Well to quote Wikipedia it is as follows:

An Internet Protocol address (IP address) is a numerical label assigned to each device (e.g., computer, printer) participating in a computer network that uses the Internet Protocol for communication.[1] An IP address serves two principal functions: host or network interface identification and location addressing. Its role has been characterized as follows: “A name indicates what we seek. An address indicates where it is. A route indicates how to get there.[2]

For more information about IP Addresses see here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IP_address

For our purposes the “name of the game” here is to get your back links for any of your target Urls from as wide an IP spread as possible. Google want to see (and if Google want to see something then show them, don’t be stupid, don’t fight them) your Back Links come from as many Internet Users and Sources as possible, spread over as many parts of the globe as is humanly possible.

‘Nuff said really.

Using Multi Combinations to get No 1 slots in Google within days

Hi Gang,

I’ve been writing recently about the success we’ve been getting over the past few Months with combining the twin power of good Press Releases and then hitting them hard with associated support practices chief amongst whom are SLS.

The process goes in this order:

1.    Keyword Research. In our case this is fairly tightly focused and widespread as to be honest we don’t want to spend too much time fighting a variety of battles so we want Niches that we can get into fairly fast. By fast I mean hours rather than days if possible

2.    Drafting the Press Release. Now as far as our main aim is to get into Niches quickly we also want to make sure that wherever possible our Chosen key phrase is right at the beginning of the body text. This is because at the moment Google is sourcing its Meta Data (i.e. the data it uses as part of its ranking algorithm) from the first 300 Characters of the Body Text. Now when you take into account that this also includes the beginning information:

(EMAILWIRE.COM October 17, 2011) – sample date

then basically you are down to the first 145-155 Characters so our technique is put your Key phrase in first and then we usually close it with a question mark to make it isolated.

3.    Press Release Submission. Now the Service we use and one that we’ve run Webinars over is this one: http://www.warriorplus.com/linkwso/5lmj33/368 and yes this is an affiliate link but then I have to keep the present Mrs Morgan as happy as I can :-) . The real reason we use and recommend this Service is that quite simply, we’ve found Dennis and Eric to be the best suppliers and have the best after sales and support going. For unlimited Press Releases the current rate (whatever that is) is vastly under priced but as I say, it’s the fact that they deliver every time with the Press Releases and deliver promptly. At the moment we have anywhere between 1-2 per day going through per day and by and large without any issues at all. If there are any issues and there very rarely are (I think I’ve had one problem release) the after sales support is so good they by and large tell you there is a problem before you have any chance of finding out.

4.    Promoting the Clippings Report. Usually a few days after the Press Release has emerged and been submitted they issue a clippings report. Now I have prepared a few videos covering this but will edit them all into one master video but the basics of the process is this. The Clippings report contains about 50-60 Urls of where you can find your Press Release. Take these Urls and using any one of a number of services, mash these Urls into one RSS Feed and then submit this RSS Feed into Yahoo Pipes and then run the pipe. Take the Pipes RSS Feed and submit via your favourite RSS Submitter and hey presto, you have Yahoo all over your links like a rash and also via redirects; you have links to all of your individual clippings from Yahoo. Not bad eh?

Next up you can repeat this exercise with Google Reader and suddenly you have links to your clippings from Google. Finally we take the RSS feed that we’ve created and then submit it through SLS as well as a number of the key Clippings Urls (the ones where the master site has a domain rank of over 5) and then promote as per normal. We usually only hit about 6-7 of the Urls as this is enough to make sure that these PR Urls have enough grunt behind them to dip in and out of Page 1 in Google usually very quickly.

I’ve just recorded a Client Case Study video that shows us submitting a Press Release on November 7th and by November 10th (less than 3 days later) we had notched up 2 No 1 slots for the clients inner page, one No 2 and the rest were 5, 6 and 7 slots. All six terms were on Page 1 and the Press Releases in this case hit Page 1 on five out of the six occasions and on the sixth the PR was at No 12.

I can’t reveal the niche or Key phrase at present but once I’ve got the client permission to do so (and I expect this in a few weeks time) then I will release the videos free of charge to members as a case study exercise. You can appreciate that we have to respect the Client wishes first and foremost and once they feel that their Campaigns will no longer be compromised then we will be able to proceed.

To back up and support these claims, I’ve shown a limited number of the videos to certain select SLS Members and their confirmations supporting our assertions can be found here: http://simpleleveraging.com/slschat/index.php/topic,190.0.html

There are additional aspects to this type of promotion that make it so successful and I’ll cover these in later newsletters but the key thing to it all is that taking these Press Releases and using SLS and a combination of other factors really means that you can get into niches very quickly.

Usual deal, if anyone has any questions then by all means post in the Forum or just email me by return and I’ll try and work my way through as many as I can as quickly as I can.

How to own 95% of Google in Under 24 hours?

Yes you read it right correctly, this is how we took a particular term that was OK a very tightly focused niche term, but one that had adverts running as far as Page 2 in Google and therefore was making money (or so Google thought so) and we ended up “owning” 95% of Google in under 24 hours.

Actually astute viewers of the video when it comes out will spot that we actually did this in just less than 13 hours!

So what did we do?

First in broad match our Press Release for the Client hit the No 2 slot out of 309 million pages in 13 hours and in narrow match we ended up with our Press Release taking 19 out of the top 20 slots in Google in the same period

Now the video, though having been recorded, is not going to appear for another 14 days or so as we are live in the midst of the Campaign for the Client and to be blunt, I don’t want any enterprising folks out there “nicking our niche” but the video proof is there and when I deem it safe the video will come out to our members only download area.

So how was this done?

  1. Careful Keyword Research.
  2. Timing
  3. Proper and planned use of META Data

Firstly as Myra and I discussed in our recent Web Discussion, it was all down to careful Keyword Research for the right term for the client. Secondly as this particular Season Campaign has just got underway I guess our timing was pretty hot in that we hit the tracks running just before the previous Seasonal campaign had actually ended. Thirdly and last of all we made sure that our MEAT Data for the Keyword Research was included right up at the front of the Press Release.

Now astute Google watchers will know that Google have fine-tuned their algorithm recently and for the time being seem to be using for the Meta Inserts in the SERPS, the first 300 Characters of the main body copy of the piece you are trying to optimise for.

Now the Golden Rule here is to try and make sure you get your main Key phrase inserted right there at the start of your piece. Now this is not new and has been standard SEO practice for years but it did seem to have gone slightly out of fashion recently but now appears to have come back to the fore in Campaigns or so our research has shown.

So given the fact that in Press Releases our distributor automatically assigns the first 300 characters to the Meta description and this includes the beginning information, for example:

(EMAILWIRE.COM, October 17, 2011)

This means it shortens your ability to use the keywords in the first 145-155 characters in the meta description that Google displays before it truncates. So make use of your keywords in the Meta description early on, ideally right in the first part of the first sentence.

Anyway enough of this. I’ll get the video put into the Members only support area of the Forum within the next 14 days or so but to further add proof to the fact that we’re not sensationalising this, I’ve released the video to a couple of SLS members to get them to verify that we’re not making this up. I’ll get them to add their comments to back up our claims.

The Real Reason we build Back Links to our Tiered Pages

One of the things I love about Simple Leveraging is that the “knowledge share” truly goes in more than one direction. This has been evidenced particularly in two incidences that spring to mind for me.

Firstly the experience working with Myra Love on our forthcoming project provisionally entitled “Multi Disciplinary Marketing” where we took the $240K in four days Campaign and analysed it’s various component parts and broke it down into stages and examined in detail.

Secondly, it was after talking to another SL member, Dave “Quinn” Thomas over cool ways to promote Wikis etc and this opened my eyes to a technique that I was aware of but hadn’t really thought about too much in detail.

I have now though, but perhaps it might be an idea to get back to basics first.

Why do we pursue this whole concept of Tiered / Layered Multi-level Linking? Firstly it’s something that we have been advocating and doing at Simple Leveraging by and large well before most others but more importantly why?

It’s a question I get asked all the time, why do you advise the constant building of links to support links to support…….etc  etc?

The answer is very simple. It is because of the transient nature of certain forms of Link Support that we use in our Campaigns. Now that is not to say that short term support is a bad thing, it’s more a case of understanding fully what is going on.

For example, one of the first things we want to do with a site is build in Authority links as soon as is possible. Now in most cases this means getting links on High Page Rank Social Media sites and / or Press Releases.

Now in a lot of cases the Home Page PR of a lot of these sites is fairly high ((5+) and the knock on effect is a fairly vigorous (if we’ve planned and executed it properly) short term “hit” on our sites that results in a rise up the “SERPS”.

Now as they all say, “What goes up always has to come down” and that is the case with the effect received from those short term links but there are steps that we should do almost immediately to mitigate any potential downfall.

I explain it with diagrams and a PowerPoint in this short video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pxboJJneJg0  but the upshot is that sooner or later pages gaining the benefit of links from these High Page Rank Home Pages drop the moment that the links themselves disappear and the inbound links form these sites tend to come from less powerful inner pages.

Hopefully by then, all good promoters / Link Builders will have already had in place additional Link placements to add support to these pages. In the case of declining Press Releases, usually a fairly vigorous Link Building Campaign (from SLS etc) is good enough to not only arrest the decline but in most cases reverse it.

I’ve also uploaded to the Members Only Downloads area of the Forum another more in depth video that goes into detail a very useful little technique that drives excellent authority links from a PR8 Site to all of our Press Releases no matter how many we have, within seconds. You can also use this to replicate this technique with at least one other Authority site also. The video can be found here:

http://simpleleveraging.com/slschat/index.php/topic,187.0.html

 

New Training Video and Press Release and SLS Case Study posted

Just wanted to update members on yet another Training Video / Case Study we’ve just posted live in the Simple Leveraging YouTube Channel.The video covers the subject of Press Releases and SLS and covers the Halloween Niche. We show a live case study of a Blog / domain that had some Press Releases released on October 1st and two weeks later both the Press Releases and site Urls have gone from nowhere to not only Page 1 in Google but are oscillating between positions No 1 and No 4!.

The video can be found here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SqugRxgFHxg

Secondly, we have some rather neat lists of some EDU Blog Urls for commenting – in fact in total we have over 5,800 EDU Urls that are available for commenting and are all above PR2.

Because of the size of the total list we have broken them up into chunks and they can be purchased in the following packets:

180 PR 5 &6 Urls spread over 48 Domains – $60

926 PR 4 Urls spread over 148 Domains – $60

2647 PR 3 Urls spread over 265 Domains – $60

2141 PR 2 EDU Urls spread over 278 Domains – $50

If any of you are interested in these then the Buy It Now Buttons can be found here: http://simpleleveraging.com/bonuses/highpredublogs111013.html

If there is anyone out there who would be interested in the entire package of these Urls then the entire package can be bought $180. Get in touch via the form above  and I’ll send out the Urls directly.

Delivery is immediately after purchase via e-junkie.com

Article Marketing – Not dead yet

Just a quickie as we update and prepare our next Free Members only Monthly Link Packet to be sent out.

One of my colleagues sent through to me a fairly neat little list that I thought might be of use to some of you out there who use Article Marketing as part of your Link Building Programme (and who shouldn’t be?)

Basically it’s a list of 276 Article Directories that are either Auto Approve or publish material extremely quickly. Now the methodology behind the compilation of this list is that a submission project was set up with a larger list via Article Marketing Robot (AMR) and two days later the 276 Directories in this list had been checked as showing that they had published the test article.

Now this list contains a couple of Directories with reasonable Homepage PR and they are as follows:

PR 4 – 4 Directories

PR 3 – 13 Directories

PR2 – 25 Directories

PR1 – 54 Directories

The rest are either PR0 or we couldn’t trace the PR but there might be the odd surprise in there.

Now as to the usability in practice of these, I would use these as follows.

Basically the fact that they publish quickly is an absolute godsend so you can submit and get published very quickly articles with your links in the Author Resource Box. Then via your favourite Back Linking tool, drive links very quickly to these Urls and so start the process towards building up a very powerful link Mountain (as we call it).

The bonus would be that this mountain would consist of in excess of 200 separate IP’s so perfect for “Panda Proofing” your Link Building Campaigns.

Easy really. The hard part is finding the Article Directories that publish very quickly for you to use?

As this is a small list and was supplied to me one of our suppliers, I can’t give the list away free of charge but the list can be bought and downloaded from here for $9:

http://simpleleveraging.com/bonuses/276AAlist.html

Give it a rattle (as we say over here).

Back to you soon with the new Free Members only Monthly Link Packet.

 

Are NoFollow Links any use?

This question was asked recently at one of the Forums that I participate in and I thought that the reply I gave might be of use here as well.

The answer to this is very straight forward. One of the most important factors that appears to have emerged in the latest Google “Algo” update was that they were now looking at the breadth, strength and variety of the inbound links that appear in your back links “landscape”. The old days of just getting loads of so called “dofollow” anchor links from one site / IP no longer cut it.

Now whilst folks have caught on about the IP diversity (still not to the extent they should have) people still haven’t fully appreciated the fact about “Link Diversity”. By this I mean that Google are looking now for a bank links landscape that as fully replicates that created by a human as possible. To this end they are now looking to see a variety in styles of links such as a mix of dofollow / nofollow, directs, indirects, typos etc in fact anything that looks like it could have been created by hand rather than an automatic submission bot.

At the same time time there appears to have been a re emergence of a concept they first looked at a few years ago called “Trust Rank”. This looks at the site that the inbound links originate from and assesses the “trustworthiness” or “authority status” of the site as it lies within your back links landscape. This is where EDU sites really come into their own and even if they only provide “nofollow” links. As most of these EDU Domains are virtually coming down with authority back links within their own profile, a lot of this is passed on in a way that is quite different to the old and now defunct (in reality) concept of Page Rank.

So to sum up (before I go too much about this) nofollow links from EDU domains are really valuable in a number of hitherto misunderstood ways. There are also a number of other factors that give benefit as well.

Reasons to be Cautious of Google +

So, unless you’ve been hiding under a stone recently or have just arrived here from the Planet Zarg then it’s a safe bet that you’ve been hearing loads about Google+

So then why is it that yours truly is urging caution and reticence regarding this one in the latest series of offerings from our almighty Search Engine, the Big G.

Well first up, Google + is operated and run by Google.

Secondly, it’s run by Google…

And so on.

What more do you need here folks?

Lets be honest, Google’s track record in releasing offers like this is not exactly exemplary. Hands up all those who remember Google Buzz, Wave and Voice plus not to mention all those glorious Updates?

No my reasoning is more to do with the fact that I trust Google about as far as I can throw them at the moment but let me explain further.

It’s like this. You have a great website and you want to get some more action in Google over it but as we all know Google frown about all sorts of activities that might in some way give your site a slightly more competitive edge over the competition. So what do you do?  You get all your friends organised into one of these Google+ circles and get them all to “vote” for your site and then sit back and watch as your site climbs the charts?

Hmnnn, let’s think about it folks. You’ve been using a service run by Google to actually help in your intended aim of “gaming” Google.

The best bit of it all is that sooner or later some clown will come out with a WSO or E-book claiming that this is all one big Google Loophole and that this is going to be the next killer application and this is how you make it much better.

Just how dumb can we all get?

It’s like taking a big stick and standing there somewhere in the heart of the Congo Rain Forest and poking a big Gorilla with it. Folks, this, like the Google scenario, is not going to end well. Someone is likely to end up needing fairly intensive surgery and let me take this opportunity to say “it ain’t going to be Google…or the Gorilla.”

I mean, how clever is it to scheme up some really smart plan of actually creating a structure that is designed purely and solely for the purposes of getting round Google’s filters and structures….and then telling Google how we are going to do it…and when?

Let me finish this short newsletter with a quote taken from “The Filter Bubble” by Eli Pariser. In this short extract he describes the end of a conversation with a “Google insider” in which the subject of the Company Mantra “Do Not Be Evil” comes up:

“I once explained to a Google Search engineer that while I didn’t think the company was currently evil, it seemed to have at its fingertips everything it needed to do evil if it wished. He smiled broadly. “Right,” he said. “We’re not evil. We try really hard not to be evil. But if we wanted to, man, could we ever!””

Please treat Google+ with a huge amount of caution, especially if you are trying to use it as a form of SEO Weapon?

Panda 2.2, Trust Rank and 50 EDU Properties to place your own copy and Links

Recently I wrote about some information we had gleaned about the latest Panda Update and touched upon the concept of “Trust rank” and as such have had quite a few emails asking could I elaborate on this further?

Well the story behind Trust Rank is this.

As a concept it has been researched by two separate organisations, Google and Yahoo. As a concept behind the scenes it had been around for some time in the Google camp but it was actually Yahoo who first went public about it really when one of their researchers alongside some research personnel from Stanford in 2004 put together a Paper entitled: “Combating Web Spam with TrustRank”. For those who want to pursue this matter further the paper has been retrieved and put online and can be found here:

http://www.vldb.org/conf/2004/RS15P3.PDF

Apparently at the same time Google had been doing some behind the scenes work on a similar concept called Trust Rank and registered the Trademark “Trustrank” as Matt Cutts (the public face of Google) explains here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p8mUXQzwEvs

Now where all of this falls into place with my feelings in my last Newsletter are this. Google has been searching for some time to further provide more background analysis on the “worthiness” of Web Sites and how they stack up.

Initially this was to be provided by using data from their Page Rank analysis but since Page Rank has been generally accepted to have been on the slide for the past few years (Google themselves downgraded it from being the “jewel in the Crown” in the Search Algorithm now to being “one of 200 other ranking factors” – bit of a drop in emphasis I think you’ll agree?) they have had to look further afield.

They then decided to expand the Trust Rank concept further in 2009 when as well as having the Trademark registered they registered the Patent as well. Now things were getting really serious and it is only now some 2 -2 ½ years later that we are starting to see the true manifestation in this with the Panda Update.

Looking round for methods to try and help them get some sort of handle on the generally accepted worthiness of a site, they hit upon the idea of seeing how a site was viewed by virtue of how a site was viewed by its peers hence the appearance of the “+1” concept. Now this, as in all things, can be gerrymandered such is the good and bad side of human endeavour but it goes some way to showing where they are going.

The other parts of the Trust rank concept lie in an old view of “you are known by the Company that you keep” or who links to you. Now we know also that Google tried to control this with the much vaunted “rel=nofollow” attribute but once again this has now also turned into a dead duck so where does this all lead us?

Well as I said in one of the newsletters of a month ago that I felt that with Panda, Google were turning back the clock to almost the days of the late Nineties with their views on inbound links etc.

Now my views on this are as follows. I think that there are certain aspects of Linking that Google are trying to downplay in the algorithm but with the absence of any credible alternative they cannot nor ever will truly be able to remove data from Link Building entirely. So the upshot of that being is that for the time being we are all safe there folks as far as our Back Link building efforts are concerned but what I think Google are placing more emphasis now than perhaps they have done before, is the nature of the IP spread of those links.

Whereas in the past, conventional wisdom was that with a few PR5 – PR 6+ links from a couple of websites you could drive a site up the serps, now that is no longer true in the same way. What Google now want to see are links, but instead of a few folks voting i.e. just one or two sites they want to see loads more and those votes need to come from as wide a section of the Internet population than before.

So the upshot of all of this is that you need to have your links coming from a much wider variety of sites than before.

So what about Authority and Trust?

Now to further this and aid the overall Trust and Respect for a site, if you can throw as many links to your site from as many different types of sites as possible – so much the better especially if those links are from perceived trusted domains such as .Govs and .EDU’s.

Google’s love affair with .EDU’s and .Govs lies not as most folks think, in a fixation with the domain suffix but rather with the nature of the sites themselves. Indeed we have found in our own research that a great many Education / Academic sites that are not .EDU’s for instance are just as powerful if not more so at times.

For instance in the UK, the domain suffix .EDU doesn’t exist rather the academic suffix is .ac.uk and this is a the case in a great many other territories worldwide so as we have seen the power and authority doesn’t necessarily stem from the suffix, rather the nature of the site itself and that fact that these sites (as Matt Cutts himself has been quoted) tend to have loads of authority links pointing at them as well so this in turn gives their outbound links out more power.

So where does this leave rel=nofollow links from .EDU’s?

Exactly as where it left them before to be blunt. Just as powerful but with a different dimension i.e. the fact they originate from where they do carries a different set of weight rather than any PR juice that folks think they might not be able to impart.

For your own back links profile and authority status the fact that you might be able to count as many quality EDU links in your profile goes a long way to help confer “trust status” as far as the Search Engines are concerned.

To further this we have been running an associate program to our main Bookmarking Program and this has been centred round locating development spaces within various EDU properties where you can insert your own content under your own editorial control. Called the Lost Art of Conversation we have now reached Module 4 and in Module 4 we now have 50 EDU properties that you can insert your own Links and copy. Now these properties include a mixture of DoFollow and NoFollow links but as has now been conclusively proved for Trust and Authority status the NoFollow attribute is by and large of no consequence.

As with before we will only be releasing limited copies of this Module to the general public and I wanted to notify members of my Newsletter first. The uptake of previous Modules was such that they never actually made it to public release as they were all snapped up by readers of this newsletter and members of Simple Leveraging. The cost of Module 4 of The Lost Art will be $75 and if anyone is interested then send the $75 to info@simpleleveraging.com and I’ll forward the zip file with the contents through to you straight away.

 

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