Latest Articles
SEO Services To Offer… Social Media Naming Audit.
November 11, 2008 By Webposition SEO Team
By Scott Goodyear
Back in April of this year, I wrote an article called “Name Squatting 2.0“. Essentially, some will buy a domain name and hold it until it becomes popular. Once popular, they may try to sell the domain as if for ransom. In the social media world, I pondered the probability that the same thing could happen with name registrations and services like Twitter, MySpace, and others. Anne Zieger of What Matters Online, had a similar thought. Connecting the dots to how you run a marketing business, she proposes that her clients contact her in order to run a social media naming audit.
This is a great idea. As an online marketer, a social media naming audit is one more service to offer if you have the bandwidth and you can explain the value proposition to your client.
If you can explain the value of social media to a client, and they get it, perhaps you may also want to reserve some of the obvious names for your clients. While not everyone will be ready to take up the reins of social media, a client may be pretty appreciative if you have the foresight to reserve a few obvious names for them.
It probably goes with out saying, but be sure that expectations are set and that there is a clear explanation of who holds the registrations, when the logins will transfer to the client, etc. You probably don’t want to be labeled as a scamer or name squatter yourself and you want a client to sing your praises, not complain about you online. Thus, give the registration to the client when they are ready to take the reins or if you cease business relations with the client.
Social Marketing: Some Links Are Radioactive
November 6, 2008 By Webposition SEO Team
By Scott Goodyear
When you look at the number of links pointing back to your site, it is usually good to see the total number increasing. This often means that you are doing something right. When dealing with client expectations, you may need to explain to a client that just because the number of links go up, this does not necessarily mean that all of their rankings will go up in turn. It may, in some ways, be helpful to explain to your client that links can often be radioactive in nature. They can provide a benefit today that energizes your rankings, helps it to gain traffic and conversions, to start a conversation about a product or service, and so on, but many links lose their strength to provide these actions over time.
Links that might be considered “radioactive” are those that have the potential to bring a lot of popularity to your site and provide some great uplift to your rankings but only for a limited time. After some time, they might be spent or depleted of their ability to help.
As one example, lets say that Google just so happened to visit Best Week Ever this morning. And it looks like they have…
One of the posts on their front page today, leads to a page that talks about a cat toilet. Not too exciting, I know. While the post on their main page talks about and links to the manufacturer, Google and other engines will see that link back to the manufacturer and they can associate a bit of the page’s popularity to that link. In this case, Cat Genie, has a PR7 page pointing back to it from BWE.
As the BWE home page adds newer posts, the Cat Genie post will be buried further (PR7), and further (PR 5), and further (PR 0) into BWE’s site structure. As the link moves deeper into the site, most of the benefit that Cat Genie’s rankings had gained from this link will decay or disappear.
While this is just one example, there are many hundreds of thousands of blogs, forums, social bookmarking sites, news aggregators, and other sites that have this same process at work. I know that PR is a lousy measure by most accounts, as it is not updated for updated for months at a time, and there are indeed many factors aside from PR that engines like Google use to rank a page. Understanding this concept of link radioactivity, depreciation or whatever you want to call it, may help you to explain to clients and others why link building is not a one time action. This understanding can also help when trying to explain why even with a huge number of links behind them, a site may still no do so well in the rankings. Even with a good volume of links behind them, sites can – seemingly out of nowhere – find that their rankings tank through no fault of their own.