Link building has always been associated with link exchanges, link request emails, link buying etc. Not any more. They’re all old-school stuff people try and waste their time on. Now since the social media revolution, there’s a whole new array of sites available that allows SEOs and webmasters to get some link juice from them for free. Now, these features will be taken for a ride, if given out freely, and they know. For the same reason, many of the sites have converted from “dofollow” to “nofollow“.

Social Media sites are basically communities where like minded guys gather up and share stuff. Be it SU, or Digg, there’s a community within. And universally, SEOs and Webmasters are looked upon with a raised eyebrow because these guys (you and me) tend to manipulate the system, and benefit from it. So let me warn you, what I’m going to tell you is of course a part of SEO, but this does not mean we have flock to all of them and start building links from day one.

Social media sites are seen generally as traffic generation machines. Be it Digg or SU, people see it as a medium to get the extra ordinary visibility for their websites, and take advantage of the large communities there. This is something that’s open to discussion. Whether to use social media sites for link building or to leave them off as communities and let them exist for what they are.

Now, here are the social media sites that are known (as of today) to pass link juice apart from teh community benefits. Some of them give huge traffic, some does not, but give you good healthy, relevant google juice.

Digg - Digg gives link juice from all the stories submitted. If you are on a top page, you have higher PR link juice, if you are on the upcoming page, lesser.

Mixx - Mixx does pass link juice and it’s easy to use it to rank high on SERPs as of now. But it’s a growing community, so it may not be easier later. Bit right now, it’s a good tool.

Hugg - Hugg is almost like digg with focus on environmental issues. Links are crawlable and passes juice.

Linkinn - Linkinn has some offbeat categories that you won’t find in the mainstream, popular social media site. A PR 6 site it features videos and pictures. Links are indexed and pass juice.

Reddit - One of the most popular guys around, reddit still have it’s links dofollowed so if you make it to the top pages, you’re lucky.

Indian Pad - Audience that’s Indian targeted, this guy is the only most popular social media site in India. Links are crawlable and indexed, and does pass on Google juice. The most popular categories are Tech and News

Backflip - Social bookmarking site with PR 6. Links are crawlable and passes on link juice.

Mister Wong - One of my favorites, Wong is a PR 6 social bookmarking site that allows dofollow links.

Mylink Vault - This guy gives you PR 5 backlinks, clean interface, good tool.

Swik - A clean social bookmarking site that gives you PR 6 backlinks. The community id for developers and open source enthusiasts.

That’s it for now. There are quite a number of other niche social media sites that help you with link juice and targeting niche communities. A healthy participation in these communities respecting the members and the laws can ensure you long lasting help with link building and traffic.

It makes sense for someone to look for the ROI when he’s investing money on an SEO project right?
When dealing with clients who have a limited budget, one question that they are keen on is -

“What ROI would I get investing all this money in SEO?”

And I think that’s an interesting question because, in any other project, there is a ROI calculator, especially SEM. When you are opting for PPC ads, there is a clearly a mathematics involved. In PPC, you have a daily budget and you know how much traffic you get, it’s all out there in numbers at the end of the day.

But does the same happen with SEO?
Some questions SEO’s are expected to answer are -

• Can you guarantee me a number one/two position?
• How much traffic will I get if I spent X amount of money with you?
• What will happen if I don’t reach a good position?

Now, it’s not difficult to answer these questions you know. More than answering these questions, what helps is “educating the client”. The client would be only familiar of PPC campaigns and online advertisements, the ROI of which he calculates by using the simple formula of “No. of visits/No. of purchases.”

Unfortunately, this simple formula when applied in the SEO perspective becomes a little vague. If you had all the numbers in place for SEO, probably a formula similar to the following would have  made sense. (For product selling/ecom websites)

ROI on SEO = (No. of goals achieved x Price of product) - Cost to SEO

Where no. of goals achieved is no. of sales or subscription/ visit to a check out page.

Conversion ratio OR Efficiency of an SEO = (No. of organic visits(traffic) / No. of goals achieved)

Things are more tough in the case of non product selling websites.

Here the core metrics would be (i) Page Views (ii) Traffic and (iii) Subscriptions

The above formula can be tweaked to suit them.

For sites dealing with subscriptions as their final objective.

ROI on SEO =  (No. of subscriptions x Effective revenue from Ads) - Cost to SEO

Conversion ratio OR Efficiency of an SEO = (No. of organic visits(traffic) / No. of subscriptions)

Basically, any website that employs an SEO can take the organic traffic to be their primary goal. The rest depends on what the goals are and what the revenue model is.

Most of the times, if SEOs can ensure a boost in “value traffic” then things become easier to handle. And interestingly, this is where many clients gets into disagreement. Increasing traffic is not important, but “value traffic” is.

What is the difference between “traffic” and “value traffic”?
Traffic is only numbers. You can employ 10 guys from around the world to Digg your articles to get traffic, it’s no big deal. But the question is whether it that traffic is converting into results. The SEO Efficiency ratio calculated will show how effective the campaign is. There might be 10,000 new visitors but only 100 new subscriptions. Which means the traffic is not relevant.

Meanwhile, “Value Traffic” is the one which has come from relevant sources, through a pull strategy, in the right amount. This traffic is likely to have more conversions as compared to the “bought” Digg traffic. There might only be 500 new visitors but 400 new subscriptions. But this makes more sense to the client.

So essentially, even though it is tricky to find ROI ratios on an SEO project, if you dig into the details and have clear cut ideas on what the metrics are, it is quite possible. I have an inclination to believe that SEO Efficiency is far more better than SEO ROI though.

This is no exaggeration. A true story I’d like to share with you, probably you’ll have something to take back home.

I had launched a new website this April 12, related to the IPL chennai super kings. If you don’t know what that is, it’s a cricket team in the Indian Premier League and I support them. I had started this website just because I had to support them and the official website was scrap. I had no intentions of monetizing it, as a matter of fact I wanted to have a better site for the fans, that’s about it. But things have gone totally out of hand now (for the good that is.). Let me tell you in detail.

This is how the whole thing began.

- April 12
Started the blog, put up a good theme from WP Designer, and put a few content as well.
- The next few days, I kept adding more content and used the social media to promote it. Well, that’s submitting content to all those guys out there.
- Placed a banner ad on DailySEOblog.(Check out the right hand panel)
Traffic - Nil

- April 13-15
- Site indexed on Google, picked up a few positions on the SERPs for terms such as “chennai super kings pics” and “chennai super kings wallpaper”.
Traffic - Around 50-100 uniques a day

- April 15-18
Added more unique content, wallpapers, pics, siggies (You know the boys stuff! )
Traffic - Around 50-200 uniques a day

- April 18 - 22
Nothing at all as I was attending the Bangalore Barcamp, and took a days leave further
When I left on 18th to bangalore the traffic was around 300-400 uniques a day. And when I came back, the traffic was around 500 uniques a day.
That got me exciting, as I saw the traffic trickling down, decided to do some “home work” on it.
Though on a tight schedule, decided to spend some time on it, since I saw that on Google Trends, the search frequency for IPL related terms were increasing.

Okay, so I went about doing a quick SEO campaign for the site, the next few days.

1. Went about using all the powers on my social media network and promoted some unique content that was there on the site.
2. Targeted some regional networks, like the star brand amassadors fan sites and networks, and gave them some exclusive viral content to feed on.
3. Link building, link building. No, not the typical directory submission for page rank, but the “new kind” that helps the content travel places and keeps the bots busy on the site. This worked and articles were now getting indexed within 30 minutes.
4. Used Google Trends to fish out the IPL related keywords
5. Wrote excellent SE optimized content targeting the keywords and their combinations.
6. Traffic just multiplied by 100 times (see the stats) in just two days.

Looks very simple eh? It is indeed. Simple strategies but doing the right thing at the right time really matters.
If you look at what I achieved in numbers, check the stats.

Current Stats

VISITS

Total 17,236
Average Per Day 2,097 (It was in 200-300 range 5 days earlier)
Average Visit Length 1:29
Last Hour 175
Today 1,159
This Week 14,677

PAGE VIEWS

Total 34,471
Average Per Day 3,863
Average Per Visit 1.8
Last Hour 345
Today 2,192
This Week 27,044

Traffic Stats over the last 7 days

I think for the little effort from my side, the results are very interesting.

Some crucial things that made me achieve the results are -

i) Putting up a banner ad on DailySEOblog. (If you want one, do let me know)
ii) Promoting the site genuinely on the social media (Mind you, this isn’t just about digging and thumbs ups)
iii) Some careful and timely Keyword research
iv) Some clever onsite SE optimization
v) Getting control over the bots as to when and how should they crawl

Now, that the traffic is there, I’ve put up AdSense ( bad choice huh?) and some banner ads, if at all they make some money, why not try them?

Here are the twenty four kickass plugins that are used on DailySEOblog. Some are active and some are not. Marked against each is the reason why it’s cool and what it won’t do.

Akismet
The must have spam catcher. It’s already present in your default wordpress installation, if you haven’t activated it, please do it before those spams accumulate.

You rarely see such titles on this blog. Today, I have a genuine reason to write one. A screen capture.

Link to the webpage here.

I appreciate the efforts but it does throws a bad picture. In fact, on many others as well.

A good increase in the number of subscribers and total traffic. There has been a steady increase in the number of unique visitors and page views as well. More pages at the blog is now viewed, which is really exciting. I think the large footer placed with all the SEO tutorial links has really worked, people are really finding it useful.

However, this December I had been involved with house shifting and transfer so there were less posts than usual which has reflected on the traffic. I think this will be a one off thing and the traffic will gain in the coming months.

There are some interesting and basic SEO tips and tutorials that’s coming up so that should keep you hang around the blog for a while.

Wondering what’s it?

Well, at DailySEOblog, I’ve tried my best to keep away from personal stuff. Simply because, I never wanted to disturb my readers and clients. So this idea of starting a new personal blog clicked! For a writer, getting an opportunity to write is like getting high on hashish. And that’s why all of us like blogging isn’t it? We can create platforms of our own.

So I have a personal blog now. It’s Manikarthik.com, and you’ll see a lighter side of me there.

I’ll be sharing jokes, travelogues, places and basically all the interesting stuff. If you’ve been bored listening to my SEO, SMM, marketing bhashans, come over to my personal space (well, not really personal right?). It’s like inviting you all to a Saturday night get-together at a favorite food joint.

And don’t forget to subscribe to the feed.

OK, So what about the money..Mani ?

I’m giving away $250 this season, and there’s a competition you can win. It goes like this.

It’s going to test your SEO link building and offsite optimization skills. So only the best-hardcore SEO’s who think they are really game for a battle need to take part.

The subject would be my personal blog, (which is brand new).

What you have to do

1 - Pick a keyword of your choice that is suitable for the website. It could be something like Mani Karthik, SEO India, Best SEO India, well, it’s your choice to select what you are comfortable with. You can use SEO tools to pick the keyword but make sure it’s relevant to the site.

2 - Let me know what keyword you’ve selected through comments here, so that everyone knows about it. (Don’t email please). You might want to pick keywords first so that there is no duplication. Each contestant will be assigned a single unique keyword. Incase there are more than one contestants for a keyword, variations of the keyword will be assigned to you by me.

3 - You have a time of maximum, 60 days. Ending March 29, 2008 you have to submit your results as to what is the position the site have achieved, because of your efforts, for the particular keyword that was assigned to you.
Of course, the progress of the competition will be monitored through out the schedule.

Points to note.

- Based on which keyword ranks me higher, the winner will be announced. For example, if the keyword, “Mani’s blog” ranks higher than any other keyword, it would be announced the winner.
- Incase there are more than one keyword that ranks number one, for instance both the keywords “Mani Karthik” and “Mani’s blog” ranks number one, the winner will be decided on the quality of the keyword.
- If it’s confusing still, it will be open to readers to select which is the best keyword.
- Keyword selection is totally up to you, but it should be related to the site and should be approved by me prior to the start of the competition (in comments).
- The results will be checked on Google.com and not any regional domains.
- Prize money will be sent through paypal ids only.
- There will be no control over the onsite optimization factors for the contestants. I’ll be making regular posts on the blog during the competition time.
- You can adopt any white hat strategy you like like reviews, link building etc. As long as it’s not black hat, it will be approved.
- Contestant should provide details of link sources on demand, though it may not be necessary.

So, there you go.

Time to prove you SEO skills and test out what you’ve learned over the years form DailySEOblog. This is going to be a litmus test for all of you SEO’s/SEO wannabes out there. I’m sure only the best would win, and if I find your work really worth it, you’d even get into a contract with me. So make sure you win the contest at any price!

The current stats of the blog are as follows.

- Not indexed on Google.
- No incoming links.

So what are you waiting for? Get set…go !

You’ve been using Lijit on your blog right? No? Then do it right now.

Since their launch, I was impressed with the tool as well as the guys behind it. They seemed to be a friendly, fun loving, jolly group of geeks. Remember this post?

I had trouble customizing the widget for this blog, but thanks to the quick responses and help over email from Tara, she actually bugged me to get it right. I like that kind of spirit, especially at work, when you’ll go extremes to get things done.

I’d seen Tara in one of her blog posts wearing the cute Lijit Tshirt and I wanted one! Unfortunately, Lijit haven’t opened a store yet like Linkedin (and that’s fine.), so Tara very kindly offered me to send one as a compliment.

So that’s the story. As a matter of fact, I really like the Lijit logo, the site and the tool as such, so I’d be proud to be wearing the T shirt. I’m planning to wear this T-shirt to the conferences and geek get togethers.

Here are the pics.

Thanks much Tara, you guys are a lovely bunch of guys there!

This is an interesting case study for everyone.I hope my readers from outside India give me their sincere opinion on this and not dodge the question. Here goes.

Recently, at a conference I remember the CEO of a popular Indian SEO company proclaim that their company ranks high on Google for the term “SEO India”. And this should show others how good they are and what great deal of business they do.

Honestly, this seemed like a baseless statement to me because, for any SEO company, ranking high for a particular term cannot (underline) bring them real business. I’m talking about real good, genuine, healthy business. From my experience, I’ve learned that good business always come from referrals. And for referrals, there needs to be an incredible amount of credibility towards the company. By just ranking high for the term SEO India, can give you probably one time clients, but if you lack in quality, that’s the end of it. For it’s a service not a product we sell.

And I’ve enough reasons to think that company’s that boasts of ranking high for the term SEO India are bogus themselves! First off, the term SEO India, as suggested by the CEO gentleman itself is not a popular word among clients (US and UK predominantly). Because of the poor quality of services offered by many SEO companies in India, there is a widespread belief that all SEO’s in India are weak, which is not true.Yes, there are weak ones, but not all are.

Out of all my clients that I deal with today, almost everyone (this is shameful) has had a bad experience with an Indian SEO. The common issues raised are that, the so called “professional SEO’s” does not reveal to the clients what they do with their site. They don’t tell them where they are sourcing the incoming links from, they don’t tell them why they are using a particular keyword on the meta tags, they don’t even tell them what they should do with their duplicate content on the site.

I’ve heard this issue with many clients and I think they have all good reasons to complain that Indian SEOs are poor quality. Now, if we further investigate into this problem, we can find some interesting equations.

Normally when a client wants to outsource their SEO work to India, they’d normally go googling. And they are likely to go ahead with the first few companies that they find on Google ranks. The problem arises here. Out of the top rankers for the term SEO India, on Google, many so called “professional” companies use keyword stuffing and hidden text to make it to the top.

Why that frown on your face? Check it out yourself. I don’t want to take names but it is disappointing to see that even in the top results, many of them use the words SEO India, SEM India, SEO company India and many similar keywords either extensively on the top header, in the ALT tags, in the title, more like spam often repeated and in lines with black hat methods.

One simple question here -

If these companies will do such kind of unethical SEO practices to get better ranks themselves, would not they do similar unethical strategies to the clients?

Indeed they will. Now, that explains it all. Doesn’t it ?

Okay, coming back to my readers outside India, I’m just curious to know, what keywords will you use to search for an outsourced SEO firm?

Google Trends shows that nobody outside India uses the search term “SEO India” on Google. Absolutely none. My opinion is that it is the SEO firms in India that are competing among themselves to rank for this term (See the number of ad results on Google), and not any genuine potential client. He might be searching for other keywords but definitely not SEO India. In order to test this out, I’ve changed my title tags and metas to feature the keyword SEO India, I’m just curious to see how much traffic this change is going to bring?

These days, importance is given to link building than anything else in SEO metrics. Out of the various factors considered today as must have’s for SEO, link building stands out. At the forums and discussion boards, there is always someone who’s looking for outsourced SEO’s who can work on link building for their site. Many are preferring cheap SEO’s too. Hmm, though it looks murky, I’m not of the opinion that link building should be outsourced to any cheap SEO.

If you take a look around, you’ll see that out of all the bloggers, only a few say less than 10% even consider outsourcing link building. The majority of them handle it themselves. And they are good at it. May be there’s something you can learn here.

1. Link building is not tough as it seems like.
You have no clue why your site is getting a better PR, or a better position. That doesn’t mean that your link building campaigns, if at all any, has gone wrong.
Probably it means that you’re not doing it right. I’ll get to some tips of how to do link building successfully down the article.

2. Link building is not easy as it seems like.
Having said that, it’s not something everyone can focus on. Many of us do a one man job at the site, writing content, tweaking template etc. In between all this, link building goes out of focus and remain down the priority list.

3. Link building is not about commenting and directory submission alone.
Many of us count link building practices limited to directory submission and commenting. Well, honestly that’s only 10% of the whole process. There is a whole lot more in link building. Let’s see further.

Let’s clear some common mis conceptions about link building.

Last, day I asked a question, what are your link building methods?

And the common answer many agreed on was that - Exclusive content and natural linking will help you more than anything else. 

Josh Spaulding says that, since he deals with niche sites, he believes in natural linking though he submits his blog to directories.

Josh is right. If you have a niche site, and if you haven’t marketed in properly, it is highly unlikely that it will get noted by others and hence the link building will be fairly okay while not helping the site much. In such cases two things can help.

1. Directory submission and  2.Social Media Optimization.
If you submit the site to some quality directories, it is likely to get some attention and traffic(Not all does give it, you have to chose wisely).It would help you get some Google juice atleast, again it’s only a better alternative to waiting for your content to get noticed.

Social Media Optimization is the thing! If you are clever enough to create a remarkable(in the right sense of it’s meaning) article, which is likely to get noted by others, then things happen really quick! People notice your blog and favour it with links. Just what we wanted.

Nitin Pai is of the opinion that, natural linking is the best way to get links.

Here too, the uncertainty in when you will get the incoming links and attention is something that will put us off.Again, SMO will help you out here.

Rajan and Mohan is also of a similar opinion. They say that the content itself will bring you links if it’s exclusive.

So what we can learn from this discussion is that taking into consideration, the uncertainty and ambiguity in waiting for the spotlight to feature your content, taking a step forward and creating those killer, viral articles optimized for the social media, would help you more than anything else in building links.

• Agreed that content is king and exclusive content will bring you natural links but optimizing your site for the social media is the right weapon to hunt for links. It’s a fool proof strategy. Waiting for natural links to come is vague.
• Links from commenting does not help you get a higher page rank.
  I heard some one say that he builds couple of links a day through commenting to ensure that his page rank is better the next update. It’s a wrong idea. Commenting on blogs can only bring you traffic, and backlinks on Yahoo and MSN but not Google, unless if the blog is “Nofollow” free.
• Links from forums don’t help you at all.
  I know many of you will disagree with me on this. I can explain.
  Just answer the following questions and you will agree with me.

  - How many links can you gather from a forum?
  - If you are getting signature links at a forum, many others would. Isn’t it?
  - If all of us link to our sites from one single forum (or as many which provides sig links), wouldn’t Google put them all in one bracket ?
  - What’s that you’ll get from a forum that other’s don’t?

  Do you get my point now? From my experience, if you rely solely on forum links, they don’t give you any exclusivity at all. If you know of a forum that allows signature links, probably everyone will. Though it carries some weight, when everyone starts getting incoming links from common domains, they does not give you that edge over others. This is more applicable in the case of sites that fight for positions on the SERPs. For the small time amateur blogger, who just needs an incoming link for the sake of it, it works fine.

So the point here is that, handling link building campaigns yourself may not give you the desired effect because you are not specialized in it. But if you are very clever, there’s nothing stopping you. From my experience, hiring a so called “cheap SEO” doesn’t serve the purpose if you are looking for quality links. Many of them I know rely on forum links, directory submissions and at the most article submission. Beyond all these traditional methods, I’ll rank Social Media Optimization as the right weapon. If you can find someone who’s good at it, he can give you quality links than a cheap SEO. Remember, links are not just about numbers, it’s also about quality. Fifty incoming links from forums/directories is equal to five quality contextual incoming links.