Vol. 3, No. 9
September 2002

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Newsletter Archive

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Academy Newsletter

Editor
Terry Plank

Head Writer
Robin Nobles

Contributing Writers
Bill Gentry
Lee Traupel

Published Monthly
Copyright © 2002
Academy of
Web Specialists LLC

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In This Month's Issue...

131 (Legitimate) Link Building Strategies
by Robin Nobles

Google's Groundbreaking AdWords Select™ Program
by Lee Traupel

Link Popularity – LinkSurvey
by Bill Gentry

Strategies and Techniques
by Terry Plank

131 (Legitimate) Link Building Strategies
by Robin Nobles

This compendium of linking knowledge gathers the wisdom of many of the Web's most successful Search Engine and Internet Marketing professionals.

The contributors include such names as Mike Adams, Michael Campbell, Chris Churchill, Terry Dean, Elbert Flores, Chris Genge, Bill Gentry, Ron Gotcher, Don Hammond, Detlev Johnson, Dixon Jones, Jon Keel, Barbara Coll, Stephen Mahaney, Nancy Nelson, David Notestine, Susan J. O'Neil, Debra Paynter, Terry Plank, Rocky Rawstern, Gil Sery, Chris Sherman, Judith Silver, Marshall Simmonds, Scott T. Smith, Danny Sullivan, Becky Thompson, Carl Watney, Steve Wilson, Brent Winters and Gary Woods.

Please proceed to the whole article on 131 (Legitimate) Link Building Stratigies.

**Robin Nobles, Director of Training for the Academy of Web Specialists, has trained several thousand people in her online search engine marketing courses (http://www.onlinewebtraining.com) and is the content provider for (GRSeo) Search Engine Optimizer software (http://www.se-optimizer.com). She also teaches 3-day hands on search engine marketing workshops in locations across the globe with Search Engine Workshops (http://www.searchengineworkshops.com).

September Sponsor Endorsement Link Analysis is essential to search engine ranking. Now instead of just counting the links, the search engines really know what you're about. OptiLink finds the links to your site and tells you how the search engine views what your site is about, the "Topic," and what others say about you, your "Reputation." Know this and you will know what to do to improve your search engine ranking and increase your traffic. Click here to learn more!

Google's Groundbreaking AdWords Select™ Program
by Lee Traupel

One of the absolute best online marketing processes available to any business today is Google's AdWords Select advertising program. It produces immediate results within minutes after being set up, drives highly qualified traffic via selected keywords, and can be monitored and modified on a 24/7 basis via Google's excellent online interface. There are no hidden fees – it costs a mere $5 US to set up a campaign and requires a credit card submission at startup. We highly recommend this interactive marketing process to all of our clients and incorporate an AdWords Select component with all of our marketing campaigns.

Google's Pricing Model
Google charges you on a CPC ("Cost Per Click") basis – you only pay for each clickthrough to your web site from Google's – no more, no less. You don't pay for "impressions" (number of times someone views your ad), like many first generation Internet advertising models, it's truly a results-driven marketing process.

Keyword costs can vary tremendously, ranging from $.05 to $11 US or more per keyword – Google assigns a "minimum cost per click" for specific keywords based on "market value" and "performance history" via Google's AdWords Select program history. Be prepared to pay a much higher rate for very popular keywords, and this is a moving target all of the time – the more popular this program becomes, the more you will be forced to pay for selected popular keywords.

Creating Your Sponsorship Ad
Your ad's position is based on a combination of the CPC you selected and relevancy of your ad – if your ad and keywords are relevant and drive clickthroughs, then your ad will rise in position on the sponsored column versus your competitors. This is an innovative feature and helps to distinguish Google's program from all other PPC ("Pay per Click") campaigns (Overture and their primary competitors) – most of these programs have an "economic bias" built into them; i.e. whoever pays the highest fees gets the top placement.

Dynamic Ad Placement
Google's unique AdWords Discounter keeps track of your costs per click versus your competitors. You select the maximum amount you want to pay for your keywords and the ranking algorithm keeps track of your keyword costs, ensuring you only pay one cent above the CPC cost you specified when you set up the campaign versus your competitors.

Setup Process – Sponsored Link Ad and Keywords
AdWords Select is based upon driving highly targeted traffic to a web site via a set of keywords that are selected via Google's account management interface. There are two primary components to the setup process, creating your "sponsored link" ad and selecting your keywords. You start by creating a "sponsored link" ad that is subsequently inserted into Google's search results on the right hand column – targeted by keywords that you have selected. It only takes a few minutes to have your campaign go "live" after you've completed the setup process.

It's very important to spend quality time creating your sponsored link, as this is the "online ad" that people will view in the midst of search results and competing sponsored links (in some cases). You have the ability to create a short headline coupled with two lines of text with approximately 35 characters per line – the headline must be succinct and hard hitting and the related text should backfill the headline with supporting words that convey what goods or services your company provides.

Keyword selection can be the most daunting task for setting up a new campaign – be prepared to spend some focused time working through multiple keywords to find those that you can afford. It typically takes 1-3 hours to find 10-20 keywords that are relatively low cost – however, if your budget isended and you have sufficient marketing funds to pay $1-8 US per keyword, then it can take much less time. Your market focus is also another important variable that can impact the keyword selection process – if you're in a narrow market niche with only a small number of competitors, then it is much easier and faster to set up a campaign.

Finally, be aware you can find some keywords that are very inexpensive, but Google will disallow these if they don't drive a minimum clickthrough amount of roughly less than 1% – you can start off with them, but they will be turned off after 7-14 days if they aren't driving sufficient clickthrough volume.

Wordtracker Keyword Research Tool
You may want to utilize other keyword analysis tools that will give you a broader selection and help you to understand what keywords are popular and searched on, which in turn ensures the keywords you do select will drive traffic and will not be disallowed by Google. Wordtracker is an industry standard keyword analysis tool that those of us in the online advertising world (and many others) have used for years to help us understand what keywords are popular – their service is very low cost and easy to utilize via their web site.

**About Lee Traupel: Lee Traupel has 20 plus years of marketing experience and is the founder of Intelective Communications, Inc., a marketing services company which provides strategic and tactical marketing services exclusively to small-to-medium-sized companies. Email: Lee Reprinted with permission from Intelective Communications. (c) 2001-2002 by Intelective Communications, Inc.

Link Popularity – LinkSurvey
by Bill Gentry, Academy Software Reviewer

LinkSurvey, developed and marketed by AntsSoft, is the latest entry into the realm of link popularity software. It is comparable to RankSpy, link popularity software I reviewed in March 2002.

Discussion of Features
LinkSurvey supports 13 search engines: Google, Hotbot, All the Web [Fast], Lycos, AltaVista, MSN, Yahoo, All the Sites, AOL, Excite, Sympatico, Goeureka and iWon. This covers most of the major search engines. Notably absent from the list are LookSmart/Wisenut, Teoma/AskJeeves andDirectory Project. The user may select any or all supported search engines for link popularity reports.

The software offers three types of reports: Link Popularity, Single Site; Index Assessment, Single Site; and Link Popularity, Multiple Sites. Each report contains the URL of the page that is linking to the specified domain(/spacer.gif) and the total number of "hits" or links that were found for the specified domain(/spacer.gif).

Link Popularity, Single Site Report
Simply put, this checks the selected search engines for any pages that link to the specified domain.

Index Assessment, Single Site Report
This report checks the selected search engines for pages from the specified domain that have been indexed.

Link Popularity, Multiple Sites Report
Using this report, you can see how your site compares in link popularity with your competition. The program checks link popularity for all domains specified.

Additionally, the program can save/export each of the above reports into the following formats: .txt, .html, .csv [Comma Separated Value] and .xls [MS Excel]. Finally, LinkSurvey sports an embedded multi-tab browser for viewing pages listed in the above reports. This browser can also highlight links on the page for quicker link identification.

Analysis of Software
AntsSoft proclaims that LinkSurvey is "an advanced link popularity analysis software, which can check link popularity of multiple relative websites, combine result to spreadsheet and generate detailed link popularity report for you." However, I found this statement to be misleading. LinkSurvey does not analyze the links it finds. It only counts the number of links found in each search engine and the total number of links found overall for each domain specified.

Despite this misleading statement, LinkSurvey can still be a useful tool. While the Link Popularity, Single Site report really does not tell the site owner much, the Index Assessment report will help the site owner identify pages that have yet to be indexed by the various search engines. By analyzing this report, you can check your site navigation to ensure that all pages on your site can be crawled by search engine spiders, correct any problems found and either resubmit those pages or let the spiders find them on their own. Additionally, the Link Popularity, Multiple Sites report can compare the number of links for competing sites at the same time. This is useful only in the sense that it gives you a glance at how your link popularity campaign compares with your competition. This report should be tempered with the fact that link quality is normally more important than link quantity.

The ability to export each report into various formats is a nice feature, which allows you to send these reports to clients, although, in my opinion, it is likely that an explanation will need to accompany the report. I also do not find much use for the reports, except for the Index Assessment report, and I doubt that clients will find much use for them either.

One other thing that I noticed is that the total number of "hits" or links found for the site I used to test this software varied between the Link Popularity reports. The Link Popularity, Single Site report found 140 links and the Link Popularity, Multiple Sites report found 123 links. This strikes me as odd [although I am aware that there are inconsistencies in the search engines themselves], especially since I ran the reports within minutes of each other.

Finally, I find it curious that the developers included Excite as one of the search engines it supports, since it’s been a while since Excite was sold and converted to a metasearch engine, using Dogpile results. You might as well deselect Excite when running a report and save bandwidth.

Missing Features
One feature that I would like to see added to LinkSurvey is the ability to filter out internal links in the Link Popularity reports. Link popularity is mostly about gathering high quality external links, so this information is not needed and inflates the quantity of links. Also, if you are comparing link popularity between your site and the competition, the site with the most pages may likely show a larger number of links, due to the large number of internal links. This feature does not exist in RankSpy either.

OptiLink does not filter internal links either, but as a true link analysis program, there is extremely useful information to be found from internal links, but not in link counting software such as LinkSurvey or RankSpy.

Final Assessment
LinkSurvey costs $40, which is the same price as RankSpy. However, RankSpy also requires an annual licensing fee, whereas LinkSurvey does not. Since LinkSurvey supports more search engines than RankSpy, allows you to check link popularity for multiple sites simultaneously, and costs less in the long run, I rate LinkSurvey slightly ahead of RankSpy. LinkSurvey is a decent program if all you want to do is count links. However, if you really want to analyze your incoming links for various important parameters, LinkSurvey falls short. It does not analyze links in the way that OptiLink does, despite the claims the developers make. If you are looking for true link analysis, I suggest that you skip LinkSurvey and spend the extra $57 and purchase OptiLink.

I wish to thank Lewis Hong of AntsSoft for a registered version of LinkSurvey to use for this review.

Announcement
On September 9-11, 2002, WebBuilder Conference will invade Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas, Nevada for three days of web design and development discussion and training. Also on the agenda are a couple of sessions regarding search engine marketing. I’ll be there covering the first two days of the conference for the ACWS newsletter. For more information about the WebBuilder Conference, go to http://www.webbuilderconference.com/. Send me an e-mail if you decide to attend or already planning to attend, and we’ll try to get together sometime during the conference.

I had actually wanted to make this announcement in last month’s newsletter, but was waiting to hear if I was going to be granted a press pass to attend.

**About Bill Gentry: Bill Gentry has been a professional Web designer since 1999 and a Search Engine Optimization and Online Marketing specialist with Look Sharp Designs since February 2000. E-mail: billg

Strategies and Techniques
by Terry G. Plank

When isn't your company name important? When is comes to your linking strategy!

Google has become the dominant search engine over the last few months and in order to get good traffic, you must be ranking well with them for your chosen keyword phrases. They are also feeding AOL results pages. I was a speaker at the last Search Engine Strategies Conference and sat in on the Google presentation, "Looking at Links." Daniel Dulitz was clear that Google believes that what is on your company's page is not the best indicator of what your page is about. They know all about marketing language that we all employ!

What counts in a big way with Google is what others say about you! If an authority site in your industry thinks you are about "green tomatoes chili" then you are probably about green tomatoes chili and might the best candidate for good ranking in their search results.

Google will know that an authority site in your industry believes you are about green tomatoes chili by the fact that they link to you. But, more importantly, that they link to you from the text, "green tomatoes chili."

So back to your company name. Let's say an authority site has the following recommendation of you: "Plank Industries Inc. has a green tomatoes chili that uses organically grown tomatoes and beef from range fed cattle." If they link to your site with "Plank Industries Inc.," your ranking will be lower for "green tomatoes chili" than if they link to your site from the text "green tomatoes chili."

Getting 20 strong, authority sites linking to your site from your keyword phrase will indicate to Google that your site probably is a quality site about green tomatoes chili.

**About Terry G. Plank: Terry is the Academy of Web Specialists co-owner and Director of Business Development and Promotion. A search engine marketing professional since 1996 with Search Engine Marketing Consultation (formerly Whistler Enterprises) and the Academy of Web Specialists, he is also co-owner of a local ISP in the San Francisco Bay Area. Certifications: Certified SE Marketing Strategist, Certified Advanced SE Marketing Strategist, Certified Internet Marketing and Business Strategist.