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Ask yourself, why are there so many wannabes in the SEO industry and why do they appear to be a brainless army of zombies dwelling in the realm of repetitive and low value activity.

Think about all the blog commenting, forum signatures, cheap and fluffy article distribution, countless  directories and paid reviews. The answer could be in the fact that a lot of these processes seem very easy to replicate.

Let’s look at online directories. There used to be a few, fairly well moderated, carrying a reasonable link value. Naturally some genius thought –

‘ Hey, why don’t we make more directories and give ourselves more links!? ‘

Soon after that, link directories were popping up like mushrooms after rain. What did search engines do next? Devalue! Great. Thanks guys.

The above mentioned scenario replicated in countless other cases, and all of them exhibited one common element – they were easy to do, and easy to replicate.

Let’s face it, there is no long-term shortcut to easy SEO results. Instead, we can hope occasionally catch a wave of a new strategy that search engines have not caught on yet, or we can choose to do it the other way – the hard way. The reason this strategy is worth adopting is the fact that people are lazy and only true professionals will bother with hard work and high quality. By eliminating about a ninety percent of spammers leaves us with true SEO professionals. Wouldn’t you want to belong to that category? The crop of the cream!

What is involved with creative link building?

1. Brain. Those creative cells in your brain will have to spark up and you will have to invent a new solution for every new client, scenario or situation.
2. Uniqueness. You cannot afford to think in the way of automation, replication, there can be no shortcuts. Think about the unique approach for each webmaster or content manager you are about to approach.
3. Personalization. Connect to people you wish to get links from on a personal level and try to understand what they do, what their motivations are for publishing content online. A retired general will not be interested in a $100.00 per link per month deal, but he might give it to you for free if he knows you’ve read his book or donated to the charity he is a member of.
4. Time. You will have to spend time getting that link, there is just no way around it. Be prepared to carefully plan your approach and execute it in an appropriate fashion. Your clients will push you for rankings, but you cannot push a webmaster for a link.
5. Contribute. Be generous, get involved, help and give without asking for anything in return. People will recognise your efforts and offer to assist you on their own, try to find a solution that will compliment both your efforts and their content or mission.

These are just a few key elements that characterize a unique link building strategy and all of them result in contributing to the quality of the web content. Not all links are difficult to get this way, at Dejan SEO we’ve been using these methods to stay ahead of the competition and it has paid off.

It’s not only our clients who benefit here but also our staff who are able to bypass the monotony of link building and enjoy their daily tasks knowing that every next day brings a new challenge.

Please comment on this post by sharing your creative building strategy or experience with other readers. Share this post http://bit.ly/TJV6g

This is a Li’l Engine guest post by Dejan Petrovic of Dejan SEO – Follow Dejan on Twitter if you like to get more tips on link building strategies.

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Next time you perform a search in Google, note how many results appear on page one?

Out of millions of hits there are only 10 results on page one. as research indicates 89% will click page 1 results. and 4% on page 2, 6% page 3.

In the world of Search Engine Optimization competitor research plays a very important part to a successful campaign. By knowing who is on the top 10 result, and digging deeper to find out how they achieved this, you will be able to budget and plan your campaign. To be on page 1, you have to beat the other 10 results.

In the world of online business, knowing your competition is the key to success. From knowing who your top competitors are, why they are at the top and finding out when a new competitor appears will help your business grow and prosper.

Knowledge is power, here are some great tools I use on a daily basis to help my clients and to spy on my competitors. I will be covering each tool in separate posts to keep reading at a minimum.

Case Scenario

My company ( Clear-A-Face ) sales a fast acting acne removal cream, recently a new competitor ( Super Clear-A-Face ) has launched a similar product claiming to remove acne twice as fast. Been a smart business man, I want to know what this new competitor is up to and how they are marketing the product.

Google Alerts

Imagine if you had a personal assistant that was scouring the internet for information about your competitors 24hrs a day, 7 days a week. No overtime pay, no holiday leave and best of all , they work for free and deliver their research to you without fail, everyday.

Google Alerts

This is Google Alerts. A free service provided by Google which delivers to you in the latest customised topics from ;

• Google News
• Blogs
• Web Search results ( new SERPs )
• Videos
• Google Groups

Use this great tool to gather intelligence about your competitors products, their online marketing efforts and the markets interests on your competitors products. There are of course many other websites that offer a similar service, but to be able to see the news from Google’s eyes is great for SEO.

Using Google alerts I can setup as many campaigns based on keywords related to my competition.

• Campaign A for their brand name Super-Clear-A-Face.
• Campaign B for product related keywords : Acne Cream, acne treatment cream, pimple removal cream, acne gel.
• Campaign C for treatment , symptoms related keywords : Acne treatment, rid acne, cure acne, acne medication

Google News alerts will let me know if my competitor appears on major news networks or official press releases

Google Blogs alerts for possible product reviews by their customers, or any new competitors on the scene.

Google web search alerts to inform me of their SEO / online marketing efforts. I will see when their new website has appeared in Google’s index, any new pages they may have added, websites selling their products, websites possibly been used for link building purposes and research websites / forums dealing with acne.

I can also find out what products are gaining popularity by following discussions and forums found in my alerts.

You can really build a great overview of your competitor’s SEO and marketing strategy, the markets interests and awareness in your competitors products. Any interesting alerts should be bookmarked and filed for reference. After a few weeks you should have enough data to make a calculated decision whether this competitor poses a serious threat.

If you are reading this, stop. Click here and setup a Google alert campaign for your own keywords. Currently I have Google alerts tracking keywords such as SEO, SEM, search engine optimization, search engine marketing, Google Caffeine, Caffeine, Goobinghoo, lil engine, li’l engine, little engine.

I really can’t stress how useful this tool is, if you are already a Google Alerts user let us know how you have benefited.

As always if you have any questions feel free to post them in the comments section, or discuss it on our forum. Please pass on this article if you found it to be useful. ( http://bit.ly/Gripp )

In the next few posts I will be introducing competitor research tools like Google Ad Planner, Real-time search monitoring and link analysis, keyword scraping tools.

Follow us on twitter or subscribe to our RSS and get notified of new posts.

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I was asked by a friend today if posting comments on blogs with no follows is a good way to build links for SEO. When I asked him what other strategies he had for acquiring links he mentioned this was going to be primary source of link building!

Why link building using comments is on its way out?

Just like the good old days where keyword stuffing and meta tag stuff used to work quiet well, search engines and especially Google are now catching on to comment spamming.

Links in comments are now devalued regardless whether or not if they have no follows. This is a direct response to the huge amount of spam comments now appearing on blogs, if you have ever ran a blog of your own, you will know what I mean, even the most obscure, hard to find blogs on the strangest topics can attract spam comments.

Its actually not hard for search engines to determine if  a link is from the comments section of a blog, a quick look at the code in wordpress.

<ol class=”commentlist”>
<li id=”comment-1372″>
<a id=”comments”>

Not hard for search engines to look for these tags and devalue the link-juice within them is it?

Don’t despair, comments are still useful

While comments are no longer useful for link-juice / reputation passing, they are still useful for the following reasons;

Driving qualified traffic

Lets say you own a fishing / lure store and you come across a blog post from someone complaining he isn’t catching any fish. This would be a perfect opportunity for you to leave a comment with fishing tips and suggest some lures he could use; at the end of the comment, be honest and say you own a fishing store where they purchase these products, with one link to your website, not ten!

You already have the target audience thanks to the blog post, now its simply putting together a well constructed comment.

Be mindful how you structure the reply, comments that look like a cut and paste job or advertising fluff will be deleted. Trust me, these type of comments are not hard to spot.

Ask yourself, are you providing any added value to the post, if a friend came to you with a complaint that he isn’t catching any fish. Are you going to give him a bunch of random lure names without telling him why he should use them? Of course not, be conversational. don’t write your comments like robots, because they will be treated like one.

Quicker Indexing

Comment links can also be used to get your website indexed quicker by search engines, if your website is new and not showing up in Google index; it is most likely in Google’s Sandbox.

A method I have found to be useful is using blog comments on popular blogs to naturally drive Googlebot to your sand boxed website.

Follow the advise above with comment structure and don’t spam. You will find once you have a few decent comments approved on blogs, it will move out of the sandbox faster, in most cases I have found this process to be faster than manually submitting your website to Google.

( Don’t forget to setup a Google webmasters account, if your sites not been found it could be other issues causing it, don’t assume its just been sandboxed, I will be posting about Google Webmaster Tool soon, stay tuned )

Making Connections

Blog commenting is one of the simplest form of Social Media Marketing! Good comments generate discussion, and this is what every blog owner wants. Subscribe to comment updates via email so you know when someone else has responded to your comment, this is where you can really engage with your target audience and offer your services / products.

Good comments can still land you juicy backlinks, most blog owners appreciate good comments and will reward you with a link from an actual post perhaps mentioning how your fishing lure has helped him catch more fish!

Not only do you get a backlink from an actual post which would pass on the link juice, you have just gained yourself a loyal customer that will potentially refer others to your website.

Closing thoughts on blog comments

So hopefully you will take my advice and stop comment spam once and for all on the internet!
But seriously, blog commenting is a great internet marketing tool, but for link building purposes they are clearly not as useful as they used to be. If you are solely focused on an SEO campaign, cross off blog comments please!

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A compilation of the most newsworthy, ground breaking, interesting and useful stories that matters to the search and marketing industry, sourced from websites, blogs and tweets. Can’t wait for the weekly round-up? Follow us on Twitter @little_engine for the latest on search and marketing.

Google Caffeine

Google announces public testing for the new search infrastructure on Google webmaster blog.

Search quality engineer Matt Cutts updates and answers questions on Caffeine

Will Google Caffeine effect Google Local Listings – some thoughts and comparisons

Lil Engine evaluates and tests Google Caffeine -  Exclusive overview and comparison

SEO & SEM Tools

GooBingHoo.com – Compare side by side search results from Google, Yahoo, Bing and now also with Caffeine.

20 free keyword research tools – Excellent list of free to use keyword suggestion / volume comparison research tools.

FireFox Addon: Monitor the Page Size with View Dependencies – via SEJ

Optimize your crawling & indexing – Good tips provided by Google Webmasters blog , slideshow and text wrap up

Matt Cutts:  Straight from Google – What You Need to Know about Word Press Optimisation, very good video for WordPress users that want to learn some simple optimisation tips [Video] 45 min

Small Google PageRank update – Mostly changes in internal pages, SEO’s reporting mostly drops in Pagerank for internal pages, especially those sites with a large index.

Matt Cutts on nofollow – The debate continues with this video with Jen Lopez ( SEOMoz ) and Matt Cutts ( Google ) @ SES San Jose 2009

Why are .com sites ranking highly in UK SERPs? – Matt Cutts on Google Webmaster YouTube

Pie chart of component’s of Google’s algorithm – via SEOMoz.org

Pie chart of component’s of Google’s algorithm

Online Advertising / Marketing

Google Adwords Conversion Rates Don’t Vary Much with Ad Position from Chief Economist at Google, Hal Varian.

Google Adwords – Sponsored search ads now displaying closer to organic results. Keep track of CTR’s in the next day or so. Advertisers reporting a 5 – 10 % increase in clicks.

Google Adwords – Googler’s have reported different text size / type and location changing on Sponsored Results Ads. Appears Google is doing quite a lot of A / B testing on Adwords.

Google Adwords – New Search Ads Quality Guide , Google adds some pretty useful resources to their Adwords help section, such as: how quality score affects your ranking and how quality score affects how much you pay.

Is Your Business Ready for Online Marketing? – Great 60min video of Warren Lanier, CEO of Bridge Point Marketing and David Kamatoy. Some really useful tips for business owners and entrepreneurs, covering the differences between traditional advertising, SEO and social media marketing.

Social Media Marketing

10 Really Tangible Ways To Measure Social Media Success – nice tips on measuring the success of  social media marketing campaigns with sites such as Twitter and facebook.

United Breaks Guitars Song 2: Yes, Dave is back with another YouTube music video on his broken guitar. Will he get as much exposure as his first hit? I doubt it, this song is pretty weak and really doesn’t bring anything new or fresh to his first song . Maybe my conspiracy theory is true, maybe Dave is working on a Viral campaign for United!

From the Li’l Engine Forum

A new visualized web search engine, sleagle.com, was born today – 08/18/2009 : Join the Discussion

Cheers

Thanks for checking out the first ever Li’l Engine weekly search roundup! I’d love to get some feedback on my writing style and also the topics covered, perhaps you may have more to add to this roundup? or want to see a particular topic covered more, let me have it You can contact me directly via my personal twitter account or just leave a response in the comments.

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The buzz within the search marketing industry is torn between 2 of this quarters biggest announcements:

1. First been the search partnership of Bing ( Microsoft ) and Yahoo! ( more )

2. Secondly Google has announced a major update to its search infrastructure code named #caffeine

We are going to explore what caffeine is all about and the major differences in part 1 of this 2 part post. In part 2 we will be dealing with some direct data comparisons and delivering our own conclusions based on this data.

[ don't forget add our RSS or Twitter to get notified when part 2 is released ]

On August 10th, the Google Webmasterblog announced public testing of their new #caffeine search quoting :

For the last several months, a large team of Googlers has been working on a secret project: a next-generation architecture for Google’s web search. It’s the first step in a process that will let us push the envelope on size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness and other dimensions. The new infrastructure sits “under the hood” of Google’s search engine, which means that most users won’t notice a difference in search results. But web developers and power searchers might notice a few differences, so we’re opening up a web developer preview to collect feedback.

The caffeine update is been reported as a complete rewrite of Google’s search infrastructure – lets check out what this means;

• Changes in how Google stores the massive amount of data gathered by their robots.
  This is a direct response to the rise in new digital media such as streaming videos, blog posts, social media content ( Twitter, facebook ). The old Google infrastructure was built to handle data by way of Collection > Quality Ranking  > Sandbox > Indexing. However with the explosion of real-time content, search engines are faced with the daunting task of filtering all this content to provide a real-time search. With any major change in a new data model, software must be upgraded / rewritten, this is part of the Google Caffeine update.
• Changes in how the Google collects its data.
  While this has not been confirmed, it is safe to assume with any updates in how data is written and stored, changes to the data collection process will also be different. Google uses robots that crawl through the web for data ( googlebot ), this is traditionally data that may not change or update in real-time. The caffeine update must include changes to the robot to cater for real-time content. My theory currently is Google has developed several types of robots that differ in its indexing rate and craw rate to cater for different media content.
• Changes in the how data is served to end users.
  So, Google is fairly tight lipped at the moment when asked if the #caffeine update will effect end-users. Quoting from their Google webmasterblog:

The new infrastructure sits “under the hood” of Google’s search engine, which means that most users won’t notice a difference in search results

• From what we have tested on the #caffeine sandbox this is not really the case, some major differences we and other users have reported include:
  • Massive differences in the total search results returned. We are talking a few million results wiped out from results in general.
  • Search query time is generally faster. ( however take into account no Adwords are been displayed, which would increase load time )
    
  • Major SERP ( search engine result position ) changes. Which leads me to the next important point.

Have the search results changed in Google Caffeine? ( Changes in the Google algorithm / ranking system )

Yes most definitely, although Google is stating otherwise ( for now ). When we first heard about #Google #Caffeine I posted this question to Matt Cutts from Google.

john chen August 10, 2009 at 7:47 pm

Hi Matt,

Been sussing this out all morning, from the Google blog and your post its seems there are algo changes / updates on the current sandbox. I’ve noticed some definate changes in the how the SERP is different in the sandbox in my play this morning.

Could you confirm this?

Matts response was:

john chen and Daniel Sterling, most of the changes are in things like our core indexing, so there’s less changes for things like rankings. Lots of users won’t notice a big difference

From our own research and you can verify this yourself in the #caffeine sandbox, this is simply not the case! There are major differences in Caffeine SERP that will ultimately effect users, SEO and most of all companies that depend on their search positions.

Some changes we have identified in Caffeine SERP

• Google Sitelinks disappearing from some results.
• Rich Snippets disappearing from some results.
• Caffeine has difficulties handling 301′s. ( This is a bug )
• Page 1 results mostly contain the same sites, however positioning is quiet different
• Page 3 and onwards seem generate completely different results.
• The index page on root domain now has more weight.
• Pages with heavy keyword stuffing are been penalised.
• Pagerank Sculpting is no longer effective. ( further confirming the rel=nofollow topic )
• Brand name / Domain trust further effecting SERP. ( a step further in the Google Vince Update? )
• Number of inbound links from external domains
  
• External links using targeted keywords as anchors carry more weight.

These changes come from our initial research in comparing a sample data of searches, and by no means represent a concrete conclusion. Google caffeine is still under development, as such the algorithm and infrastructure will change and alter in the near future. These are just preliminary conclusions for your consideration ( food for thought ) and therefor I recommend that you make no immediate changes to your SEO strategies, but simply keep the above in mind.

How have your websites performed in Google Caffiene?

Google has released #caffeine for general public testing here

If you are after a direct comparison tool between #caffeine and current #google search Try http://www.goobinghoo.com/

Goobinghoo - side by side SERP comparison

You can easily compare the search results side by side, but don’t forget to sign out of your Google account. ( otherwise you may see your own preferred results )

Part 2 of this Google Caffeine update post will expand further into our findings above and with real data + example comparisons, as well as some SEO tips that you can perform today.

Did you find this post informative? Have anything further to add? Please leave a response in the comments section.

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