If you missed my previous posts about local search marketing strategies, you can find them here and here. After you get caught up, check out the following additional suggestions.

Create a directory—or better yet, a portal—devoted to your location. You can base it on your own site or have it as a separate resource. If your marketing budget allows it, you might want to consider buying such an existing portal. This solution is great even though it takes time and can be costly. It will allow you to drive targeted traffic to yourself easily. And then you can sell to this audience all day long.

Create a newsletter about local news related to your niche, as well as news about your own business. This will definitely increase conversions or revenue. Even a monthly newsletter can bring great results—there’s no need to bother the people on your list too often.

A great idea is to always include your local data in your signatures. And I don’t just mean email signatures, but also in blog post signatures, forum signatures, signatures used when you write articles for external resources, etc.

The web is increasingly moving towards video. People like watching information rather than reading it. So it’s time for you to get involved. Start making videos about your local business, place them on your own site, and also promote them through a good number of video resources available on the web. (A comprehensive list of video-sharing websites can be found here.) By the way, a little-known fact is that video results in the general search results page (SERP) are clicked much more than the text results, no matter what position they take on the page. Little video windows do stand out from boring texts, and that alone attracts people to click on them. (Read more about this fact here.) Because of this, it may be worthwhile to use a solution that posts a video to all major sharing sites at once.

One more interesting trick you can use in local marketing: Offer a locals-only discount. This is especially good if most leads you get are locals anyway. They’ll feel special and that will increase their signup chances for you. When I planned to go to Sea World in Orlando, I was pleasantly surprised that there is a permanent discount to Florida residents. Of course, I purchased the tickets right away.

More strategies are coming soon! Until then,

Shavkat Karimov, Internet Marketing Manager, mobileStorm
“Every problem comes with a solution”
SEO Consulting

First, you need to understand the purpose of link building. Many non-professionals don’t build links because they just don’t get the point. Some people may think that optimized links in their content can be unnatural or disturbing for readers. This might be true, but it depends on how you do it. The links will be a natural addition when they help readers to explore a subject further.

One should understand that he/she is giving additional value in the form of external resources when readers want to learn more. At the same time, links save time for readers who don’t want a lot of information on one page. Links also help other pages on your site, and external sites with worthy content, rank high and be found by real people. They help the Web to be more organized for us all. Links are vital for SEO (search engine optimization)–they help the promoted page to rank high for its keywords and to be found by those looking for it. Link building is essential to increase anyone’s web presence.

It’s not just about sending out templated emails and sometimes responding to the replies. Moreover, we all should understand that spam is evil. There are plenty of ways to gain natural links from related pages, without getting on people’s nerves.

Link building requires some technical skills (to insert the link codes, for example) as well as extraordinary search skills (to find strong link partners for automated or manual link submissions).

A good link builder is the one with a “good eye.” This person is able to see the link value of certain pages within the enormous pile of worldwide Web information. Ideally this person will have wide interests,  is versed in hundreds of subjects, and is capable of identifying a great link partner on-the-spot.

Link building requires a creative approach. While everyone knows the rules, only those with original moves and strategic vision can outrank others.

Devotion, determination, and passion will help a link builder to do the job repeatedly on a day-to-day basis. You also need patience. Link building is time consuming. The results of this kind of work won’t be apparent right away. The only great thing about it is that when you do “your thing” correctly, the results will come sooner or later.

To be successful in building links for your site, or the sites of your clients, you can’t be shy. You need to go out there and interact with others. Sometimes, you need to ask for a favor. You need to explain and convince. You need to be active.

Link building is different from link baiting–as work is different from fun. While the second can have a nice effect, it cannot be your long-term strategy. For solid results you need to build strong “permanent” links that wouldn’t disappear as fast as they had appeared. Don’t just create a buzz that will result in some occasional traffic–it’s just a waste of your time and bandwidth. Better to have onw really interested visitor who might buy from you, or otherwise convert for you, than to have 10 drive-by visitors who won’t stay longer than a few seconds.

Some people can tell stories, while others can’t. If you can, you are lucky and you can use it in link building as well. Links that aren’t boring live longer. Try humor. If your link is funny, it will stay in place for a long time; if the content is funny, it will gain links continuously.

The links should be useful. They need to bring additional value to the content. Those automated, spammy, sponsored, or otherwise annoying links we see on the Internet aren’t useful and bring no additional value, that’s why they go away pretty fast. Moreover, they have a negative impact on those sites or pages to which they link, and thus even harm them.

Relevancy is another key to long-lasting links. Until recently one of the hardest but most desired place for links – Wikipedia – is pretty stable for really relevant links even if they sometimes break their guidelines. Keep your links relevant all the time.

I hope this post will inspire others to link to it.

P.S. To make this article useful and, moreover, to prove the point, here are relevant links to the articles I previously wrote on link building that might be helpful:

Basic Link Building

After studying and exploring what you can do within your website, this post teaches strategies you can do for your site off-page–like link building.

Some Ideas for Getting Links

This is where you can be really creative, with things you can do repeatedly in order to continue ranking higher than your competition.

Link Baiting Ideas

In the first article of this series I explain what link baiting is, then share ideas on how you can get lots of links without lifting a finger.

More Link Baiting Ideas

A second part on link-baiting ideas–with ideas you won’t find elsewhere since I came up with them by myself.

Ideas For Getting Links, Part 3

Links are everything on the Internet, and this third article in the series brainstorms the creative ideas on getting more link love for your site.

Interviews as a Link Building Approach

I personally consider this method as one of the most effective in link building: Conducting interviews isn’t so easy, but it is still not as hard as writing original material and asking webmasters to give you some link love.

Building Links with Directory Submissions

I am all for the directory submissions and since sometimes people don’t get the power of getting listed in strong online directories I have decided to give some arguments for the directory submission and explain my professional point of view.

Link Building Strategies with Social Media

Get some strategies for this part of your online marketing so if you go this road, you do it the right way.

SEO Competition is your another Way to Build Links

Your competitors are your best friends when it comes to outranking them: Discover why by clicking above.

Ways To Get Links

In this post I am talking about the most valuable links: ones that are relevant, from the resources and sites that are relevant to yours.

Other Ways to Get Links

Link building tactics include: Friends, family, clients, partners, profiles, networks, reference sites, video sites, blogs, forums, directories, press-release websites, link sellers, social media, and more.

Shavkat Karimov
Internet Marketing Manager
mobileStorm, Inc.
Every problem comes with a solution
Effective SEO Consulting

At least, in my writing I am.

The other day I came across an application called Gender Genie, which allegedy can suss out if a writer is male or female by studying a piece of writing . I tested several of my own samples, from this blog and others, ranging in topic from text messaging to acoustic music. And every time, the software declared, “The Gender Genie thinks the author of this passage is: Male!” Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. And wrong again.

Luckily it’s OK to be gender-neutral when writing about marketing technology or underground music. In these cases, knowledge about the subject, and the ability to make it easy to understand, are more important than whether the “voice” is male or female.

But I got to thinking that the Gender Genie could be a useful tool for other copywriters. It could help them make sure content is tailored to the intended audience. That’s something that marketers, especially, must worry about when creating copy–even for websites and SMS/email marketing messages. Recipients sign up to receive the latter; if they don’t feel like these notices speak to them, they will cancel their subcriptions.

My experience with the writing algorithm reminded me of jobs I’d applied for long ago. Gigs for which I was more than qualified, and which were in the city where I lived, meaning it would cost the company nothing to bring me in for an interview. I never got my foot in the door. These positions were at places like gossip websites and mid-scale cosmetic vendors–that is, businesses that catered almost exclusively to women. The person writing lipgloss ad copy or catty celebrity news would likely need to have a certain type of female voice. And according to Gender Genie, that is not me!

Certain marketing experts, especially those selling a product that only appeals to a certain demographic, should see how they can tweak their marketing copy to really speak to that audience. Now, I don’t think Gender Genie is all that. I mean, it categorizes the very common word “a” as male! But since it’s fun to use, copywriters might as well make it one more tool to help craft the tone of their content.

I ran this post through the Gender Genie one more time–and once again, I scored far more male than female. In that vein, I’ll just say: D’oh!

Eydie Cubarrubia, Marketing Communications Manager, mobileStorm

“I’d rather you text me”

By focusing on WU, you will greatly increase conversions and sales since users always return, and will refer others to your site. You’ll also experience other positive side-effects when you show visitors that you care about their user-experience on your website.

Website usability includes almost all aspects of your site’s structure, design, programming, forms, scripts, layouts, and navigation. WU is closely attached to SEO; I am confident that many of its elements are built-in within search engine algorithms as ranking factors for websites. The more you take care of these elements, the better your rankings will be in the search engines. Note too that WU is more about converting the traffic, rather than just attracting it.

The first thing to do is to answer these three initial questions: What is the goal of your website? Who this website is for (target audience)? What are your resources?

This is most important to do, even if you already have a live website and it works fine. You should always know who you are, what you do, who you do it for, and what resources you have got. Stop reading right now and devote some time to answer these questions. I will give you a week to think it over before we continue…

Shavkat Karimov
Internet Marketing Manager
mobileStorm, Inc.
Every problem comes with a solution
SEO Consulting Services

Would that simplify the life of an SEO expert? Of course, not—everyone will have to become wiser about using optimization and link building techniques for not just textual content pages, but also for videos, images, blog posts, press releases, and books. We now need to expand our skills and be able to optimize external pages and objects that will eventually bring us traffic and leads. We need to expand our expertise to other fields and fight for rankings with all these forms in the SERPs (search engine results pages).The competition now isn’t the first ten places of text results on the first page. Now, it might be just four or six text results, plus image, news, or video results.

Other search engines besides Google are trying universal search. Yahoo’s cool-looking Alpha Beta is a strong competitor. Live.com and Ask.com are implementing universal search as well.

The SEO implications of universal search becoming the standard will turn out to be even more complex, because of its influence on pay-per-click (PPC) advertising. Universal search means fewer paid clicks and more value in organic results. It might also mean no more cheap clicks for PPC newbies. Now every paid click would matter when this advertising space decreases in size, because non-regular search results will draw more attention since PPC will just be text. This will again increase the natural search competition. For example, video search results (actual videos in the SERP, which are sometimes playable) are catching the searcher’s eye much better than text results. So if your keyword is good for searching videos, there’s a good chance that video results will appear along with normal search results. In this case, try doing some video marketing, which I wrote about here and here.

When products from commercial sites appear in your search query results, you need to make sure those products are yours and not your competitors’. If there are books in the search results, try to see if you can get your link or your ad on the page of that book. Or write a book or buy the rights for one, and make sure it ranks high for your keyword in the universal search results, to make sure you get all that traffic.

Press releases and news stories are even more complicated as they are the most time-sensitive. You need to act fast and actually get mentioned in the news pertaining to your field.

As a general advice: study the search results of your keywords and if it’s a universal SERP, see what you can do to outrank each search results category: Videos, images, news, blogs, shopping, books, and local maps; and even codes, patents, and stocks if possible.

Hope this helps your SEO endeavors in the universal search era.

Shavkat Karimov
Internet Marketing Manager
mobileStorm, Inc.
Every problem comes with a solution
SEO Consulting

Why? They just list sites. That’s it. It’s a very long list, and the sites listed are sometimes irrelevant and useless. Because of this state of things, I’d like to offer tips on how your links page can be modified to look natural and be useful.

First, never actually call this page “Links.” Don’t even use the word—it’s a red flag for Google. Call it “Resources” or, because the latter word is also quite overused, come up with something else, like “Web Map,” “Online Center,” or “Interesting Sites.” Even better is to call it by the name of your niche and adding the word: “sites”, “resources” or “websites”; for example, you can call it “Digital Marketing Sites.”

As Google suggests, make your site—and your links page—for people, not spiders. Give a description for each site listed, and make sure each site really is useful and/or relevant. Create all this in a “natural” way; for example, tell a “story” about your subject and add the external links into it where expected. Thus, your visitors will benefit the most from your links page.

When you link to external sites inside your copy (i.e. the site content), it looks natural to the spiders and will get the same attention from them as any other regular page. Remember, traffic from content is usually better than traffic from banners. A good example: If you list tips on some particular subject (such as digital marketing tips) and, inside the article, you give useful links to other sites with their preferred link anchor texts, it will “read” well by both people and bots. You could title that page (on the page and in the code: TITLE tag) “Digital Marketing Tips.”

You can also divide your links into sections or categories, and have a sub-header for each such section with a title and a description for it, serving as a new paragraph in your article. This simple technique will even let you categorize your links into different pages if necessary. It’s a good idea, because having more than 50 external links on the same page will make the page look suspicious, and will also seriously decrease the value of the links you give to your link partners.

There’s another method for creating a links page that I call “citations,” by which you talk about something on that page, and then have citation marks that lead to the source site mentioned on the bottom of the page, along with other cited sites with direct links to them. Thus, your links page will look like an academic paper and might even gain value for the search engine spiders. You also help your visitors by sharing more information about external resources.

If there is a need to list links for a large number of sites, it might make sense to add a search function to the links page. It might even become a strong directory with this case scenario. The large links page must be well-organized; have logical sections (with a separate page for each) with descriptions; list links in a natural way; and provide the entire directory.

By following these straightforward ideas you can be assured that your links page will not just be more useful. It will also invite site owners to exchange links with you, and attract good-quality traffic that might even convert for you if you add your call-to-action buttons/links on the right or left panel or on the header or footer of the page.

Shavkat Karimov
Director, Online Marketing
mobileStorm, Inc.
Every problem comes with a solution
Unlimited SEO Consulting

First of all, every good link counts. Directories’ links to your site are good because your link is placed under its own category among other links; the links you get from directories are related to your website. Of course, you shouldn’t submit to some FFA (Free-For-All) “linkfarm” directories—having your link there might even harm your site. Only submit to authoritative and reputable directories, like Yahoo! Directory, DMOZ, Business.com, Kahuki.com, BizFive.com, etc.

All these directories, except DMOZ, are not free, but in my personal opinion paid directories give many more benefits than free ones. The have less links in their databases, that’s more value for you; the sites they contain are in most cases good-quality sites, making these directories “good neighborhoods”; and they do care about their reputation, so you are in good hands.

Secondly, directory submissions are probably the simplest and the fastest ways to get links. The process is totally automated, so you don’t ask anyone for a favor nor do you need to think of any link baiting techniques. It’s pretty straightforward and you get what you want almost right away.

A very good idea is to submit to niche directories. It will not only help with SEO but will also grant you high-quality traffic. For example, if you are a creator of some WYSIWYG editor software, you should submit your listing at htmlArea.com, a wysiwyg editor directory that owns the space; you might want to even advertise there. The sites listed in this directory are all from the same field. Some are getting more traffic from this site alone than from search engines or other sources. Research your niche and see who is an authority directory therein—then be confident about submitting your website to this directory.

Today, almost every site has its own blog, or the entire site is a blog. So there are many credible blog directories out there where you can get your blog listed: BlogCatalog.com, BlogDirs.com, BlogTopList.com, etc. If you are into internet marketing, you might want to submit your blog to: eMarketingBlogs.com.

I usually suggest doing manual directory submissions instead of using dedicated software. This is a true case in which quality is more important than quantity. On the other hand, the more directories to which you submit your site, the better. Just make sure each directory is a good directory. You don’t want to spoil your hard work by submitting to some risky ones.

In conclusion: By submitting to directories your increase your web-presence and your online visibility.

Shavkat Karimov
Internet Marketing Manager
mobileStorm, Inc.
Every problem comes with a solution
SEO Consulting by SEO Manager

Leave creative signatures with your inner links in the forums where you are active, if they are appropriate for showing up on your site, and also add the links to your personal profile page on the forums. If you make quality contributions to the forums, some of their users might follow these links and even “convert” for you.

Ask and answer questions on sites like Yahoo! Answers or Google Groups, and give some links to your site as a reference or otherwise. Get creative.

Encourage people to syndicate your RSS content; that might result in some additional “link love” for your webpages.

Aren’t you an expert in something? Create a topical Squidoo page, show your expertise, and link to the pages with expert documents or useful tools on your website.

Do some “microblogging” with Twitter and share your links with your friends and contacts. Some might get into the public.

Comment frequently on other related blogs. Add your links inside your comments or instead of your name. If you do it every day on many different blogs in your field, you will not only establish yourself as their devoted reader, but will also see a good ranking increase for the links you leave there within a month or two. Just make sure your comments really add value to their posts, otherwise you will only harm yourself and waste time.

Post announcements at Craigslist—add your optimized links there.

Write about products and services on shopping search engines like ePinions. This will help you build your authority in particular subjects and thus will result in some external links for your website.

Leave testimonials for the products you buy and use and for the services you like. Testimonials are easily placed on the providers’ sites. The testimonials pages are usually highly ranked, and they always add a link to the site of that person who was kind enough to leave a testimonial. These aren’t your best optimized links, but they are still good link opportunities you don’t want to miss.

This is obvious, and thus often ignored: Create a blogroll and exchange links with other bloggers there. It’s a legit practice that Google isn’t opposed to.

Keep using all the ideas I’ve given, and enjoy the results!

Shavkat Karimov
Director, Online Marketing
mobileStorm, Inc.
Every problem comes with a solution

Interview big-time players in your field, real people with blogs. They’d love to link to your interview if it’s done well, and thus you will get quite some strong linkbacks.

Review products and services related to your niche. This method works as effectively as the one above.

If you sell products or services of your own, launch an affiliate program. Most of the links from your affiliates will not have any SEO value themselves—they’ll have unique affiliate IDs in the URLs or will use other identifications—but the added exposure will almost always lead to some regular links.

Run contests, especially SEO contests. That’s probably the cheapest and most effective way to automatically gain lots of links. Just make sure that people really want to take part in this competition, and that you follow common practices and make the contest rules straightforward.

Tag good sites that are related to yours on social bookmarking sites like Del.icio.us or Digg.com. Spice up your tag with an original and interesting comment. You will not only gain a reputation for tagging and bookmarking good stuff, but you might also get some trackbacks from the users of these sites.

Ask friends to tag your own articles if they are really well-written—then you will get lots of people, especially bloggers, viewing your site and potentially linking to it. Ask different friends and contacts to use different sites for your various articles—it’s not a good idea to have all the same people tagging the same stuff for the same sites.

Join the Better Business Bureau and other “reputation validity” sites. Their linkbacks are automated and might be even pretty strong in terms of pagerank and “heaviness.”

Check your site for safety at online safety and virus checkers, and you might get some good links from those places. Make sure your site is indeed safe—for example, run a search at http://www.siteadvisor.com/

Check your site’s other parameters at these sites:
http://www.alexa.com
http://www.compete.com
http://www.aboutus.org
http://www.domaintools.com
http://www.dnscoop.com
Plus do it on other similar resources, and recorded sessions from these will generate more links for you.

Participate in public discussions and in online groups with published bulletins – have your optimized links in some of your messages and enjoy the effect.

List your site at the local library’s website. Libraries are very friendly in many cases and if your resource is good they’ll accept; and their link “vote” is impressive.

Create folders on your site and add mirrors of some big sites who are looking for additional external mirrors, and who will then linkback to you.

Optimize your images and submit them to image search engines. Do the same thing for photos, videos, and even the new search-engine friendly flash pieces.

If you are a business, get a link from your local chamber of commerce.

Submit your website to relevant city and state government resources and directories. This trick might get you really strong linkbacks. True, sometimes this is near-impossible to achieve. Still, it’s worth trying.

Add your addresses to interactive maps like Google Maps and others.

Create original news about yourself or your industry, and submit it to niche publications as well as to major ones when possible.

OK, I believe you’ve got quite some work to do for now. Happy link-baiting!

Shavkat Karimov
Director, Online Marketing
mobileStorm, Inc.
Every problem comes with a solution

The Johnson Box/above the fold scenarios have also been adapted for email. Most email clients today offer a “preview pane” in which readers can see the first 20 words, more or less, of the message. These are the first words a reader will see, and will most likely be the words a reader will use to determine whether or not to read the rest of the message. To that end, it is critical that whatever content is used in that portion of an email contains the crux of the message.

Additionally, from an email delivery standpoint, another common practice for email senders is to include in the top portion:

• A message to recipients to add the sender’s address to their address books.
• A link to a web page version of the email.

In one test, response rate was increased by 220% when a sender modified the top of the content as directed above. As responsible senders, it is essential that you use this preview section of your message to your advantage. Doing so it will help to generate more response to your campaigns, as well as subscriber engagement.

Until next time,

Jaren Angerbauer, Director of Deliverability, mobileStorm
Eat Responsibly, Drink Responsibly, Email Responsibly