Recently, there has been alot of talk about Google’s PageRank update and paid links.  Loren Baker at Search Engine Journal’s article, Google Page Rank Update and Link Selling, talks about how some directories and web sites were losing one or even more units of PageRank in a recent Google update and that Danny Sullivan in his post at Search Engine Land, talks about the Stanford University Newspaper and how it’s prior PR of 9 was suddenly dropped to 7, likely due to Google’s recent update to account for sites that are selling links.  Apparently,  the Stanford Daily was selling links on their site for $350/month!  A pretty good deal for a .edu domain and PR9!  Danny pinged Google and confirmed this update for paid links was true.

It just seems like its getting harder and harder to obtain good quality links for our clients. I am recently running a link acquisition program for US Patriot Store, a retailer of law enforcement and military gear and clothing.  At times, I spend half or all day and have a handful of links to show for it, or even worse, simply some database entries indicating potential link partners.  It is slow going at best.  Sounds like link acquisition is only to get harder and require more methodical yet creative approaches.

How goes it for you?

There are millions of lists out there for building links but I actually wanted to capture some recent articles and postings about web directories and their usefulness for search engine optimization and link building.

• Hey, this article is almost three years old but many of the directory ideas are still good - some are free and some you have to pay a yearly fee. In all cases you have to watch out for the quality of the directory: “56 directories to submit to“
• Another dated but I found still useful article on “how to find directories to link to“
• Great article by Rand Fishkin on “What Makes a Good Web Directory“
• Rand again has some great ideas on what makes a good directory in his article “The Wisdom and Folly of Directory Link Building“
• 131 link building strategies (another way old article but still relevant)
• Andy Hagan & Aaron Wall’s article on “101 Link Building Tips to Market Your Website“

I have been reading a great classic book on information architecture - “Information Architecture for the World Wide Web” - by Morville and Rosenfeld. The book is filled with wonderful concepts and ideas about how to ‘architect’ information for a web site based upon various criteria such as:

• Organization schemes - organizing by topic, task, audience
• Organization structures - hierarchial, database driven, hypertext, social classification
• Labeling systems - labeling of links, headers, content areas, contextual links
• Controlled vocabularies/Thesauri

It occurred to me that this is exactly how we do search engine optimization work here at Out of Bounds. I talk alot about architecting the web site according to consumer search behavior, carefully labeling links with descriptive names, organizing content tightly into related content areas, navigation areas.

They also have a wonderful chapter on Navigation systems that talks about ’supplemental’ navigation systems such as site maps, indexes and guides. We can build site maps not only to help search engines understand the site information but also provide another navigation aid to our users. Another SEO idea would be to build various ’shopping guides’ or tools to help browsers or other shoppers in the early buy phases to find what they are looking for.

The book talks alot about ‘findability’ of information. I can see now how proper information architecture is really the key to both solid web site design and seo design!

Tracking search engine optimization ‘campaigns’ or results is not even close to being as easy as tracking and monitoring paid search advertising results. Why? Well, just think for a minute. With PPC, you define exactly which keywords you want to advertise, what matching options, etc. then you define what search engines and even what campaign and ad group names. And you can insert tracking codes into the query strings on the ad URL’s to provide your analytics engine with exactly where that visitor came from and what their actual keyword query was. The beauty of PPC is that you have already defined up front what campaign or category that keyword belongs to. Thus, instead of looking at each keyword and how it is doing, a daunting task, you can monitor at a more macro level, the campaign or ad group level, then troubleshoot and go down to more detail from there.

But, what about SEO? You get thousands of inbound organic keyword searches a month, with visitors using phrases you never, ever optimized for. How do you even ‘allocate’ or define what campaign an organic keyword belongs to? With SEO, you optimize specific pages on your site for a handful of keywords but what keywords organic visitors use if never known until you view your web logs or analytics tool. The difficulty is then sifting through these thousands of organic keywords and figuring out what ‘campaign’ or keyword category they belong to so you can have a more macro view to analyze. Otherwise, how do you determine how you are doing with your SEO?

Be Careful Who You Associate With

Page links are critical when you’re attempting to elevate your natural search engine rankings. You may already know this, but did you know that changes in search engine algorithms have made who you link with more important than how many links you have?
Put simply, Google and the other big search engines are making it harder to manipulate your ranking just by adding inbound links.

When you do link building for your web site, you should focus on your “linking neighborhood” and who you are associating with. What many shortsighted search engine marketers view as a hassle can become a great asset to your company if you follow a few simple optimization techniques.

Search Engines Are More Sophisticated

In theory, the search engines are becoming more sophisticated in their analysis of your site’s inbound linking map. As you probably know, Google’s PageRank algorithm, as originally set out, uses a democratic approach to analyzing the value/authority of a page. Each link to a page is a “vote” for that page - the more votes a page has the higher its importance. Combining PageRank with content analysis of the page, Google ranks pages and displays them in the results. However, this connectivity approach to calculating a page’s importance was, at first anyway, easy to manipulate, resulting in less relevant search results.

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