When it comes to a link building exercise for clients, I tend to prefer a long tail strategy rather than a top level generic strategy. Long tail Link building? What the heck is that? Why don’t we just chuck all our links with the exact anchors that we want for our money words?

To start with, a long tail link building strategy centers around driving a small share of link volume per page on a site, while using 3+ phrases as the anchors. The other element of my long tail link building strategy, is that instead of driving links into the top level pages, I would drive them to tighter match, sub category pages.

How Do I Work on the Long Tail Links?

So take for example an affiliate site that deals with Insurance. Typically, you would have some top level categories like:

• Car Insurance
• House / Home insurance
• Cheap Insurance
• Pet insurance
• Health Insurance

The typical traditional exact match anchor link building looks a bit like this:

Traditional anchor links

However, my long tail link building is more about building out each one of those categories into sub categories.

A very small sub set of Car Insurance would look like:

• Car insurance for Young Drivers
• Car Insurance for women
• Compare Car Insurance

I would then use google suggest to gauge the really long tail versions of queries that match these pages:

And the end result would look a bit like:

Long Tail Anchor Links

So Why The Long Tail Link Build?

I have 5 reasons for building links in this manner:

1. It look more natural than exact match anchors
2. It’s easier to get these links than your typical one word or two word anchors
3. You use googles own data to pick out long tails
4. There are knock on effects to the rest of the site
5. You build a link profile that is varied, and strengthen the base of the site

Effects Of Long Tail Links

But to give you a more detailed view, when we build links to long tail phrases, we talk about the 4 fold effect:

Effect one

Directly improving the pages relative import to Search Engines for the phrase and its minor variations for that Key phrase, thus ranking well for long tail keywords. In my SERP Sniffing post, I highlighted the importance of ranking for the long tail:

Effect Two

Indirectly affecting that pages ( the long tail page) importance for shorter versions of the hyper link – so where “car insurance quotes for young drivers” is the anchor, both, Car insurance Quotes, and Young Drivers, get affected as other possible key phrase combinations and rank for them, such as “Car Insurance for drivers”, Insurance for Young drivers”.

Effect Three

The page gains authority and can potentially rank for some of the related content on the page, for example if that page had a section: “Risks for Young Drivers”, chances are that the sites ranking for that phrase may go up, and as a result should be correlated with rankings / traffic before the link building was carried out

Effect Four

Over all site authority goes up. As we build a large number of long tail links to deeper content, this has a pyramid effect, where the high base is holding up the tip (in this case the home page) which strengthens for its own content, which then causes a flow of strength through the whole site

Proving the value of a Long Tail Link Building Strategy

Convincing clients used to traditional link building to use this approach may or may not be easy, but you still need to justify that it works. The best way to do this is to:

Take two time points:

• Before the strategy started
• At the end (or current point in) of the campaign

Next, isolate all the traffic to your end target pages from search engines and extract all the referring keywords to those pages for each given time point.

Now compare three things:

1. Volume of traffic, then and now

2. Keywords variations driving traffic, then and now

3. Keywords targeted, vs kws NOT targeted, then and now

If you ran a decent campaign, then the difference would be in the numbers:

Example of increase in long tail traffic within a week of a single page targeted with 20 Keyword link variations

This example is for one of my small affiliate sites, I isolated a page that had many combo variations via google suggest, then built  a series of long tail links. The keyword variation on keyphrase referrers to the page goes up,  as well as traffic. Over time, as those links mature further, it will rank higher and higher. If I did the same for the 50 plus pages the site has, the benefits would be higher than trying to get its two word anchors for the home page and trying to compte in that space in the SERPs.

And that folks is my simple guide to long tail link building

When PR Doesnt work with SEO and loses link opportunities.

PR and SEO

I know How powerful SEO and PR can be. You do too, I am sure. PR is the one way to get legitimate “white hat” links of real authority. However, we are far from working well together with PR. Below I have highlighted 9 mistakes I have seen more commonly than I would like to.

This is a short post, because you dont need a full explanation – these points should, in theory, explain themselves.

1. When the PR story is shared BEFORE the SEO team realise
2. When the PR team release it without ANY links
3. When the PR team knows something is cooking, but doesnt tell online team – especially with reputation management
4. When the PR team links to product pages which may move around
5. When the PR team links to product pages / site with ANALYTICS TRACKING
6. When the PR team links, but doesnt capitalise on the right anchor text
7. When the PR team gets a good link TAKEN OFF. (trust me, it happens)
8. When the PR team refuses to answer interviews regardless of how good the Link opportunity is
9. When the PR team waits for weeks before forwarding a GOOD link request from a National Newspaper, because its “online only”

Image Source: My awesome Logo Creator

"Your Next" - Source: Unknown Email FWDs...

It isn’t often that I give out Link Building advice. This is because I don’t really like link building – I find it tedious and sometimes boring, except for when the ideas are around Link Baiting (but that’s another post ) .  As a result, I am always looking for low hanging fruit (to use a cliché). It amazes me how often you find a simple yet easy strategy that gets you links, very often these are links that you already deserve!

JC Penney Link Building

I bet you are bored of hearing about these guys. So am I. After, how many times would you want to read about the JC Penney fiasco? Well, bear with me. I am using them as the example because it is relevant.

When  I first wrote my post on JC Penney, I misspelled their name. Chris Lake (Director of Innovation @Econsultancy) was kind enough to let me know of my error, and I quickly corrected the post. In fact, you can still see the error in the URL for that post:

http://explicitly.me/10-things-you-should-have-learnt-form-the-jc-penny-seo-fiasco

This reminded me of a strategy that we used a few times before to grab links – after all misspelling is a common problem with a number of businesses, especially with big brands.

Cracking Open The Data

Majestic just released a pretty good Site Explorer tool, which I used to play with some of the data. Unfortunately, as I am not a premium subscriber, I only get to see  handful of links – as a result I opened up SEOmoz’s Open Site Explorer which gives me a few more on the free version.  So lets look at the most common misspell:

So Many Links - Nyum Nyum

As you can see, there are hundreds of root domains, and thousands of backlinks! Is that easy picking? You bet it is. After all, you have already been given the link, just to the wrong domain!

Miss Spelling JCPenny.com

Here are a few choice links to prove that the links exist:

JC Penny Link 2

JC Penny Link 3

Now that doesn’t mean you should ignore other weird and wonderful miss spelled domains, for example, JCpeney.com has only one link:

JC Peney Link

Pro Tip: Buy those Misspelled Domains!

301 Misspells

JC Penney did one thing right – they own the most common misspell JCPenny.com, and it redirects to the home page.  However you will be surprised how many brands DON’T own their miss spells. Buy those. Make sure they 301 properly. Other wise you are losing out on so much link equity, as you can see from the example above.

I suggest buying all variations – for example JCpeney.com is interestingly, this is an affiliate owned domain name which redirects to:

http://www.jcpenney.com/jcp/default.aspx?cm_mmc=LinkShare-_-AFF-_-Mktg-_-Ad

International TLDs

If you are a business that operates internationally, (JC Penney doesn’t operate in the UK for e.g, as in it doesn’t market to the UK) then chances are that you may own most the TLDs. In most cases, I have found businesses redirecting these properly to the live site, if they don’t use local domains for their website, but subdomains or folders. However, there are instances I have found that businesses:

1. Don’t own the Local TLD
2. If they own it, don’t redirect
3. If they redirect, they use 302s

In the first instance, GET those TLDs!

Side Tip: If you operate in the UK, a .co.uk isn’t enough, get the Irish Domain (.ie), the Channel Island Domains (.GG and .JE ) Isle of Man Domain (.im). You never know when you need them.

For the second point, if you own it, redirect it! The third mistake is daft, use 301 unless you planning on building a site on the domain.

However, popular US businesses DO get traffic from the UK, and JC Penney SHOULD have bought the .co.uk,  – they don’t have many links (OK just one), but other businesses and brands may have more – check yours today!

JC Penney .co.uk Link

Side Note: Dont Ignore Misspelling, Domaining them is Big Business

The highest sale of a typo domain we’ve ever seen and the $200,000 sale of a domain that had been donated to a charity headline another big week of domain sales. You may need smelling salts after looking at the whopping $242,400 price paid for the #1 domain, Mortage.com (DN Journal)

Buying up Misspelled Domains should be part and parcel of your businesses Online Marketing. Why? Well, for one, Its stops Lazy Affiliate strategies. (and the practice of TypoSquatting).

Secondly, how many times can you misspell Britney Spears? Loads, Says Google. The big G has been working hard in passing through the right results for misspelling, even using common volume misspells to correct results. (Vanessa Fox has a decent post on this). Although a large proportion of people tend to use search engines now instead of the address bar, people still do type in domains (shock and horror). Dont let them go to the wrong place.

Third, take a look at your Google analytics data. You will often see misspells in them. Isnt that a case and point?

Resources

• I am not the only one who has covered this tip. Rand calls them his HeadSmaking Tips.
• Wiep Covers it in his monstrous Solid 69 Link building tactics (he suggests 404 monitoring on point #9).
• Use Aarons SEOBook Spelling Typo generator to some up with suggestions to test.
• If you really want to get creative about link building, have a read...

Conclusion

As you can see, there are loads of low hanging fruit that you can pick, if you are a lazy link builder like I am. I have a few more easy tips up my sleeve, and the next post is titled: Link Building: 3 Easy Pickings for Retail and Ecommerce Sites. So why not subscribe to my feed to catch it when its out?