Searchlight

It's interesting how aspects of our lives come into play. Prior to joining this Web revolution, or evolution, depending on your point of view, I worked in the world of consumer packaged goods. I developed and managed some of the office products that most of you probably use everyday. I became fairly familiar with even more products that I didn't manage, but was naturally exposed to. One of these was the Rolodex brand card file products after that parent company was acquired.

Even though I didn't manage the product line, there was always something intriguing about the products. In this highly electronic world we live in, business cards continue to change hands every day. At some point or another, I'd guess that nearly every TV sitcom has someone pulling a card or looking up contact information from a card file; or at the very least, one is seen prominently on someone's desk. It just lends credibility and is something we've grown to expect.

By no means do I see business cards disappearing anytime soon--so pull those boxes back out of the trash. But, keep in mind that even business cards can only take you so far. Beyond business cards, everyone (and every business) should make sure that they are adding LinkedIn.com to their marketing mix.

While there are a number of services that can help keep you up to date with your contacts--probably better actually--the mix of features as well as the huge and continued adoption of LinkedIn by professionals makes it a worthwhile Web marketing venue.

So how can LinkedIn fit into your SEO and Web marketing mix? Here are three key areas to focus on.

Links & Linking

Every LinkedIn profile is able to add three links to other sites. These could be anything--perhaps to your company home page or to your blog. What many may not realize is that these links are live, direct, and not "nofollowed" on the public profile page...which is the page that is openly available to search engine spiders.

Rather than using the default choices that LinkedIn provides when adding links though, select "Other:" to add relevant anchor text to your links. Of course, you also need to make sure that your public profile is set to actually show these links within the Web site section of your profile. Since these public pages are accessible to search engine spiders, they'll also pass PageRank and contribute to overall link popularity.

Now that you've added links, be sure to link to your public profile URL from other sites when appropriate. This way you'll drive a little traffic to the profile, and depending on the link, also flow a little PageRank through the profile page to your chosen Web site or sites.

Answers

SEO of course has a strong focus on-site and in regard to search engine spiders. But SEO is also part of the much bigger picture of search engine marketing (SEM). This becomes especially clear when looking at the social media arena. And no where is this more evident than in the LinkedIn Answers section.

The Answers section provides members a forum for asking as well as answering questions posed by other members. While search engine spiders may index and even return these pages, more importantly, these pages are seen everyday by real live human beings who may well be potential customers. Participating within the Answers section is an ideal opportunity to demonstrate thought leadership within your industry, draw additional attention to your Web site (since you did of course add a link to it from your profile as discussed above), network, and further build your brand image.

Optimization

Did I mention that your public profile may be seen, indexed and more importantly, returned within search results? What this means is that you have one more opportunity to rank, and not only rank, but rank via content that you control. LinkedIn is a great reminder that optimization is mostly focused on-site, but we should never lose sight of opportunities to optimize content we can control, residing on sites that may lead visitors to our site. And actually, LinkedIn may provide even more than one opportunity to rank since every employee's profile within a company may be one more potential search result.

Now this isn't a license to spam your LinkedIn profile. What it does mean is that it may be beneficial to give a little more attention to the summary information that you provide. Write it intelligently but also incorporating strong keyword-rich signals that are related to your brand, industry and Web site that you wish to be found for.

Best of all, even if LinkedIn decides to "nofollow" all links within profiles, or even block search engines from indexing member profiles, LinkedIn will still serve as an online marketing and networking channel to connect you and your business with potential clients and customers, which in the end, is what SEO is really all about.

But as I said earlier, don't go throwing out your business cards, or your card files. Who knows though, maybe in the future, business cards will look a little differently than they do today, and perhaps something more like this:

Brian R. Brown
http://www.linkedin.com/in/brianrbrown

Certainly allows for plenty of white space.

Link building is one of those challenging subjects that carries a lot of technical undertones. It's a subject that often requires some explanation, depending on the audience, as to why it is so important to begin with.

The importance of building links to a site is something that SEO (search engine optimization) practitioners understand all too well. It's not just a quantity thing, but a qualitative measure. Links aren't just a conduit for traffic; they serve as an important signal to search engines. Of course, it is the significance and understanding of this signaling that often steers the explanation of link building into a much more technical discussion.

Just last week I was in New York for an on-site training with the Institute for International Research. IIR is a great organization to work with and very interesting from an SEO perspective. IIR puts on large-scale events on a wide array of topics and an even wider array of industries, like the upcoming conference that search engine optimization expert Stephan Spencer will be speaking at called The Conference On Marketing.

So I found myself explaining link building to an audience that was nearly as diverse as their topics...varying responsibilities, positions, and technical expertise. This meant discussing the importance of quality versus quantity--that links from pages and sites that are authoritative within their topical area, with thematically relevant anchor text, hopefully from pages with lower numbers of outbound links, and higher PageRank may carry more value than other links. Of course, all of this is on a relative scale, though the ideal is finding links that score high on all these, and other, signals.

On the flight back, as exhaustion was starting to settle in, I found myself trying to come up with some image that could encapsulate these concepts of link building. One of the great things about being in a state of exhaustion is that simple visuals often come to mind over more complex ones. At some point, my mind settled in on the image of a mobile...as in the sculptures you hang in the air, based on counterbalanced components. Some of these feature pieces that are larger, counterbalanced by a pair of smaller ones, and so on.

I thought this image was appropriate, how the largest piece represented that most ideal, highest-quality link. Every site has a link profile, composed of all the links coming into it. Some are highly relevant, some highly irrelevant. Some come from authoritative domains, others not so much. We really, as do search engines, expect to find a diverse mix of links, many of which we have no control over. But while those ideal links may take more effort to achieve, they often carry considerably more weight, and value, than a handful of low-quality links.

Link quality illustrated as a mobile sculpture.

It's important, when link building, to remember that most links have value and we must find balance--spend too much time just looking for ideal links, and your link profile will remain stunted, but just building links for links' sake will leave you out of balance, with links that convey no real value, off-topic from spammy sites.

Link building, like much of SEO, is about balance.

Inbound links control PageRank, which in turn has a deep impact on Google rankings. Other search engines work similarly, rating the quality and number of links a given website receives as if they were votes for that site. So, how does one get a good take on inbound links for a site? There are many advanced linking softwares out there, like Advanced Link Manager, that can perform complex and deep analyses. But many webmasters or site owners may not need that much power, or would prefer to invest software dollars elsewhere. In most cases, simple link queries can offer a good overview of a site's inbound linking status.

What exactly is a link query? It is essentially a command line, followed by a web address, typed into a search engine. Most commonly, it looks like this:

link:www.yoursitehere.com

This line works for both Google and Yahoo. Each will return results listing websites that link to that address, but they will also list total numbers of inbound links as each engine counts them (note that currently Yahoo is a bit quirky in that it returns different numbers depending upon whether or not you?re logged into Yahoo). These numbers are rarely going to match between search engines as they use different methods to crawl and define inbound links, but taken together they draw a good picture of the linking popularity of a given site.

At the beginning of the year, MSN Live Search stopped offering the link query command. Though there was a rather cryptic work-around, it s no longer needed as MSN recently re-introduced the option with a slight variation: a plus sign (+) must be added to the beginning of the command:

+link:www.yoursitehere.com

Check it out for yourself here. Now anyone can get free reports on inbound links from the big three search engines. Use the information to gauge and build a link building strategy. Check out Stephan Spencer's earlier post on link building for more information.

I'm an evangelist when it comes to blogging as a way to build brand, thought leadership status, and links. Heck, I've written a lot about making blogging pay off in terms of SEO (here, here and here, for example). However, my enthusiasm does not carry over to spamming the blogosphere. Not through comments. Not through trackbacks. Not through spam blogs (a.k.a. splogs). Not through payola.

There are firms out there that hang out their shingle as "blog marketing firms," that take your money and promise many links from other blogs to your site or blog. Buyer beware! It may be nothing more than a link farm wolf in a Web 2.0 sheep's clothing.

How can you know? Go to in Yahoo Site Explorer and start digging through their inlinks and their clients' inlinks. For example, from this sponsored post you will find mention of a company in the business of acquiring blog links for SEO. A quick peruse through their inlinks revealed the sorts of keyword-stuffed blog posts they'd be acquiring / manufacturing on your behalf. Here's a representative sample:

• http://rvincoletto.multiply.com/links/item/81
• http://shoppingmum.blogspot.com/2007/06/website-optimization-firm.html
• http://timworstall.typepad.com/419_er_watch/2007/05/looking_for_a_w.html
• http://adsensead.blogspot.com/2007/05/sponsored-blog-posts-marketing.html

Yuch! Such stellar prose, eh? And it doesn't take a rocket scientist (or a Google algorithm!) to figure out the search term they've targeted ("website optimization firm").

Not only is this a red flag to the search engines (notice their site doesn't rank in Google in the first 100 results for the targeted term), this is a red flag to you, the prospective buyer of such seedy services. Think of it this way: you could buy the supposed miracle diet pill for the quick fix, OR you could buy REAL blog consulting, where it's eating right and regular exercise for the eventual, hard-earned payoff.

A legit blog consultant wouldn't buy you a bunch of links that -- by some strange coincidence -- all happen to have the same exact anchor text from an array of blog posts that read like machine-generated content. A real blog consultant will instead help you shine in the blogosphere as a thought leader, help you engage in honest and open conversations with your market, help put a human face to your company name, help you craft entertaining/helpful/insightful "link baits" that attract high quality/trusted/authority links like a magnet.

Links (and higher rankings) will follow from hiring the the second type -- the true breed -- of blog consultant. Importantly, those links won't be flagged by the search engines as suspicious, because they will arise organically, they will have been earned by merit -- rather than having been engineered. Just ask a blogger like Steve Spangler (disclosure: he's a client of ours at Netconcepts) about the hard work involved in blogging for real. It's a serious commitment you can't back down from. While you're at it, ask Steve about the rewards he's reaped: Steve attributes over 15% of online sales to his blog; he also credits his blogging to him getting nominated by the Time Magazine editorial staff for the Hundred Most Influential People of 2006.