Monthly Archives: April 2009

ILQ (Inbound Link Quality) definition

ILQ is an acronym for Inbound Link Quality, which is a score calculated by the quality of links to a website. This doesn’t take into account all of your links, instead it simply focuses on Yahoo Directory links (worth 1 point each, but generally you get 15 links from a listing), DMOZ listings (30 points per listing), .edu listings (worth 45 points each) and .gov listings (worth 67 points each).

As you can see, the rating doesn’t take into account links from all kinds of high ranking websites, nor does it take into account the relevance of other inbound links. However, it can prove to be a useful guide.  Here are a few examples of different ILQ scores:

BBC: ILQ score: 1,928,870 | Y! 10,400 | DMOZ 1,920 | edu 39,700 | gov 1,110
CNN: ILQ score: 5,045,390 | Y! 5,190 | DMOZ 520 | edu 106,000 | gov 3,800
Ebay.co.uk ILQ score: 2,767 | Y! 15 | DMOZ 7 | edu 55 | gov 1
Play.com ILQ score: 2,796 | Y! 6 | DMOZ 3 | edu 60 | gov 0

Unsurprisingly:

Google.com ILQ score: 100,166,600 | Y! 600 | DMOZ 638,000 | edu 1,610,000 | gov 128,000

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Google maps tracks swine flu outbreak

Following the recent outbreak of swine flu, Google has started tracking the latest epidemic using it’s maps API. On the map there are a number of markers. Pink markers represent suspect cases, purple markers represent confirmed cases, yellow markers represent negative cases and markers without a black dot inside represent a confirmed death. You can view the map by using this link to Google Maps H1N1 Swine Flu.

The page was created on the 21st April 2009 and already had 65,348 views when I first opened the page. Approximately 5 minutes later after refreshing the page, the page had received 66,632. That’s approximately 250 hits per minute.

This is just one of many uses that Google has found for it’s maps API. Personally, despite the morbid feelings associated with this, it is quite interesting to view. It also shows just how quickly the virus has spread and gives a much more accurate overview of the epidemic. Although this certainly isn’t something that an online marketing company should look to capitalise on, it shows how much traffic can be generated if you were to create a link bait on popular world news.

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The importance of SEO and online marketing

During a client meeting today, I was suprised when one of our more ‘technical savvy’ clients said they didn’t know what SEO (search engine optimisation) was. Maybe when you become so engrossed in the minor details of a skill like SEO, and speak daily to 100’s of experts worldwide, it is easy to forget that the vast majority of people simply haven’t heard of search engine optimisation. More importantly perhaps, is that they don’t know the potential benefits!

So I talked more with the client, and discovered that they had a website which was getting direct traffic, only from people that knew of the company (as such they were averaging around 1-2 hits per day). I explained proper keyword analysis and optimisation, and the difference in traffic between being ranked in the top 3 and being on the second page of Google SERPs for these keywords. At this point their interest in the subject had increased, but they still didn’t fully see the advantage to additional traffic. This is because they currently didn’t get any business through their website, and had it simply because they felt they needed to because they were a professional company. This then lead to a much more interesting conversation around developing an online strategy for their business, but at the end of the meeting I realised I assume a certain level of knowledge for most clients which they don’t have. Don’t get me wrong, these guys are super intelligent in their own field but just haven’t been exposed to SEO and online marketing before.

After the meeting they talked briefly about marketing budgets and possibly replacing traditional methods with online marketing based on it’s effectiveness. Some people may find this surprising, but I actually completely disagreed with this approach. Online marketing shouldn’t replace traditional methods, in fact, it should compliment it. Online marketing can be much more cost effective and is very easy to measure it’s effectiveness and ROI, and during difficult times like a recession, a lot more people have been choosing it invest in it. However, it should play a large part of your overall marketing strategy. I would not recommend using only traditional online or traditional marketing techniques on their own, because you will be using an incomplete strategy.

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Protecting against social media identity theft

Due to the exponential increase in Social Media, it is becoming more important than ever to make sure that you are using it to best effect for your company. We have even added a new Social Media section to our blog to categorize all of our posts! Because of the power that social media has to manage reputations and increase traffic to your site, there is now several sites that help you to protect your ’social media identity’.

Knowem.com offers a service to check the availability of your username across 120 different social media sites, and unique to Knowem, can then automatically sign you up to all the sites so that your identity cannot be taken by another user. This isn’t a free service, there is an initial cost for the sign up and then a monthly subscription fee which automatically signs you up to new social media sites as they spring up.

I don’t know much about this service, only what I have read online and on Twitter but it seems that quite a lot of people are already aware of the site, which was previously checkusernames.com.  I would be interested in finding out if they have any ‘authenticity’ checks, i.e. if someone wanted to regsiter Elevator SEO, would they need an Elevator SEO email address or could anyone register it? I guess this would be much easier to manage on big names such as Sony or Manchester Utd etc!!

So how necessary is it to ‘bagsy’ all the names across these social media sites? Surely if you signed up to all of them you would have a very diluted social media campaign? Would it not be better to focus on just a few of the primary sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, MySpace etc?  Additionally, during the automatic sign up, does it use the same username and password for each? If so, if someone found out your details for one site they would essentially have access to all 119 of the other sites you were signed up to!

After thinking some more about this, percentage wise how important is it to register your identity in other social media sites that don’t have anywhere near the same level of traffic?  Also, protecting usernames is very similar to the issues a lot of website owners used to have with domain names. However, there are always alternatives you can use such as adding hyphens to separate words or adding ‘official’ in the name etc.

What the site does show however is the importance of social media, and just how powerful it can become if this kind of action is already becoming available.  If anyone knows more about knowem, has used the service, or would simply like to add to this post then leave your comments below!

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The dangers of buying links

I get a lot of emails from companies wishing to partner with Elevator SEO, or offering their services as an outsource - normally at a very cheap price. A lot of these companies are based overseas, and their offering is almost always the same. They offer to write blogs, register domains with directories and you can buy links to your domain in the 1000’s for a very small monthly investment. Because of this, it’s easy to see why inexperienced companies who know ‘a bit of SEO’ and decide to do it themselves can make mistakes (see our article on DIY SEO). Also, companies claiming to be SEO consultants outsource to these companies to maximise profit, again in most cases this is through inexperience.

Some specialist broker websites allow you to purchase temporary inbound links to your website at a monthly cost.  As soon as you stop paying for the links, they are then removed.  This has been an acceptable practice for many years with some SEO companies, although it has always been frowned upon, as it really defies the purpose of the link.  A lot of the links that get purchased all come from the same server, the sites look very similar and often have just simple colour changes to the site design, and are created with the simple purpose of linking to other sites. In a worst case scenario, some of the links may even originate from ‘link farms’.

Google is cracking down even more on sites that purchase inbound links to raise their rankings. Google knows if a website has an unnatural spike in links to a domain, and in some cases websites have been heavily penalised for this. Additionally, it also knows which sites are known link providers and the algorithm will be looking more closely at purchased links. Because of this crack down, some websites may find that their rankings drop suddenly in the not so distant future. Additionally, a lot of SEO companies may find that a lot of their clients may also start dropping out of the rankings!

Buying links is not the only way to get good inbound links. There are lots of good strategies you can employ to build inbound links naturally. To find out more, why not contact Elevator?

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