Free, but not easy

How e-retailers are building web links that charm search engine spiders

An online retailer of baby gear is offering great deals on strollers, making “strollers” a spot-on-relevant keyword for the retailer to target in optimizing pages for natural search. They’re a popular item among new-mom consumers, and they’re priced right and attractively presented on the site.

Sales are robust—for other online retailers. Because under the term “stroller,” this retailer’s listing shows up at number 29. So what gives?

The problem could be links: not enough outside links pointing to the page, or perhaps not enough of the right kind of links. As a result, listings from competitors that may be as well optimized on-page but that have more and better links from outside are moving to the top of search results.

How those links from other sites can improve a retail web site’s rankings in search listings is one of the least understood aspects of natural search optimization.

“Link-building has always been a part of search engine optimization, but retailers have been more focused on the on-page aspects of SEO because it’s easier for them to get their heads around,” says Stephan Spencer, president of Netconcepts LLC, which helps retailers optimize search engine rankings. “But the link-building factor is just as powerful, if not more so. One link or a handful of links can make the difference between meeting your budget or not.”

While it can be difficult to pinpoint exactly how outside links affect a retailer’s rankings in natural search results vs. the effect of other optimization elements such as page architecture or keyword-rich text, one way to diagnose link problems is by ruling out other reasons a retailer’s listings aren’t ranking higher.

“When you’ve had your site design fixed for a few months, you can attribute some of the fluctuations in ranking to what you’re doing with link building,” says Josh Greene, director of online marketing for Discovery Communications Inc.

Sniff test

A link, or hyperlink, is a connection by click to a specific area of content on another web page, either within the same web site or to another site. It’s the latter path that figures into how high a retailer’s listing ranks in natural search results under a given keyword. As search engines strive to deliver relevant results, their algorithms take links to a web page from outside the site—from consumers, directories, blogs and other entities—as evidence that the page is relevant to the searched term.

In fact, outside links are such a valuable commodity in boosting a site’s listings in search engine results that online retailers, their advisers and other parties simply looking to profit have come up with a wide variety of tactics for making those links happen.

But here’s a warning to e-retailers out to build links: Search engines resist being gamed. Because their own reputations suffer when they return results searchers don’t find relevant, search engines are ever more adept at protecting themselves by sniffing out when links are contrived without relevancy solely to boost a listing.

Most recently, market leader Google has been working to identify and actually discount links added to a site exclusively for this purpose. “Since the initiation of search there always have been ways to trick the engines, but the engines always wind up winning in the end,” says Khrysti Nazzaro, director of optimized services at search engine marketing company MoreVisibility.com.

This means retailers should look to emerging best practices in link building and sidestep tactics that could backfire under search engines’ increasing scrutiny of link quality. Here’s an example of such a tactic: The PageRank system, part of the Google algorithm, measures the popularity of a web site to determine how high in natural search results a site will appear. It’s possible for a heavily-visited site to elevate the PageRank of a less-visited site just by linking to it, a practice called “passing PageRank.”

Any number of popular media sites sell links for this purpose, according to Spencer. These links are different from paid search ads that link to products. But when Google finds them, it discounts links that a retailer buys merely to “pass PageRank.” “Google doesn’t want you to buy links and pass PageRank if the links are advertisements,” Spencer says.

Masquerade

Spencer adds that search engine algorithms can easily find various forms of link-buying masquerading as link-building. For instance, search engines frown on asking an author to post a link in an old web article or blog post, even if the content is relevant to a retailer’s keywords. Engine algorithms will likely flunk such links as “natural” listings by determining from cached pages that links are suddenly appearing from a web page that has had no updates for years.

Another link-building practice that engines can spot as unnatural is three-way linking, in which a web site asks to link to another site, and in exchange, asks that site to link to a third site that also links back to the original site. “If those sites don’t have any relevance to each other, the engines are able to see those kinds of multiple link relationships,” Nazzaro says.

With search engines increasingly calling the shots on what outside links will or will not help with list rankings, what opportunities are available to online retailers looking to build links while steering clear of algorithmic biases? Plenty, say search engine optimization experts.

For starters, general directories such as the open-source Demoz.org or niche directories such as BabyBusiness.com can provide online retailers with a source of outside links. So does the Yahoo Directory, the still-existing, human-edited, searchable data base of submitted listings that preceded Yahoo’s web-crawling search engine.

The directories span both free and paid options, such as the Yahoo Directory. Though search optimization experts say the best outside links are naturally-occurring—for instance, a web site or blog about parenting might link to a recommended item at an online toy store—paid links aren’t all bad in terms of their ability to help boost a listing in natural search results, says Eric Papczun, director of natural search optimization at DoubleClick Performics Inc.

Not necessarily bad

“If someone has a site that sells cooking utensils, we shouldn’t discount the value of that retailer choosing to purchase a link from a blog or web site that is relevant to their content,” he says. “Determine what constitutes a good link—is it relevant to the page and is it credible—and if you pay for it, that doesn’t necessarily make it bad.”

Sponsorships of events in the offline world also can add links. For instance, a retailer could sponsor a local baseball team or a charity event and bring in links from those organizations’ own web sites. A thank you or a testimonial on an outside site in relation to a service provided or a community event can bring links from that site to a retailer’s site.

Blogs are another fertile field for retailers’ link-building. At the online store of Discovery Communications Inc., which also operates the Discovery TV Channel, toys are a major category. So the site has reached out to parent bloggers, bringing new toys to their attention, sometimes offering toys for their review and comment and seeing if links from those blogs result. To identify influential bloggers, it depends on input from Netconcepts as well as its own research.

“It’s a beneficial cycle,” Greene says. “As you have links coming into a particular area of your site, you get more traffic, and then other links may show up that you may not have actively pursued.” For Discovery, links from parents who have blogs help build exposure that leads to links to tech toy pages from technology bloggers and sites, even green-focused blogs and sites in the case of Discovery’s fuel cell-powered toy car.

And while compelling content and products work to bring in outside links, this works even better when supported by offline PR. A Discovery.com microscope mentioned in a Wall Street Journal article got a link from the article online; placement on “The Oprah Winfrey Show” later netted Discovery Channel’s Planet Earth DVD set a spot in the show’s annual holiday “Favorite Things” segment, with a corresponding link to the site from Oprah.com.

National Underwear Day

PR efforts and media coverage also combine with content to bring in outside links at underwear site Freshpair.com, a MoreVisibilty client. The site originated National Underwear Day, which features a live show with models strutting in their skivvies on a runway in Times Square. The site devotes real estate to the annual event year-round, with streamed videos, previews, reports of media and more, all of which helps to attract traffic and build links, says president Michael Kleinmann.

Online community and social sites represent another potential source of outside links for online retailers. Online marketing company Orange Soda leverages relationships it’s established with the most active users on social media sites in link-building program for retailer clients such as AbleKitchen.com.

After reviewing social media sites to see what people are talking about that might relate to a client’s business—for a kitchen site this might be buzz about a favorite dessert recipe at a popular restaurant—Orange Soda might develop an article about how people can prepare similar restaurant-quality desserts at home. It’s offered free as useful content to sites and bloggers in the cooking space. Where posted, Orange Soda then sends those postings to social media sites including Digg.com.

Digg depends on a user ranking system to figure out which submitted postings and articles are the most popular—or “dugg”—and that determines in what order they are posted, starting with the top spot on the home page. Sometimes words in those posted articles are linked back to e-commerce sites and the opportunity to buy a referenced product.

But according to Dan Garfield, SEO manager at Orange Soda, it’s not sales and conversions that are the real payoff for getting an online marketer’s content up high on Digg; it’s links.

“If you get on the front page of Digg, you are going to get thousands of hits in five minutes. Those people are not going to click on your ads, but they are great at spreading the word. A lot of people like to blog about stories on the front page of Digg. So if you get a story there, you might generate a thousand links,” he says.

While putting compelling content up on a retail site attracts traffic and links, e-retailers need to get real about the quality of the content they expect to do the job, experts say. “You have to ask yourself, why would someone want to point a link to you? It has to be something people really want, either because it’s truly useful or because it’s cool,” says John Tawadros, chief operating officer of search marketing company iProspect.

Drag and drop

He offers a hypothetical example of content that would be both: a home furnishings retailer creates a tool for its site that presents 10 layouts of a living room. Visitors pick the one that most closely resembles their own home and travel through the online store, dragging and dropping into the layout the furniture that interests them, so they can see how it would all look together.

“That’s something people might want to use and point to,” Tawadros says. “It’s about building something that will entice people, something they will want to pass around. If it’s actually useful, that creates longevity.”

Best practices in organic link-building revolve around the concepts of compelling content, relevancy and relationships—with a knowledge of new online media, cross-channel media and public relations, and a watchful eye on ever-changing search algorithms blended in.

Successful link-building also takes something online retailers haven’t needed so much in the pay-per-click online marketing environment, and that’s patience. Unlike pay-per-click programs that show instant results, it takes time for link-building strategies and tactics to find their audience and produce an effect.

“A good expectation would be to see some results 30 to 90 days after the initiative is launched,” says Tawadros of iProspect. “If I suddenly have a million links pointing to my site overnight, that is a red flag. No way can you organically get that many links.”

However retailers choose to pursue them, links are key to any search engine optimization program, experts say. “You need good content with sound architecture that is spider friendly,” Spencer says. “But just as important, if not more so, you need great links pointing to your site.”
source:http://www.internetretailer.com/article.asp?id=24882