Timothy Carter

Urchin Tracking Module (UTM) is an important feature for any link-building campaign. UTM parameters can be added to your links in order to track which sources are driving traffic and conversions to your website. With this information, you’ll know what marketing tactics are working best and how they affect conversion rates. In today’s article, we’re going to discuss the basics of UTM tracking as well as some of the most common uses for it. What is UTM? UTM parameters are codes that you add to your links in order to track which sources are driving traffic and conversions. Adding UTM’s will allow you to see where a visitor is coming from, what they clicked on the link (landing page), and how much time they spent there before converting or leaving. These parameters can be added using either the URL of an individual landing page by adding them after the ‘&’ or “?” symbol at the end of the URL. Why is UTMs Important? UTM parameters are an important part of link-building campaigns because they allow you to track the sources, landing pages, and conversion rates for each. This way, you can see which marketing tactics work best for your website. When you use UTMs, you can gauge the success of your link-building campaign. This way you can save both time and money when performing these high-priority campaigns. How to Track Links Using UTMs If you want to track where your links are coming from, there is an easy way. Just add UTM parameters at the end of a URL in order to see what page was clicked on. UTM’s can be added using either a landing page or simply by adding them after the ‘&’ symbol following the link’s web address (URL). If you’re just tracking one specific link with multiple attributes, it will look like this-‘link text & utm_medium=social’. There are two ways that these fields can be formatted for more than one attribute; start each field with an ampersand and separate all values with semicolons. Should You Use UTMs by Yourself? UTMs are a great way to track sources and landing pages, but they aren’t effective if you don’t have the time or resources for managing campaigns. If this sounds like your situation, it’s best not to use UTMs on your own. Instead partner with an agency that can help. This way, you can focus on running your business, while a reputable link building agency does the rest. How We Can Help Link-building isn’t easy. Hiring an agency is the best route for getting the job done effectively. If you’re looking for an agency to help with your campaign, contact our team. Our link-building team will work with you to add UTM parameters to your targeted URLs to maximize the performance of your campaign. Contact Us Today! UTM parameters have long been used as a technical way of tracking the performance of links. Allow us to help your campaign reach its full potential. To learn more about link building, please take a look at our beginner’s guide to link building. Otherwise, let us help you with your digital marketing needs. Contact us today to speak to a member of our team.

Here is another golden SEO tip for beginners: Without a quality backlinks, your website is dead in the water; but with the wrong kind of linking strategy, you will put your site in an even worse state. Linking strategies are among the most innovative aspects of search engine optimization. Links determine your website’s popularity and they keep the traffic flowing to you. But not all backlink strategies are created equal. Free backlinks are usually free because they’re not worth as much. Far from it. There is one linking strategy that is clearly superior to all the rest. According to SEO experts, one-way link building rules them all. What is one-way link building, and how is it better than any other link-building campaign? Consider the two link-building strategies that are used the most often: reciprocal linking and one-way linking. Let’s discuss how both of them work, examine their advantages and disadvantages, and see how one outperforms the other. Tactic No. 1: Reciprocal linking As its name suggests, reciprocal linking is a strategy in which you ask another webmaster to link to your site, and in return you link back to his or hers. One of the biggest advantages to using this strategy is that it provides your website with free exposure. And if the site you effect a reciprocal link with has a high pagerank or is a good authority site that enjoys a healthy amount of traffic, you can be sure that your site will enjoy a surge in traffic as well as an increase in ranking. However, search engines have recently stopped placing as high a value on this type of linking strategy. This is not to say that Internet marketers should give up on reciprocal linking altogether; rather, you should stop focusing your primary energy on creating reciprocal links. The main and perhaps only disadvantage to using reciprocal linking lies in the fact that your traffic is shared. This strategy may encourage your visitors to wander off to all the other sites you are linking to. And if you’re running an e-commerce site, while you may be getting traffic from other sites, you could also be losing some opportunities in sales as your regulars visit those other sites. In the worst case, the imbalance in traffic could all lean in the other sites’ favor. Tactic No. 2: One-way linking strategy With one-way link building,  your site gets inbound links from other Internet locales without your having to link back to them. News sites, entertainment sites, and mega-prolific and ultra-authoritative bloggers enjoy a great amount of inbound or one-way links on a consistent basis. What’s great about this approach is that you don’t have to worry about possibly linking back to bad sites. Most importantly, one-way links are judged by search engines to be the most valuable linking strategy, because inbound links signify a vote of confidence on the part of other sites in favor of yours. This means other site owners have found your website to be highly valuable and they are recommending your content to their visitors. Keep in mind that one-way links are most beneficial if the sites that link to yours have a greater domain authority than yours, or have achieved roughly the same level, at least. When you can attract links from such sites, search engines will ultimately award even greater value to your site. Face-off: Reciprocal vs. One-way Of the two, one-way link building strategy definitely takes the blue ribbon. As mentioned earlier, search engines no longer place as much importance on reciprocal links as they did several years ago. Plus, when you go for reciprocal links, you run the risk of linking to a site in a bad neighborhood, where a mass of links from scam and worthless websites converge. And there’s a chance that the search engine police could penalize you for that. One-way links, on the other hand, are more natural and provide your site with highly targeted traffic and, even more desirable, that all-important Google juice. It doesn’t matter which sites are linking to yours, as long as those sites link to you in a way that does not raise red flags. Creating one-way links If your business’s website has only recently gotten launched, remember that you want links to come from authority sites and those that have greater pagerank than yours. Some of the things you can do to generate high-quality one-way links to your sites include: Linking from social media sites such as StumbleUpon, Reddit, and LinkedIn Submitting original content with links to your site on EzineArticles.com Guest posting Submitting to directories like Yahoo! Directory and DMOZ In the case of submitting content to article directories, be sure to post them in the appropriate categories to help the search engines properly identify what your site is all about. You also want to keep your website’s content fresh, interesting, highly valuable, and engaging so your other visitors and websites you’re not aware of will have new reasons to visit and link to you. Conclusion Most importantly, create one-way links to your site on a constant basis. Make it an integral part of your online marketing strategy. Before you know it, your site will enjoy an accelerated increase in pagerank and authority. Want more information on link building? Head over to our comprehensive guide on link building here: SEO Link Building: The Ultimate Step-by-Step Guide If you’re an SEO agency owner, we encourage you to engage us for private label link building. Dozens of agencies use as as their back-office for building quality backlinks at scale. Or, use our backlink checker to check your website’s existing backlink profile.

99%+ of website shouldn’t even take stock in the idea that keyword stuffing will ever affect them. Why? Because we have tested thousands of sites and found that even sites with a keyword density of up to 12% can still rank VERY well in SERPs. Do you know what a keyword density of 12% looks like? It atrocious. But, it still works. The keyword stuffing that doesn’t work is when you shove your keywords in an invisible <div> tag. That’s when you get in trouble. Ask any professional SEO what they think of keyword stuffing as a strategy and they’ll tell you it’s obsolete, useless, or actively harmful for your brand. But just how harmful is it? What are the risks involved with keyword stuffing? Will search engines really punish you? Will your search rankings drop? What Qualifies as Keyword Stuffing According to Google’s own definition, keyword stuffing is …the practice of loading a webpage with keywords or numbers in an attempt to manipulate a site’s ranking in Google search results. Google goes on to explain that these instances often appear in a list or group, in a context that makes no sense for them, or repeated an inappropriate number of times. There is no hard parameter the number of times you use a keyword on a given page to qualify it as keyword stuffing. Because Google’s ranking algorithm works at least partially based on the context of various pages, it’s almost impossible to empirically tell. Instead, you’ll have to use your best judgment. If you read a keyword-containing phrase and it sounds “weird” or “off” to you, that’s a good indication that you’ve “stuffed” it into a place it doesn’t belong. In order to make sure you’re are not keyword stuffing, we suggest you check out our guide to keyword density in SEO. Keyword Stuff Has Been Dead for a Long Time To understand why keyword stuffing is harmful in the first place, you have to understand the world of semantic search, which boils down to two important Google updates. The depth of keyword research, length of material, subject of material, detail, wording, and accuracy are all taken into consideration (among other factors). Sites with “fluff” content or content that isn’t relevant or useful are penalized, while sites with more valuable, well-written content are rewarded. Keyword-stuffed content naturally reads as unnatural and non-useful, making it rank lower than its contemporaries. How Keyword Stuffing Hurts You Now that you know what keyword stuffing is and why it can hurt you, we can take a look at exactly how keyword stuffing can hurt you. I’ve already mentioned that it can lower the rank for the page or site in question, but how much? Direct penalties. You won’t be blacklisted for stuffing a few keywords onto a page, but your content quality will be graded against how naturally written and useful it is. The more you keyword stuff, the lower quality content you’ll be deemed to have, and the lower your ranks will sink—eventually to the bottom. User experience factors. Keyword stuffing isn’t just bad for Google’s crawlers. If a user reads content on your site stuffed with keywords, they’ll end up with a bad impression of your brand. That’s potentially lost business even if you manage to attract traffic. Lost potential. Inbound links are a necessity for building rank, but people only link to valuable content. If yours is keyword-stuffed, you won’t be able to build the backlinks, and your progress will stagnate. When combined, these effects of keyword stuffing have a cumulatively devastating effect on the ranking of your website. You won’t end up on Google’s blacklist, and a few simple content edits should be enough to reverse your momentum, but keyword stuffing will still stifle your progress almost completely for as long as you continue to abuse it. Why Keywords Are Still Valuable With all that said, “keywords” as a concept are still valuable—they’ve just evolved as a form of understanding your users. Rather than selecting a handful of specifically phrased keywords to hammer into your content at every turn, in the modern world, you’ll want to find subjects that your average user might like to read about or search for, and build content topics around those subjects. If you’re sufficiently detailed, and you focus on answering user questions completely, you’ll naturally use the type of language Google wants to see in its evaluative processes, and you’ll naturally rank for those queries. It’s also important to use keyword identifiers for your brand and company in the page titles of your site, so Google understands who you are—the trick is to avoid too much repetition or any situation that might make a user grimace. Again, if it sounds like something a person would say naturally in a conversation, you’re probably in the clear. Doesn’t SEO manipulate rankings? While it’s not advised to manipulate search rankings, that’s a fine line to walk with SEO because the purpose of optimizing your website and content is literally to get your web pages ranking higher in the search engine results pages. To increase your page’s ranking, you’ll need to do things that look like they’re designed to manipulate rankings. However, when you use keywords appropriately with informative content, it’s not technically manipulation. What you need to do is focus on providing value to your visitors and you’ll find the sweet spot for keyword optimization. When you create rich content that uses keywords properly, even when you stuff keywords into your content, you’re not creating a negative user experience. Informative content that utilizes specific phrases doesn’t count as keyword stuffing. Genuine keyword stuffing, on the other hand, does create a negative user experience. Filling pages with keywords just to get on the first page of the SERPs will annoy your visitors and reputable sites don’t use this practice. In the early days, this was the norm, but search engines wised up to this practice and while keywords are still important, you can’t rank a

If you’ve tried your hand at search engine optimization (SEO) for your clients but you haven’t quite gotten the results you wanted, or if you find your agency strapped for resources, you might consider outsourcing your client’s SEO. Outsourcing SEO can help you and your clients in many ways. Successful search engine optimization requires implementing a specific strategy, and if your in house team doesn’t have much experience, an SEO outsourcing company can get you the results your clients want. Every SEO firm is unique in terms of service, experience, and price, so if you want the best possible results for your budget, it’s important to understand why outsourcing SEO is beneficial, and what types of firms tend to see the most success. Throughout this guide, we’ll help you understand the main motivations for outsourcing your client’s SEO, the considering factors for choosing an SEO company, and best practices for working with a firm moving forward. The Basics of SEO Outsourcing Source: Omnicore The premise of SEO service outsourcing is simple. You’ll work with a third party to get access to SEO services on your client’s behalf. This agency will use search engine optimization best practices to optimize your client’s site, write new content, and build links to help your clients earn higher search engine rankings and get more organic search traffic. Depending on the agency or individual you’re working with, different services may be available. Often, SEO outsourcing services can provide you with more than your in house SEO team. In most cases, these services will be white labelled meaning your agency can take credit for the work and present all information to your clients with your own branding. Most of the time, agencies outsource SEO with one of two main options: Independent contractors/freelancers. Hiring independent contractors for search engine optimization can have its advantages. You can assemble your own team of specialists with varying levels of SEO expertise. Outsourcing SEO work to contractors can save money in most cases. You can also provide more overarching direction. But at the same time, independent contractors with SEO expertise can be hard to find, and they tend to be less reliable. Additionally, you won’t have much help with the high-level strategic direction of your campaigns. SEO companies/agencies. A better option is to work with an SEO company or agency. These organizations exist purely to provide outsource SEO services, and they tend to have access to a robust number of resources, including specialists in many areas related to SEO. These companies are true SEO experts. You’ll pay a bit more to work with an SEO agency, but it’s well worth the money to get access to their expertise, reliability, and resources. Especially if you have multiple clients who need SEO. The Benefits of Outsourcing Your Client’s SEO Now, the obvious question: what’s the benefit of outsourcing SEO? There are actually many different benefits to outsourcing SEO, assuming you’re working with a quality SEO provider. Save time. First, when you outsource SEO services you’ll save time. This is a great benefit when you’re working with multiple clients. You won’t have to follow tedious steps like spending hours on keyword research, nor will you need to invest as much time in strategic planning to execute a complex SEO process. When you outsource SEO, you can focus on customer service and providing services in other areas. Save money. Outsourcing SEO will cost you money, but don’t forget about the money you’re saving—by hiring an SEO agency, you can avoid hiring a full-time in house team, and spend fewer man-hours on each client campaign. Ultimately, many providers end up saving money by outsourcing SEO work. Get better results. Outsourcing SEO gets better results. Your outsourcing partner is an expert in SEO, so it’s likely that outsourcing will get you better results. Your client will climb rankings faster, get more organic traffic, and earn greater brand visibility. This is one of the best benefits of outsourcing SEO because it validates your status as an SEO specialist. Offer more services. If your organization is limited in the range or volume of services it can offer, outsourcing SEO is the best way to expand your offerings. You can offer your existing clients more support and make a better pitch to new clients in the future. Also, SEO outsourcing companies often have access to more SEO tools that can help with conversion optimization and other SEO efforts. In other words, you’ll be providing comprehensive SEO services to your clients. Skip training and education. Succeeding in SEO requires you to constantly train and educate yourself. You’ll need to familiarize yourself with the latest Google updates and the latest white hat SEO trends and keep improving your technical skills. While it’s still a good idea to do this to some extent, outsourcing SEO allows you to push this burden onto a third-party SEO expert. Free up internal resources. If an SEO outsourcing agency is handling the bulk of your SEO campaign, you can free up your internal resources to focus on other responsibilities. That could mean managing an internal digital marketing campaign or working on other important matters. This is why outsourcing SEO can be an excellent part of scaling your business. Get access to better reporting. Many SEO providers struggle to provide adequate reporting to their clients, but reporting is a critical component in the SEO process. They aren’t sure what metrics to report, or find it difficult to put together consistent report documentation. When you outsource the work, your SEO expert partner will be responsible for generating and distributing these reports. Outsourcing SEO doesn’t mean you’re not responsible to your clients for results, but you won’t have to do the work. See faster progress. Though not a guarantee, in many cases, you’ll see much faster progress when working with a white hat SEO outsourcing agency. When outsourcing SEO, you’ll have access to more resources and more expertise, so there are fewer errors and less troubleshooting to deal with. Collaborate

Topic research follows similar lines as keyword research, but it demands a closer focus on user behavior and content trends than search trends, specifically. For this reason alone, topic research should be treated as a separate entity. So far, keyword research has been executable and valuable for a standalone SEO campaign, but topic research can benefit you in far more areas; your content campaign, social media marketing campaign, and customer retention strategies can all benefit more from topic research. There’s some overlap, because both keyword and topic research are designed to bring people to your site, but topic research has a greater likelihood of keeping people on your site. From a pure customer acquisition perspective, topic research can help you take advantage of the semantic search that Google has been using since it launched its Hummingbird algorithm. Because one-to-one keyword matching can’t guarantee that keyword inclusion will help you rise for specific keyword queries, topic research helps you understand—and meet—user needs, essentially getting in front of more people out of necessity. As an illustrative example, take the search phrase “garbage disposal is broken.” Google interprets this phrase semantically, understanding that your garbage disposal is not working, and provides content that doesn’t contain these exact keywords (i.e., “How to Fix a Garbage Disposal”), but does interpret and address your need. Topic research helps you find and solve these user needs. Factors for Success The factors for success in a topic are slightly different than the success factors for keyword research, because you’re after a qualitative user experience rather than quantitative benefits. Interest. The first major factor is interest. Your users need to have a vested interest in the topics you produce. What does that mean for your brand? There are a few fundamentals, but ultimately every brand and every audience will have a different answer. For example, one of the most important qualities of “interesting” content is that it’s unique. Your topics can’t be ones that competitors have already covered. You can publish new versions, or different angles, or follow-ups, but it needs to be original. Beyond that, you’ll have to rely on what you know about your demographics, including their wants or needs. Value. Another important factor is value, and oftentimes this translates to practicality. Your topics should serve some kind of function for your users, giving them instructions they need in a certain situation, or information they need to consider some broader ideas. How-to articles and tutorials are exceptionally popular, but remember, these need to be unique. Also keep in mind that your topics don’t have to be practical to be valuable—the best example of non-practical, valuable content is entertaining content, though obviously this won’t work for just any brand. Timeliness. Unlike the interest and value factors, timeliness isn’t an absolute necessity, but it can be helpful. New topics, such as those covering a recent event or update in your industry, tend to be highly popular in the first few days and weeks after their release. Trending topics can also be taken advantage of for additional search visibility. However, “new” topics and appropriately timed topics shouldn’t make up the entirety of your focus; you’ll also need “evergreen” topics that will presumably stay relevant indefinitely. Balancing your topic spread between these two types of content timeliness will give you the widest possible spread, helping you take advantage of news topics without sacrificing the longevity of your campaign. Catchiness. Again, this isn’t a necessity, but it helps if you find topics that are “catchy”—that is to say, topics that have a high likelihood of getting shared or going viral. Content pieces that are shared virally tend to attract far more backlinks, helping them earn more authority and rank even higher for your SEO campaign. A major factor for catchiness is uniqueness, which you’ve hopefully already covered in the “interest” category. Beyond that, you need some kind of emotional “hook,” such as something surprising, or something otherwise emotionally charged. Phase I: Market research When you first start the topic research process, you’ll need to dig deep to gain a thorough understanding of the types of people who will be viewing your content. Remember, keyword research allows you to be more quantitative in your approach, calculating things like competition and search volume, but topic research demands a more qualitative approach, forcing you to understand the hows and whys of customer interaction with your material. Buyer personas. One of the best ways to start is by developing specific “buyer personas” that represent the main demographics you intend to target with your content. Rather than making assumptions or guesses about your audience’s needs, this method will force you to sketch out a portrait of your “average” customer, including their basic information, disposition, interests, family life, professional life, wants and needs. Treat it like you’re developing a fictional character, and interview some of your existing customers to get a better feel for who you’re working with. If you need a good template to build your buyer personas, Hubspot has a great one. (Image Source: Hubspot) Buying cycle. In addition to buyer personas, you’ll need to get a better understanding for the buying cycle of your average customer. What are your customers thinking when they first start the research process? Where do their interests turn as they become more familiar with your brand? You can use this information in several ways in the course of your topic research. For example, if you want to specialize in one area—such as finalizing potential customers already familiar with your brand, or merely increasing brand familiarity among people unfamiliar with your brand—you can do so by favoring those topics. You can also opt for a more homogenous blend of different target topics. Social listening. Social listening will help you kill multiple birds with one stone. The basic idea is to “plug in” to social media channels to find out what your key demographics are talking about—what topics they seem to be sharing, what keywords they seem to be including in

Quality SEO is not cheap. If you’re in the market for search engine optimization (SEO) services, you might be surprised at the quotes you receive. Thousands of dollars a month (or more) to get your site to rank higher in Google search results? It might seem excessive, but there are some important reasons why SEO is so expensive. Once you learn them, you’ll understand exactly what it is you’re paying for. Cheap SEO vs. Expensive SEO First, let’s openly acknowledge that there are cheap SEO agencies out there—but be warned. When SEO agencies offer unbelievably low prices, it’s probably for a reason. They might outsource content to non-native speakers, reducing the fluidity and value of the finished work. They might engage in link schemes meant for fast, but unsustainable results. Or they might not have much experience or resources to back their work. In other words, they’re low quality. When SEO is expensive, it’s usually because of the time and effort necessary to achieve high-quality work. Time and Effort What do we mean by that? SEO involves many separate components, including: Keyword research. Site analysis. Onsite optimization and technical SEO. Onsite content writing. Offsite content writing and link building. Measurement and analysis. Some of these steps only take a few hours, and represent a one-time effort to improve your site, but most of these efforts require ongoing, time-intensive work. Take, for example, onsite content. For a blog post to be effective for SEO, it needs to be sufficiently detailed (at least 1,000 words, if not several thousand). It should be well-researched and provide original thoughts. It needs to be structured and formatted efficiently, with plenty of internal and external links, and it should include just the right amount of relevant keywords and phrases. Even for an experienced writer, this could take hours of work per post, and if you’re outsourcing multiple posts per month (or per week for a more intensive campaign), that can add up quickly. Good content creators demand an understandably high hourly rate—and you’ll also need to account for the work in editing, publishing, and distributing that post. Link building with offsite content is even more time intensive. The best way to build links (which are practically necessary to rank in search engines) is with the help of high-quality, audience-centric external guest posts. Not only will you need to consider the time and effort needed to develop the content necessary for the guest posts, you’ll also need to consider the effort it takes to initiate and maintain relationships with top publishers. Some link building agencies’ relationships with top publishers have taken years to blossom. Any experienced SEO will tell you that the on-going cost of link building is the single biggest expense in any SEO campaign.  If you want to take advantage of an SEO campaign, your choices are either to work with a specialist agency and pay the high rates, or try to do everything yourself. And if you do everything yourself, it will take you years to fully ramp up—and countless (likely inefficient) hours to keep your strategy going. Built-in Losses SEO campaigns are tricky. If you’re going your own way, you’ll likely discover dozens of tactics that don’t work (or actively work against you) before you settle on the right combination. This can cost you tons of time and money. By contrast, if you’re working with a reputable agency, they’ll go out of their way to make sure you get your money’s worth. If a guest post gets rejected by a publisher (as is common for discerning, high-authority outlets), they’ll replace it. If you’re not seeing results in line with expectations, they’ll build extra links or improve your onsite optimization to make up for it. These are a form of expected losses, and they’re typically “built into” SEO pricing. The Changing Landscape It’s a bit of a cliché to say that SEO is both an art and a science, but it is. There’s no simple mathematical formula you can apply to every site and get it to rank higher; if there were, everyone would be learning and using it. You can’t learn SEO the same way you learn to change a tire, because every site is different and the landscape is always changing. A true SEO expert understands the fleeting and diverse nature of the industry. Each client will require a different combination of tactics, and some trial and error to figure things out. And if Google comes out with a major algorithm change in the middle of a campaign, they’ll need to react quickly and appropriately to accommodate it. Again, these needs increase the time and expertise demands for SEO agencies. Only experienced SEO strategists can manage campaigns successfully, and that experience comes with a price tag. Additionally, you’ll need lots of tweaking before you get results; this is all built into the price. ROI and Short-Term Bias via GIPHY We also need to consider the return on investment (ROI) of SEO, and how it distorts our vision of what counts as “reasonable” SEO prices. SEO is a long-term strategy whose ROI increases noticeably over time. Almost every asset you create for SEO, including blogs, onsite changes, and links, is permanent, and will continue returning value to you indefinitely. If you pay for only a month of SEO services, at $5,000, you’ll gain infrastructure and assets that could continue rewarding you for the entire lifespan of your business. Additionally, as your online reputation grows, you’ll gain access to bigger and better gains. For example, blog posts with effective calls-to-action (CTAs) are 10 times more effective when you’re generating 10 times as much traffic. If you pay $300 for a post and it yields 1 conversion that nets you $300, you’re barely breaking even. With 10 conversions, you’ll net $3,000—even though the blog post still costs $300. The real value of SEO is in its long-term potential, so initially, SEO prices seem unnaturally high. Your ROI in the first two or three months