Great article posted by randfish

When I first started in SEO, link acquisition was almost always a manual process. I’d search the engines for links that pointed to the competition, find relevant directories and link lists, email relevant sites and beg, borrow or bribe (aka buy advertising) to get a link. I tried reciprocal link building (and did some pretty dumb stuff). Then, as I got more intertwined in the SEO community, I found vendors who built large networks of sites, spammed blogs/forums/guestbooks and ran text link sales operations. I leveraged these services to help clients rank better, almost always with great success. Then I met Matt Cutts, found out more about Google’s webspam team, saw penalties and their impact (remember Florida?) and even found some sites we worked on in the Sandbox.

Over time, I got smarter. I read papers about Hilltop, Trustrank, Anti-Trustrank and many more. I saw sites escaping the sandbox once they’d earned greater quantities of trusted links. I started understanding that Google’s search quality team was only going to get better at recognizing and counting legitimate links (and tossing out the junk), so I focused exclusively on more “white hat” kinds of links. That’s when I discovered linkbaiting and the power of Digg, Reddit & StumbleUpon to drive traffic that would naturally link. We had success with quizzes (and after Matt left SEOmoz, he had a little too much success) and viral content that earned thousands of links overnight and started offering it as a service.

As our clientele and foci changed, we changed again. Linkbait gave way to broader viral marketing efforts.Social media marketing arose as a practical and high quality way to earn links. Our clients became larger brands and organizations and one-off link projects weren’t scalable, so we consulted on tactics like content and technology licensing, training editorial staff to earn links & participate in the social media world themselves, and incentivizing user-generated content, which in turn brought links from those users. We found ways to drive natural links to deep pages on huge sites targeting the long tail, how to combine embeddable content and user-adopted brand affinity to drive link growth. And we stopped buying links entirely.

I figured a visual history might make for a compelling view:

Now, link building is changing again. I’m of the distinct impression that the engines (nowadays referring toBing & Google, since the others are all but out of the picture) are evolving to keep up with the web’s breakneck speed and new forms of data, along with new ways of analyzing links, are making themselves felt in the SERPs. My guesses/observations would include:

• Twitter really is cannibalizing the web’s link graph, or at least, the blogosphere’s and Google seems to be using Tweet counts in some way (though possibly only in the QDF algo).
• The acceleration rate of link acquisition and the freshness of new links is having a more dramatic impact than before, and the “old crusty links” paradigm may be fading a bit.
• Brand mentions and keyword associations with brand names are influencing the rankings more and more.
• Un-trustworhty link patterns are conferring more filters and penalties than ever before.
• QDD is as strong as ever, and vertical results are more prominent than at any time in the engines’ histories.
• Google and Microsoft both know more about traffic and surfing habits than ever before, and this data is likely being used to, at the least, quality control for potential algorithmic misses.
• Ad blindness is worse than ever (16% of Internet users are responsible for 85% of all ad clicks on the web), forcing the engines to make ads more relevant and more obvious to continue earning revenue.
• Paid inclusion is going away, and talk of potentially paying sites to be in the indices (the reverse model) is in the air (or maybe not).
• Billions of non-linked “references” flow out across the web through social media messages, emails, tweets and IMs. Someone, at some search engine, is undoubetdly mining this data to see how they can derive value and relevancy from it.

As marketers, we have to evolve or be left behind by those who can better adapt. It’s hard to see the forest for the trees right now, but I think we’re closing in on a time when real-time, social and traditional web references are all a part of the rankings equation. The future may be less about links and more about brand building and brand participation. I don’t want to be the most-linked-to site in my niche; I want to be the site that’s synonymous with my niche.

Now we just have to figure out the tactics…

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Recently here in Montana, two friends of mine who happen to be brothers decided to open a restaurant.  Now, their family has a long history in the restaurant business so this was not done a whim and a lark.  Anyway, I have spent many hours over beers talking about the business with them, especially marketing and ways they can bring in more business.  And since that is the point of this blog, I thought I would start this off by talking about some of those suggestions/ideas that I had:

1. Setup a twitter feed for the restaurant and include the url somewhere in the menu.  The restaurant can use this to keep customers posted on what is going on, can offer promotions unique to twitter followers, let customers know about exciting news  like “just got in 100 lbs of fresh Alaskan crab”.  This technique has two main goals. The first is that the followers feel like they are the In Crowd at the restaurant getting exclusive deals and insider information.  The second is that it keeps the restaurant always on customers’ minds. This way when they are trying to make a decision on where to go for dinner they will remember the tweet from earlier that morning.

2. Keep a Blog. Now this sounds really simple, and not a unique idea, but it is still a fantastic idea for restaurants.  Post about anything restaurant related, whether it is a new recipe the exec chef is working on, a way to add a little unique flair to a normal dish that anyone can make from home.  In the case of this restaurant they are a Silk Road specialist, so a topic for them could be ways to add a little Silk Road flair to any common dish.  A post about something as mundane even as the difference between a smidge and a pinch when cooking.  The idea here is to turn the blog and by extension the webpage into a must visit site.  Especially if you can set up a schedule so every M-W-F there will be a new blog post (remember a post can also be a repost from another blog which will help with reciprocal linking), you will get users checking on a steady basis.  If you use a little bit of know how you can even tie in your blog to you twitter page that automatically informs all followers of the new post.  If you have users checking your blog on a continuous basis, they are also checking your webpage and thinking about coming to your restaurant.  The recipe posts are especially great because people are going to remember that dish and think about getting it that night. Memory is a great thing when it comes to food.

3. Post to Allrecipes.com  There are a LOT of recipe directories.  Use the recipes that you are posting to your blog and post them in these recipe directories.  Make sure to include links to your blog/website/twitter accounts in your signatures so people know where to look as well as increase SEO work.  While on these sites make sure to get involved in the conversation on those sites. Make suggestions to recipes. If someone posts about your recipes be sure to follow up.  The idea is to build your audience and your own web presence not JUST in your local area.

4. Monitor yelp.com and other review sites.  A major task of having a web presence is maintaining that presence and reputation.  For those who don’t know yelp is a social website where users can write reviews mostly of restaurants, bars, etc.  It is really important to make sure that people are posting positive reviews here.  If they are not, this is a much better way to find out then those little cards you have people fill out on your way out the door.  If you have loyalty cards, make sure to post a link to your yelp account so that they can post good reviews.  If a patron wants to send a ‘good job’ to the chefs, let them know they can go on google.com or yelp and post a positive review.  Poll your twitter or facebook followers to find out what review sites they use the most and focus on those.

5. Google Alerts is a GREAT way to keep track of what people are saying online about you.  You can set it to send you emails either once a day or immediately.  For very important keywords like: “The name of my restaurant” you may want that coming ASAP so if it is good you can immediately respond back with a thank you or if bad you can address it immediately.  Other topics you may want to track are “Indian food in Nashville” that way you can see what bloggers are posting about that, or if people are saying there are NO good Indian restaurants in Nashville you can jump into that conversation and tell them where you are located.

6. INSTALL GOOGLE ANALYTICS. In case you missed that it’s: INSTALL GOOGLE ANALYTICS.  You can use GA to track the keywords which is good to know what people are looking for when getting to your site, but even more important is the clickstream.  This lets you follow their course on your website.  If you realize that on average people are going to the blog but are not visiting the menu at all that’s interesting, if people are landing on your specials and not your main beautifully designed page, that’s a problem.  And this will let you determine that and figure out if for some reason other pages on your domain area are ranking higher in google than your main landing page?

Oh, and finally I guess I should probably mention the restaurant that inspired all of these ideas: Silk Road Restaurant.  If your in Missoula, MT I really recommend you stop in. And if you do, mention that Scott sent you.

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