Shaw & Todd - Advertising and Marketing Communications

SEO and SEM pros frequently dispense nuggets of wisdom on the importance of backlinking, so I thought I’d write about this all-important web objective of getting other sites to link back to your site. Why is this so important you may ask? In theory, vastly improved search engine results is the answer.

As most know, Google and other search engines use complex and super-secret algorithms to determine the page rank of a site; incoming links and the quality of incoming links being among them. So don’t just think if you have a thousand sub-standard sites linking to yours, that suddenly you’ll shoot to the top. Thanks to search engine analysis techniques like TrustRank, quality is more important than quantity.

Here’s what I mean. Say you own an agency that specializes in business-to-business advertising, and that’s a keyword you’d like to own. In a perfect world, you’d have hundreds of sites and/or bloggers, posting something to this effect:

“I recommend Shaw & Todd highly. They’re a top business-to-business advertising agency.”

As shown here, the desired keyword is linked back to your site. This would be a home run.

Since we’re talking perfect worlds here, you’d also want these links to be posted on sites that the engines deem content rich information portals. I’d rather have my agency be linked somewhere on the AdAge site than something called “The World’s Worst Website“. I know this seems blatantly obvious, but hey, it needed to be noted.

So how should you go about getting more backlinks to your site? The first thing is to focus on your site itself, and get it as ship-shape content-wise as possible. No sense spending time to get people to link to you if you’ve got a crappy site. Consider creating something for your site that could go viral. Something that people will want to link to (a game or video perhaps) . This is known as “link bait”.

Next, do a Google search on the keywords you desire and visit the sites with the highest rankings. See if you can get any of those sites to link back to you. Then I’d advise visiting a backlink tracking site, such as Backlink Watch. These sites let you view who’s currently linking to you, which is always interesting and sure to spark some ideas. Also plug in the websites with the top search engine rankings in your desired keywords, see who’s linking to them, and try to them to link to your site.

Well, I guess that was more than a few words. That’s all for now on backlinking.

Without knowing offhand, I decided to look the other day to see who the number one domain registrar was. The answer didn’t surprise me; what surprised me was how far out in front the leader was. The king of the hill is Go Daddy, registering three times the number of new domains than runner-up Network Solutions. That’s quite a margin. Low prices I’m sure has a lot to do with it, but let’s not kid ourselves, their outrageous ad campaigns are a primary reason Go Daddy built such as large lead. Ad professionals have weighed in on more than one occasion, deriding the over-the-top tactics, and I must admit I was one of them (couldn’t believe how crass that first Super Bowl commercial was back in 2005) but I guess the Go Daddy execs are the ones laughing last. The good news is that Go Daddy is recent proof that advertising works. It’s also recent proof that sex still sells. Does it also prove that men are registering domains at at least three times the rate of women? Going to have to look into that one.

Since such an enormous amount of us are using social media in some way, shape or form, it’s natural for us communicators to try to figure out how to leverage/use social media in our marketing efforts. I’ve been to seminars, client meetings, and networking events where this very subject has been discussed and discussed and discussed and discussed (you see what I’m getting at). For those of us marketing to scientists, we couldn’t have been happier when Bioinformatics and PJA posted the results of their survey: “The New Collaboration: Social Media and the Life Science Opportunity.”

Kudos to those involved with the study. While there’s nothing earth-shattering about the findings, we need data like this to pore over. So before I lead you to the report, I do want to offer a quick comment on the top answer to the question: “In which social networking sites do you currently participate on a professional basis?” Number one answer: The Science Advisory Board, by an enormous margin (69% to 2nd place finisher Nature Network’s 24%). Huh? Here’s why: over half the survey participants were registered members, and most likely active participants, of the SAB. So maybe that result is a bit skewed. I can accept that. Otherwise, there’s some great info in there, and therefore a must-read for anyone currently marketing to the life scientist.

Check out the study here.