Are we thinking too much page rank? Who needs all these backlinks?

jfranktoo · 07-07-2007, 01:30 PM

Take a look at your Google analytics traffic sources/referring sites.

I've been sorting out those of our site visitors who are sales prospects for us and those who are not.

In our latest data, our top six referring sites are holiday trade directories, highly relevant to our little business, some of which we pay for, some we don't. 240 recent referrals came from these 6 sites, all of them "qualified" as sales prospects for us. Good results. Total cost about £190pa.

The next 50 referring sites include 11 "miscellaneous" sites which give us visitors but none of them are any good for us, because they are not looking for what we sell. This includes visitors referred from Iwebtool, by the way.

However, we have also gained 120 good referrals from another 34 sites, all qualified prospects, all out of reciprocal links in relevant sites, most with a pr of 2 or 3 on their links page.

Each of these good referring sites were gained in the good old-fashioned way. We identified businesses in our type of trade, offered them a reciprocal link. It was a big slog. We had to contact 300 members of a trade association, ask each if they were interested in linking, and 30 of them said they were. In the end 25 of them did swap links with us.

I don't ever want to do this gruelling exercise again - they promised to do it, didn't do it, did it wrong - hopeless, dealing with unenthusiastic amateurs. Enthusiastic amateurs will get it right in the end. Very many of their external, paid for, webmasters didn't want to know.

But these sites have led to business for us, without a doubt. Not only that, most of them have good pr on their linking pages and we have gained our pr4 status from that mostly.

We have 814 inbound links altogether says the google site map. 750 of them are a waste of space. Our world depends upon the other 64.

John

jdegerstrom · 07-07-2007, 04:10 PM

Hi, John,

My favorite sermon for website owners covers the importance of evaluating expectations. Do some site owners get too hung up on PR? YES. Consider your business and level of satisfaction with your website's performance. Are you busy and making a decent profit? Continue promoting but reconsider how many hours you spend analyzing traffic data, and if you're wringing your hands and getting worked up over better PR, that time spent may be better used on profit generating activities. Call an inactive client and try to renew the relationship.

Website promotion to improve traffic and attract new customers is important, and yet it is hard work and time consuming. Add fresh content often and design your site for human visitors first, and the rest will follow naturally.

My core business is website design and matching graphic artwork, but because I have over 30 years experience in senior management, I feature advice for small business also. If you had asked me a year ago if I'd get noticed for the advice content my answer would likely be "no". A search for "business advice blog" in Google returns more than 50 million results, and you might expect a huge company like American Express or the Small Business Administration to be in the top spot.

While analyzing visitor stats for my site the "business advice blog" was one of the terms that brought one person to my website. Out of curiosity I checked to see the position in the SERPs. My site was Google page one and number one (after sponsored links) and a complete surprise. People would pay big bucks to learn how I did that, but the truth of the matter is there was NO conscious effort to promote that phrase.

I repeat: Add fresh content often and design your site for human visitors first, and the rest will follow naturally.

Jim

NavyCS · 07-07-2007, 05:38 PM

Getting referrals from links is defenately one of the benefits of getting links. Links from relevant sites should produce better results than those from non-relevant sites. What should not be over looked in the building of links is that you are in doing so, as long as you are keeping in mind your target, off-page optimizing for the keywords/phrases you hope to rank in SERPS. A good example of the power of the anchor text is in fact your business advice blog. To see the pages on the net who are actually competing for the term place the term in quotes, the 70 million reduces to about 1800. That means there are about 1800 pages on the net with the exact term on the page or they have anchor text using the term to the site. There are only 8 sites which have the anchor text term pointing to their page. Your site is one of the 8. Chosing the keyword/phrase is vitally important. Your words and phrases should be ones that produce traffic.

This is why people say stop worrying about PR but keep building links - the PR is a symptom of the amount and quality of links you have and your position in SERPs if a reflection of your optimization efforts while building those links. SERP position for quality words/phrases will drive much much more traffic than the links themselves. Relying on referral links for traffic will place you at the mercy of the ability of the webmaster on the other end to drive your traffic.

cmsdestekcom · 07-07-2007, 10:52 PM

goooodd
for thanks

jfranktoo · 07-09-2007, 06:33 PM

Ok, that's puts a slightly different construction on the issue.
1) We must build effective on-page optimising - no one disagrees with that, using keywords in natural language
2) We need backlinks from quality pages for our pr, which will help us get ahead on the Google page when we are level pegging with others on the same search term.
3) The anchor text used in these inbound links, whether or not it comes from pr0 pages is the critical factor in off-page optimising.

But I use several keywords or phrases on the same page.

I may have six main keywords/phrases on an important page - they hardly relate to each other. (E.g. Glencoe/cottage/lochside/Scotland/holiday cottage/self catering)

Each of these may be equally important as the other. I fully realise that we also deal in natural language, and that these words are naturally used in phrases, e.g. holiday cottage in Scotland, etc.

In an ideal world, should I develop different anchor text for different inbound links to include each of these different keywords or keyword phrases.

I'm only concentating now on the text I might want for inbound links, not the text in the copy, or headlines - which is in natural language.

Put it another way, every time I post in IWebtool, should I be using a different signature, such as Travel Scotland, or Self catering holiday West coast. These words drive nearly as much traffic as Glencoe according to search strings

At the moment I seem to be overdoing the main phrase, using it all the time everywhere.

John

OldWelshGuy · 07-09-2007, 07:12 PM

Too full of cold, too late and too tired but here are some points.

You have to build links for traffic and also to appease the great god of Google for their ridiculous link mongering algorithm!

I have preached for years 'link for traffic and anything else is a bonus.'. IF you link for traffic, then you will AUTOMATICALLY be4 building on topic and related industry links.

One thing John, you mention businesses that use external developers really didn't work. here is my top tip for today. USE THE PHONE!!!!!

If I am building links in the UK for UK customers, I use the phone every single time. I telephone the OWNER, explain who I am and the benefits to THEM of my proposal, and then get their agreement. If THEY are the site builders then I send them the code, if they use an agency, i ask them for their designers contact email and I contact them direct, again with the code to be pasted into the page.

THEN I PHONE THE DESIGN COMPANY AS WELL

As you can see I am fairly aggressive with this regard, but I prefer the phone as I can get across what I am looking for better, and get a face to face agreement. Then when I speak to the designers, I impress on them that the OWNER of the site has agreed. Normally I CC the owner in on the email.

NavyCS · 07-09-2007, 07:17 PM

How many links do you have pointing to internal pages? 96% of my sites traffic actually enters my site thru internal pages - each page has targets, this includes your index page. I guess the best prespective is look at each page as it's own website. You have may have an internal page that covers "Lochside cottage near Glencoe in Scotland", that page should have the anchors to it with that phrase. If your site is about "holiday cottages in Scotland" then that should be to the index, generic and covers the theme. I think a common mistake is having pages on your site compete against eachother - there is enough competition on the web! Hope this makes sense...I feel like I may be babbling

OldWelshGuy · 07-09-2007, 08:03 PM

Not babbling at all.

jfranktoo · 07-09-2007, 08:54 PM

Thanks guys, turned out to be a fruitful topic after all.

Totally agree about the telephone - I don't do it, but of course, it is obvious when you say it. E-mail makes us cut corners far too often. Will do it in future, promise.

Persuasion: me telling you in writing how good I am - not very persuasive,
me telling you on the phone how good I am - a bit better, me telling you face to face how good I am, that's better, but still not good, because I'm still pushing me and hardly paying attention to you. Me telling you how good you are, that's more persuasive but manipulative. You hearing how good I am from people you respect, that's public relations. You with a problem, and asking me to help you to resolve it, that's selling.

Old Welsh has this knack of cutting through to the bone.

John

OldWelshGuy · 07-09-2007, 09:59 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by jfranktoo

Thanks guys, turned out to be a fruitful topic after all.

Totally agree about the telephone - I don't do it, but of course, it is obvious when you say it. E-mail makes us cut corners far too often. Will do it in future, promise.

Persuasion: me telling you in writing how good I am - not very persuasive,
me telling you on the phone how good I am - a bit better, me telling you face to face how good I am, that's better, but still not good, because I'm still pushing me and hardly paying attention to you. Me telling you how good you are, that's more persuasive but manipulative. You hearing how good I am from people you respect, that's public relations. You with a problem, and asking me to help you to resolve it, that's selling.

Old Welsh has this knack of cutting through to the bone.

John

Most Internet money making is obvious

It just becomes more obvious when it is pointed out to you. I said to a customer once " Internet marketing is mostly common sense" His reply was " common sense is not as common as you think" . Which made me giggle and still does .

RE cutting through the rubbish. I can achieve more with a £250 or £500 report one off with follow up emails/phone calls, than many so called 'expert SEO's' achieve in 6 months @ £250-500 and up.

Changing the mindset is a key element to the success of the small business online, and I love helping to educate people on the basics of web marketing (as well as the more advanced stuff) THIS is why I love working with small businesses and hang out in forums.

One ability I have been told I posess is the ability to explain a very complicated process in simple understandable terms.

trichnosis · 08-05-2007, 10:45 AM

thanks for the replies

happyandyk · 08-10-2007, 07:16 AM

i am new in all this. but even i feel too much is made out of page rank and back-links. people go beserk over seraching for backlinks rather that focusing on content. i put up my site on 27th may 2007. though a 'non-zero pagerank' would make me happy, iv decided to concentrate on content. if its good il get a nice pr--- ;-) if not...no issue !

OldWelshGuy · 08-10-2007, 08:40 AM

PR comes from links not content. You must have some backlinks or your pages will go supplemental

lajocar · 08-12-2007, 10:19 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by OldWelshGuy

PR comes from links not content. You must have some backlinks or your pages will go supplemental

Yes Pr come from backlinks

If you have very good content then some people will naturaullay link to your site.

07-07-2007, 01:30 PM	#1
jfranktoo Member Join Date: Aug 2006 Location: chichester england Posts: 189	Are we thinking too much about page rank? Who needs all these backlinks? Take a look at your Google analytics traffic sources/referring sites. I've been sorting out those of our site visitors who are sales prospects for us and those who are not. In our latest data, our top six referring sites are holiday trade directories, highly relevant to our little business, some of which we pay for, some we don't. 240 recent referrals came from these 6 sites, all of them "qualified" as sales prospects for us. Good results. Total cost about £190pa. The next 50 referring sites include 11 "miscellaneous" sites which give us visitors but none of them are any good for us, because they are not looking for what we sell. This includes visitors referred from Iwebtool, by the way. However, we have also gained 120 good referrals from another 34 sites, all qualified prospects, all out of reciprocal links in relevant sites, most with a pr of 2 or 3 on their links page. Each of these good referring sites were gained in the good old-fashioned way. We identified businesses in our type of trade, offered them a reciprocal link. It was a big slog. We had to contact 300 members of a trade association, ask each if they were interested in linking, and 30 of them said they were. In the end 25 of them did swap links with us. I don't ever want to do this gruelling exercise again - they promised to do it, didn't do it, did it wrong - hopeless, dealing with unenthusiastic amateurs. Enthusiastic amateurs will get it right in the end. Very many of their external, paid for, webmasters didn't want to know. But these sites have led to business for us, without a doubt. Not only that, most of them have good pr on their linking pages and we have gained our pr4 status from that mostly. We have 814 inbound links altogether says the google site map. 750 of them are a waste of space. Our world depends upon the other 64. John __________________ Scotland last minute short breaks and special deals, self catering cottages Self catering cottage in Appin by Glencoe Scotland Last edited 07-07-2007 at 01:36 PM. Reason: typo

07-07-2007, 04:10 PM	#2
jdegerstrom Junior Member Join Date: Jan 2007 Location: Kissimmee, Florida Posts: 92	Re: Are we thinking too much page rank? Who needs all these backlinks? Hi, John, My favorite sermon for website owners covers the importance of evaluating expectations. Do some site owners get too hung up on PR? YES. Consider your business and level of satisfaction with your website's performance. Are you busy and making a decent profit? Continue promoting but reconsider how many hours you spend analyzing traffic data, and if you're wringing your hands and getting worked up over better PR, that time spent may be better used on profit generating activities. Call an inactive client and try to renew the relationship. Website promotion to improve traffic and attract new customers is important, and yet it is hard work and time consuming. Add fresh content often and design your site for human visitors first, and the rest will follow naturally. My core business is website design and matching graphic artwork, but because I have over 30 years experience in senior management, I feature advice for small business also. If you had asked me a year ago if I'd get noticed for the advice content my answer would likely be "no". A search for "business advice blog" in Google returns more than 50 million results, and you might expect a huge company like American Express or the Small Business Administration to be in the top spot. While analyzing visitor stats for my site the "business advice blog" was one of the terms that brought one person to my website. Out of curiosity I checked to see the position in the SERPs. My site was Google page one and number one (after sponsored links) and a complete surprise. People would pay big bucks to learn how I did that, but the truth of the matter is there was NO conscious effort to promote that phrase. I repeat: Add fresh content often and design your site for human visitors first, and the rest will follow naturally. Jim __________________ Jim Degerstrom, Small Business Resource Center, Web Design and Graphic Artwork Custom Web Design \| Small Business Advice Blog \| Small Business Advice Podcast Be kind to strangers. Here's one reason. Read Hebrews 13:2

07-07-2007, 05:38 PM	#3
NavyCS iWEBTOOL SEO Advisor Join Date: Feb 2006 Posts: 242	Re: Are we thinking too much page rank? Who needs all these backlinks? Getting referrals from links is defenately one of the benefits of getting links. Links from relevant sites should produce better results than those from non-relevant sites. What should not be over looked in the building of links is that you are in doing so, as long as you are keeping in mind your target, off-page optimizing for the keywords/phrases you hope to rank in SERPS. A good example of the power of the anchor text is in fact your business advice blog. To see the pages on the net who are actually competing for the term place the term in quotes, the 70 million reduces to about 1800. That means there are about 1800 pages on the net with the exact term on the page or they have anchor text using the term to the site. There are only 8 sites which have the anchor text term pointing to their page. Your site is one of the 8. Chosing the keyword/phrase is vitally important. Your words and phrases should be ones that produce traffic. This is why people say stop worrying about PR but keep building links - the PR is a symptom of the amount and quality of links you have and your position in SERPs if a reflection of your optimization efforts while building those links. SERP position for quality words/phrases will drive much much more traffic than the links themselves. Relying on referral links for traffic will place you at the mercy of the ability of the webmaster on the other end to drive your traffic. __________________ Memphis Website Design Military Benefits

07-07-2007, 10:52 PM	#4
cmsdestekcom Smurf Join Date: Jul 2007 Posts: 47	Re: Are we thinking too much page rank? Who needs all these backlinks? goooodd for thanks

07-09-2007, 06:33 PM	#5
jfranktoo Member Join Date: Aug 2006 Location: chichester england Posts: 189	Re: Are we thinking too much page rank? Who needs all these backlinks? Ok, that's puts a slightly different construction on the issue. 1) We must build effective on-page optimising - no one disagrees with that, using keywords in natural language 2) We need backlinks from quality pages for our pr, which will help us get ahead on the Google page when we are level pegging with others on the same search term. 3) The anchor text used in these inbound links, whether or not it comes from pr0 pages is the critical factor in off-page optimising. But I use several keywords or phrases on the same page. I may have six main keywords/phrases on an important page - they hardly relate to each other. (E.g. Glencoe/cottage/lochside/Scotland/holiday cottage/self catering) Each of these may be equally important as the other. I fully realise that we also deal in natural language, and that these words are naturally used in phrases, e.g. holiday cottage in Scotland, etc. In an ideal world, should I develop different anchor text for different inbound links to include each of these different keywords or keyword phrases. I'm only concentating now on the text I might want for inbound links, not the text in the copy, or headlines - which is in natural language. Put it another way, every time I post in IWebtool, should I be using a different signature, such as Travel Scotland, or Self catering holiday West coast. These words drive nearly as much traffic as Glencoe according to search strings At the moment I seem to be overdoing the main phrase, using it all the time everywhere. John __________________ Scotland last minute short breaks and special deals, self catering cottages Self catering cottage in Appin by Glencoe Scotland

07-09-2007, 07:12 PM	#6
OldWelshGuy iWEBTOOL SEO Advisor Contributor Join Date: May 2007 Posts: 675	Re: Are we thinking too much page rank? Who needs all these backlinks? Too full of cold, too late and too tired but here are some points. You have to build links for traffic and also to appease the great god of Google for their ridiculous link mongering algorithm! I have preached for years 'link for traffic and anything else is a bonus.'. IF you link for traffic, then you will AUTOMATICALLY be4 building on topic and related industry links. One thing John, you mention businesses that use external developers really didn't work. here is my top tip for today. USE THE PHONE!!!!! If I am building links in the UK for UK customers, I use the phone every single time. I telephone the OWNER, explain who I am and the benefits to THEM of my proposal, and then get their agreement. If THEY are the site builders then I send them the code, if they use an agency, i ask them for their designers contact email and I contact them direct, again with the code to be pasted into the page. THEN I PHONE THE DESIGN COMPANY AS WELL As you can see I am fairly aggressive with this regard, but I prefer the phone as I can get across what I am looking for better, and get a face to face agreement. Then when I speak to the designers, I impress on them that the OWNER of the site has agreed. Normally I CC the owner in on the email. __________________ Umbrella Consultancy Internet Marketing Company - Rugby Forum - Google Expert Blog

07-09-2007, 07:17 PM	#7
NavyCS iWEBTOOL SEO Advisor Join Date: Feb 2006 Posts: 242	Re: Are we thinking too much page rank? Who needs all these backlinks? How many links do you have pointing to internal pages? 96% of my sites traffic actually enters my site thru internal pages - each page has targets, this includes your index page. I guess the best prespective is look at each page as it's own website. You have may have an internal page that covers "Lochside cottage near Glencoe in Scotland", that page should have the anchors to it with that phrase. If your site is about "holiday cottages in Scotland" then that should be to the index, generic and covers the theme. I think a common mistake is having pages on your site compete against eachother - there is enough competition on the web! Hope this makes sense...I feel like I may be babbling __________________ Memphis Website Design Military Benefits

07-09-2007, 08:03 PM	#8
OldWelshGuy iWEBTOOL SEO Advisor Contributor Join Date: May 2007 Posts: 675	Re: Are we thinking too much page rank? Who needs all these backlinks? Not babbling at all. __________________ Umbrella Consultancy Internet Marketing Company - Rugby Forum - Google Expert Blog

07-09-2007, 08:54 PM	#9
jfranktoo Member Join Date: Aug 2006 Location: chichester england Posts: 189	Re: Are we thinking too much page rank? Who needs all these backlinks? Thanks guys, turned out to be a fruitful topic after all. Totally agree about the telephone - I don't do it, but of course, it is obvious when you say it. E-mail makes us cut corners far too often. Will do it in future, promise. Persuasion: me telling you in writing how good I am - not very persuasive, me telling you on the phone how good I am - a bit better, me telling you face to face how good I am, that's better, but still not good, because I'm still pushing me and hardly paying attention to you. Me telling you how good you are, that's more persuasive but manipulative. You hearing how good I am from people you respect, that's public relations. You with a problem, and asking me to help you to resolve it, that's selling. Old Welsh has this knack of cutting through to the bone. John __________________ Scotland last minute short breaks and special deals, self catering cottages Self catering cottage in Appin by Glencoe Scotland

08-05-2007, 10:45 AM	#11
trichnosis Senior Member Join Date: Jan 2007 Posts: 452	Re: Are we thinking too much page rank? Who needs all these backlinks? thanks for the replies __________________ Türkçe Bilgi \| Hobiler \| Satranç \| 2

08-10-2007, 07:16 AM	#12
happyandyk Smurf Join Date: Aug 2007 Posts: 39	Re: Are we thinking too much page rank? Who needs all these backlinks? i am new in all this. but even i feel too much is made out of page rank and back-links. people go beserk over seraching for backlinks rather that focusing on content. i put up my site on 27th may 2007. though a 'non-zero pagerank' would make me happy, iv decided to concentrate on content. if its good il get a nice pr--- ;-) if not...no issue ! __________________ www.winvistaclub.com

08-10-2007, 08:40 AM	#13
OldWelshGuy iWEBTOOL SEO Advisor Contributor Join Date: May 2007 Posts: 675	Re: Are we thinking too much page rank? Who needs all these backlinks? PR comes from links not content. You must have some backlinks or your pages will go supplemental __________________ Umbrella Consultancy Internet Marketing Company - Rugby Forum - Google Expert Blog

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