SEO A to Z - part 13 - "Landing Page to Link Juice"

Speaker 1: 0:02

Hello and welcome to. Seo is not that hard. I'm your host, ed Dawson, the founder of keywordspeopleusecom, the place to find and organise the questions people ask online. I'm an SEO developer, affiliate marketer and entrepreneur. I've been building and monetising websites for over 20 years and I've bought and sold a few along the way. I'm here to share with you the SEO knowledge, hints and tips I've built up over the years. With you, the SEO knowledge, hints and tips I've built up over the years. Hello and welcome to this latest episode of SEO is not that hard. It's me, ed, as usual. And today we are on to part 13 of our SEO A to Z, where I'm hoping to cover landing page to link juice. So, without further ado, let's get on with the show.

Speaker 1: 0:40

So landing page. So a landing page, in analytics terms, is any page which user first enters your site. It's the page they land on. That's the first meaning of landing page. The second one is that marketers and SEOs quite often might design and build specific landing pages for campaigns where they aim to get people to land, whether by driving them from online or offline ads or even via seo. So this is where you've got a particular action you want someone to take. So you're going to write an ad where you're hoping people to say potentially, give you their email address in return for a lead magnet which we'll get on to shortly and you might design a particular landing page where that page has got that action in mind that you're going to try and drive, might design a particular landing page where that page has got that action in mind that you're going to try and drive people from an ad or offline or some other resource to come in onto that page and you just you build that landing page with a specific action in mind. So that's the. That's the marketer's term for landing page when they talk about creating a landing page. But in analytics terms, a landing page is just any page where a user lands on a site for the first time and they're called landing pages in analytics. So yes, it's a double meaning term landing page.

Speaker 1: 1:54

Next up, we've got lead generation. So a lead is the pre-qualified contact details of a person or a company that's interested in buying a product or service. So lead generation is a website monetization strategy where a website will be designed to generate leads for what are usually, say, high value products such as mortgages, and then the site will sell these leads that they collect to companies that can actually supply the product. So the buyers of the leads will then contact the lead to try to sell to them. So in lead generation the seller of the lead gets paid, regardless of whether the company buying converts the lead to a sale. So this is like it's also known as rank and rent is a type of lead generation where people will rank a website for a particular term. It might be used in a geographic area, like plumbers in London, and they'll get people contacting them through that website for plumbers in London who are looking for that service, and they will then sell those leads onto actual, real plumbers who can then go and perform that service. So if you're a lead generation company and you're creating lead generation websites, your aim is to suck in people who are interested interested in a service, whether you provide it or not and then sell those people's contact details to actual service providers.

Speaker 1: 3:12

Next up we've got lead magnet. So a lead magnet, as I mentioned when we're just talking about landing pages, a lead magnet is a piece of content or functionality that you give away to people online in return for their email address usually their email address, sometimes it might be phone numbers or physical addresses, but most commonly it's email addresses. So examples of lead magnets are ebook, research papers, online tools and courses, cheat sheets, all that kind of thing, and having acquired a user's email address, then typically you add them to your email newsletter or follow them up with a sort of automated email sequence trying to sell them some other service or product that you're looking to upsell them. But essentially, with a lead magnet, you're giving something away in return for contact details of people so that you can then build on the conversation with them down the line.

Speaker 1: 4:02

Link is the next. We've got link. I mean, we've talked about links quite a bit across some of the other episodes, but just to recap here, a link is a link from one web page to another. There are various different types. We've got internal links, where links between pages on the same site, where you control them. External links, where you link to an external site. Backlinks, where an external site will link to your site. And these are the three main kind of links. I talk about each of them in the individual episodes, so go back to previous episodes for internal links, external links and backlinks to get more in detail. I've also got a great in-depth guide to links on keywordspeopleusecom. So if you want to look in the show notes for that, or just go to keywordspeopleusecom and have a look through some of the guides, you'll see we've got a great guide to links there. Next up, we have a look through some of the guides. You'll see we've got a great guide to links there.

Speaker 1: 4:57

Next up, we've got link bait. Now a link bait is a piece of content or a website feature that's produced with a specific aim of trying to attract others to link to it. A common link bait is where you will reference, say, an industry expert or give an award to a company in your industry, where you're hoping for them to notice that you're talking about them and people. You know. If we talk about ego bait in one another episode, there's a type of link bait where people go oh, I'm being talked about here, I'm going to share it with my audience. I might link to it from my website and say look here, look, someone's saying something great about me. People will link to content about themselves quite often. So link bait is a piece of content you create that's targeting a specific company or person or organization in the hope that they'll link back to it.

Speaker 1: 5:39

Next, we've got link building. So link building is the process you undertake to get third-party websites to link to yours. Now there are various link building tactics, such as digital PR and link bait, as we've just mentioned, to be considered white hat. However, so as in not against Google's terms of service, the process must not involve any kind of payment. That's like, whether it's monetary payment or payment in kind in return for the link, and the terms of the link, such as the anchor text to which the landing page it points to, must not be dictated to by the site receiving the link. So, essentially, if you're doing any kind of link building where you're going and paying someone or having an agreement that they will provide you some content in return, or that you're saying to them I want this anchor text and I want it to point to this page, that's where you're going to get Google's terms of service.

Speaker 1: 6:25

Now, say, some link building campaigns like digital pr, where you're just creating a piece of content and then contacting journalists and just saying here's a piece you might be interested in writing about and then just living at that, giving them no payment and telling them how to link to you or what to link to. That's all fine, that's all within google's terms of service. As soon as you start link building, where you are manipulating and setting the terms of engagement and paying for them and or even to pay for them, I think if you just set the term, say that I want this anchor text and link here, even if you don't pay, that again is against Google's terms of service. Then you could potentially get in trouble with Google and get penalised for those kind of links. But link building in itself is not a negative tactic. It's not something that you shouldn't be doing. As far as Google is concerned, they're quite fine with people promoting their content and, you know, with the aim of people linking to them. It's just you mustn't be paying for or dictating the terms, essentially.

Speaker 1: 7:17

Next we've got link buying. So this kind of goes into link building really. So it's the follow-on. So link buying is a process of link building that is against google's guidelines and the process is simple. You pay a third party website to include a backlink to your website, usually with anchor text you specify, to a web page you specify. Now if Google decides, whether algorithmically or manually, that you've undertaken link buying or even link selling, then they will at best ignore the links and you'll get no value for them, so that you've just wasted your money any time, but at worst they'll penalize the individual web pages or even entire websites. Now link buying goes on all the time.

Speaker 1: 7:53

I don't say whether you should or shouldn't do it in terms of a moral choice. You know I don't care if you want to buy links by links, but just appreciate the risks. If you get caught buying or selling links, then you can find that your site can soon be penalized and you know you've just wasted a lot of time and effort. I've spoken in the past on many podcasts about how I used to buy links Prior to Google Penguin back in 20, I always forget the date 2012, 11, 13, somewhere around then and we got really heavily penalized on Bobanuckuk, to the point where it almost killed the business, and since then I made a decision, decision. I'm not bothering buying links anymore. It's just too much risk. I want to build for the long term, but that's not to say you might make a different choice, but just be aware of the risks.

Speaker 1: 8:37

Next we've got link equity. So link equity is a generic term that some people use to describe the power of a link to help boost rankings and it's loosely based on the concepts covered by PageRank. So there's Google's. Well, there's original algorithm that Google was based on, whereby rankings are improved by having more sites and pages linked to your page. Now, not all links in the PageRank algorithm are equal. The higher and more popular a page, the more a link from it is worth to yours. So high authority, high value sites a link from one of them is a lot more powerful than a link from a brand new site on a new page with no traffic, essentially. So this is where you talk about the link equity. So it can be the link equity of an individual link. So one really good link can have a huge amount more equity than another really low-powered link. And link equity can also be cumulative equity for a page or a website. Essentially. So it's just a way of trying to give a name to that power of the links you've got on your website, and it's loosely based around page rank. It's just a term you might hear.

Speaker 1: 9:52

Hear people talk about, about link equity, and that's what they're referring to. Next we've got link insert. Now link inserts is a um, it's a link buying technique really, and you'll also hear them called niche edits. So if someone's providing you a service and they talk about providing with link inserts or niche edits? What so if someone's providing you a service and they're talking about providing you with link inserts or niche edits? What happens in these is it's a technique where a website that has got a page already talking about the subject that you want to link about will edit that page and put a link into that page with the anchor text you want, pointing back to your um, your page. So essentially it's a case of yes, these broke link brokers will go around, find pages talking about the subject or the topic that you want to link from and then they'll pay that website to insert a link inside um that content link to you and it is a form of link buying. It is against google's terms of service. So just be careful. If someone um comes to you and says oh yeah, I've got a niche edit or a link insert for you, we can do some, we can get some link inserts done, just be aware that that is against Google's terms of service and is a potential penalty risk. Now, they're obviously quite easy to spot because Google caches different versions of the pages and they'll say this page had no links on it. Then all of a sudden this link gets inserted and back to a site. Now that could happen genuinely.

Speaker 1: 11:16

It's not that all link inserts are going to be inserted by link buying. I mean, I've certainly been back through some of my content and have added links into them to other sites, the editorial links that I give decided that's a good resource to link to from my site, so I'm going to put that link in so it can be above board that this happens. But I think it could be the kind of thing that could be flagged. If all of a sudden, sudden, for no apparent reason, you get lots of these little link inserts appear on sites all around the internet and all of a sudden point to your site in a short period of time, that could be the kind of thing that could trip a filter, could be seen as suspicious. Um, so just be careful. Just understand that if someone, if you're giving someone money and they're going to get you what they call link inserts, then that is potentially problematic and just be aware of the risks of doing so.

Speaker 1: 12:07

And finally, we've got link juice. Link juice and this is a term that's going to make some people cringe um, it's another word for link equity that we just spoke about. It's another word for page rank and it's just a kind of a colloquial term that some people use to describe what they get from. You know the value you get from a link pointing to a web page, and link juice is something that that, yeah, it's been used for a long time this term, but I know that it makes some people's stomach turn. But I needed to put it in because otherwise you know what's the point of doing a glossary if you only pick and choose terms that you like. You've got to put in all the terms, otherwise people who are listening to this might hear someone talk about LinkJuice and have no idea what it is. So that's why I've put it in. So, yeah, it's just another word for link equity, another basic word for page rank, if you follow the channel, I bet. So yeah, that's everything for today. So yeah, that's everything for today. So we've done a landing page to LinkJuice and we'll carry on with the rest of the L's next week. If there's anything you think I've missed, please do get in touch. I will add them to the glossary. The full glossary is on the keywordspeopleusecom website. And, yeah, look forward to seeing you next time.

Speaker 1: 13:15

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Speaker 1: 13:49

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