For years people have said that Google look for sudden changes in the number of backlinks being created and flag this up. Recently this triggers an automated unnatural links has started appearing to hundreds of thousands of website owners in Google Webmaster Tools.

To date there has been absolutely no evidence that off-site backlinking can have any negative effect on search engine results page ranking, so what action should you take if you have received a Google Webmaster Tools notice of unnatural links detected to your domain?

The “unnatural links detected” warning states:

Unnatural Links Notice from Google Webmaster Tools

Scary isn’t it? Of course it is! It’s designed to be. Google’s computers have simply detected that you have got a lot of links pointing to your website with the same anchor text, and next they want to determine whether or not you have been engaging in any link building that falls outside of their Quality Guidelines. However, Google know that nobody is in complete control over the links built to their websites. They know that you aren’t responsible for low quality links that someone else points to your website, and they aren’t going to penalise you for it.

What they are trying to do is cause a knee-jerk reaction that will reveal to them any unnatural link building. So naturally this raises some questions about what you should do in these circumstances.

What to do if you have received this notice

If you have received the notice and have been relying on a single source of backlinks, for example the BuildMyRank network which closed down recently, then you should take steps to have those links removed and respond to the notice detailing the steps you have taken.

However, several companies with good backlink portfolios who have responded to the notice have seen their rankings drop shortly afterwards. So if you are confident that you have a good backlink portfolio, don’t respond to the “reinclusion request”. Instead I recommend the following action:

1. Make sure you aren’t buying backlinks from any website that claims to increase your Google Pagerank as that is against the Google Webmaster Guidelines on link building. Only ever buy backlinks from sources that aim to increase the targeted traffic to your website rather than trying to manipulate the search engine results page rankings.
2. Ensure that you are creating high quality content as it is normal to have a mixture of high quality backlinks such as original articles and press releases, medium quality ones like company blog posts and social bookmarks, and lower quality links such as those posted by other bloggers, in forum posts/profiles, and directories for example.
3. Make sure your anchor text looks natural and avoid keyword stuffing techniques. If it looks to someone like you have used a crowbar to get the keywords in, it’s going to look like unnatural link building to Google. Whilst you can’t necessary stop others creating low quality content linking to your site, you can put out high quality content yourself on a regular basis. Naturally you will have a mixture of exact match and long tail keywords in the anchor text.

Going forwards

Every website owner should work towards creating a high quality backlink portfolio consisting of a variety of content types. Examples include high quality informative articles focusing on long tail keywords that target customers whose problems you can solve, press releases sent to PR sites, blog posts, social bookmarks, and online video.

High quality content takes extra time and costs more if you outsource it, but you will get much better results long term than relying on low quality backlinking services alone. That’s a recipe for disaster!

Remember if you are building high quality content there is no amount of low quality backlinks that can harm your search engine ranking.

Part of the world’s most watched Social Media video series; “Social Media Revolution” by Erik Qualman. Based on #1 International Best Selling Book Socialnomics by Erik Qualman. This is a shorter version that includes new social media statistics for 2011.

Pinterest

If you would like to jump to the front of the queue just ask me for an invitation.

Simply comment below with your email address and I will send you a free invitation to join.

I will endeavor to send your invite out within 24 hours!

Set up an attractive Twitter profile

Your Twitter profile is the first thing people will look at when you start to follow them, or they read one of your tweets of interest. Make sure you have a good profile picture, this can be a photograph of yourself (dressed in business attire – head & shoulder shots tend to work best), or it can be your business logo if you are making a corporate Twitter account. The choice is yours and both work equally well. Fill out all the information in the profile including a description of yourself or your business, and remember you can change the design of your Twitter profile to match your corporate branding.

Understand the importance of high quality Tweets

People buy from people, and they don’t like to be sold to. However people love to buy things when they think it’s their decision. The trick to getting this right online, especially on Twitter, is to post great content that your prospective customers will find useful. So look out for industry sources, non-competative information sites that you can share on Twitter, even links to great YouTube videos or photographs. If people visit your profile and see that you are sharing great content they will be much more likely to follow you.

Obey the Twitter “law of thirds”

It is recommended that you tweet one third conversations with people – replying to their tweets, one third re-tweeting useful posts that others have made (this is great for strengthening relationships with your followers), and one third local news – including of course the occasional tweet about things that you or your company are doing. Obey this law and your followers will not mind the occasional plug for your own products or services because the useful content that you have shared far outweighs any commercial content.

Follow your competitors Twitter followers

This is a great trick for attracting highly targeted Twitter followers and it’s really simple to do. Use the search facility at the top of the Twitter page to search for one of your biggest competitors, then click the “Followers” link to see who is following them. Next just go down the list following their followers. The point of this is that some of them will follow you back. If they are using a service such as SocialOomph they may auto-follow you back. Others will see that you have followed them, and check out your profile before deciding whether to follow you back or not. Keep posting great content because people will be checking out your profile and weighing up whether or not they wish to keep in touch with you.

When to tweet for maximum effect

To begin with I’d recommend you send a tweet in the morning, at lunch, and at the end of the day. However, once you have a good number of Twitter followers you can use a free tool called Tweriod to analyse the times that your Twitter followers are most active. This gives you a great idea about when most of your Twitter followers will be online and potentially will read your Tweets live. If you tweet when people are not online, by the time they come online your tweet has probably scrolled off their timeline and the only way they will be able to find it is by searching for keywords (or #hashtags), or if they have added your account to a Twitter list.

What are hashtags on Twitter?

Hashtags are a way of showing that a word in your tweet is particularly important, and it is done by placing a # before a word (without a space). So for example if I was tweeting about targeted twitter followers I could write those words like “#targeted #twitter #followers” in the tweet. Each one of those words would become hyperlinks and by clicking any of those words twitterers can see other tweets containing those hashtags. There are many websites that monitor hashtags in tweets and republish them, so including relevant hashtags in your tweets can increase the visibility of your tweets to the known twitterverse!

How to use Twitter follower lists

Under profile, click Lists, and create a new list. You can then add specific people to lists. For example you can have a list of your clients, or suppliers, or your referral partners. You can also have a list for friends and family. This way when you view the list you will see all the recent tweets from the members of that list, and peoples tweets are not lost amongst the thousands of tweets from other people you are following. This is a great way to keep in touch and communicating with your more important followers.

Be sure to follow your followers

If people follow you, but you don’t follow them back, they may presume that you are not interested in them. So it is very important to go through your list of followers and follow them all back. I’d recommend you do this once a week. To save time I recommend you use Socialoomph which will automatically follow your new followers for you, and optionally send them an automated welcome message by Twitter direct messaging (DM).

What to do when you reach a Twitter following limit

Twitter has following limits designed so that you cannot mass follow too many people at once. When you reach your Twitter following limit, simply wait a few days, then unfollow anyone who hasn’t followed you back. This can be a very time consuming process so I recommend that you use a website like ManageFlitter to automatically find out who you are following who has not followed you back. These are called “unmutual” followers. Let’s face it, no matter how interesting your tweets are some people will never follow you back. It’s better to unfollow them, then you can follow other people who may follow you back. This is how to grow your following to 10,000+.

Rinse and repeat

Congratulations you are now building your targeted Twitter followers. Keep tweeting useful content, retweeting other people’s useful content, sharing local news, and conversing with your Twitter followers. Repeat the following process by following the followers of other competitors, or use the keyword search function to find twitterers who are tweeting about topics related to your industry – and follow them! The possibilities are endless.

Have fun with it, and remember that successful Internet marketing is about building and strengthening relationships prior to people taking action. Never attempt to hard-sell to anyone online. The key to getting Twitter marketing right is “polite dinner party conversation”. Follow the tips in this blog post and you will certainly see your followers increase and start to see enquiries and opportunities coming in.

If you have any more tips about increasing the number of targeted Twitter followers please comment with them below.

1. Get traffic

2. Make an offer

The key to fast success in any business (which I measure by how much £££ you are earning), you need to focus on one simple thing:

Getting visitors

If you are spending a lot of time on the phone telemarketing I encourage you to STOP! Cold calling is completely outdated. Whilst it’s important to speak on the phone to people, you need to make sure you are only talking to people who are the right people.

I suggest that you focus your energy on driving visitors to your offer. I’ve generated hundreds of thousands of pounds a year over the past 12 years by focusing my energy on driving traffic, and you can too!

Sounds simple? The best ideas usually are aren’t they? Stop wasting time on things that aren’t working – and really focus your energy on activities that will drive more visitors to your offers. You’re going to make a lot more money as a result.

A structured business networking meeting

Many business networking groups will tell you that no matter which of their groups you visit you will get the same experience, and that every networking group is the same. However, in reality do you really get the same experience no matter which group you attend? In my experience you don’t, and there are some key differences I’ve identified between networking groups:

The Welcome

First impressions count, and the way you are welcomed makes a huge difference to your perception of a business networking group. Are you greeted by friendly smiles? Is the signing in table well organised – with receipts provided for any meeting fees? Is the person on the signing in desk wearing a name badge? I’ve been to some events where the signing in table was inside the room rather than outside, and the cash was laying on the table rather than in a cash tin. It’s essential when being involved with the running of a networking event to make sure that all the visitors are made to feel welcome.

The best events I’ve been to have several welcomers near the entrance to the event, who show visitors to the signing in table, then someone else takes over and shows you to a seat to put your bag and coat down, and then takes you to the tea and coffee station to get a drink (especially needed if it’s a breakfast meeting!), before introducing you to people who you might be able to form a business relationship with (more about that later).

Open Networking

Some events are unstructured. There is a regular event held in Nottingham for the IT industry where people just turn up in the evening and socialise. That’s great – unless you are a shy kind of person who doesn’t find it easy to approach strangers. If people aren’t making an effort to actively approach strangers and speak to people who are on their own then it’s not going to be a great networking experience for everyone. Personally I always make the effort to speak to new people and approach people who are looking “lost”.

Sometimes you will get people who corner you and try to sell to you, or get you to join their latest network marketing opportunity. Dealing with these types of people can sometimes be challenging because often they are nice people, but coming across as “desperate” because of their desire to sell rather than build relationships. If you have any good tips for dealing with these type of people please feel free to add your comments below. One technique I’ve used is to politely say, “I’d love to find out more, and there are a lot of people you must want to get around tonight, so can I have your business card and we can arrange a one to one meeting some time later?”, and you can also say, “You go this way, and I will go this way – if I bump into anyone who might be interested – I will send them over to you!”

The best way to use the open networking time is to find out what people do, arrange one-to-one meetings later, then pair them off with another person who they may be able to build a relationship up with. That way you can work the room more quickly and not get stuck in long drawn out conversations with people that could be done later. There is nothing worse than leaving a big networking event and only having made a few contacts. Success is always in the follow up of any networking event, so remember to make those calls and arrange follow up meetings to find out more about the other person’s business and start building up a business relationship that could lead to dream referrals!

Structured Meetings

Many events have a structured part of the meeting that may involve everyone standing up and speaking about their business for 60 seconds, or listening to a speaker. Other events involve a guest speaker who talks at some length about their background often sharing tips that may be useful for the business community. I tend to find events that have minimum speeches, and are more focused on generating business more effective.

I’ve been networking for years but until recently the only thing I got out of it was a few small jobs and a massive collection of business cards. I must have over 4,000 business cards! I only wish that I put them onto a spreadsheet because then I might get some use out of them.

However, since finding a really good structured group which I’ve since become highly involved with, I’ve found that my networking has really started bringing in the business. The main difference I’ve realised through studying the habits of effective networkers is that by focusing on helping others with their needs, you will naturally encourage others to look for business for you in return.

In Summary

By all means go to open networking events such as Chamber of Commerce events. Those can be very good for random contacts. It’s the luck of the draw who you will talk to. For best results do your research beforehand and identify who you want to talk to and what you want to accomplish from meeting them, do you want to arrange a one to one meeting later, or do you want to ask them advice on a particular topic? Don’t go in for the sell straightaway and bear in mind if they don’t know you and trust you they aren’t going to be likely to introduce you to their best client.

Find out who near you is successful in business networking and go along to one of the groups they are involved in. See if it’s right for you. The organisation I’ve chosen to be involved in is Business Network International who have over 600 groups throughout the UK. You can find your local BNI Chapter here.

For more tips on networking I recommend the following sites:

• Business Networking UK
• Ivan Misner’s Blog
• Joined Up Networking by Heather Townsend

Please use the comment form below to share your experiences of business networking!

Socialmonkee

I tried out their paid service this week and submitted my test project to 100 social sites for a one-time fee of $3.97.

It sounds like great value, especially as Socialmonkee promises that the bookmarking will be completed within three days.

Indeed I received a report from Socialmonkee just three days later listing the bookmarks they had created.

Here are a selection of the “social sites” which Socialmonkee submitted my link to:

• http://monobookmarks.com/story.php?title=pet-porte-microchip-catflap
• http://mybigfaturls.com/story.php?title=petporte-micro-chip-cat-flap
• http://mysocialgator.com/story.php?title=pet-porte-microchip-catflap
• http://navybookmarks.com/story.php?title=petporte-micro-chip-catflaps
• http://nowgo2.com/story.php?title=petporte-microchip-catflap
• http://parabookmarks.com/story.php?title=pet-porte-microchip-cat-flap
• http://pinkbookmarks.com/story.php?title=pet-porte-micro-chip-cat-flaps
• http://planetbookmarks.com/story.php?title=petporte-micro-chip-cat-flap
• http://press2bookmark.com/story.php?title=petporte-micro-chip-cat-flap
• http://socialcanal.com/story.php?title=pet-porte-micro-chip-cat-flaps
• http://sociallywebbed.com/story.php?title=pet-porte-microchip-cat-flaps

Immediately – I noticed how the URL’s are all formatted exactly the same way with “?title=” in them. This seemed fishy because it’s highly unlikely that every social media sites would all have the same URL structure. This suggested to me that all the sites were built on the same platform – and probably all owned by the same person.

Next, I checked the pagerank of the sites. Normally sites like Delicious, Digg, and Stumbleupon all have high Google Pagerank scores of 8 out of 10. However most of the sites I checked from Socialmonkee have 0 out of 10 Pagerank – meaning that Google do not value their links as highly.

The sites are all hosted on different web hosts according to my checks on Whois.net but I strongly suspect they are all run by Socialmonkee. If you check the sites all the usernames appear to be random – not like real usernames you would find on a good quality bookmarking site such as Delicious.

My advice is rather than waste money on “cheap backlinks”, it’s far better to use a high quality link building service that will give you backlinks from genuine social bookmarking sites, and real human accounts. These will have far greater weight in the search results, helping you to increase the ranking of your website, and increase the amount of targeted visitors who click through to your site.

Please comment below and let me know if you have tried Socialmonkee, if so what results have you got from the site?

Have you ever considered what happens to all the thousands of people who visit your website and don’t buy anything?

Typically people will visit several websites when making a purchasing decision and if they don’t remember yours for one reason or another they may end up purchasing from a competitors website.

Remarketing gives you a second chance to sell!

There is now a technology called remarketing that allows you to use pay per click (PPC) ads to advertise to people who visited your website but did not purchase by displaying ads to them when they later visit other websites.

Several PPC networks now offer remarketing campaigns which make it easy to show display ads (typically graphical banner ads but can sometimes be text based ads) to people who once visited your website minutes, hours, and days after the original visit.

The benefit of using PPC remarketing is that you can keep people thinking about your offering to remind them of your value proposition. This is great if you have a special offer on for instance. You can bring people back and have a second time to sell to them.

Remarketing Campaign Examples:

Say for instance you run an ecommmerce store and someone visits a certain page on your site where you are advertising a deal of the month on a top selling product. But something happens and they leave your page without purchasing. Now because you have placed a remarketing tracking pixel on their computer ad networks can identify that visitor and display your ad to them as they navigate the internet visiting possibily unrelated websites to the original search query.

Remarketing works great for these types of offers:

• Niche product vendors – eg. fashion shops, software vendors, etc.
• Vacation sales – cruises, holidays, flights, etc.
• Local businesses – plumber, accountant, solicitor, bookkeeper, etc.
• Property sector – Estate agents, letting agents, property management, etc.
• eMarketing – web designers, graphic designers, social media marketing agencies, etc.
• Financial sector – banking, loans, mortgages, mis-sold ppi, will writing, etc.

Many of the ad networks now allow targeting by interest as well. This can help certain sectors attract people who are in a possible buying frame of mind for their product/service. Once they visit your website they can later be targeted using remarketing pixels.

To find out how remarketing might benefit your business please call James on 01332 898879.

Check out my latest video on using Google Plus for business reasons. In this video I mention where to get started with Google Plus, hint: click here. Then you can create a Google Plus business page, and add people to “circles” so that you can share the right information with the right people. I also mention the Google +1 buttons that you can add to your site to encourage social sharing and get a boost in the search results.

Follow JW Enterprises on Google Plus

When I first started networking many moons ago, I made the mistake of thinking that networking was meeting potential customers. I didn’t realise it was actually about forming relationships that may lead to referrals.

I was involved in various different networking groups before I heard about BNI or Business Network International. This is a world-wide organisation that offers a structured referral marketing based training programme for its members and weekly referral generation meetings where there also happens to be excellent networking opportunities with visitors and members.

BNI totally changed my opinions about business networking. I realised the importance of being specific when asking for referrals. Whereas I was saying I just want introductions to anyone who needs search engine optimisation services, I now ask if members of my BNI Chapter can refer me to someone who I name. I find that by doing my research first and picking out a company that I want to work with, and finding the name of the person who would influence the decision in the company about using a search engine optimisation service I am now able to get better introductions and close more business.

If you are thinking about joining a business networking group I’d highly recommend you see if there is a local BNI Chapter because BNI is the largest and more successful referral organisation. If you just want a coffee why not meet at Starbucks? If you are serious about generating business then visit your local BNI Chapter. You can find your nearest BNI here.

There are many other benefits of attending a good business networking group in addition to referrals. It’s also a great support network where you can have access to people in lots of different professions. If you know someone who needs a plumber or a builder – you can refer them. If you need to ask the advice of an accountant or a solicitor – you have access to trusted people. I only wish I found out about BNI sooner!

If you would like any advice on getting the most out of business networking I’d be delighted to help you. Please post your comments below or use the feedback form.