I’m reading some of Diggity Marketing, marketing materials. one of them is an SEO guide. I’m not very far into it, but I like reading what other SEO’s suggest and put out as marketing guides. It keeps me on my toes, I guess. This one makes you subscribe to their newsletter and all sort of junk to get to it. They have their lead generation tactics on check over there.
You’ll never see that here, but I gave them some fake information and got through all the blocks. Who gives real information before they really know they want a newsletter, it’s silly. We are all overloaded with information to begin. You have to really want on my email list and even then I might use it twice a year. Anyways… off that soapbox.
This guide is really great though. They did a wonderful job of writing it. It might be worth it for the newsletter. I might go back and give them real information later… we’ll see. It’s really long which is unexpected. I’m not very far in, but here is a great tip out of it for you, that I already use. It’s a good reminder and good to share.
Do NOT use Wikipedia links as authority links within your copy.
First off, it’s cheesy. Anyone can edit a WikiPedia so a great way to discredit anything is to know your competition to see the links they use and then edit the pages they take you too. WikiPedia is great information a lot of the time, but other times it’s horrible. It most definitely isn’t a creditable source.
WikiPedia is however a great source for finding other more creditable sources, at the bottom of most of the pages. The editors will put the source of their data. These are the links you want to use as your authority outbound links. (Verify they are a source, of course.)
Mr. Diggity, says to not do it because that is what other SEO’s are doing. I don’t know if his reasoning is correct, I’ve never been a fan, but I’m an oddball. I always try to look at site users before I think about what search engines are doing.
My train of thought goes like this:
- What does a user expect?
- What does the search engine need in order to get the user that expectation?
Another great outbound authority links, is universities. Universities often times have amazing stu, dies on just the topic your talking about. I work on a plumbing site regularly and it’s amazing how many frozen pipe studies have been done.
Anyways, external linking is always semi-tricky in small service businesses and in e-commerce businesses.
It could be tricky here too, since the only link on this page is to a semi-direct competitor, but I think they are doing good things at Diggity. I’m so presently surprised by this great writing. I want to give them credit. They are definitely a much larger firm than I am and work with clients on semi-large budgets. Here, I’m focusing on small businesses a lot of the time. I really have no desire to grow into more of a firm. I want to be able to support smaller tighter budget clients to get great results. These facts make Diggity not really competition, but rather allies within a similar market. We’re not interested in the same clients though at all.