Looking for Links in all the Right Places

March 12, 2008 | In SEO/SEM, Tricks | 2 Comments

Today’s Y!Store blog is another guest column by long-time Yahoo! Store owner and developer Rob Snell of Snell Brothers, still located in sleepy Starkville, Mississippi. Rob blogs about Yahoo! Store, speaks at search conferences about Yahoo! Store, is the author of a not so new book on Yahoo! Store: Starting a Yahoo! Business For Dummies, and is fixing to go ask for some more links. You should, too!

Howdy! Let’s talk about SEO, specifically links and how to get more of them. It must be that time of the year again, because I’ve started my annual obsession with links. Links to your Yahoo! Store are more important than ever. You need links. Lots and lots of links. Beg, borrow, buy, barter, swap, sponsor — whatever it takes, get ‘em, you need links. Why? I’ll tell you…

Nowadays, quality links are a valuable commodity. Links from other Web sites send shoppers to your online store. Quality links also pass link popularity and PageRank which helps increase your search engine rankings for your best converting keywords, which drives more folks to your store. Good links are hard to get, because lots of Web site owners know the value of a link ($$$), and they don’t want to give you something for nothing.

This post is about using free browser tools (bookmarklets) to save you time and aggravation when you’re hunting links. Less hassle means I’ll have the patience to stay on target and get more links. I didn’t invent search bookmarklets, but I hacked these bookmarklets together from some existing ones to make checking your backlinks so much easier. I have about 20 search bookmarklets I use on a regular basis. If you like this one, comment and I’ll share more…

First, Who Links To Me (And Who Should)

First thing I do when I dive into a Vendors Link project is to take a link inventory. I make a list of all my vendors, and then I make sure they link to me. One of the easiest ways to get free, on-topic, and relevant links to your Yahoo! Store is to ask your vendors for a link. I covered this in great detail in another guest post about link-building strategies.

To see who links to your Yahoo! Store, ask the search engines. Google will show you some of your backlinks (but not all) when you search for link:domain.com, but Yahoo! shows you all the backlinks Y! knows about with Yahoo! Site Explorer. Yahoo! will also let you combine multiple operators into a single search. This rocks! Here are some sample searches. When searching for your own site, replace yourdomain.com with your domain name.

Show all pages with links to this specific page url
link:http://www.yourdomain.com/page.html

View Yahoo! Site Explorer results

Show all pages with links to your domain (from any site)
linkdomain:yourdomain.com

View Yahoo! Site Explorer results

Show all pages with links to your domain (except from your site)
linkdomain:yourdomain.com -site:yourdomain.com

View Yahoo! Site Explorer results

Typing in these operators every time I want to see if a site links to me can be a pain. This is where Bookmarklets come in.

All About Bookmarklets

Bookmarklets are smart little “links” that you can bookmark and use an itty bitty bit of javascript to do a neat trick on the page when you click it. Almost anything javascript can do, a bookmarklet can do. Bookmarklets work better in some browsers than others, and I recommend Firefox for folks doing SEO.

 

For example, I stick my favorite bookmarklets on my Firefox Bookmarks Toolbar, so when I’m on a page I can highlight some keywords in the text on the page and search Yahoo! for those words, or see all the pages a domain has in the search engines, or see who owns the domain (WHOIS database) of the page you’re currently on or 100 other things. Check out http://www.bookmarklets.com if you want to learn more.

 

Firefox

First, you need to make sure your Firefox browser is displaying the Bookmarks Toolbar. Right-click on the green arrow to the right of the address bar. A window appears displaying all your installed toolbars. If a check appears to the left of the Bookmarks Toolbar, you’re fine. If not, click the “Bookmarks Toolbar” and the menu disappears and your browser now displays the Bookmarks Toolbar.

Here are two ways to create a bookmarklet in Firefox: Click and drag a pre-made bookmarklet/link to your Bookmarks toolbar or hand-edit an existing bookmark.

Firefox: Click and drag a link to Bookmarks Toolbar
Click and hold on the link/bookmarklet (below, the text Domain links to me?). Drag the link/bookmarklet to your Bookmarks Toolbar and let go. The name of the link appears on your toolbar.

Domain links to me?

NOTE: The example link uses yourdomainhere.com. To make this link work for your own site, replace yourdomainhere.com with your own domain.

Firefox: Edit existing bookmark
Right-click on an existing bookmark on your Bookmarks Toolbar. A menu appears. Select “Properties.” A little window opens up. Type something short and sweet into the Name field and paste this code in the Location field:

NOTE: Remember to replace yourdomainhere.com with whatever domain you want to search for. You can always edit this later. Click [OK] and you’re done.

 

Internet Explorer

Adding a bookmarklet or link to the LINKS tool bar in IE is a little different. Internet Explorer calls bookmarks “favorites.”

 

Internet Explorer: Right-click and add to Favorites:LINKS folder
Right-click on the link/bookmarklet. A menu appears. Select “Add to Favorites.” A warning message appears (because of the javascript in the link). Click “Yes.” The Add to Favorites window appears. Click the LINKS folder. Click OK. The bookmarklet/link now appears on your LINKS Toolbar.

 

Now surf over to some domain you know you have a link on, for example, the Yahoo! Directory and click the bookmarklet on your browser’s toolbar. The bookmarklet zips you over to Yahoo!, and does a site:dir.yahoo.com linkdomain:yourdomainhere.com query to see if you have any links in the Yahoo! Search index.

Now what? Organizing Your Link Hunting

Now that you’ve got an easy way to check a site for any links on any page to your site, start getting some link love from your vendors:

1) When you already have a link on a vendor’s site, that’s great! Make sure it’s the link you want.

For example, I had a link on the Tri-tronics dealers page, but it went to my home page, when I thought it would be better to visitors and search engines to point that link straight to my Tri-tronics collars section page. I asked the Webmaster and she changed my link the same day. Awesome!

2) Also, when you have a link, you also want make sure you keep that link.

Company Web sites get redesigned all the time, so you want to periodically check your vendor links to make sure you still have them.

3) If you don’t have a link, you need to ask for one!

Collect all the contact information, and ask your vendor for the link you want. Again, I covered this in great detail in a post last year about asking for links from your vendors and suppliers.

In that post, I recommended using an Excel Spreadsheet to keep up with all your links, but I’ve found a Web-based app which is my new, preferred tool for organizing link hunting. High Rise is a contact management system from 37Signals which makes it easy to stay organized. Think of it as your online Trapper Keeper. I keep tabs on Web sites we have links from, the sites we want links from, and all the contact information and detailed notes that are a part of link hunting. What’s cool is that the free version lets you have up to 250 contacts, so that’s enough to see if you’ll actually use it. Take a look!

Wrapping things up, this year’s link audit has been very productive so far. Not only did I come across broken links and sites that linked to all of my competitors but not to me — I also found over 100 new companies, organizations, new manufacturers, and Web sites that we do business with that should link to me.

I found all these link opportunities by flipping through folders of invoices, reading old email, rummaging through rolodexes, looking at who links to the competition, and even asking my non-Web staff for link ideas. Link hunting may not be the most fun part of SEO and online marketing, but it’ll give you the biggest bang for the buck. Happy link hunting!

Rob Snell
Guest blogger for Yahoo! Small Business

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Adding a Little Bling to Your Site

January 26, 2007 | In Merchant Questions, Tricks | 39 Comments

I’ve seen a few merchants ask how to add a favicon to their site. If you don’t know what a favicon is, it’s the small icon that appears for some sites in the address bar of your browser or in the bookmarks or favorites listings.

Figure 1: Favicon appearing in the Address bar

Figure 2: Favicon appearing in Bookmarks.

Adding this to your store is pretty simple. Here are some instructions.

Step1: Create your favicon

You can skip ahead if you already have a favicon ready to go. Creating your favicon can be easy. There are sites that will generate a favicon for you from an image that you upload. Dynamic Drive has one such tool. If you are generating a favicon from an image you have though, make sure it is an appropriate size and design. Your final image size will be 16 x 16 pixels—not much room to work with. As such, you need to start with an image that is square so when it is resized, things stay proportional. Also, while the image you start with may look good at 100 x 100, it may be unreadable when resized. Start with a simple design for best results.

If you are more adventurous and wish to create your own favicon from scratch, there are sites that offer online favicon creator tools to do so. If you want a favicon, but don’t know where to start, many of our Yahoo! Store developers offer graphic design services and can easily help. Once you have your favicon, upload the file (either in the Files area of the Store Editor or the File Manager in the Web Hosting portion of your account).

Step 2: Adding the code for the favicon

After you have your icon, you need to add the link to your favicon.

Store Editor

Add the following code to the Head-tags variable:

<link rel="shortcut icon" href="http://enter-url-here-to-your-store/favicon.ico" type="image/x-icon" />

Building on the Web Hosting side

Add the above code between the <head> and </head> tags of each page in your store.

Notes:

• Be sure to name your file favicon.ico
• Be sure to replace the URL listed in the code sample with the full path to your favicon.
• IE users: You may need to add your site to your favorites, close your browser and then revisit the site to see your favicon appear the first time.

Paul Boisvert
Yahoo! Small Business

P.S. If you need some inspiration in terms of what your favicon could look like, here is a link to a site with a large collection of favicons to use for inspiration in creating your own.

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Dressing up Your Invoices

January 12, 2007 | In Tricks | 7 Comments

Reading through merchant emails lately has allowed me to see some feature requests that I hadn’t heard of before. One request that I saw a few emails for was a means to add a company logo to order invoices or packing slips. Merchants were concerned about the “out of the box” experience (the process of unpacking the ordered item). While we don’t have this feature in the product currently, I did try a few different ways to accomplish this with minimal effort.

The Easy Way

The easiest way to add a company logo is to create your own company letterhead on which you print invoices or packing slips. You can put your logo as a watermark to appear at the top of your invoices.

Invoices only have a half inch (0.5”) top margin so in the example above, I have placed the logo at the top right of the page. You can view an invoice in Acrobat Reader and copy the information to a Word document for determining the proper location for your logo. You may need to resize your logo to fit within the allotted space.

Another option would be to set the opacity of your logo to a value less than 50% and place it at the top center as a background image. The text for the invoice or packing slip will appear over the logo, but with the right logo, this can look professional; I would not recommend this approach for logos with a lot of text though.

Another option is to use the right margin and align your company name or logo vertically.

The example above shows a packing slip which has a larger available right margin (1.5”) in which to place your design. The invoice, which would likely be more commonly used, has a smaller available margin (0.7”) so your design would have to be more compact than the one shown above. Also, you may wish to use professional printing services with a design such as the example above. Printing a similar design in your office may not allow you to “bleed” the color to the edge of the paper as most office printers have a minimal margin, even if you set your word processor to have no margins.

Once you have the design you wish to use, you can have a print shop produce a large quantity. Before you spend the money to print large quantities though, make sure you test your design on both invoices and packing slips (if you send one or the other depending on if the order is a gift). Then just load your printer with your custom paper and print the invoice or packing slip as you process orders.

The Real Easy Way

Perhaps an even easier way, though it may not be right for all type of stores, is a customized rubber stamp. A quick search for “custom rubber stamps” showed multiple services that will help you create/design a custom rubber stamp for your store. You can even make it specific to packing such as “packed with care at Insert Store Name Here”. Then, you can simply print and stamp orders during the packing process.

The Not So Easy (But Not Quite So Hard) Way

One final way to add your logo to invoices or packing slips is by editing the files before printing them. You can download invoices or packing slips in PDF format and then run batch process action in Adobe Acrobat® for applying your logo as a background or watermark. Note this method requires you to have the full version of Acrobat, and not just Acrobat Reader®.

An alternate way is to download your invoices or packing slips in HTML file format (use the “options” button to switch the format from the default PDF format) and then insert your logo and print. If you have Macromedia Dreamweaver® you can set up a batch process by recording commands which you can repeat on multiple files. After editing the original files, you can then print the files.

The obvious downside to these last two methods (apart from needing to own additional software) is it will require some additional time to process orders. This may be fine for merchants with a low volume of orders, or at times of the year when orders are fewer, but this may present too much of a burden if orders pick up.

Remember though—in your quest to look like the ecommerce giants, don’t forget that as simple an act as writing thank you on your invoices, can make an even bigger impression on buyers.

Paul Boisvert
Yahoo! Small Business

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