Are more brandlinks really better? Or is it better to focus on Tweets and Facebook Likes to POWER YOUR SEO? At the A4Uexpo Christoph C. Cemper presented studies from various extremely comptitive industries like Credits Cards, Online Dating, Payday Loans, Internet Marketing, Weight Loss and of course Link Building and SEO. Watch Christoph’s presentation from A4Uexpo 2011 in Munich on Jun 8th in full HD now!

Hello. I’m Christoph Cemper, and this is my presentation from the A4U Expo 2011.

What is your hat colored? Are you a white hat? I hope you’re not fond of white fonts and white background, though. Would you consider yourself a blue hat just because links are blue? What about an orange hat? Do you like this one?

Well, I do like orange jackets and wear them every now and then at the conference in SEO or internet marketing, because I’ve being a link builder since 2003, but I’m also an SEO consultant and affiliate. Actually people started making funny comics about me wearing the jacket. So that’s my thing I’m fond of.

But this is a presentation I gave this week at A4U Expo in Munich 2011. Made a lot of friends, had a lot of fun, and I thought I’m going to give you a chance to actually recap on this presentation, watch the presentation again and enjoy it and come back to question me.

A couple words about myself. I’ve been doing link building since 2003 in English, German, Spanish, and French. We specialize in trust links and we also do SEO consulting for selected premium client. We also created the Link Research Tools, which are actually the most advanced link building and SEO analysis tools, especially when it comes to competitive research and finding highly available links.

First of all, the number one tape I have for you is the secret of link building. It does not exist! If you have done any link building ever, you know it’s a painful, tedious job. There’s no secret involved except working hard and taking many things into account and keeping up-to-date. We don’t have 2004 anymore, OK?

That’s where Link Research Tools and my company comes in. Of course, you could go full speed, wrong direction, if you focus on the wrong ideas, the wrong, let’s say, currently fashions in SEO simply because you’ve read it on a popular blog.

And I want to present insights that we have from our every day work. You know, the brand benefit story. This been around for years, and of course, it is an old story. Becoming a brand is always great. Who does not want to become a brand? I mean, come on, what’s that’s for a recommendation? We know that conversion and trust are so much higher for brands. Brands tend to convert 40% to 60% of their brand traffic was as 5% to 10% on generic key words. So becoming a brand is a no-brainer.

Pricing. We pay premium prices for brands. How much for a pair of sneakers or Nikes? Well, we know, generic, mock-up fashion is a lot cheaper, just to give you one example. . To becoming a brand is a no-brainer, again. But do you need brand links to become a brand?

First of all, a quick definition of the brand versus money versus other links. When I say brand links, I mean for example something like http://www.cemper.com, or cemper.com, or cemper, or simply der cemper if somebody’s referring to me with my personal name. These are all brand links.

When I refer to money key word links, I’m talking about key words that I want to rank for that do not reflect on my brand. Link Building Company, orange jacket guy, best SEO, strongest links. Those are supposed to be money key word links. Other links are stuff like cool site, click here, gib dir den!, et cetera.

All right. Now we’re going to present a couple case starters from actual higher money key words that were analyzed. So looking at the top 10, and comparing those to a result in the 30s or 40s, assuming that would be your site, with our competitive landscape analyzer gives us a lot of insights. The Competitive Landscape Analyzer’s one of the 10 tools in the Link Research Tools and it’s really awesome to use.

First of all, the question, what about more brand links for the key word phrase link building? What we see here is the average percentage of brand links for the top 10, the top 5, at the top 3 results for the key word link building in Google Co UK. This is us. Well, actually it’s not us, but the site that were picked on the page number three. OK? As you can see, it has only 5% brand links.

What we see here, 95% money key word links screams over SEOs. What about SEO itself? The top 10 results for SEO got 21% brand links. Page three result has 9%. And it has 91% over, darn it, were the money key word links again. But check this out. 0% other links. Not a single link going to that site I picked saying something like great service or interesting site. That screamed over-optimized again.

So what you should do here is actually build more brand links. So the recommendation to get more brand links is correct.

What about credit cards? The financial space? Again, top three results, 52%, top five, 53%, the top 10, even 71%. On page three, we’ve got 74%. That’s way too much. And also these other links, the crappy links, there are not enough.

Financial space again, payday loans. Same industry, different key word. Hmm. And different rules. 21% brand links, 71% money key word links. That doesn’t look over-done. And also these other links, I think it’s pretty good here.

Don’t obsess about 1% or 2%. You just want to blend in, blend in and be just a little bit better in all the mentions. So when actually looking at that industry, at this key word space, we see that it’s not a really evenly distributed. We see a lot of sites here in the top 10 that are below 10% brand links. So these seem to be SEO projects. While we do have some sites here that have really high percentage of brand links.

Are you confused? Let’s listen on. What about cash advance? Again, financial space. Wow. Look at this. 28% other links on that site. These guys should really do more SEO, do more specific anchor text. They got way enough anchor text with their brand key word. The recommendation get more brand links would be wrong for these guys. Again, it would be wrong to build more brand links here. A waste of time. You want key word links. OK?

Bad credit loans. You see? Again, enough brand links. Lack of key word links. And hey, lacking again these other links. You want to blend in and make your link profile natural. The question that we had yesterday in the presentation was what is natural? A natural backing profile does blend in. It’s not because Christoph said it’s 23% is natural, or Matt Cutts said 20% of this is natural, or Rand Fishkin says 50% of that is natural. Natural is if it blends in. If you don’t stick out like a red flag.

What about online dating? Do we need more brands links for online dating for our site? Hell, yes. 36% versus 68%. Over-optimized again. What about weight loss? 42%. Brand links 54%, key word links. I would say this one kind of blends in. But it has way too many no-follow links.

This is another dimension. Keep in mind it’s not only a question of brand versus money links. All the other aspects, all the other dimensions on views, on the backing profile are important too. The site is lacking follow links in its mix. And quite interesting, it’s lacking links for blogs and personal pages too. Obviously, it does have a lot of no-follow links, but it doesn’t look like they’re coming from the right areas.

So in this case, reach out to bloggers would really make sense. Maybe the number of Facebook votes should be looked at, too. As you can see, we got 4% likes on our links, compared to 21% for the top three. So 21% of the links to the top three got at least one Facebook like. We only got 4% of our links liked.

The same is true for even more prominent pages. Compare 10% of the links have at least 11 likes when we only have one. Now, in this space, for this key word, for this site, it would really make sense to engage more on Facebook.

Are you confused? What does this guy want to tell me? Do we need more or do we need less brand links? Fact is, there’s no rule, there’s no one-size-fits-all. The rules depend on your key word, your language, and your country. There are even different rules in the same industry. And keep in mind, rules change. This is a moving target. There’s no one-size-fits-all in the first place. And in the second place, you have to re-visit and re-check rules with competitive analysis on an ongoing basis.

All right. Let’s take a little bit more about the modern stuff, Facebook, Twitter, likes and tweets for your links. It’s quite interesting because the question was how do re-tweets of likes affect rankings? I mean we all know, tweets and likes are nice because we get links from trusted sites. It’s awesome and it brings you traffic. But do tweets actually power links? Can it improve the power of my links by liking those pages? Getting more likes to the pages that link to me? More tweets for those pages that link to me?

Let’s look at the data. After all, we got it all here. A tweet’s powering links for weight loss. Oh yes, they are. Actually, with us being on the third page, we’re already pretty good. It’s not too bad, but still the number three– one, two, three– are outdoing us, and we see a trend of the higher the results, the more tweets the pages have.

What about losing weight? Same story. 90% tweet on the back links for the top three. 30% for the top 10. We got 15%, so I think we should blend in here pretty well. But we’re still below the fold here, beyond 10, when it comes to having at least 11 tweets for a page. So I will work on that.

Are tweets powering their SEO rankings? Yes, they are. But I think these guys have already over-done it. Or actually, not so much. If you look at this, we do have 21% of the back links being tweeted 1 to 10 times. But only 4% have been tweeted 11 times or more, which actually indicates that the links that this site has from are coming from not so strong blogs. And as you can see, here, something between maybe 13 or 15 would make sense. You need links from heavily tweeted pages. Not a single link has been tweeted over 100 times, OK, and I think that speaks for itself. Engage more.

What about the link building? The rankings for link building. They look pretty similar. These guys are doing a lot of twittering, but for pages that actually do not get enough tweet. See, 35% of the links are sent out to Twitter. They are re-tweeted or tweeted out. But only 2% of them more than 11 times. I think the guys doing the link building for this company should actually get more followers and more accounts.

So are tweets powering online dating space? Yes, they are. And I think, again, we should have around 16% here of our back links being tweeted at least once. We should have at least 7% tweeted at least 11 times. OK? And a couple of our links should be tweeted really, really hefty.

Financial space, cash advance. Same picture. I think we want more links tweeted at least once. And 2% of the links should be tweeted 11 times or more. Again, I think the higher the better here. And this also reflects on the quality of the accounts.

So are tweets powering links? Hell, yes. I think Twitter is the single-most important tool to power your links right now as we speak. And Matt Cutts, actually, on March 10, has confirmed that the Google Algo may give a boost to links that have been tweeted versus those without tweeted. OK? It didn’t get more specific, but the data I see, the data we have here, actually speaks for itself. And Twitter is awesome. It helps your indexing, your pages, and your links in no time. Sometimes it can just take a second to have a page indexed after it’s been tweeted by a couple accounts.

And quite interesting, I did a test with roughly 120 tweets on the page on SEO Com AT. You know, the conference that we ran in Austria. We also do an SEO Com Academy right now. And Google co UK for the key word phrase link building experts– this used to be number 10 on May 30. With 120 tweets, this became a number three already four days later. Pretty cool, huh?

Out-ranking Link Building Experts Co UK, which is an exact match domain. Out-ranking Sugarrae. She has been writing about link building since I was a toddler, out-ranking a famous quote by Marcus Tandler recorded at A4U 2009. I think that’s quite impressive. Of course, it’s just one example. It depends on the industry.

What about Facebook likes? Are likes powering links for bad credit loans? What a boring topic. People talking about that on Facebook? Well, it looks like some of them are. And if you have links from pages that are liked, and if 50% of your links are actually liked on Facebook, you seem to deserve to be in the top three. Compare this to the site that I actually picked from a third page.

What about cash advance? Hmm. Actually, comparing this to the previous example we see that the importance seem to diminish. The top three are still having 5% of their back links liked on Facebook. But this is a downward trend. The same is true for the stronger ones. So I wouldn’t be too sure that this is an important issue, an important thing to do for this key word. What are payday loans? Hmm. As I thought, the top three only got 3% of the links liked versus 8% for the average of the top 10. This tells me Facebook votes are not too important for the financial space.

Well, again, who is fond of talking about needing a payday loan on Facebook big time, or about sites discussing payday loans and the problems surrounding it? It makes sense, right?

So are links powering weight loss rankings? Hmm. Pretty clear. We see an upward trend here. The top three got 21% of the back links liked on Facebook, while we only got 4%. Again, the top three got 10% of their back links liked on Facebook at least 11 times. And even 3% of the back links are liked on Facebook 100 times or more. We really, really suck compared to the top rankings here.

So here, it makes sense, and if you think about it, talk about losing weight, that’s quite a social topic for some people, it makes sense. Same here. 20% for the top three result, 205 of the back links for the top three for losing weight got their back links liked. 11% of the back links for that key word in the top three are liked at least 11 times. Again, here it looks like Facebook votes make a lot of sense.

What about internet marketing services? Oh. Look at this. The top rankings for internet marketing services are all roughly 6%, while these guys here on the third page, clearly they have over-done it. So I wouldn’t engage more. And probably, they just fell victim to the new hype. I think it’s been mentioned on SEOmoz and other blogs that Facebook votes are all the rage. Not so in this space for this key word.

So, as a summary, tweeting link pages can make the difference. It’s the single-most important thing I would look at right now. Of course, taking into account that rules are different for different spaces.

Facebook likes are not as nice. I’m not so convinced that this is a clear, a criteria for better rankings in many industries. Weight loss, it is.

So to sum this up, it all depends on the language, the country, the key word, and the competition you have. There is no one-size-fits-all. And you have to make sure that you understand the space that you’re in, and you have to set your right goals. Right? If you’re a new kid on the block, you can’t simply out-do a site that has been there for 10 years. But at least you should try to understand what you’re up to.

The CLA needs one key word, one URL, one country, one language, and spits out grass like that for SEOmoz, for AC Rank, for SISTRIX Index, for the Facebook likes, the re-tweets, and 50 other different metrics to help you understand your space.

If you want to leave your business card– actually, I can promise you a free account for a month. So just shoot me an email and I’ll be happy to have you trial the tools.

Thanks for your attention, and obviously, if you have any questions, you can contact me on my Twitter account, or send me an email or just check out the tools here. Thank you very much.

I’m Christoph Cemper of cemper com, creator of the Link Research Tools. Bye-bye.

What do you say about his views? What’s your experience?