5 MLM Success Tips From My Presentation Last Night
Brainstorming Your Link-Building Strategy
Posted by JonQ This post was originally in YOUmoz , and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author’s views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc. Often when client arrives in need of links, it can be fairly daunting trying to figure out how the heck you’re going to get the link juice you need. Coming up with a structured plan that works is something I’ve been trying to improve over the last year or so, and I’m pretty sure it’s something I’ll be refining for many years to come. At the start of every campaign I’m involved with, I try to sit down and thrash out a load of ideas in an effort to come up with a link-building ‘road map’ to follow for the coming months. I find having a solid plan useful in two ways. Firstly, for the client, I think it’s really good for them to understand what you are doing with the time they are paying for. In my experience, it really helps to sit down with them and say I’m going to be doing this much of ‘x’ and this much of ‘y’ because of ‘a, b, and c.’ Being able to report back on this structured activity will definitely go down well with your clients. This open explanation of your plan creates a good transparent relationship with the client, and hopefully, one that will also stand the test of time. Secondly, having a clear plan to follow is brilliant for me. Having a clear set of tasks allows me to manage my time much more effectively and ensures that I don’t fall behind on anything. Being freelance, I don’t have a boss to keep check on me so it’s vital that I keep track of what I’m working on and what I need to work on before the month is over. Sure, things are likely to change along the way, but it’s always useful to understand what you’re changing and why. Here are some of the things I like to think about when coming up with a game plan. 1. Requirements – What Links Do I Need? The first part of any solid link-building strategy should be trying to establish what links your client needs. Depending on the situation, you might either need to do a full backlink analysis or alternatively spend half-an-hour or so getting a quick ‘feel’ for things. Either way, it’s a step that shouldn’t be skipped. For me, this falls into two stages: Checking existing links – Using both Open Site Explorer (OSE) and Majestic SEO , I try to build up a good picture of what links are already coming into the website. How many linking root domains are there? What’s the anchor text balance like? How have they been building links in the past? All of these questions will go some way to determining what type of links I might want to prioritise. For example, if your new client has a brand new domain with no links, then you will probably want to tread extremely carefully with your link-building. However, you might find out that your new client has gone way overboard with exact match anchor text, which will mean that balancing out the anchor text should become a focus for you. Checking the competition – This is where things can start to get really interesting. Checking out the competition is a vital step in understanding what you might be going up against. Armed with that information, you can start to get an idea of what you might need to do in order to rank well, and how long it might take you to get there. Having some good insight into your competitor’s link profile will also help you to track changes and understand shifts in the SERPS; all great information to be armed with! I usually start this process off by tracking who’s ranking in the top ten for a variety of my main keywords. Once I’ve got a good idea of who’s hanging around, I’ll then download a full OSE report for the top ten results for each keyword. I can then look at numbers of linking root domains, anchor text spread, and many more things that will help determine what I might need to do. Justin Briggs wrote an amazing post on link analysis that goes into some great detail on the subject; I strongly suggest you read it! Key Questions: How many linking root domains shall I aim for? What anchor text am I aiming for? How is the competition getting their links? 2. Timescales and Budgets This is sadly one of the biggest factors that can affect your potential link-building strategy. It’s important to get a good idea of how much budget and time you will have available to you before you start thinking up a load of wonderful ways to build links. There’s no point in dreaming up ways to start promoting your amazing infographics and embeddable content if you don’t have any budget to create anything. That being said, there are always ways to build content and links for any budget (within reason of course!) If the budget is tight, then it might be worth considering writing some great guides and resources to help establish your client as a trustworthy source of information. So long as you have the time to research and be creative, writing a good piece of link-worthy content shouldn’t have to cost the earth. Key Questions: How much money do I have to spend on content? Do I have a budget for high-level directory submissions, press release distribution, etc? How much time can I give to this project? 3. Resources By resources, I mean anything. Anything that you can draw on to help enhance what you’re doing. This is where being sociable, friendly, and a little bit persuasive can really help with your link-building. Do you have great designers you can call on? Do you know some fantastic writers? Does either you or the client have specialist knowledge that could be called on to create some useful resources? The word “resources” doesn’t just have to mean financial resources and number of staff; in my book, it means ANYTHING that could be useful in creating content, spreading the brand, and of course, gaining some juicy links. Key Questions: Who do I know? Can the client get involved? How creative can we get?! (Figuring out a plan getting to you? Just don’t end up like Crazy Harry… Photo credit ) 4. Content – Post or Host?! We all know that hosting great content on your website can help establish you as a great source of information, and hopefully start to bring in links naturally. So it’s definitely something you need to think about. But placing content on other websites is also a great way of building links, especially if you’re a new website trying to build a reputation from scratch. Hosting content on your own site – Personally I see this as a must for any website. If your content and website sucks, then your success is going to be relatively limited. Writing great resources and promoting your own great content will help you build traffic, links, and social activity. However, can the website easily facilitate new content? Is your client willing to promote free content? These are a couple of things that could stand in your way, and working out how to get round them should definitely be planned for. Posting content on other sites – If you’re working on a new website, then it might be some time until the links start to build up naturally. Going out and placing content on other websites is a fantastic way to build links and reputation. Using services like MyBlogGuest will help you to find some really good websites that are looking for content in your niche. Key Questions: How much content can I/we create? Who’s going to be working on the content – me/client/third party? Where can I find a list of potential sites to post content on? 5. Specific Tasks By now, you should be gathering a few pretty decent ideas together of where you might be headed with your link-building campaign. The real skill is turning all of this information into realistic tasks that can fit into the timescales the project allows. I think the key here is being ‘realistic.’ Your strategy has to work for the project and give the client as much value as possible, but also not cause you to be overworked and underpaid. I don’t think it’s very valuable to say ‘we’re going to make some link bait.’ It’s far better to come up with specific tasks such as: Source a designer Gather a list of key industry figures/bloggers Release the content via your social network/paid discovery Track key metrics of the latest link bait Going back to the point I made at the beginning, it’s always really useful to have a list of tasks to keep yourself in check and also to help feedback on progress to the client. Knowing what you need to do and when should help keep the wheels rolling. There are plenty of project management tools out there, but I tend to use a simple spreadsheet with a tab for ‘each task area.’ Each tab can then contain specific month-by-month details of each task, with a detailed breakdown of the steps along the way: Spending that little bit of extra time making some detailed plans should help you to work more efficiently and to keep focused throughout. 6. Don’t Fear Change Whatever your plan includes, try not to worry about changing it along the way if you find that something isn’t working out as well as you might have hoped. It’s often the case that some things work out really well and produce more than what you expected, while other things simply never take off. Try to carry the mantra of ‘fail fast.’ If something’s not working out, then tweak, change, and tweak again until you hit that magic balance. Having a detailed plan will mean that you can track everything you’re doing, so any changes you make will hopefully be well-informed. As a last note, I thought I’d mention a few of the best resources I’ve read recently (SEOmoz and others) that have definitely helped shape the way I plan and research link building strategies. If you haven’t read these then go and do it now! Clockwork Pirate – Free link building EBook from Kelvin Newman Guide to Competitive Backlink Analysis – Justin Briggs Actionable Link-Building Strategies – Paddy Moogan Competitive Backlink Analysis – Jane Copland Effective Link Building – Justin Briggs Webinar About me: I run my own SEO consulting business Go Search Marketing and have worked with a large variety of clients in different industries. I also have the pleasure of running my own ecommerce site The Jewellery Boutique . Feel free to come say hi and pop me any questions on Twitter @jonquinton1 . Do you like this post? Yes No
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Brainstorming Your Link-Building Strategy
Set It and Forget It SEO: Chasing the Elusive Passive SEO Dream
Posted by russvirante This post was originally in YOUmoz , and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author’s views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc. Howdy, Mozzers. This is Russ Jones (@rjonesx) from Virante, Inc . I recently spoke at the Search Exchange conference in Charlotte, NC on the topic of programmatic, automated SEO solutions and realized that it could probably be more valuable in front of a larger audience. Of course, the attendees have a head start, so you better get to work. I have a confession to make. I love infomercials . In fact, I would probably call myself an infomercial elitist / hipster. I liked infomercials before they were cool; before the Billy Mays and Slap Chop Guy made their way into internet memes. I pledge my allegiance to the godfather of infomercials, Ron Popeil , while guys like Anthony Sullivan weep at his alter, asking forgiveness for their sub-par jobs as pitchmen. OK, maybe I take it a little too seriously – I do happen to have a DVR full of Gator Grip, Ginsu Knives, and Flowbees – but I believe there is something extremely motivating about this type of advertising. And Ron Popeil hit it on the head over and over again: Set It and Forget It. This was the tag line for the Ronco Showtime Rotisserie, an amazing success for infomercials. You see, there is an innate desire for us to find solutions to common, everyday problems that do not require our attention. These nagging, annoying problems like making dinner, cleaning up, and in our industry – SEO tedium – tend to suck up our time and attention while bringing only marginal improvements. Unfortunately, there is this perception, almost bias, against automation in our space: a misbelief that there is nothing that we can set and forget in SEO . Well, I am here today to free you from the reigns of some of your daily miseries of SEO, all for the incredible price of free. Strategy 1: Real Time Referrer Indexing We often joke that “Google knows everything.” While we can lament the loss of privacy and liberty, there is one thing that I do want Google to know about – my links. I want them to know about as many links pointing to my site as possible. Unfortunately, Google misses out on a good portion of the web. Well, what if you could find links that Google hasn’t necessarily found, and then make sure that Google does index them and count them? Introducing Real Time Referrer Indexing: If you were go into your Google Analytics right now and export all of the pages that have sent visitors to your site since your website’s inception, what percentage of them do you think will have been indexed by Google? 90%, 95%, 99%? Sure, it will probably vary from site to site, especially given how many different sites out there have sent traffic to you, but there are likely to be a handful that Google never got around to crawling. Our goal with this first set-it and forget-it tactic is to find the pages that refer traffic to your site on-the-fly and make sure if they have a link, that Google knows about it. Ideally, our automated solution would work like this… The script would record every referrer from other sites. The script would spider that site to see if it actually has a real, followed link. The script would check to see if Google had cached that referring page with the followed link. The script would coax Google to reindex that page if it had not yet found the link. The script would continue to check to see if Google had cached the referring page. This is actually quite easy to accomplish programmatically. The first three steps are done every day by tools regularly used by SEOs. The only difficult part is finding a way to encourage Google to visit the referring pages it has not yet indexed . We can solve this by simply having a widget on the page that displays those referrers, essentially an “As Seen On” bulleted list of pages that had linked to your site, but had not yet been indexed. Well, I have a treat for those of you who are or know someone with some half way decent programming skills. Here is sample code that does just this on your typical LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) installation. A word of warning – it is highly likely that this code is buggy. Make sure that you check it and make modifications before running it on production. All you need to do is install the script on any pages of your site for which you would like to perform real time referrer indexing. This is exactly the type of set-it-and-forget-it SEO that I love. Simple techniques, simple solutions, long-term results. So let’s move on to another set-it-and-forget-it technique. Strategy 2: On-the-Fly PageRank Recovery Alright, so if you haven’t heard of PageRank Recovery before, you are going to need a quick little lesson. Whenever someone links to your site, but screws up the URL, the PageRank that flows through that link essentially evaporates. I am pretty sure that it ends up in Matt Cutt’s personal PageRank stash, which he has learned to convert into a powerful foodstuff that he consumes prior to mountain climbing and running marathons . But I digress, if you can find where those broken links point to on your site, then 301 those URLs to a real page, you can “recover” that PageRank. Virante created a tool to do just that based on SEOMoz’s Site Intelligence API which Rand highlighted a little while ago , but it still requires you spend time going and running the tool regularly. I want to be lazy and have my site recover PageRank for me while I watch The Facts of Life dressed in a Snuggie and downing 5 hour energy shots. So here is how it would work: Ideally, our program would do the following… The script sits in your CMS right before a 404 is fired. If you don’t have a CMS, you would direct your HTACCESS file to pass all 404 traffic through it first. The script captures the URL that the visitor or GoogleBot tried to visit. The script somehow magically knows what URL you MEANT to visit. The script 301 redirects you there. What’s that you say? ” But Russ, our programmers don’t know magic. They are all muggles. And even if they did know magic, I can’t find a USB powered wand anywhere these days. ” Well, I am bringing you good news from some friends: Mr. XML Sitemap and Ms. Levenshtein. If you were paying attention to countless blog posts in the SEO world, you should have an XML Sitemap which keeps record of all the URLs on your site. This is a good start to the magic that is On-The-Fly PageRank Recovery, because now we know all the possible URLs your visitor or GoogleBot may have been trying to reach. Now, we simply have to find the most similar URL to the one the visitor came to . How do we accomplish this? Levenshtein Distance. Levenshtein Distance, also known as the Edit Distance, is a measurement of the minimum number of changes necessary to convert one piece of text into another by adding a letter, removing a letter, or substituting a letter. For example, the Levenshtein Distance between the words “Rock” and “Russ” is 3, because we will have to substitute the O, C, and K with U, S, and S. Below is an example of how Levenshtein Distance could be used to find two similar URLs: So, the way On-the-Fly PageRank Recovery works is by reading all the URLs in your sitemap and then comparing the Edit Distance between those URLs and the URL your visitor entered. If the server finds a close match, we then 301 redirect rather than show a 404 error. Subsequently, when a Googlebot tries to visit those previously 404 pages, it will instead find that 301 redirect and appropriately pass the PageRank through to the intended page. Plus, On-the-Fly PageRank Recovery is a huge usability win for visitors who now don’t have to try and search your site to find the correct page. Want to give it a test drive? Try any one of these broken links back to Virante and my blog, TheGoogleCache Virante’s Tool Page: http://www.virante.com/se9-toolz Second Page Poaching: notice the dollar sign in the url Now, It would be hypocritical of me to talk about setting it and forgetting it, and then make you go out and do all the work yourself to get it up and running. So, in the spirit of laziness, I have included a couple of options for you to use as well. Of course, double-check everything before you go into production with any code you ever get on the internet, regardless of whether or not it is on a trusted site like SEOmoz. WordPress Plugin Drupal Module Generic PHP Code Final Thoughts There are incredible opportunities in the world of Search Engine Optimization that we have only begun to address. So much more can be done in terms of describing, detecting, and repairing SEO issues all in a programatic, automated fashion. These are just two of them. Good luck, and keep inventing! Do you like this post? 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Set It and Forget It SEO: Chasing the Elusive Passive SEO Dream