Ever needed to send a link request but lacked anything better than “webmaster@site.com” as a contact address? I’ve been back to basics with a client recently, and of course this classic situation has come up. Here are a few tools/tricks I’m using to get more information to personalize the email/phone call and increase the success rate:

1) Whois data: For those who don’t know, “whois” refers to the registrant information and associated contacts for domain names. Often a person is listed in the whois data even though the site itself doesn’t give any names of people to contact.

2) Sometimes, Whois only lists a company name. In such a case, I’ll look up the company on both Bing/Google and LinkedIn. Maybe the company behind my link-target-site has a brochure site about themselves with contact info. Better yet, maybe they’re on LinkedIn and I can contact them there!

3) At times, you’ll find a site for the holding company via Google but because of server or other issues, the site’s not accessible. And that’s where search engines’ cache and preview can be really handy! In particular, try a site:example.com inurl:contact search to find a contact page on your target domain, then use cache or preview to see if there’s an email or phone number publicly visible.

4) Another valuable resource I just discovered is searching for a company by name – often yellow pages type directories come up in the results with valuable data.

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• Content Marketing Cannon WordPress plugin - Consolidates content for more links, PageRank and traffic. Details: New SEO plugin: Content Marketing Cannon
• Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so you rank like Wikipedia. Details: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

Need A Free Ebook Directory? Here’s the Ebook Directory list….

Hat tip to Eric Ward for telling me about ebook publishing as a link building technique. It obviously helps more if those ebooks are free. Check out Eric’s link opportunity alert newsletter for more…

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Content Marketing Cannon WordPress plugin - Consolidates content for more links, PageRank and traffic. Details: New SEO plugin: Content Marketing Cannon
• Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so you rank like Wikipedia. Details: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

It’s no secret that editorial links are typically relationship driven, but who has time to build relationships? That’s why we talk at each other in ephemeral tweets that last 140 characters … if you had that kind of lasting power in your relations with your wife, a divorce would not be long in coming!

So I want to share two little time-saver tools to building relationships by making more meaningful investments of time.

The Problem: People share links over Twitter and Facebook a lot more than they do via their blogs, because we’re lazy. Facebook and Twitter make it easy to do, with embedded widgets that let you share from any page on the web – not just when you’re logged in on their sites. That’s a lot nicer than having to go to your site, login, click new post and then finally create the link.

Turns out at some point in the dozens of version updates, WordPress snuck in a feature called Press This. It’s a bookmarklet – aka a button you can drag to your bookmarks bar in your browser – and when clicked from any page on the web will automatically take you to your New Post editor in WP and auto-insert and link the page you were on. Woohoo!

On a similar note, what if you’re collecting lots of URLs for a link roundup? It’s annoying having to edit the html to make each a link. Not to worry, there’s a plugin for that:

Auto-hyperlink URLs

Link out, make friends, watch them reciprocate. Win-win.

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Content Marketing Cannon WordPress plugin - Consolidates content for more links, PageRank and traffic. Details: New SEO plugin: Content Marketing Cannon
• Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so you rank like Wikipedia. Details: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

This guest post is by Andrew Breen of Outshine Online Marketing who offers SEO, PPC management, and CRO services. We met at SMX West a few years ago and he recently got back in touch to see about guest posting… I suspect this technique is how he found out about me taking guest posts !

ScrapeBox kicks butt for link building. It has dramatically sped up my link building process more than any other tool I’ve used. This post will show you exactly how I use ScrapeBox to find dozens of high quality guest blogging opportunities – in minutes instead of hours.

What the heck is ScrapeBox?

ScrapeBox is a powerful tool that’s popular with affiliate marketers and those who like to push the boundaries of automated blog commenting and trackback posting.

But don’t let that scare you away.

ScrapeBox can be used to speed up regular link building tasks too. I’ve found it particularly handy for uncovering good guest blogging opportunities.

How? ScrapeBox lets you harvest a list of blogs that accept guest posts, then gives you the ability to sort that list by PageRank to identify your strongest targets.

Let’s go through the step-by-step the process I use. This is a real example of how I used ScrapeBox to find guest blogging opportunities for Adwords articles I plan to write.

Find Guest Post Opportunities with ScrapeBox

1. From the main ScrapeBox screen, enter your keyword (adwords in this example) in the first box and “guest post” in the second box. Use quotation marks around guest post to make it an exact match search.

2. Select the search engines you want to scrape. In this example, I’ve used Google.com, but you also scrape Yahoo, Bing and AOL. You can also manually add the Google CCTLD of your choice, to help you focus on your target countries.

3. Click the “Start Harvesting” button and ScrapeBox starts to do its magic. Depending on the speed of your proxies (and you’ll want to use proxies to avoid getting blocked), the scrape can take a few seconds or a few minutes.

4. Now you have a big ole list of URL’s, 991 in this example, but you need to clean it up a bit. So using the Remove/Filter drop down in the Manage Lists options, we’ll remove Duplicate URLs.

5. Get the PageRank of the Domain using the Get Domain PageRank option in the Manage Lists section. I’m interested in the Domain PageRank, as opposed to the URL PageRank, as it’s a better gauge of the link value your site will receive from your guest post.

6. Click the Import/Export URL’s & PR Export drop-down and select CSV. This will export the URL list with PR values into Excel.

7. Open the Excel document. Filter out the N/A PageRank values, and then sort from largest to smallest PageRank. Now you have a list of blogs that accept guest posts (or have run guest posts in the past) that you can target, ranked by their PageRank.

Granted, not every URL will be a good guest posting opportunity. But with a few minutes of refining, you can identify dozens of high quality opportunities. Here’s a sample of the Adwords guest post sources I found:

This is just one example of how you can use ScrapeBox for link building. If you’re not using ScrapeBox now, I’d highly encourage you to try it out. Its $97, but you can easily find coupons for a $40 discount.

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Content Marketing Cannon WordPress plugin - Consolidates content for more links, PageRank and traffic. Details: New SEO plugin: Content Marketing Cannon
• Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so you rank like Wikipedia. Details: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

Did you know I used to rank #3 for SEO on Google.ca – without being logged in or anything – behind only two Wikipedia results? So de facto, I was the #1 top ranking SEO in the country .

I had taken screenshots at the time which I never got around to posting on the blog, and while visiting my parents (who have the computer I was using then), I found the proof pics and sent them to myself. Here ya go:

Incidentally, I also once dominated all of the top 3 results for link building on Google.ca . I couldn’t find that screenshot, but here’s one of me at #1.

Before somebody asks, no I didn’t edit these photos in Photoshop or the like. If I had, I wouldn’t write this post about it because some Photoshop pros could analyze things and show what a photoshop amateur (and general idiot) I am.

What do I attribute the rankings to? You mean, besides my good lucks, charm and humility?

Mostly efforts at building relationships and sharing attention with others, which they were courteous enough to reflect back on me . My Internal Link Building plugin (currently over 25,000 downloads) was a pretty sweet piece of linkbait, too.

Want to be #1 for your terms? Get my latest posts sent to you free by email or RSS and learn your way to the top.

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Content Marketing Cannon WordPress plugin - Consolidates content for more links, PageRank and traffic. Details: New SEO plugin: Content Marketing Cannon
• Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so you rank like Wikipedia. Details: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

This guest post is by Ben Jackson, founder of SEO Discovery, an SEO blog with free tutorials, link building strategies, and more.

This is a case study of my broken link building campaign. These are the steps I took, the successes I had, and the mistakes I made.

What is broken link building?

In case you’re not familiar, broken link building is the process of finding an old resource that is now a 404 error page and rebuilding it. You then contact anyone still linking to this page and inform them that they have a broken link on their site and you have a similar, updated version of this resource on your site they can link to instead.

[Editor's note: It's like cloning expired sites for links.]

The Benefits of Broken Link Building

An advantage of broken link building is that the pages you recreate were already great link bait. Tons of people linked to it in the past so they will likely link to you now.

After your broken link building campaign you can also get more current links by sharing it through social media, social news sites, and any other outreach plan you have.

• It’s a great way to get in-content authority links.
An in-content, dofollow link on an authoritative page on an authoritative domain is arguably the best kind of link you can get.
• It bypasses most of the brainstorming involved with linkbait
The 404 page was already link bait, so you KNOW you’re going to get some links and the type of resource you’re going to recreate
• It’s an ever-green source of links
If you feel like you’re starting to run out of link sources, you can always get more links by doing some broken link building

Resources You’ll Need:

Xenu – for finding broken links
SEO Quake – for checking backlinks

There are a lot of ways to go about broken link building. Here’s the path that I took…

I started by finding some SEO and Internet Marketing blogs listed in Dmoz. I purposely selected a few sites that hadn’t been posted on for a year or longer. Current sites also have broken links, but I thought I would have a better picture of the sites of yester-year like this.

Once I gathered a list of about 5 sites, I ran each one through Xenu. Xenu is a site-wide broken link checker. My jaw drops every time I see someone checking for broken links page-by-page. There was just a post in SEO Moz about a plugin that checks one page at a time quickly. YAWN! Turn on Xenu, and walk away.

I had Xenu create a report for each site and then looked through the broken link section for any outgoing links leading to 404 pages.

Tip: You’ll find all kinds of links that won’t help you at all, but you can tell right away by the URL if a page is going to be good to recreate.

When you come across any link that could be a good page to rebuild, visit the page and check the backlinks it has with SEO Quake. If the link profile is good then you have a potential winner, save it in a notepad or other file. If it only has a few links then move on.

Tip: Don’t be discouraged if you go through a couple sites without luck at first. After your first time you can build a network of go-to sites in your niche.

Once you find a few broken URLs that have a good amount of backlinks, visit the Wayback Machine. Put in the URL and go back to when it was still online. This way you can see exactly what the resource was and how you can make the same thing, but much better and more modern.

Now this is a case study, so let me tell you exactly what I did…

One potential page to rebuild I found was a 404 page on a site called Dosh Dosh, you may remember it. The page had a good amount of backlinks, but it was very extensive and about a topic I didn’t feel particularly qualified to write about. What I then realized was that the site was still online, but every single page was a 404 error.

I then Googled “Dosh Dosh” and found a post listing 18 Must Read Posts at Dosh Dosh. I looked through this list and picked out the one I thought I could recreate with the most ease. The page also happened to have 690 backlinks.

Here’s the page I made on my site. I improved the Dosh Dosh version by including a few different metrics and putting the sites in one easy to use table.

While there were 690 links to the page at Dosh Dosh, the majority of them were repeat links from obscure and abandoned sites. However, I did find a good number of links with PR.

A lot of SEOs recommend developing a persona and building a relationship before requesting that the webmaster links to your page. Since I was emailing people mostly in the SEO industry I thought this would be annoying and I cut straight to the chase. I notified them of the broken link and also mentioned my similar and updated resource in my first email.

Who I emailed:

I emailed anyone who had a page with any PR. I also emailed a few who had 0 PR, but had decent Alexa rankings. I did this in hopes that the sites were still well-maintained and could potentially send traffic.

I ignored sites with 0 PR and very high Alexa rankings, and also pages that had tons of links on them.

Tip: Be careful not to email the same webmaster twice – that’s just awkward.

My Results:

I emailed about 40 different webmasters and got these results:

7 emailed me back and linked
3 emailed me back and didn’t link, 2 of them said they would
1 did not email me and linked
1 person emailed me back, linked to me, and wrote a blog post about how I was building links and linked to me again (an authoritative domain as well)

The PR break-down of the links:
PR 3 – 3
PR 1 -1
PR 0 – 5

It might seem like very little for a lot of effort, but there are many more benefits and potential links here.

• I emailed a lot of sites somewhat indiscriminately that haven’t been updated in a while – they might link eventually
• The post was a good addition to my site and easy to share and get traffic to since it was very useful
• Broken link building provides excellent insight for what makes for great link bait
• It can be a good way to make new contacts ie it’s why you’re reading this guest post now

Looking at my broken link page, you can easily discern a few of the keywords I was attempting to rank for. The only keyword that gained immediate traction was “social news sites“. My page is currently jumping between pages 2-3 for the keyword. Not bad for Keyword Difficulty score of “62% Highly Competitive” from SEO Moz.

Besides the links I got from my broken linking, I’ve linked to it once with partial match anchor text from a guest post I did for Business 2 Community, but I expect the ranking to increase relatively quickly once I begin building some exact match links.

What I Did Wrong

• I was not as organized as I should have been.

I didn’t copy down a list of URLs that I tried to get links from. This would have been especially helpful for the sites that I had to use an on-site contact form for. I would advise anyone doing this to copy down the URLs and email addresses of every single webmaster you contact, and what their response was.

• I didn’t have an outreach plan.

I got the links I could from the broken linking, but due to the nature of the page, I could have capitalized on my resource more as link bait. I shared the post on social sites, linked in a guest post, and also had a lot of “recent post” CommentLuv links from blog comments. This was okay, but not enough to get the linkerati on board.

• My page has a lot of outbound links

I could be getting more benefit to my site from the links I got if I didn’t have so many outbound links on the page. It’s a matter of SEO VS User Experience. Having the links clickable is draining the PR, but it also makes it easier for users.

[Editor's note: I think this is a good thing: we know Google rewards good linking out.]

What do you think? Should I un-link the names of all the sites?
For now, I’m just building some exact match links and waiting to hear back from the busy webmasters at Copyblogger for a potential PR 5 link. Wish me luck ?

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Content Marketing Cannon WordPress plugin - Consolidates content for more links, PageRank and traffic. Details: New SEO plugin: Content Marketing Cannon
• Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so you rank like Wikipedia. Details: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

The following is a guest post from James Agate, the SEO director at Skyrocket SEO, a leader in eCommerce SEO & Conversion Optimisation for small and medium sized online retailers.

eCommerce SEO is a unique beast. There are technical issues to consider, scalability challenges to think about and countless other opportunities and drawbacks that need to be taken into account. We work a great deal in the eCommerce space; here are some of the ways I know will take your or your client’s business to the next level.

Put an End to Ranking Cannibalism

The problem

eCommerce websites are notorious for having multiple versions of very similar pages which can cause serious SEO headaches. This is because there might be multiple URLs as a result of sort/search parameters or category labels.

In an ideal world, you will have one page that ‘champions’ each keyword so you can concentrate resources and measure progress.

I’m not talking heavy anchor text linkbuilding here e.g. all links pointing at your page for ‘picnic blankets’ need to be for ‘picnic blankets’. I mean a general awareness across your organisation that you are trying to get ‘yoursite.com/picnic-blankets’ to rank for ‘picnic blankets’.

There’s nothing wrong with getting multiple listings for a term –if you can. But if a client isn’t visible for a term because they have split links and social signals between 2 or even more pages, get a first listing ranking, then you can worry about a second listing.

The solution: How to eliminate page overlap in ecommerce SEO

1. Generate a crawl report using SEOmoz’s Crawl Test Tool (or comparable software).

2. Run a Google Analytics Top Content report.

3. Go through the sitemap (and the site itself) to identify content that overlaps and go through the crawl report to identify pages with duplicate content.

4. You should now have a list of pages that need some attention from you.

5. Using the data from both the crawl report and the top content report, you can now run through each page and analyse the best resolution – this might be redirecting or canonicalising one page to another, building out the content on a page to make it sufficiently different or useful, or perhaps consolidating content from multiple pages into one hub and redirecting all link juice into one place.

If you are unfamiliar with the term canonicalising, then I am simply referring to the use of the rel=canonical tag. This indicates to Google and other search engines which version of a page you want to rank.

The rel=canonical tag is easily implemented by adding the following tag to the of a page that is not your keyword champion, but has similar content.

< link rel="canonical" href="http://www.example.com/example/product12345.html" >

Manual implementation of rel=canonical across a site could take a great deal of time but there are numerous plugins for a variety of platforms which can make the process a lot less painful. Also, many of the leading eCommerce software platforms have started to incorporate automatic rel=canonical tags into their system to make the process very straightforward indeed. Check with your eCommerce provider or web developer to see what the situation is for you.

Caveat: Social shares don’t appear to redirect in the same way link juice does so take this into account when deciding what to do with a page.

If you are an SEO practitioner then I think you will be amazed at the impact you can have on a client site just by doing this kind of housekeeping. As Warren Buffett would say “I don’t look to jump over 7-foot bars: I look around for 1-foot bars that I can step over.”

Optimise Detail Pages’ Content with Structured Markup

There’s more to on-page optimization in today’s richer web than titles and keyword use, and with stronger competition, the need to go that extra step is increasingly important to gain an edge.

On-page optimisation for eCommerce websites is an extremely diverse subject but one area I would concentrate on initially would be on-page markup since it is apparent that Google will be focusing more and more on this in future. In particular, I would be looking at adopting the Schema.org principles.

Schema.org is a set of html tags for structured data that is supported by all the leading search engines. It allows you to add rich context to your website’s pages, by telling search engines what parts of the content refer to commonly sought information such as price, average review score, number of reviews, colour etc.

In turn, the search engines use this to make your search listing that extra bit jazzy. They create rich snippets in the search results displaying things like price, rating, availability, brand, condition, model number and much more besides.

The main benefit is an increased clickthrough rate. Over time, it could also actually improve your rankings because Google is working user feedback metrics like clickthrough rate into its algorithm.

Schema-Creator.org is a fantastic free tool which allows you to easily add the required markup to your pages. You can enter all the details about a product for example and it generates the markup code which you can then copy and paste into the page on your site.

Afterwards, you can use Google’s Rich Snippet Testing Tool to make sure you have implemented everything properly.

Scale is currently an issue when it comes to implementing Schema.org but as this area advances, readily available tools to automate and scale this will almost certainly follow. There is already a WordPress plugin (I haven’t tested this yet though).

I would also suggest that many of the leading eCommerce software companies out there will create of add-ons or plugin because the future of SEO is all about a richer web.

If you have an able web developer then chances are they will be able to advise you as to the best way to implement structured markup in your particular situation. Planning a redesign or a restructure – now is the time to look at ways Schema.org can be incorporated into your code.

Finally, also in the context of richer markup, you might also consider implementing rel=author for any content, blog posts or guides you have on your site. Rel=author is an html attribute for the link tag (like the alt attribute for images) indicating who has created the content, and allows authors to carry their authority around the web with them, regardless of what site they write on.

This will ensure you or your client, any authors on the site and the website itself will all start to build a reputation within your chosen industry. At some point in the future when Google really starts to take into account the Google Authorship Markup (rel-author) you will be ahead of the curve and likely gain an edge over the competition.

Don’t Set and Forget Keywords

Very few organisations review their keywords’ performance regularly, if at all. That’s a big mistake.

To many, keyword research, is a set and forget exercise, believing it is possible to make your keyword selections and then just plug away building links and content for months or even years, regardless of whether that particular keyword is still performing well in a business context.

The first step we take with clients is to understand and analyse their keyword portfolio, in particular the performance of individual keywords and categories of keywords.

How you decide to structure your audit depends on the goals of your client, but we mainly analyse looking at metrics like current ranking, current traffic, current conversion rate, revenue contribution, future potential and time to conversion.

Time to conversion is a particularly interesting metric because it helps you to identify what stage in the consumer decision making process a keyword might fit into. This helps you tailor content that targets this keyword to be as relevant as possible to the user.

For example, a keyword might have an average time to conversion of 35 days, a relatively long period of time.

Such a keyword is likely at the problem recognition or information seeking stages of the consumer decision process. You would do well to encourage users who arrive via this keyword to download a product brochure perhaps, get a product tour or even a demo.

In contrast, if you identify a keyword with a short average time to conversion – say a few minutes to a few days – this would suggest the consumer is much further along in the decision making process. So you should be encouraging ‘add to basket’ type actions as visitors are clearly on the verge of handing over their money – offering up a product guide or a product tour is inappropriate this late in the process.

Point #6 in my recent SEOmoz post talked more about performing keyword audits.

Auditing keywords is no easy task. There is quite a bit of data to trawl through but it will be worth it because it can help you to shape an overall SEO strategy that delivers a far higher return on investment, over a strategy that relies upon throwing links at the wall to see what sticks.

• Look specifically for keywords that contribute a high-level of revenue or have a particularly high conversion rate – identify ways you could increase traffic on these keywords. Are you ranking as high as you could be?

• Look for keywords that have strong traffic but a poor conversion rate – this could be an indicator that something is going wrong and is a good place to start when it comes to fixing and optimising the performance of a site.

• Look for ways to branch out around high-conversion keywords. Identify common themes amongst your top performing keywords and see if there are associated terms that you could be targeting.

Essentially a keyword performance audit is about identifying opportunities and looking at ways to capitalise on them.

Build a Community

SEO and social are now inextricably linked – we are hurtling towards life after link trust so your website and your business need to be ready.

Building a community serves multiple purposes both now and later down the line:

• Build a loyal base of customers – brand loyalty, less churn, increased profitability.

• Helps with SEO – user generated content can help scale your SEO.

• Future-proofs your website – if Google switches to more of a social trust algorithm, you’re not going to end up out in the cold.

First and foremost, your community should be respected – don’t be ‘that company’ that fakes a community or sells them out to turn a fast buck. Building a community can be a long term strategy that is beneficial for both business and individual alike.

You can leverage the power of your community in the following ways:

• For content – encourage community members to add comments, submit reviews and generally contribute to your website. All of this is long-tail content that enriches your pages and helps improve visibility AND you haven’t had to write it yourself or pay someone else to.

• For linkbuilding – As Patrick Altoft from Branded3 points out: “Commercial sites struggle to attract natural links.” This is because the person you are requesting the link from knows that in some way you are going to (over time) benefit financially from the link, in the form of direct traffic and increased search engine visibility. Leveraging a community for links can mean running competitions and prize giveaways to generate social shares and actual links. Rewarding users for linking back to you, or even giving them an identity (and a widget/badge) to show their commitment to your community.

• Grow your revenue – encourage advocates/ambassadors by offering rewards and incentives for helping you as a business achieve your goals. Referral bonuses or community points that can be exchanged for goods or cold hard cash are great ways to kickstart a community growth explosion.

Use Punchtab – a great engagement app that helps you easily reward your community when they perform a particular action e.g. like you on Facebook, makes a comment, submits a review and so on.

For further reading, you should try Motivating a Community and Gamify your Community; both provide valuable insights and tactics for encouraging and building a community even in a commercial context.

More posts on ecommerce and ecommerce SEO:

Don’t Leave Shipping Rates To The Cart
5 Surprising Sources of Competitive Intelligence
Ecommerce Widgets and more – video
How Inhouse SEOs can Add Value Beyond Search
Google’s Conspiracy To Monopolize Shopping

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Content Marketing Cannon WordPress plugin - Consolidates content for more links, PageRank and traffic. Details: New SEO plugin: Content Marketing Cannon
• Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so you rank like Wikipedia. Details: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

Full disclosure: I’m getting a free review copy for this review.

Eric Ward, aka Link Moses, has been at link building since the bad old days when Yahoo Directory actually was a place to start your search (imagine!). More importantly, the man is great at unearthing very high quality link opportunities, often hubs, that would go for $500 – $1000 / pop if you were paying true value for time.

Eric’s subscription newsletter is available very affordably – $8/month!

What’s nice is that the newsletter isn’t rehashing directories everyone knows. For example, were you aware that you can get into Encyclopedia Britannica? Or that there are specialized search engines for boating and biology?

One thing in particular that I’d never considered was how PageRank is partly dependent on how specific a page’s topic is. The wider your appeal, the more links you can gain and thus obtain more PageRank. But the more narrowly and specifically you cover a topic, the fewer the people that might link to you. Conversely, narrower treatments will often answer a searcher’s intent better than general pages. I won’t share Eric’s examples, but he demonstrated his case well with some particular SERPs.

(For people wondering how my book compares to Eric’s newsletter, the purposes and learning are different. While I have a section on link building tactics, my book is on all of advanced SEO, including converting SEO traffic, keyword research and other miscellaneous tasks. Further, I also teach you the creative thinking to invent your own link acquisition tactics. Hence the book being in the $100 price range.)

Finally, Eric discusses free tools like Firefox extensions few people know about… sure to be appreciated by people spending most of their time on the link hunt.

Liked this post? Get a free chapter from my book, on how to massively scale link building without social media!

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Content Marketing Cannon WordPress plugin - Consolidates content for more links, PageRank and traffic. Details: New SEO plugin: Content Marketing Cannon
• Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so you rank like Wikipedia. Details: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

I’ve been digging into online marketing tools and to my chagrin, most want an annual fee (or one time payment usually roughly equivalent). It’s the rise of SAAS…

Email:

MailerLite: Was on Discount from MightyDeals (found via Yoast) for $49/year!! Up to 10K subs… Love this pricing!
Or MailChimp: Free for up to 2K subs, plus very impressive segment-upon-signup options so you can better tailor content and increase open rates. Starting $49/mo thereafter.

I currently have Aweber which so far has been good, and their support’s generally been good – which is very important. I’m mostly interested in switching due to price (mailerlite) and functionality (chimp). Paying $29/mo for service at my # of subs (over 500, under 2k), for the advanced SEO book.

Contact Management / Social Media Analytics

The first two here are relationship-measuring social analytics tools. The latter is a traffic measuring social analytics tool.

I currently have BuzzStream which is pretty sweet. It automatically finds contact info, can track all email contact and Twitter contact too (going forward, non-historical), plus has various link building metrics and social media functions built in too, though personally my orientation is more the link building side. Starting $19/mo.

ConnectedHQ: Contact Management with full historical data and integrations with various social services. Measure and strengthen your relationships so you get more exposure and traffic. $10/mo

The reason ConnectedHQ also appeals to me is because of more integrations (mostly FB, I’m not big on LinkedIn) and historical data for them. Plus it’s affordable, which is great! Strong contrast to so many tools out there where average monthly price for a non-feature-neutered package is $49…

Awe.sm: Traffic analytics focused on social sharing where links are shared via means besides the browser (outlook, tweetdeck etc) and accurately reporting on where Twitter/FB/LinkedIn traffic really originated from, down to the particular tweet! Valuable for optimizing social media campaigns focused on traffic / conversions. Starting $15/mo

VaultPress: Multiple cloud-based backups + security monitoring for WP, by the creators of WP at Automattic. $40/mo and + for service including security. $15 for cloud backups which is basically not worth paying for since existing WP plugins do that.

Or: CodeGuard: Roughly the same idea but not WP specific. Unclear if they provide human support for cleaning bugs and reinstalling. $15/mo — Update: Got CodeGuard!

VisualWebsiteOptimizer: Tempted by their easy WYSIWYG interface… for better CRO testing. GWO’s horrible, sprawling documentation and disorganized forums are also a massive pain to navigate. $49/mo + for a decent package.

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Content Marketing Cannon WordPress plugin - Consolidates content for more links, PageRank and traffic. Details: New SEO plugin: Content Marketing Cannon
• Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so you rank like Wikipedia. Details: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

In a thought-provoking article, Russ Virante of Virante SEO asks whether, instead of manually checking through competitors’ backlink profiles, it’s perhaps possible to automate the analysis, at least to dig for paid links. He suggests that by using SEOmoz’s link index, and comparing the numbers on some backlink profile metrics against those of Wikipedia [which has never manipulated its backlink profile], it’s possible to get an idea o how natural a site’s backlink profile is.

I think the idea is brilliant, but there’s another caveat beyond that listed: not all categories of sites build links in the same way/pattern. Nor do all industries.

In fact, Wikipedia is quite unique in that it’s reasonable to expect that more of its links go to deep pages than the home page.

Conversely, for SMBs (for one example), it’s much likelier that most links will go to the homepage. Think of the basic directories, mentions in local press, BBB etc.

I get that the idea was to find a site that hasn’t manipulated its backlink profile intentionally, but the choice of Wikipedia still has several other difficulties.

The fact remains that this automated analysis of link profiles is a pretty clever notion. Perhaps a better alternative would be to use the tool on competitors in the niche and thus appraise what they’re doing at a glance, in contrast to oneself/one’s agency.

Check out Russ’ tools.

• Link Proximity Analysis Tool
• Source Link Depth Tool
• Multiple Links Analysis Tool

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Content Marketing Cannon WordPress plugin - Consolidates content for more links, PageRank and traffic. Details: New SEO plugin: Content Marketing Cannon
• Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so you rank like Wikipedia. Details: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

It seems whenever BuzzStream send out an email with new product features for their link building CRM software, I’m highly impressed with the value they’ve added to their product. It’s a great competitive differentiation they’re building, and in my eyes, highly worth it for any link builder regularly building links manually.

Some of their latest integration collects all potential contact information, including social media accounts and phone numbers.

They’ve also added automated tracking of relationships with Twitter, and now you can share that between people working on a relationship. It used to be limited to whoever ran the Twitter account in contact with the particular lead.

Over and above that, they’ve automated link prospect queries and scraping the results, including de-duplication and adding in contact info plus other details.

Brilliant time-savers that make link building a lot less tedious for anyone involved, imho. Buzzstream is social media analytics.

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Content Marketing Cannon WordPress plugin - Consolidates content for more links, PageRank and traffic. Details: New SEO plugin: Content Marketing Cannon
• Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so you rank like Wikipedia. Details: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

I recently came across what is to me a new SEO problem.

A site I consult with has some thin pages with a handful of ads at the top, some relevant local content sourced from a third party beneath that…

and a bunch of inbound links to said pages. Not just any links, but links from powerful news sites. My impression is that said links are paid (sidebar links, anchor text… nice number of footprints.)

Short version: They may be getting juice from these links. A preliminary lookup for one page’s keywords in the title finds it top 100 on Google. I don’t want to lose that juice, but do think the thin pages they link to can incur Panda’s filter. They’ve got the same blurb for lots of [topic x] in [city y], plus the sourced content (not original…).

So I’m thinking about noindexing said pages to avoid Panda filters.

Also, as a future pre-emptive measure, I’m considering figuring out what they did to get these links and aiming to have them removed if they were really paid for. If it was a biz dev deal, I’m open to leaving them up, but that possibility seems unlikely.

What would you do? One of the options I laid out above or something else? Why?

p.s. Good answers get dofollow links .

Add #1:

Stever is a local SEO Consultant
Miguel is a organic SEO Consultant

p.p.s. Related note: I’m looking for intermediate to advanced guest posts for this blog, which has 2000+ RSS subs. Email me at gab@ my site if you’re interested.

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Content Marketing Cannon WordPress plugin - Consolidates content for more links, PageRank and traffic. Details: New SEO plugin: Content Marketing Cannon
• Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so you rank like Wikipedia. Details: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

While emailing with Aaron Wheeler about SEOmoz‘s Link Intersect, Aagon gave me the following insight into how they crawl the web and prioritize their choices of links. It’s pretty fascinating from a tech perspective…

Hey Gab!

Thanks for writing in and sorry that you weren’t able to find that directory in the Competitive Link Finder tool. Competitive Link Finder is still in the Labs section of the site, which mean it’s beta, prone to breaking, and we’re either working on tools to use the technology demonstrated in the Labs tool or we don’t plan on working on it any further (but it’s still cool enough to show off!). It really depends. Regardless, we can’t provide too much support for these Labs tools because they’re not on our main road map. Sorry about that!

If you have specific feedback about why you think http://montrealloft.ca/fr/liste_promoteurs.php should have been listed in those results [my initial email asked why it wasn't], let me know and I’ll pass on the feedback. We really appreciate it! It does look like http://montrealloft.ca/fr/liste_promoteurs.php isn’t in our Linkscape Index of the web, so it’s probably not going to show up throughout our site Index-wise.

Most new sites and links will be indexed by our spiders and available in Linkscape and Open Site Explorer within 60 days, but some take even longer for a plethora of reasons, including crawl-ability of sites, the amount of inbound links to them, and the depth of pages in subdirectories.

Just so you know, here’s how we do our index: we take the last index, take the 10 billion URLs with the highest mozrank (with a fixed limit on some of the larger domains), and start crawling from the top-down until we’ve crawled 40,000,000,000 pages (which is about 1/4 of the amount in Google’s index). Therefore, if the site is not linked to by one of these seed URLs (or one of the URLs linked to by them in the next update) then it won’t show up in our index

We update our Linkscape Index every 3 to 5 weeks. Crawling the whole internet to look for links takes 2-3 weeks. And then we’ve got 1-2 weeks of processing to do on those links to determine which are the most important links etc. You can see a schedule of how often we update, and planned updates here.

Linkscape focuses on a breadth-first approach, and thus we nearly always have content from the homepage of websites, externally linked-to pages and pages higher up in a site’s information hierarchy. However, deep pages that are buried beneath many layers of navigation are sometimes missed and it may be several index updates before we catch all of these.

If our crawlers or data sources are blocked from reaching those URLs, they may not be included in our index (though links that points to those pages will still be available). Finally, the URLs seen by Linkscape must be linked-to by other documents on the web or our index will not include them.

I hope this information helps! While the site may not be indexed yet, give it some time – maybe we’ll see it in OSE and Linkscape next month.

Best of luck!
Aaron

I wrote Aaron back:

hey Aaron,

Thanks a lot for the indepth answer – that was really helpful! Can I
actually publish that on my site? I’ll bet other folks would be interested
in the answer.

Re: Link intersect and the presence/absence of particular pages in it, Link
Intersect is one of the key reasons I subscribe, along with Q+A and maybe
keyword difficulty. And I know a lot of other advanced link builders value
it highly, because it answers the “why” question – why are competitors in
the niche being given links – in a way most likely to be imitable. As to
that particular directory, being that it’s on a high quality website, I’d
encourage you guys to look at how to include more like it in your index.
It’ll make Link Intersect and Linkscape/OSE in general a lot more valuable.

And his response:

Hey Gab,

My pleasure! Glad it was helpful. You can most certainly publish it on your site. =)

It’s really good to hear your feedback about your tool usage; it helps us figure out what to prioritize! It would be pretty awesome to include the LI tool in a future iteration of Open Site Explorer, as we’re already making changes to OSE to roll out in a couple months.

Did you know we have a feature request forum? It’s a great place to share your ideas. Other people can vote on them and it will help us determine priorities. You should check it out: http://seomoz.zendesk.com/forums

Regardless, I’ll pass the message along to our team and we’ll see what we can do to add more functionality to Link Intersect down the line. Thanks again for letting us know! Best of luck with your upcoming book; hope we help you keep your hats in order. =)

Have a great day,
Aaron

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Content Marketing Cannon WordPress plugin - Consolidates content for more links, PageRank and traffic. Details: New SEO plugin: Content Marketing Cannon
• Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so you rank like Wikipedia. Details: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

In Adam Audette‘s recent link building column (via Wiep’s link roundup), he claims to have failed at link building (or more accurately, client relations). The client – a major corporation with 10 big websites – wanted results in a short time frame, so instead of going for high quality links that take time to build, Adam went for “freebie” links like profile links in order to boost up particular URLs on client sites.

As a result, though the SEO results were there, Adam’s client saw unimpressive reports about the actual links, so they left.

Adam blames himself for abandoning his normal M.O. and going for the easy links.

Did Adam really make a mistake though?

Some clients have a short-term mindset, and education won’t change a thing for them. If they’re just a run-of-the-mill client, you can pass on them knowing that 10 more are just around the corner.

But there’s a limited supply of big-budget companies. Not as limited as most SEOs think, but still not that common.

So if a company with lots of money to spend on SEO wants to see results in the short term, should you turn the revenue away? Adam thinks the answer is a clear-cut “yes, turn it away.” I’m not sure the issue is so black and white. Consider the pros and cons.

Pros:
1. Big short term revenue/profit boost
2. Relatively easy work, even though they don’t know it
3. The business results as measured in dollars of ROI will be there

Cons:
1. A savvy SEO in their company may criticize your mediocre links and cause the gig to be lost after just a few months
2. You’ve invested time into a project with a short lifespan, when similar time could be better invested elsewhere.

At times, business calls for you to seize the opportunities you get and take the easy money. In this case, Adam didn’t do anything unethical – the work itself was just easy. And depending on how open-minded or close-minded the client was, education may not have persuaded them to take a longer-term approach. So if some company was going to make the money, and no one gets hurt / nothing unethical has to be done, why not be that company? What do you guys think?

If you liked this post, add my RSS feed to your reader for more.

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Content Marketing Cannon WordPress plugin - Consolidates content for more links, PageRank and traffic. Details: New SEO plugin: Content Marketing Cannon
• Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so you rank like Wikipedia. Details: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

Hey Ladies and Gents!

Did you miss SphinnCon 2011? Sucks to be you! Fortunately, Elan Perach got a bunch of pics, videos and slides from the show.

Here’s the video of my own preso, on delegating and scaling link building.

On a related note, if you’re in Israel and need SEO services (or in most other parts of the globe), PPC Proz are a sharp-minded shop you can check out!

If you like this post, check out more in the blogroll category, and get a free chapter from my book!

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Content Marketing Cannon WordPress plugin - Consolidates content for more links, PageRank and traffic. Details: New SEO plugin: Content Marketing Cannon
• Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so you rank like Wikipedia. Details: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

As you know, hubs are a great source of editorial links, i.e. they carry a lot of trust. Once you’ve found a type of hub with a hub finder though, do you need to keep wading through its results like a ridiculous automaton?

No, you don’t. Once you found a real hub, you have the answer to the first 3 key link questions: who, who and why.

Instead of continuing through the list of hubs searching for more reasons, maximize your use of that first answer.

For example, suppose you’re promoting a soccer coach’s site, and you find that soccer leagues are a hub, directing team managers to potential coaches. Don’t keep going through the list!

Search for more soccer leagues in the area. Use a site: search to find if they list coaches. Prioritize who you contact by whichever leagues already link to other coaches (or do the reverse for virgin ground free of other people’s links). Voila!

Like this? Add my RSS feed to your reader for more or get my latest posts by email.

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Content Marketing Cannon WordPress plugin - Consolidates content for more links, PageRank and traffic. Details: New SEO plugin: Content Marketing Cannon
• Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so you rank like Wikipedia. Details: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

This is a guest post by John McElborough, who runs an SEO consultancy and Brighton web design company in the UK

In my last post here I shared some tactics for how you can cash in on long tail keywords using various content generation strategies. There’s no doubt that the long tail is where the traffic’s at but today I want to talk about the mid-tail which in many sectors is where the moneys at!

What’s this mid-tail then?

Well basically it’s the bit between the head and the long tail or to bastardise a graph from SEOmoz…

Mid-tail's where the money's at!

Mid-tail keywords are those terms which you want to rank for, you pro-actively optimise for but which don’t usually get your boss or clients all hot under the collar like a head term does. They’re the unsung hero’s of many SEO campaigns. Here are a few examples…

……….

Head: “Car insurance”

Mid tail: “Compare car insurance quotes”

Long tail: “What’s the best car insurance for a green Ford Mondeo 2002″

……….

Head: “Hotels”

Mid tail: “Brighton hotel deals”

Long tail: “Best price on Kings hotel Brighton in June 2011″

……….

Head: “SEO”

Mid tail: “SEO agency brighton”

Long tail: “Best brighton SEO agency under 500 pounds per month”

……….

Why target the mid-tail?

There’s a few reasons I think the mid-tail should be where you’re spending most of your SEO time…

The mid-tail converts in most cases far higher than the head or long-tail. Most purchase decision keywords like ‘compare’ or ‘buy’ keywords fall into the mid-tail category and most mid-tail phrases will be made up of 3-4 keywords, which statistically convert the best- again this SEOmoz graph paints the picture nicely

Mid-tail keywords are far, far easier to optimise for than head terms and more practical for small sites to target than the long tail. Just look at the drop in the sort of link numbers required to rank from head to mid-tail:

“Hotels” – about 2000 linking domains

“Brighton hotel deals” – about 70 linking domains

This puts these terms within the grasp of SME’s, new websites and local businesses who don’t have the budget to take on the big players for head terms.

[Ed: Check out my advanced SEO book for some chapters on converting homepage [e.g. head] traffic better and likewise for the long tail.]

Optimising for the mid-tail

There’s a few tactics and techniques which I use to optimise for these mid-tail terms beyond the standard SEO stuff which you already know about.

Clustering keywords

When you target head terms there’s usually very few keyword variations you can use but when you move down to mid-tail terms you can take on 5-10 variations of each keyword in what I like to call a cluster which might look like:

• Brighton hotel deals
• Hotel deals brighton
• Cheap brighton hotel deals
• Find brighton hotel deals
• Deals on brighton hotels

To manage these keywords I tag up each of these clusters in Raven or Advanced Web Ranking so I can look at ranking reports across a whole cluster rather than just for individual keywords. The thing about the mid-tail is the traffic on individual keywords often isn’t that impressive, but when you look at the total traffic for a cluster of 5 or 10 related keywords the total can often be greater than what you’d get off a single head term. It also makes sense to look at your rankings in aggregate across the cluster of mid-tail terms rather than looking at the rankings of individual keywords, which will fluctuate from month to month. here’s the type of reporting view I look at in Raven to analyse the performance of each cluster.

Here's an example of an aggregate traffic and ranking report for a cluster of keywords. The cool thing about Raven is it will also display your competitors average rank for the same cluster head to head.

Onpage optimisation

I try to take on one mid-tail keyword cluster per page with the main term from the cluster being the page name then the different variations scattered through the page title, H1 and body. In most cases it doesn’t matter if the exact keyword variation is written on the page or not because these keywords are very closely related and hopefully not uber-competitive.

Internal linking

This is absolutely the key to succeeding with the mid-tail for me. The trick here is to vary the anchor text used to link to your mid-tail targeting pages rather than using a fixed anchor in the navigation across the whole site.

The traditional internal linking model- all internal links use the same anchor text

The dynamic internal linking model- internal links use alternating anchor text from across a keyword cluster

By mixing the anchor text and cycling through the different keyword variations from the cluster your internal linking will be helping that page to rank for 5 variations instead of one. You can either dynamically vary the link anchor text in your menu system or if you’re using a CMS like WordPress or Joomla you can use a plugin like Gab’s excellent wordpress internal linking plugin or JV content links for Joomla. You may also enjoy this post on anchor text variation.

Link building

Assuming your mid-tail keywords are likely to be moderately competitive you’re going to need some external link building to these pages to get them to rank.

What I like about optimizing for mid-tail keywords is that you can accurately predict the amount of link building effort, number and quality of links required to rank; something which is hard to do with very competitive head terms these days. Factors like brand strength and domain trust are less of an issue at this level of keyword and most of the time you’ll find the pages with the most anchor text links and best PageRank occupying the top few positions.

Therefore the best strategy for link building to these pages is to be quite methodical about your link building and work to a number target. Just like your internal links cycle through your cluster to vary the anchor text you use to link back to the page. Again I’ll reference Raven Tools here as it makes tracking your clusters of links really easy using tags (Buzzstream also does this just as well)

Assign a tag for each of your clusters and tag each link to that cluster page with it.

I won’t go into details about how to actually get these links as that will vary from industry to industry but to me it makes sense that a mid-tail term should have a medium quality link, one which is permanent and not rented- so you might want to check out the SEO ROI link building services

I hope this post will make you rethink your keyword strategy and question whether going after those fat head terms is really the best use of your time and money. Feel free to ask any questions in the comments.

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Content Marketing Cannon WordPress plugin - Consolidates content for more links, PageRank and traffic. Details: New SEO plugin: Content Marketing Cannon
• Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so you rank like Wikipedia. Details: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

At Pubcon, I was lucky enough to meet a person I’d long tweeted with, Melanie Phung. She took notes on a great link panel I wanted to attend but coudn’t.

For some background on Mel, she is a Washington DC SEO with extensive in-house experience.

She currently serves as director of new media at PBS. She’d like to remind fans of public media that they can watch TV online for free on the organization’s video portal or on PBS’ mobile apps.

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Part 2

Moderator: Lee Odden, TopRank Online Marketing

Speakers:

Greg Hartnett, Best of The Web

Dixon Jones, Majestic SEO

Rae Hoffman, Outspoken Media

Aaron Shear, Shopping.com

Aaron Shear of Shopping.com Talks About “Real World Links”

Aaron works with e-commerce clients like Zappos.com, which he calls a phenomenon to watch in terms of link building.

They have pretty much all the links they could ask for and that’s in part because Zappos trusts employees to evangelize on the company’s behalf.

Building links for ecommerce is a challenge, especially if you’re in a saturated market. There aren’t a lot of compelling reasons for sites to link to shopping sites.

It’s easy to think big and try to build links for quantity rather than quality, a strategy that worked 5 years ago. But he wouldn’t recommend buying low quality links to his clients.

Leveraging Affiliate Links
For e-commerce sites, the best way to generate high-quality links is through affiliate networks.

The top affiliate networks offer great service and great support, but won’t pass links, though.

Some of your affiliates may be a good source of links, but with a standard affiliate campaign, search engines won’t pass link credit because the affiliate network runs everything through tracking links.

So what can you do?

The solution is what Aaron calls a “naked link campaign” – a cookie-based affiliate tracking system (i.e., instead of URL-based).

You need someone to build functionality for your program that allows the link to go directly to the merchant site (rather than through an affiliate system), and have the tracking info stored in cookie rather than via sophisticated link-based tracking system.

[Mel: I've worked in e-commerce before and this idea works well in theory for small blog-type affiliates, but you run into all sorts of problems if you happen to run a major white-label solution through the same system.]

If you can get someone to build this functionality for you, this is great way to get links naturally and harness that credit.

[Mel: That's what I thought too, but I could never get anyone to build that functionality for me because they were more concerned about making sure affiliate info didn’t get lost due to cookie issues than they were in harnessing naked links. Damn the affiliate managers prioritizing affiliate payments over SEO.]

Linkbait and Widgets
Another strategy of course is to do link bait, but it’s hard to do e-commerce link bait.

“Products” are not that interesting and for the most part no one is going to care about them. But if you have a feature or service that makes it easy to find something, for example, you can create a widget (the web kind, not “widget” as a stand-in for a product).

Comparison engines are popular and they get to take all the credit. Find anything that’s unique or interesting, do that extra step of drilling down to create a widget, and that will drive a simple system that will easily attract links on its own. People will share that. It’s an effective approach to providing value that can result in links.

Don’t forget to reach out to bloggers to get them to write about you and your widget.

Bloggers can be an influential source for ranking products and category pages. Give them gift card to get them to buy on your site and write about the experience.

Even if it’s a negative experience, you still get the link.

High profile bloggers won’t do it for free and even if you pay them, it’s probably not worth it to them, but a gift card will usually work better than straight-up cash.  [Although I’m sure the FTC has something to say about either method.]

Social Media

Suffice it to say, you have to be social. Social media can be powerful if you manage it. He jokes, do what all the other SEOs are doing.

But then he cautions about doing social media badly though and gives as an example the experience he had with an airline on Twitter.

They tweet but won’t answer complaints. If you tweet at them with an issue, they’ll say, “that’s not handled by my department.”

But there’s no such thing as “my department” in social media, you ARE the company, all of it. If you tweet about your products or services, but customer service sucks, everyone sees that and won’t buy from you. The lesson: Social media is not just a marketing driver, it’s customer service too.

Facebook “Like” is Social That Works

Google does look at social signals. Unfortunately, the Facebook “like” button is slow. It could take a large site down if implemented incorrectly.

Putting “like” on a product could be helpful depending on the product, but a better tactic is to focus on getting users to “like” a buying guide or other similarly sticky content.

Aaron explains that links from social media may not be traditionally “good links” because most sites use “nofollow” but they can make a difference in rankings if combined with other quality signals.

Press Release SEO

Every SEO book out there says to write press releases [with embedded links, like you can do on PR Web].

But he says you have to have something worth writing about; most ecommerce sites have nothing that the press is really interested in unless its dirt on bad product. You’ll piss off press and get them to ignore you. Keep it down to 2-3 releases a month unless you are an Amazon and have exciting announcements.

Don’t forget to archive your old press releases and make sure you add text with deep links to important pages, categories or products on your site.

Also change up the links in boilerplate — don’t just send the same thing out over and over again.

Special Relationships

Next up Aaron runs through ideas to help e-commerce site SEOs to brainstorm on relationships they can leverage for links:

1. Are you selling something exclusive?
2. Some manufacturers have a page with a list of vendors
3. Leverage conversations and actual relationships to turn them into links
4. A deep targeted link would be better than one to homepage, but don’t turn links down. Take what you can.
5. Do you have clients that have a website?
6. Traditional linking methods are not as effective, so put your thinking caps on.
7. Create trusted partner program, certification. Shopping engines get tons of links from these types of programs.

Last but Not Least: Rae Hoffman, Outspoken Media

And finally, the speaker that probably drew the most people to this panel: Rae Hoffman. Rae is CEO of Outspoken Media and a long-time affiliate marketer.

Rae mentions that the #1 retweeted tweet of the day is something about married men at PubCon not wearing wedding rings.  [It’s only because it was one of those really annoying sponsored tweets that got pinned to the top of the search results.] Don’t lose hope, says Rae: I’m marrying a guy I met at PubCon. [Congrats on this week’s nuptials!]

After that bit of happy wedding news, she warns:

“You know how you’re not supposed to just yank your thumbdrive out of the computer, and it always warns you that not ejecting properly will corrupt your files, but no one heeds that warning because it never does? Well, yeah, it will.” Apparently her thumbdrive is toast.

Rae starts giving linkbuilding tips sans PPT or notes. [This is rapid fire and I have no bullet points on a screen to help me fill in what I’m missing as Rae is talking double-time.]

Example: You need links for an app. Submit to mobile apps directories and sites that review apps; most of these sites will link back to main site plus the specific app page.

Facebook “like” button.  Rae likens it to old days of Digg. People misunderstood what they were chasing. The point of getting on Digg was the homepage and getting eyeballs — not just being submitted — and getting people to see you and blog about you.

Getting “liked” is a great discovery mechanism. Every time you can get someone to like something on your page, you may get in front of 300-400 friends because it shows up in that person’s feed.

Focus on getting button on pages that might actually get liked, especially your meaty content.

Blogs:  Get link juice to blog where all the good content is and then push links back to main site.

Twitter: Get the attention of media on twitter. Sites like wefollow.com, journalisttweets.com and muckrack.com have lists of journalists on twitter by beat.  Click on “follow all” button and try to interact with them, create relationships. Use Twitter to push big media pieces.

Another Twitter example: Outspoken Media did a Twitter Bowl. It got lots of horizontal links from Jets sites.

Market your site horizontally. Don’t limit yourself to just your own niche. A guy who sells apples might think to reach out to other fruit blogs but he could also connect with a senior living blog – write an article about 5 Things to Do with Grandchildren, #4 is make apple pie. You just need to come up with four other non-apple related things.

The Lesson:  Don’t be Britney Spears (who has someone tweet for her), be Alyssa Milano – be real.

Another idea: Contests for free stuff.

People do ridiculous things for free stuff.

But keep in mind that you’re not allowed (from Google’s standpoint) to launch a contest that says “enter by linking to us”; instead say “enter by blogging about why you love us”. That’s the difference between a paid link and a social media campaign

When the contest is over, transfer the contest content, including the winner info, to another page and 301 the old page somewhere else. That way you retain the content people might continue to link to, but you pass the bulk of the link juice to a more valuable target page.

Rae didn’t drop the F-bomb once, but she warns her twitter account is not family friendly.

Link Building Q&A

With that, the formal presentations are over and a lively Q&A follows. I don’t usually take notes on the audience follow-up because the questions tend to be so basic, but the presenters share a lot more tidbits during the Q&A that are worth highlighting.

Rae:  If search engines are smart, they’d discount affiliate links so don’t rely to heavily on your affiliate program to do all the heavy lifting in your link building strategy

Dixon: Don’t forget that you can discount specific parameters in Google Webmaster Tools.

Badges: They may be cheesy, but they still work, says Greg. Rae urges people who make badges to give different badge options for those people who want the graphic to Lee cites his own backlinks due to his BIGLIST, many from competitors, not only because his list is link-baity, but because he has badges for sites that made his list. Dixon gives a pro tip: widgetize the badge creation so you can include a text link but vary it so it’s not always the same anchor text.

One audience member asks what’s going on with links losing value – how it is that links can get a page to rank really well for a short period of time but then the page slides off the SERPS again. Rae explains that this has a lot to do with Google getting “fresh” signals for a while; there’s an initial boost in rankings as everyone is visiting. Google is recognizing that there’s buzz. Then you drop back down. Then you need your links to age.  And you move back up (hopefully).

Someone from the audience says that he heard that sending press releases via PR Web doesn’t work anymore. A lively debate ensues, with Aaron warning that you want to only send releases when you have something good to say: Don’t cry wolf constantly – you’ll get put on the “ignore” list by your target journalists.

But Greg says even crappy press releases get good “pickup” from scrapers. Yes, all things being equal, quality is better for “high value” placements but high volume links also cool. Rae quantifies it by saying even crappy press releases probably get 20 scraped links. If you’re brand new site, and all your links are scraped, this won’t help; but a good site, it’s cheap for links with great anchor text

Press release SEO is a hot topic. Another audience member shares a story of how her press release got copied word-for-word but all links got changed to point to their competitor. [Yep, been there too. Really annoying.]

Pretty much all the panelists shrug and say there’s not much to do about it. It’s the web. That stuff happens.

Rae says that if you take the amount of time you stress over competitor’s behavior and channel it toward efforts on your own site, you’ll do much better. Put it behind you, it’s not worth it to your business to spend time getting worked up over stuff like that.  Stress = bad ROI. The time you spend chasing down someone who copied a single one of your press releases could be spent on writing even more and better press releases for your own site.

Dixon says his company has a templated letter to send to the offender’s ISP about IP violations and then he washes his hands of it. He agrees that it’s not worth the effort to do any more than that.

And with that, having run at least 20 minutes into lunch, the session is over.

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At Pubcon, I was lucky enough to meet a person I’d long tweeted with, Melanie Phung. She took notes on a great link panel I wanted to attend but coudn’t.

For some background on Mel, she is a Washington DC SEO with extensive in-house experience.

She currently serves as director of new media at PBS. She’d like to remind fans of public media that they can watch TV online for free on the organization’s video portal or on PBS’ mobile apps.

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Part 1

Moderator: Lee Odden, TopRank Online Marketing

Speakers:

Greg Hartnett,  Best of The Web

Dixon Jones,  Majestic SEO

Rae Hoffman, Outspoken Media

Aaron Shear, Shopping.com

It’s no surprise that a session billing itself as a low-risk, high-reward link building session would be packed. Everyone is looking for the Holy Grail.

The four speakers who will try to guide us to the Holy Grail this day are from very distinct corners of the internet: a representative from a paid directory site (Greg Hartnett of Best of the Web), a link tool vendor (Dixon Jones of Majestic SEO), an affiliate marketer (Rae Hoffman, who the moderator warns says f*ck a lot), and an e-commerce SEO  (Aaron Shear of Shopping.com).

First up: Dixon Jones, Marketing Director, Majestic SEO

Dixon Jones opens by saying he avoids saying f*ck at all costs. Oops. He then promises his talk will be the easiest to blog.

His ten tips:

Send samples

He gives an example of a client who ran a campaign to reach out to a small, targeted list of active bloggers who wrote about children’s fashion. But the company in charge of fulfilling the samples accidentally sent all 15 samples to the same blogger at AMothersRamblings.com, instead of 15 different bloggers.

The blogger was so impressed that she wrote up an extensive review with relevant anchor text. She put on a kids fashion show of all the samples and took video. It ended up being great ROI on that campaign.

The lesson: Send samples, but send them to the right people.

Organized Blogger Meetups

This might not be relevant to every site, but a great way to get people to write about you is to organize blogger meetups. If you get a group of bloggers together, they’ll blog about it the next day.

(Obviously you need to do more than just show up at meetups, but actually organize or at least host them, or there’s no reason for bloggers to mention you. No mention, no link.)

Reclaim lost links

Use your log files or MajesticSEO to find links that point to the wrong pages.

You can’t find lost links in Google Analytics, so you’ll need to comb through your log files or a tool like (ahem) Majestic SEO.  Your log files can also tell you when people type the wrong URL when they’re on your domain.

Whenever you find links or typo’d URLs, either redirect them or create a new page in that location if you your content strategy supports it.

Reclaim your competitor’s lost links.

Tip #4 is an extension of the previous tip but takes it up a notch (and requires a tool like Majestic SEO):

Scour your competitor’s linkgraph for 404s; that is to say, find pages on your competitor’s site that have inbound links but which just go to error pages.

Contact the site with that broken link and tell them that their page has a broken link and get them to link to you instead.

Monitor Bankrupt Companies.

Find companies undergoing bankruptcy and try to buy their domain name(s) for a song.

Don’t wait until the domain is available on the drop market [because you may never see it or because by that time the links won't be worth anything to you]. Usually their accountants are trying to recoup any assets possible so you can get a bargain if you approach them.

Alternatively, contact the sites that link to that site and tell them that they’re linking to a company undergoing bankruptcy. No one wants to link to bankrupt companies. Get them to link to you instead.

[I wonder if my friend's dad, a Montreal bankruptcy trustee, might know where to find listings of such companies...

My own efforts via the Canadian government bankruptcy record search tool got very few listings in general for bankruptcies from 2010 or later.

As well, you have to pay to see results each time, even if there are NO results!]

Offer testimonials

An easy source of links is to leverage existing commercial relationships. Work with a vendor? Exchange your testimonial for link. Have clients? Offer a discount on their next invoice for a link.

Run a good cause website

Dixon didn’t spend a lot of time on this slide except to warn that the cause needs to be legit. Especially if you’re a commercial site that has a hard time attracting natural buzz or excitement around your site, creating a site for the promotion of a cause can help you overcome that hurdle.  [This might be low-risk and high-reward, but it also seems like a very high-effort tactic.]

Identify mentions of your brand

An easy win with very low risk is simply identifying brand mentions that don’t include a link.

He says that anyone who mentions your company name basically already has a “relationship” with the brand, and should be more amenable to simply adding a link their existing content.

Use Clique Hunter

Clique Hunter is a Majestic SEO feature that lets you identify domains that link to multiple sites within a vertical (in other words, sites that link to several of your competitors).

Comparing where competitors in verticals are getting multiple links from multiple sites, let’s you identify viable link prospects because if a site is linking to more than one competitor, that ups the odds that they’ll also link to you (whereas a site that only links to one of your competitors likely has a special relationship with your competitor).

Speak at conferences.

Last but not least: make it easy for people to blog and link to you

This one is meant a bit tongue in cheek, but it’s real advice. Much like bloggers who attend a meetup are likely to blog, speaking at the types of conferences that include bloggers in the audience is sure to get you at least a few write-ups from blogs related to your niche.

Next up: Greg Hartnett, President, Best of The Web
Greg Hartnett is up next to talk about link building via directories.

It seems like he’s spent the last few years fielding “aren’t directories dead?” questions because he starts his presentation by teeing up common objections.

Q: With all the cool new ways to get links, why still get directory links?
A: Directories are like ball bearings. Not sexy, but still necessary.

Q: Isn’t a directory listing just a paid link?
A: No. There’s a key differentiator between paid links and pay-for-review sites: You may get rejected, so what you’re paying for is the review. He cites the YouTube video from Matt Cutts on the subject of whether directories like Best of the Web are paid links/useful to users.

Q: Isn’t a directory just a link farm?
A: No. Link farms are just a collection of links – no categorization, no editorial discretion. They are simply created to manipulate search results. [See video referenced above.]

Q: How can you tell a directory from a “directory” (wink wink, nudge nudge)
A: It’s a matter of common sense. Good directories have history. Here Greg pauses to qualify the statement to point out that obviously everyone has to be new at some point, but he warns that he would avoid any brand new ones. If they age well, you’ll see that. He continues: good directories contain great resources — you should see brands you recognize. And most directories that are worth being in are built for users (although he admits most users don’t use directories, just search). You should be able to tell it’s a labor of love.

Q: What about my local business?
Greg recommends finding niche-specific directories as well as local.
Good local resources (directories as well as sites that discuss local) include:
Google Places
Yelp
Yahoo Local – a valuable local citation
Bing – overlooked recently, but really stepping up their offerings
BOTW Local
getlisted.org – recommended tool for submitting local listings to lots of places at once (run by David Mihm and Patrick Sexton -2 guys who know lots about local)
mihmorandum – recommended blog

Q: Can I list my website multiple times?
A: Yes! Most directories will let you if you have unique content for multiple categories. CNN, for example, has 750 local listings in BOTW. WebMD has over a hundred listings in DMOZ.

Q: Does Yahoo Directory still work?
A: Yes, it works. But if you ask “Is it worth it?” – the submission fee is $300 – you need to define “worth”. It depends on your monetization strategy. Yahoo Directory is an aged, trusted domain and it’s a primary hub of Internet mapping. If you look at the link structure of the web, you’ll see Yahoo is a central hub. The citation value remains, but it no longer sends killer traffic.

Q: Which directories are considered most trustworthy?
Yahoo
DMOZ
BOTW
Yelp

IPL2′s directory – very strict. Hard to get into, but worth it if you can.

The slide listed business.com as one of those trusted directories, but Greg heard just that morning that the business.com web directory was going to get shut down. RIP.

Q: How can I ensure my site gets listed if I pay review fee?
A: To increase your chances of having your listing accepted, start by follow the rules. Specifically:
Understand that there is no guarantee of getting listed (in the quality directories)
Read the guidelines
Write a good title and descriptions (especially when it comes to DMOZ. It’s entirely volunteer-based, so make their job as easy as possible. Take out marketing hype. The harder you make their job – by submitting to the wrong category, by writing bad descriptions, by not following the guidelines – the greater the odds they won’t even bother with you. [I was a DMOZ editor for a while, and this is absolutely true.])
Beef up your content.

Q; Where can I submit my blog?
Yahoo and DMOZ have specific blog categories
BOTW blog directory
See: SEJ’s “20 places to submit your blog”
Also: Lee’s Top Rank Blog “RSS and blog submissions” page

The formal part of Greg’s presentation is over and Lee asks Greg:

Q: Does it ever make sense for someone to create their own directories?
A: Absolutely. He encourages people to start directories if they have the perseverance. The #1 reason for his success is he has another business he could rely on for income. You need connections; it’s a long build. Years of slow rise. You need time, patience and deep pockets. “It’s great to start a directory.”

[Is he trying to convince us, or himself? ]

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I recently spent $200+ testing out a text link ad broker who promised a big network of blogs, without footprints. This link broker sells on a monthly membership basis that ended up auto-renewing for a few months, partly because I was too busy to test immediately when I bought it. Lesson #1: Avoid buying on impulse.

This text link advertising network has a 3 step process.

1) Upload an article, and pick categories it fits under.
2) Add your text link in along with other innocent links.
3) Finally, the text link broker sends the article out to some blog they run.

When I finally got around to publishing some articles, I was in such a rush to see results already that I clean forgot step 2.

To keep itself discrete, this link broker doesn’t tell you what blogs the links are published on. So I couldn’t do a backlink lookup with a backlink research tool, nor could I get any reporting from this broker. (Except that the pieces were published, if memory serves.)

Forgetting to add in the links turned out to be a good thing, I saw later, because my article got posted on a wholly irrelevant blog. And not even an impressive one, that’s well maintained by humans etc. This was an obviously generic creation with no soul. “Take me to the Wizard for a new heart,” it whimpered tinnily.

(Lesson #2: If they sell text links based on automated distribution of articles, and you can’t see the broker’s inventory (to avoid Google smacking it all down), publish some articles with unique phrases in them.

Then Google it and see where it ended up.

Depending how relevant the resultant sites / pages are, you can decide whether to include your links in future articles.

[This is really just the grayhat parallel to the blackhat SEO's comment spam swing dance].)

text link ads on irrelevant websites coming next.>

Now, I know that my point about offtopic sites sounds contradictory to other advice I gave recently, about how it’s the page that matters. Isn’t it irrelevant what the site is about, and only the page relevance matters in determining the link’s value/relevance ?

It depends. It depends on some conditions. Imagine this as a spectrum of relevance.

- If the site is about nothing in particular, like a personal blog, news site or other generic publisher like About.com, then no, it doesn’t matter. The link counts if the page is topical.

- If the sites’ topics have 0 relation, but somehow the page manages to bridge that gap, it’s ok. SEO has no relation to dentistry, but it’s a clean link when I link to my dad’s dental related business from here, because he’s my dad – it’s normal and accepted that I should link to him. And before anyone jumps to conclusions, this text link broker trial was for an affiliate site of mine, not my dad’s business.

- If your site topics overlap and the page is offtopic, it’s not grand (both in terms of traffic and link value), but it won’t hurt.

- If the sites’ topics overlap and the page is relevant, it’s better, simply because the traffic quality will be better. Traffic I get from my guest-posts at Wolf-Howl is pretty good, because our audiences are mostly interested in the same thing.

- If the sites are exactly on the same topic and the page is relevant, it’s money.

- (i) Offtopic sites with (ii) offtopic pages that (iii) don’t bridge the topic gap with the site they’re linking to = Paid links that don’t count.

- Also, (i) Offtopic sites with (ii) relevant pages that (iii) don’t bridge the topic gap with the site they’re linking to = Paid links that don’t count.

The latter type is what I encountered with the text link broker, and it’s why I cancelled the subscription. I dipped my pinky toe in, saw there was an oil slick in the water, and called the President got out.

Finally,

- (i) Offtopic sites with (ii) relevant pages that (iii) DO bridge the topic gap with the site they’re linking to = Paid links that DO count.

So yes, links from offtopic sites do count, including paid links from offtopic sites.

It just depends…

As they say, the devil is in the details.

Liked this post on text link brokers? Check the pros and cons of buying links, pre-published vs post-published text links, 101 tips on discretion in paid link purchases.

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Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Content Marketing Cannon WordPress plugin - Consolidates content for more links, PageRank and traffic. Details: New SEO plugin: Content Marketing Cannon
• Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so you rank like Wikipedia. Details: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.