Central Perk: Scalable Link Building Using Social Media

vineri, 11 noiembrie 2011

Scalable Link Building Using Social Media - Whiteboard Friday

Posted: 10 Nov 2011 12:54 PM PST

This week we are thrilled to have Mike King join us again for another amazing Whiteboard Friday. As marketers and SEOs we all have asked our selves at one time or another how we can use Social Media to build links. Mike lays out a very scalable way to build links for just about any business. Enjoy and share your thoughts below in the comments.

Video Transcription

Greetings and salutations, SEOmoz fans. My name is Michael King, and we're going to talk about scalable link building using social media. Follow me on Twitter, iPullRank.

So the first thing you want to do is identify your audience, and you're going to use industry demographic data from sources like comScore, QuantCast, and Compete. These are paid tools, but they do give you a lot of stuff for free. So just play around with them until you can figure out what you can get.

From there, you also want to use social listening tools. There are a couple of free ones, and there are some paid ones as well. So, the free ones are Social Mention and Amplicate. Basically, what you are going to do is you put in a keyword, and it's going to give you back all the people talking about that keyword. You can use that to figure out who your audience is because what we're going to ultimately do is get to the personas. I'm going to get to that in a second.

There are some paid tools, such as Radian6, Scout Labs, and Alterian SM2. They're really extensive, but they're also kind of expensive. So you may not be able to use those. If you can't, you can get a lot of stuff out of Social Mention and Amplicate.

With all that information, what we're going to do is create four core groups, and these are our personas. They're a representation of the four groups of people in your audience. So, in this case, we have Music Moms, Happy Hobbyists, Raging Rock Stars, and Involved Instructors. So what we've identified, we're talking about a guitar company and these are their audience. What we have identified are these four groups of people.

Music Moms are people that typically have children that are Happy Hobbyists. They're the hip mom who wants to buy the guitar for their son. They're trying to figure out which guitar is best.

Then, you have the Happy Hobbyists. These are the people that make the most content in this space. They've learned all of these cool things from their Involved Instructors, and they're at home on YouTube practicing, showing you their favorite song and they're playing it. They're typically, like I said, learning how to play an instrument.

Raging Rock Stars are typically independent musicians or even celebrity musicians. We would reach out to these people as influencers and for guest posts, things of that nature.

Involved Instructors are the people that are teaching your Happy Hobbyists how to play an instrument, and they're also involved in the conversation, talking about which guitars are the best, which piano should I get my Happy Hobbyist student to buy.

Once we have these people, we figured out what words go with these people, and we can go to Follower Wonk with these keywords and identify them. In the case of Music Moms, you can type in "music mom" and you get a whole list of moms that are into music and may have children that are Happy Hobbyists.

Happy Hobbyists, you could type in "guitar student," and you're going to get a whole bunch of kids that are guitar students. So, what you want to do is use that in concert with the Scraper Tool for Chrome. It's a plug-in, and you can right click one of the names, and it will give you all these people in Google Docs so then you can export them to Excel or whatever it is.

From there, what you want to do is use Knowem.com, and you can put in people's user names and see where they are on the different places throughout social media, because most people use the same user name for all their different social media profiles. For example, Rand Fish, if you put it in Knowem, you see that he has YouTube, SlideShare, MySpace, Squidoo, Foursquare.

You can look at all of these things together and figure out what that person is into and create a mental model and use that for context when you contact them. From there, what you also want to do is create an industry specific persona for yourself. The reason you want to do that is because, let's say you did your link building through Twitter using your SEO Twitter. Then someone came back to your profile and they're looking at all of this stuff about link building. They're not going to believe you. They know that you're just trying to get a link.

It's the same thing as if you were a pickup artist and then you gave your girlfriend a copy of Neil Strauss' book. It's not going to work. No, don't do that. So, create a persona for yourself with all types of information and posts and content about your industry, and that way when people see that, they're like, "Oh, this person is an authority. They're genuine."

Then, what you want to do is make sure that your messaging stands out. If you're going with email, make sure your subjects are short. Make sure your subjects are natural. Don't use link requests in your subject because nobody will ever open it. The whole point of making these messages stand out in the inbox is that they actually open the message. So, you want to send email as a person, not as a company, not as a web theme. You want to send it as an actual person. Then you also want to include a natural citation because that's what shows up on the bar in Gmail, and they're going to get that preview. If it's like "Dear Sir or Madam," they're not going to open it.

Now, Twitter is actually better for outreach link building because people are expecting to be hit up with inane conversation and unsolicited conversation. What you want to make sure you do is converse with context. If they've mention guitars, respond to their question if they had a question or say, "Hey, I saw something that goes with what you're talking about." Don't spam them. Don't just send them a link and be like, "Hey, here's my link. Link to me." No, it doesn't work. Nobody likes spam. You don't like spam.

Escalate quickly. You want to also, as soon as you're in that conversation say, "Hey, follow me so that I can DM you." Then you can take that conversation offline. Then you can get the email easily, stuff like that. You just want to be able to talk to them privately. Then, you need to continually participate. That goes back to this point of create an industry specific persona because that way, if you're participating, you're constantly putting up content related to that thing, and people are like, "Hey, I'm going to follow this guy."

Also, write relevant hashtags. So if it's something about music or something about guitars, post your content, your information with those hashtags, and people will find you, and then it's easier to develop that rapport and then get a link. From there, you also want to continue to offer value. When I say offer value, I don't mean necessarily give them an incentive. If you have something that's entertaining, that they might be into, send them a funny YouTube video. Or if you have a resource that they may not know about, send them that. If it's an infographic, whatever it is. It doesn't even have to be something that's on your site, just something that's relevant to the topic. Send it to them so that you're a valuable resource to them, somebody they might follow on Twitter.

Then, if you do have incentives, you want to dangle the carrot. You don't want to just be like, "Hey, we have free guitars. I can give you a guitar for a link." No, it doesn't work like that. What you want to do is create some sort of contest or campaign around that and invite them to join it.

For example, let's says I have 50 guitars to give away. I would just give them away to 50 people. What I do is I set up a contest where they write a blog post about guitars and link back to our site in question. Then, that way, it becomes a one-to-many thing rather than a one-to-one thing. When it's one-to-one, you get one link per guitar. I don't think that's really worthwhile. But if you can get 100 links per guitar, then it's worth a lot more.

Then, once you've actually closed a link prospect, maintain the rapport, and the best way to do that is just follow them on Twitter with a private list or make a link building circle on Google+. Make it private and just hit them up every once in a while just to maintain that rapport and send them some new content or just keep it going so when you have something else that you want to get a link from, you can easily just contact them, or they may even naturally just link to you again because they've seen that you continue to make awesome content.

So, with that, that's scalable link building using social media. My name is Michael King. Thank you again. Please follow me on Twitter, iPullRank.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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Set It and Forget It SEO: Chasing the Elusive Passive SEO Dream

Posted: 10 Nov 2011 04:02 AM PST

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.

Set It And Forget It 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.

Temporarily Linking to Not-Yet Indexed Pages

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:

Levenshtein Distance

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.

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!

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