10 experimentally proven ways to build links

For some time now I’ve been trying to systematize the process of link building. I just ran a quick experiment on some of my friends / competitors: Anduro, Foundpages and Vovia. As they say, “check what competition does and do better”. This post shows a process I used to define link-building categories as well as a list of these categories. This should help people who’s tasked with on-going link building.

My link building research methodology

1. identified top 3 competitors for “online marketing Calgary“
2. ran all three of them through Yahoo Site Explorer (inbound links from outside domains)
3. saved the TSV files for each of those competitors
4. merged all three files and added two more columns (links to, type of link)
5. went through the list to remove duplicate domains
6. ended up with a list of over 400 sites linking back to my competitors
7. identified the links in one of the following categories

Link building categories identified

• Clients and Partners: this one is self explanatory. Whenever you do a project or partner with somebody ask if they could place a link to your site on theirs. Make sure your anchor text is in order. You can event cut some cost of the project to get that link. However, if you’re thinking of doing it, make sure their site has a significant pagerank (anything above PR4 is good).
• Offline participation: Take part in industry events (as a speaker) or organize your own. Either way there will be link building opportunities. For example, bigger events usually send out an email blast with speakers bio. Ask if you could include a link in that bio, especially if you can anchor link to your site (text “Online marketing expert” linking to your site).
• Online participation:
  • join industry forums, ask questions, give answers, comment, participate. Building links form blog comments has worked well for me. Just make sure you provide quality feedback in your comments. Use StumbleUpon to find relevant blogs to comment on. Don’t overdo it though. Balance with other link building practices.
  • do guest posts: there are plenty of group and individual blogs in your industry. Come out as an expert and write an article in an area of your business. Approach the blog owner and as to contribute with an article. Don’t forget to include properly formatted anchor text in your article. Don’t overdo with the number of links to your site inside the article. 2-3 links is plenty.
  • share your content: if you’re blogging on regular basis, make sure you 1) make sharing your articles easy, 2) you share those article with your network on Twitter, Faceook, StumbleUpon.
• General directories: these are directories like DMOZ, Yahoo! Directory, Business.com, etc. Some are paid, some are free. Just make sure that a listing has an option of linking to your site. Linking with anchor text is ideal.
• Geo-specific directories: Google values local connections. There’s probably a lot of directories in your locale. Make sure you are there. I’m looking at my competitors and they’re in most of the local directories.
• Thematic directories: Doing a quick Google search for ” “your indsutry” AND “directory” ” will probably give you a list of directories in your specific industry. They will be from all over the world but they will be theme specific. Engines like when your site is on the list with other relevant resources.
• In the media: One of my competitors got mentioned in a very powerful news source. Think industry specific (Mashable, TechCrunch) and geo-specific (Calgary Herald, Calgary Sun). If you have a news worthy story, I suggest you connect with your local reporters on the topic. Even if you don’t think you have a story, still connect, find out what the trends are and what the reporter is writing like. Make this connection! (courtesy of Never Eat Alone by Keith Ferazzi).
• Link-bait and quality content development: It’s a great sign when others link to specific posts on your site. Engine love that and they thing that your site has developed natural authority among like-minded people. Having a link from a relevant site is worth a lot, so I suggest you invest time into quality content development.

I hope that all makes sense. Feel free to let me know what other proven ways you found useful.

Social media monitoring: LAR model revisited

Late last year when I worked at Apis Design, we blogged about a simple social media monitoring process and we called it LAR model. LAR stands for Listen, Analyze and Respond. Recently I’ve been looking at web monitoring more closely and identified one more step – Measure. This post will go over the key stages of this new updated model.

Listen to social media space

Listening is the most important business skill. It does not only help you communicate but it also saves you from saying stupid things. Listen first – is the golden rule. In social media listening is even more important. Knowing people’s problems first helps you get to the right conversations at the right time. Once you’re able to understand what the problem is it’s way easier to solve it, thereby building a stronger relationship. There are a few tools that will help you get better at listening. I like Google Reader. And, as I promised to some of my colleagues, I’m working on creating a step by step guide on how to use it to monitor social media.

Analyze your results

Once you set your social media monitor (a tutorial is coming up in a couple of weeks), and get a list of relevant news items, it’s time to look at the list and do some analysis. It’s actually much simpler than it sounds, no semantic analysis involved at this stage yet. All you need to know if that you are looking for either opportunities or threats in those news items. Some things may hurt your business and you should look though the list to pinpoint those. On the other hand, spotting the right opportunity will get you a raise or increase market share of your company.

Look at it from a funnel perspective:

• first you have a large list filled with tonnes of irrelevant information
• then you filter all the garbage out and are left with a smaller list with only the items that are relevant
• finally, at the end of your analysis stage, you should end up with a small list of actionable items, which will graduate you to the next step – engage!

Engage in social media

Social media engagement is a tricky thing. Many people start their social media journey with it. They create a Twitter account, start a Facebook page and a Youtube channel. And the most common question is “what do I do now?”. In this case, you’ll notice that engagement only comes after we listened and understood the problems our audience is having. By this stage, you’ll probably have a few solutions ready. Now you can go out and start solving problems by still listening to relevant conversations (either via Google Alerts, Google Reader or using real-time search tools like search.twitter.com). I won’t go into a lot of details here, but I will commit to write a process guide to this and other stages of this social media monitoring process.

Measure social media engagement

By now, you will have engaged into a few conversations on Twitter, Facebook pages or Linkedin and will want to see what works and what does not. This crucial stage does not necessarily have to be the last. Some social media tool providers have it second after listening. Having it last is just my interpretation of the process. Anyways, at this stage we start talking about ROIs, different ways to measure your social media engagement and some hard numbers.

Believe it or not :), defining your social media engagement is not as straightforward. I’m not saying it’s difficult, I’m saying it’s not always as simple as previous 3 stages. The main reason is that something that worked for one audience in one market does not necessarily have to work in others. There are things though that are general enough and can be applied to different cases. And this is exactly the topic of a separate guide on how to measure social media engagement. And, guess what? It’s coming up!

I recently presented this model at one of Calgary’s meetup groups. The presentation is available on my online marketing presentations page. Let me know if you have questions or feel that I’m missing something.

Website SEO: Maintenance, step 7

Once your site has a solid base: clear understanding of your product and the audience, strong keywords, proper SEO implementation, etc. it’s much easier to build on it. This article is about being consistent when we talk about online marketing and SEO.

Content development

Content development is about creating original and fresh content. This is exactly what shows search engines that your site is growing, contributing to the universe. This should be the key element of your SEO maintenance strategy. A few things to note:

• Articles frequencies: frequency of new content is important. Often it does not matter how what the time interval between updates is, as long as it’s regular (i.e. weekly articles is usually a good way to start). Once you’re comfortable with this frequency (and you start getting returning visitors for new portions of knowledge), you can start increasing the frequency to twice a week, three times a week and daily articles.
• Article length: there are many different perspectives on it. The average number of words in a good article varies from 400 to 700. Make sure it’s not too long (people have different reading behaviours online as opposed to reading books, magazines and newspapers). Make sure it’s long enough to convey your points with an intro, body and conclusion sections.

Content distribution

Once your article is written, it’s time to get it distributed. Yes, Google will eventually pick up on new content. However, distributing your articles once they are written make your content index even faster (usually within a matter of minutes / hours). There’s a few things that will help you:

• Ping services: ping is kind of like a “poke” on Facebook. It’s about letting search engines know that you’ve got new content. There are many services (paid and free) that will ping search engines for you. Here’s a list of ping sites I use in my WordPress. This ensures that every time there’s a post, a ping is sent to all those 40+ services. To learn more about pinging Google: ping services.
• Share + bookmark: If you’re using Wordress to produce and manage your articles like I do, you should have a AddToAny plugin installed. This plugin adds sharing / bookmarking button to the end of your articles. This way readers can save / bookmark or share the article for later review or to share with friends. Other blogging platforms should also have similar plugins. If you don’t have a blog platform like Wordress, Joomla, etc. you can use their non-plugin service at AddToAny. I use this sharing button to manually bookmark and share my new articles with the network of my social profiles.
• Online press releases: There is a few different services aimed at distributing your press releases online (PRWeb, Marketwire, Google: online pr distribution for more options). Your PR release is your new article. Before sending it in, make sure you follow all the guidelines (usually on a vendor website) as well as keep an eye on proper anchor formats to get the most out of those releases. This way of distribution will not only get you indexed fast but also will generate a number of links to your site. And, as a bonus, if your article gets published in a quality publication, you get the bragging rights.
• Guest posts are a good practice to have. Pick a few sites / blogs in your area of expertise, ask if you can send them your weekly articles. They’re usually looking for content and will be happy to feature yours. Then, start sending your articles to them on weekly basis. Not all of them will get published but the ones that do will be worth it. IMPORTANT: make sure each of your articles includes properly anchored link to your site.

Link building

Link building has to be periodic. It’s not enough to bulk-link-build in the beginning. It’s about gaining authority with search engines and the process is continuous. Search engines need to see that there’s consistent increase in the number and quality of sites linking back to you over a period of time. That is why gradual link building is much more important than one time. There’s a few things you can do here:

• Engage in link bait: Link bait is about creating quality content on your sites in hopes that the community finds it useful and starts linking back to it. In other words link bait is creating link-worthy content. There are a few things that characterize a good link bait article.
• Read and participate: As you read industry periodicals make sure you share your opinion (if you have one of course, don’t just leave a comment for the sake of link building, they will get deleted) and engage in conversation on blogs. Ensure that every time you leave a quality comment you get a quality credit in a form of a good anchor.
• Hire a link builder: I know, this is controversial. And many SEOs will disagree with this. Although I’m a firm believer in quality link building through articles and community participation, I still think that the number growth in links matters. At the end of each month I’m tracking both links I generated as a result of my community engagement as well as links that were generated for me by a lower cost provider. Time and experimentation will tell, but for now let’s leave it at that.

Website analytics

Analytics is super important, especially in the age of it being so affordable through Google Analytics. Establish goals (usually done at step 5 of my process. Use Google Analytics to check how you did this month. Make adjustments to your efforts as needed. Sometimes it’s better to leave things as they are for another reporting period. Some results may take time to show.

A few other things:

• Avoid drastic changes to your site structure (category / directory changes, page name changes)
• Read SEO resources to stay up to date on the industry of search engine marketing

This concludes my 7-step SEO process. I hope it was helpful in defining the key stages of SEO for your new website. One thing to remember: it’s all about creating quality content consistently. I encourage you to comment and add your observations to each of the articles in this series.

Website SEO: Think about it, step 1

This is the first article in the series “Online marketing and SEO, launching a new site“. Today I want to talk about the first and the most crucial step in any SEO endeavor: think about your product and SEO.

Even before getting into keyword research, looking at the tools and trying to understand what people are searching for, it’s crucial to make sure you clearly understand what you’re selling. These are a few questions to ask yourself:

1. What it is that I’m selling? What are the 3-4 word combinations that can clearly describe my product?
2. Who’s my target market? What’s my target market’s decision making process?
3. What are the companies that sell similar product? How are they referring to their product online?

Feel free to talk to a friend or colleague to come up with relevant terms for your product. However, don’t fall into a trap of thinking that people are using the terms that you would use. I will address this in my next post: Keyword Research. For now, the goal is to come up with a list of a few terms that describe your product according to you, your friend, your competition.