Popular Link Research Tools

The Common Back Links Tool:  This back links tool finds links that are linking to at least two domains, or specific pages, that you choose to compare.  One good reason to use this tool: if you compare two competitor sites, you will likely find links that you may have an opportunity to gain.

The SERP Research Tool This tool is one of my favorites.  It allows you to search for potential places to post your link, using your keywords to make sure the pages are relevant.  It also checks to make sure you haven’t already posted a link in that location, because if you post several links a. you’re annoying and b. it looks spammy.  (Your common (SEO) sense comes in to play here – this is a great way to find links to post on but if you aren’t posting something useful, you are going to look spammy even if you only post once.)

The Competitive Landscape Analyzer This tool basically compares you with your competitors, head to head, across several SEO metrics.  It can help you determine a strategy by pointing out your strengths and weaknesses.

The Backlink Profiler This tool looks up all of the backlinks for a domain and brings you back loads of information about each one.  With this tool, you can see the anchor text, the type of link (follow, no-follow), and what type of site is linking to you (blog, forum, directory, etc.).  Beyond the ability to find additional links, if you check out a competitor’s backlinks, you can also use this tool to organize and categorize your current links.

What Sets Link Research Tools Apart?

In talking to a Link Research Tools representative, my first question was to ask them how they differed from other SEO tools.  According to the representative, one of their major pulls stems from the fact that many other SEO tools (including SEOmoz) have their own pre-crawled and pre-analyzed data, which allows them to do analysis based on a limited number of metrics (mozRank, Page & Domain Authority, etc.) very, very quickly.  Also, for link data, although it the data is pulled quickly, it is very often outdated because they don’t know when a link goes down until they re-crawl the page on which the link should be.

Link Research Tools use not one but more than 20 different data sources and support approximately 50 different metrics – including all the SEOmoz metrics, but also many, many more. Additionally, Link Research Tools crawl all the data live, which means that the data in a report is never outdated. With Link Research Tools, you can be 100% sure that every single link you see in a Backlink Profiler report that is marked as “Follow” is actually still follow. Dropped links are marked as “[LinkNotFound]” (or ignored, if you have the Superhero package and choose to ignore dropped links from your report).

Also, according to the representative, Link Research Tools actually have a number of metrics that *no* other SEO tool, as far as he knows.  (I don’t know of any other tools that have these metrics either, so if you’ve heard of similar tools, I’d love to hear about them!) Link Research Tools exclusive metrics include the “Theme”, which shows you the topic a site has and is great for the analysis of the thematical relevance of the backlinks for a site.  They also have the “SiteType”, which shows the type of software that’s behind the site, like Blog, Forum or CMS. Link Research Tools also support social metrics like Facebook Likes, Retweets, etc.  I could glady talk all day about the (increasing) importance of social media in your SEO efforts but that’s another blog post.

If you look at the Case Studies at http://www.linkresearchtools.com/case-studies/ you’ll find that these metrics, exclusive to Link Research Tools, can actually matter quite a bit.

The downfall to Link Research Tools, is that it takes some time.  In order to aggregate loads of new data, you have to wait anywhere from a few minutes to an hour.  The length of time a report takes is proportional to the size of report and the number of metrics selected, so it’s not entirely out of your control if you need to run a few reports ASAP.   All in all, that’s a small price to pay for good data (and lots of it!), there are some tools that we use here at Hanapin that require us to run reports over night because they take so long.  Like I said, for good data, it’s worth it.

I’d love to hear a rebuttle from other representatives, namely an SEOmoz representative, since SEOmoz is widely known and was used as a benchmark in several comparisons.  Both Link Research Tools and the SEOmoz tools are very helpful in analyzing SEO efforts, especially linkbuilding.  There are pros and cons of all tools but the larger your toobox is, the more opportunities you have to build a strong search engine marketing strategy for your site.

Looking back across my shares, obviously they are subjects that I’m interested in and bring some sort of worth to my life.  So how do we begin to apply this to content created just for the links (aka link bait)?  We know what we like when we see it, but can we define the characteristics that make us like it?

Link bait has changed drastically since its inception, and it will continue to develop as technology continues to grow and change.   It’s important to remember that link bait is not limited to a list.  Creativity in link bait is key, and there are truly endless possibilities for creating the next cool thing.  That being said, here are a few examples with my not-so-humble opinion alongside some of them:

• Widgets and useful tools
• Images/Cartoons/Illustrations – (E.g. The Oatmeal is a natural link baiter).
• Groundbreaking information or research
• Controversy
• Videos
• Using Tweets/Facebook and sites like Digg, Reddit, and Stumble Upon
• Infographics
• Quizzes (With a pay off – Maybe your quiz generates an automatic Tweet for your account with a link back to the website?)
• Polls and surveys (*yawn*)
• Contests (Prizes!)
• Guest bloggers and interviews (think thought leaders and popular writers)

The Je ne sais quoi.

I don’t have a full-proof process on creating link bait.  There are folks out there that have outlined processes (several of which I’ve read) with basic step-by-step creative suggestions.  My answer is that you can’t really put great link bait in a box, because it’s going to need to change as people become bored with the same old thing.  Here are my observations on what makes me link, or the je ne sais quoi.

You can’t plan viral. You just can’t.  You can, however, bounce ideas of off the people you work with and put your best people to work on creating the link bait.  You can also work at understanding what your target audience wants to see, and preparing yourself for the chance that something you put out goes viral.  If it does go viral – how do you handle it?  Are you prepared for increased traffic, sales, and the need to make more to keep it going?

Since everything can’t be viral, know that anything can fail. That SEO article you spent days writing with amazing, unheard of information, controversy, and pretty pictures – can fail.  Not because it isn’t good, but because maybe it wasn’t the right content for your audience, or maybe you didn’t promote it well.

Link bait needs promotion. The Internet is huge, and throwing an article out into cyber space isn’t automatically going to help increase traffic, branding or potential customers.

Good link bait isn’t lazy. Well, sort of.  If we’re talking about a really clever meme, then sure, it could be.  If we’re talking about a real investment, then you need to hire the right people who can execute it the right way, whether you need graphic artists, writers or programmers, if you’re serious about doing something right, then don’t let your teenage intern do it (unless they have wicked, good skills).

Link bait is ground breaking. You don’t need to have the cure for cancer in your link bait, but people appreciate innovative ideas.  If you put a poll up on your website, you might have people stop by and share their opinion, but are they likely to spend time sending that poll to their friends or blogging about it? I can honestly say that I’ve never shared a poll or survey.  They don’t really have a way of pulling interest or sparking debate for me.

Link bait shares a common interest. Think about your industry, and I mean truly think about it.  What sort of things do you run into on a daily basis that you can turn into link bait?  Turn those daily problems into a solution for your readers, or even a comical cartoon on how frustrating it is.  Your readers want to be able to relate to you, and when they can find that common ground, links will come.

Link bait is personal: people share things because the content either made them laugh, reflect, bond, or brag.

Link bait is a bit selfish. I don’t mean this to sound negative, but anything you create is to get people to read, comment, and link to YOUR site.  Anything that someone decides to share is in order to be seen as trendy or innovative.  There’s a sort of excitement in being one of the first people to share something new.  Sure you’re interested in spreading your ideas or getting a discussion going, but at the end of the day, it’s selfish and there’s really nothing wrong with that.

Link bait should be measured. We are marketers, and thus, need to remember that everything we spend time on needs to be given some sort of measurable value.  How are you going to measure your ROI and determine if your link bait was worth it?

Links are important to SEO. We know this, and we embrace this.  The problem with links is they can be difficult to get, and link building itself is a very time consuming process.  Developing good link bait will help your website acquire natural links from others.

For more thoughts on great link bait, check out Abby’s article on awesome purple cows. ; )

Sure, linkbuilding is partially under your control but let’s face it: it takes two.  Linkbuilding is all about building a relationship and, as in every other twosome, no one will agree to a relationship unless it benefits both parties.  These tools will help you find sites that will benefit your site.  Plus, if you do your research correctly, these sites will be within your niche and could possibly even benefit from hosting your link.  If you have to, get creative, find a way that the other site would profit from linking to your site, that’s the only way they are going to consider it.  Oh, and make it believable.

Getting Started

Take it back to the basics.  Search for your most popular keywords and see what the top results are.  This is the position you’re shooting for, right?  Aside from being optimized well (might as well peak around at their optimization tactics, while you’re there), the top results likely have a lot of ‘link juice’, so that’s always a good place to start.  Of course, you’ll have to browse through a few sites in order to find some that might be willing to link to you.  (Your competitors are no more likely to link to you than you are to link to them.)  Specifically check for blogs, (hint: use Google’s blog SERP) because it’s their job to come up with new and interesting content, apps, and SAAS to share with their readers.

Competitive Link Finders

Think about the terms that you are targeting and consider comparing yourself to other sites competing for the same term.  You can use several tools to determine which sites are ranking to the competing sites.  Chances are, if the site is linking to one or more of your competitors, they may consider linking to your site as well!  There are a few good tools to analyze your competition: specifically, one of my favorites from SEOmoz, Competitive Link Research tool, will tell you which sites are linking to more than one of your competitors plus whether or not you’ve acquired a link or not.  Other good tools include The Langreiter Tool or GoogeGuy.de, and Opensite Explorer, which are great for directly comparing your sites inbound links against your competitors.

BackLink Finders

Backlink finders are good for multiple reasons.  Backlink finders are good for determining which sites are already linking to you and they are also handy for competitive research, as previously discussed.  After finding the sites already linking to yours, you can use the information to check the anchor text as well as the information surrounding it to ensure that it is up to date and the anchor text, optimized.   If not, send a friendly email asking for an update.  You can also use this information to brainstorm similar sites that might consider linking.

Backlink Analyzer handles almost all of your dirty work for you, using data taken from both MSN and Google, which contains anchor text analysis as well as ooutbound link information.  It should be noted that it requires an API key for Google results.

Linkscape is a simple tool, which analyzes your inbound links based on page authority and page rank.  You can also use it to look into your anchor text.

Xenu Link Sleuth is a downloadable software that makes it quick and simple to find broken links on your site. Link Valet does the same but doesn’t require download. Both are very fast and run an easy to read report.

Potential Link Finders

These tools can be used to find sites that may consider linking to yours based on information that you submit, which generally includes your URL and top keywords, among other things.

BackLink Builder looks for sites that are currently ranking well for the keywords you’ve defined and also looks for phrases such as “submit site” and “add link”.  Both SoloSEO and Backlink Builder return themed directories and forums. These tools make it much easier to find relevant sites to add your links to without too much elbow grease.

Juicy Link Finder is a great tool for finding a large amount of links that are considered an authority for the terms you’re interested in targeting.  Type in keywords and it will spit out up to 200 potential link opportunities.    Prepare to sift through the results, though.  Just because these pages are ranked for the terms doesn’t mean they’ll be interested in outbound linking.

With Link Acquisition Assistant, you’ll fill out your website, brand, topic, industry, and location and it will return potential sites that it deems relative.

Determining Page Rank and Authority

Historical Pagerank Checker contains pagerank information as far back as 2007.  Remember, high quality links are going to give you the best results so focus on the links with the highest pagerank.

Bad Neighborhood Tool is great for checking out the sites that you are linking to.  Remember, you are guilty by association.  Make sure that your outbound links, if you must have any, should be directed at high quality, authority sites.  Use this tool to make sure that you are doing just so.

I think most search engine optimization specialists would agree that linkbuilding tools are really only good for the research phase.  Attempting to automate the linkbuilding process is most likely going to result in faulty attempts to mass-request links and of course a lack of personalization in said requests.  Since most everyone is looking to receive inbound links without giving outbound links, you will only receive a small percentage of the links that you request, so my advice is to come up with a huge list of potentials and create a spreadsheet documenting the exact URL you requested a link from, contact information, the anchor text you suggested, and the date you last contacted them.  From there, you can document the response and if you don’t receive a response, check back in a few weeks!  For more detailed information, check out Jessica and Jenny’s posts on improving your link building techniques including linkbuilding tools and other suggestions.

1. Set your goals. As I mentioned before, blogs are a great way to reach your audience, and give them up-to-date information about your industry, company, and even employees (because after all, they are the most important part of your business!).  However, which of these are important to YOU? What do YOU want to accomplish from your blog? Setting your goals up front will save you many headaches later on, because everyone involved will know what you are trying to do with each post. Based on your goal(s), identify the key performance indicators (KPIs) that you want to monitor, and make sure you have accurate tracking from the beginning.
2. Be consistent! Yes, I’m sure you’ve heard this a million times before – be consistent in your posting. However, this truly is important. If you sporadically post, how will your readers know when to check back? If you aren’t consistent you won’t create a solid reader base – no matter how great your articles are.

Solution: Create a calendar. There are a TON of ways to create a calendar (I like to use excel), you just need to make sure it’s functional for everyone involved. A good rule of thumb is to create a calendar one month in advance, and have it finalized about a week before the current month is over. That way your team can review the schedule, and let you know if there are any conflicts well in advance.

If you split the blog writing with your client or another team, don’t be afraid to use some color on the calendar so everyone knows what they are responsible for.

3. Be unique. When choosing your topic, keeping it fresh will also (more than likely) keep it interesting. Would you want to read a blog post about the same exact thing that 20 other industry blogs have covered….all this month? Nope. And neither would your audience. And if you find yourself in a position where you do have to cover the same topic as everyone else – find a new angle. Play devils advocate, and stir up some conversation – what better way is there to not only get people to read your post, but get them to interact with you? (Disclaimer – please do this with moderation, I’m not recommending you start a huge controversy!)
4. Length matters. Make sure your word count is exactly….well, exactly what you need it to be. There are multiple posts from respectable blogs out there that give a standard of anywhere from 250-600 (this number varies by industry). But instead of being focused on an exact length, it should be much more important that your posts are thorough and of high quality. If you are reaching to hit a minimum, you’ll more than likely add fluff words, and let’s face it – that’s really just wasting the valuable time of your readers.

On the other hand, each post should answer the questions of your readers. A great way to keep an eye on this is to review the comments. If you find that there are quite a few questions coming through asking for clarification or additional information, you should really try to challenge yourself to be more thorough in their research and writing. Before writing each post, write out a list of the questions you originally had, and be sure to answer them. You can also review other posts on the topic, and see what those comments were.

5. Make your English teacher proud. You don’t want people asking “who learned her to spoke?” so keep your grammar, spelling and punctuation in check.  We have all been in a place where you are up against a deadline, and you have to crank out a post. Though you may typically have plenty of time to review your article before posting, it’s always a good idea to get a fresh pair of eyes on it first. Set up a final review system with your team, and share the responsibility of reviewing each post.
6. Easy reading, please! Blog readers decide in the first minute if they are going to continue reading or not, so you need to format your blog post in a way that is easy to skim, and also easy to read. Keep your thoughts in a well-organized layout, being sure to use headlines, paragraphs and bullets.
7. Comments welcome! I know it’s hard to believe, but not everyone will agree with you on everything – and that’s ok! But before you begin blogging, you need to have a clearly defined plan for handling comments. First and foremost, you need to decide if you will allow them. If you decide to let them in, what guidelines will your internal team need to follow before approving them? And how will you handle less than positive comments? Having a plan of action in place BEFORE a negative comment happens will help your team be sure to respond in a timely manner.
8. Be social. Do you have an RSS feed set up? Can people request to be on your email list? Do you tweet about your latest and greatest posts? Can people like you on Facebook? You better hope so! It’s important to let your readers have options when they share your content, as they will more than likely all have a different favorite. Keep this in mind when writing too; a few tweetable phrases here and there never hurt anyone!
9. Be mindful of SEO. Yes, I saved this for last for a reason. A blog is a perfect way to enhance your SEO efforts. You are creating fresh, unique, highly relevant content, so why would you miss the opportunity to optimize each article? Before posting, be sure you create a catchy title that contains your core/target keyword, and an optimized meta description under 160 characters long. You should also be sure to crosslink throughout the post, using optimized anchor text for each. And if you include images, be sure to give them good alt tags.

One of the great benefits of blogging is increased link building, which makes sense. Each piece of content you create has the chance of being linked to, which in turn gives you more credibility with the search engines, and increases your ranking. In fact, Hubspot did a study about blogging for small businesses which showed the following pretty cool stats:

Whether you are planning on starting a blog in the coming year, or you want to dust the cobwebs off the one you forgot about long ago, I hope these 9 steps were a good recap for you of past posts of tips for bloggers new and old, and gets you off to a good start. We’re always looking for ways to stay organized and efficient, so please send along any other suggestions you have!

Those setting up sites should be conscientious of the effects their URLs are capable of having in terms of search engine rank.  It is infinitely easier to do this the right way from the get-go, as opposed to going back and changing the URLs later in the game.  HOWEVER, if you have a pre-existing site, read on; you can change your URLs to optimize your site, it’s just a little more work.  It’s important to keep your URL structure consistent throughout the entire site, so you will need to change your whole site not just a few pages.

Without further ado, let’s start with the basics of URL optimization:

Keep it Short and Sweet:

Google’s crawlers put less weight on terms to the far right of the domain.  In other words, the closer the keyword is to the domain, the higher the value it is given.  It’s recommended that keywords are no further than the third to fifth term to the right.  Also, according to a study, shorter URL’s are clicked more often than their longer counterparts.

All Keywords Are Not Created Equal

Sure, having keywords in the URL are more beneficial than no keywords at all.  Keywords in spot 5 or before, are better than keywords after term 5.  Also, keywords in the filename position are better than keywords in the subdirectory or subdirectory name.

Your  Personality Should be Dynamic, Your  URLs Should Not

Search engines prefer static URLs over dynamic URLs, meaning your URLs should not contain ampersands, equal  signs, or question marks.   However, if you must have dynamic URLs , cut it down to what you really need.  This goes back to bullet one, keep it short and sweet.

Keyword Separation

Keywords should be separated by hyphens.  This makes it easier to read for people and for search engines to understand your URL structure as well as where each keyword ends and another begins.  Hyphens are best practice over underscores, although that may change in the future.  Try, if possible, not to use hyphens in the domain.

Sometimes Less is More

As we all know, search engines do not like to be fooled.  That being said, there are serious consequences for keyword stuffing.  Although, you most likely won’t get penalized too hard for keyword stuffing your URLs, it’s still bad practice.  Pick the best 2-5 keywords and try to utilize those in the URL as well as throughout the content and metadata.  Anymore than that starts to look spammy.

Change is Bad

Your URLs should remain unchanged so that search engines are able to find the pages that they had previously indexed.  If you would like to change the structure, you should redirect your old URL to the new URL. This will ensure that Google and other search engines are able to transfer your link juice and PageRank without hurting your site.

Don’t Save The Best For Last

Some search engines discount pages with a large directory depth.  A directory depth works like this:

www.Domain.com has a directory depth of 0.

www.Domain.com/directory has a directory depth of 1.

www.Domain.com/directory/subdirectory has a directory depth of 2.  (Notice, there are two backslashes)

There aren’t usually indexing issues because of directory depth but the weight can be discounted for pages that are multiple levels down in the directory structure because some search engines considering the pages nearest the domain to be the most important pages on the site.  Generally you should keep your content up to 2 or 3 subfolders deep in URLs and separate multiple keywords with dashes.

On that same note, directory names should be created for the search engines and for users.  As previously discussed, directory names should contain keywords so that search engines and humans can identify what the page is about.

To ‘www’ Or Not to ‘www’? That is The Question.

It’s common practice for people to create multiple URLs for one web page. I.E. you might want domain,com and www.domain.com, to make sure you are catching all traffic but beware, search engines treat each URL as a unique site and, thus, view this as duplicate content.

So you pick one URL, then what happens to the rest of the traffic?  The best practice to combat this issue, Is to create a permanent 301 redirect to forward your home page URL to a preferred domain.  You can use Google Webmaster Tools to set up the preferences for the www or non-www version.

Ditch the I.D.

Each time the spider comes to a URL with a session I.D., it find a different URL.  As we just discussed, the spiders view each URL as a unique page so a URL with a unique session I.D. appears to be a duplicate page, and Google assigns zero importance.  Then, when the Googlebot tries to crawl the original page, it receives an error.  Plus, everyone linking to your page will be linking to a different URL, which means every inbound link will be directed to different URLs and will not improve your page rank.

If you follow all of these tips, you should have a well optimized foundation for your site.  Next, I’d suggest creating metadata and writing content for each page, remembering to use the keywords that you had chosen for your URLs.  Since the keyword research is out of the way, you’ve paved the way for a speedy optimization process!

To help simplify link building efforts, we use some templates to track our activities, so I have included those here as well for your reference- specialize to your needs as necessary! Many thanks to my co-bloggers, Jenny, Caleb, Rob, and Bethany for sharing their knowledge on these subjects.

Why is link building important?

Link building is important on two levels.

1. It increases (when done correctly) your websites page rank.
2. It increases your websites reach, user-base, and customer knowledge/confidence.

The first point goes hand-in-hand with our goals for our SEO clients. Good links help our sites rank higher in search engines. Google’s stance on links and their results:

Google and most other search engines use links to determine reputation. A site’s ranking in Google search results is partly based on analysis of those sites that link to it. Link-based analysis is an extremely useful way of measuring a site’s value, and has greatly improved the quality of web search. Both the quantity and, more importantly, the quality of links count towards this rating.

It’s important to not forget the second point however as a site’s users should be the most important aspect of any site. Although as SEOs, we often only think about how our link building strategy is going to increase our rankings, Google recommends thinking about the customer first:

Our general advice is: Always focus on the users and not on search engines when developing your optimization strategy. Ask yourself what creates value for your users. Investing in the quality of your content and thereby earning natural backlinks benefits both the users and drives more qualified traffic to your site.

What types of sites are most helpful in improving your page rank?

The most important thing to remember when building links is that you want every link to be relevant to your site and you want to avoid link-building scams. Some sites do have more weight than others. Finding a few well targeted links to your site can be more effective than having several average links and is certainly more effective than have LOTS of terrible links. Here is a list of generalized high quality links:

• Sites with .edu
• Sites with .gov
• Sites with .org
• Directories – the more specific the better
• Informative .com’s that are topic specific (blogs and Forums)
• Any site that is an authority on your subject (high PageRank)

Keep in mind that some of these sites might not directly improve your page rank but the overall effect could be tremendous. Blogs and Forums are a good example of this. While you might not gain a lot from a link on a forum, the effect of that link spreading through the forum users is the real payoff.

What tools can you use for link building?

• SEOmoz – the mozBar

• SEOmoz Linkscape: In the full version, users cannot only judge the quality and quantity of links to their own web pages, but to their competitors as well. Users can compare number of links, number of domains and domain ranking side-by-side against competitor sites. Users can also determine the keywords competitor sites are targeting in their anchor text and identify competitors’ most powerful links.

• Competitive Link Finder: This tool will tell identify all of the websites where multiple competitors are being linked to and identify whether or not your website is being linked to also, clearly identifying which websites to reach out to. Not only are these sites also likely to be relevant to an industry, but they also have a much greater chance of being willing to add additional links to other relevant pages, i.e. your client.

• Open Site Explorer: Not only can you break down this information by internal or external links, nofollow, 301s etc., but it also displays the authority of the page, and the anchor text, used to save you from even having to load each individual page and see for yourself. You can save hours scanning down this list to get a quick idea of how various competitors are ranking for certain keywords and then check out those sites that seem to offer the best quality links, in more detail and directly contact each webmaster to recommend my client’s websites for inclusion.

• Juicy Link Finder: The Juicy Link Finder is intended to find links that have authority – old domains with a high PageRank that rank well for the keyword you enter. It returns a list of the top 50, 100, 150, or 200 pages ranked at Google for your target keyword and allows you to sort them according to age (when the domain was first spidered), position, and PageRank. You can also download the list of juicy links in CSV format.

• Link Acquisition Assistant
  Find high value link opportunity queries automatically by entering details about your site.

• Xenu Link Sleuth – Downloadable software which makes it fast and easy to find broken links on your site. Link Valet does the same but doesn’t require download. Both are very fast and run an easy to read report.

• Template that can be used to track link building efforts

SEO_Linkbuilding_Template

• What creative avenues should you think about using to make sure you expand your reach?

• Blogger Outreach (Thought Leaders, Industry blogs, niche blogs)
• PR Directories (if appropriate)
• Blogger, Twitter & Facebook Influencers
• Niche social media
• Local Links
• Link bait (budget, time, reward)
• http://dofollow.info/

Socially Engaging

• Guest blogging
• Retweeting
• Commenting (blogs, Social Networks)

• Are reciprocal links good or bad? Why were they considered bad to begin with? Do they carry any weight?

There are two main advantages to non-reciprocal links as opposed to reciprocal links. The first is that these links will hold more weight, as they aren’t reciprocated (the search engines can detect whether links are reciprocal). The second advantage is that they don’t have to be monitored as closely as reciprocal links. With reciprocal links one has to be aware of unethical webmasters who will take links down or use other tactics to insure that the search engines don’t see the links pages. You have to be aware of these events so that you can remove their links from your site if warranted however with non-reciprocal links you don’t have to be as concerned as you’re not linking to them.

In addition to the basics, think outside the box! What tools can you use to find influencers, blog writers, etc.?

Goals to establish and Questions to ask:

What do they blog about? How many readers? How many followers? How many fans? Do they allow promotions? How should you approach them?

Research

Build a large list and narrow down

Build the right list – Check to make sure they are still blogging, blog frequently, and they still accept marketing/pr pitches

Go for smaller niche blogs, and follow their blogrolls

TOOLS: Search for individual blogs/bloggers or keyword categories

Google Blog Search

Post Rank

Technorati

AllTop

Measuring Influence

Technorati  – Find Blogger authority (influence), link count

Google Reader

Bloglines

We Follow – Twitter Followers

Alexa

Klout – Twitter influence

Google Page Rank

Start the Relationship

Set up Google Reader, Google Alerts

Follow on Twitter

Hootsuite

Reach out via social media first

The Pitch

Then contact through email or Twitter DM

Personalize the email in a 5 Sentence Pitch = Compliment, Who you are, what you are promoting, Do they want to review

Be up front

The Follow-Up

Thank you

Canned information

Reminder Email (a few days before the launch)

We all know link building is important, but we also all know that it can be both time-consuming and sometimes a challenge in terms of actual valuable link acquisition. With some creativity and foresight as discussed, you can make the job a bit more interesting for yourself (and increase your likelihood of success), and track your results more accurately.

How will press releases do this, you ask? Well, good press releases on your site are also crawled by search engines, ultimately affecting your page rank. Also, these articles that you release can (and will) be noticed by your consumers and other journalists. It’s important to have good releases for your potential customers, but it’s more important to be noticed by other media outlets, as they may mention you and/or link to your press release. This will help your page rank, as to be discussed in the strategies below.

To start, here are a few strategies to both write great press releases, and also get noticed by search engines, customers, and other media outlets.

• Writ somethin well Write something worth reading.

This goes without saying—write something worth reading. An interesting article is the first step to getting your press releases noticed. More people will mention your article, it will have more people linking to it (which is discussed some in point three), and basically it will help to get more traffic to your site. And please, make sure that your writing is error free, as grammatical errors will make you look unprofessional—like this.

• Don’t trash old content!

Always be sure to keep an archive of all your previous press releases, unless of course you have some embarrassing misprint. All joking aside, this archive can serve as a valuable resource to both you and anyone else looking to cover/interview your company. It gives a substantial background of your company, it establishes a brand history, it keeps you from reprinting old stories as you know what you have discussed already, and also it serves as a way to monitor responses to your news as people comment on your site about the releases. Also, if your company has any substantial accomplishments or awards, this is a great way to share them with the world, even if they happened years ago. Make these milestone archives much easier to access.

• Link to the good stuff

Not to imply that your site isn’t the “good stuff,” but let’s face it—if you are reading this blog you need advice on how to get noticed, so like the cool kid at prom we’ll let you in on a secret or two. If your article is talking about a trending topic, link back to where you heard it first. A lot of news sites or bloggers check to see where their clicks are coming from, and if they notice that you are driving a lot of traffic their way, you might be able to gain a link out of it. This will help your “authority” in the eyes of the search engines, and up your page rank. More people will read your release, and if all goes well, this will drive more traffic and potential customers to your site. So remember—its all in the links.

• If you get noticed, let everyone know!

No, this doesn’t involve being a braggart in the conventional way, but if a large media outlet links to your article or website, make note of it. This can be as simple as a headline or banner on your website, to as substantial as a “Featured on” section with its own distinct web page. This garners considerably more legitimacy in the eyes of a consumer or journalist, and could either get you more conversions/clicks, or could influence some other sites to link to you or mention your site as well. And as mentioned earlier, the more links coming in to your site, the higher you will rank in the search engines.

• This is one more page to optimize

Press releases aren’t granted a free pass in the eyes of the search engines—they are ranked like all others. That being said, you can optimize this page to rank highly like any other page.  But, there are a few things to consider that are unique to the press page. First, your article headlines are not like ordinary newspaper headlines. Yes, they must be descriptive, but you must keep in mind that this headline is mainly for the search engines, so write as such. For instance, keep your headlines eighty characters or less, and try to put some of your important keywords in the headline as well as the corresponding body text, so as to rank better in the SERPs.  And keep in mind the short attention span of a human being—the first paragraph should be the most important, with the most keywords, your brand name, your topic, and your product all discussed.  Otherwise, you may lose that potential journalist/customer.

A Good Tool to Gauge your Press Release’s SEO Grade

At www.pressreleasegrader.com, you can enter in your press release into a copy and paste box, give the URL of your company website, supply them with an email, and the site will grade how effective your press release is in terms of SEO.  It goes without saying that the better the grade, the higher the chance of your press release being ranked in the top of the SERPs.  It’s worth a look, and can be a helpful tool in evaluating how effective your press release really is.

So, to conclude, a solid press release can help your ranking on the SERPs in a number of ways, but you must do it right. All of these strategies can and will help to boost sales, brand awareness, and also can help you get noticed (and linked to) by major media players, driving up your “authority” and your rankings on SERPs.  So utilize these strategies, and the tool provided you in www.pressreleasegrader.com/, and you can see great results in the way of clicks and conversions!

There is a lot of information out there on link building and one of the more common ways to build links is to simply ask for them. This is basically like cold calling someone, where you actually email a blog or site, tell them a little bit about your site and ask for a link. This can be incredibly time consuming and if done right, it is a lot of work. In order to get any of those blogs to respond, you need to research their site, find a reason their readers would be interested in your product, and present a well thought out and personalized argument for why they should link to you. Carrie explains the right way to send a link request in her post, How Not To Request A Link.

Today, I’d like to focus on techniques for link building that generally see a higher return on investment and links that are, for the most part, naturally non reciprocal.  These are all strategies for building links that we use for many of our SEO clients. But, before we get started, if you don’t already have it installed, take a few minutes and download the Free mozBar from SEO Moz. This tool will come in handy when analyzing a site for its link value as it provides a quick glance of a site’s SEO metrics in addition to easy highlighting of no followed links. Do you have it downloaded? Okay, good! Let’s start with the first strategy, directories…

Directories
There are thousands of directories online that categorize and list different sites. Some directories include all products and services, while others, like Market Mommies, focus on one type of industry (in this case it is Mommy bloggers and business owners). The nice thing about these directories is that so many of them are free. Generally, they ask for a description of your product or service, a link, an image, etc., so it’s fairly easy to mass-produce the information that you can then copy and paste into each directory. The downside is that some of the more valuable directories do cost money. Many require only a one-time fee, while others require a yearly fee at a lower price. Yahoo! Directory, Business.com, Best of the Web, and Joeant.com, are a few of the directories that require a fee, but are generally worth the return. In his SEO Boy post, Five Free Directories that Can Provide Quality Links, Joe reviews his favorite free directories that are worth checking out. While all of these are general topic directories, don’t forget about those niche areas like Market Mommies. This is where you can really find a targeted audience for your site!

PR Directories
Writing and distributing a press release is another fairly quick and easy way to gain links. The nice thing about a press release is that once you write one, you can repurpose the same thing or nearly the same thing to multiple PR Directories. Don’t make the information too cookie-cutter though. The more interesting the information is, the more likely someone is going to ‘pick it up’ and spread the news. A few free press release sites to get you started include: Free Press Release, 1888 Press Release, PR Log, and Click Press.

Article or Blog Submissions
Useful articles are not only a great way to attract readers to your site, but they’re also a great way to gain a new audience but sharing your information through article or blog submission sites. Squidoo and Buzzle are two example sites and just like the directories, some of these sites focus on niche areas so you’ll know your hitting your target audience. Don’t worry! You don’t have to maintain a blog to write interesting and relevant articles. You can simply have a section on your site for Articles & Resource and then repurpose the information on other sites. Again, don’t completely copy, as this can lead to issues of duplicate content but why not reuse the information you’ve already written for your site?

Local Newspapers
I am sure that this title sounds silly. But, the idea comes from a SEOMoz Pro Seminar session on local SEO. If you are a smaller company and you feel like a tiny fish online, don’t forget about your local community. Your story may be similar to thousands of other online startups, but to your local community, you may have something interesting to say. Getting in the local or regional newspaper can be a form of link building. How? Well, most newspapers have an online version and if you’re covered in print, you’re likely to be covered online. Whether or not the article or press release will guarantee a link, I cannot say, but it’s worth a shot at getting one!

The same is true for government and educational sites. Do you have a university in your town? Find ways to partner with them. Sponsor an event or even guest lecture a business course. If you can get your URL linked from a .gov or a .edu, the link value is even greater.

Niche Relationship Building
This is a little more time consuming, but it isn’t as ‘telemarketer-ish’ as cold-emailing blogs to ask for a link. Building a relationship with other companies or bloggers that fit within your niche can be an incredibly rewarding form of link building. Maybe you sell a product that pairs nicely but doesn’t compete with another site. Build a relationship that could lead to future links from your new friend. Or maybe you sell a product that all runners would be interested in. Find forums related to running and join their conversations. Finn’s post on Link Building By Making Friends talks more about this.

Those are some of my golden nuggets on link building. Do you have any others to add?

In the end, the question is:

How deep should you analyze the backlinks to your sites and to your competitors’ sites?

Checking per keyword

The first step to consider is the keyword(s) you’re aiming to reach. Then ask:

• What is the traffic?
• How competitive is that keyword?
• How many keywords are you looking to rank on?
• Which keywords are most important?

It’s basic stuff, but the twist is that if the keyword is branded or niche or long tail, then chances are overwhelmingly in your favor that you can hit them without going crazy on the analysis.

Checking the 1, 5, & 10 position

Here’s where the fun start. Now you get to see what others did to get to these positions.

• What is the keywords in the domain?
• How many subfolders are in those URL?
• How many backlinks are pointing to those URLs?
• What is the quality of those backlinks?

And when you get to checking the competition’s backlinks, you start considering opening Pandora’s box.

Why?

Have you ever seen the Google Wonder Wheel? Google related searches? These two tools provide indications as to how deep the link relationship can be analyzed. Just a few clicks leads you down thousands of possibilities. The same goes for competition backlinks.

For example: Take the #10 listing for the SERP you want to rank for. Complete a content & design analysis and get to backlinks. Some listings are backed by hundreds of thousands of links. And the sites that link to those thousands can have thousands of their own.

And before you know it, you’re down the rabbit hole.

So, how deep should one take their link love?

It really does come down to ROI – Return on Investment. In theory, you can hit any keyword you want to hit. The question is: do you have the time?

My advice:

Consider easy-to-reach keywords to help your ROI and take a long term approach to those big keywords. Build up momentum. Pending your responsibilities, it’s easier to track down the keyword than sprint to the keywords. And you’ll need that consistency over time to build up faith in the search engines.

How Deep Is Your Link Love?

The war room is the room where strategic decisions are analyzed, discussed, proposed and made. The war room exists for every company because your company is in competition with another company – it just depends on its quality.  Everyone needs a strategy. I always prefer to do a rundown list on competition. It starts this way…

Someone wants to start a small business – something they love to do – and they want to see if they can make a little money of off it. They ask me, “what could I do to increase website visits.” After I give a punch list, they start backing away. More often than not, they have a fear of getting in over their heads and want to keep it small. Two months later, they come back “ok, let’s do it.” At this point, I wish I could pull down maps out of nowhere and get an expandable pointer. Why? Because there’s no time to waste.

Here’s my initial punch list to develop a war room strategy:

1. SERPs
Search Engine Results Pages. Your keywords. What are they? What are people typing to find you if they don’t know your name? The top results in your keywords and key phrases are your competition. Search less popular terms and take note of any opportunities.

2. Competitor Websites
Visit each website and take note of the following of how their information flows and the direction it takes you.  Does the information make sense? Are you guided to make a decision? Does it prompt you to make a decision now or some nebulous time in the future?

3. Links
Are other sites linking them? Which ones are they? Are they quality sites?

4. Social Media
Are they on Twitter? Facebook? Are they actively using them?

5. Local Results
Google Place Pages, Yahoo and Bing Local. Did they claim their listings? What info are they sharing?
What are they NOT doing?

6. Blog & Forum Chatter
Search on their name and URL – see what people are saying about them. Do they have a blog? How often do they update it?

That’s the short list right there. Once you profile your top competitors, you then look for holes in each instance to “do one better.”

A. SERPs
Place your keywords and keyphrases in places where they matter most.  Optimize for the “not as competitive” keywords to circumvent a bloodbath of fighting.
Example: Three Competitors fighting for “Home Windows.”  Instead of joining in the fray, I optimized for “replacement vinyl.”  It worked, but then the other sites caught on so I changed it again.

B. Websites
Arrange your web pages to flow to increase conversions by giving strong call to actions and empathizing with prospective clients.  Example: After researching a year on the top problems a potential client would face to bring them into my “store.”  I changed the flow of the homepage to those problems with quick solution paths.  Conversion percentages were staggering.  Company information was moved way out of the way to the “About Us” tab.   I have never seen a commercial starting off with the history of the company, why should your website?

C. Links
Seek out better places to link to you. Example: A competitor had 3 times as many backlinks as one client.  They were going for quantity rather than quality.  By getting links from the local TV station, Better Business Bureau and the local university and a government website. It made a difference and it didn’t matter if the “no-follow” link attribute was used because of number 1.

D. Social Media
Do it better.  Example: We started a client with both a Twitter and Facebook account.  Facebook was a lot more popular.  We were able to acquire fans with an offer, a contest and other promotion.  However, it started becoming problematic to retain and engage the “Fans” without annoying them but serving a purpose.  The direction was changed quietly as competitors started to blast their fans needlessly … and still do.

E. Local Results
Fill out your local profiles and use them to the fullest.  Example: Using coupons and mimicking the working language from your website that works, a lot of lead sources and phone calls were tied to the local SEO.

F. Blog & Forum Chatter
If there’s anything you can capitalize on – a mood within the industry, a PR flub, take note and move wisely. Example: Google Alerts were set up for competitor names as well as the client’s name.  This was able to bring in alerts where people were talking about us positively and negatively.  Seeing the negative aspects of a competitor’s customer service allowed us to enhance the client’s.

Hoowah! Don’t get intimidated. Size up your competition and know their weaknesses. Remember, knowing is have the battle.  Scouring this site is a place to build your war room for the above steps.  What tactics are in your “war room?”