Real Time SEO: Monitor Your Brand & Build Links Simultaneously

July 14, 2010 By Greg Shuey Leave a Comment

In our day and age, nothing is becoming more important than monitoring your brand name. With websites like RipoffReport.com and Scam.com, you can find yourself looking for an SEO company to handle your Reputation Management in a hurry. Some companies often take it a step further, monitoring their executive management member’s names and their products and services names. The beautiful thing about monitoring your brand name is that you can use the time spent monitoring toward your link building efforts as well.

Using different methods and different tools, it is very easy to follow what people are saying about your brand. When someone references your brand, you can immediately reach out to that individual and thank them (if it is a good mention) and ask them for a link to your website. You might even ask for specific anchor text to be used and leverage that opportunity for maximum SEO effectiveness. These are some of the easiest, most beneficial, and natural looking links you can acquire to diversify your link portfolio.

What if you took this a step further? What if you used these methods and tools to monitor chatter in your industry and around your keywords and keyphrases? You could not only promote your brand by answering people’s questions, but you could find additional link partners with those people who are already talking about your industry and the specific keywords you are targeting.

There are many different tools that can be leveraged in finding these link building opportunities. I will discuss my favorites and how I use each of them below.

trackur social monitoring

Trackur

Trackur is a full on, brand monitoring service created by Andy Beal. They have a free version where you can have one search query saved and monitored on a regular basis. Most might think that one saved search query is lame, but I run dozens of keywords on a regular basis through Trackur. You just run them one at a time and export the results into a .csv file. I can then take the file and see who is talking about my brand or keywords and where. I can then reach out to them and attempt to create strong link partnerships. Trackur will deliver news, blog, twitter, and other current results. I have found it to be quite extensive and worth every minute of my time.

replyz twitter search

Replyz

I would classify Replyz, as a real time search engine that delivers questions from individuals who are trying to learn about a particular topic, whether it be a brand or a keyword. Within Replyz, anyone can tap into the real-time stream and monitor keywords, keyphrases, brand names, and just about any thing else being asked on Twitter and on Replyz. When someone asks a question and mentions the words that you are monitoring, it is automatically added to your dashboard. Once it is added to your dashboard, you can easily answer it from your Replyz account, thus promoting your brand.

Reaching out to these individuals first is crucial to building their trust with your website and what you have to offer them. If you portray yourself as an authority in the space, you might even get a link out of it.

openbook facebook search

Openbook

Openbook is also another real-time search engine where you can search Facebook updates about any keyword, keyphrase, or brand and see what people are talking about. Unlike Twitter’s free for all when connecting with people, Facebook requires you to connect via friend requests and direct messages. The upside of connecting via friend requests and direct messages is that you can build a rapport with those who are willing to let you into their friend circle and leverage those relationships to build your business and ask for links.

google alerts

Google Alerts

Google Alerts is probably my least favorite method to monitoring brand names and keywords, however, it does provide some value so it is at least worth a mention. Within Google alerts you can monitor different search terms and Google will deliver news, blogs, video, and discussions around those search terms to the RSS reader of your choice. I pull it into my Google Reader, but you can take the feed URL supplied and monitor it wherever your heart desires. In Google Alerts, I tend to monitor brand mentions and visit those sites talking about my brand and ensure that they are linking to my website. If not, I contact the editor and ask for a link. This seems to work better if the mention is recent. The older the mention gets, the less success I seem to have with this tactic.

social mention social media alerts

Social Mention

Social Mention is like Google Alerts, but for social media. Just like Google Alerts, you can search on brand names and keywords being discussed in the social media sphere and leverage those opportunities to obtain links. Some of the sites they monitor are Identica, Twitter, Youtube, Delicious, Photobucket, Facebook, Flickr, Reddit, Digg, Techmeme, Yahoo News, Myspace, Faves, and many others.

whos talkin social media

Whos Talkin

Whos Talkin is also a social media search tool that should be used in conjunction with Social Mention. Whos Talking searches blogs, news, networks, videos, images, forums, and tags and delivers relevant search results around the brand name or keyword searched on. This tool will not only help you find link acquisition opportunities, but see what the competition is doing in the different realms so you can catch up with or stay ahead of them in the different spaces.

There will be some overlap when using all of these tools, but I have found it to be very minimal and very effective to build natural looking links that will not only help increase your search engine rankings, but also drive relevant traffic to your websites.

If you have any other tools that work really well, please share with us in the comment section.

Filed Under: SEO, link building, social media Tagged With: , , ,

Strategic Link Building That Drives Huge Results

May 25, 2010 By Greg Shuey Leave a Comment

strategic link buildingA strategic link building campaign is more than just picking one or two methods of building links and running with it. To build a well-rounded link portfolio and have the greatest chances of success, you need a combination of credible links and number of links. Today, I want to talk about the credible links and what will move the needle for your SEO campaign.

Knowing What Content Will Attract Links

To get started, you must know which pages on your website are going to have the potential to attract the most links. Some of the most linkable Web pages contain the following types of content:

  • Videos
  • Webinars
  • Downloadable PDFs
  • Widgets & Free Apps
  • Company Blog
  • PR
  • Contests
  • Coupons
  • Job Openings
  • Forums

If you don’t find enough content on your website that will attract links, you know where you must put your attention and resources before you begin the link building process.

Know Your Top Competitors In The Search Engines

When we bring a new client into SEO.com, we ask them to provide us with their top five competitors that they feel are their biggest threat online. Nine out of 10 times, they completely miss the mark on who their actual competitors are.

In the SEOmoz Advanced SEO Training Series, Tom Critchlow made a statement that really resonates with me. A competitor is a website that RANKS! This is the top three websites displayed when searching on a keyword or keyphrase, not the biggest businesses in the industry. You shouldn’t worry too much about any of the sites not in those first three positions; they obviously aren’t doing enough things right to be there yet.

After learning who your true competition is, analyzing those competitors link portfolios, anchor text distribution, and most linked-to pages will quickly help you see what they are doing to help them achieve those high rankings.

To analyze competitors backlink portfolios, I use tools like Open Site Explorer, Yahoo Site Explorer, and Majestic SEO to pull my backlink lists for each competitor. Once I have my three lists, I scrub any duplicates and then begin looking at who is linking to this competitor and why. Once you have that, you can quickly see what each competitor is doing the best and apply it to your link building tactics.

Understand What Type Of Content Attracts Links

One thing that is very difficult for people to grasp is the fact that great content attracts links, will eventually rank, and have staying power. It is far too easy these days to purchase a domain, install Wordpress, throw up a bunch of crap content on a site, and start building links in hopes of ranking and making some cash. The truth of the matter is, those sites don’t deserve to rank and even if they make it to the top, they won’t stay for very long.

When building a website, it is important to analyze the competition in terms of their content that attracts links. One of my favorite tools I use to research top website content is, again, Open Site Explorer. Through Open Site Explorer, I can quickly analyze the top pages of any domain based on number of backlinks. From this analysis, I can see if my competition has content that is attracting a lot of backlinks. If I don’t have content around the same topic (content that is better than my competitors) my chances of being successful are slim to none.

What it comes down to is the fact that good, linkable content will always win in the end. If you don’t have the resources right now to produce the best content, you probably aren’t ready for SEO.

Know Your Market Defining Keywords

Knowing and understanding the keywords in your niche will quickly help you determine if those keywords will bring visitors looking for more information, or bring visitors looking for purchase a product or service found on your website. To have the most successful SEO campaign and increase your ROI, you want to find the keywords that will bring buying customers to your site.

For example, you take the company “MING Brands,” which sells iPhone Skins. When putting together their SEO campaign, they probably wouldn’t want to target the keyword iPhone, even if a top position would bring you close to 13 million visitors. To have the best chances of success and bring them the highest ROI possible, they would want to focus on keywords like iPhone Skins, iPhone Cases, iPhone Protectors, Etc.

Knowing your market and understanding how potential customers view your market is crucial in finding the best link opportunities.

Knowing Search Queries That Will Uncover Link Opportunities

To find some of the best link opportunities online, you must be comfortable with link building queries. Link building queries are searches equipped with advanced operators to match up your linkable content with prospects from around the Web.

Finding out what these queries are is quite a bit easier if you are using tools such as the one provided by Ontolo. Initially, it is a bit confusing on how to use the tool so here is a detailed description from Search Engine Land on how to use Ontolo’s search query tool. Once you have the queries that will work best for you, you can dive into a highly effective, highly targeted link building campaign that will drive results.

In closing, strategic link building is more than just applying a few different tactics here and there. Strategic link building is about putting together a long term strategy, a strategy that is going to take time, a strategy that is going to take effort, and a strategy that will help you achieve the top positions in the SERPs for the keywords you want to rank for.

Filed Under: link building Tagged With: ,

The Best Link Strategy Starts With Mindset

April 27, 2010 By Rick Hardman Leave a Comment

It is no secret that links are one of the largest keys to achieving a high ranking in the search engines. There is certainly a lot more involved in ranking well in the search engines than just getting links, but links are the largest single factor.

There is a lot of debate about what the best links are, how to get links, what links are not worth the effort and much more. Knowing what to believe and what not to believe can be a bit overwhelming and very confusing. If you want to know for sure, you should test the different link aspects yourself and determine what aspects are the most important. However, that can take a lot of time. A quicker solution is to look at leading seo companies and experts for the best advice. Pay attention to who gets the most links from others in the industry as you study through seo blogs and forums.

There are several factors that influence the value of a link.

1- Is It Internal or External? – It is crucial that your internal link structure is done correctly, but external links are more valuable because they verify what you have already said the page was about by the anchor text you used to link to the different pages.

2- Follow or No Follow? – There is no question that a followed link is more valuable, but that does not mean that a no followed link is not valuable. Remember, not all links are for ranking, but for sales and traffic as well.  If a link will not help you in the rankings, but will bring in valuable traffic and possibly lead to a sale, then that link should also be obtained.

3- Quality or Quantity? – This may seem obvious to most, but its quality, right? Well, if that is the case, why do so many SEO experts look at the quantity of links that the competition has? Truth is it is a combination of both. A link is a link and anytime you can get a link to your site you should. How much effort should be expended to get a link will depend on the quality of the link. No one should be spending a lot of time getting low quality links, but many of them take next to no effort.

4- .edu’s & .gov’s or .com’s – This question comes back to quality aspect. Generally speaking, .edu and .gov links are considered higher quality. Anyone who has attempted to get a link on a domain with this extension knows why they are higher quality. They are tougher to get. Because they are much harder to get, the links are trusted more by search engines and human visitors.

5- Anchor Text – Any careful link campaign will utilize the right keywords for the anchor text and link it to the url it is mapped to from the keyword research. However, this is an area where a lot of Internet marketers can get sloppy and lazy. Take the time to make sure (and then double check) that you are using the right keywords and variations of those keywords to link to the appropriate pages. Using variations of the targeted keyword in the link campaign will help those links look a lot more natural to both the search engines and the human visitors.

6- Page Rank (Authority) - There is no question that a single link from a site with a higher page rank (no, we are not getting into the page rank is dead discussion in this post) will help more than a link from 100 sites with no page rank. However, again there is a balance. Balance is natural and all links should be sought after if the price in time to acquire the link is right.

7- Deep Links or Home Page – There are numerous places where you can put a link to your site where they only allow you to link to the home page, so link to the deep pages whenever you can. If linking to a deep page is an option in a particular link strategy, then you should do it – every time! Save the home page links for those areas where you are forced to do so.

8- Link Diversity – This is perhaps the largest area where link building campaigns go wrong. Too many people get stuck in one or two tactics to build links and they do not build out diversity. If you want some good rankings and you want them to stick, then you need to make sure that you are utilizing many different link building strategies and getting links coming from a lot of different sources.

In the long run the best link building strategy is exactly what Google would suggest. That is to build content, resources and tools, such as this large list of chrome extensions that people will want to naturally link to. This takes a lot more time and effort than most all other link building strategies, but in the end, these are some of the best links you can get. While doing this, you will also build credibility with your target audience; you will build your brand as an industry authority; you will receive more links from various blogs and websites; and people will share your blog post and tools with others in social networks.

Filed Under: link building Tagged With: , , , ,

Top Five Tips For Generating 1000′s of Inbound Links

August 17, 2009 By Michael Fleischner - Marketing Expert Leave a Comment
Okay, so you're already sold on the concept of link building. That's good... everyone knows how valuable inbound links are to your marketing pages and web sites. I know you've heard it countless times but are you implementing an inbound link plan each and every day?

I'm here to say that the majority (9 out of 10) clients I work with are not implementing a cohesive inbound link strategy on a daily basis. The good news is that about 80% understand the importance of inbound links and about 30% actually have plans for generating them, but a mere 10% are actually doing something about it.

Why Inbound Links Are Important
If you want to reach the top of major search engines, then you're going to have to tell the search engines why they should rank you. Do you have unique content? Are you a credible website? Can you provide a good user experience? These are all important questions you should be asking yourself as you consider developing an inbound linking strategy.

Tip #1: Here and Now
Start with an idea of where you are. Regardless of what type of tool you use (free or paid) to evaluate your current SEO status: rankings, keywords, sites linking in, etc., make sure you have a good idea of where you're starting from - and ultimately where you ant to get to. Additionally, plan to check your progress at least once a week. You want to see if your inbound links are helping you success on search.

Tip #2: Begin With Your Competitors
One of my favorite link building strategies is to start with your competitors. Who's linking to them? Are the links from high Google PR sites? What else can you learn about your competitors linking strategies? Start with your competitors or who is already ranked in the number one position for the keyword term or phrase you're optimizing for.

Tip #3: Focus on Anchor Text
Another great SEO tip for inbound linking is to evaluate all of the existing inbound links to your website. Whether you use the simple "link:" code via the Google search box, Alexa, or some other tool, create a list of sites linking in and work with them to apply the proper anchor text to the link associated with your keyword. For example, contacting a site and asking them to update your URL (ex: http://www.yoursite.com) with anchor text (ex: Improve search rankings) can make all the difference.

Tip #4: Quality Content and Social Media
If you provide quality content on your site or simply cover something that would be of interest to your target market, allow others to comment, bookmark and share. Quality content is what search engines like and so will your readers. Develop quality content and encourage others to share it. This creates quality backlinks to your website.

Tip #5: Three Way Linking
Okay, "reciprocal linking is dead". Yeah, I get it.. don't necessarily agree but we wont debate that here. The good news is that we don't have to talk about it since the best linking option is one-way linking. This can be achieved through a 3 way link. Trying to make a difficult to explain concept relatively simple, exchange links with another website but do it using a 3rd site, not your own. This allows one-way links in either direction.

These tips cover a great deal and have worked for me when it comes to helping my websites and blogs, as well as others, build a significant number of inbound links to their website steadily over time.

WARNING: You may be the anxious type, looking to build hundreds or even thousands of inbound links to your website(s) in the next 48 hours - DON'T DO IT! Although I successfully did this in the past, Google is penalizing sites who are too fast out of the gate when it comes to link building. You should look to ad 3 - 5 quality links to your site on a weekly basis. Slow and steady wins the race.

Find more link building tips and strategies in, "SEO Made Simple: Strategies for Dominating the World's Largest Search Engine" available at Amazon.com.

For more free marketing advice, visit the marketing experts at http://www.MarketingScoop.com.
Filed Under: link building