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Posted by Danny Dover
This week on Whiteboard Friday we pull a secret out of the SEO secrets vault. This handy strategy helps you take advantage of the specific types of results that Google chooses for people and company based searches and helps you dominate your brand search engine result page.
Dominate Your Brand Search Engine Result Page (SERP)
Build YourBrand.com
Building a brand hub is an obvious suggestion but not necessarily for the reason you might think. Use these types of websites to promote what other domains are saying about you or your brand elsewhere on the Internet. This gives those pages (social media profiles, interviews, etc…) link juice and improves their relevancy, thus helping them rank for your brand SERP. (Hint: Use anchor text like "SEOmoz on Twitter" or "John Doe in the New York Times"). You can see an example of me doing this tactic on DannyDover.com
Build an Alternative Brand Site
After building your brand hub and linking from its homepage to the other pages you want to rank, you should build another brand site. In practical terms I recommend using a single page on a related domain. (I use this page targeting just my first name, Danny as my alternate). This helps you command a second result in the SERP because it is on a separate (and in this case, a more powerful) domain.
Create Social Media Profiles
This is obvious. Social media profiles (Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, etc…) are both great search results for people/brand searches and are on very powerful domains. This makes them great resources to fill up your brand SERP.
Do Interviews/News
Linking to relevant articles/interviews on your brand hub site is an excellent tactic for filling the remaining spots on your brand SERP. Like the last tactic, these pages are helpful search results for searchers and are usually on powerful domains.
Do PPC
This final tactic is less intuitive. Bidding on your name/brand allows you to control the ads on your brand SERP. This is helpful for branding (der…) and it actually tends to increase the click through rates of the number one result on the page as well as the ad.
Update: You can see 4 more excellent suggestions from seo-himanshu in the comments below.
Follow me on Twitter, Fool!
or
Follow SEOmoz on Twitter (who is slightly less rude)
If you have any other advice that you think is worth sharing, feel free to post it in the comments. This post is very much a work in progress. As always, feel free to e-mail me if you have any suggestions on how I can make my posts more useful. All of my contact information is available on my SEOmoz profile under Danny. Thanks!
| | Posted by Danny Dover
This week on Whiteboard Friday, Rand Fishkin describes the methods he recommends for outsourcing content creation. Content is extremely important for SEO and users alike so these best practices are important for those of us without the luxury of an in-house staff of copywriters.
Embed Video:
Rand starts this presentation by setting context with his favorite SEO diagram. You can read more about the SEO Pyramid here.
Step 1: Requirements Gathering
Decide what you are trying to accomplish. Are you doing this for sales? SEO? Engagement? Traffic? Brand awareness? Be clear and write down what you want to accomplish along with the metrics you will use to measure them.
Step 2: Locating Potential Resources
You have plenty of options for finding potential resources. You can go offshore, in-house or hire web contractors. For web contractors, you can use the traditional services like Craigslist, oDesk, Elance, Guru or tap into the world of writing communities and long tail bloggers. These last two recommendations while not as established can many times provide superior quality writing with lower budgets.
Step 3: Research Writing Quality & Voice Match
In order to do this, we highly recommend you set up a voice document (a written record of how you would like to sound in your company’s written communications and promotions). Give this to the writer before getting a sample and use this as the yardstick after they submit their first sample. This will help you gauge if this person is a good fit for your organization.
Step 4: Scale, Evaluate, Track
Now that you have established a process, you need to put checks into place to make sure the writer is hitting their targets. Look back at the goals you created in the first step and use them to track and improve upon the related metrics.
Remember, from both an SEO and from a human perspective, writing is about quality over quantity. Having one great article that engages readers and earns links far outweighs 100 poorly written articles.
Posted by Danny Dover
Guess who’s back. Back again. Danny’s back. Tell a friend. (My co-workers hate me ;-p) This week’s Whiteboard Friday is about how to get an SEO job. In it, I divulge the secret of how I suckered my way into how I earned this job. I also do the worst impression of my life and finish with a shocking twist that I guarantee you won’t see coming!
Embed Video:
Apply for an Internship
- Leverage Start-ups – Start-ups are particularly well suited for interns because most of them can’t afford to pay people
- Use the "Godfather Approach" – Make the company an offer they can’t refuse. (Try working for free and provide your own laptop in exchange for an internship,)
Dive Right In
- Build Test Sites – After reading the Beginner’s Guide to SEO, try building simple sites to target long tail terms.
- Offer to Help Charities – Like start-ups, charities tend to not have a lot of extra resources. Take advantage of this by volunteering.
Create a New Niche
- Leverage What You Already Know – Combine your current knowledge with what you want to learn to become the best in a given niche.
- Educate Others For Free – Earn links and share the love by teaching others about what you learn.
Join the Community
- Participate in Blogs/Social Media/Conferences – Get your name out and build your network by participating online.
- Take Advantage of Osmosis – Get into an environment where you learn simply by being in the right place.
Follow me on Twitter, Fool!
or
Follow SEOmoz on Twitter (who is slightly less blunt)
If you have any other advice that you think is worth sharing, feel free to post it in the comments. This post is very much a work in progress. As always, feel free to e-mail me if you have any suggestions on how I can make my posts more useful. All of my contact information is available on my SEOmoz profile under Danny. Thanks!
Posted by Danny Dover
This week’s Whiteboard Friday features the return of Rand (woo hoo!) and his self declared biggest SEO mistakes. We screw up a lot here at SEOmoz (hell, they hired me), so we feel it is only appropriate to take this opportunity to share what we have learned in an effort to prevent you from making similar mistakes. SEO is complicated. The best we can do is practice, work hard and compare notes.
1. Reciprocal Links + Robots.txt NoFollow
Back before the formal SEOmoz days, Rand used to dabble a bit in some grayer areas of SEO. The first mistake he mentions is a tactic involving offering reciprocal links but blocking the outbound links via robots.txt/meta robots so that he could get all of the link value. This tactic didn’t really work and he ended up having to do a lot more work to get in the good graces of the webmasters he had fooled. Head smack!
2. Buying Links for Clients
This tactic also took place before formal SEOmoz days. At the time, Rand spent client budgets on paid links. This is a bad idea because the value of the links can’t be determined (was Google even counting them?). He later found out through Google employees that the links were not being counted and that they may actually be hurting the client’s site ability to rank. Oops!
3. Recommending People Use H1 Tags with Keywords
This mistake is a little bit more subtle. For years, SEOmoz recommended including keywords in the H1 of pages. After we started doing formal machine learning correlation tests we found out that this tactic didn’t actually help very much at all (including the keywords in normal text in bigger fonts worked essentially the same). This was a shame because it meant we wasted time and energy convincing our clients to update their H1s.
4. Recommending People Not To Use XML Sitemaps
When XML Sitemaps first debuted, Rand and SEOmoz recommended not using this. While the idea was sound in theory (having a XML Sitemap can make it difficult to spot information architecture problems) the observation ended up being outweighed by the impact we saw with the increased indexation rates of sites that employed this tool.
5. Incorrectly Redirecting Linkscape to Open Site Explorer
Recently we decided to 301 redirect all of the old Linkscape reports to our newer, better converting, Open Site Explorer reports in a 1-1 relationship. This was in theory a good idea but unfortunately including various tracking components on the redirect URLs resulted in us losing a significant amount of traffic. We later fixed this with rel=canonical but a lot of the damage was already done. Ouch!
Do you have any lessons you have learned after making some noteworthy mistakes? If so, we would love to hear what you learned in the comments below.
Posted by Danny Dover
Want happier website visitors and higher rankings? This week’s Whiteboard Friday is about how and why to speed up your website. It is more technical than previous videos so I tried to spice it up with an ode to one of my favorite canceled TV Shows, Pop-up Video. Can’t stand the content? At least the added commentary is entertaining. (It is the perfect plan ;-p)
7 Ways to Take Advantage of Google’s Site Speed Algorithm
The following are seven proven techniques well known websites use to boost their site speed.
1. Enable Gzip
Gzip is a open source compression algorithm that can used to compress your website’s content before your server sends the data to a visitor’s browser. This makes your servers job easier and makes pages load faster for your users. You can learn how to enable Gzip here.
2. Minify Javascript/CSS
Minify is the process (and software) for removing unnecessary formatting characters from code. This makes your files smaller and your visitors happier. You can learn all about this process here.
3. Use a CDN (Content Distribution Network)
CDNs are systems of interconnected server resources that spread content and assets around the globe to shorten the distance between server and prospective user. They are commonly used by the Web’s most popular websites. You can find a list of free CDNs here. Note: This is not a tip for beginners. Working with CDNs gets complicated very quickly.
4. Optimize Images
You can take advantage of the countless man hours that have been devoted to image compression and make your users happier by simply saving your images as the appropriate type. As a very general rule of thumb, I recommend saving photos as JPEGs and graphics as PNGs.
5. Use External Javascript/CSS
When a browser requests a website from a server it can only download a set number of files of the same type at any given point. While this isn’t true of all file types, it is a good enough reason to host applicable files on alternative subdomains. This is only recommended for sites where the pros of speed will outweigh the SEO cons of creating a new subdomain.
6. Avoid Using Excess Redirects
While redirects can be extremely useful, it is important to know that implementing them does force your servers to do slightly more work per applicable request. Always avoid redirect strings (301 -> 301 -> 200 or even worse 301 -> 302 -> 200) and use these tools sparingly.
7. Use Fewer Files
The most straightforward way to speed up your website is to simply use fewer files. Less files means less data. My favorite method of doing this is utilizing CSS sprites. You can read how popular websites are using this trick here.
Google’s Mission to Speed Up the Web
Fueled by the massive potential of the Internet, Googlers are working on many projects in their attempt to speed up the Web:
- Rewriting Internet Protocols – Starting at the foundation, teams at Google are rewriting the protocols that run the Internet in order to get faster performance.
- Creating a Public DNS – Google recently released a public DNS resource to help speed up DNS calls.
- Providing Fiber-optics for the Public – For a select few cities in the United States, Google will soon be offering ultra high-speed broadband networks for consumers.
- Encouraging Webmasters/SEOs to Speed Up Their Sites with a New Algorithm Update – Google spilled the beans about their one new aspect of their ranking algorithms by saying that site speed is now a ranking factor. This post explains how to take advantage of that.
Follow me on Twitter, Fool!
or
Follow SEOmoz on Twitter (who is slightly less blunt)
If you have any other advice that you think is worth sharing, feel free to post it in the comments. This post is very much a work in progress. As always, feel free to e-mail me if you have any suggestions on how I can make my posts more useful. All of my contact information is available on my SEOmoz profile under Danny. Thanks!
Posted by randfish
After last week’s Whiteboard Friday on the penalties paid links can incur, I got several questions about whether paid/spammy links could be used as a weapon to potentially harm someone else’s rankings. In this post, I’ll walk through why this is rarely the case, how you can defend yourself from potential scenarios and why this isn’t a great tactic to employ against your competitors.
Can Paid Links Be Used as Weapons in the SERPs?
The short answer is "almost never." But, as is typical in the SEO world, there’s a lot more in the long version.
In general, it’s very, very hard to bring down a white hat site/page ranking well in the search results. Although Google isn’t perfect at catching spam (e.g. our recent video featuring the success of some very obvious paid links in a well known network), they seem to be surprisingly excellent (almost prescient) at detecting the intent of links. My suspicion is that sites who buy links to prop up their own rankings have very different patterns than those who have competitors buying links to them. These patterns exist on the sites themselves, in other sites registered to the owners, in link footprints and in usage/search behavior.
It could, in fact, be that the "penalties" many SEOs often ascribe to paid links are in fact the result of a much more sophisticated analysis by Google looking at multiple aspects of a site’s presence before making a determination of the link intent. Given that, in nearly 10 years of SEO, I’ve only heard of two reasonably verifiable instances of "Google-bowling" (the process of pointing bad links at a site or page to hurt it’s rankings) working, my guess is that Google’s webspam team has developed some very impressive methods here.
Many SEOs have also suggested that a certain "bar of trust" can be achieved in Google, after which, negative links may be devalued, but likely don’t cause penalties or rankings drops. This makes a lot of sense to me (though it’s nearly impossible to prove), since "Google-bowling" is largely defeated and even good sites who stray into black/gray hat link building will simply find themselves wasting money, rather than being removed from the results (which could, for many popular brands/sites, cause a loss of relevance in the results for users).
Thus, if you are trying to wield paid links as a weapon against your ranking competitors, it’s far more likely to work against the new(ish) site ranking #65 for your keywords rather than those who’ve earned their way to the top spots with white hat techniques.
Defending Yourself from Potential Link Attacks
Have you recently broken the heart of a black hat link broker’s son or daughter? Stepped on a link farmer’s superhero cape? Talked smack about a nefarious panelist at an SEO conference not realizing they were just around the corner? The best defense, in this case, is a good defense (don’t go buying and renting links to others; you’re only enriching the spammers).
Many, many SEOs and webmasters worry a tremendous amount about spammy links pointing to their sites and pages. By and large, this isn’t a concern and it happens to every site on the web. Just look at some of the spamtastic links that point to SEOmoz (via this Yahoo! query):
If you see a collection of scraper sites filled with pharmaceutical, financial, legal, real estate and other questionable links with surprisingly well-optimized anchor text appearing in Google Alerts or your 24-hour reputation monitoring queries (e.g. http://www.google.com/search?as_q=seomoz&as_qdr=d&num=100 - which queries Google for all pages mentioning "seomoz" in the past 24 hours) don’t panic. If you exist on the web, you’re going to attract these types of links and the search engines will not punish you for it, even if you’re a relatively new, untrusted site.
However, if you start acquiring links that look an awful lot like they’re part of an intentional, paid link network (great anchor text, pointing to internal pages on the site, coming from footers and sidebars that contain other irrelevant, anchor-text rich links), there may be some cause for concern. Your best course of action is to submit a spam report to Google from your own, verified, Webmaster Tools account, noting that you have nothing to do with the links and want to make sure Google doesn’t think you’ve created, endorsed or paid for them.
This action is rarely necessary or worthwhile, but if you’re highly concerned about competitive conduct, it’s not a bad route to take. Of course, you’ll want to make sure you don’t actually engage in any black/gray hat activity yourself or it could trigger the wrong kind of review by a webspam team member.
Should I Buy Links to Push Down My Competitors?
Not unless you feel the link brokers of the world are more worthy than your favorite charity.
Seriously, the chances you’ll have a negative impact are far lower than the changes you’ll actually help (again, I refer back to our paid link WB Friday experiment in which the obvious link network had positive effects, even on the brand new site). The money is far better off spent on editorial content, public relations, social media campaigns and white hat SEO efforts for your own stite. Bringing someone else down may seem temporarily, emotionally satisfying, but it’s the wrong way to approach SEO (and life in general, if I may be so bold).
Looking forward to the discussion in the comments and happy to talk through the filtration processes and failsafes (or at least, my speculation) Google may employ.
p.s. The new Beginner’s Guide to SEO has more on understanding + recovering from search spam penalties.
Posted by Scott Willoughby
WARNING! This week’s video is pure evil! If you are faint of heart, easily disturbed, care for small children, terrified of slugs, curious about magnets, or fond of licorice, TURN BACK NOW!
This video provides actual evidence that the diabolical practice of buying links can actually work (and astoundingly well). It also says the practice can get you penalized back to the stone age, but hey, who needs to talk sense; there’s controversy to be courted! So, without further ado (or any more exclamation points), let the heresy commence…
Did you avoid the temptation? Did you refuse to watch? Is the curiosity killing you? Okay, okay, I’ll give you the lowdown, but you have to promise you’ll nevereverever use this information for evil. Keep that halo sparkly, champ!
Here’s the deal: Rand snuck out without telling any of us and bought some illicit paid links. They were anchor text optimized links from the same page on the same site to minimize the confounding factors. He got one link to each of three different sites…
Experiment 1
- Bought a link for a three word phrase with a Keyword Difficulty Score of 30%
- Directed it at an SEOmoz blog post with the term in the body, but not in the title tag
- Ranking before link purchase: #458
- Ranking after link purchase: #30
- Time elapsed: 8 days (all links were pulled as soon as changes were observed)
Experiment 2
- Bought a link for two word phrase with a Keyword Difficulty Score of 36%
- Directed at page on an established, but low-authority domain with term at end of the title tag
- Ranking before link purchase: #426
- Ranking after link purchase: #58
- Time elapsed: 4 days
Experiment 3
- Bought a link for a three word term with a Keyword Difficulty Score of 26%
- Directed at a page on a brand new site with less than 10 total links
- Ranking before link purchase: #198
- Ranking after link purchase: #4
- Time elapsed: 4 days
Holy crap, right?! That’s some serious movin’ and shakin’ out of one little link! Here are a few things to note before we discuss why you shouldn’t go smash open your piggy bank and spend your shiny coins on nefarious links: 1) As soon as the links were pulled, the rankings fell back down to where they were before the links, so if you’re renting, don’t get too comfy in that high position; 2) These were very short-term so there wasn’t much time allowed for Google to sniff these links out; 3) This is not a statistically significant sample size or a scientific test, take these results as anecdotal.
Okay then, why shouldn’t you buy links if they work such splendid voodoo on your rankings? Let’s fight anecdotal "proof" with an anecdotal warning. Some friends of SEOmoz who run a fairly well-established site recently ran into a snag–they vanished from Google. They had ranked in the top two for many moons, raking in the lucrative spoils of their hard-won rankings. Then they got greedy; they thought a couple of paid links (four to be exact) could secure them the number one spot for all eternity. They wanted to be like the lone Highlander atop his mountain. They bought their links, and it worked for a minute. Then Google beheaded them (to continue the Highlander theme) by abso-friggin-lutely burying their site. Their links were discovered and now they can’t even rank for their business name or their full title tags. Suffice to say, this has made business a tad difficult.
Listen, my fellow marketers, to this cautionary tale of penalty and woe. Paid links may reap quick and easy reward, but the repercussions can be dreadful. Besides, everyone knows that the Krampus comes for SEOs who pay for links.
Big thanks to Avi Wilensky of PRO Media Corp for collaboration with us on this study.
And now, a very special message…
This week’s episode of Whiteboard Friday is a bittersweet installment for me. After producing this blog feature for over three years, and more than 150 episodes, this is my last. As Rand mentioned in the video, I’ve decided to bid farewell to the magical world of SEOmoz and pursue my next great adventure. I’m still weighing opportunities and haven’t decided where I’ll be heading next, but you can rest assured I’ll still be playing in the online marketing sandbox, so bring your shovel and we can build a castle together. It’ll be sweet; we can have towers and a moat…maybe a dragon. If you’d like to keep in touch, I’m easy to find on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter.
I want to thank everyone in the community for contributing to the truly wonderful experience I’ve had here, and all of the amazing people I’ve had the pleasure to meet online and off. I hope you’ve all enjoyed watching these videos and reading my posts as much as I’ve enjoyed making them. Most sincere thanks and gratitude to you all for an awesome experience over the last several years. Have fun and I’ll see you around the interwebz!
Best,
Scott
Posted by great scott!
The avalanche-like flow of special guest Whiteboard Fridays continues this week with another installment featuring our beloved London SEO expert, Richard Baxter (anchor text, y’all). Last week Richard helped us all learn how to get our fresh content indexed licketty-split, and this week he’s back to help us learn how to identify which areas of our sites are working hardest for us.
Whether you have multiple types of content on your site (maybe a blog, tools, articles, etc.), or you have limited content types across different topics (blog posts about cats, kittens, evil cats, ninja kittens, evil ninja kitten cats, etc.), wouldn’t it be nice to know which content types or topics bring you the most and best traffic? Never fear, Richard’s here to explain his handy-dandy system to do just that! By the end of this video you’ll know exactly which stats to pull from your analytics to create a so-shiny-it’s-practically-chromed spreadsheet that will let you peer deep into the inky black heart of your site and know the stars, the slackers, and the shiftless hobos among your content.
Wow! It’s like the future is now! And, since thinking of the future always makes me think of ‘Flash’, and thinking of ‘Flash’ reminds me that those of you without Adobe Flash can’t watch the video, I’ll try to summarize Richard’s bard-like musings on content segmentation and performance analysis.
In order to track and analyze the performance of your individual content, you’ll want to segment out your analytics data by content type. This is really, really easy to do if you have good, clean site structure (which you have, right? RIGHT?!). You can just pull Richard’s data points (below) for the different sections or subfolders of your site. If you were lazy and thought the best way to organize your site was to throw all of the pages into a virtual bucket, dump them out, name them by throwing your keyboard at a stump, and call it a day, you’ll have to get a little more involved with how you filter your segments. No matter what though, you might consider segments like all blog posts (perhaps a ‘CONTAINS /blog’ filter), all tools, all content written by Belverd Needles, III (/authors/belverd), etc.
Once you have your segment filters in place, you just need to pull the data that Richard suggests and you’ll be able to see exactly how Belverd’s content compares to that of his bloggitty arch-nemesis, Marmaduke Huffsworth, Esq. (/authors/marmaduke). What data you say? This data:
1. Number of Pages per Segment Richard advocates crawling your site using something like Link Sleuth to get this number; you’ll use it for all sorts of fun calculations. Yes, calculations can be fun. If you don’t believe me, just ask these racially diverse, embroidered youths.
2. Number of Keywords Sending Traffic You can pull this from your analytics. Don’t worry so much about the words themselves here, you just want to know how many different keyword terms are delivering one or more visits to each segment.
3. Number of Pages Getting Entries from Search Engines How many pages within the segment received one or more visits from a search engine (pick an engine, any engine, or all of them, whatever matters to you…so Google, basically).
4. Total Visits from Google Search Engines Like it says on the tin, this is just the total number of visits to the segment from search traffic.
5. Percentage of Total Visits that Performed a Conversion Action This will require that you have some conversion actions setup in your analytics, but it’s a key data point if you want to figure out your strongest content.
So what can all of this stuff tell you? LOTS! By tracking these numbers, you’ll be able to quickly identify which content is working hardest for you. You’ll be able to know whether Marmaduke or Belverd is better at drawing high-converting traffic. You’ll know which subjects and content types are most deserving of your precious time and the investment of your hard-bilked pennies. You’ll know who put the bop in the bop shoo bop, who moved your cheese, and why birds suddenly appear every time I’m near (it’s because my pockets are full of birdseed). You’ll be 12.7-29.4% awesomier than you were before, and you’ll smell delightful ALL THE TIME!
Now aren’t you glad Richard stopped by and shared his magic secrets with you? Thanks, Richard!
p.s. Richard has posted more about getting things indexed quickly w/ PubSubHubBub and more on his blog – well worth a read.
Posted by great scott!
One of our favorite things about SMX Advanced is that it brings all kinds of cool people to town, and you know what that means: special guest stars on Whiteboard Friday! This week one of our pals from across the pond, Richard Baxter of SEO Gadget, joins Rand to talk about how to get your content indexed faster.
When you’re covering poppin’-fresh, trending, news-worthy content, there’s no time to sit around whittling miniature canoes and waiting for Google to come crawl your site and index your new content. That sort of passive attitude will allow your competitors to dominate all of that awesome Query Deserves Freshness search traffic and make enough money to go buy real, full-size canoes whittled by fine Native American craftsmen. You’ll be poor and jealous, and we just can’t have that. Watch this week’s video to learn several near-magical strategies to get your fresh content indexed faster than meth-fueled panther (that’s fast, people)!
Okay, you’re so fast that you ain’t got time to watch no stinking video, you just want the overview, well here you go. Mr. Baxter’s five strategies for super speedy indexing:
1. Normal Crawling
No, it’s not fast (usually), but it’s fairly reliable. That said, we don’t care about reliable; patient people are reliable and we’re not patient today, we want it NOW! Normal crawling is for sissies, ignore this point and move on to…
2. Update Your XML Site Map
There’s a link within your Google Webmaster Tools that will let you ping Google and let them know you’ve updated your XML, News, or Video Sitemaps. If you ping them, they will come. They may not come as quickly as they would if you put out a sign that says, "Free Beer," but it’ll definitely be much faster than their normal crawl pace.
3. PubSubHubbub
Say that three times fast! You won’t summon the Candyman, but you will remember the name of this awesome service that can help you get found super quickly. By publishing to a PubSubHubbub Hub (you can use a public one or create your own using Superfeedr), you’ll automatically reach all PSH-compatible services including Google Reader, Friend Feed, and Feedburner. One-stop-shopping, people (and Richard promises that it’s super easy)!
4. Twitter
Okay, okay, it’s not an official signal, but everybody who’s anybody thinks it’s highly likely that Google watches for new and/or popular content URLs that may be emerging faster than they can discover them. Makes sense, right? You and your friends can send word of the latest and greatest Hatchet-Wielding Super Hero faster than Google can find it; and if lot’s of people re-tweet it, there’s a good chance it deserves a little oomph in the SERPs.
5. Ping-O-Matic
Other than sounding like yet another wonderful device from the twisted mind of Ron Popeil, this service is like a combination of tactics 2 and 3. Ping-O-Matic lets you quickly ping a bunch of web services (such as PostRank, Bloglines, NewsGator, and Google Blog Search) notifying them of new content on your site. It’s as if there were a giant alarm that went off alerting the world of your amazing new content, and hey, isn’t that exactly what we’re trying to accomplish (as long as it doesn’t sound like the car alarm that keeps going off outside; I’d like to drop a meteorite on that car)?
There you go, five awesome tactics to get your stuff indexed and out to the public faster than a well-trained team of bobsledding ducks! Big thanks to Richard for hanging out with us this week and taking the time to work a little whiteboard magic.
Posted by great scott!
Content, content, content…everybody wants it, everybody needs it, and you’re great at creating it, but maybe nobody’s reading it. Since that brainy brain of yours is already pumping this stuff out, how can you leverage your great content to get some quick and easy links?
"How ’bout this for a story: ‘Man with giant baby head considers gubernatorial bid’?"
There are all kinds of ways to distribute your content: article submission sites, one-off submissions, self-publication…on and on. As with everything else, there are trade-offs to each dissemination vector and that’s what we’re talking about this week: What are the pros and cons of using article/content marketing as an SEO strategy? Where and how can you identify potential partners to get the highest quality links for your content? When is it better to let someone else publish your work? Are links the best arbiter of value? The answers to all these questions and more await you in this week’s Whiteboard Friday…
Yes, content creation is a lot of work. It takes time, effort, and creativity to generate high-quality content, and that’s why it’s in such high demand. While you may hate to send your precious baby off to live on someone else’s blog, it may be what’s best for the child (and you). Sure, you won’t get as many links as you may have by self-publishing, but if you’re selective about the site, you’ll get one or two very good links, but wait, there’s more…
By publishing on a larger, more visible site than your own, your content could be seen by many more people. This makes it an excellent branding strategy. The reputation effect of an author byline on a popular piece on a well-read site can pay huge dividends in reputation, traffic, and business if you select the right partners. Do you need to publish somewhere directly in-line with your niche? No. Look for sites with relevant readership–SEO content creators may want to look to email marketing, web design, or ecommerce focused publishers for instance–that will have an interest in your topic but may not have as much exposure to it as they would like. This can quickly help establish you as an authority among a valuable audience segment, and once you’re their authority, they’ll seek you out for more content and advice.
p.s. Someone in the comments pointed us to this Guest Blogging Community Portal from Ann Smarty. I haven’t tried it yet, but I think she’s certainly on the right path with that approach.
