Posted by Suzzicks

This post was originally in YouMoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author's views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc.

This is the third and final installment in this mobile SEO blog post series, covering the impact of the new Google smartphone bot and how you can use it to make the most of your mobile content. The first article in the series discussed how the new smartphone bot works and which sites will be most affected. The post from last week discussed how to author redirects correctly to ensure that your mobile content will be properly indexed by the smartphone bot. This final post will review common search engine indexing problems that mobile sites and mobile platforms have, and how you can prevent them.

Some SEOs insist that we must believe what Google tells us about how and why they index things the way they do; that indexing is consistent, predictable and flawless. Unfortunately, that is not the case, especially in mobile where there are more pages and more potential for things to go wrong. Believing that indexing will always happen correctly, and that you need not mitigate risk factors for mis-indexing will not create the ideal SEO scenario. It will leave your sites (mobile/desktop/tablet) exposed when there are changes to the algorithm, or when new crawlers are evaluating your site for the first time.

If you are trying to ‘dot all your ‘i’s’ and cross all your ‘t’s’ in the world of mobile search engine indexing, here is what you need to know to prevent mis-indexing:

Avoid Duplicate Content

Google has never and will never like duplicate content. Google’s new smartphone bot, and their decision to index and cache mobile redirects may be a way for Google to avoid or minimize the need to index entire mobile pages (possibly), but it is still hard to tell how it all works. Adding mobile pages into a mix will always presents the RISK that something will be misunderstood as ‘duplicate’ and cause problems.

To keep Google happy, in the mobile world it is especially important to avoid the sneakier kinds of duplicate content that some webmasters forget about, otherwise known as DUST. The acronym stands for Duplicate Url Same Text [Acronym shared with my by the awesome Lindsay Perkin-Wassle, of Keyphrasiology]. DUST happens any time more than one version of a URL will resolve in the address bar but the browser shows the same page. The easiest example to understand is a page rendering with or without inclusion of the ‘www’ in the URL (the canonical v. non-canonical discussion usually stops here), but DUST can also be seen when there are multiple versions of a home page or category level page, as in the examples below:

In the mobile SEO world, it is quite common for mobilization platforms to control the servers and databases that generate the mobile content, and they are infamous (maybe only in my mind) for generating lots of DUST. Even the best mobilization platforms typically have minimal understanding of SEO; they try to set their servers to be very flexible with what page requests they can correctly render, and render as many different variations of a URL as possible. Instead of doing this, the platforms should be setting up the servers to 301 redirect any version of the URL that is not the canonical ‘chosen’ to redirect to the ‘chosen’ version of the URL. This is also how you can set up your own servers to prevent DUST.

Avoid 404 Errors and Misdirects

There is a risk that Google’s new smartphone crawler may be overly literal at first, and rely exclusively on the redirects that are in place, but not evaluate other signals or algorithmic elements. This means that it will probably also have a heightened the sensitivity to errors that are present on a site or in a redirect.

In general having lots of errors on your site can hinder crawling and indexing and cast your mobile site (and possibly desktop site too) in a bad light. Be sure that you check the content frequently for indexed 404 errors in Webmaster Tools, especially if you are generating dynamic mobile pages or using a hosted mobile solution to generate your mobile pages. To make finding and fixing 404s easy, you should set your mobile content up in a separate Webmaster Tools account. This way, you can see just the errors and information related to the mobile content, and not have to subtract out desktop figures to generate meaningful information.

Many 404’s in mobilization platforms are caused by improperly expired mobile content, but you should also watch for 404 errors caused by a lack of capitalization normalization and trailing slash rules set up on the server. See the example below, where one version of a URL is working fine, but the same URL with a capital letter is understood as missing, and being redirected to the mobile home page. (This is also DUST – your server can automatically normalize URLs to remove capitals.)

Capital letters in the URL cause a 404 or redirect to the mobile home page:

The presence or absence of trailing slashes can also cause problems, as shown below:

Whether the page is 404 or just redirecting to the home page, this is a problem. Stuff like this REALLY happens all the time, especially when the mobilization platforms are in charge of the server, so if you are working with an external mobilization vendor, go check this stuff out when you are done reading the article. Error-based redirect to the home page could be somehow mis-indexed as the mobile redirect.

Mobilization platforms will usually not archive mobilized pages for long periods of time, especially for sites that generate new content on a daily basis, but they also generally don’t have a proper mechanism to expire the content in a way that is good for SEO so a very similar scenario could happen with a 404 error on a page that has expired.. Mobilization platforms will generally just remove the content and leave a 404 error, which makes the mobile site look bad, because as you are constantly generating new content, you are also constantly generating new 404 errors at the same rate.

What if Google took the 404 errors on the mobile pages seriously? What if Google somehow associated the errors on the mobile pages with the corresponding desktop pages even though they were still live and fine? Hopefully Google would not let the 404 on the mobile page drag down the credibility and rankings of the desktop page that was redirecting to it, but it is not worth the risk! If you are worried about it, there is a Mobile SEO Tool to help you check indexing of one domain across the desktop and WAP index. 

When you are optimizing your mobile content, the best bet is to always play it safe, and keep your content and your server settings as neat and tidy as possible. Avoid the risk of mis-indexing by checking your URLs and watching for errors. When you add more pages and more redirects, and potentially even more servers and different companies to the mix to achieve a good mobile user experience, you increase the risk of mis-indexing.

Thanks for tuning in to this mobile SEO series about optimizing for Google’s new smartphone bot! If you missed the previous articles, they cover important information like how the new bot works, which sites will be affected and how to generate the right kinds of redirects to ensure that your content is correctly indexed by the new bot. Good luck with all of your SEO efforts and stay mobile!

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

Posted by Suzzicks

This post was originally in YouMoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author's views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc.

This is the third and final installment in this mobile SEO blog post series, covering the impact of the new Google smartphone bot and how you can use it to make the most of your mobile content. The first article in the series discussed how the new smartphone bot works and which sites will be most affected. The post from last week discussed how to author redirects correctly to ensure that your mobile content will be properly indexed by the smartphone bot. This final post will review common search engine indexing problems that mobile sites and mobile platforms have, and how you can prevent them.

Some SEOs insist that we must believe what Google tells us about how and why they index things the way they do; that indexing is consistent, predictable and flawless. Unfortunately, that is not the case, especially in mobile where there are more pages and more potential for things to go wrong. Believing that indexing will always happen correctly, and that you need not mitigate risk factors for mis-indexing will not create the ideal SEO scenario. It will leave your sites (mobile/desktop/tablet) exposed when there are changes to the algorithm, or when new crawlers are evaluating your site for the first time.

If you are trying to ‘dot all your ‘i’s’ and cross all your ‘t’s’ in the world of mobile search engine indexing, here is what you need to know to prevent mis-indexing:

Avoid Duplicate Content

Google has never and will never like duplicate content. Google’s new smartphone bot, and their decision to index and cache mobile redirects may be a way for Google to avoid or minimize the need to index entire mobile pages (possibly), but it is still hard to tell how it all works. Adding mobile pages into a mix will always presents the RISK that something will be misunderstood as ‘duplicate’ and cause problems.

To keep Google happy, in the mobile world it is especially important to avoid the sneakier kinds of duplicate content that some webmasters forget about, otherwise known as DUST. The acronym stands for Duplicate Url Same Text [Acronym shared with my by the awesome Lindsay Perkin-Wassle, of Keyphrasiology]. DUST happens any time more than one version of a URL will resolve in the address bar but the browser shows the same page. The easiest example to understand is a page rendering with or without inclusion of the ‘www’ in the URL (the canonical v. non-canonical discussion usually stops here), but DUST can also be seen when there are multiple versions of a home page or category level page, as in the examples below:

In the mobile SEO world, it is quite common for mobilization platforms to control the servers and databases that generate the mobile content, and they are infamous (maybe only in my mind) for generating lots of DUST. Even the best mobilization platforms typically have minimal understanding of SEO; they try to set their servers to be very flexible with what page requests they can correctly render, and render as many different variations of a URL as possible. Instead of doing this, the platforms should be setting up the servers to 301 redirect any version of the URL that is not the canonical ‘chosen’ to redirect to the ‘chosen’ version of the URL. This is also how you can set up your own servers to prevent DUST.

Avoid 404 Errors and Misdirects

There is a risk that Google’s new smartphone crawler may be overly literal at first, and rely exclusively on the redirects that are in place, but not evaluate other signals or algorithmic elements. This means that it will probably also have a heightened the sensitivity to errors that are present on a site or in a redirect.

In general having lots of errors on your site can hinder crawling and indexing and cast your mobile site (and possibly desktop site too) in a bad light. Be sure that you check the content frequently for indexed 404 errors in Webmaster Tools, especially if you are generating dynamic mobile pages or using a hosted mobile solution to generate your mobile pages. To make finding and fixing 404s easy, you should set your mobile content up in a separate Webmaster Tools account. This way, you can see just the errors and information related to the mobile content, and not have to subtract out desktop figures to generate meaningful information.

Many 404’s in mobilization platforms are caused by improperly expired mobile content, but you should also watch for 404 errors caused by a lack of capitalization normalization and trailing slash rules set up on the server. See the example below, where one version of a URL is working fine, but the same URL with a capital letter is understood as missing, and being redirected to the mobile home page. (This is also DUST – your server can automatically normalize URLs to remove capitals.)

Capital letters in the URL cause a 404 or redirect to the mobile home page:

The presence or absence of trailing slashes can also cause problems, as shown below:

Whether the page is 404 or just redirecting to the home page, this is a problem. Stuff like this REALLY happens all the time, especially when the mobilization platforms are in charge of the server, so if you are working with an external mobilization vendor, go check this stuff out when you are done reading the article. Error-based redirect to the home page could be somehow mis-indexed as the mobile redirect.

Mobilization platforms will usually not archive mobilized pages for long periods of time, especially for sites that generate new content on a daily basis, but they also generally don’t have a proper mechanism to expire the content in a way that is good for SEO so a very similar scenario could happen with a 404 error on a page that has expired.. Mobilization platforms will generally just remove the content and leave a 404 error, which makes the mobile site look bad, because as you are constantly generating new content, you are also constantly generating new 404 errors at the same rate.

What if Google took the 404 errors on the mobile pages seriously? What if Google somehow associated the errors on the mobile pages with the corresponding desktop pages even though they were still live and fine? Hopefully Google would not let the 404 on the mobile page drag down the credibility and rankings of the desktop page that was redirecting to it, but it is not worth the risk! If you are worried about it, there is a Mobile SEO Tool to help you check indexing of one domain across the desktop and WAP index. 

When you are optimizing your mobile content, the best bet is to always play it safe, and keep your content and your server settings as neat and tidy as possible. Avoid the risk of mis-indexing by checking your URLs and watching for errors. When you add more pages and more redirects, and potentially even more servers and different companies to the mix to achieve a good mobile user experience, you increase the risk of mis-indexing.

Thanks for tuning in to this mobile SEO series about optimizing for Google’s new smartphone bot! If you missed the previous articles, they cover important information like how the new bot works, which sites will be affected and how to generate the right kinds of redirects to ensure that your content is correctly indexed by the new bot. Good luck with all of your SEO efforts and stay mobile!

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

Posted by iPullRank

The Noob Guide to Online Marketing is arguably the greatest single post of all time. If you don’t agree, well, it’s at least my favorite. Oli Gardner (of Unbounce) displayed a playful writing style mixed with pixel perfect graphic design, and a GPS of a roadmap to take your site from mile marker zero to one hundred in six months. It’s nothing short of amazing.

While savvy content marketers realize that many of Oli’s tactics will naturally attract links, fledgling link builders got to the 63^rd page and were still wondering what to do. With this companion piece, it is my goal to grab the baton from Oli and outline a six-month link building action plan for your brand or client’s new web property. Even if the website isn’t brand spanking new, that’s fine, what I really mean is that this is the link building plan for the less savvy looking to do dive into off page optimization. Marketers with long existing sites and more link building experience will be better served downloading the Complete Six-month Off Page SEO Gameplan from iAcquire.

Following this guide in concert with Oli’s you will identify your audience, build a list of prospects, plan and execute four successful pieces of content and convince influencers to create content for your site.

Since we last spoke I left Publicis Modem to become the Director of Inbound Marketing at iAcquire which is a technology-focused off page seo agency. I encourage you to read the “Quantifying Outreach” study that I released at LinkLove London wherein I examined nearly 300k outreach emails from both our own iRank platform and Buzzstream’s CRM software. The study will help you optimize your outreach emailing tactics and understand why treating people like people rather than prospects is a far more effective tactic than sending form letters.

For those keeping score at home this falls under both the Content Strategy/Development and Social Strategy phases of the New SEO Process.

For many, link building is a numbers game and it quickly becomes clear why those people would rather put their resources into black hat tactics. Those marketers are too impatient to properly build links because link building is a process wherein you are convincing people who don’t know you to take a real world action that benefits you. To do that at scale requires a budget, great understanding of people, a large outreach team and a commitment to creating content that people will actually be compelled to link to or embed into their sites. In other words, you either have to make friends or make news.

In this age of 2pac Holograms, stop motion action figure videos, and augmented reality utilities how do you compete? While that type of content is awesome, it represents the type of big swings that may not be in your wheelhouse or relevant to your brand/client so often people wonder how to build links in their otherwise boring niche.

Naturally, there are ways to manually submit your site to millions of forums, blog comments, and directories, but those links are generally very low quality and have been the focus of algorithm updates such as Penguin. That is not to say that these tactics don’t work, but just as you should diversify your traffic sources beyond just Search, you will want to diversify your link building tactics to build a varied and natural link portfolio.

Sites with unnatural link profiles create a footprint that is easy to identify from a 10,000 foot view and of course Google has that perspective. Don’t put yourself on their radar by engaging in spammy tactics.

Anchor Text Distribution

This metric, which is the number of times an anchor in your backlink profile occurs, is best measured using tools like Open Site Explorer, MajesticSEO, Ahrefs, etc., is very important. An ex-Googler told me at SMX Australia to always be sure the highest occurring anchor text for a site is branded otherwise you may trigger an algorithmic filter or penalty.

Link Equity

The value of the links you build to your site is not a trivial thing. Links are the lifeblood of Search campaigns and therefore the foundation on which every site that is visible in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) must be built.

These numbers will not be an exact determination of what you will need to accomplish as there is a sliding scale of worth for links, but this crude explanation will make it clear to higher ups what needs to be done and why.

1. Use the aforementioned backlink profiling tools to determine how many links your competitors have and how many links you have. Whether you only use one tool or all tools, make sure that you stay consistent. Backlink profile tools all measure a different portion of the web and none of them are as comprehensive as Google so it’s important to use the same source(s) to capture a snapshot for every site.
    
2. Calculate Share of Voice.
   Share of voice is a traditional advertising term that basically means of the percentage of opportunity that a given brand occupies. If there are 10 TV advertising slots for a given TV show and a company ran ads that filled five of those slots for that show, they have a 50% Share of Voice.
   
   
   
   For the keyword [ham sandwich] the site HamSandwichMusic.Com has the highest SoV because it’s in the #1 position. The keyword [ham sandwich] has a local search volume of 33,100 which means the largest amount of traffic you can get from that keyword (according to industry standards) is 18.2% which is 6024.2 visits. So if my traffic for that keyword monthly is only 500 visits, I have an 8.3% SoV for [ham sandwich].
    
3. Determine the number of links required for you to beat your competitors. That is to say if the first position has 100 links and you have five, make the case that it will take you 96 links to get the share of voice that your top competitor has. Again, this is not exactly indicative of what it will take to beat your competitor because you may surpass them with less links that are higher quality or it may require more links and competitors will continue to build links, but to build an easily understood case use share of voice.

Tools

The specific tools required for each month are called out in this guide however there are tools that may be used at any point for a variety of reasons. Every tool mentioned in this guide is free or at least has a free tier and/or a free trial that will allow you at least start working.

• Rapportive – This Gmail Plugin is for identifying what users social profiles are connected to their email address. This is key because reaching out to people via social media first is far more effective than emailing them first.
• Boomerang – This Gmail plugin allows you to schedule and automatically follow up on emails.
• Microsoft Excel – This spreadsheet application is in invaluable for collecting, slicing and dicing data. Get to know it well with Distilled’s Excel Guide to SEO.
• SEOmoz Toolbar – The SEOmoz toolbar is a must-have for a variety of reasons, but in the case of building links you can find out whether a site meets your SEO metric requirements as you go.
• Scraper for Chrome – Stop copy and pasting data one piece at a time, use this plugin to quickly scrape data off a page and port it right to Google Docs.
• Google Refine – The data you collect will often be wonky or at least not in the format that you want it to be in and for some things Excel just doesn’t cut it. This tool by Google helps you clean it up.
• SpyOnWeb – Using this tool you can quickly figure out what domain names or IPs share the same space and what sites have the same AdSense ID. In other words you can use SpyOnWeb to identify whether your prospect is a part of a link farm.
• Link Detective – This link classification tool quickly lets you determine what types of links you or your competitor has. Take a CSV from Open Site Explorer and throw it into the system and find out the makeup of a link profile.
• Link Indices – A link index gives you the links that are linking to a given page or site. This is invaluable intel for tracking progress and identifying opportunities and deficiencies. Each of the following link indices has its own strengths and weaknesses, so give them all a try and determine which one fits your needs the best just like Branko Rihtman did:
• Open Site Explorer
• MajesticSEO
• Ahrefs

MONTH ONE – PLANNING AND QUICK HITS

This month in the Noob Guide to Online Marketing Guide you are setting up your online presence and the tools to measure it. Simultaneously, you should be planning out your link building campaign.

PLANNING

Oli’s guide talks about launching an editorial calendar at Month Two, but I suggest you start thinking about when you’re rolling your content out before you start anything. You should of course be thinking about what’s hitting the blog when, but content takes time and careful planning to create and then launch.

When planning your link building you should do what it takes to differentiate yourself and your content because you are competing with the whole web. Making your content stand out will make building links substantially easier.

With that in mind you will be launching the following content:

• Egobait (Month Two) – This is content that includes and flatters your key influencers to in turn encourage them to participate by linking to or sharing your digital assets.
• Data Visualization (Month Three) – Everyone’s go-to version of this is an infographic, but consider other ways of visualizing the data such as a book (Storybird), a timeline (dipity) or a videographic if possible. In month three you will be launching your own.
  
  
   
• E-Book and Guest Post (Month Four) – By the time the fourth month rolls around, the key influencers in your space should know about you or your client and what you bring to the table. At this point an e-book is great way to solidify you or your client’s thought leadership. Much like this guide and Oli’s, you will be coupling that e-book with a blog post on an influential site in your space to be sure that it is seen.
  
  The content should have a centralized theme that links back to your business goals, but you want it to be different enough so that your growing audience will want to share all of it.
   
• Audience/Influencer Personas – Understand who your target audience is by creating personas. Personas are general representations of your audience. Typically you should create four personas for the whole site campaign and while you can make as you like, four are more easily managed.
  
  These personas don’t have to be particularly in-depth (for example we don’t need to determine their need states) nor validated through measurement, they just have to help you create a mental model for content ideation, prospecting and outreach. While a more in-depth form of this falls under the Opportunity Discovery model, for the purposes of link building a basic understanding of who is potentially out there is all that is required. This will make it easier to associate concepts and keywords with one segment of the audience rather than another and then ultimately allow you to tailor outreach specifically to that segment in order to scale the messages.
  • Social Listening – Use tools like Topsy, Social Mention, Amplicate and Google Discussion Search to identify user segments based on keyword searches and usage. Starting from basic keyword searches that you have identified in the Adwords Keyword Tool identify who is contributing to that conversation. In cases where the conversation is particularly spammy, download the tweets and clean them up using Google Refine.
     
  • Facebook Ad Creator – The Facebook Ad Creator is to audience research what the Google Adwords Keyword Tool is to Keyword Research. It is an invaluable tool to understand the inventory of people that fit a very precise demographic. This tool will be the validation required for the personas you are building. If you hypothesize from social listening that there is a user segment out there between 30 and 40 and is interested in search engine optimization, you can then take that to the Facebook Ad Creator and see how valid that is. The only limitation is that you can’t examine the interests together using “AND.” You can only use examine the inventory using “OR.”

• Prospecting – Finding people who will be interested in your content has never been easier. Now that you have identified the type of people that you want links from and split them into targets and influencers you have a fairly precise idea of what they are into. Break these into defining keywords and run searches in:
  • FollowerWonk
  • Zerply
  • About.Me

You can also prospect specifically for sites within Google by using a variety of search queries. Additionally, there are prospecting tools such as Citation Labs and Ontolo, but these require paid subscriptions.

Keep track of these users by persona type so you can later segment your outreach and create more directly tailored form letters — if that is your thing. If you’re prospecting specifically by site you can also keep track of those sites by the segment that those sites target.

• Original Content Ideation – Even with an incredible Creative team amazing content is not scalable. Even Don Draper’s team had far more misses than makes, but what Sterling Cooper didn’t have is Social Media.
  • GoFish – This is a tool that I built to perform real-time keyword research in order to help identify co-relevant ideas that are already occurring on Twitter and gives you a list of users that have tweeted those keywords. I gave an example in my “Targeting Humans” talk where I put in the keyword “Michael Jackson” and it identified the keywords “Jackson trial” and “south park” as occurring together very often. A content idea with a built-in audience would be “The Michael Jackson Doctor Trial” played out with South Park characters. More information on how this tool works can be found in my “Using Social Media to Get Ahead of Search Demand” post.
     
  • Facebook Ad Creator – You might be surprised to see this tool twice. In addition to being great for segment inventory it’s also great for inferring content ideas that will resonate with those people. For example if we found that target segment of XXX is interested in [A].[B],[C] can we can infer that they would be interested in a __________________. This is the same idea as with GoFish, but it allows for more evergreen concepts.
     
• Pre-Contacting – At this point you have your ideas and a strong list of prospects. Strike up a conversation and tell them about the content you’re working on. Ask them for feedback due to their expertise or interest in the subject matter. Update them regularly along the way to make sure they are still onboard so when the content launches you will have a warm rapport with these people. Keep track of who was interested in your spreadsheet.

QUICK HITS

The following quick hits can be done at any point in any month. Many of them are one-offs, others will benefit from continued engagement. They are placed here so that you can get wins and show movement to the powers that be in order to get continued buy-in for your link building campaigns.

• Ask for Links in Mailing List Signups – Encourage users to link to your website when sending out the confirmation email for your mailing asking them or including embed code.
   
• Profile Links – Many Web 2.0 profiles allow you to implement a “DoFollow” link or links that pass link equity. When claiming your brand on social networks be sure to include links from your profile.
  • Facebook Fan Page
  • Twitter
  • YouTube
  • Google+ Profile
     
• Directory Submission – Directory submissions are generally considered the lowest form of link building and generally won’t help you move the needle. That said you can easily identify directories with keyword searches plus directory type e.g. “3d tv rss directory.” Again, you can show numbers with these, but they are generally not worth your time.
  • RSS Directories
  • Niche Directories
  • Paid Directories
  • Article Directories
  • Blog Directories
  • Design Galleries
     
• Better Business Bureau – The BBB has a site with an incredibly high domain authority, it’s a widely trusted site in both the eyes of the search engines and the consumer. Getting linked from this site is fairly easy and very valuable.
   
• Chamber of Commerce – Similar to the BBB, the local chamber of commerce provides the same type of value and ease for obtaining links.
   
• Join the Conversation – Typically this is called “link dropping,” but that is only in cases where people place links without joining in the conversation contextually. If you are adding to the conversation (as seen on SEOmoz posts) this is a viable tactic for link building.
  • Message Boards/Blogs – Find these with keyword searches in Google’s discussion search and Social Mention.
  • Quora
  • LinkedIn
  • Yahoo Answers

MONTH TWO – EGOBAIT

This month in the Noob Guide to Online Marketing Guide you are building your social media followings and soon you will be expected to seed users. That’s much easier said than done, but one of the best ways to do that is by getting your influencers to put your content in front of their users. The best way to accomplish this is by launching egobait which is content made to flatter, include or get the attention of specific users while also providing utility to your audience,

• Crowd Sourced Posts – Reach out to influencers and ask them what they think about current events. This makes them feel important and allows them to voice their opinion on topics without having to write a full post themselves and truthfully allows you to create content with little effort.
   
• Best of Lists – Curate a list of the greatest content, writers, things in your space and give props to your target influencers. Another way to quickly make content that will make the rounds and their audience will start to engage with you.
   
• Interviews – Have a Q&A session with a popular thought leader over the phone using Google Voice and you will quickly have a transcript of your interview and your influencer will have piece of content they are proud to share and link to.
   
• Awards/Badges – Gillian Muessig said it best “no one gave us the authority to launch the Web 2.0 awards, but we did and people still try to enter them to this day.” Launch your own awards in your space and send the people you want to link to you badges that they can use to link back to you. You can take this even further by launching an unbranded microsite and then tricking you competitors into linking to you.

• X-Factor – There’s an infinite amount of ways to flatter people. Without picking up a copy of the Art of Seduction I’m sure you can creatively figure out how to get influencers to come out to play. Here’s an example from a Credit Card Finder site in Australia where they created a comic book series starring the top financial bloggers in their space.
  
  This is a great opportunity to revitalize a dormant content idea that never quite took off. Do you have creative content that fell to the wayside because the characters never took a life of their own? Take your influencers and breathe new life into an old idea by making them the stars.

MONTH THREE – LAUNCHING DATA VISUALIZATION

The infographic is largely misunderstood as a piece of automatically viral content. The reality is that the infographic has been done to death so unless you have an active built-in community yours requires a substantial launch plan and push. The Noob Guide to Online Marketing Guide places the launch of an infographic at Month Six, but to get the most mileage out of it as a noob, I’m placing data visualization at Month Three. Feel free to launch an additional infographic at Month Six.

In 2012, data visualization should be presented as a Maximum Viable Product. A great example of such is an Australian site in the life insurance space called Life Insurance Finder who launched a very impressive and successful piece of link bait called “What Happens Online When You Die.”

Don’t just build the infographic, build a data visualization experience that exhausts the available digital assets. Create a video counterpart to that infographic, and highlight the source data to build a higher barrier to entry for those that will look to steal your success. Even right now you’re thinking that’s a lot of work; well think of how competitors will feel once that work is finished. Zappos has over 30,000 videos for its products; it is very difficult to compete with Zappos in video search because they got there first. Be the Zappos of the topic you visualize.

Simply put, some people want infographics, some people want a page and some people want a video and the performance of the “What Happens When You Die Online” campaign is very indicative of that. Here are the numbers:

• Page – 258 Links, 86 Root Domains, 172 Facebook Shares, 145 Tweets, 51 +1s
• Video – 81,072 views, 2071 Facebook Shares, 69 links, 10 Root Domains, 2601 Tweets, 61 +1s
• Infographic – 86 Links, 28 Root Domains, 31 Facebook Shares, 99 Tweets, 16 +1s

Make it easy to link to you, give the people what they want.

TACTICS

• Seed to Your Influencers – You have pre-contacted influencers for this very reason. Spell out their involvement in your content so they are compelled to link to it, share it and otherwise endorse it.
   
• Reach out to your Targets – The list of prospects you’ve created have been waiting for this moment. Ideally, you will reach out to them first in social media and then escalate to email.
   
• Contact Those Already Linking to You – Pull your existing links using a link index tool and then inform all of the relevant people that already link to you that you have launched a new piece of incredible content.
   
• Leverage Your Mailing List – At this point your mailing list should be full of people that want to find out about your content. Inform them of your new content and include the relevant embed code to make it easy for users to link to you.
   
• Add to the Conversation – Head back to the forums, blogs, message boards and Q&A sites and contextually add to the on-going conversation and when it makes sense add a link to your content.

MONTH FOUR – RELEASE AN EBOOK AND GUEST POST

By now you and/or your team have written the most incredible e-book your niche has ever seen with the best graphic design and interesting if not new insights on your subject. Luckily, you’ve saved some room for your new influential buddies to get a piece of the action and enough tangential or cutting room floor content to spread it around and get the most mileage out of it.

TACTICS

• Exclusive Release – Align with an influential site in your space that gets a lot of traffic and offer your E-Book as an exclusive download.
   
• Guest Post – A good guest posting opportunity typically serves two purposes. First, you are writing content for a third-party website wherein you can drop as many exact match anchor text links as you like. Secondly, you have an opportunity to leverage the eyeballs of users that frequent the site.
   
• Foreword – Invite a key influencer to write the foreword of the book so their name can be attached to your promotions in social media and on other influential websites.
   
• Quotes – Reach out to thought leaders in the space for quotes, similar to the pre-contacting done in the first month asking thought leaders for quotes keeps them aware of the process that you are making a book and once the book arrives you can easily reach out to those influencers and request a link or promotional support.
   
• Reviews – Reach out to bloggers that specifically write book reviews in your space. Simply search for “[keyword] book review.” For example, if I were to write an SEO e-book I would certainly reach out to this gentleman, Ian Lurie, since he has reviewed an book about SEO in the past.
  
  (I just egobaited Ian here. Now when I tweet about it I can put "featuring @portenint" in the tweet)

MONTH FIVE – HOST A BLOG CONTEST

In Month Six Oli suggests holding a contest in social media. I’m going to move that up one month in order to couple it with the event you will be throwing in Month Six. I’m also going to take another page out of Oli’s book and suggest this be a blogging contest.

The concept is quite simple:

• Reach out to influencers in your space that are awesome writers
• Convince them to write their best work
• Offer awesome prizes
• Decide the winners based on social metrics

You may be few thousand dollars lighter from the prizes you pay out, but you also have a ton of great content from thought leaders in your space which then turns into more linkable assets. You also have a ton of social shares that put your content in front of those influencers’ followers in social media.

Does it work? Well Unbounce ran the same contest and here’s the leaderboard:

The posts led to a combined 20,000 unique visitors during the respective two week scoring periods of each post and twenty one posts that continue to drive substantial traffic and links for Unbounce.

TACTICS

At this point the content on your site will be robust enough to make linking to you easy and worthwhile. The following tactics will allow you to continually identify contextual prospects and grease the wheels for any ongoing outreach link building:

• Set up Google Alerts – Use your brand name, the names of people involved in the business and target keywords as the queries that you are targeting in Google Alerts. If someone has mentioned you and not linked to you, quickly ask them for a link.
   
• Ifttt– Set up automatic alerts using If That Then This for when the brand, keywords or guest post URLs are mentioned in social media. Reach out to those people and encourage them to link to you.
   
• LinkStant – Find out when someone is linking to you as they are writing their post and ask for updated anchor text.
   
• Image Search – Google’s image search allows you to search for sites that have embedded your infographic and request that they cite their source by linking to you.
   
• Video Search – Sometimes people re-upload videos to YouTube and that causes the views to be split between them. Search for those videos on YouTube and then search for the URL in Google to find sites that have embedded your video and request that they switch videos and link to you.

Once the competition is over, revisit your badge strategy by sending all entrants a badge and encouraging them to link back to their post.

MONTH SIX – THROW AN EVENT

You may have heard that the best way to get someone to link to you is to buy them a beer; throwing an event is the scaled version of that. Throwing a successful event naturally generates a lot of fanfare, promotion and chatter that will also lead to links.

First, you must decide what type of event you want to put on:

• Meetup
• Conference
• Party
• Dinner

TACTICS

Ask People You Know To Link To You – The people that you specifically invite to your event should be the type of people that you want to link to you. Show them a good time and encourage them to write about your event after the fact.

• Press Releases - These have been abused by SEOs on PRWeb and Businesswire for content launches and link building but they are most effective in the case of launching an event.
   
• Reach Out Directly to Journalists – Find journalists with the keyword searches “columnist for [publication]” and “writes for [publication].”Invite these people out and show them a great time.
   
• Handwritten Notes – Follow up after the event is over with handwritten notes so potential linkers remember you and your hospitality.

FINAL QUICK HITS

• The SEER Method - For your grand sendoff use the SEER Interactive method; pull your full list of followers using SimplyMeasured and pull your complete backlink profile with MajesticSEO, expand any shortened URLs and do VLOOKUPs to determine what users are following you, but not linking to you and reach out to them.
   
• Find Who Shared Your Stuff – Similarly, using Topsy, pull the profiles for all the people that shared your URLs and perform a VLOOKUP to see what users shared your content but didn’t link to you and reach out to them.

CONGRATS!

Presumably, you’ve made it through not one, but two guides on how to successfully launch a new web property and ultimately get visibility not just in the SERPs but amongst key influencers in your vertical. I hope now that link building doesn’t seem quite as daunting as it once did and I wish you great success!

Remember there are two solid ways to build links: Make News or Make Friends.

Which one are you prepared to do?

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Posted by randfish

Yesterday, I filmed some quick thoughts on Google's Penguin update. You can find the full video on our Google+ page:

In it, I cover a few unique items about Penguin:

• It's (weirdly) not focused on improving search quality
• It appears to affect some of the worst spam (but not all) and some very light forms of spam/manipulation (oddly)
• Not tied to on-page or on-site necessarily, though outlinks may be looked at and several other updates occurred at similar times (making it tough to reverse engineer what might have caused a penalty)
• Appears to affect a disproportionate number of web service industry sites (though that could be correlation, not causation)
• Not yet clear if this a rolling update (though there are signs it may be)
• Left a lot of very strange, "empty" types of results in many of the spammiest verticals/SERPs

I wanted to crosspost about it here so those asking for my opinions about Penguin could check it out. Look forward to some great discussion on G+ (or here in the comments). Oh, and if you haven't encircled SEOmoz on Google+... You totally should! We've got another WB+ video coming out very soon :-)

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Posted by evolvingSEO

Or do you find yourself feeling a bit like Gary Coleman...

He is talking about WordPress, yes?

If you've ever tried to optimize WordPress for SEO success you've probably said those exact words at some point... some crazy theme breaks something, or a plugin crashes the whole site, or in terms of SEO you get 971 duplicate pages back from your crawl report. 

But I don't think your troubles with WordPress are your fault entirely. I've been there too when I was first learning it! Gary Coleman has been there. But this post is an opportunity to move on from that...

Let's Wipe That Gary Coleman Look Off Your Face!

There's a lot of well meaning yet misguided info out there. After over two years of battling with (umm... using...) WordPress, I know it can be tricky and frustrating at times, and so I wanted to create a guide that might help clear some of this up.

I'm not here to get into every single little detail and variation, but rather to spend time on the core WordPress features and give special focus on SEO related WordPress issues.

Five Goals of This Post

1. Clear up some confusion about WordPress terminology
2. Explain that WordPress, being a dynamic CMS, is built on relationships (as in "relational database") - and explain those relationships
3. Show you some hands on, practical tips for setting up your WordPress site with an SEO focus
4. Give you a few ways to cross check SEOmoz's crawler diagnostics with other sources
5. Get rid of that 'ol Gary Coleman look!

For This Post, Let's Assume

• We're running wordpress.org (the self hosted version)
• This is a single author site (to keep it simple, although not hard to extend the concepts to multi-author)
• We're not doing any ecommerce, photo galleries, or anything else you'd find in a more custom application of WordPress.
• We're using Yoast's SEO for WordPress plugin.

Alright. Everyone ready? LET'S GO!! ....What Chu TALKIN' Bout WordPress?!

Part 1 - WordPress Terminology

• Explanation of some of the most common terms

Regular Web "Page" vs. WordPress "Page"

Let's get really basic here for a minute, hope you don't mind. But I think a lot of people may confuse/interchange a WordPress page with a Web Page.

A web page is a single HTML document that exists at a unique URL. Even if the extension is .php or .asp. The underlying source code is still HTML. This is a WEB page. It does not matter HOW it was created - it loads in your browser as an HTML document and that's all you need to know. And for the rest of this post, when I say "web page" I'm talking about any HTML document existing at a URL.

But a WordPress page is WordPress's version of a "static" page. In fact, anytime you're talking about a page in the context of WordPress, put the word "static" before "page" = "static page" and it will always make more sense.

Pages vs. Posts

This is the second thing people either usually confuse, or have a hard time grasping. To your credit, I think it's confusing that they're put side by side in documentation, as if they're somehow similar. They're not at all!

Note that pages and posts differ entirely in how they function.

• A post is dated and "time-sensitive" and a page is not.
• A post can belong to categories, tags, dates and authors and a page can not.
• You can access a post from multiple pages - its category, tag, date or author.
• A page is only accessible from where ever you link to it.

Some additional references about pages vs. posts:

• wordpress.com documentation (although not the self hosted version, still applies)
• wordpress codex about pages
• wordpress codex "the dynamic nature of pages"

Categories vs. Tags

Ah. Another sticky point for folks. Some may argue, but I think Yoast would agree. Categories are for your main 5-7 "buckets" of topics that your posts fall into. Tags are there to fine-tune categories, and are usually much more specific that categories.

• Also, you should NOT have a category that is the same as a tag or vice versa. Categories should all be unique from tags.
• And, categories can have hierarchy and tags have no hierarchy.

Author Archives

• Simple. Me like.

Dated Archives

• Easy. Good.

Pagination (Subpages)

Yeah... why is this confusing? The only thing that doesn't paginate... are PAGES!!  ....WHAT CHU TALKIN' BOUT??'

Part 2 - Relationships In WordPress

• This part will show you how the different elements within WordPress relate and interact with one another.

Pages - They're Static

Not much to 'splain here (I hope by now!).

• Pages are like regular, non-blog pages on a website.
• They can have a hierarchy.
• They will not go into the RSS feed.

Use Pages For The Following Types Of Content

• An "About Us" section
• If a dentist, say a page about "dental implants" describing your service.
• If a restaurant, your Menu Page.
• Directions page
• Fees page etc.

Posts->Categories

Think of "Many To Many" relationships in databases. 

• You can put a post in many categories. And of course a category can hold many posts.

Posts->Tags

• You can put the same tag on many posts.

Date & Author Archives

• Dates are simple. If you view a date archive by month, all the posts from that month appear within that date archive.
• For our single author blog setup, since every single posts is by the same author, that's what you'd get when viewing that archive (which is why we 301 redirect it to the blog homepage).

Accessing Posts

• This is showing you, you can arrive at the same post from multiple places.

• And this is showing you, for the most recent posts, or popular posts, sometimes there is a link in the sidebar - and of course the blog home IS a feed of the most recent posts.

Don't Forget Pagination (Subpages)!

• All of these web pages can have subpages off of them.

Bonus - For the Truly Geeky

I found this awesome template of the hierarchy within WordPress and loading a page. Not necessary to know for what we're doing here, and not 100% relevant either, but I found it really useful, especially if you like to know more about what's going on behind the scenes.

Part 3 - Best Practice Configuration

Any Decisions I Need To Make Up Front?

This is sort of a "I wish I knew then" chart. Things that would be useful to know up front, such as;

• Decide your categories at the beginning.
• Decide what you want the homepage of your blog to be early on.
• When you create a user account, choose the username wisely, because this is the URL and can not be changed afterwards (don't get stuck with "admin"!)

What Should Be Accessible To Users & Search Engines?

• This chart is showing you what page types should be accessible to the user and to the search engines.
• So unless otherwise noted, the page type can be indexed and followed.

What Links Go In What Menus?

This is the general rule of thumb I follow for deciding what links to put where. In general

• I put pages and categories in main menus
• I put categories, recent/popular posts, dated archives, and maybe tags in the sidebar/widget.

Where Do I Control URLs Titles & Descriptions?

URL control can be confusing, because some are set in odd places, or called "slugs".

• Page and Posts URLs get set within the page/post editor
• Category and tag URLs get set in their respective menus under "slug"
• Author URLs are the "username"

If you've got everything set up correctly, it should be EASY to get your titles and descriptions in check.

• Title and description templates get set in Yoast
• Titles and descriptions at the individual page/post level are set in that page/post editor with Yoast.
• Need help writing a title? Use this post I did about writing titles.

Actual Setup

Themes

This is where things get tricky, because a lot of themes tend to break perfectly good WordPress install. Or they try to handle SEO stuff when they shouldn't. Or, you get a theme, and a plugin and WordPress all handling title tags and it becomes a mess.

DO use themes for design elements;

• Colors
• Fonts,
• Page layout
• Headers
• Footers
• Basic social media button stuff

Do NOT use themes for SEO stuff, such as

• Indexation
• Analytics codes
• Titles and descriptions
• RSS feeds
• Menu structure (ideally this is done with WordPress Custom Menus)

Let the Yost SEO plugin handle this stuff! Shut off / do not use these types of SEO functions within the themes. 

Plugins

There are two plugins I always install right away for pure SEO stuff;

• Yoast SEO for WordPress
• Yoast Google Analytics for WordPress

I often see other plugins that try to set SEO settings - so be sure you're only managing SEO with one thing!

Configuring Yoast SEO

Titles & Descriptions

• Yoast SEO has the ability to assign a title and description template for every possible page, post and archive - so I advise using Yoast to manage all title and description templates.

As noted: Don't forget to update your header.php file to include the correct title code;

A note about the 'sitename' variable - this is the site title under settings>general

Indexation

• This follows all of the best practice procedure from above. Tag, author, and date archives will all look too similar to other content. So it does not make sense to have them indexed.
• Please note: Want to reiterate - this is what I typically use for a standard WordPress setup - one author, standard blogging format, or a business website with a blog inside etc. You may find yourself in a different circumstance if you have multiple authors, ecommerce etc.
• Also - if your blog has already existed for some time, and you've been indexing tags all along for example, you shouldn't just go deindexing them. Look in analytics, see how much traffic they might be bringing you, if that traffic is quality, and make a well thought out decision about if/how to move away from indexing tags.

• Since running a single author blog, disabling the author archives 301 redirects them back to the blog homepage. This is good for the engines AND the user since they look exactly the same.
• I like letting users browse posts in the dated archives
• Not best practice to add noodp/noydir to every page - but the plugin allows you to do it for individual pages/posts in the editor.

XML Sitemaps

• Make sure you don't have any other plugins or your theme handling the sitemap.
• Check off what you don't want included in the XML sitemap. (This is usually the same as what you are NOT indexing).

Permalinks

• One thing I LOVE about Yoast's plugin - you can strip /category/ off the folder structure for categories. AWESOME! You should definitely do this. If the site has already been indexed with /category/ redirects are automatically created.
• You could redirect images to their parent post or page. I usually don't but it won't do any harm if you do.
• Unless you're running something with https (secure pages) you can just leave canonical settings as default.

Part 4 - Diagnostics

This is THE most common question we get in Q&A. Duplicate content issues. Basically I want to give you guys some extra tools and resources for checking duplicate content issues re: WordPress and the Moz crawl report.

A lot of folks get concerned when they see "47 duplicate page titles found" etc, and with understanding!

If you've set everything up as above correctly, there isn't a whole lot of room for error. But sometimes things happen and stuff breaks or we miss something.

And most times, no matter the issue, ensuring you have things setup as described above in the post, will fix things.

Step 1 - Check Google Webmaster Tools

Check webmaster tools. If they are not reporting duplicate page titles or descriptions, you probably have little to worry about. Moz might have picked up on pages that were crawlable but not being indexed. But definitely check back in with webmaster tools in a week or so (its healthy to check webmaster tools once a week anyway!)

Step 2 - Crawl With Screaming Frog

I honestly love the Moz crawl report. Its turned up some important things to fix for me at times. Yet I think its just smart with ANY tool to cross check, especially if it involves a big error like duplicate content.

Use the free version of Screaming Frog to crawl up to 500 pages (and the paid version is unlimited).

1. Crawl the site
2. Click on titles
3. Select Duplicates
4. You'll see a report like this:

In this case we can clearly see subpages are causing a lot of the duplicate title issues. 

Step 3 - Use Google Queries To See What's Indexed

Just because a crawler like Screaming Frog or the SEOmoz crawler crawls pages, does not mean they are indexed. Check Google's index to find out with these queries.

• site:mydomain.com/blog - check for blog indexation
• site:mydomain.com/category - check for category indexation (unless you've stripped from folder structure)
• site:mydomain.com/tag - check to see what tags are indexed
• site:mydomain.com/author - check to see if author archives are indexed
• site:mydomain.com/2012 - check to see what dated archives from 2012
• site:mydomain.com/ inurl:page - check for subpages being indexed (see example below)

Steps To Take If You Confirm Errors

If you also find errors in webmaster tools, screaming frog, or Google's index:

1. Identify which page type it is (category, tag, dated archive, author archive, or subpages)
2. Determine if the page should be indexed to begin with.
3. If it should be indexed, make sure you have a setting in WordPress to generate unique titles/descriptions from the template.
4. If it should NOT be indexed, block it using Yoast and be sure you don't have to do any 301 redirects

I know that's a little overly simplistic - it'd be tough to cover every possible variation of errors within this post - but that general framework is what I would advise to follow.

Part 5 - Do The Gary Coleman Dance

No seriously. I know WordPress can be challenging - but I hope this guide has helped give you a better understanding of its different functions, and how to resolve some common issues on your own.

I will answer some questions...

Got questions? If you lead them with "What chu talkin' bout!?" I'll answer (within reason - only short 3-4 sentence answers possible here). NO specific site questions here please, just general concept questions.

Please take any detailed or site-specific questions on over to the Moz Q&A.

Or... ask me questions at MozCon! That's right, I'll be at MozCon, as an attendee, so if you're there you can track me down and ask away!

Thhhannnnnks!

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Posted by Stephanie Chang

Some of the greatest challenges my previous ecommerce clients have faced have revolved around developing a cohesive and long-term content/link building strategy. They’ve done all the changes they can on the technical backend of the site, incorporated keywords on the site, created a crawlable internal linking structure, and have paid for PR releases, submitted directory submissions, and written the occasional blog post. Now they ask, what’s next?

Creative Category Pages

Category pages are the money pages for ecommerce sites. Getting links to these pages is a major win because these are the pages that will be ranking for key head and mid-tail terms. Furthermore, even as products are rotated or as the site undergoes a redesign, the category pages will still remain a part of the site architecture and are the pages least likely to be impacted. However, it’s also a major challenge to garner links to these pages. Who wants to link to a page full of products? 

Start thinking about how you can redesign your category pages to make them more than just another page. For instance, Hema’s category page was designed to become a wacky Rube Goldberg device. This page has gotten 20,826 links from 2,686 linking root domains.

Using Products as Linkbait

Often times, it can be challenging to revamp or redesign category pages, so that valuable, unique content can be added. If that’s the case, selling interesting products on your site can become an effective form of linkbait. 

Threadless sells creative t-shirts. After the homepage, their second most linked to page is this product page. This product page received 5,065 links from 686 linking root domains, 3,068 Facebook Shares, and 1,167 Facebook Likes. It has received links from high authority sites, such as Wired and Boing Boing. 

• A robot tea infuser from ModCloth. The page received 789 total links from 201 linking root domains from sites, such as Uncrate and The Next Web. 
• Tactical duty kilt from 5.11. Although this product started off as an April Fool’s Joke, 5.11 ended up making them because of the demand, while also receiving links from sites, such as Alltop.

Leveraging Sales/Deals Pages

Another linkbuilding tactic is to build and maintain a deals/sales page on the site that fulfills SEO requirements, such as having crawlable, indexable content, static URL, incorporating targeted keywords on the page etc... Then keep the same URL and revamp it every time you have a new deal or sale. 

Personalized Product Giveaways

Think about what makes people feel special. Everyone appreciates personalized gifts. With Mother's Day just around the corner, why not create a care package to the top 50 most passionate moms within your community with a personalized thank you from you and your team? It doesn't have to be expensive to show that you care. Now take the surprise of the care package, combine this with people's insatiable desire to share via Pinterest, Tumblr, Twitter, and Facebook, and they've just published and pinned beautiful photos of this sincere gift to their network for the world to see.

Link-worthy Contests

If personalized product giveaways aren’t possible, consider running effective contests in conjunction with identifying influential individuals on channels using tools, like Followerwonk. This would allow you to systematically target the type of audience and sites you want involved (while also expanding your brand awareness). You need to give something away that people would actually want, especially your target audience. It’s also worth having a little fun with it and seeing if you could come up with some creative tactics that would require contest submissions to link back to your site. 

• Fashion/clothing ecommerce sites: Does your boyfriend need a $500 fashion makeover? Send pictures and write a post on the products you would purchase.
• Tools/home improvement sites: Shopping spree competition - Does a room in your house need a makeover? How would you spend the money using products from our site?

Value of High-Quality Photos

Who doesn’t like looking at pretty pictures all day? We’re all visually stimulated by beautiful images and so really, it’s worth the effort to incorporate large, high-resolution photos on your site. Not to mention as an ecommerce site, your website is the main vehicle for visitors to take a closer look at the products you offer. If I can’t see the product clearly, why should I buy it from your site? How can I even trust it?

Leveraging Anticipation

There’s something to be said about building anticipation before a product actually hits the market. People are naturally inquisitive and want to be the first to be granted access and try out a product. Think about the huge lines that were outside of Apple stores the day the iPad 3 was released or the anticipation surrounding the release of Diablo 3. 

Widening Your Audience

Sometimes we become so entrenched in trying to attract our target audience (What’s their persona? Who do they follow? How can I build a relationship with them?), that we can lose sight of all the other potential opportunities that are out there. Brainstorm all the cool things that you’re doing as a company and what your next initiatives are. Can you make any of these into a story? If you can’t think of any, then think outside your site and your target audience and write a blog post that speaks to them.

• Comprehensive Guide to Guest Blogging
• Posts about writing effective outreach emails here and here
• Lists of 500 sites that accept guest blog posts
• List of 100 sites that accept guest blog posts 

Using Personal Stories

The new online marketing landscape offers new opportunities for storytelling and adds a human element to the type of stories that we share. The Coca Cola content initiative demonstrates that content marketing is growing and becoming a vital part of online marketing. There are several other brands that also utilize storytelling as a channel, such as Nike's story on how running reunited a long-distance relationship. 

Taking a Risk and Creating Amazing Content on a Budget

Let’s say you have a limited marketing budget and aren’t sure that you have the resources to create linkbait content. Having such constraints for marketing is normal, but being creative, bold, and taking a risk can still pay off. Take the Dollar Shave Club as an example. With less than $5,000 budget, Dollar Shave Club was able to create a Old Spice like video about their product that led to over 4.5 million views on YouTube, 27,000 Facebook Shares, and over 2,000 tweets. This LA-based startup combined razors, a monthly subscription model, and a video introducing their company to the world with humor as their way to break into the space. Creating content like this isn't without its risks, but when it pays off and is aligned with your core offering, there are many added benefits (brand awareness, growth in revenue, and word-of-mouth).

Audio Content Marketing

Here is another great example of how something as random as a late night Facebook comment manifested itself into a No. 1 Amazon.com selling book almost overnight. Adam Mansbach, author of the children's book for adults titled (kids, cover your ears for this one) "Go the F**k to Sleep" quickly garnered the attention of celebrity Samuel L Jackson to do the narrative once he heard there would be an Audible.com version of the book. It was this combination of interesting, yet unique content narrated by a recognizable voice that transformed Audible.com's sales page into one of the domains top linked, most socially shared, and highest reviewed pages on their site.

Utilizing Pinterest

Pinterest has experienced rapid growth over the past 6 months with over 10 million registered users. The power of Pinterest is in its ability to drive referral traffic to your ecommerce site. This type of platform presents an opportunity for ecommerce sites to use Pinterest’s user base as a way to effectively engage targeted users by creating content that is relevant to them, and make its products more visible to the right audience. Ideally, the strategy should be to create compelling and valuable content so that users want to click on the pins and land on various product pages. Colby Almond of 97th Floor has created a Viral Guide to Pinterest Marketing, as well as written additional blog posts that introduce how to effectively build your Pinterest following and create the right type of content for this medium. 

Lessons Learned When SEO Isn't a Consideration - Honda

Everybody loves a Rube Goldberg machine. They are fun, smart, interesting, and super darn creative. Honda created a Rube Goldberg device crafted out of their car parts called “The Cog”. You know what made this video less cool? The fact that still, to this day, this content is nowhere to be found on any of Honda's websites or YouTube channels. Guess who this did bode well for? A car enthusiast channel known as Web Rides TV with over 3.7 million views and counting. This URL also received links from 582 linking root domains. 

It's Hard Work, But Keep at It

Link building is hard work and results often don’t appear until months after you’ve invested an incredible amount of time and resources. However, these case studies show that it works and even though results appear minimal at the beginning of the curve, results will grow exponentially at the end of the curve. It’s all about constantly pushing the flywheel, working really hard until you get even a hint of momentum, and then continuing to build upon that tiny amount of momentum until it starts to ease up and pushing through becomes easier. Just keep iterating and don’t give up! 

Additional Resources on Link Building for Ecommerce Sites

• http://www.slideshare.net/tomcritchlow/ecommerce-inspiration
• http://www.slideshare.net/tomcritchlow/ecommerce-seo-in-2012
• http://www.slideshare.net/richardbaxterseo/linkbuilding-for-ecommerce-sites-smx-munich-2012
• http://kaiserthesage.com/seo-strategies-for-ecommerce-websites-2/
• http://www.seomoz.org/blog/link-building-for-small-ecommerce-sites
• http://www.seomoz.org/blog/link-building-for-ecommerce-sites-targeting-the-right-anchor-text

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Posted by Modesto Siotos

This post was originally in YouMoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author's views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc.

Google’s actions against “overoptimised” sites have been intensified and it seems that the recent updates are able to detect various links-related overoptimisation violations that can result in short or long-term positional drops, with or without warnings. Even though Google announced the Penguin update on the 24th if April 2012, changes on Google’s link evaluation system have been noticeable several weeks before the public announcement.

It appears that in some cases Google has been overzealous, hitting (temporarily) even websites with rather natural link profiles. In other cases, Google admitted algorithmic classification mistakes, publishing apologetic messages like this one Matt Cutts posted on Google+.

According to Patrick Altoft (branded3) the sites that have received unnatural links notifications fall under five main categories, and they are not just the ones participating in link exchanges or other types of link networks. Rand made a Whiteboard Friday video about 6 changes every SEO should make before the overoptimisation penalty hits. Now that Google has rolled out the Penguin update against "black web spam," making sure that your website's backlink profile does not violate Google's quality guidelines is quite essential, especially if your traffic has gone down.

This is a follow up to the post ‘How to Monitor Your Website For Link Equity Loss’, which can be used to identify backlinks from low quality or penalised/deindexed websites. However, this post intends to cover the following links related overoptimisation cases:

A) Excessive Link Acquisition

B) Site-wide links detection

C) Unnatural Anchor Text Distribution

D) Unnatural Spread of Links Authority

A. Excessive Link Acquisition Check

Acquiring a high number of links over a short period of time has never been a good practice and webmasters need to keep an eye on the levels of acquired links, especially these days that negative SEO seems to become more of an issue. Phrases like the following one from Dan Thies, seem to be heard more often lately:

"Both sites have received “unnatural links” messages in Webmaster Tools. Neither site has had a “link building” campaign ever. By using 3rd party tools (e.g. Majestic) I can see a lot of unnatural links pointing at both sites, but I didn’t put those links there"

There are two quick ways to check your site's link acquisition velocity, using Ahrefs or Majestic SEO.

Extremely  High Link Acquisition Velocity (Ahrefs) 

Unnatural Link Acquisition Velocity (Majestic SEO historic index, cumulative view)

B. How To Check For Site-wide Links

A high number of blog-roll, header, footer or sidebar links can trigger Google’s “overoptimisation” wrath and keeping them to a minimum would be a rather reasonable thing to do. Certainly some site-wide links may have occurred naturally but the less "overoptimisation" signals you site sends out, the better. There are a few ways to quickly check your website against site-wide links with the quickest one being Webmaster Tools.

Under 'Your site on the web' -> Links to your site WMT list the domains that link the most to your site. The ones that link several times should be flagged as potential site-wide links and be manually checked.

Using Webmaster Tools to detect site-wide links is a rather easy and quick way. However, because WMT don't report all backlinks Google actually see, for a more thorough investigation a third party link intelligence service should be used such as Majestic SEO, Open Site Explorer, Ahrefs etc. One thing to bear in mind using any 3d party service, is that their crawlers do not try to replicate Google's behaviour, therefore in some cases the data can be significantly skewed. This is particularly the case for links from web sites that Google has removed from its index but the 3d party services will still report as normal links. 

A section in the Ahrefs FAQ page reads: “Having the full information at hand you may decide on subjective estimates of links and figure out real situation with the given website or page”. In a similar manner a Majestic SEO rep commented that:

 "Our index is independent of Google and will remain so. If Google has banned a site, it does not mean there are no longer links to that site. We map the link graph – not Google’s interpretation of it."

C. How To Check For Unnatural Anchor Text Distribution

Overoptimised anchor text seems like a ticking bomb, especially after Google made public the following two messages:

"Tweaks to handling of anchor text. [launch codename "PC"] This month we turned off a classifier related to anchor text (the visible text appearing in links). Our experimental data suggested that other methods of anchor processing had greater success, so turning off this component made our scoring cleaner and more robust."

"Better interpretation and use of anchor text. We’ve improved systems we use to interpret and use anchor text, and determine how relevant a given anchor might be for a given query and website."

This task is quite more complicated because, ideally, you need as much data as possible. Exporting anchor text data from as many different data sources as possible is strongly recommended e.g. Majestic SEO, Ahrefs, Open Site Explorer, Sistrix, Blekko. 

Next you would need to filter the data removing the following:

• Dead links - These are sites that no longer link to your site but used to link in the past. Filtering out the dead links is absolutely necessary and some 3d party services offer such tools. Otherwise, proprietary link checkers can be used like the one we use at iCrossing UK - Alex Ovsianikov's creation. Counting dead links into a backlinks audit can result in wrong conclusions.
• Deindexed linking root domains - It's rather pointless carrying out a backlinks audit for Google including links from sites that Google has deindexed. NetPeak Checker, makes this task quite easy as it is explained on this post.
• No follow links - These are unlikely to cause any overoptimisation issues and could be discounted
• Site-wide links - These should be counted once, otherwise the anchor text distribution will be greatly skewed. Different services treat site-wides differently; hence you need to pay extra attention at how each service treats them.

After having applied the above filters, the remaining backlinks data could be analysed for different anchor text types such as:

• Exact match targeted keywords e.g. hr software
• Broad match keywords e.g. online hr software system
• Brand terms e.g. BreatheHR, www.breatheHR.com
• Keyword + brand terms e.g. Breathe HR software system
• Image links
• Other e.g. 'click here', 'this site' and other natural anchor text that doesn't fall under any of the above categories.

Having classified all different anchor text variations, it is now relatively easy to spot weaknesses - pay particular attention for spikes on exact match keywords as in the following graph:

D. How To Check For Unnatural Link Authority Spread

Don’t Let The Penguin Leave You In the Cold

About the author
Modesto Siotos (@macmodi) works as a Senior Natural Search Analyst for iCrossing UK, where he focuses on technical SEO issues, link tactics and content strategy. Modesto is happy to share his experiences with others and posts regularly on digital marketing blog Connect.

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