Posted by Kate Morris

I've been reading The Idea Factory, the history of the innovation that came out of Bell Labs around WWII. Innovation, invention and ideas are things that we don't get to talk much about in SEO. It's all about keywords, links, and content, but I want you to take some time today to think about ideas, inventions and innovations. Why? Because we all want to be millionaires (oh hush, yes you do), and while that might not happen to all of us, idea generation is central to our jobs in search marketing.

Bell Labs was born out of a technology being invented (the telephone) and the problems AT&T faced building a communications infrastructure in the United States (and how to connect overseas). We are talking serious problems like wood decay, birds and wires, distance and signal strength. Things we take for granted today. 

The men and women at Bell Labs strove to find the best materials, to make products and services better. We can learn from the team at Bell Labs. Use the ideals of hard work, research and development, invention, and innovation to drive us to make our websites, products, and services better. 

That's how you win on the internet. Be better than everyone else. 

Innovation is a Lengthy Process

The term "innovation" dated back to sixteenth-century England. Originally it described the introduction into society of a novelty or new idea, usually relating to philosophy or religion ... an innovation defined the lengthy and wholesale transformation of an idea into a technological product or process meant for widespread practical use. 

This portion of the book really hit home with me. Innovation is a lengthy process of taking an idea to a product or process for widespread practical use. There are no overnight successes, just people that worked really hard behind the scenes pouring their blood, sweat and tears into an idea.  

The same should be true with your business and website. Innovation in your space is not just putting up a website and knowing the right keywords to target. It's about waking up at 5:30 in the morning to be at a networking breakfast at 8am a few times a month for a few years. Success is about determination, dedication and hard work. 

The time you take to discuss your idea, how you plan to be different with members of your target market, will pay back not only in the refining of that idea, but also in friends and allies when your business or website launch. Choosing the connected people is a strategic process; if they are there at 8am, they are dedicated too and have met others that are of the same breed. Now does that mean that everyone needs to go to 8am networking breakfasts? No. I hate them. But you get the idea.

Want your website to be a success? Then spend the time in the following areas:

• Business Idea - don't copy someone else's idea unless you can be better than them and everyone else in the space doing the same
• Website Copy - Develop the copy for your site, and if you have products what you'll let others use. Write into affiliate contracts that your product descriptions are not to be used elsewhere. Treat website content like a white paper, protect it, don't allow others to copy it. 
• Promotion - I am not talking online promotion, I'm talking the whole marketing umbrella. This is not something you buy/outsource and leave alone. It's your baby, own it! 

Make Goals, Not Hard Timelines

Inventions are a valuable part, but invention is not to be scheduled or coerced. Harold Arnold, Bell Labs

Need $10k by next year? Don't build a website, add products, pay someone in another country to write copy and do SEO and think you can do that. Good ideas don't fit in timelines. You cannot rely on keyword research tools to tell you what product area has low competition and can make you millions. 

What you can do is find an area, a business idea that you really love: something that you can get lost talking about for hours and not mind. Your first goal should be to find that idea. Once you have that (and most of you do as you have clients or work in-house for someone that has that idea already), then you need to set goals for what you want to accomplish. 

The goals should be:

• Lofty but attainable (one viral infographic a month is not an attainable goal, an increase in sales from organic search by 20% is attainable)
• Developed around making the customer happy (the happier they are, the more you sell, simple)
• Tied to your boss's goals (even if your boss is your wife)

Once you know what you want to do, the end result, that drives how to get there. Now you have a purpose, but you can't rush it. You will fail, content will flop sometimes, there will be a keyword that you just have a hard time ranking for. Things will go wrong but things will also go amazingly right if you focus on a good goal.

Do Something

When you don't know what to do, do something!" Jim Fisk, Bell Labs

This is my new favorite motto. Do something. As Will Critchlow says all the time, fail faster. Come up with as many ideas as you can to meet your goal, no matter how far out of the park they are. Execute. Try things, be risky, and fail (sometimes). I can almost guarantee you that even if you fail; you'll learn something you can apply to your next attempt.

Studying Sharks

Jim Fisk proposed a $50,000 study of sharks to help naval warfare. It made it to the top and the lead of Bell Labs finally killed it. How cool a story would that have made? I would have linked to it, what about you?

Dare You

Don't know what to do? Here are some ideas for every SEO out there. I dare you to try one.

• Data Mining. Take a half-day, look into the data you have in your company about clients, about the industry. If you were to clean it all up, could you show trends about your industry? Get creative and find a way to share that information in a resource, a white paper, blog post or infographic. And then do a marketing campaign around it. If it works well, make it an annual update about the industry.
• Content Revisit. Find your top 10 products or services pages. Revisit the content, when was it last written? Update it! Add resources; make it the page to go to for that product or service. Think from the perspective of a potential customer, what would make that page better than all of your competitor's pages? Consider new images, a video, new resources, reviews. 
• Page 2 Revamp. Take 5 pages that rank on page 2.  Revisit the title tag and meta description of those pages. Is the title tag over optimized? Does the meta description really pull you to the page? Rewrite them to be real, accurate and descriptive!
• $5000 Challenge. Ask for a budget that is normal for a project in your company or for a client and do something that is way out in left field. You in finance? Pay off someone's car loan. Don't give away a iPad, donate 100 to a school that teaches computer science to under-privileged kids. 

So would you do with $5000 to help your site? What is your shark bait?

Shark Stock Photo from Shutterstock

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Posted by searchbrat

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.

There has been a lot of great discussion about the term “inbound marketing” of late and exactly what is covered by that phrase. For the purposes of this case study we are using the hubspot definition of inbound and outbound marketing. The following is a case study of how we (Salesforce.com) used inbound marketing along with social advertising and great retargeting to grow both our traffic and leads in the UK. Whether you are in B2B or B2C marketing, this case study should be relevant to you and your markets.

The new B2B Purchase Journey

The online landscape for marketers is changing at a rapid pace. People don’t buy the way they used to. There is a new purchase journey with three key elements:

1. Search-initiated - Most people begin their research of a new product via search engines, 78% of Internet users conduct product research online (Source Pew Internet & American Life Project, May 2010)
    
2. Social-powered – The growth of social networks has meant we can now tap into our own external networks for recommendations. Twitter’s active user base alone generates 90 million tweets per day, with 24% of adults have posted comments or reviews online about the things they buy. We now have a lot of user-generated content to review before making a purchase decision.
    
3. Buyer controlled - People can now choose where and when to engage with your brand, plus what content they would like to consume. You have to produce marketing strategies they choose to engage with.

For B2B companies this means their sales people are being engaged a lot later on in the purchase cycle and presents marketing with an great opportunity to become an integral part of the overall sales process.

"Get Found"

Considering the above, we decided to run a pilot project in the UK around the concept of “Get Found” (coined by Brian Halligan of Hubspot). Our aim was to get found by the people who are actively looking for help with the kinds of issues we address. We would do this by harvesting our own expertise in content that helps our prospects do their jobs better.

Since the core mediums involved in this project were search, social and content, we needed to consider how these different tactics are starting to converge and try to hit our sweet spot.

To do this we needed to answer three key questions:

• What do our prospects care about?
• How can we harvest our expertise to help?
• How can we get this content to market now?

Our Answer – “Content Rich Microsite”

When discussing microsites, a lot of people probably conjure up images of those used in new product launches (they have a very short life span) or those used to build elaborate link schemes. Our solution was to build content-rich microsite filled with the kind of content our target market would value. One critical aspect of the project was the location of the site. If you look at the salesforce.com structure, you will notice we already have a lot of great blogs sitting on http://blogs.salesforce.com/company/. Since I am interested in EMEA and in particular the UK for this project, I wanted the site to sit within our UK folder, so it would benefit from all the inbound links and social shares generated. To build our micro-site strategy, we had to address six key points:

1. Personas:
Who would this site be for?

For me persona development is the foundation of any good inbound marketing strategy. I am a massive fan of persona development, from the usability and design of your site, to content development; they ensure you strategy stays on target. In fact one of the best link building posts I read last year involved a type of persona development. We ran an intensive persona workshop (with the help of iqcontent.com) that included people from marketing, sales and customer feedback. We came up with 5-6 profiles of users we were trying to reach.

We mapped these against different stages of the purchase cycle and segmented by company size. All of this would help us when it came to content strategy and promotion.

2. Theme:
What would be the overarching theme that would hold all of our content together?

We used our own Radian 6 our social media monitoring tool, analytics and feedback from personas to come up with “The Social-Powered Business”.

3. Topics:
How do we take that theme and break it down into specific topics we can generate content around?

For us, this was pretty easy; we looked at the areas of business where social media had the greatest impact (sales, customer service, collaboration and marketing). It’s also important that your topics and themes are aligned to your products (we are trying to generate leads after all).

4. Process:
Exactly where would this content come from and how would it be validated?

Getting people excited about the project is key. You need to have people who will help with content development, feedback and amends. We used our own collaboration tool Chatter to build an internal social network around the project that consisted of 56 people. All content development was driven through that group.

5. Resources:

Of course we needed to source budget and a team.

6. Metrics:
How would we measure success?

This is a really important part of establishing any successful strategy. Brand awareness is never a good enough metric, traffic; leads and pipeline are what count. We built a dashboard in omniture with all key business metrics to measure our project.

The Launch – #socialsuccess

In 12 weeks we managed to develop:

• Strategy
• Personas
• Website
• 32 pieces of content

and our #socialsuccess site was launched on January 3rd, 2012.

The following five items were important in terms of making the launch of the site a success.

1. Content Types

For launch we chose four different categories from which we could generate content:

1. Created: Original content that was created from scratch. These are obviously the most resource intensive. They included things like an eBook, infographics, articles and slideshares.
2. Curated: These are round-up style posts. Choosing a topic like social selling and pointing to the best resources from the web on this topic.
3. Collaborative: We choose some of the best thought leaders around our topics and reached out to see if they would contribute some content.
4. Legacy: One of the easiest ways companies can quickly scale their content for inbound marketing is to repurpose content they already have into different assets. For example, our Dreamforce event that runs in San Francisco has a huge amount of expert presentations that are recorded over three days and put onto Youtube. We simply took the best videos and turned them into articles.

2. Product Messaging

Remember this sort of content is not product centric. Best practice for this kind of content is to follow the 80/20 rule – 80% non product and 20% product, for launch we stuck to 90/10. Product references were used where they made sense, but only on a limited basis.

3. Promoting the site

If you build it, they probably won’t come unless you have an awesome promotion plan. Some of the things we did to promote the site were:

1. Facebook/Twitter: Of course, all our best content was shared via our own Facebook, Twitter and Google+ pages
2. We took over the home page of our corporate site (www.salesforce.com/uk) to promote this new microsite
3. Expert advocates: We collaborated with 15 experts for launch, who were kind enough to share our content with their networks.
4. Email/Newsletter: We promoted the site launch to our UK email database and also created a newsletter called #socialsuccess Insider to keep connected with users who signed up via our eBook download.
5. Guest Blogging: We did some guest blogging on relevant sites to promote #socialsuccess
6. PR: We did some PR around some of the pieces we produced
7. Employees: We galvanized our internal employees to share with their external networks

4. Outbound Marketing

We supported all our inbound marketing with great outbound tactics:

1. Twitter: We ran sponsored tweets for our premium content (eBooks). We saw some really great CTR numbers for these. I highly recommend them.

2. LinkedIn Banner Ads: We ran some advertising on LinkedIn targeted at our core personas developed above (linkedIn has some great targeting options like target by job title). Again, we saw a far higher CTR from these ads (those offering content) over those just advertising a product.

3. Google Display Network: We are currently rolling out the same type of ads (those offering our premium content) on GDN.

5. Experts

Reaching out to thought leaders in your market is a great way to produce some highly valuable content. We were lucky enough to have some great experts involved in the initial content, who shared their expert advice with our audience and were kind enough to share our content with their own.

The Results

The project was launched officially on January 3rd, 2012 and we have seen some great results already. The feedback we have been getting back on our social channels around the content is great.

But we have also seen great results in terms of our business metrics (keep in mind we are in B2B):

• Traffic for January was up 80% YoY
• Traffic from social sites was up 2500 %
• We have over 6500 people signed up to our newsletter
• Our eBook has been downloaded over 10,000 times (generating 10,000 leads)

Our inbound marketing experiment has really shown us how impactful this stuff can be. We are currently working on similar sites in France, Germany and also new topics sites for EMEA.

So it’s Onwards and Upwards!!

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Posted by randfish

Having overly optimized web pages could soon get your websites in some hot water with Google and their search results. It has recently been announced that Google will start to penalize websites that engage in over-optimization practices.

In this week's Whiteboard Friday, we will be covering some changes that you should be making to your SEO practices in order to avoid this type of penalization.

We hope you enjoy and don't forget to leave comments below! Happy Friday Everyone!

Video Transcription

Howdy SEOmoz fans. Welcome to another addition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we've been hearing a lot of chatter in the SEO blogosphere and on Twitter and on the forums about this new potential Google penalty that's coming down the line around over-optimization. Now, one of Google's representatives mentioned at a conference, South by Southwest, down in Austin, Texas, about a month ago actually, that Google would be looking into penalizing over-optimized websites and folks who have engaged in over-
the-top SEO.

There's been a lot of speculation around when that's coming out, whether that's coming out. There are a few things happening, actually, this week and last night about, "Hey is this already something we're seeing?" Seer Interactive, right, Wil Reynolds' fantastic SEO company out of Philadelphia had this penalty, and people were wondering whether that was related to this. Not really sure.

But before this penalty hits, for goodness sake, SEO folks, let's make these changes to our websites because we could be in real trouble if we don't impact these things beforehand. I think these are some of the most likely candidates to be hit by Google's over-optimization penalty, some of the most likely patterns they're going to try and match against in this upcoming change. So let's talk through them.

Number one, your titles need to be authentic. They need to sound real. They need to sound like a human being wrote them that was not intending necessarily simply to rank for phrase after phrase. I'll give you a good example. Bad: web design services, web design firm space brand name, whatever your brand name is, web design. What does it sound like? It sounds like all you're trying to do is rank for keywords, not show off your brand name, especially if this is your home page or those kinds of things. You're repeating keywords three times. Web design is in this title three times. Think about whether a normal human being would read that title and think, oh yeah, that sounds legitimate. No, they'd think to themselves there's something fishy here, something spammy, something's wrong, something manipulative. Try instead, probably equally effective, if not more, brand name web design Portland Spiffiest Design Services. Now look, I've got the word "design services," which you wanted to get in here. I've got the city where you are that you're trying to target, got brand name web design, right, sort of branding myself as the product and the keyword. Much, much better.

Try and look through your sites and see if this is a potential issue. I've seen tons of sites where SEO folks have just gone overboard again and again. Don't get me wrong. I used to do this too. One of the crappiest things about this is, even if your rank, your click through rates go down. So you can rank in position two or three and be getting less than the people below you, because people don't think that these are legitimate titles and they perceive them to be manipulative, especially if you're targeting more higher end, savvy or sophisticated technology customers.

Number two, manipulative internal links. I see this a lot on side bars, inside of content, where people have taken all of the instances of a particular word or repeated it throughout the side bar or in the footer, those kinds of things, and are pointing with exact match anchors to the same page over and over again. Now, we all know as SEOs that the first anchor text link counts and only one on the page is going to pass that value. Linking repeatedly to the same page with the same anchor is not helpful for SEO, and it makes our sites look really spammy and manipulative and questionable to someone who's browsing it. Why would we want to hurt our conversion rates like this, and why would we want to point out to the engines that, hey, over here, I'm trying to manipulate you? What are you thinking? This is crazy.

Instead, go with logical, useful, change it up when you're linking to pages, maybe a couple of times, in some spaces. You have a blog post and it mentions a page on your site that you want people to actually go to and that you think is useful in context. Great, link over there. Fine, use the anchor text. Maybe use a modified version of the anchor text, a little longer, a little shorter, a little more natural sounding, and you're going to get these same results, but you're going to do it in a much more effective way. You're not going to be at risk of whatever is happening with this over-optimization penalty.

Number three, cruddy, link filled footers. I see this all the time still. You're just having a bunch of exact anchor links down in here that no one would actually really click and that come in lists. I often see them in light gray on light gray so that it's not particularly easy to read. Use your footer wisely. Use your footer to link to the things that people expect to find in the footer. If you really need to get anchor text on pages, find natural ways to put it in the real menu at the top, in the content itself. Don't be trying to mess around and throw footer links site wide, across things. This 2002, man. We're ten years later. It's like at least a decade past that.

Number four, text content blocks built primarily for the engines. You know how sometimes you get to a page and there's good content, usable stuff, an image, a call to action, and then weirdly there's this block of junk. It's this block of blah, blah, keyword, keyword, blah, blah, blah, keyword, keyword, blah, blah, blah. Why is that there? Why does that exist? Does that really work? Does that really trick the engines? Yeah, it tricks them into thinking that they should penalize you. Get that out of there. Rewrite that stuff, man. Seriously, this is going to cost you far more than it's going to help you. If you've got those spammy blocks of text in your pages, that have no purpose other than to get your keywords or some keyword into the text, and it's not actually helping anyone, it's not a good call to action, it's not helping your conversion rate, it will actually drive people away from you. Why are you trying to rank if not to get people to do good things on your site, and like your brand, and appreciate you and come back again and again, and tell their friends, and share it socially, and link to you? Don't be putting this stuff in here. This is dangerous for all of those reasons, and super dangerous given this over-optimization penalty that's potentially coming down the line.

Number five, back links from penalty likely sources. So this is one of the toughest ones because it's really hard to control if you've already gotten links from these places. But you can see with those 700,000 Google webmaster tools, pings that they sent everybody that said, hey, it looks like you've done some manipulative linking, and that kind of thing. Be really careful for all of these, link networks, anything that says private link network, or I have a link network and I'll place your site on it, or building up a network of sites that you then interlink to one and other. Come on. There are so many better ways to get links. You're putting a lot of time and effort and energy into building all of that stuff. You can do so many authentic things with that time. This is time terribly spent. Comment spam, especially those that are sent though automated software blasts, so you think of your XRumer or your SENuke, the article marking robot, or whatever, that's going to submit your site to tons of places or find open holes in the web where they can leave comments and link spam and that kind of stuff. Forum signature links, this is actually one where I suspect it's one of the places where Google really gets to know, hey, this guy clearly is a manipulative, black hat/gray hat SEO, because look, they're pointing to the same site where we found all the link spam from forum signatures, particularly on webmaster sorts of boards. That clearly indicates that's their site and their trying to rain for it, and all that kind of stuff. They've got a long profile, and they keep linking to all these things from their forum signatures. Just be very cautious about this. I'm not saying don't link to it, but maybe don't use your exact match anchor text or try to make it more of a branding play, try and make it more authentic feeling. Certainly participating in communities is a great thing. Just watch that.

Reciprocal lists, right, people are emailing each other back and forth and saying, "Hey, I'll put you on my list of links. You put me on yours. Oh, and we'll do it 20 times and we'll form this big reciprocal circus that's going to get all of us penalized." How great is that?

Article marking sites, I've talked about article marketing in the past. Generally when you see, hey, we're an article marketing site and we can help you rank higher, and submit your content to us and we'll link out, and the same is true for SEO focused directories, anytime you see a site that is essentially extolling the virtues of participating there, or contributing there, as being primarily related to the link and the anchor text and the page rank you're going to get, you can bet your sweet hiney that Google does not want to count that. That's exactly what they're trying to prevent, and I'd worry, whether it's this penalty or a penalty that Google makes in the future, that this is the kind of stuff that gets hit.

Last one, number six, large amounts of pages that are targeting very similar, kind of modified versions of keywords and keyword intents, with only slight variations, slight variation being the key here. So think:
used cars Seattle, used autos Seattle, pre-owned cars Seattle. Why are those three different pages? It sort of feels like keywordy, SEO-y, spam, right, and then there are pointing exact match anchors at all of these. This is the same page. You can target all three of these keywords very nicely on one page that's called Used and Pre-owned Cars/Autos in Seattle. Right, one page, good, you've got it. You've combined all of the things. You want to have that great user experience there. You don't want to have to build that three times. You're not trying to build a bunch of spammy anchor texts to each one that's pointing from each of the different ones. The used cars Seattle page has a link to the used auto Seattle's, it's sort of like, "What?" From a user perspective, "Why is that there? What is the difference between a car and an automobile exactly? I don't understand why these two exist." This kind of thing is something where I think it's a very clear pattern match that the engines can detect. Looks like they did some research and then just built a page for everything, and then they pointed links at all of them. Its manipulative, right. This is the kind of thing, also, that will get you in trouble.

So, one, one, two, three, four, five, six. Six things you should change, and even though I'm not the Count from Sesame Street, you should still pay careful attention to these, because I'm super nervous that when this penalty going to come out, there are just going to be so many webmasters and SEOs who are doing this kind of stuff, and I don't know which one Google's going to hit on this time and what they might hit on in the future. But I just want you to be okay. I want your sites to do well, and this is such bad stuff for user experience too. So please avoid it. Be careful. Good luck to you, and we'll see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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Posted by Dr. Pete

If you live outside of the ivory walls of the Fortune 500, it can sometimes seem like Google gives big brands all the breaks. This isn’t just sour grapes – some examples are very public. When JC Penney and Overstock got a slap on the wrist for widespread and intentional link manipulation, it was hard not to feel slighted.

There’s been a lot of debate about how Google, both manually and algorithmically, may favor big brands, but I think the debate misses something more fundamental. Since the beginning of the internet, the eventual advantage of big brands was only a matter of time. This post is about why I think that advantage was inevitable, why it’s not going away, and what you can do to compete.

The Wild West

In the early days of the public internet, building a website was like heading into the Wild West – all you needed to stake your claim was a wagon and a frontier spirit, as long as you survived the cholera, dysentery, starvation, and bear attacks (i.e. learning HTML)…

Sure, you didn’t get many visitors, but at least it was quiet and no one minded if you wallpapered your house with dancing hamsters. Then, along came the search engines. At first, it was great – the pioneers got all the visitors. With the allure of free land and free customers, though, the quiet didn’t last…

Much to the dismay of early adopters, it didn’t stop at a few neighbors. Pretty soon, people started to make real money online, and along came…

The Gold Rush

Big brands didn’t rush to the internet early on because they simply didn’t have any reason to. They let the pioneers do the hard work of drawing the maps and clearing the brush, until the first prospector discovered gold. When online-only brands started to draw sky-high IPOs and generate ad revenue, the big brands took notice, and the dot-com bubble started to inflate…

Before this becomes a history lesson, let me cut to the point. The risks in any uncharted territory are often taken by the people who have nothing to lose, and that’s not the big brands. As soon as there was gold to be had, the companies with money and power made their move to claim it. The early movers had an advantage, but it wasn’t destined to last forever.

Googling for Gold

So, what does all of this have to do with Google?  While Google probably has made changes along the way that favor big brands (like 2009’s “Vince” update), I suspect that many of the changes in the search landscape really just reflect the broader evolution of the internet. In other words, as big brands followed the gold, so did Google.

Over time, signals that favor brand-building have naturally found their way into the algorithm. Let’s step back from any specific algorithm update and look at the progression of ranking signals since the early days of search engines…

Declaring the “first” search engine is an argument waiting to happen, but I’m going to pin the launch of mainstream search around the time of Excite in 1993. The early engines relied almost exclusively on on-page ranking signals, like keywords in page titles, content, and (at the time) META tags. This leveled the playing field for a lot of small businesses, as anyone could create content that was keyword-targeted. Big brands could exert their influence by spending more money, but the direct influence of their brands on on-page signals was fairly weak.

Of course, the downside of on-page signals is that they were also easy to game, and the early search engines suffered from a lot of spam and quality issues. Then, along came Larry and Sergey and their PageRank algorithm, which relied on links to rank websites. In 1998, Google officially launched to the public…

Link-based rankings gradually gave big brands more of an advantage – their offline presence naturally led to news articles and write-ups, and they began to collect strong link profiles. I call this influence “Medium” because it was mostly indirect. Link buying was (and is) strongly discouraged, so big brands had to work through one-off channels, such as viral marketing.

What’s important to note here is that Google didn’t create PageRank and the link-graph specifically to hand big brands an advantage. They created PageRank as a response to the declining quality of search results powered only by on-page signals.

In 2009, with the success of social media sites like Twitter, Google launched real-time search. Soon after, both Google and Bing would begin to integrate social signals into the algorithm…

While the impact of social signals on ranking is still evolving, these signals are directly influenced by the power of a brand. Offline advertising drives brand awareness and mentions and this directly leads to social media activity. As social mentions begin to affect ranking more and more, brands now have a direct channel for their influence to impact SEO.

Step 1 - Get Over It

So, what can you do about the advantage that big brands have in the evolving internet landscape? First, some tough love – you have to get over it. This was inevitable, and whether or not Google was complicit to some degree doesn’t matter. The internet was destined to reflect the offline world, and in the offline world big brands are rich and powerful. We had a nice run, but it was naïve to expect that to last forever.

Step 2 - Act Like a Brand

Ok, so Step 1 wasn’t very helpful. I see too many SEO situations where people obsess about the competition and what’s “fair” – it’s time to step back and learn from the big brands. If your entire focus is on a few on-page factors and manual link-building, you’ll live and die by the algorithm. Big brands are part of the public consciousness – they bombard us on multiple channels, and don’t put all of their eggs in the Google basket.

Obviously, you can’t spend billions of dollars simply trying to implant your brand in people’s brains, but you can tap into the brand awareness you already have. Somewhere, your product or service – if it’s at all decent – has fans and evangelists. Engage with them, reward them, and start thinking about your brand as more than just Top 10 rankings. Social media is a perfect place to start – stop just Tweeting links and begging for Likes and build relationships. In other words, stop focusing on the direct SEO impact so much and start looking at the health of your brand outside of search.

Step 3 - Be a Pioneer (Again)

Search is changing faster than ever. I’ve seen too many companies recently that rely on Google for their survival and have watched their rankings slip over the past year or two. Many of these are good businesses run by good people, but they’re also businesses who made good on SEO years ago and, at some point, started to coast. Meanwhile, the internet changed, the algorithm changed, and the competition changed. If you’re resting on your laurels from 2005, you’re in for a wake-up call. It may not be tomorrow, but it will happen, and it will happen quickly and without mercy.

The early movers had an advantage on the internet because they were willing to take risks that the big brands couldn’t. You can’t live forever in the glory days of being the first person to set up shop. It’s time to branch out again – get active on social channels, including new and unproven channels. Try out new tags and on-page approaches (like Schemas). They won’t all work, but when they do, you’ll be somewhere that the big brands aren’t yet. Your greatest power as a small to mid-sized business is agility. You can set up a social profile or add a few pages to your site without a committee meeting, budget approval, and 6 months of deliberation. That’s a 6-month head-start, but to get it you have to move now.

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Posted by Dr. Pete

If you live outside of the ivory walls of the Fortune 500, it can sometimes seem like Google gives big brands all the breaks. This isn’t just sour grapes – some examples are very public. When JC Penney and Overstock got a slap on the wrist for widespread and intentional link manipulation, it was hard not to feel slighted.

There’s been a lot of debate about how Google, both manually and algorithmically, may favor big brands, but I think the debate misses something more fundamental. Since the beginning of the internet, the eventual advantage of big brands was only a matter of time. This post is about why I think that advantage was inevitable, why it’s not going away, and what you can do to compete.

The Wild West

In the early days of the public internet, building a website was like heading into the Wild West – all you needed to stake your claim was a wagon and a frontier spirit, as long as you survived the cholera, dysentery, starvation, and bear attacks (i.e. learning HTML)…

Sure, you didn’t get many visitors, but at least it was quiet and no one minded if you wallpapered your house with dancing hamsters. Then, along came the search engines. At first, it was great – the pioneers got all the visitors. With the allure of free land and free customers, though, the quiet didn’t last…

Much to the dismay of early adopters, it didn’t stop at a few neighbors. Pretty soon, people started to make real money online, and along came…

The Gold Rush

Big brands didn’t rush to the internet early on because they simply didn’t have any reason to. They let the pioneers do the hard work of drawing the maps and clearing the brush, until the first prospector discovered gold. When online-only brands started to draw sky-high IPOs and generate ad revenue, the big brands took notice, and the dot-com bubble started to inflate…

Before this becomes a history lesson, let me cut to the point. The risks in any uncharted territory are often taken by the people who have nothing to lose, and that’s not the big brands. As soon as there was gold to be had, the companies with money and power made their move to claim it. The early movers had an advantage, but it wasn’t destined to last forever.

Googling for Gold

So, what does all of this have to do with Google?  While Google probably has made changes along the way that favor big brands (like 2009’s “Vince” update), I suspect that many of the changes in the search landscape really just reflect the broader evolution of the internet. In other words, as big brands followed the gold, so did Google.

Over time, signals that favor brand-building have naturally found their way into the algorithm. Let’s step back from any specific algorithm update and look at the progression of ranking signals since the early days of search engines…

Declaring the “first” search engine is an argument waiting to happen, but I’m going to pin the launch of mainstream search around the time of Excite in 1993. The early engines relied almost exclusively on on-page ranking signals, like keywords in page titles, content, and (at the time) META tags. This leveled the playing field for a lot of small businesses, as anyone could create content that was keyword-targeted. Big brands could exert their influence by spending more money, but the direct influence of their brands on on-page signals was fairly weak.

Of course, the downside of on-page signals is that they were also easy to game, and the early search engines suffered from a lot of spam and quality issues. Then, along came Larry and Sergey and their PageRank algorithm, which relied on links to rank websites. In 1998, Google officially launched to the public…

Link-based rankings gradually gave big brands more of an advantage – their offline presence naturally led to news articles and write-ups, and they began to collect strong link profiles. I call this influence “Medium” because it was mostly indirect. Link buying was (and is) strongly discouraged, so big brands had to work through one-off channels, such as viral marketing.

What’s important to note here is that Google didn’t create PageRank and the link-graph specifically to hand big brands an advantage. They created PageRank as a response to the declining quality of search results powered only by on-page signals.

In 2009, with the success of social media sites like Twitter, Google launched real-time search. Soon after, both Google and Bing would begin to integrate social signals into the algorithm…

While the impact of social signals on ranking is still evolving, these signals are directly influenced by the power of a brand. Offline advertising drives brand awareness and mentions and this directly leads to social media activity. As social mentions begin to affect ranking more and more, brands now have a direct channel for their influence to impact SEO.

Step 1 - Get Over It

So, what can you do about the advantage that big brands have in the evolving internet landscape? First, some tough love – you have to get over it. This was inevitable, and whether or not Google was complicit to some degree doesn’t matter. The internet was destined to reflect the offline world, and in the offline world big brands are rich and powerful. We had a nice run, but it was naïve to expect that to last forever.

Step 2 - Act Like a Brand

Ok, so Step 1 wasn’t very helpful. I see too many SEO situations where people obsess about the competition and what’s “fair” – it’s time to step back and learn from the big brands. If your entire focus is on a few on-page factors and manual link-building, you’ll live and die by the algorithm. Big brands are part of the public consciousness – they bombard us on multiple channels, and don’t put all of their eggs in the Google basket.

Obviously, you can’t spend billions of dollars simply trying to implant your brand in people’s brains, but you can tap into the brand awareness you already have. Somewhere, your product or service – if it’s at all decent – has fans and evangelists. Engage with them, reward them, and start thinking about your brand as more than just Top 10 rankings. Social media is a perfect place to start – stop just Tweeting links and begging for Likes and build relationships. In other words, stop focusing on the direct SEO impact so much and start looking at the health of your brand outside of search.

Step 3 - Be a Pioneer (Again)

Search is changing faster than ever. I’ve seen too many companies recently that rely on Google for their survival and have watched their rankings slip over the past year or two. Many of these are good businesses run by good people, but they’re also businesses who made good on SEO years ago and, at some point, started to coast. Meanwhile, the internet changed, the algorithm changed, and the competition changed. If you’re resting on your laurels from 2005, you’re in for a wake-up call. It may not be tomorrow, but it will happen, and it will happen quickly and without mercy.

The early movers had an advantage on the internet because they were willing to take risks that the big brands couldn’t. You can’t live forever in the glory days of being the first person to set up shop. It’s time to branch out again – get active on social channels, including new and unproven channels. Try out new tags and on-page approaches (like Schemas). They won’t all work, but when they do, you’ll be somewhere that the big brands aren’t yet. Your greatest power as a small to mid-sized business is agility. You can set up a social profile or add a few pages to your site without a committee meeting, budget approval, and 6 months of deliberation. That’s a 6-month head-start, but to get it you have to move now.

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Posted by Karen Semyan

One of the recent water cooler conversations around the Mozplex has been about dashboards. The question: What makes a great dashboard? We all use these top-level reports in various apps everyday, for professional and personal reasons, and some are better than others. 

At their best, these reports can do an amazing job of making our work more efficient. You check the dashboard, review your progress, gather some insights, and know what to do next. Etta James cues up, the clouds part, sunshine beams down on your desk, and a unicorn gallops in slow motion past your office window. 

But at their worst, dashboards are lacking in useful info, cluttered, or convoluted. They amount to one more click between you and the real details you need in an app, adding to the clown-car cycle of chasing down your next actions. 

So we put the question to you...

What dashboards give you your “At Last” moment? Or are at least useful? What features on those dashboards are the most useful?  

Take moment and fill out this survey and share your thoughts.

To get you thinking about this, here are some some favorites from Mozzers, in no particular order:

WebTrends

Rand says: Beautiful UI/UX, fun to look at, colorful, bleeding edge. 
Miranda says: Clean design, interesting use of typography, and nice supporting visuals.

Mint

Courtney says: It’s super detailed and yet, I know what to do what to do at first glance. The yellow, green, red indicators show my progress and warn me when I’m approaching or over budget. Alerts at the top of the page provide insights into how I’m doing and what I can do better. Goals provide easy benchmarking. This holistic view paints the entire picture in a way that is easy to digest and suggests actions, and I love that I can dig deeper into any of these topics with a single click (or two).

New Relic

Thomas says: I get quick access to recent over-time data for the most important metric in a way that can be dissected easily. A statistical score for most important metrics, plus traffic. You can change the timeframe quickly. They provide alerts, have nice use of color, and use consistent help-hovers.

GeckoBoard 

Adam says: It’s perhaps not the most beautiful dashboard, but it’s broadly customizable. There’s something to be said for a big bold dashboard that shows off your key daily metrics in big bold type.

AdWords

Joanna says: For me a dashboard needs to both summarize the movement of my data but also suggest a next step. I think Adwords does a solid job, but I also find that paid marketing platforms in general do a great job of surfacing the changes I should prioritize investigating. For me its all about summarizing and prioritizing...and it being pretty of course. Give me all that and I'm not going anywhere.

WordPress 

Rand says: It gets me all the info I need, and it’s customizable.

KISSInsights

Joanna says: KISSInsights has test summaries and important info, all laid out very digestibly. 

More favorites include: 

Mixpanel

SimplyMeasured

Chartbeat

Please share your favorites with us!

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Continue Reading

Posted by Karen Semyan

One of the recent water cooler conversations around the Mozplex has been about dashboards. The question: What makes a great dashboard? We all use these top-level reports in various apps everyday, for professional and personal reasons, and some are better than others. 

At their best, these reports can do an amazing job of making our work more efficient. You check the dashboard, review your progress, gather some insights, and know what to do next. Etta James cues up, the clouds part, sunshine beams down on your desk, and a unicorn gallops in slow motion past your office window. 

But at their worst, dashboards are lacking in useful info, cluttered, or convoluted. They amount to one more click between you and the real details you need in an app, adding to the clown-car cycle of chasing down your next actions. 

So we put the question to you...

What dashboards give you your “At Last” moment? Or are at least useful? What features on those dashboards are the most useful?  

Take moment and fill out this survey and share your thoughts.

To get you thinking about this, here are some some favorites from Mozzers, in no particular order:

WebTrends

Rand says: Beautiful UI/UX, fun to look at, colorful, bleeding edge. 
Miranda says: Clean design, interesting use of typography, and nice supporting visuals.

Mint

Courtney says: It’s super detailed and yet, I know what to do what to do at first glance. The yellow, green, red indicators show my progress and warn me when I’m approaching or over budget. Alerts at the top of the page provide insights into how I’m doing and what I can do better. Goals provide easy benchmarking. This holistic view paints the entire picture in a way that is easy to digest and suggests actions, and I love that I can dig deeper into any of these topics with a single click (or two).

New Relic

Thomas says: I get quick access to recent over-time data for the most important metric in a way that can be dissected easily. A statistical score for most important metrics, plus traffic. You can change the timeframe quickly. They provide alerts, have nice use of color, and use consistent help-hovers.

GeckoBoard 

Adam says: It’s perhaps not the most beautiful dashboard, but it’s broadly customizable. There’s something to be said for a big bold dashboard that shows off your key daily metrics in big bold type.

AdWords

Joanna says: For me a dashboard needs to both summarize the movement of my data but also suggest a next step. I think Adwords does a solid job, but I also find that paid marketing platforms in general do a great job of surfacing the changes I should prioritize investigating. For me its all about summarizing and prioritizing...and it being pretty of course. Give me all that and I'm not going anywhere.

WordPress 

Rand says: It gets me all the info I need, and it’s customizable.

KISSInsights

Joanna says: KISSInsights has test summaries and important info, all laid out very digestibly. 

More favorites include: 

Mixpanel

SimplyMeasured

Chartbeat

Please share your favorites with us!

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!

Continue Reading

Posted by randfish

Every year, our annual summer customer conference, Mozcon, sells out to capacity, and this year is shaping up to be no different. In my opinion this is largely due to the speakers and the format. The content is among the best I see each year because the conference has developed a reputation as a forcing function for "upping one's game" on quality of tactics and presentation delivery.

I'm excited because over the past six years Mozcon has risen from a small training event to become something that influences and inspires me throughout the year. It makes me want to step up my game - in my writing, my presentations, my entrepreneurship and the work I do in the marketing field overall. I've seen it do that for hundreds of others, too, and it's the best reason I can give as to why you should be there.

I'm posting about it tonight because we've just announced the full speaker and presentation lineup:

This exceptional group of folks are those we've seen deliver consistently phenomenal talks at events around the globe and many are the writers who've delivered exceptional content here on the Moz blog and across the web.

It seems almost hard to believe, but in the latter half of 2011, I felt so many of the seeds planted by great Mozcon talks sprouting in the blogosphere and social channels of the SEO/marketing world. From Avinash's presentation on analytics to Bob Rains' stories of moving from black hat to white hat to Wil Reynolds' mining of the social graph for link opportunities and Martin MacDonald's unforgettable look at scalable embeds, the sparks that flew at Mozcon caught fire time and again.

This Friday's the final day to get the early bird price of $699. I hope to see lots of you there!

p.s. FYI for those who didn't catch it, Google whacked a lot of sites over the past 48 hours. I expect we'll have a blog post up soon on the topic, but be sure to check out this good discussion started by Cyrus Shepard on G+.

p.p.s. If you can't make it to Mozcon, there's two other west coast events in June I highly recommend - SMX Advanced in Seattle (also usually a sellout show) and Distilled's first ever Searchlove on the west coast, in Berkley, CA (at which I'm speaking).

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Posted by neilpatel

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.

From Google’s Panda, Search Plus Your World and Venice updates, in the last year alone the SEO landscape has changed. And while that means your SEO strategy will change, too, there is one thing that remains the same…keywords.

Keywords remain important to your content and link strategies. 

But there is one change coming down the Google pipeline that will change keywords…semantic search technology and the human element.

What is semantic search?

Basically, semantic search is technology that tries to determine what users mean when they type in a certain keyword.

They explore the semantics of those words…or the meaning behind them.

For example, if someone typed in “laptop” do they mean:

• That they want to buy a laptop?
• Have one repaired?
• Upgraded?
• Are they even talking about a computer, but something entirely different?

In the real world most people don’t search with one keyword…additional keywords give additional clues.

Even then search engines aren’t always right. Google guesses because all it has to go on are the keywords you enter into their engine.

Semantic search will look at how those words relate to each other and look for clues on how you entered them…location being crucial.

Say you used Google search on your smart phone to find “laptop repair.” Semantic search will recognize your location via your GPS on your phone and deliver you “laptop repair” results based on location.

In other words, results related to “laptop repair + [your city].”

How does this impact SEO?

In your SEO campaigns semantic search means you will have to identify the right keywords based upon user intent in the real world…and then create content around those terms.

This is where the semantic keyword research comes in.

In the world of keyword research you simply sought out the keywords with the highest search volume. The meaning between your list of keywords and the content you created was equal. There was a one to one relationship.

“SEO strategy tools” meant “SEO strategy tools.”

In the semantic keyword world, you build a database of keywords that are full of meaning...”SEO strategy tools” could be used in four different contexts.

Your job is to figure out how.                                                   

What are the advantages of semantic keyword research?

Having a database of semantic keywords to create high-converting blog posts is one advantage…but there are other benefits, like improved CTR and PPC optimization as Wordstream explained: 

• Higher click-through rate – Whether it’s in your emails, landing pages, text ads or blog posts, highly-targeted semantic keywords will improve your CTR. When all these elements of the conversion funnel are aligned semantically…your results will go through the roof.
• Lower minimum bids – Higher relevance and targeted action with your content due to semantic keyword enhancements will lead to lower minimum bids on your PPC campaigns.
• Higher quality score – When you achieve high relevance around your semantic keywords…the search engines will reward your content with a high quality score that leads to better rankings.

Tools you can use to find semantic keywords

Employing a semantic keyword plan is crucial. But how do you come up with those keywords? Here are five approaches to use…including recommended tools.

Using Google advanced search

Google’s advanced search results provide a quick way to generate some semantic keywords. Just type in a query like “laptop discount codes” and click “Show search tools”:

Then click “related searches”…

…and then you’ll see all of the semantic terms for “laptop discount codes”:

As you can see from the results above, when searchers think of “laptop discount codes” they are thinking in specific terms of a brand for the most part.

In other words, the term “laptop” was changed into a brand…giving you semantic options.

And don’t forget to use Google Instant for further ideas on keywords:

By the way, all those keywords are completely different than what you got in the “related search.”

Now let’s look at a reverse case of semantic keyword use. In this case we’ll look up the term “laptop repair”:

“Laptop repair” is synonymous to screen repair, brand laptop repair and even different ways of looking at repair like “troubleshooting.”

And this is where it gets interesting. Look at the Google Instant version of “laptop repair” and you see this:

You get all the options related to location.

Keep in mind that your job isn’t simply to scoop up all of these up. You have to decide what people are thinking when they search with these terms. In some cases it will be obvious…in others it won’t be so obvious.

That’s what semantic keyword research is all about.

You can refine your results with Google Insights for Search where you can narrow keywords down via categories, for instance.

Semantic keyword research with bookmarking tags

If you want to find out how some searchers think about keywords, examine how tags are used at social bookmarking sites like Delicious.

Here’s a search on their database for my blog QuickSprout:

As you can see, there are a total of 578 posts that have been bookmarked in Delicious.

To examine the tags that people use to bookmark that content…in a sense, seeing how people are viewing the content and giving you an inside track to their mind…look at how people created “Stacks,” “Links” and “Related Tags.”

You can perform the same process on new social bookmarking sites like Diigo, Pinterest and Licorize.

Again, it’s important to think through how to use these keywords and not just scoop them up.

Building a semantic keyword cloud through social monitoring tools

Using social media monitoring tools to track the mentions of your brand is pretty common and an effective way to stay on top of the competition and conversation.

Using these same tools for semantic keyword research is just as effective to build a cloud of keywords around a particular sentiment.

For example, in Social Mention search a keyword you type in. Here I used “Virgin Atlantic.”

Then you can get a quick look at the top keywords being used around the brand.

Other social mention tools you can use to help you build a cloud of semantic keywords are TweetDeck, Raven Tool’s Social Monitor and Technorati.

Optimizing semantic keywords around trends

A great strategy to keep in front of the public and at the top of search engines is to optimize your semantic keywords around a trending topic.

This means you have to keep your eyes on high-volume topics. Here are the tools to do that:

• Google Trends – This is the obvious place you should check first.
• Ice Rocket – Search the latest buzz on blogs through this search engine dedicated to blogs. While you will see what’s hot on the blogosphere…one thing you won’t see is any older posts.
• Trendrr TV – And if you want to keep on top of what’s hot on TV, then Trendrr is the place you need to look.
• TweetVolume – While it’s offline for the moment, sign up to be the first to use this powerful tool to see popular keywords and trends on Twitter.

Gathering semantic keywords through social search

When it comes to researching on the social web, the first place I always look for keyword ideas is TwitterSearch.

The way to use it is to look up a keyword like “SEO strategies.” Then look at what people are tweeting about that keyword phrase:

What you want to find is how people are using that term. So look at the words surrounding the keyword…and then decide how to use it to build your own semantic keywords.

OpenBook – This site will let you see what people are sharing on Facebook. And just like Twitter Search, look at the context on how the keyword is used to determine query intent:

Conclusion

There are dozens of tools out there you can use to build a semantic keyword cloud. Hopefully you understand the approach that I’m recommending so that you can then apply these principles to other tools.

Keep in mind that as much as semantic keyword research is about finding actual keywords you can use in your SEO campaigns…it’s just as much about building a complete profile of your target customer. And the better you can understand your target customer the better your campaign results will be!

What other tools do you use to create semantic keyword groups? 

About the author: Neil Patel is the co-founder of KISSmetrics, an analytics provider that helps companies make better business decisions.

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Posted by kaiserthesage

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.

When I started to work as an SEO for an Australian-based SEO agency in early 2010, I never knew anything about the work (optimizing websites and building links to them) and definitely unsure of most of the things that I have worked on during that time.

All I did was to follow all the instructions given to me, build links in volume and research/learn all the basics of SEO from scratch. I got the hang of it after a couple of months, and I thought that I was doing great. Then I got fired.

I guess it was a tragic story, but not quite true, since I was immediately hired by Affilorama and Traffic Travis right after getting ditched by my former employer. Fortunately, this led me to getting acquainted with the works of Ross Hudgens, Garret French and Wil Reynolds in mid-2010 – the people in this industry who have really influenced my thinking on SEO, particularly in scaling almost all encompassed processes and methodologies when optimizing a website, which certainly include building and promoting “linkable assets”.

So let’s head over to the main topic of this post (sorry for the long introduction), and start defining what a linkable asset is. Basically, a linkable asset is any part of a website or organization that its target audience will genuinely perceive as worth citing/referencing to. It could be people, content, events or anything that can be really interesting to a specifically targeted market.

This aspect of a website is so important to any form of online marketing campaign, especially these days, seeing as these materials are able to benefit a site/brand in so many ways, such as:

• Ability to continuously attract links to the domain
• Strengthen a site’s online brand presence (substantiates the brand’s authoritativeness)
• Generate more interested/fascinated brand followers and leads to the business
• Becoming more visible through search and social channels (and yield more traffic to the site)

To give you a clearer picture of how linkable assets work, I’ll give several samples below as well as the link building methods that you can implement to promote each type of content.

Awards

Samples:

• Adage Power 150
• Mashable Awards

How to build links to online Award-giving Bodies:

• Provide embeddable widgets – Offer widgets that the award’s nominees, finalists and winners can use and embed to their sites/blogs, which will link back to your site.
• Get press mentions – find columnists and authority bloggers who will most likely be interested to cover your online event (particularly those who write about your business’ industry). Engage and pitch a newsworthy angle about your upcoming event. For a more in-depth guide on pitching news to authority news sites, you can check out Chris Winfield’s recent post on getting press coverage.
• Reach out to content curators – identify the top curators in your industry, probably bloggers who have published lists of top blogs and resources in your field. Contact these people and ask if they’ll be interested to make a write up about your event, or offer to do a guest post for them.
• Leverage social sharing to nominees, members and/or winners – encourage participants to share their entry, as the more your content gets across their network and audience, the greater chances of getting second wave coverage/links from small and medium-sized blogs.

News Voting Feature

Samples:

• Inbound.org
• Hacker News

A news voting feature is best built to already existing communities that have a strong following base, like industry-specific forums and blogs, since they already have users who can regularly submit articles and contribute to discussions. It’s also a great way to engage an already existing community, seeing that you can incentivize the approach by allowing your community to promote their own content within the site.

How to build links to a news voting section of a site:

• Get press coverage – as always, getting links from news sites that have strong readership can help drive massive traffic to your site, especially in its launching stage, and can eventually bring more natural link acquisition opportunities from bloggers in your industry who might write about your site’s news voting section. Track and make a list of the people who’ll share the news articles about your launch, and segment those who have blogs, as you can also reach out to these people and ask if they’ll be interested to link to your news voting page.
• Embeddable widgets for top members – you can also choose to offer widgets to your active members to generate more links to your site.
• Acquire links from industry resources pages – Find resources pages in your industry and offer your news voting section to be included on their list of resources (you can start with queries like “keyword news” + inurl:resources). Given that this area of the site will be mostly user-generated, your link requests will have higher chances of getting approved.
• Get blogroll links – start with blogs that have already linked to your site in the past and with individuals that you have already connected with, and pitch the idea of including your news voting site to their blogroll links. Psychologically, the request will have more impact, since the page will surely be offering fresh pages/articles about your industry around the web (which means the page is able to offer real value to possible click-through visitors).

Free Learning Tools and Extensive Lessons

Samples:

• Codeacademy
• Affilorama’s Free Affiliate Marketing Lessons
• Team Treehouse’s Web Design and Web Development Lessons

How to build links to free lessons:

• Contextual links from externally distributed content – cite your extensive free lessons whenever you contribute to other blogs through guest blogging. Place the links within your guest posts’ content and always vary your links’ anchor texts. You can also link to them through the other formats of you content you distribute, such as free whitepapers, slide presentations and newsletters.
• Push content via social media – increase awareness by launching a social media campaign for your free lessons. With more people discovering the content, the more it can translate to possible editorial link opportunities and acquisitions. You can start with a Stumbleupon marketing campaign through paid discovery or by just promoting the shared links through su.pr to increase unique pageviews to your free lessons.
• Linker Outreach – make a list of known linkers and social sharers in your industry and let them know about your free course. You can easily identify these people by tracking your competitors’ social and link data, particularly from your competitors’ strong content. To learn more about this method, you can check out this guide on linker outreach that I wrote several months ago.
• Request links from .edu sites – this type of material will almost always have higher response rates when pitched to .edu sites, knowing that the offered content is providing high-value information. Search for .edu sites (ex: “keyword resources” site:.edu) who might be interested to add your lessons on their resources pages.
• Build links through community discussions – search for questions that relates to the information supplied by your lessons on related forums and Q&A sites. Link to your free lessons’ page when contributing to these highly-relevant discussions and make the link serve as a reference.
• Get featured on other bloggers' newsletters – if you’ve done your homework and have managed to build relationships/connections with bloggers in your field that have a substantial amount of email subscribers, then pitching to have your lessons featured on their newsletters is a very feasible idea. Absorb their audience to take a look of your site and try to contain them once they land on your free lessons page.

Video Series

Samples:

• Everything is a Remix
• Ted Talks List

How to build links to a page with series of videos:

• Embed and incorporate videos when submitting guest blogs – this will make your guest posts look more comprehensive and it also gives you the right to link back to the category or main page of where you host your videos.
• Promote via Stumbleupon – this social platform is a home to millions of cerebral and social media-savvy users, they basically know how social media works, so you’ll definitely want to have your page filled with high-quality videos in front of their users. You can invest $20 - $100 on paid discovery just to get a jumpstart with your social media campaign and probably expect to have your pageviews multiplied if you’ve positioned your social buttons well to act as obvious CTAs. The more the content gets exposure from these types of viewers, the more opportunities your page get for link acquisition.
• Track the links and social shares from your competitors’ videos – you can use tools like Topsy and Ahrefs to identify the sites and Twitter profiles who have shared their content. List these people/blogs and try to be in touch with them, and then ask if they’ll be interested to see your videos and perhaps share and/or link to it as well.

Job Boards

Samples:

• ProBloggers' Jobs for Bloggers
• YouTheDesigner's Graphic Design Jobs

How to build links to Job Boards:

• Blogroll links – most independent blogs are publishing tutorials to help their readers learn, earn and probably get a job, and with that being said, requesting for them to link to your site’s job board makes it absolutely reasonable and relevant. Start with blogs who have already linked to your site in the past, as these blogs are already aware of your brand and somehow trusts you as a resource in your field of expertise. You can eventually expand to your other link/blog prospects along the process of building relationships with them.
• Acquire links from those who are posting job offers in your site – some of these businesses could be a good link/content partner for your site, so it’s best to build relationships with them as well.
• Encourage visitors to socially share their entry or the job board page – building social signals is quite important these days, as it will not just help in making the page more visible through search and social, but it also denotes high-activity and usage of the page.
• Request links from .edu sites – there are tons of .edu sites that list job vacancies/openings from different companies, primarily to make it easier for their students to find jobs right after they graduate. Use Google Search to find job resources pages from .edu sites and make contact to ask if it’s possible for your site’s job board to be included on their resources page. Specificity is the key to get high approval rates from your link requests. Ensure that the jobs being offered in your page will bring value to the page you’re trying to get a link from.

Bonus tip: You can use this scraping method and CitationLabs’ contact finder to easily extract each of your target .edu site’s contact details, because they really do reward links to job listings.

Data Visualization

Samples:

• The Hidden Cost of War - Kinetic Typography
• The State of Internet 2011 - Interactive Infographic
• World Bank's Data on Philippines - Linked Data

How to build links to these types of rich-media content:

• Create news through your data and pitch the story to news sites and authority blogs – journalists and top/pro bloggers love data and numbers, so if you can do an extensive research about your industry, which can provide stats that could be helpful to build a newsworthy story, then you can improve your chances of getting solid links from authority domains just by presenting your data to columnists/bloggers who specifically write about your industry.
• Offer embed codes – make it easier for others to copy and embed your rich-media content to their own blogs (that links back to the original source of the content – your site).
• Feature it on your guest blogs to increase approval rate – you can also build more content that supports the data/information provided by your infographic/video and submit those as guest blogs, along with your infographic/video embedded within your guest entry. This will then amplify the reach of your data, as more brand signals will be sent out to people (your blog prospects’ audiences) who will be able to see your contributed content.
• Promote heavily through social media – reach out to known influencers in your industry and ask for feedback or if they can share your content on social networks (Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, etc...). It's important to evaluate your content, if it's really compelling and share-worthy, before sending your pitch.

Coin a term

Samples:

• Inbound Marketing - Hubspot
• Linkerati - Rand Fishkin

Creating your own brand’s industry term or technical terminology is a form of thought-leadership, and it’s definitely a linkable asset, wherein people will give credit to your brand whenever they use the term you have created. That’s why it’s imperative to build a definition page for the term(s) that you’re planning to invent, which should clearly define the meaning, usage as well as the history of the word, to own it in the SERPs.

How to build links to your technical terminology’s definition page:

• Use it frequently when distributing content externally – use the term and make it link back to your term’s definition page (hosted within your domain) when you’re submitting guest posts to other blogs, participating on community discussions and distributing free downloadable ebooks or slide presentations.
• Create a Wikipedia page for your industry term – use your definition page as well as other high-authority pages/articles that have used the term as references.
• Set up Google Alerts for your term – track blogs/sites that might use your term through Google Alerts, and try to ask for link attribution whenever you see it getting mentioned by other sites (if it’s not linking back to your definition page).

Extremely Useful Apps and Browser-based Tools

Samples:

• Open Site Explorer
• Hipmunk

How to build links to Web-based tools:

• Every major tool version update is newsworthy – if your site is offering free web-based tools, you should take advantage of its major updates, as you can publicize it through content distribution (press release and blog posts). Google is doing it, why shouldn’t you?
• Get links from bloggers (experiential reviews) – reach out to highly relevant blogs, and see if they’ll be interested to try out your tools. Provide them with all the resources that they might need to help them understand how your tool works, as this can somehow make them more interested to write about your tool. You can also check this list of alternative blogger outreach techniques to improve the chances of acquiring links from them.
• Obtain links from list pages (top and best resources/tools in your niche) – find pages that list the best tools and resources in your field. Engage the publisher of the content and invite them to try out your tool. Send a link request if they’re satisfied. You can also use the broken link building method to speed up the process of acquiring links from these list/resources pages.
• Guest blogging – write advanced tutorials on using your tool and/or on how it can improve its target users’ productivity, and then submit it to high-traffic and highly relevant blogs. Use strong calls-to-action on these guest entries, to have better chances of absorbing and converting their readers.

Custom Categories

Samples:

• 217 Link Building Articles, Posts, Interviews and Columns from Eric Ward
• SEO Strategies Resources by Kaiserthesage

Custom categories or high-quality resources pages can easily attract links, seeing that it contains links to highly resourceful pages, in which the traffic it’s able to acquire will more often than not save/share/bookmark the page, particularly if they have found the links that the page host very useful.

This type of page also has greater chances of achieving higher search rankings for industry head terms, since the absolute relevance of the content (based from both internal and external links it hosts as well as the anchor texts used pertain to thematically related subtopics).

How to build links to custom categories:

• Guest blogs – build contextual links to your custom categories through your guest blogging campaign.
• Interviews – link to it whenever you get a chance to be interviewed by other bloggers, given that it’s a good page to refer their readers to, wherein they can see almost all of your published works in one place.
• Author, Social and Forum Profiles – building links through your external profile pages (from other web communities) is also a great way to make this page more visible to your target audience. This will also allow search engines to regularly crawl the links in your custom category/resources page (as well as the new links that will be continuously added to the page).
• Constantly drive new traffic to gain more natural links – based on my experience, once the page is constantly generating new visitors (when it’s ranking highly for its targeted head terms), the more it can naturally attract and acquire links.

Finding possible linkable assets

There are also other types of web content that could possibly fit as a linkable asset that you can work on for your link development campaign. It could be a well-researched blog post, crowdsourced content, a forum thread, or even sales/product pages.

You can simply find and identify these strong pages resting within your site through assessing and sorting your site’s pages by:

• Most linked pages or pages that are naturally attracting links (via Google Webmaster Tools)

• Most visited pages with high user-activity, particularly from search engines (via Google Analytics)

Once you have distinguished pages that can possibly help you build more links with minimal effort (by just constantly bringing targeted traffic to the page that have high probability of sharing or linking to it), start enhancing these pages to strengthen its ability to automate a fraction of your link building process. Enhancements could be on areas/elements of the page such as:

• Design
• Usability
• Length Content
• Call to action
• Sociability
• Internal links to the site’s other important pages
• More inbound links to the page

It’s also best to understand the linking behavior from your newly discovered assets (or even the linkable assets of your competitors). Know why people are naturally linking to it, so you can have more ideas of how you can replicate the approach for your content as well as to your site’s other possible linkable assets.

Discerning the natural linking activities to your pages will also enable you to create powerful outreach templates that you can use to build more solid links to these pages, as you’ll be able to weigh the value that resonated to your previous linkers, and could then be elaborated as the value proposition of your outreach copy.

Prolong the purpose of the content

Optimize for search

Optimize the page to target industry-specific keywords as it will have better chances of competing for tough keywords, given that you’ll be working on to drive powerful links to the page, as well as with the page having the capability to attract links (where natural linkers will mostly use the content’s title as anchor text when linking to it).

Always Test and Update calls-to-action

This is vital, especially if your site’s strong and link-worthy pages are constantly driving new traffic to the site, as you can always change its call to action whenever you have new offers and/or products, which will allow you to effectively convert new visitors.

Brand strengthening

Let the continuously driven traffic to the page know who created the content. Highlight brand and trust signals on some parts of the content to improve brand retention.

Social CTA to force multiply social sharing

Make the content’s social buttons very visible, to continuously gain social shares, along the process of getting new visitors to the content (probably from search engines and other referring sources).

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