Yes, really! I was on Twitter today (okay, I’m on Twitter all day, everyday, but usually it’s through TwitterFox) and noticed that my profile is now a PageRank four page. I looked around at a few of the people I communicate with frequently and they range from PR 1-4.
We all know the links in the “Web” section are nofollowed, but if you just type your link in your “Bio” section, that’s a followed link and it just took you a minute to leverage a tool you’re already using! (If you’re not, you should be. And if you are, you should be following me, @rachael823!)
Looking for more great ways to build links? Read Wil’s recent post on the three link building tips no one ever talks about.
Of which we at SEER do them all. But after finding two links in my scanning of our web analytics tool, I wondered how did we get two links?
One link is from a PR 6 one is from a PR 0, but who cares about that. Both links came to us in two different ways without trying and there are hundreds more that have as well.
Remember this one fact, people like doing business with people they LIKE. Linking is no different.
Tip #1 – Karma & unselfishly helping others leads to unsolicited links
Sure the example above got a PR 0, whoo-hoo, but who cares about that, at one point all new sites are a PR zero. Stop using PageRank as the sole way to judge link value!
It is just my style to sit down with people trying to figure out SEO over coffee and seeing if I can help themâ¦NOTE by help them I DON’T mean make them clients!!. I mean help them expecting NOTHING in return. I have found that this approach has led to more people linking to us than I ever expected. NOTE â I never asked for these people to link. (I do think it is smart to run an advanced query, because not everyone who thinks you are great links to you and they gladly would).
You get more when you give more.
I have been asked by 4 universities to speak to their students for either classes or conferences. How does this happen? Easilyâ¦people usually watch our youtube channel and realize that I am about helping people and giving it all OUT. If you can learn from me and never become a client, that is fine w/ me.
So in conclusion, link tip #1 â Give of your knowledge freely and GO MAD DEEP in your area of expertiseâ¦by helping people out 10 minutes here, over coffee there, in the airport, you’ll find that those people have sites, blogs, and friends and sometimes, just sometimes they link to you without you asking.
Ask yourself â when is the LAST time you used your knowledge or network to help someone else, and not to try to get their business. When is the last time you looked at someone’s web site and offered 10 minutes of your time to help them out (thus alleviating them from the arduous process of getting that same knowledge by reading books and blogs for hours?)
Here’s a starter, sign up for help a reporter out. You’ll find opportunities for friends, colleagues, and clients to get press, they’ll like you for that.
Tip #2 – Traveling & Going to Conferences Chris Winfield recently asked on twitter why do you go to conferences? Most people replied for the networking and connecting with people in our industry. There is a byproduct of connecting with people in your space AND taking Tip #1 â LINKS!!! If you meet people who share your same passion and you help them, and several others (and by help it could be something as simple as Todd Malicoat telling me to speak with Tamar at the last Pubcon). Everyone you meet won’t link to you, so meet a lot of people and take time to LISTEN to their struggles, see if you can help or know someone who can.
At the last affiliate summit I referred someone to Jim Kukral who was having a hard time monetizing his site â I don’t know what will come of it, but my goal is to help as many people as possible that I can in business and personally (yes everyone at SEER volunteers. Building your own network can help you help others so network!
You want 5 good on topic blogs to link to you and have a ton of fun in the process?
Get on a plane, train, or automobile
Go to a conference
Ask 25 people you meet what their struggles are
Help them if you can or connect them to your network if you know others who can help
I asked Todd Malicoat a question, he used his network to introduce me to Tamar, easy, he spent literally 30 seconds at a conference and got a link from our vastly important site :)
This is not easy, you can’t walk around with a can I help you sign â you have to LISTEN.
The other part about using your network to help others is doing it with NO profit motive.
At SEER we have never accepted a referral fee and we never will. I like seeing people succeed and if I can be a part of that, then that’s all I need.
So in conclusion, link tip #2 â Get on a plane or train, meet some people on the conference floor and in the sessions, listen to them, see if you can help them or know someone who can. Do this as often as you can, at the bar grabbing drinks, in the registration lines, etc. You can’t help everyone immediately, but follow them on twitter, linkedin, etc and some day they may just reach out for help in a way that you can help them.
PS: buying a lot of drinks and hanging late is also a great way, as people post photos and their discussions of how much fun they had at the hotel bar to their blogs often. This happens at a lot of tech events and networking sessions.
Tip #3 doing a great freaking job
The first link I mentioned above came from an OLD client (we worked with them some years ago), who gave us a massive shout out on their website credits sometime in the last few weeksâ¦we never asked for it, and I am just now finding it. They have about 51,000 inbounds, of which 1,500+ are from .edu’s and 200 from .gov’s. This is a great linkâ¦how did we get it? We did a great job, we pushed and pushed and pushed for them to analyze our impact beyond rankings and traffic but to leads and even though they couldn’t do it, they knew we wanted to track our efforts from the beginning. We were good guys and girls who wanted to make sure they they got a great ROI and we also kicked their traffic up a notch or two :)
The best thing about these strategies is that not only are they ways to get links, but they actually get CLICKS â when is the last time you got a click from a low quality directory site?
Hardly ever. Even the PR 0 site is sending us a little traffic.
So I guess at the end of the day its the golden rule that wins out. Watch this to get you pumped.
I have been shocked by how quickly content on some sites are picked up lately. An article I posted on Ezinearticles.com and our company profile on SEOmoz.com are examples of pages I have seen that within hours of getting something approved and live on the site the post was picked up.
Along that vein, search engines should spider sites more frequently that post new GOOD content, an easy concept. So for those of you asking me if setting up a script to pull a new press release everyday is a good idea the answer is still NO.
If you set google alerts to daily or weekly you may not get an indication of what sites have content that gets picked up most quickly.
Taking Aaron Wall’s concept one step further, a KEY component of being a good SEO is understanding link value, and if your client can write 1 article a quarter, which of the 1000 article sites should you submit your 4 to this year for them most bang for the buck?
If you are JUST using PageRank you could be way off.
I would recommend that you run tests on the top article sites (or any site for that matter), submit garbage and submit good stuffâ¦see which ones let the garbage inâ¦I would be willing to bet that the sites that have CRAP QA on article submissions are less likely to get their pages get in the index within 24 hours. The really strong ones do.
By running a test on how quickly a page gets in the index from hundreds of article sites you should be equipped to ensure that you get the articles in on sites that are seen as most credible (and authoritative) by the search engines.
If you set your Google Alerts to get notification as they happen you’ll see that some sites get picked up within hours of mentioning you…to me that says the site might be seen as more of an authority site than others that take longer. This is one way you could look at article submissions or any effort to gain authority links…if you order them based on time to get something indexed it should be one indicator to help you understand authority.
You can also do this using your Google reader if a site you are trying to get a link from has RSS.
I opened my reader and searched for some content from the most recent post which happened to be from SEroundtable. Notice it was posted 1 hour ago.
Now notice how long it took Google to pick it up â about 1 hour.
Competitive hint: Looking at the sites mentioning your competitors and getting picked up quickly is one way to prioritize which sites that link to your competitors should be targeted by your linking efforts.
I have not tested this strategy fully, so I would absolutely welcome some alternative points of view.
One of the things that makes SEO so fun is that there is sometimes no definitively right or wrong way to do things. There are few things that I enjoy more than a good debate with the team about the pros and cons of different strategies. Coming up with strategies to drive high-quality, long-term valuable links for our clients is one of our current areas of focus.
A little while ago, I ran across a site that, on its blog, asked people for a link in exchange for a $5 gift card. The blog would also link back to anyone who linked to them (can you say reciprocal link?). This immediately sparked debate internally. Some thought it was very smart â it was argued that the site is simply asking people who enjoy its services to link to them. I agree; I think it is a smart idea to get people who like your company to link to your site. However, I argued that there were some flaws in the execution.
I wouldn’t have made my request so public. Last year, Google started cracking down on paid links by asking people to report them. Honestly, if I was a competitor of this site and saw this, I think I’d consider reporting them. Whether this counts as “paid links” is sort of borderline, but when you’re in a competitive industry and someone isn’t playing by the rules, I’d let a third party (Google) decide.
To correct this, I’d take a much more “below-board” approach to this strategy. I wouldn’t put the linking request out there as a public post on my blog. I would recommend communicating with customers, communicating with Twitter followers, messaging people in Facebook, etc. The strategies that I would employ are ones like this. Sure, a competitor might catch wind of it and still report you, but at least you’re minimizing your risk. Why not first try to get maximum value while minimizing risk? And if that strategy doesn’t work, then think about going public. But the risk is huge â if you are reported and Google decides that this is against its policies, you’re putting your site and your revenue at risk.
Still, it’s a very grey area. What do you think? Would you consider this example link buying? How would you improve upon their strategy? Let the debate continue.
The most recent affiliate summit was awesome, even provided me a little reflection time on the ride back.
I wanted to post the slideshare version of my slides that some of you have asked for. I am glad so many of you came out to talk about Google Knol, and the tons of SEO tools like linkdiagnosis and SEO quake to name a few, the rest are on my delicious account.
Here are the slides and remember to thank Rand Fishkin & Ann Smarty for their sharing of queries to help you find good links, which I used in the slides!
These guys are my old bosses and I just wanted to thank them. Why would I do that here on the blog? Let me explain…
I was on a train riding back from Affiliate Summit East to Philly, and passed the Bridgeport train station on the Amtrak and was hit with a nostalgic moment. Bear with me on this one it is not a VERY SEO post…
I don’t ride the train past NYC anymore – so in 7 years I haven’t seen the Bridgeport station as it is north of Penn Station. It reminded me of my first SEO job with a great company run by great visionaries. The company was NetMarketing.com and the owners were Ettore Rossetti & Angelo Rossetti, Internet marketing visionaries.
While people in 1997 were still building websites as the hot thing, these guys KNEW that traffic would be the key and built a PURE web marketing agency.
How did I get the job? I just knocked on the door at NetMarketing in a borrowed suit and asked to be their first full time employee and they actually HIRED me, amazing. The next day I was putting my cube together with a mallet.
Within about 6 months of being exposed to the business (I went to school to be a teacher) I asked them if they could bring our SEO service in house with a team of interns and programmers around me, and they did. Even with a client roster that included the likes of Barnes & Noble, Mercedes Benz USA, and even DoubleClick (yes I did SEO for DoubleClick in the late 90′s).
THEY BELIEVED IN ME, A 22 YEAR OLD BUSSHY TAILED KID WHO WANTED TO BE A PART OF BUILDING SOMETHING GREAT. Sure I slept on the cheap black leather sofa in the office a few nights, and will never forget the allnighter we pulled to land the Harman Kardon account â and even the girlfriend who wasn’t happy about it.
This blog post is a nostalgic THANK YOU to those guys.
Without their faith in me I don’t know if I would have discovered SEO or had a group of people who supported me and believed in me enough to take such a huge risk at that time. They didn’t box me in, the believed that if I said I would do something well that I would give it my all.
They were GOOD people, people who would give you the coat off of your back, and put people before business. A lot of how I operate SEER Interactive is directly related to the lessons in pitching and setting expectations I learned from Angelo and the lessons in working with employees and caring about them from Ettore.
My life is great, my stress level is low, the company is growing and we have a great team. Riding past this train station reminds me that while I had ambition I still needed someone to give me a shot, today I say thank you to Ettore & Angelo and encourage all of you who read this blog to think about that person that gave YOU a break, and write a blog post shouting them out, I’d love to read them. Whether they read your post or not, you should post it!
FYI both guys are still heavily involved in web marketing still:
Angelo is now here:
Ettore is now here: Save the Children
I do not purport to be some grand social media whiz nor a whizbang local SEO guy, but I felt compelled to write about an experience I recently had.
My new house has some electrical problems, Yeah!!!
I did research on local electricians in the Philadelphia area, obviously I am typical of most people…If you don’t already have a recommendation you usually go with a search engine!
I remember seeing vans and BMW Mini’s from some company all over the city.
Win #1 — Your branding was memorable, your logo, your BMW mini, etc made you look hip — it doesn’t say you are good though
So I do a search for Philadelphia electricians because I never remembered who had those flashy cars with the nice logo.
Here’s what I find:
Win #2 — You are showing up tops in Google Local
Google is also showing that you have 16 reviews combined, the next closest local company has 1, then all the rest have zero
So of course I click on the reviews to see what people are saying
Win #3 — People sound fanatical about your company, WOW!!! Great reviews!!
So I go to the site…
Win #4 — This site has better calls to action and usability than many e-commerce sites that live and die by conversions.
Does this site look like the website of an electrician?
They get my call
They come fix my problem in NO TIME, the guy even vacuumed up every speck of dust he left, and I mean EVERY spec.
Win #5 — I am a fan, I am a loudmouth, I tell everyone I know how great these guys are!
This is the trifecta people of all SEO (local and national)
1 — They were well ranked in local maps which show up above the organic results
2 — They have GREAT reviews and have encouraged people with a great experience to write about it
3 — They practice what they preach, they could have been all flashy and all ranked well, but if they weren’t awesome, it wouldn’t have mattered.
Last but not least, I just got a LinkedIn request from one of the two partners…HA you found me…now you can create an ongoing dialogue with one of your clients by finding them on LinkedIn…smart!!!!!
