Build Links with Tynt Publisher Tools

Monday, January 23rd, 2012

Here at SEER, we are fortunate to have some awesome clients who continually produce great content that is worthy of sharing. In a SEO dream world, every time someone copies a portion of this content, they’d attribute the source with a followed link back to our client’s site. However, this often isn’t the case. That’s where Tynt Publisher Tools come into play–to help capture some of these lost linking opportunities.

What is Tynt?

Tynt’s website states that for every user who clicks on a “share this” button, there are 90 users sharing through copy and paste. Tynt is a free tool that aims to leverage this fact by automatically inserting a link back to the site whenever a user copies and pastes an image or text.

How does it work?

You can install Tynt by adding a snippet of javascript to your site’s source code. If you’re working with a WordPress site, there are also two plugins available.  Once the code is in place, Tynt’s attribution link will appear whenever someone pastes your content into an email or adds it to a website. It is then up to the user to decide if they would like to keep this link in place, or easily strip it out by deleting it.

Results

Three months ago, we added Tynt to a client’s blog. Now whenever someone pastes their content, an added link reads “More from [Client Name]: URL.”  In the past 30 days alone (Dec. 24 – Jan. 22), Tynt monitored 778,154 total page views, 41,196 image copies, and 391,039 word copies, which lead to a whopping 4,614 new links.

There are some important things to note about this data. First, only 1.07% of image and text copies generated a link, meaning that 99% of users either pulled this link out before republishing online or shared the content through email.

Second, the majority of these links are nofollowed. In this case, three of the top sites where this content was shared were Facebook, Pinterest, and Twitter, and while it is great to have visibility on these platforms, the links pass little to no SEO value.

Lastly, very few of these links are high quality. Tynt separates the links into three categories: Gold for sites the search engines will find, Silver for sites behind logins or of low quality, and Bronze for sites that won’t impact SEO, but may refer traffic. Of the 4,614 links Tynt contributed, only 25 qualified as valuable Gold links. While this is small fraction of the links Tynt reports, I don’t know a single SEO who wouldn’t gladly take 25 easy links.

Additional Benefits

Tynt has its own analytics suite that provides some interesting metrics. For example, you can see which images and features generated the most shares, broken down by the top 28 images and top 20 posts. You can also discover which regions generated the most copy and pastes. This information can then be used to plan and create new content that caters to user preferences and these geographic areas.

In conclusion, Tynt is a low maintenance tool that quietly works to drive SEO value to your site. It requires little effort once it is set up. If you have a client with engaging content, we recommend testing Tynt for a month to see if it can benefit as an easy supplement to your current linkbuilding efforts.

If anyone has any experiences with Tynt or questions about the tool, feel free to leave a comment below or reach me on Twitter at @alliebrown89.

Huge thanks to our resident Analytics junkie @RachaelGerson for introducing me to this tool! 

Posted in linkbuilding, tools | 19 Comments »

Why Aren’t You Using Twitter To Build Links?

Tuesday, October 25th, 2011

Posted in linkbuilding, SEO, social media, tools | 15 Comments »

Pinning Your Interest: The Potential SEO Value of Pinterest

Monday, October 24th, 2011

Two months into the SEO sphere, and I’ve come to learn a lot about the value of links, best practices for outreach and search queries that make any previous Google search by me look like chopped liver. My latest SEO exploration is of Pinterest.com (Pin + Interest, get it?) and the potential value the site might have for SEO geeks like myself. I’ve been a fan of this “virtual social pinboard” since the summer, as it allowed me and millions of users to “pin” images off the web into different, organized “boards” that I can easily share with everyone. From there, users can re-pin images that they feel inspired by onto their own boards, causing a domino effect for millions of random graphics off of the internet.

As an average consumer, I’ve been using Pinterest for my own personal blog by finding fashion/pop culture images, interesting infographics and random phrases of inspiration to post on a weekly basis. Recently though, I’m (with the much appreciated help from Wil Reynolds) starting to see a new side and use for this popular social media platform from both a client and an SEO side. No drumroll necessary, but read on to find out more!

(more…)

Tags: content creation, Link Bait, Outreach Methods, Pinterest, seo value
Posted in ecommerce, linkbuilding, SEO, social media | 7 Comments »

Tracking in Tout May Hinder Link Building Efforts

Friday, August 12th, 2011

At SEER, we’ve been testing Tout for a few months. It is a simple yet powerful email tool. Unfortunately, some of the features of Tout may actually be counterproductive in link building outreach and get your messages caught in SPAM filters.

If you aren’t familiar with it, Tout allows you to speed up your template emails (while still allowing much needed customization) and tracks email views and clicks.
I used Tout for one small outreach project back in June, but got a lower than expected response rate, 3 out of 19 emails, about 16%. We decided to tweak the message and try again; the response rate was even lower, 1 out of 18 emails sent. That’s about 6%.

So I tried a small test of outreach the old way, using the exact same outreach message from the second round with Tout. Of 7 emails sent manually (2 were through web forms), I got 3 responses. That’s about 43%.

This is one small test, but still worth investigating further.

Now consider those numbers with this screenshot of a test email I sent to my personal email address. (No this wasn’t the actual outreach message.)

If you’ve ever used email marketing software, this is probably familiar. The URL redirect used by Tout to track clicks added to your URLs can set off a phishing filter in some email clients if you use the actual URL and not anchor text. Here’s a further explanation of phishing and email marketing.

It’s worth noting; the first outreach language didn’t have URLs in the body text, but did have a URL in the signature line. The second outreach language had URLs in the body text and the signature line.

If you use Tout, are you still wondering why you didn’t see this when you dutifully checked your message before sending? Not every email client shows phishing warnings like this – and Gmail doesn’t. This same email showed up without the phishing warning in my iPhone. On the flip side, some email clients or people with very strict SPAM filters will block it all together.

Why Tracking Isn’t Good for SEO Outreach

SEOs Use URLs – In SEO outreach, you are of course trying to get links! So your email outreach is almost always going to include the URL of your website, and may reference a URL on the individual’s website where you want a link. Imagine if you received an email that links to your own site and see that phishing warning – REPORT SPAM & DELETE.

Anchor Text Links Can’t Be Copy/Pasted – You can avoid the phishing warning with anchor text, which is another common element in link outreach. With anchor text right in the message the recipient can simply copy and paste. However, if you copy and paste from a Tout email, the link will go to http://go.toutapp.com/###, not your client’s website.

If it Looks Like a Link, Tout Makes it a Link – I also tried to make this work by making sure the message was text with no links, but if it looks like a link (http:// or www.) Tout turns it into a link with tracking.

You might be able to find outreach language that avoids the phishing problem with a non-www link as seen above, but I don’t think it’s worth it. Tout still has value in other situations, but may not be the best choice for link building. If Tout came out with a feature allowing you to turn off link tracking, then it would be worth revisiting.

If you think the convenience and speed makes up for the fact that some emails will be labeled SPAM, remember that an increase in SPAM emails could get you blacklisted.

So if you don’t want to use Tout, remember there is still the Canned Responses Lab in Gmail. You have to give up fancy tracking, and it takes more effort to evaluate A|B testing on messages, but at the end of the day, it’s about getting responses, and getting links!

Posted in linkbuilding, SEO | 6 Comments »

Cutting Through the Clutter: Identifying Patterns to Build Better Queries

Friday, May 6th, 2011

I stumbled upon an article this week posted by Ross Hudgens that discusses the “10,000 Hour Rule.” For those of you who are unfamiliar, psychologist K. Anders Ericsson proposed the idea (based on his research) that it takes about 10,000 hours of practice in any particular field or activity to become an “expert”. Whether you agree or disagree with the theory, the underlying principle holds true- the only way to master your craft is by devoting serious man-hours (or woman-hours) towards developing your skill set. You don’t have to be a genius to become an expert; you just have to be consistent.

I thought about the 10,000 Hour Rule this week as I sat in our SEO meeting watching Wil explain how he evaluates client projects using his “gut.” No, he was not referring to his rippled 6-pack that he’s developed from countless sit-ups and trunk twists in the gym downstairs; he was referring to his ability to spot trends and patterns in data that most of us newbies are unable to detect.  I’ve seen Wil attack a 10-page competitor analytics report with the same zeal as a mad scientist on the brink of discovering plutonium. Wil can quickly recognize trends that others can’t- not just because he’s really smart- but because he’s been doing SEO since the Old Navy Tech-Vest boom of 1999.

It’s still a good look in 2011, in my opinion…

The longer I work on link-building, the more I realize the importance of recognizing patterns and trends in my research in order to find opportunities that scale. In my first couple of months at SEER, I would be pretty “pumped” if I found a high authority, PR 6 .edu page that was a perfect fit for one of our projects. Today, I would still be excited if I found the same opportunity, but I would take the extra step to see if I could locate a common thread in similar .edu pages in order to generate a query that could open the door for several other clients as well. Below, I am going to highlight a couple of very simple ways that identifying patterns in research can lead to scalable opportunities that can be implemented across multiple projects.

Finding Guest Post Opportunities on the Backs of Competitors

Image Source: chikarapro.com

Recently, I was doing some research to find guest post opportunities for our client that sells contact lenses. I used the query intitle:”contact lenses” OR “contacts” OR ”glasses” OR “eye care” + “guest post” OR “guest author” and came across 7 or 8 really solid results. One thing that I quickly noticed was that a few of these results were from the same competitor and they were doing something that was pretty creative. They were writing guest posts on all different kinds of blogs-from parenting blogs to legal blogs- and just finding a way to incorporate vision or eye care in their post in order to make them relevant. An example of this strategy was a guest post on a legal blog discussing the best type of eyeglasses to wear in order to look more professional in the court room.

The other thing that I noticed was that the author byline at the end of each guest post was exactly the same. It read, “Jane Doe is a content contributor for CompetitorsName.com.” Upon identifying the recurring byline, I simply put it in quotes and searched in Google- returning 666 unique results. Since they were posting on such a wide array of blogs, the research boiled down to about 40-50 quality blogs on several different topics that we’ve used to contribute content for several of our clients.

Finding Local Links and Citations Using a Competitor’s Broken Page

Image Source: geeksucks.com

Yesterday, I was doing some research to find linking opportunities for our client that happens to be an online University located in Philadelphia. As I was digging through a competitor’s OSE top page report, I found that their 4^th most linked to page was serving a 404 error. The broken page was for their Sacramento campus and had 150 linking root domains. I ran the broken page through OSE and found that the majority of the 150 unique linking domains had the same exact URL structure: (name of town).com/SAME-URL-STRUCTURE . I clicked around on these back-links and found that they are all part of a nationwide network of neighborhood-specific, real estate sites that are formatted the exact same way and link out to local resources.

Having identified the pattern in the URL structure, I was able to generate the following query to serve all relevant results (33,000) of town pages that were linking out to local Universities in the Philadelphia Area: inurl:SAME-URL-STRUCTURE “215” OR “610” OR “484”. While we are still evaluating the overall quality of these sites (average domain authority of 25-35), they have relevant categories for just about all of our clients and submissions appear to be free.

The Take-Away

Although neither example above uncovers a ground breaking or revolutionary search tactic, they do allude to the simple beauty of spotting patterns to improve search efficiency.  It doesn’t take 10,000 hours (just pouring through 10,000 back-links) to realize that efficiency is the name of the game in link building. In most cases, the difference between finding one good opportunity for a client or several opportunities that scale is just identifying the pattern that leads to a more robust query.

If you have any other effective queries, strategies or ideas -or you want to know what that URL structure actually is- please feel free to connect with me on twitter @MikeSpringman.

Posted in linkbuilding, SEO | 1 Comment »

Link Buying: Nine Ways To Get Them For Cheap

Wednesday, April 6th, 2011

When I was in New Orleans for the Advanced Link Building Seminar, I was able to learn a TON of smart ideas from some very smart people. I absorbed everything from outside of the box link bait ideas to some very interesting ways to conduct outreach. One topic that was discussed was link buying. When the term was first “introduced” to the listeners, I could feel a collective cringe go around the room. It wasn’t a cringe of “oh my gosh, did XYZ just mention link buying? All of us in this room do nothing, but white hat SEO tactics.” Instead, it was a feeling of “Tell me more, but let me act like I’m not too interested, just in case Matthew Cutts is listening.”

Image via Zazzle.com

Let me set a few things straight. When I say link buying, I am not talking about something in the footer that looks like this. A lot of you shaking your head in discontent participate in link buying and you don’t even know it. The problem with link buying is that when people hear it, it comes off as if I was scratching a chalk board with Gail Devers’ nails. Let’s break “link buying” into it’s two main components: “Link” and “buying”

Link – A clickable reference from one site to another

Buying – Engaging in the voluntary exchange of goods, services, or both

So, by definition, link buying is the voluntary exchange of goods/services for a clickable reference to another site. Did you give that blogger a free sample of your product in exchange for a review and a link to your site? Yup, you just bought a link. Did you pay a site $250 to become a “sponsor” that happened to come with a link back to your site? That sounds like a link buy to me. Did you pay a content writer $25 so that you can shop a “guest post?” C’mon! Don’t make me look in the Yahoo Directory ($299/year?) and start calling all of you out! Let’s be realistic, we all do link buying, but some of us just do a better job of making it seem grayer than others. So, now that we have established that we all do it, let’s be smart about it. Here are nine tips to help you stretch your marketing resources.

1. Sponsor a youth athletic team. Check out this site. The registration for a child is $45. Do you think this site would turn you away if you said that you wanted to sponsor two kids for the year, every year, for a link in return. Be a good guy or girl, though. Show up to a game or two. Maybe take some pictures with the kids. Be a human being.
2. Sponsor a meetup group. This was introduced in Adam’s post recently. Meetup groups that don’t have any sponsors yet are great targets. They are waiting for someone to notice them, and that lowball offer of $50 for the year may be enough for them to pay for some pizza for a meetup or two. Use this query to find meetup groups with no sponsors that are in your niche. Meetup.com also offers custom anchor text and dofollowed links.
   • [keyword] “We want Sponsors!” site:meetup.com
3. In case you have been under a rock for the last 15 years, you may know that it costs money to keep a site up and running. $10-12/year for a domain name and $5-10/month for hosting can be a burden for a site that has SEO value, but no visitors to balance everything out. Why not transfer some of that SEO value to your site and help a webmaster out at the same time? Check out this heartfelt letter that this webmaster has sent out to solicit people to donate money to the site. If I was in the restaurant or vegetarian food business, this would be a fantastic opportunity. This site owner is asking for anything from $20 to $1K. With the amount of effort that was put into this letter, I am sure a reasonable donation can get you a link somewhere on this site.
4. Sponsor a local Codecamp/Barcamp/Wordcamp. Since I live in Philadelphia, I searched for some Barcamps around my area and I found one here. They will link to you if you provide just about anything. This particular Barcamp will even take lanyard donations. We once got a link from a Philadelphia camp by donating some old hats that a client had lying around. Be creative. Some of that old stuff you have lying around in the back office could be worth its weight in links. Looking for further “in-kind donation” opportunities? Try this query:
   • sponsor our site “in kind”
5. Let’s make this really easy. How much do you want to sponsor? This is 2011. Type it in Google and see what comes up. Let’s say I feel comfortable sponsoring a site for $100. I tried this EASY query and I ended up here. For $100, I can get a link here. The page has minimal PageRank, but if my business is in North Jersey, I not only get a link, but I get all of this. It looks like my Benjamin just helped my site and I have something for the little ones to do all summer. Sounds like a good deal to me.
6. Start a scholarship. I can’t take all the credit for this one as this was born from Adam’s idea. Remember that query where I showed you how to name a donation price to get a link? Why not try that with a scholarship? I found a page here that is linking to scholarships for as low as $50. How did I find that? I’m glad you asked.
   • scholarships inurl:k12 100 – Be sure to include that inurl:k12 in there so that you can focus on the high schools
7. Offer a service. One of my recent successes came from a link that I got for a client that cost nothing. There is a site out there that mentions wacky holidays. I found out that the site was linking to sites that were mentioning the details of the holidays and the one that related to my client was blank. I reached out to gauge interest and I found out from the site owner that her site had been negatively impacted by the Panda update. After clicking around the site, I had some recommendations. It took maybe 15 minutes to make about 5-6 easy recommendations that should help out. I sent these over in a nice email along with a link to the client’s blog post explaining the details of the national day. One day and two email exchanges later, the link was up on a topical PR4 URL. I do SEO all day and I love it. I almost felt like I owed more.
8. Offer a student discount. I have to thank Jessica Hill for this one. Do you have an e-commerce client with a minimal linking budget? If they have a section on their site where you can input discount codes, create a special code that you can distribute to local colleges. A 5-10% discount really doesn’t affect the bottom line much and it brings in business that you wouldn’t have had otherwise. Schools have pages such as this one that will link out to sites that provide discounts for their students. Just don’t get greedy with anchor text here. This is one of the reasons that Staples got penalized.
9. My last tip is one that I LOVE. I like to target events that have recently ended. I have reached out to many sites only to hear that the annual event that I wanted to sponsor happened a week before my email was received. Some link builders would put that in their calendar and follow up next year. Not me. I’d tell the site owner that I have so much faith in their organization that I would be willing to make an early donation for the 2012 event. Think about this for a second. The event is over and it took the organizers six months to raise the money to put on a successful event. When a person like me comes along that is willing to put money in their pockets for next year today, they are all smiles. Not only do I get the discounted rate since I am late/early, but since I am paying for the 2012 event in 2011, I get the link until the next event comes up in 2013. I just paid $100 for a link for the next 2 years. That’s about $4/month for a PR6 homepage link.

So, I hope that these tips make it easier to stretch that marketing budget. Do you have any other ideas that have worked well for you? Feel free to share those in the comments section or chat with me on Twitter.

Posted in linkbuilding, SEO | 18 Comments »

All SEO’s Do Paid Linking & Google Doesn’t Care

Monday, February 21st, 2011

Ok, technically anyone who hires an SEO to do link building is doing paid linking. They are paying someone with expertise and dedicated resources to do link building and much of the time it is specifically to manipulate Google’s search results. It does not make good business sense to rely only on “organic” links to compete for search results. This may work for Brand related searches. If you are interested in ranking for any generic terms however, you will need some help or to spend your own resources doing the link building; neither of which is free. Paying someone to do link building is different than paying for a link, but both have the same goal.

While Google may want all links to be organic, I believe that they know that is not even close to within the realm of possibility. They know that non-organic link building will always be a part of the search landscape and have begrudgingly come to terms with the issue. Understandably however, Google has to draw a line somewhere. It’s up to us as SEOs to understand where that line is and for the sake of our clients, not to cross it.

So where does Google draw the line?

Normally I would say “intent.” This is the ad hoc metric Google uses to determine whether something is evil or not. If the intent is obviously to manipulate their results, then more often than not it gets a busted. However, since almost all link building is done with the intention of improving a pages/sites position in search results, “intent” cannot be that line.

Par for the course with Google, the line is a little fuzzy. They can tell us something is not acceptable on one hand then on the other, SEOs show us that it clearly has impact. Google does not think it is fuzzy at all by the way. They tell us what they expect and lead us to believe they have the technology to enforce it. SEOs have shown over and over again that their enforcement tends to have holes.

Examples on both sides of the line.

The recent J.C. Penney paid linking issue uncovered by the New York Times was an instance where the intent was obviously to influence rankings. It’s a great example of either not understanding where the line was or not caring if it was crossed. The search firm who handled the Penney’s site either allowed the creation of or actively created thousands of links using paid link networks. With what I personally consider a gross disregard for the basic principles of link building, these links were place on totally non-relevant sites which was the cause of the overall “JC Penalty” debate started in the New York Times. Google has told us that paid link networks were stepping across the line over and over again.

When was the last time you saw traffic from the Yahoo! Directory in your sites referrals? That’s a $299 a year link and the only reason most people even bother anymore is because of the strength of the site and the potential link juice it can pass. I just checked, those links are still without the no-follow tag. How far would the sales drop if Yahoo! decided to add no-follows; pretty far I am guessing. Quality directories are a rather safe bet from a paid linking standpoint. When a directory is hand edited and is full of useful links across its categories, Google will normally see value in a link on that site and give it a pass.

How to deal with the line.

Let’s face it, many clients and unfortunately many SEOs don’t have a clear understanding of how much work goes into building quality links. It’s a time consuming and expensive process. Remember, I said “quality” links, sure you can get links cheap, and paying for links is an easy way to get the job done efficiently, hence its popularity. But in this case, cheap and easy usually equal dangerous and risky; just ask J.C. Penney. The tactic of quantity over quality is not viable anymore.

Dealing with the far side of the line is easy. Just stay away from link networks and brokerage houses. If a company has a “List of Publishers” you can choose from then it’s most likely not a list you want anything to do with. If a company has an exclusive network of sites, they are probably not sites you want anything to do with. Use common sense, any service that “automates” a link is probably not a service you want anything to do with. Quality link building is neither cheap nor easy. If a company or service disagrees with this, assume they are on the wrong side of the line.

Draw your own line.

A few weeks ago, Michael Martinez of SEO Theory wrote an article similar to this one. It was somewhat tongue and cheek, but focused on the point that since all linking is paid, it’s hypocritical to allow some and not others. And it may be, but there is a point at which Google decides that SEOs have gone too far and it’s at that point that the site or page gets slapped. As SEOs it’s up to us to decide for ourselves how close to the line we are willing to venture and since it’s a fuzzy line it’s a subjective decision. Some SEOs don’t mind pushing the limits while others stay as far from the line as possible. In the long run it’s up to us as SEOs to draw our own line remembering that in most cases it is not our sites which will be in the Google crosshairs if the line is crossed.

Personally, my line was pushed to far beyond my comfort zone where I was before, I am glad to be at a place like SEER where the line is mine to control once again and all the people around me have the same regard for the clients and their sites as I do.

This was my inaugural post here on the SEER blog. I am glad to have both the time and a place to write about the industry I love once again. If you are coming over because I mentioned this post on the SEO101 Radio show, thanks for dropping by.

Posted in business thoughts, linkbuilding, SEO | 9 Comments »