When it comes to link building, one of the toughest challenges I ran into was clients who only wanted links built to specific pages on their site. Sometimes it was just one specific page – their homepage, and other times it would be to their homepage plus various product pages. Pages that no one really would want to naturally link to unless they were already buying the products.

The best link building clients were the ones that were open to link building towards any of their pages, including and especially to their great content. There is nothing easier than link building for a website that actually has link worthy content – infographics, videos, whitepapers, tutorials, lists, or even just informative blog posts. The only thing you run into with these clients is keeping up with all of the great content that there is to link to on their site.

The Purpose of a Content Audit Spreadsheet

This is where a content audit spreadsheet comes in handy for link building. A content audit spreadsheet for link builders is simply an analysis of the top pieces of link worthy content on a website, organized in a way that makes it easy for link builders to find the right pages to propose in their link requests to other sites based on category. The main goals of this spreadsheet are as follows.

• To help link builders organize the information about each page so they are not always looking up the site to find a particular piece of content and what to write about it when it comes time to actually email a prospective link opportunity.
• To keep information organized so that it can be passed on to different link builders throughout the course of a project.
• To serve as a checklist for on-site optimization and baseline statistics.
• To keep track of overall links built to each page.

 

Now that I’ve hopefully sold you on the benefits of a content audit spreadsheet for link builders, let’s look at the information you will want to keep in yours.

Information for a Content Audit Spreadsheet

The following pieces of information are crucial for a great content audit spreadsheet that will serve as your ultimate link building tool for each client.

• Type – Whenever you are link building, you might find opportunities for specific types of content. For each link worthy page on a website, note the type of content on that page – infographics, video, tutorial, whitepaper, free trial download, widget, tool, application, blog post, and so forth.
• URL – This is the full URL for each link worthy page on the website for quick copying & pasting when needed.
• Shortened – For social sharing, keep track of a custom Bit.ly link that you can use for social promotion of the page. This way you will have social statistics including clicks and latest activity for that URL.
• Title – This is simply the title of the piece of content. While you might want to link everything to keyword phrases, there is nothing more natural than linking to a page by its title.
• Description – This is the description for the content which you can use when emailing a prospective link opportunity or filling out a form that asks for the page’s description.
• Keywords – These are all of the applicable keywords and keyword phrase anchor text that fits each link worthy URL. You can enter multiple keywords in one column, or add additional columns per keyword.
• On-Site Check – This can be per page or for the entire website, but it is simply a date of when someone last checked on-site optimization. If anything should happen down the road with the website’s rankings, it might be a good thing to check back up on. A number of times, I have seen client’s websites rankings drop simply because they changed their website design and their old URLs were not redirected or the newly designed pages were no longer optimized properly.
• Page Authority, Links, Tweets, Likes, and Google +1′s – One thing I like to do with any website is grab a simple baseline measurement of stats before I start working with it. This way, a month or two down the road, you can see if your link building activity is making a positive impact by checking the current stats. These stats also serve defense in case the customer starts asking about results. Grab these stats using the SEOmoz Toolbar and the official social sharing buttons on the page. If the page doesn’t have social sharing buttons, you can always plug the page’s URL as the URL to share in the official button code pages for Twitter, Facebook, and Google (under Advanced Options) to see the numbers.

 

Additional Tabs

Most link builders probably have your own tools for recording links. If not, just add additional tabs to this spreadsheet for each piece of content or one additional tab for all of the links. On the link recording tab, enter the anchor text used for the link, domain the link was placed on, domain authority, traffic, page the link was placed on, page authority, contact name, and contact email. This way, you have great information to give to the client if they need proof of work, and you also have a great record of contacts to get links from on future projects.

Get the Spreadsheet

Not in the mood to create a spreadsheet from scratch? Just grab the sample spreadsheet on Google Docs!

For Google Docs Users

If you are signed into your Google account, simply use the File > Save option to save this spreadsheet to your documents and start filling it in with your information.

For Excel and Open Office Users

If you don’t have Google Docs, or would prefer to save it on your local machine, go to the Google Docs version and use the File > Download As to save it as your desired file type. I’d suggest Open Office or Excel if possible for functionality.

How do you organize content for link building? What other details would you include? Please share your thoughts in the comments, and happy auditing!

Image credit: Joe Hall

Content Auditing for Link Builders – Why You Should Do It, Tips, and a Spreadsheet is one of our latest posts from: SEOgadget.co.uk.

> Skip the chit chat, give me that tool now!

It has been a little while now since my last blog post, but hopefully the wait has been worth it! I’m very excited to be writing this post and to be sharing this tool with you.

Research for new content strategies takes time

Every day in our industry we face the challenge of developing new strategies for attracting traffic to a website and staying ahead of the competition, whether this is through on or off site engagement. As marketers it’s our job to overcome these challenges to ultimately build ROI.

But before you can jump to a strategy you need to do the research:

• What type of content is (and has been) working well – is it contextually relevant?
• What topics are people talking about now in and around your industry?
• What’s trending?
• What questions are people asking?
• What types of content is attracting social shares, mentions etc?
• What types of websites are mentioning these topics? And more specifically, who?
• Which platforms are being utilised to promote this content?

– In a nut shell, what is hot right now? And how are people interacting with this content?

Our research doesn’t end there, once you have the above data you should be checking out similar topics too. Answering these questions will give us the foundations to creating our own on or off-site strategy.

Check out our content generation tool

The problem we have with this process is that it naturally absorbs a lot of time, and if you are just checking out ideas for outreach purposes it is almost completely unfeasible.

For the purposes of this blog post here is a top level view of the on & off site strategy process:

Maximise return, minimise time

After checking out Tom’s epic guide to Import XML for Google docs, I was inspired to develop a tool that would effectively generate this research which could be adapted for both processes based on a single user action.

As soon as a user enters a keyword(s) into the tool, content will be returned from a number of sources all based on this keyword.

These sources can be categorised as follows:

The latest news & discussions

Google Discussions – What’s the latest [keyword] talk in the forums?

Google News & Bing News – Hot off the press [keyword] news.

What content is being shared?

Digg – the most dugg content relating to [keyword], there is also an additional column for the most recent dugg content.

Reddit – The top rated reddits relating to [keyword].

Youtube – The most viewed videos relating to [keyword].

Topsy Latest Tweets – the most popular [keyword] related tweets in the last day, including twitter name and number of RTs received.

Topsy Latest Top Trending Tweets – this is then aggregated in the same way as the previous point.

Twittorati Search – the most ‘authoritative’ tweets relating to [keyword] based on the Twitterati authority score.

All Things Now – the most popular content Facebook shares relating to [keyword].

What questions are being asked?

Yahoo Answers – questions relating to [keyword] filtered by questions with the most answers.

Wiki Answers – this is split in to two columns, the latest questions that have been asked relating to [keyword] and the top answered questions.

How Stuff Works – articles answering a problem relating to [keyword].

Content aggregators

Blog Catalog – the latest blog posts relating to [keyword].

Fark – the latest and most popular items shared on Fark relating to [keyword].

Redux – discover further video content relating to [keyword].

Helium – The latest [keyword] articles shared on Helium.

Cracked – One of my favourite sites I couldn’t leave out. A fun/comedic site returning articles relating to [keyword].

Niche

Due to the generic nature of this blog post, I haven’t included any niche specific sources in the tool, but to really get the most out of it incorporate aggregation sites relating to your target niche or even specific blogs, there are plenty of them out there which will provide an even greater insight into what works well/what’s hot in your niche right now.

The party doesn’t stop there

After going through your first sweep of the Google doc, your brain should (hopefully) be flooding with ideas for link bait, viral and useful content that could be used for outreach or on your own website, but that was for only one keyword!

Towards the end of the spreadsheet you will find three additional columns looking into keyword variants. Using the power of Uber Suggest and Google’s similar and related queries, why not incorporate these into your search for even greater content analysis and idea creation…

But wait a sec!

Before you get stuck into other queries, there’s another dimension to this tool which has been running in the background. If you head on over to sheet 2 (Source and Place), the tool will whip up possible placement opportunities for the ideas which you will have just been putting together.

With the help of Topsy I have pulled out ‘experts’ relating to the keyword you will have typed earlier. To help filter out the junk, I have incorporated another filter which searches the users twitter profile to determine how many times they have mentioned your keyword (naturally works best with single generic keywords), and the number of followers they have. Finally, the website that is featured on their bio has been extracted. Together they will help you to identify potential outreach placements.

Ok so this helps for outreach, how can this actually help create content for my own website?

Analysing the data collected within this tool will tell you what types of content are working for your niche. If there are questions being asked over and over again, why not consider introducing useful guides for people on your website, or if there are a lot of different questions being asked why not develop a Q&A system.

You should constantly be looking at how you could potentially capitalise on the latest news to gain traffic, just tread carefully as some can be more controversial than others.

Analyse the types of content that is attracting a lot of social buzz and how the websites have went about promoting this content – is it a video?, an infographic?, a topical post?, a creative piece or an article that triggers an emotional response? Etc.

Strategies based on this research can begin to evolve, but before you become fixated on delivering i.e. a Q&A system – break out the box, find out what (in this instance) awesome Q&A systems are currently out there, and take look at what makes them stand out from the crowd. List their positive characteristics, but also take note of the negatives – this identifies potential gaps that you could exploit in your strategy.

Whether it’s a QA system, an infographic or whatever, research every fragment of existing strategies, look for the holes and how you can make this even better and more unique – finding gold takes time, but if you mine for long enough you are going to eventually strike it rich!

Right, let’s get started…

As this is a Google doc’s tool and due to the number of queries it contains, if it is run a few times within close proximity then you will likely see some incomplete results, so just be careful with it. Would love to see this developed into a more secure tool using python, but that’s another challenge.

Ok, here is a link to the tool: Google Docs Tool

Please can you log in to Google in order to make a copy of the Google doc and activate the tool, if you have any problems accessing it just let me know.

Type your keyword(s) in to cell B3 using the + symbol to separate multiple keywords e.g. seo+agency and then hit return. You should now have a complete set of data ready to spark some creativity!

I am very excited to be sharing this tool with you and would love to hear your thoughts.

Image credit: Tom T

Using Google Docs To Generate Hot Content Strategies [Tool] is one of our latest posts from: SEOgadget.co.uk.

Several very talented SEOs have put a lot of effort towards helping the SEO industry understand what Google’s most recent algorithm update did for search quality and search engine traffic. It seems that, gone are the days where domain authority rules the roost, if you’re pushing out a lot of pages, and those pages are a touch thin content wise, you’d better have a great strategy to get links to those pages or create a richer user / content experience.

Image credit: Philipp Klinger

Flat growth or a sudden reduction in long tail traffic

Has your traffic been hit by the May Day update? Perhaps it’s been flat with below expected growth of late. Your traffic might have dropped, specifically traffic in the long tail. If that’s the case, you might want to check how hard your deepest content types or subfolders have been working for you.

With all of that in mind, what sort of process should you follow with your site analytics and what types of changes can you make to claw some of that traffic back? Most importantly, how can you adjust your SEO strategy to help avoid updates like May Day hurting you again?

Get a good sense of depth, authority and employment

Experimenting with methods to measure link distribution, indexation and employment by content type (subfolder) in your site architecture might be a smart idea. By “employment” I mean, “how hard is this content group working for me?”.  Thinking about the ratio of pages per subfolder to the number of pages in that folder receiving at least one entry from Google, what was the before and after May Day view of employed pages? How many keywords were driving traffic to your site daily before and after the update? Can you see weaker areas of your site working less well?

How hard is this content working for me?

Some of the experiments I’ve been working on involve collecting data that brings together the opportunity to answer questions like the ones above, but they rely on a little patience and problem solving along the way. Particularly, collecting the data with automated tools.

If you’re interested in getting into the “nuts and bolts” of indexation depth, authority and employment metrics you’re going to need some data:

• Top linked to pages on your domain
• Total root domain links by content type (subfolder)
• Total pages that receive at least one entry from Google over a period of time
• % Indexation by subfolder (The percentage of total pages in a subfolder that receive at least one entry over a set period of time)
• Pagerank by page
• mozRank by page
• Depth in architecture by page from Xenu
• Internal links by page from Google Webmaster Tools

These are the kinds of values you can collate and compare to get a better understanding of potential weak areas in your site architecture, creating data tools if you will – a topic you’ll notice I’m covering a lot in the coming weeks. Here’s an example of how links by subfolder, total pages and the count of total pages receiving at least one entry can work together to show you how employed sections of your site may be.

I know there’s a problem, what should I be working on right now?

The biggest impact (I sense from talking to friends in the SEO sphere) has been felt on page types that are a little too “boilerplate”. Category, listings, product listing pages, white label sites “customised” with an advertiser logo or any type of site that might be using excessive, near duplication. Pages that tend to vary H1s and some meta for long tail traffic. This tactic, seemingly works less well if you don’t have the direct links to those pages today.

Uniqueness and authority by page appears to be the key formula. Dave Davis made an important point on this, essentially stating that it’s far from the easy approach, but focusing on value add pages that attract links naturally are the important way to go. If you’ve already been following this strategy, then you’ll probably be one of the folks that hasn’t had a problem with long tail traffic.

Modify your existing pages to add unique value

Remember the blank review pages issue raised by Matt Cutts over a year ago? Obviously even back then, Google were losing patience for pages that added little value to their vision of the web. Regardless of the role I believe external links (authority from external sources) can play in the rankings of even the crappiest of webpages, there’s an important quick win: make your pages appear more unique.

• Index your own tweets and play the text back on pages that are most relevant
• If you’re advertising information on locations, venues, events, pull through their twitter stream
• Make your product, design, UI and user experience awesome
• Add reviews to the pages, make it fiendishly easy for users to comment – bin your lengthy registration process to allow comments
• Create video and rich media – make it really easy to embed any data / content you offer on each page on a 3^rd party website (Salaries, Price comparison, search boxes, latest odds, celebrity news, whatever – think widgets and always make it easy to share)
• Get quick and easy links to each page using plugins like Tweetmeme
• Mashups can work, but it’s best to use syndicated snippets of your own content (think guide snippets, related blog post articles)
• Use services to create snippets of genuinely custom content (Mechanical Turk for example)
• Reward your audience for participation, create value add programs that make people want to talk about you
• Make it quick and easy for your SEO’s to add unique content to even the most template of pages – even a simple “You might be interested in…” box where a few lines of text and a link can be added makes a world of difference to those boiler plate pages
• Think a little outside the box – recently we added a custom text snippet at the end of each breadcrumb on a page template – adding just a little extra length to the long tail.
• Try to apply dynamic variation to otherwise boilerplate navigational section headings
• If you’re working with data feeds as an affiliate, think about your automated content / data feed strategy and read this presentation by Tom
• Use your deepest, archived content wisely
• Take a look at the site you worked on a few years ago on Archive.org – if some old content has been ditched (rewritten guides, as an example) – is there any of this stuff you can turn to snippets and resurrect?

Think about your site architecture

There are heaps of ways to skin this cat – but the bottom line is, how well are you distributing authority down and across your site architecture? It’s perfectly natural for content pages lower down your site architecture to earn fewer links, but leverage the ones that do to spread the love into places that are link love starved.

• Keep your  site architecture flat
• Use DHTML / CSS to create more links on a page without harming the user experience
• Cross link between content silos
• Use your most linked to pages
• If you’re brave, create a heat map of your most linked to areas on the site and work from that
• Use similar, related, most frequently visited, top pages and most commented suggestions to improve your internal linking

I don’t think May Day introduces anything new – it simply enforces what SEO’s should have been doing all along – working to add value. Dave made the point well: “Google is now seeing individual documents as their own entities a lot more” – so, it’s time for us to start doing the same.

Survival SEO Strategies – The May Day Update is one of our latest posts from: SEOgadget.co.uk, UK SEO consultants helping people and organisations succeed in search.