Real Life Link Building Examples [SMX Advanced 2010]
Yes, yes. Do a top 10 list. Got it. Attract links with rewards. Heard that. What else you got when it comes to link building? In this session, link builders share real life stories of how they obtained hard-to-get links. Is it the relationships, stupid? Focusing on what matters?
Tips and strategies, for the professionals, at SMX Advanced Seattle 2010 featuring Debra Masteler, Roger Monti, Gil Reich, Chris Bennet, Arnie Kuenn.
Building links for B2B sites – Roger Monti – Martinibuster
1) Target searching – use allintitle: “relevant keyword” resources site:.org
2) Backlink trolling – troll for sponsor or advertising opportunities and cherry pick the best. Don’t poach the backlinks (same links) of competitors. Cultivate your own set of backlinks: linkdomain:relatedsite.com -site:relatedsite.com “sponsors” / “advertisers”
3) Association memberships – some associations link to their members. Do searches for member lists, restrict your searcg to .org and add in relevant keyword phrases to filter for your related groups. Don’t be afraid to expand your search to cover closely but not directly related groups
4) Paid links – carries risk, evaluate the risk tolerance before attempting to negotiate paid links
5) Broken link campaign – Flame-outs from the past are fertile hunting grounds, particularly for B2B sites. Once you have identified a dead internet page do a linkdomain:example.com
6) Sponsorship campaign – “sponsors” “your keywords” site:.edu
7) Free links – free links from web pages about your products / services often have phrases like “resources” and “where to buy” associated with them
Examples of targeted link requests – Arnie Kuenn – Vertical Measures
Pirate costume link – used Open Site Explorer to find relevant links and email and said “Ahoy Webwench, I like yer site…” – acquire a link by using the same language or style that the website’s tone is written in
9) Do some research before you contact a website. Try to find out if you can contact someone personally. Researched a site owner who claimed he could predict the next Miss America pageant winner. Started a conversation around hiring the webmaster to make predictions on another website
10) Look for broken links on a site, contact the webmaster, tell them about the broken links suggesting a fix with an updated URL
11) SayCampuslife.com – connected and asked if they could contribute some content to their site and use the clients huge Twitter following to tweet the link as soon as the article was published – use your resources to drive traffic to a guest article on a target site
12) April Fools Day Prank – “Google opening SEO agency” – 27 days later Newswire editor turns the news into real news on their website – over 800 links coming into this post
Infographics – Chris Bennet – 97th Floor
What makes for a good infographic? Lots of data, information, presented and made “interesting” and visually appealing, aesthetically pleasing. Turn complex ideas into concepts that are easily consumed. Infographics are a 100% legitimate and natural way to build links and can set you apart from your competitors.
Chris’s infographic examples
13) STD’s across America – http://stdtesting.md/blog/stds-across-america-32
14) Who owns the most servers – http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2009/05/14/whos-got-the-most-web-servers/
15) Where does the money go? – http://www.joeydevilla.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/where_does_the_money_go1.jpg
16) What is a petabyte – Mozy.com – http://gizmodo.com/5309889/how-large-is-a-petabyte (Seeded via Gizmodo.com)
17) Commercial domains have a hard time playing in the social space – hence visualeconomics.com, a link bait project created for a loans credit site that has attracted over 50,000 backlinks in 9 months
18) Use guest virals, host your amazing infographic content on a partner publisher site to get initial exposure – this will skip the buries on Digg and take you straight to the traffic, just make sure when your viral is embedded on a guest site, it links back to your domain
19) Contact people who linked to you and thank them – notify them the next time you create good content and create virals on their behalf
How to get people to link to you by telling them how great they are – Gil Reich – Answers.com
20) You rock! badges – confirming people’s expertise and get them to host a badge to your site
21) The SMX Advanced “I’m speaking” badge is a great example of this
22) Testimonials
23) Get awards – even give yourself awards
Write on sites that want good content and can deliver an audience
24) Keyman collect-ables – each time this guy gave a good answer linking back to his own site (??)
25) Ask a question on answers.com that leads to an answer that is in fact, your website
26) Leverage Youmoz’s power!
27) Enlightened self interest is ok – serve your community and that makes it perfectly acceptable for you to link to yourself
28) Disagree with a statement and ask for balance in an article
29) “Chase the community” – give, link out, be nice, try to be trusted and liked within a community
30) Common enemies – if a few folks mutually disagree with someone, the community who disagrees with that person together are more likley to cite you when they’re publicly disagreeing, too
31) Help people – charity widgets work well showing donation totals
32) Make it easy to link to you – eg the answers plugin for WordPress
Pump up your links – Debra Masteler – Alliance-Link
33) Use Dapper.net – http://dapper.net/open/ – content is what’s driving links – create RSS feeds for all of the content that you’re producing on 3rd party sites with a link back to your site. Use RSS directories to then link back to you. RSSmix.com into RSS directories. Sweet!
34) Use Yoast’s RSS Footer plugin
35) Use RSS for media leads – set an alert service from a publishers RSS list (Watchthatpage / Trackengine) Monitor for contact details on RSS feeds for major publisher sites (look out for email addresses etc)
36) White papers, Living stories, podcasts, News Streams, – Syndication is the word
37) Create podcasts (very hot for links apparently) – release your new stuff to the media (not the press!)
38) iTunes is awesome to get Podcasts out
39) Guest blogging is still the way – use SoloSEO to generate queries for great link building: http://www.soloseo.com/tools/linkSearch.html?keyword=seo
40) Widget bait – “baby ticker countdown”, “Mortgage calculator” – you can build those on Widgetbox.com and they “kind of ok” – great widgets syndicate news / items / links to relevant articles. Widget directories, widget galleries. Widgets are east to get built on elance.com
41) Use chatroulette – “link to us and we’ll give you a free xxx”
42) Microsites – buy blogs / old sites, rebrand them and use them as microsites
43) Use Linkinfluencer, SEObooks link hub tool, SEOmoz’s link intersect tool, social media for Firefox
Real Life Link Building Examples [SMX Advanced 2010] is one of our latest posts from: SEOgadget.co.uk, UK SEO consultants helping people and organisations succeed in search.
SEO For Google Vs. Bing: How Different Are They? [SMX Advanced Seattle Tips]
Is there that much of a difference between ranking factors for Bing versus Google to justify all the efforts in “optimising” for both engines?
The first of a series of awesome panels at SMX advanced features Matt Cutts (Google), Janet Driscoll Miller (Search Mojo), Rand Fishkin (SEOmoz), and Sasi Parthhasrarathy (Program Manager, Bing) to explain exactly that.
Useful stats – Bing Vs Google
When Bing and Yahoo combine, the new engine will have around 30% market share (US), so it’s pretty key to start thinking about your traffic from a two engine world, if you haven’t already. Bing can “outperform” on certain metrics – the quality of the traffic, pages per visit, bounce rate is very high in comparision to Google.
Screenshot: Bounce rate, Time on site and Pages per visit metrics from Bing traffic (Photo: Fabio)
Similarities between the engines
Both search engines struggle with JavaScript dependent objects such as flash
XML sitemaps work for both engines, but Bing currently does not accept video or news sitemaps
Geolocation results
Bing “does a very good job” of serving personalised results based on IP location. The example search result “sex and the city 2″ will show local cinemas close to your location. Both engines do a good job with Weather based results too.
Sitelinks
In Google you can ask to have a sitelink removed, but there’s no way to do this with Bing.
Link building / Value
Bing has a webmaster centre, the first example being the “backlinks” area, There’s also an outbound links – actually that’s quite an awesome tool! For every link your website has, Bing assigns a “page score” to help indicate the value of those links.
News
How do you get into Bing News? Submit the bns@microsoft.com and create an rss feed of your content – apparently this submission process is slow and you have to keep pinging Bing until they come back to you.
Shopping area
With Google base, submission is free. Bing shopping is paid submission only and Bing are removing the cashback feature ;-(
Social sharing
Bing are helping users share content via image search (example above) although to allow Bing to share via your Facebook, you do have to grant access via Facebook connect. Janet also demonstrated a search result for “swagger wagon” where Bing will “document preview” videos in the search result pages. The preview (video) is Youtube only – but very interesting functionality nonetheless. This is a great piece of functionality for sites with large amounts of video based content.
To control document preview (the “More on this page” section), Bing takes information from your page in this order:
- H1 if it does not match the title tag
- First paragraphs of information
- To add contact information, add your address, phone and email to the page
To disable document preview, use the following meta tag in your page header:
<meta name=“msnbot”, content=“nopreview”>
Rand Fishkin – Google vs Bing
Rand is presenting next. His presentation covers data to bring more science to the SEO process and to provide recommendations and open interpretation based on the data. Awesome.
The data is based on 11,00 search results and only the first page. The correlations are all with lower or higher ranking positions where all (or none) of the results matched the metric. I’m going to document each point, but definitely check out Rand’s full post on the subject.
Query matching in the domain name
An exact match domain has the highest (most powerful) correlation to rankings. Google is slightly higher than Bing – but exact match domains are the way to go, hyphenated versions are less powerful but more frequent (powerful) in Bing. Just having keywords in the domain name has substantial positive correlation for both engines.
Exact match domain names by TLD extension (.com, net etc)
Exact match domains using .coms have a more powerful correlation to rankings in Google and Bing. Bing seems not to mind so much with exact match domains that are .net, org etc.
Keywords in sub-domains
Using all the keywords in the subdomain – seems to be some correlation between keyword use in the subdomain and Google rankings, but much less so with Bing. Bing may be rewarding subdomain keywords a lot less than previously, and generally speaking KW’s in subdomains are not nearly as powerful as the main domain
On Page Keyword Usage
H1 tags and Titles (and in Bings case, keywords in the body) all have “some” correlation, but it is weak. Alt tags have “some” correlation – so a good idea is to include the KW in a relevant page to enhance your rankings. Putting KWs in a URL is likely a best practice, but simplistic on page optimisation generally isn’t a huge factor.
Links
The quantity of different root domains (domain diversity) offers a strong correlation to rankings, particularly in Bing. Domain diversity is key in SEO for both search engines, but slightly more so in Bing. SEOmoz thinks that Bing may be slightly more naive in their use of link data over Google. Bing seems to care about “raw” links in their algorithm.
TLD extensions
.Org TLD’s have very strong correlation to rankings, but that’s surprising data, perhaps .orgs have more links in their data set
URL Length
The longer your URL the worse your rankings could be – shorter URLs are probably a good best practice. Long domains are not ideal but aren’t “awful”. Generally, raw content length is pretty marginal.
Website homepages
Bing has substantial correlation with homepage out performing internal pages in the search results. Google has a slight preference as well, but less so than Bing.
Anchor text link matches
The raw quantity of exact match anchor text links correlates hardly at all with rankings. It’s about linking root domains with exact match anchor text links. In fact this is the highest of all correlative metrics for high rankings. Bing seems more “Google like” now than they were around 10 moths ago.
Features with high correlation to rankings
- Exact match .coms domais
- Exact match anchor text
- Linking RDs
- Quantity of links
Link attributes are still extremely powerful, and more important than on page SEO factors. Google and Bing are remarkably similar in SEO, and more so than they were last year. Cool.
Here’s the post on SEOmoz: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/google-vs-bing-correlation-analysis-of-ranking-elements
Comments / QA
Was this work done before or after May Day? – The link data was updated on June 4th – 5th. Very fresh.
What’s going to happen to Yahoo Site Explorer – no real answer but the user experience (and the SEO) experience at the end of the merge will be “really good”. The algorithm at Yahoo will be the same as Bing, making for identical search results.
Will it make a difference if I start my domain name with a number? – You can brand but it’s harder to brand starting with numbers. Google tries to figure out how to “break” keywords up in a domain. If you can find a nice, brandable domain, that can be a little bit better
Google seems to be able to index faster than bing. What can be done to help Bing index more pages – Submit a sitemap, Bing would review on a case by case basis. Generally, it’s the most relevant pages that Bing want to return. Sitemaps are a “good” signal, but just because a URL is in the sitemap doesn’t mean that they’ll index the page. Matt says that video sitemaps are something that Google are looking at more closely, especially because of Google TV – if you produce videos and you haven’t created a video sitemap, you definitely should be doing that now.
Are you (Bing) going to support the Ajax specification for indexing? – We’ll get back to you on that
SEO For Google Vs. Bing: How Different Are They? [SMX Advanced Seattle Tips] is one of our latest posts from: SEOgadget.co.uk, UK SEO consultants helping people and organisations succeed in search.