Search Marketing Insomniac…The Blog of Adam Henige

As I sit in my recliner with the Olympics glowing in the periphery, I can’t help but think how few people have the motivation to devote four years at a time for their shot at glory.  I’m fairly certain a lot of these athletes forgo making a decent living to pursue their passion.  As I mull over all of that dedication to hard work, I realize just how much I like being lazy.  So in this edition of SEO on a Nickel, I’ll offer up a quick and easy way to continuously build links - blog commenting.

Now, let me say this first.  I do not condone spamming blogs for links. If you read this blog and use its contents as ammunition to spam other blogs, there is a good chance you will be eaten by polar bears…but I digress.  Let’s get down to business.  Here’s the tools we’ll be using today:

1. Google Reader
2. Google Alerts

Short list, eh?  I said this was going to be a testament laziness, didn’t I?  Okay, so here’s the idea.  If you don’t have much time, a great way to find links is to set up a handful of relevant searches in Google Alerts and spend a few minutes each week looking for relevant blogs to post on in Google Reader.

The first thing you need to do is recognize what linkable assets you have on your site.  Is your home page a valuable asset?  Is it a site that has particular value for a product category or a niche interest?  Perhaps you have an article section with valuable information, or some tools on your site that make it easier to find the right product or calculate an important equation.  Regardless, most sites have some specific linkable assets, and if not, start by making some unique content that relevant sites in your industry would want to link to.

Secondly, do a couple of searches in Google blog search to identify some searches that provide a healthy amount of returns.  If you sell blue widgets, you may just want to do a search for “blue widgets” or if you want something more specific to blue widgets, you might want to search  intitle:”blue widgets” which will return only blog posts with the phrase blue widgets in the title.  Handy, eh?  If you want to take it a step further, you can add some additional elements to your search to find blogs that are more likely to be dofollow - or as some of the industry insiders call them, “footprints”.  An example of this would be blue widget “allowed html tags:” which is a footprint in the comment section used on many blogs that tend to allow dofollowed links within the comments.  The link query tool from Ontolo can be used to show you a whole bunch of ideas for this (use your keyword and then select conversation from the linkable opportunity type drop down).

With some queries in place, get into Google Alerts and set up your search:

Keep up on your blue widgets.

Once you create your alert, you can choose to edit your alerts where you can select the option to view in Google Reader.  Otherwise, I suppose you can have them sent to your inbox (but that’s sooooooooooo 2008).  Now, you can set up a time each week to find appropriate blog posts where your comment can add value through providing a link to your site.

Once again, I recommend that you don’t bombard every blog you come across.  Chances are you’ll find some blogs that are good communities to participate in aside from building links, so if you’re a good citizen, you can make some worthwhile connections that may lead to a bevy of other opportunities.  So keep that in mind before you start angering people…or the polar bears.

The SEO polar bear hates blog spammers! Image courtesy of www.freeimagedepot.com

And I would be remiss not to point out that I fleshed this post out from Navin Poeran’s suggestion on Search Engine Land a while back.  That post will open your eyes to the immense number of ways you can use search queries to identify linking opportunities.  Until next time, I wish you lazy but successful link building.

This might not seem like the most original post in the world, as a lot of people have covered the topic of keyword selection before, and done so quite well.  One thing I’ve noticed that’s usually missing from these posts, however, is a practical and quick methodology with some examples.  So today, I’m going to walk you through an example of how you can make some smarter decisions on keyword selection.

First, the tools you’ll need to pull this off:

• Google Keyword Tool
• SEO Quake Add-on for Firefox or IE
• Google

Second, the overall concept of what we’re trying to do:

When I talk with clients I ask the three basic questions in keyword selection.

1. What keywords will bring the most traffic to your site?
2. What keywords are likely to bring traffic that will convert into leads or sales?
3. How feasible is it to rank highly for that keyword?

Ideally, you want keywords that meet all three criteria.  My typical rule of thumb for a site is to try to rank in the first three results, because at the fourth listing you’ll only get around 6% of clicks  (so says the numbers from AOL).

So here’s the process, in order of activity for a quick way to select your keywords.

1. Identify the target pages you will be optimizing for
2. Create a list of keywords that pertain to the product/service offered on each page (you can have 5, you can have 50)
3. Toss those keywords into the Google Keyword Tool and export them to a CSV (make sure you use the drop down in the upper right corner to select “exact match” - this will give you more accurate estimates for SEO purposes…and no, these are never exact) .  If you’re looking for additional ideas, let the keyword tool run a scan of the page itself, or a few competitors’ pages.  Export and combine these numbers, using whichever volume, global or local, pertains to your page/site.
   1. If there’s strong seasonality in your business, you may want to look into grabbing Microsoft’s Ad Intelligence Tool, which will help demonstrate possible opportunities and threats for keywords in terms of seasonality.
4. With this initial list, start weeding out the keywords that don’t match or are too general.  Once you have that in place, sort by volume - high to low.  Now go down the list with your second piece of criteria in mind - likelihood to convert.  Here, you can toss things out like “athletic shoes” in favor of “discount running shoes” if your page has a heavy emphasis on low cost running shoes.
5. At this point your list should be cut down pretty substantially, so now it’s time to look at feasibility.  With the SEO Quake Toolbar installed, just turn it on before you do a search on each of your keywords and you’ll have some intelligence available to you in your search results - such as the page’s PageRank, Yahoo SiteExplorer’s stats for links to the page (L) and links to the domain (LD).  The lower these numbers are, the more likely you can quickly achieve this ranking.  Other items to look for include whether or not it’s the site’s home page (typically stronger pages, more likely to capture links) and whether the page title contains the keyword (the page title is always the clickable link in search results.  In the example below, the keyword search was for “keyword 1″ and it is in the title, so that would be something to take note of.

Coming back to my previous comment, I usually aim for the top three positions.  So if you’re in a hurry, I’d grab the metrics I’ve mentioned and build a table for all of your keywords based on these metrics and one more - PageRank of the site’s home page.  Here’s my logic behind each metric.

1. PageRank of ranking page - If Google has determined the page has authority and trust, you’ll need to acquire some, too
2. PageRank of site’s home page - This is usually a quick indicator of whether the entire domain has a high trust score, which can also be a problem if you’re trying to outrank a seemingly menial page on a behemoth of an authority site (this is why Wikipedia is so hard to outrank)
3. Whether or not the page is the home page - as I said before, this is usually a site’s strongest page, so it can be some extra work to outrank it with a subpage, or it may always be a threat if there are a lot of home pages around you who suddenly decide to start getting aggressive with SEO
4. Page links - If a page has a lot of links and a high PageRank, that usually means the page has some good links and/or is attached to a strong domain.  This is a red flag if this number is high, and an even bigger red flag if it’s a sub page with a large number
5. Domain links - another domain strength metric, the home page may not be responsible for all the links, so if the site’s pulling in links from all angles, this is another major hurdle to climb
6. Keyword in title - this is the most important on page element, so if the other sites are fairly serious about your keyword, you should see this bolded all over the titles on the first page of search results, if not, there may be opportunity.

If you take this approach, you’ll build a spreadsheet like the one I have assembled below, where you can go through and quickly select your best opportunities based on the above criteria.

I hope this walk through is helpful for those of you who may not have all the time in the world or the tools available to build a helpful process for keyword selection.  If you want to read more on this wildly fascinating topic from people much smarter than I, I would suggest the following:

• SEOMoz’s 10 Steps to Advanced Keyword Research
• Search Engine People’s Proven System
• Hobo’s Keyword Research For Beginners with Aaron Wall
• 5 Steps to Effective Keyword Research on the Search Engine Guide Blog

You can’t pinch your pennies enough these days, or pinch them at all if you’re working with a broken hand as I am…ANYHOW, I figured it was about time for another quick hitting edition of SEO On A Nickel - so all of my penny pinching fans feel free to rejoice! No lengthy diatribe, typing with one finger doesn’t lend itself to verbose blogging.

What I want to cover today is extremely important. If you’ve never really laid out a strategy for your SEO work, or you’re just getting started, it’s extremely important that you assess your current state, and the state of those pages occupying the SERPs you desire.

There are some sweet paid tools that will do this for you - like SEOMoz Labs’ Linkscape Visualizer. This very succinctly details how you stack up to a competitor.

We've got a ways to go to catch SEOMoz...those rascals!

If you’re not familiar with SEOMoz, they have their own metrics (thus the names), but the basic concepts from this can be done with other tools to give direction to your SEO efforts.  Some things to look at, and the tools to compare them:

• Inbound links - Yahoo site Explorer is the easiest tool for this task.  Look at the link profile of the ranking page, as well as the domain.  The page may have few links, but might be ranking out on the strength of internal links from a very powerful domain.  Also, be sure you compare apples to apples, having 50 links from the same domain is far different than 50 links from unique domains.  If your links all come from only a few sites, you’ll want to add that to your list of priorities.
• Trust - This is a bit more difficult, but if you have MORE links than a competitor, trust could be an issue.  Link Diagnosis will show you the Google PageRanks of sites linking in.  If you have a bunch of PR1 and PR2 pages and your competitor has a few 5 and 6s…it’s time to get some more authoritative links.
• Internal links - Site Explorer works well for this task, too.  Are you getting the most out of your own site?  Sometimes just by optimizing internal links you can make a major move.  If you see a target page is lacking in internal links, start there.

Essentially, if you perform the above tasks and make yourself a checklist, you can figure out your greatest deficiencies before moving forward.  If you’re trying to save a few bucks in your marketing efforts, this will definitely be a step towards efficiency.