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.

I’m sure this last could be a whole lot longer, but since I find myself doling out a lot of advice to SEOas and budding SEOs these days and while a lot of times people are on the right track, they tend to overlook little details that can make a big difference.  Here’s a short list I find myself saying often -

1. Don’t waste time getting links from bad pages.  Check to see if the page you’re linking to has some value.  Is it indexed?  Check by doing a Google search - info:siteyouwanttocheck.com and you’ll see if you get a result, and if it’s been cached.  Does the page have PageRank?  If it passes these tests, that’s a good start.  If there are too many outbound links on a page, you’re sharing juice and your links aren’t going to be worth much.  You also might want to do a quick search for the page title, or the website’s page title to see if it’s experienced any Google penalties (hint: if you can’t find the pages anywhere in the rankings for their exact titles, it’s probably worth staying away from)
2. Don’t overdo the anchor text, especially on deep pages.  If you own a site that doesn’t get many links, Google will probably notice if you get 50 consecutive links to a seemingly obscure subpage with a very specific anchor text.  You’ll also want to get links to a variety of pages.  For better or worse, Google wants you to make your links look like they’re occurring naturally…even though they sure know you’re out there building links.  See no evil, hear no evil I guess…
3. Don’t focus on numbers.  Quantity might not get you to the top.  You can spend a ton of time getting massive amounts of low quality links, or that same amount of time getting a few great links.  The latter will often win.
4. Don’t get reciprocal links from less authoritative domains.  If they don’t have any PageRank or links pointing in, why do you want to share a link.  If your glass is half full and someone else’s is a quarter full, what’s the point in sharing?
   

   You might want to compare before you share.

5. Don’t be myopic.  Try different tactics.  Too many of one type of link stops the creative juices from inspiring you to find new ways to get links.  Plus, depending on your tactics, you might also be tipping Google off to your “evil” activities.  Don’t put Google in a corner!

Any other mistakes to avoid?  Please feel free to email me or add a comment.

I don’t know what everyone else’s client roster looks like, but for us it’s all over the map, both literally and figuratively.  Not only have our clients allowed us to fulfill our dream of manifest destiny (almost), but they range from billion dollar corporations to one person start ups and everything in between.  Obviously, the means and the goals of these types of businesses are drastically different, and from our standpoint they each require us to use different “SEO muscles”.

For our smaller clients that don’t have the budget or resources to do consistent content development, a large burden falls on building links through relationships.  Now there’s nothing I hate more than people talking about “relationship building”.  It makes my skin crawl.  It reminds me of this financial planner I met recently who was so obviously phony, but just kept saying “building relationships” until you either got sick of him or decided to buy into his shtick.  I chose the former.

But as much as I hate this cliched term, there’s definitely something to be said for it when it comes to effective link building.  It can be so easy to fall into the trap of thinking about links transactionally.  Do what you need to do to get the link, then on to the next target.  This is a pretty limiting approach for both you and your client, however.

Recently I’ve been doing a lot of this type of work, and particularly in the world of small to mid sized business, there’s a lot of education that needs to take place as you approach link targets in adjacent markets.  People want to know why you want a link and what the value is.  If you’re experienced in the game, you can likely give these folks a fairly canned but convincing response get the link and move on.  However, I’ve been pushing increasingly to help educate my targets as to what I’m doing, the benefit for my client, and the benefit for them.  Most often, I find that they appreciate the knowledge passed along, and in some instances, it even opens the door to opportunities for gaining a new client, either the link target themselves or one of their business contacts.  Even without that benefit, I’ve found some of my targets become increasingly willing to refer me to other good link targets, and having established that relationship makes gaining that next link that much easier.

This is terribly fundamental, but sometimes fundamentals are the easiest things to forget.  I played a basketball game the other night and halfway through the game we were really struggling on offense and we called timeout.  Everyone started throwing out ideas of what to do and someone finally said, “Why don’t we just run a pick and roll?”  One of the oldest and simplest plays in basketball.  We all shrugged and agreed to give it a shot.  The result?  The easiest two points of the night.  The moral of the story?  Sometimes revisiting the fundamentals can really reap some great rewards, and I think that definitely holds true for link building.