4 Tips for Creating Link Bait http://bit.ly/pK8NCL Posted by Geoff Kenyon
While link bait is frequently seen as more "fun", and it's definitely more creative, than doing things like guest blogging or emailing people asking for links, it has its challenges. I wanted to share a few things I've learned about creating link bait from my experiences. If you have other insights, I'd love to hear them in the comments.
Keep a Tight Scope
In most cases you will want to keep your content extremely focused around your target, or the person that you are going to get to link to you (Justin wrote more about this process here). While it’s tempting to try and cast as wide of a net possible, typically you will be more successful focusing on targeting one or two targets (and shaping the content around these demographics) rather than trying to create content that targets everyone.
While this is really important for a lot of link bait content, there will obviously be exceptions to this rule. A couple examples come to mind (if you can think of others, feel free to leave a note in the comments):
If your content or subject really is universally applicable – While this is very rare, there is some content topics that apply to almost everyone on the web. A good example of this would be Facebook; just about everyone on the internet has a Facebook account and has an interest in changes (especially when it involves privacy settings).
Creating exhaustive guides – Super in-depth and extensive guides and documents can receive a lot of links if they are done really well. Think about how many links SEOmoz’s
Keep the scope tight especially with revisions and additions. When you want to add in more content to make it better, or the client wants additions, you need to ask: “Will adding X improve the linkability of the link bait”?
Offer Something New
There are two aspects of this: perspective and information.
Perspective
The internet is huge; sometimes it feels like everything has already been written about. Fortunately people tend to write the same thing. If you want to write about a topic that has already been written about a lot, come at it from a different angle. If everyone is writing about why something sucks, write about why it’s awesome. And don’t just say it’s awesome, back it up and make a case for why it’s awesome.
Information
Though it seems like just about everything has been written about think about what you can contribute that other people don’t know. Here are a few types of information you can use:
Sales data – you can analyze your sales data and segment it by population, gender, or other information you collect in the sales process to contribute something new. Yes this data might not be completely accurate as it is your sales data and may not be representative of the market. That said, it is still new and typically unavailable to people.
User data – When users register, ask them for information. If they have profiles on their site, ask them for information. Then anonymously aggregate this information and present it with pretty charts and graphics (More on this from Dr. Pete). OK Cupid does a great job of this with most of their blog posts. Check out this one on stuff white people like (original stuff white people like).
Do your own research – Offering brand new data is great because no one else has it so you get to be the definite (linked) source for forthcoming references. This can be really helpful with infographics – if you are having a hard time finding research that someone has published, do the research yourself. Tools like Ask Your Target Market are great for this as they provide you with a large panel so you can get quick responses and you can focus your time on creating your link bait, not doing research.
Publish your data from the research you did and provide excel/csv downloads for people to be able to use the data to do their own research as a way of earning links. You can even go as far as requiring attribution to use the data.
Feedback is Key
You need to make sure that your infographic is correct and there aren’t mistakes or typos. These will get your link bait torn apart on sites like Reddit. You should minimally have people looking at:
Spelling/Proofreading – do you have typos or misspellings. It happens. A lot. Get someone who is really nitpicky and uptight to go over it.
Technical details – Make sure that the content is technically correct and that you aren’t wrong. Find a subject matter expert and have them verify your work.
Readability – While the linkbait might make complete sense to you and your cohorts, you this is your baby (and nobody thinks their baby is ugly) so somethings that might seem obvious to you really aren’t obvious to everyone else. Have your mom look at this, kind of like when you were in grade school and your mom checked your homework. Get someone object who isn’t invested in the project verify that it makes sense (and that it’s cool).
Get subject matter experts (especially those who you would like a link from) involved in the project – reach out to them before the project launches, tell them they are awesome and ask them to review it because they know so much more than you. When it goes live tell them and thank them for their help. Then encourage them to share it. They have invested time in the project and are more likely to share.
Have a Killer Hook
You can have great data but if you don’t have a hook, then it is significantly less likely to succeed. Todd Malicoat has a great overview of link baiting hooks here that you should take a read through. I will list them here quickly for you though - to get the full explanation you'll have to read the post ;) :
News hook
Contrary hook
Attack hook
Resource hook
Humor hook
Ego hook
Incentive hook
While each of these hooks are effective, you should choose the hook based on who you are ultimately targeting and who you want to link to you. While a humor hook may work well for broad appeal, if you want to increase topically relevant links you might want to go with something like a resource hook or contrary hook.
If you have a strong community you can often use the ego hook to scale your link building and get your community to build links for you.
Likewise Copy Blogger has a crash course on magnetic headlines that you should read through. Having really strong headlines will not only help improve the number of people reading yoru content but can have a big impact on how well-shared your link bait is. As such make sure your title contains a hook.
What insights do you guys have? I’d love to hear what’s worked for you when you've been working on creating link bait.
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backlinking seomoz
Friday, September 2, 2011
eCommerce Syndicated Content: How to Win http://bit.ly/oqHrKd Posted by Kate Morris
There is a ton of talk right now about Panda recovery. SEOmoz is no exception to this: questions in Q&A, webmasters cleaning up their content, and so much more. Webmasters are taking control of their sites, building some awesome original content, and ensuring that content can be found by letting users (and bots) know about it.
So it surprised me when a large client asked for help to combat an internal project that would place duplicate content on their site. They are in the ecommerce space and have the issue of selling products that many other companies sell. Duplicated content runs rampant here in the form of product descriptions. The manufacturer creates a description for resellers and that is what everyone uses. It's sanctioned from the source and no writers are needed. Sounds awesome until the product is carried by hundreds of websites and everyone has the same content. Who should rank then?
Like most big companies (as is my client), this decision was made by someone else and the SEO team screamed in defiance. So they asked me for proof that having unique content was as necessary as everyone keeps saying.
Done. And guess what? Google backed me up (in at least 3 examples). So I thought I'd share my best example and my take aways to help other ecommerce sites deal with this situation now and in the future.
Bodum Fyrkat Nipper
There is no disclaimer needed in this case as I chose this product at total random from Amazon. I had purchased a personal grill recently from the same manufacturer and knew that there were many sellers for that product. I wanted something that was cool but also common place. Therefore, I used the grill tongs and went searching for examples of other sellers. My point here was to show that duplicated content in the form of product descriptions doesn't help rank the product page, so the first step was to find multiple sellers of the product.
Find Seller Information
To identify the sellers, I used searches for the product name, product number, a snippet of the product description from the seller (and once identified, the manufacturer supplied description), and some reviews that kept popping up. I noticed that many of the pages that had the standard product description had the same two reviews as well. Easy way to identify a page with no unique content. The identified product pages (check for the canonical URL) were then checked for page and domain authority.
When the pages are checked, you'll see a trend in descriptions and be able to identify the manufacturer's feed for the description. Note which sites write their own and which use the same as everyone else. Below is a list of our competitors and their domain (DA) and page authority (PA) in order of strength, grouped by content type. From this, we would assume based on strength that Amazon, Zappos, Cooking.com, or Epicurious would have a strong shot at ranking.
Original Content
Amazon.com – 97 DA, 1 PA
Zappos – 90 DA, 46 PA
Bodum – 62 DA, 35 PA
Maple Run Emporiums – 18 DA, 20 PA
Duplicated Content
Epicurious – 89 DA, 1 PA
Cooking.com – 78 DA, 42 PA
Betty Crocker – 72 DA, 1 PA
CSNStore.com – 70 DA, 1 PA
Food Network Stores – 64 DA, 1 PA
Buzzillions – 61 DA, 1 PA
Find the Key Phrase and Rankings
But what are we ranking? Typically I would use a variation of the product name, but Amazon threw me a curve ball: they renamed the product to help with internal search. Instead of Fyrkat Grill Nipper, they use the name Fyrkat Grill Tongs. This decision makes more sense to me, and I'm assuming it helps with searching internally as well. But I didn't want to take Amazon's word for it. Always check for which term is better according to actual searches.
To test, I looked at the SEOmoz Keyword Difficulty Tool and ran three keywords. None of them had traffic numbers from Google, but the difficulty of Fyrkat Grill Nipper was higher. That made sense as more sites used that name for the product, so the competition is more fierce. The impact this has is that the Amazon page is most likely going to show lower than normal because they name the product differently.
Working in the Keyword Difficulty Tool also give you a look at the ranking sites for the keyword, which is the next step.
Results
The top three results are Zappos, Bodum, and Maple Run Emporium; the rest are videos or aggregators. These three are the sites with original content, taking out Amazon due to their shifted targeting. The product manufacturer is third and my theory is that is due to the fact that their content is duplicated across the Internet, but they are the original and should be up there.
All other major brands and their product pages didn't show on the first page, with CSN being the only one to show on the second page. Search engines want to show users the best content for their time, so it makes sense that aggregators (who show where the product is sold across the web) and video content is intermixed with the sellers who took time to describe the product on their own.
Winning in eCommerce
What I want you to take away from this post is this: Even a tiny original bit of content can set the page apart from competitors.
Maple Run Emporium, check out their domain and page strength. They are paltry next to bigger sites like Betty Crocker and Epicurious. Yet with a small hand written description of the product that is a sentence long, they are ranking above all the other major sellers! Their page, below, is simple and direct.
Winning Tips
Feel free to use syndicated content to enhance your own content and reviews.
Make it know that it is from the manufacturer.
Place it at the end of the text on your page.
Write your own descriptionsof the products. We aren't talking a novel, but something unique.
Give the product to someone in the office and have them write what they think.
Use the words from a customer's review (ask them if they are cool with that via email).
Don't just rewrite the content you are given from the manufacturer, really write what you think about the product.
Have fun with it. See examples at Amazon and Zappos.
Entice users to review your products. Email them a week after they receive the product and give them a link to the product page with a request to review it. See the example from Modcloth below:
Do you like this post? Yes No
article writing duplicate content panda SEO seomoz
There is a ton of talk right now about Panda recovery. SEOmoz is no exception to this: questions in Q&A, webmasters cleaning up their content, and so much more. Webmasters are taking control of their sites, building some awesome original content, and ensuring that content can be found by letting users (and bots) know about it.
So it surprised me when a large client asked for help to combat an internal project that would place duplicate content on their site. They are in the ecommerce space and have the issue of selling products that many other companies sell. Duplicated content runs rampant here in the form of product descriptions. The manufacturer creates a description for resellers and that is what everyone uses. It's sanctioned from the source and no writers are needed. Sounds awesome until the product is carried by hundreds of websites and everyone has the same content. Who should rank then?
Like most big companies (as is my client), this decision was made by someone else and the SEO team screamed in defiance. So they asked me for proof that having unique content was as necessary as everyone keeps saying.
Done. And guess what? Google backed me up (in at least 3 examples). So I thought I'd share my best example and my take aways to help other ecommerce sites deal with this situation now and in the future.
Bodum Fyrkat Nipper
There is no disclaimer needed in this case as I chose this product at total random from Amazon. I had purchased a personal grill recently from the same manufacturer and knew that there were many sellers for that product. I wanted something that was cool but also common place. Therefore, I used the grill tongs and went searching for examples of other sellers. My point here was to show that duplicated content in the form of product descriptions doesn't help rank the product page, so the first step was to find multiple sellers of the product.
Find Seller Information
To identify the sellers, I used searches for the product name, product number, a snippet of the product description from the seller (and once identified, the manufacturer supplied description), and some reviews that kept popping up. I noticed that many of the pages that had the standard product description had the same two reviews as well. Easy way to identify a page with no unique content. The identified product pages (check for the canonical URL) were then checked for page and domain authority.
When the pages are checked, you'll see a trend in descriptions and be able to identify the manufacturer's feed for the description. Note which sites write their own and which use the same as everyone else. Below is a list of our competitors and their domain (DA) and page authority (PA) in order of strength, grouped by content type. From this, we would assume based on strength that Amazon, Zappos, Cooking.com, or Epicurious would have a strong shot at ranking.
Original Content
Amazon.com – 97 DA, 1 PA
Zappos – 90 DA, 46 PA
Bodum – 62 DA, 35 PA
Maple Run Emporiums – 18 DA, 20 PA
Duplicated Content
Epicurious – 89 DA, 1 PA
Cooking.com – 78 DA, 42 PA
Betty Crocker – 72 DA, 1 PA
CSNStore.com – 70 DA, 1 PA
Food Network Stores – 64 DA, 1 PA
Buzzillions – 61 DA, 1 PA
Find the Key Phrase and Rankings
But what are we ranking? Typically I would use a variation of the product name, but Amazon threw me a curve ball: they renamed the product to help with internal search. Instead of Fyrkat Grill Nipper, they use the name Fyrkat Grill Tongs. This decision makes more sense to me, and I'm assuming it helps with searching internally as well. But I didn't want to take Amazon's word for it. Always check for which term is better according to actual searches.
To test, I looked at the SEOmoz Keyword Difficulty Tool and ran three keywords. None of them had traffic numbers from Google, but the difficulty of Fyrkat Grill Nipper was higher. That made sense as more sites used that name for the product, so the competition is more fierce. The impact this has is that the Amazon page is most likely going to show lower than normal because they name the product differently.
Working in the Keyword Difficulty Tool also give you a look at the ranking sites for the keyword, which is the next step.
Results
The top three results are Zappos, Bodum, and Maple Run Emporium; the rest are videos or aggregators. These three are the sites with original content, taking out Amazon due to their shifted targeting. The product manufacturer is third and my theory is that is due to the fact that their content is duplicated across the Internet, but they are the original and should be up there.
All other major brands and their product pages didn't show on the first page, with CSN being the only one to show on the second page. Search engines want to show users the best content for their time, so it makes sense that aggregators (who show where the product is sold across the web) and video content is intermixed with the sellers who took time to describe the product on their own.
Winning in eCommerce
What I want you to take away from this post is this: Even a tiny original bit of content can set the page apart from competitors.
Maple Run Emporium, check out their domain and page strength. They are paltry next to bigger sites like Betty Crocker and Epicurious. Yet with a small hand written description of the product that is a sentence long, they are ranking above all the other major sellers! Their page, below, is simple and direct.
Winning Tips
Feel free to use syndicated content to enhance your own content and reviews.
Make it know that it is from the manufacturer.
Place it at the end of the text on your page.
Write your own descriptionsof the products. We aren't talking a novel, but something unique.
Give the product to someone in the office and have them write what they think.
Use the words from a customer's review (ask them if they are cool with that via email).
Don't just rewrite the content you are given from the manufacturer, really write what you think about the product.
Have fun with it. See examples at Amazon and Zappos.
Entice users to review your products. Email them a week after they receive the product and give them a link to the product page with a request to review it. See the example from Modcloth below:
Do you like this post? Yes No
article writing duplicate content panda SEO seomoz
The Greatest Attribution Ever Graphed http://bit.ly/ncpBe5 Posted by Slingshot SEO
This post was originally in YOUmoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author's views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc.
Step-by-Step Instructions for Non-Branded Custom Segmentation
in GA's new Multi Channel Funnels Section
Multi Channel attribution is amazing, to say the least. In the immortal words of Avinash Kaushik, “You will have an orgasm!” If you weren’t there for Mozcon, I’m sorry. Don’t let it happen again, but you can always get the video of his presentation when it comes out.
Much like the way I felt on Christmas day 1996, I couldn’t wait to play with a brand new system whose inner workings I knew almost nothing about: the Nintendo 64. Rand will corroborate my story. Today, it’s the new Multi Channel Funnels segmentations in Google Analytics, Version 5 (trumpets please, Avinash).
Below, you’ll find some Michelangelo-esque screenshots of how we (the Slingshot R&D guys) broke down some custom segmentation and compared them to show differences between:
Non-branded, organic, first interaction
All non-branded organic interactions
All conversions
To create a custom Conversion Segment, simply click the link, as shown in this screenshot:
To create the First Interaction Organic, Non-Branded Segment, select the following:
Include [First Interaction] [Medium] [Containing] [Organic]
Next, select [Add a conversion path option]
And for the love of all that is Mozzy, go to the “and” section to add this piece. Use “or” and you won’t know North from a Bear-o-dactyl.
Exclude [Any Interaction] [Keyword] [Matching RegExp] [fill in your branded terms here]
Done? Awesome. Next.
To create the All Organic, Non-Branded segment, select the following:
Include [Any Interaction] [Medium] [Containing] [Organic]
Next, use “add” not the “or” option [Add a conversion path option]
Exclude [Any Interaction] [Keyword] [Matching RegExp] [fill in your branded terms here]
Done? You’re the best. Now grab your chopsticks, eat some Cheetos, and enjoy the graph!
Delicious… the graph, I mean. If at some point you decide you’re tired of looking at all those conversions (what is wrong with you? Oh right, you’re a Mozzer), you can pick and choose the specific conversions you’d like to see.
Gratuitous screenshot for your enjoyment.
Do you like this post? Yes No
SEO seomoz
This post was originally in YOUmoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author's views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc.
Step-by-Step Instructions for Non-Branded Custom Segmentation
in GA's new Multi Channel Funnels Section
Multi Channel attribution is amazing, to say the least. In the immortal words of Avinash Kaushik, “You will have an orgasm!” If you weren’t there for Mozcon, I’m sorry. Don’t let it happen again, but you can always get the video of his presentation when it comes out.
Much like the way I felt on Christmas day 1996, I couldn’t wait to play with a brand new system whose inner workings I knew almost nothing about: the Nintendo 64. Rand will corroborate my story. Today, it’s the new Multi Channel Funnels segmentations in Google Analytics, Version 5 (trumpets please, Avinash).
Below, you’ll find some Michelangelo-esque screenshots of how we (the Slingshot R&D guys) broke down some custom segmentation and compared them to show differences between:
Non-branded, organic, first interaction
All non-branded organic interactions
All conversions
To create a custom Conversion Segment, simply click the link, as shown in this screenshot:
To create the First Interaction Organic, Non-Branded Segment, select the following:
Include [First Interaction] [Medium] [Containing] [Organic]
Next, select [Add a conversion path option]
And for the love of all that is Mozzy, go to the “and” section to add this piece. Use “or” and you won’t know North from a Bear-o-dactyl.
Exclude [Any Interaction] [Keyword] [Matching RegExp] [fill in your branded terms here]
Done? Awesome. Next.
To create the All Organic, Non-Branded segment, select the following:
Include [Any Interaction] [Medium] [Containing] [Organic]
Next, use “add” not the “or” option [Add a conversion path option]
Exclude [Any Interaction] [Keyword] [Matching RegExp] [fill in your branded terms here]
Done? You’re the best. Now grab your chopsticks, eat some Cheetos, and enjoy the graph!
Delicious… the graph, I mean. If at some point you decide you’re tired of looking at all those conversions (what is wrong with you? Oh right, you’re a Mozzer), you can pick and choose the specific conversions you’d like to see.
Gratuitous screenshot for your enjoyment.
Do you like this post? Yes No
SEO seomoz
How Google Analytics Custom Reports Helped My Client to Increase His Revenue http://bit.ly/qauqWC Posted by Sajeet Nair
This post was originally in YOUmoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author's views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc.
I often wonder how the life of an SEO consultant would have been if there was no Google Analytics. I mean, sure in that case a lot of paid tools like Omniture, Webtrends etc. would have dominated the analytics segment of the online world, but then, that would also mean that business owners around the world would have had to pump in those extra bucks into their online marketing campaigns.
Google Analytics has become such an integral part of our data analysis and still quite often we land up criticizing it for some of its smallest flaws. But in all of this love and hate game, we always forget the most important feature of this wonderful tool i.e. its absolutely FREE and there are a lot of features that a lot of other paid tools do not offer.
On a personal note, I have always believed that Custom Reports, Custom Variables and User Defined Variables are some of the most underrated features of Google Analytics and many internet marketing firms do not use these amazing features to their fullest potential. In fact, if used intelligently, Google Analytics more than often can help you come out of tricky situations, especially when you are dealing with high end and high profile, demanding clients.
Imagine a client whose SEO, PPC and Social media campaigns are doing really well and yet he comes to you and states that he wants his website to generate more revenue. Keeping this situation in mind, I decided to analyze one of my client's website from usability point of view and as usual I turned to Google Analytics for some help.
Now before the word "usability" misleads you I would like to clarify that by usability I meant understanding and analyzing the performance of my website across different browsers in terms of the metrics provided by Google Analytics. I created a simple custom report with "Browser" as my key dimension. The whole idea was to find loopholes in the website from a browser point of view using some of the key user metrics like bounce rate and %exit. Once I have the data for the under-performing pages the next step would have been to identify any browser compatibility issues like page not loading properly or improper screen resolution etc.
Before we discuss the findings of the report let's just have a look at how to go about making this report.
We are generating a simple custom report with some of the key basic metrics like Revenue, Bounce Rate, %Exit, and Unique Purchases. And the dimensions selected are Browser, Page and Keyword. Now that we are done with the report let’s start with some analysis. For your information, only a few combination of metrics and dimensions are allowed. You can check the complete list here.
As I mentioned earlier, the whole idea was to generate a report that would help me in understanding the performance of the website in terms of its usability. But on creation of the report what I found was pretty startling.
For any internet marketer it's a dreaded sight to see large number of visits in conjunction with negligible revenue and I was well aware of the fact that it's only a matter of time before my client found out about it. It is clearly visible that Opera and Opera Mini browsers are driving almost same number of visits to our website but the difference in revenue is pretty huge. Obviously, this called for an investigation. The question hounded me for 10 whole minutes ( I mean sure 10 minutes sounds very less but trust me for those 10 minutes I was going crazy).
Anyway, while I was scratching my head over it, something else caught my attention.
I found that I was getting almost 5200% more (yeah you are seeing the right numbers!) revenue from Android browsers when compared against same number of visits from Opera Mini. I was nervous and happy at the same time and I knew that I had to get to the bottom of this. I immediately opened my website on Opera mini, Opera and Android browsers to understand what was stopping Opera Mini users from buying products from my site.
Well simply put, Opera and Opera Mini users were taken to the desktop version of the website. As you must be aware, Opera Mini is a mobile browser and as any SEO consultant would know, the obvious recommendation here would be to take the user to the mobile version of the website. But how do we convince the client?? The answer lies in the report itself.
That's when I showed the android numbers to the client. Turns out that Android users were taken to the mobile version of the website. (That's when we hit our Eureka moment ). This is nothing but hardcore evidence that shows that by simply taking the mobile users to the mobile version of the website the revenue will definitely improve. The above data when presented resulted into our recommendations getting implemented without any doubts or concerns at the client's end.
Once again Google Analytics made me a hero. I would be sharing more such reports with all you amazing SEOs and would love to hear back from you.
Do you like this post? Yes No
google analytics SEO
This post was originally in YOUmoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author's views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc.
I often wonder how the life of an SEO consultant would have been if there was no Google Analytics. I mean, sure in that case a lot of paid tools like Omniture, Webtrends etc. would have dominated the analytics segment of the online world, but then, that would also mean that business owners around the world would have had to pump in those extra bucks into their online marketing campaigns.
Google Analytics has become such an integral part of our data analysis and still quite often we land up criticizing it for some of its smallest flaws. But in all of this love and hate game, we always forget the most important feature of this wonderful tool i.e. its absolutely FREE and there are a lot of features that a lot of other paid tools do not offer.
On a personal note, I have always believed that Custom Reports, Custom Variables and User Defined Variables are some of the most underrated features of Google Analytics and many internet marketing firms do not use these amazing features to their fullest potential. In fact, if used intelligently, Google Analytics more than often can help you come out of tricky situations, especially when you are dealing with high end and high profile, demanding clients.
Imagine a client whose SEO, PPC and Social media campaigns are doing really well and yet he comes to you and states that he wants his website to generate more revenue. Keeping this situation in mind, I decided to analyze one of my client's website from usability point of view and as usual I turned to Google Analytics for some help.
Now before the word "usability" misleads you I would like to clarify that by usability I meant understanding and analyzing the performance of my website across different browsers in terms of the metrics provided by Google Analytics. I created a simple custom report with "Browser" as my key dimension. The whole idea was to find loopholes in the website from a browser point of view using some of the key user metrics like bounce rate and %exit. Once I have the data for the under-performing pages the next step would have been to identify any browser compatibility issues like page not loading properly or improper screen resolution etc.
Before we discuss the findings of the report let's just have a look at how to go about making this report.
We are generating a simple custom report with some of the key basic metrics like Revenue, Bounce Rate, %Exit, and Unique Purchases. And the dimensions selected are Browser, Page and Keyword. Now that we are done with the report let’s start with some analysis. For your information, only a few combination of metrics and dimensions are allowed. You can check the complete list here.
As I mentioned earlier, the whole idea was to generate a report that would help me in understanding the performance of the website in terms of its usability. But on creation of the report what I found was pretty startling.
For any internet marketer it's a dreaded sight to see large number of visits in conjunction with negligible revenue and I was well aware of the fact that it's only a matter of time before my client found out about it. It is clearly visible that Opera and Opera Mini browsers are driving almost same number of visits to our website but the difference in revenue is pretty huge. Obviously, this called for an investigation. The question hounded me for 10 whole minutes ( I mean sure 10 minutes sounds very less but trust me for those 10 minutes I was going crazy).
Anyway, while I was scratching my head over it, something else caught my attention.
I found that I was getting almost 5200% more (yeah you are seeing the right numbers!) revenue from Android browsers when compared against same number of visits from Opera Mini. I was nervous and happy at the same time and I knew that I had to get to the bottom of this. I immediately opened my website on Opera mini, Opera and Android browsers to understand what was stopping Opera Mini users from buying products from my site.
Well simply put, Opera and Opera Mini users were taken to the desktop version of the website. As you must be aware, Opera Mini is a mobile browser and as any SEO consultant would know, the obvious recommendation here would be to take the user to the mobile version of the website. But how do we convince the client?? The answer lies in the report itself.
That's when I showed the android numbers to the client. Turns out that Android users were taken to the mobile version of the website. (That's when we hit our Eureka moment ). This is nothing but hardcore evidence that shows that by simply taking the mobile users to the mobile version of the website the revenue will definitely improve. The above data when presented resulted into our recommendations getting implemented without any doubts or concerns at the client's end.
Once again Google Analytics made me a hero. I would be sharing more such reports with all you amazing SEOs and would love to hear back from you.
Do you like this post? Yes No
google analytics SEO
An SEO's Guide to RegEx http://bit.ly/nZgpOC Posted by robmillard
RegEx is not necessarily as complicated as it first seems. What looks like an assorted mess of random characters can be over facing, but in reality it only takes a little reading to be able to use some basic Regular Expressions in your day to day work.
For example, you could be using the filter box at the bottom of your Google Analytics keyword report to find keywords containing your brand, such as Distilled. If you want to include both capitalised and non-capitalised versions, you could use the Regular Expression [Dd]istilled. Pretty simple, right?
Hang on though… some of you might be asking, what the hell is RegEx? That’s a good point. RegEx (short for Regular Expressions) is a means of matching strings (essentially pieces of text). You create an expression which is a combination of characters and metacharacters and a string will be matched against it.
So in the example of the keyword report above, your Regular Expression is applied to each keyword and if it matches it’s included in the report. If it doesn’t match, it’s discarded.
RegEx has many uses aside from Google Analytics too such as form validation or URL rewrite rules. Hopefully this post will give you an understanding of the basics and some ideas for where you might be able to use it.
Characters & Metacharacters
I mentioned that Regular Expressions are made up of characters and metacharacters. A character, to clarify, is any letter, number, symbol, punctuation mark, or space. In RegEx, their meaning is literal – the letter A matches the letter A, the number 32 matches 32, and distilled matches distilled (but not Distilled - characters in RegEx are case sensitive).
Metacharacters, however, are not treated literally. Below I’ll go through each of the metacharacters used in RegEx and explain their special meanings.
If you want to test them out as we go along, I’d recommend opening up Google Analytics and using the filter box at the bottom of your reports. Alternatively you could use http://bit.ly/bxzU and make up your own data set.
Dot .
A dot matches any single character. That is to say, any single letter, number, symbol or space. For example, the Regular Expression .ead matches the strings read, bead, xead, 3ead, and !ead amongst many others. It’s worth noting that ead would not be matched as the . requires that a character is present.
Backslash
From time to time you’ll find that a character that you want to match is a metacharacter. For example, if you’re trying to match an IP address such as 172.16.254.1, you will find that your RegEx matches 172.16.254.1 but also any string such as 1721161254.1 because the dots can represent any character.
Preceding a metacharacter with a backslash indicates that it should be treated as a character and taken literally. In the example above, you should use 172.16.254.1
The question mark is often found in dynamic URLs such as /category.php?catid=23. If you’re trying to track this page as part of your conversion funnel, you may experience problems as question marks, as we’ll see later, are metacharacters. The solution is simple: /category.php?catid=23
Square Brackets []
Square brackets can be used to define a set of characters – any one of the characters within the brackets can be matched. We saw them in the example I used in the introduction - [Dd]istilled can be used to match both distilled and Distilled.
You can also use a range, defined with a hyphen. [0-9] matches any single number for example, or [a-z] matches any lower case letter of the alphabet. It’s also possible to combine ranges, such as [A-Fa-f] would match any letter between a and f in either lower or upper case. Ranges are often combined with repetition which we’ll touch on next.
Specifically in character sets, you can use the caret ^ to negate matches. For example [^0-9] matches anything but the characters in the range.
Repetition ? + *
The question mark, plus symbol, asterisk, and braces all allow you to specify how many times the previous character or metacharacter ought to occur.
The question mark is used to denote that either zero or one of the previous character should be matched. This means that an expression such as abc? would match both ab and abc, but not abcd or abcc etc.
The plus symbol shows that either one or more of the previous character is to be matched. For example, abc+ would match abc, abcc, and anything like abccccccc. It would not, however, match ab as the character has to be present.
The asterisk is an amalgamation of the two – it matches either zero, one or more of the preceding character. An example you say? Oh go on then! abc* matches ab, abc, abcc, and anything beyond that such as abccccccc.
Finally, braces can be used to define a specific number or range of repetitions. [0-9]2 would match any 2 digit number for example, and [a-z]4,6 would match and combination of lower case letters between 4 and 6 characters long.
Grouping () |
Parentheses allow you to group characters together. I may, for example, want to filter the keyword report for searches containing my name, and I want to pick up both rob millard and robert millard. I could do this by using rob(ert)? millard – the question mark and parentheses mean that either zero or one of ert can be matched.
In addition, you can use the pipe to represent OR. You might use it for something like (SEO|seo|s.e.o.|S.E.O.)moz to track SEOmoz, seomoz, s.e.o.moz, and S.E.O.moz, although the versions with dots seem unlikely.
The pipe can also be used without the parentheses if you don’t need to group the characters. For example iphone|ipad could be used to filter traffic coming to your site from keywords containing either.
Anchors ^ $
Although we’ve already looked at the caret in conjunction with square brackets, it can also be used to show that a string must start with the following characters. For example, if you’re trying to match all URLs within a specific directory of your site, you could use ^products/. This would match things like products/item1 and products/item2/description but not a URL that doesn’t start with that string, such as support/products/.
The dollar sign means the string must end with these characters. Again you could use it to track certain URLs like /checkout$ which would pick up the likes of widgets/cart/checkout and gadgets/cart/checkout but not checkout/help.
Some shorthand
There are a few quick timesavers here…
d means match any number i.e. the same as [0-9]
w means match any letter in either case, number, or underscore i.e. [A-Za-z0-9_]
s means match any whitespace, which includes spaces, tabs, and line breaks.
Phew! That’s quite a lot to digest. I’d recommend playing around with the short examples above to really get a feel for them. Once you’re comfortable with the basics you can start getting stuck into the real uses…
Google Analytics
Filters can be used to exclude internal traffic out of your reports, and combined with some simple RegEx you can filter a range of IP addresses. In Profile Settings, create a new custom filter which excludes the filter field Visitor IP Address. Using an expression such as 55.65.132.2[678] would exclude IP addresses 55.65.132.26, 55.65.132.27, and 55.65.132.28.
Another Google Analytics feature which can greatly benefit from the use of RegEx is Advanced Segments. One of the more common uses is to create a segment for non-branded organic search traffic so that you get a clear picture of your SEO efforts, unaffected by any branding exercises. Create a segment where the medium matches exactly organic and create an and statement where the keyword does not match Regular Expression. In this statement, you should include RegEx such as the [Dd]istilled example in the introduction, or for my personal site it might look like [Rr]ob(ert)? [Mm]illard.
You could also use Advanced Segments to create a social media segment - select source and set the condition to matches Regular Expression. Your value should be something like facebook|twitter|youtube|digg etc.
I’ve already touched on the filter box at the bottom of each report earlier in this post - it’s probably where I most often use RegEx as it can be a great help when investigating specific problems or queries. Use the pipe, for example, in the keyword report to find keywords containing a few synonyms, or do something similar to the social media segment on the fly by listing a handful of sites in the traffic sources report.
Finally, RegEx can be useful when setting up conversion goal pages and funnel steps where you want more than one URL as the goal or step. When setting up a new goal with a URL destination, use the match type Regular Expression match. You might wish to use a value such as ^/(widgets|gadgets)/checkout/thanks.php$ to track both /widgets/checkout/thanks.php and /gadgets/checkout/thanks.php for example. When setting up a funnel, all URLs are treated as Regular Expressions so you can use the same technique.
There are more advanced examples for all of the uses above in several excellent blog posts and resources about RegEx and Google Analytics - there are too many to list here but I’d thoroughly recommend searching and reading some of them.
Rewriting URLs
I expect that most of you SEOmoz readers are familiar with SEO friendly URLs. They should be static rather than dynamic and should be descriptive. Often this is achieved using URL rewrites which are implemented on Apache servers using the built in module called mod_rewrite. A text file called .htaccess sits at the root of the domain which contains your mod_rewrite rules. A simple rewrite looks something like this:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^category/link-building/?$ category.php?cat=link-building [NC]
This example would mean that the URL www.example.com/category/link-building/ would actually serve the page www.example.com/category.php?cat=link-building. As you may remember from earlier, the caret and dollar sign mean that the URL must start and end with link-building/, and the question mark means that the trailing slash is optional. [NC] is not RegEx - it is part of mod_rewrite’s syntax which simply states that the RewriteRule is not case sensitive.
Obviously this approach is not particularly efficient for large sites with thousands of URLs, and this is where RegEx becomes indispensable as it allows you to match patterns. A dynamic rewrite rule using RegEx might look like this:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^category/([A-Za-z0-9-]+)/?$ category.php?cat=$1 [NC]
This rules states that the URL must start with category/ and can then be followed by any combination of letters, numbers and hyphens as long as there are one or more (+). This part of the rule is surrounded with parentheses so that it can be referenced in the second part of the rule using $1. If you had a subsequent set of parentheses, it could be referenced with $2 and so on. Again, the trailing slash is optional because of the question mark, and the caret and dollar sign are used to define the start and end of the URL.
This is just one simple example in an area where there are numerous possibilities. If you want to know more I’d definitely recommend checking out this guide as well as the excellent cheat sheet.
Word – yes, Word
This is something I’ve only been getting to grips with lately, but turning on wildcards in Word’s Find and Replace can save a huge amount of time when cleaning and manipulating data. I find that I’m often doing this when creating reports or preparing data for an infographic for example.
You can find the wildcards check box under the advanced options in Find and Replace. An example of how you might use it could be to remove the session ID from a list of URLs. You could enter sid=[0-9]+ into the find box, and leave the replace box blank.
As with mod_rewrite you can also reference back to your find box, although the syntax is slightly different. Instead of $1 and $2 you use 1 and 2. If you had a list of URLs and you wanted to switch the subdirectories round you could use example.com/([a-z-]+)/([a-z-]+)/$ in the find box and use example.com/2/1/ in the replace box.
There’s more about using RegEx in Word on the Microsoft support site here and here.
Of course there are many, many other uses for Regular Expressions, especially in programming, but I hope this gives you some idea of the potential of RegEx in the field of SEO. Let me know if you have any questions or thoughts in the comments, or feel free to give me a shout on Twitter (@rob_millard).
Further Reading & Resources
http://bit.ly/11TBVS - some handy RegEx tips from the Google Analytics blog.
http://bit.ly/nZPAeg - a really well put together PDF which goes into some depth for each metacharacter.
http://bit.ly/neGhfY - a guide to using RegEx with Google Analytics by Google.
http://bit.ly/fw1uQ5 - a handy cheat sheet.
http://bit.ly/bxzU - useful tool that mentioned in the main post which is great for testing your RegEx.
http://bit.ly/9LXWzL - a quick tip from @tomcritchlow on how to use RegEx to filter by keyword length or depth of page.
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RegEx is not necessarily as complicated as it first seems. What looks like an assorted mess of random characters can be over facing, but in reality it only takes a little reading to be able to use some basic Regular Expressions in your day to day work.
For example, you could be using the filter box at the bottom of your Google Analytics keyword report to find keywords containing your brand, such as Distilled. If you want to include both capitalised and non-capitalised versions, you could use the Regular Expression [Dd]istilled. Pretty simple, right?
Hang on though… some of you might be asking, what the hell is RegEx? That’s a good point. RegEx (short for Regular Expressions) is a means of matching strings (essentially pieces of text). You create an expression which is a combination of characters and metacharacters and a string will be matched against it.
So in the example of the keyword report above, your Regular Expression is applied to each keyword and if it matches it’s included in the report. If it doesn’t match, it’s discarded.
RegEx has many uses aside from Google Analytics too such as form validation or URL rewrite rules. Hopefully this post will give you an understanding of the basics and some ideas for where you might be able to use it.
Characters & Metacharacters
I mentioned that Regular Expressions are made up of characters and metacharacters. A character, to clarify, is any letter, number, symbol, punctuation mark, or space. In RegEx, their meaning is literal – the letter A matches the letter A, the number 32 matches 32, and distilled matches distilled (but not Distilled - characters in RegEx are case sensitive).
Metacharacters, however, are not treated literally. Below I’ll go through each of the metacharacters used in RegEx and explain their special meanings.
If you want to test them out as we go along, I’d recommend opening up Google Analytics and using the filter box at the bottom of your reports. Alternatively you could use http://bit.ly/bxzU and make up your own data set.
Dot .
A dot matches any single character. That is to say, any single letter, number, symbol or space. For example, the Regular Expression .ead matches the strings read, bead, xead, 3ead, and !ead amongst many others. It’s worth noting that ead would not be matched as the . requires that a character is present.
Backslash
From time to time you’ll find that a character that you want to match is a metacharacter. For example, if you’re trying to match an IP address such as 172.16.254.1, you will find that your RegEx matches 172.16.254.1 but also any string such as 1721161254.1 because the dots can represent any character.
Preceding a metacharacter with a backslash indicates that it should be treated as a character and taken literally. In the example above, you should use 172.16.254.1
The question mark is often found in dynamic URLs such as /category.php?catid=23. If you’re trying to track this page as part of your conversion funnel, you may experience problems as question marks, as we’ll see later, are metacharacters. The solution is simple: /category.php?catid=23
Square Brackets []
Square brackets can be used to define a set of characters – any one of the characters within the brackets can be matched. We saw them in the example I used in the introduction - [Dd]istilled can be used to match both distilled and Distilled.
You can also use a range, defined with a hyphen. [0-9] matches any single number for example, or [a-z] matches any lower case letter of the alphabet. It’s also possible to combine ranges, such as [A-Fa-f] would match any letter between a and f in either lower or upper case. Ranges are often combined with repetition which we’ll touch on next.
Specifically in character sets, you can use the caret ^ to negate matches. For example [^0-9] matches anything but the characters in the range.
Repetition ? + *
The question mark, plus symbol, asterisk, and braces all allow you to specify how many times the previous character or metacharacter ought to occur.
The question mark is used to denote that either zero or one of the previous character should be matched. This means that an expression such as abc? would match both ab and abc, but not abcd or abcc etc.
The plus symbol shows that either one or more of the previous character is to be matched. For example, abc+ would match abc, abcc, and anything like abccccccc. It would not, however, match ab as the character has to be present.
The asterisk is an amalgamation of the two – it matches either zero, one or more of the preceding character. An example you say? Oh go on then! abc* matches ab, abc, abcc, and anything beyond that such as abccccccc.
Finally, braces can be used to define a specific number or range of repetitions. [0-9]2 would match any 2 digit number for example, and [a-z]4,6 would match and combination of lower case letters between 4 and 6 characters long.
Grouping () |
Parentheses allow you to group characters together. I may, for example, want to filter the keyword report for searches containing my name, and I want to pick up both rob millard and robert millard. I could do this by using rob(ert)? millard – the question mark and parentheses mean that either zero or one of ert can be matched.
In addition, you can use the pipe to represent OR. You might use it for something like (SEO|seo|s.e.o.|S.E.O.)moz to track SEOmoz, seomoz, s.e.o.moz, and S.E.O.moz, although the versions with dots seem unlikely.
The pipe can also be used without the parentheses if you don’t need to group the characters. For example iphone|ipad could be used to filter traffic coming to your site from keywords containing either.
Anchors ^ $
Although we’ve already looked at the caret in conjunction with square brackets, it can also be used to show that a string must start with the following characters. For example, if you’re trying to match all URLs within a specific directory of your site, you could use ^products/. This would match things like products/item1 and products/item2/description but not a URL that doesn’t start with that string, such as support/products/.
The dollar sign means the string must end with these characters. Again you could use it to track certain URLs like /checkout$ which would pick up the likes of widgets/cart/checkout and gadgets/cart/checkout but not checkout/help.
Some shorthand
There are a few quick timesavers here…
d means match any number i.e. the same as [0-9]
w means match any letter in either case, number, or underscore i.e. [A-Za-z0-9_]
s means match any whitespace, which includes spaces, tabs, and line breaks.
Phew! That’s quite a lot to digest. I’d recommend playing around with the short examples above to really get a feel for them. Once you’re comfortable with the basics you can start getting stuck into the real uses…
Google Analytics
Filters can be used to exclude internal traffic out of your reports, and combined with some simple RegEx you can filter a range of IP addresses. In Profile Settings, create a new custom filter which excludes the filter field Visitor IP Address. Using an expression such as 55.65.132.2[678] would exclude IP addresses 55.65.132.26, 55.65.132.27, and 55.65.132.28.
Another Google Analytics feature which can greatly benefit from the use of RegEx is Advanced Segments. One of the more common uses is to create a segment for non-branded organic search traffic so that you get a clear picture of your SEO efforts, unaffected by any branding exercises. Create a segment where the medium matches exactly organic and create an and statement where the keyword does not match Regular Expression. In this statement, you should include RegEx such as the [Dd]istilled example in the introduction, or for my personal site it might look like [Rr]ob(ert)? [Mm]illard.
You could also use Advanced Segments to create a social media segment - select source and set the condition to matches Regular Expression. Your value should be something like facebook|twitter|youtube|digg etc.
I’ve already touched on the filter box at the bottom of each report earlier in this post - it’s probably where I most often use RegEx as it can be a great help when investigating specific problems or queries. Use the pipe, for example, in the keyword report to find keywords containing a few synonyms, or do something similar to the social media segment on the fly by listing a handful of sites in the traffic sources report.
Finally, RegEx can be useful when setting up conversion goal pages and funnel steps where you want more than one URL as the goal or step. When setting up a new goal with a URL destination, use the match type Regular Expression match. You might wish to use a value such as ^/(widgets|gadgets)/checkout/thanks.php$ to track both /widgets/checkout/thanks.php and /gadgets/checkout/thanks.php for example. When setting up a funnel, all URLs are treated as Regular Expressions so you can use the same technique.
There are more advanced examples for all of the uses above in several excellent blog posts and resources about RegEx and Google Analytics - there are too many to list here but I’d thoroughly recommend searching and reading some of them.
Rewriting URLs
I expect that most of you SEOmoz readers are familiar with SEO friendly URLs. They should be static rather than dynamic and should be descriptive. Often this is achieved using URL rewrites which are implemented on Apache servers using the built in module called mod_rewrite. A text file called .htaccess sits at the root of the domain which contains your mod_rewrite rules. A simple rewrite looks something like this:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^category/link-building/?$ category.php?cat=link-building [NC]
This example would mean that the URL www.example.com/category/link-building/ would actually serve the page www.example.com/category.php?cat=link-building. As you may remember from earlier, the caret and dollar sign mean that the URL must start and end with link-building/, and the question mark means that the trailing slash is optional. [NC] is not RegEx - it is part of mod_rewrite’s syntax which simply states that the RewriteRule is not case sensitive.
Obviously this approach is not particularly efficient for large sites with thousands of URLs, and this is where RegEx becomes indispensable as it allows you to match patterns. A dynamic rewrite rule using RegEx might look like this:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^category/([A-Za-z0-9-]+)/?$ category.php?cat=$1 [NC]
This rules states that the URL must start with category/ and can then be followed by any combination of letters, numbers and hyphens as long as there are one or more (+). This part of the rule is surrounded with parentheses so that it can be referenced in the second part of the rule using $1. If you had a subsequent set of parentheses, it could be referenced with $2 and so on. Again, the trailing slash is optional because of the question mark, and the caret and dollar sign are used to define the start and end of the URL.
This is just one simple example in an area where there are numerous possibilities. If you want to know more I’d definitely recommend checking out this guide as well as the excellent cheat sheet.
Word – yes, Word
This is something I’ve only been getting to grips with lately, but turning on wildcards in Word’s Find and Replace can save a huge amount of time when cleaning and manipulating data. I find that I’m often doing this when creating reports or preparing data for an infographic for example.
You can find the wildcards check box under the advanced options in Find and Replace. An example of how you might use it could be to remove the session ID from a list of URLs. You could enter sid=[0-9]+ into the find box, and leave the replace box blank.
As with mod_rewrite you can also reference back to your find box, although the syntax is slightly different. Instead of $1 and $2 you use 1 and 2. If you had a list of URLs and you wanted to switch the subdirectories round you could use example.com/([a-z-]+)/([a-z-]+)/$ in the find box and use example.com/2/1/ in the replace box.
There’s more about using RegEx in Word on the Microsoft support site here and here.
Of course there are many, many other uses for Regular Expressions, especially in programming, but I hope this gives you some idea of the potential of RegEx in the field of SEO. Let me know if you have any questions or thoughts in the comments, or feel free to give me a shout on Twitter (@rob_millard).
Further Reading & Resources
http://bit.ly/11TBVS - some handy RegEx tips from the Google Analytics blog.
http://bit.ly/nZPAeg - a really well put together PDF which goes into some depth for each metacharacter.
http://bit.ly/neGhfY - a guide to using RegEx with Google Analytics by Google.
http://bit.ly/fw1uQ5 - a handy cheat sheet.
http://bit.ly/bxzU - useful tool that mentioned in the main post which is great for testing your RegEx.
http://bit.ly/9LXWzL - a quick tip from @tomcritchlow on how to use RegEx to filter by keyword length or depth of page.
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9 Actionable Tips for Link Prospecting http://bit.ly/oyaYXy Posted by Paul Rogers
This post was originally in YOUmoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author's views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc.
I find link prospecting to be one of the most time-consuming and challenging parts of link building. In order to build and maintain a natural link profile for your website, your prospecting activity needs to cover a wide range of opportunities and generate the right targets and leads for your project/campaign. So prospecting is usually pretty easy to start off with - run a few Google searches and you've got yourself a set of content-rich websites within your target industry. However, once you’ve gone through this initial list, you realise the challenge that you're faced with.
Here are some of the things we do at GPMD to generate a broader set of quality prospects. Using these practices, we're able to identify a huge selection of relevant, high quality blogs and industry websites within different sectors.
Tip 1: Advanced search queries
Advanced search queries are our starting point. They’re quick, easy to use and they are great for finding opportunities for guest blogging, collaboration projects, sponsorship etc.
Examples of advanced search queries:
Inurl Search (Dental inurl:blog / Dental blog inurl:.co.uk)
These search queries will filter websites with your preferred domain extension or search term within its URL. The above examples will return dental blogs and dental blogs based in the UK.
Exact Phrase Search (Dental “Guest post” / Dental “Write for us”)
These queries (using speech marks to find the exact text) are ideal for finding websites that are either looking for guest bloggers or accept guest blog posts. The above examples will return dental websites that accept guest posts and dental websites that are looking for writers.
Intitle Search (Dental Intitle:Guest Post – Dental Intitle: Advertise)
Searching for specific content within the title helps to filter the pages that are most relevant and also find opportunities by searching for advertising or guest posting opportunities. The above examples will return dental websites that accept guest posts and dental websites with advertising opportunities.
Wildcard Search (Dental “Guest *” blog)
Using the wildcard (*) filters results that contain the exact words within your query and an additional word in the position of the wildcard. The above query will return dental blogs that feature “guest post”, “guest writer”, “guest blog” etc within their content or title (with the second word in place of the wildcard).
Using more than one of these strings within the same search will help to further refine the results and provide very specific prospects for you to use to build links.
Example of a query that could be used for finding guest blogging opportunities for a dental website.
Tip 2: Use Twitter tools to find niche bloggers
Building relationships on Twitter is a great way of generating opportunities. By regularly talking to bloggers within your industry, you’re developing an outreach that could be utilised for product launches, obtaining reviews, guest blogging and much more.
Follower Wonk:
Follower Wonk is a great tool that allows you to search through Twitter bios, helping you to identify targets for building relationships or just approaching for link-building.
Example: If you're looking to obtain links from dental blogs, you could search for dental blog, dentist blog, dentistry blog and so on. You can then filter the results and order by the available metrics to help find the most suitable people.
Topsy:
Topsy is a very useful tool that lets you search the social web (including blogs). You could search for your brand, niche keyword or web address, find the people who're talking about you or your industry and then get in touch (and hopefully get a link from their blog). You could also search for guest blogging opportunities using things like 'guest blog dentistry' and then approach the website owner/blogger.
These are just a couple of examples, there are literally thousands more tools that can help you find link building opportunities.
Tip 3: Look at blogroll and directory links
When you find a really good blog that you would like a link from, don't just contact them and wait for a reply! You should be looking for a links page or a blogroll to find other similar bloggers that could also provide a good link to your website. It is important to remember that not all good blogs are optimised for search, making a lot of them really hard to find – unless you use these kinds of techniques.
Also, when you're looking down at your competitors' links from directories like spammylinkdirectory.com (not a real website), you could be finding a few new opportunities. Chances are that you've already looked through your competitors' links, but you might find different websites that you haven't analysed within these directories, some of which may have some good ideas/links that you could emulate for your website.
Tip 4: Reverse image search
I often hear people moaning about how some blog or website has used one of their images in a post or article – without realising that this is a great opportunity to obtain a really good link! If you come across another website using your image, send them a polite email, compliment their content and website, and just ask if they can add a link to your website as the source of the image. This link-building technique is natural and free – which is why optimising your images and making them freely available is a great way of generating these opportunities. You can search for your web address in Google's new-look image search feature or tineye.com, both will help you to find where your images are being used.
Tip 5: Use PPC advertising to find advertising opportunities
Running a short-term, low cost PPC campaign is a great way to find link building opportunities. Once your PPC ad is live on lots of related blogs, you can contact the blogger, mention your advert and suggest that you look at other options.
I would recommend complimenting the blog content and asking to submit a few guest posts about your experience within your industry. Then, once you have obtained a number of links, simply turn off the adwords campaign.
Tip 6: Use BuzzStream
I started using BuzzStream (a link-building CRM tool) around three months ago, with the intention of streamlining my link building process, and it has saved me a huge amount of time! BuzzStream does actually have a feature designed to identify link prospects, but I haven't really used it, I am more interested in the BuzzMarker and the BuzzBox.
The BuzzMarker is placed on your bookmark toolbar and it pulls in a huge amount of data with one simple click. This data includes whois information, social media accounts, contact details and even data from key SEO metrics (including SEOmoz data). All of this is then available within the CRM system itself and can be added too or edited at any point.
You can also BCC the BuzzBox email address into emails that you're sending to prospects, which will then automatically add the emails into the CRM.
Tip 7: Ask questions
Once you have built a relationship (or link) with a blogger or industry professional, why don't you ask them which blogs and news websites they follow? This is a great way of identifying websites that you may not have reached or found otherwise and it will take very little time. If the blogger is a friend of connection of the person who recommended it, you then also have an angle to start contact with.
Tip 8: Use what's already out there
Competitor Analysis:
Looking at the links that your competitors have will provide opportunities and inspiration, but there is a limit to the number of links that you can get. Once you have found new opportunities from your competitors, why don't you look at their links, and then links going to their links and so on? If you're looking at relevant websites, chances are they will have some good links that you can look to emulate.
Old linkbait:
If you're looking to implement an idea or even just get some quick links, looking at what has been done before is a really good place to start.
For example, if you're looking to write a list of the top 50 most influential bloggers in your industry, have a look at those who are featured on the list and check if they link back to the website. If they do link back, they could be an easy win. Also, as your version will be the latest one, it's probably worth contacting the people linking to the previous version and asking them to link to your new release.
Tip 9: Utilise existing relationships
If you're involved within your industry, chances are that you know people that have contacts that have blogs. Well, now is the time to pull in that favour and get the introduction.
If you know people, or know people that know people, make sure you take advantage of the situation, as I can guarantee that your competitors will be doing it.
These links are simple, natural and are difficult for competitors to copy.
Do you like this post? Yes No
backlinking Blogs Promotion and Marketing SEO
This post was originally in YOUmoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author's views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc.
I find link prospecting to be one of the most time-consuming and challenging parts of link building. In order to build and maintain a natural link profile for your website, your prospecting activity needs to cover a wide range of opportunities and generate the right targets and leads for your project/campaign. So prospecting is usually pretty easy to start off with - run a few Google searches and you've got yourself a set of content-rich websites within your target industry. However, once you’ve gone through this initial list, you realise the challenge that you're faced with.
Here are some of the things we do at GPMD to generate a broader set of quality prospects. Using these practices, we're able to identify a huge selection of relevant, high quality blogs and industry websites within different sectors.
Tip 1: Advanced search queries
Advanced search queries are our starting point. They’re quick, easy to use and they are great for finding opportunities for guest blogging, collaboration projects, sponsorship etc.
Examples of advanced search queries:
Inurl Search (Dental inurl:blog / Dental blog inurl:.co.uk)
These search queries will filter websites with your preferred domain extension or search term within its URL. The above examples will return dental blogs and dental blogs based in the UK.
Exact Phrase Search (Dental “Guest post” / Dental “Write for us”)
These queries (using speech marks to find the exact text) are ideal for finding websites that are either looking for guest bloggers or accept guest blog posts. The above examples will return dental websites that accept guest posts and dental websites that are looking for writers.
Intitle Search (Dental Intitle:Guest Post – Dental Intitle: Advertise)
Searching for specific content within the title helps to filter the pages that are most relevant and also find opportunities by searching for advertising or guest posting opportunities. The above examples will return dental websites that accept guest posts and dental websites with advertising opportunities.
Wildcard Search (Dental “Guest *” blog)
Using the wildcard (*) filters results that contain the exact words within your query and an additional word in the position of the wildcard. The above query will return dental blogs that feature “guest post”, “guest writer”, “guest blog” etc within their content or title (with the second word in place of the wildcard).
Using more than one of these strings within the same search will help to further refine the results and provide very specific prospects for you to use to build links.
Example of a query that could be used for finding guest blogging opportunities for a dental website.
Tip 2: Use Twitter tools to find niche bloggers
Building relationships on Twitter is a great way of generating opportunities. By regularly talking to bloggers within your industry, you’re developing an outreach that could be utilised for product launches, obtaining reviews, guest blogging and much more.
Follower Wonk:
Follower Wonk is a great tool that allows you to search through Twitter bios, helping you to identify targets for building relationships or just approaching for link-building.
Example: If you're looking to obtain links from dental blogs, you could search for dental blog, dentist blog, dentistry blog and so on. You can then filter the results and order by the available metrics to help find the most suitable people.
Topsy:
Topsy is a very useful tool that lets you search the social web (including blogs). You could search for your brand, niche keyword or web address, find the people who're talking about you or your industry and then get in touch (and hopefully get a link from their blog). You could also search for guest blogging opportunities using things like 'guest blog dentistry' and then approach the website owner/blogger.
These are just a couple of examples, there are literally thousands more tools that can help you find link building opportunities.
Tip 3: Look at blogroll and directory links
When you find a really good blog that you would like a link from, don't just contact them and wait for a reply! You should be looking for a links page or a blogroll to find other similar bloggers that could also provide a good link to your website. It is important to remember that not all good blogs are optimised for search, making a lot of them really hard to find – unless you use these kinds of techniques.
Also, when you're looking down at your competitors' links from directories like spammylinkdirectory.com (not a real website), you could be finding a few new opportunities. Chances are that you've already looked through your competitors' links, but you might find different websites that you haven't analysed within these directories, some of which may have some good ideas/links that you could emulate for your website.
Tip 4: Reverse image search
I often hear people moaning about how some blog or website has used one of their images in a post or article – without realising that this is a great opportunity to obtain a really good link! If you come across another website using your image, send them a polite email, compliment their content and website, and just ask if they can add a link to your website as the source of the image. This link-building technique is natural and free – which is why optimising your images and making them freely available is a great way of generating these opportunities. You can search for your web address in Google's new-look image search feature or tineye.com, both will help you to find where your images are being used.
Tip 5: Use PPC advertising to find advertising opportunities
Running a short-term, low cost PPC campaign is a great way to find link building opportunities. Once your PPC ad is live on lots of related blogs, you can contact the blogger, mention your advert and suggest that you look at other options.
I would recommend complimenting the blog content and asking to submit a few guest posts about your experience within your industry. Then, once you have obtained a number of links, simply turn off the adwords campaign.
Tip 6: Use BuzzStream
I started using BuzzStream (a link-building CRM tool) around three months ago, with the intention of streamlining my link building process, and it has saved me a huge amount of time! BuzzStream does actually have a feature designed to identify link prospects, but I haven't really used it, I am more interested in the BuzzMarker and the BuzzBox.
The BuzzMarker is placed on your bookmark toolbar and it pulls in a huge amount of data with one simple click. This data includes whois information, social media accounts, contact details and even data from key SEO metrics (including SEOmoz data). All of this is then available within the CRM system itself and can be added too or edited at any point.
You can also BCC the BuzzBox email address into emails that you're sending to prospects, which will then automatically add the emails into the CRM.
Tip 7: Ask questions
Once you have built a relationship (or link) with a blogger or industry professional, why don't you ask them which blogs and news websites they follow? This is a great way of identifying websites that you may not have reached or found otherwise and it will take very little time. If the blogger is a friend of connection of the person who recommended it, you then also have an angle to start contact with.
Tip 8: Use what's already out there
Competitor Analysis:
Looking at the links that your competitors have will provide opportunities and inspiration, but there is a limit to the number of links that you can get. Once you have found new opportunities from your competitors, why don't you look at their links, and then links going to their links and so on? If you're looking at relevant websites, chances are they will have some good links that you can look to emulate.
Old linkbait:
If you're looking to implement an idea or even just get some quick links, looking at what has been done before is a really good place to start.
For example, if you're looking to write a list of the top 50 most influential bloggers in your industry, have a look at those who are featured on the list and check if they link back to the website. If they do link back, they could be an easy win. Also, as your version will be the latest one, it's probably worth contacting the people linking to the previous version and asking them to link to your new release.
Tip 9: Utilise existing relationships
If you're involved within your industry, chances are that you know people that have contacts that have blogs. Well, now is the time to pull in that favour and get the introduction.
If you know people, or know people that know people, make sure you take advantage of the situation, as I can guarantee that your competitors will be doing it.
These links are simple, natural and are difficult for competitors to copy.
Do you like this post? Yes No
backlinking Blogs Promotion and Marketing SEO
6 Keyword Research Mistakes You Might be Making http://bit.ly/rl1S1d Posted by jamesagate
This post was originally in YOUmoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author's views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc.
Keyword research is an all too often under-appreciated aspect of SEO.
I've written a few keyword research posts here on SEOmoz and that's because I believe it to be the blueprint of any successful SEO campaign.
Here are some of the more common mistakes that I see people make with their keyword research.
#1 – You're being Unrealistic
"It is better to have a bigger slice of a few smaller pies rather than not getting even a slither of a much bigger pie."
Keyword research appears to be a very straightforward task. You fire up your keyword research tool of choice and find the keywords that relate to your industry with the highest search volumes. Sadly, that's not the way to do it if you want to see real results.
To many businesses, high-competition keywords are simply out of reach – at least in the short and medium term. Part of good keyword research is about being realistic and selecting appropriate keywords for targeting that take into account the site's age, current authority and any future optimisation that will take place.
Targeting one word keywords is quite often unrealistic but it may also prove unprofitable – someone searching for 'Toshiba l670 laptop' is likely to be much further along in the purchasing process that someone who searches for 'laptops' – think about which searcher is likely to have their credit card out already.
There's nothing wrong with targeting generic keywords, I'm simply saying that if your campaign has limited budget and you need results in the short to medium term then targeting less trafficked, less competitive keywords is a much better way to utilise resources.
Lower traffic but lower competition keywords might not seem as exciting to target but if your website can dominate these areas fairly quickly then you are going to see far more traffic from the search engines than failing to effectively target a much more competitive term.
#2 – You're looking at broad match instead of exact match
A seemingly simple mistake but one which many people continue to make...
Search volume is of course a very important metric when it comes to keyword research but all too often people make the mistake of looking at broad search volumes rather than the exact match figure when using tools like Google's Keyword Tool.
There can be a huge difference between broad match and exact match search traffic for example:
There are 135,000 broad match searches each month in the UK for 'dog kennels' but only 14,800 exact match searches for the same keyword. Still, this wouldn't prove particularly problematic as this is obviously still a keyword worth targeting – it would knock traffic and ROI projections way off kilter if you do these kinds of things though.
The real problem comes when you choose to target a keyword like 'ladies leather handbags' which has a broad match search volume of 2,400 but an exact match search volume of only 260 – failing to base your research on exact match data might mean you think you are targeting a reasonably well-trafficked keyword when in actual fact, once you've factored in data inaccuracies, you could be looking at a very low search volume keyword indeed.
It is widely accepted that Google's Keyword Tool isn't entirely accurate when it comes to search volumes but using exact match gives you the best data available when assessing how viable a keyword is to target.
#3 – You're targeting plural instead of singular
It is very common to see a website targeting the plural version of a keyword but in most cases, it is the singular version of a keyword that people are searching for.
I see this most often on eCommerce websites where the site owner optimises category pages and because they sell more than one product, they naturally focus on the pluralised keywords for example "tablet PCs" which actually gets 91% less searches than "tablet PC".
I will readily admit that Google is much better at determining that a singular and plural version of a keyword are one and the same, but in many cases there are still differences in the search results. Failing to target the singular keyword can be the difference between your search listing being highlighted in the SERPs (=higher clickthrough) and it can also mean your website appears lower (even slightly) than marginally better targeted pages – that could be the difference between making a sale and not.
#4 – You're ignoring conversion
This one could easily turn into a rant for me because so often I come up against clients who want to rank for [insert trophy keyword] when in actual fact they'd do better (financially) targeting a different keyword or set of keywords. I try to explain that a keyword that brings in traffic is wasted bandwidth if that traffic doesn't convert. You don't hire my company to get traffic for traffic's sake...you presumably hire us to help you ultimately make more sales.
The online world is competitive and it's only going to get more competitive, therefore making the most of every penny being invested is vital.
This makes conversion and language analysis a vital part of keyword research. The human mind is the only software capable of performing a good quality 'conversion audit' of a keyword list because whilst there are programmes out there that can filter and sort keywords to make your life easier, there's no real substitute for industry experience and SEO knowledge.
There are some very basic indicators for example prefixes such as 'buy' might be a clear indicator that the traffic from this keyword is going to convert.
A keyword conversion audit is more complex than that however since each situation and market is individual. I find existing data to be a very useful way to determine which keywords are likely to convert well. If you have goal tracking setup with Google Analytics, you can easily determine the highest converting keywords your site currently gets traffic from, try to identify patterns in your highest converting keywords and then translate and apply this knowledge to other areas of keyword research.
#5 – You're selecting keywords that are out of context
This is yet more rationale to further humanise the keyword research process because most keyword tools struggle to compute words and their meaning in the way a human would.
For example, a searcher looking for 'storage' could be looking for a self-storage centre, boxes and other storage furniture for the home or even professional storage solutions for a warehouse or office.
Opportunities for confused targeting are abundant which is why it is essential the keywords you decide to target are highly-relevant and laser-focused towards what your business offers.
A good way to do this is to search manually for the keywords in Google and see the kinds of results that come up, you will likely be able to get a feel for whether the keyword is applicable to the product or service you intended to target.
You will find a lot more how to find a niche tips by following this link.
#6 – You're failing to conduct keyword reviews
It is accepted that SEO is an on-going process but rarely are target keywords reviewed and audited. If a marketplace is shifting over time then you would also expect customer search behaviour to develop and evolve over time too – this makes regular keyword reviews essential.
In most markets, I find an annual review is perfectly adequate. Any time period shorter than this and there is a risk that targeting becomes a bit chaotic with efforts focused on new keywords before results on old keywords have been achieved or evaluated.
That being said, in some competitive and very fast moving markets a more regular keyword review may be required.
The aim of a keyword review is to:
Weed out poor performing keywords
Identify opportunities and areas for growth
Shape your SEO strategy for the future
To do a strategic and actionable keyword review you can use this adapted version of the Boston Matrix that I like to use.
Large brands use the Boston Matrix to assess the health of their product portfolio and to identify where to concentrate their resources.
You can do the same thing for your keyword portfolio.
Sort your keywords into four categories in order to better shape your search strategy for the future.
Question marks – these are keywords in areas where growth is likely but at present you're not getting the performance you'd expect. These are very often untapped keyword opportunities and you should plan how you are going to improve performance on these kinds of keywords.
Stars – high-performance keywords and loads of room for growth – find ways to capitalise on growth. My advice is to focus your resources of gaining results in these areas for maximum ROI in a short period of time.
Dogs – the poor performing keywords with little or no chance of growth – bin these in favour of other keywords, reallocate any resources to other areas.
Cash cows – the high performing keywords that show little opportunity for growth – look for ways to enhance and maintain performance whilst identifying patterns and translating this learning to other areas or verticals.
What mistakes do you see happening in the keyword research process? Please share them in the comments section below...
By James Agate, founder of Skyrocket SEO and a regular SEO contributor to leading blogs and publications across the web.
Do you like this post? Yes No
This post was originally in YOUmoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author's views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc.
Keyword research is an all too often under-appreciated aspect of SEO.
I've written a few keyword research posts here on SEOmoz and that's because I believe it to be the blueprint of any successful SEO campaign.
Here are some of the more common mistakes that I see people make with their keyword research.
#1 – You're being Unrealistic
"It is better to have a bigger slice of a few smaller pies rather than not getting even a slither of a much bigger pie."
Keyword research appears to be a very straightforward task. You fire up your keyword research tool of choice and find the keywords that relate to your industry with the highest search volumes. Sadly, that's not the way to do it if you want to see real results.
To many businesses, high-competition keywords are simply out of reach – at least in the short and medium term. Part of good keyword research is about being realistic and selecting appropriate keywords for targeting that take into account the site's age, current authority and any future optimisation that will take place.
Targeting one word keywords is quite often unrealistic but it may also prove unprofitable – someone searching for 'Toshiba l670 laptop' is likely to be much further along in the purchasing process that someone who searches for 'laptops' – think about which searcher is likely to have their credit card out already.
There's nothing wrong with targeting generic keywords, I'm simply saying that if your campaign has limited budget and you need results in the short to medium term then targeting less trafficked, less competitive keywords is a much better way to utilise resources.
Lower traffic but lower competition keywords might not seem as exciting to target but if your website can dominate these areas fairly quickly then you are going to see far more traffic from the search engines than failing to effectively target a much more competitive term.
#2 – You're looking at broad match instead of exact match
A seemingly simple mistake but one which many people continue to make...
Search volume is of course a very important metric when it comes to keyword research but all too often people make the mistake of looking at broad search volumes rather than the exact match figure when using tools like Google's Keyword Tool.
There can be a huge difference between broad match and exact match search traffic for example:
There are 135,000 broad match searches each month in the UK for 'dog kennels' but only 14,800 exact match searches for the same keyword. Still, this wouldn't prove particularly problematic as this is obviously still a keyword worth targeting – it would knock traffic and ROI projections way off kilter if you do these kinds of things though.
The real problem comes when you choose to target a keyword like 'ladies leather handbags' which has a broad match search volume of 2,400 but an exact match search volume of only 260 – failing to base your research on exact match data might mean you think you are targeting a reasonably well-trafficked keyword when in actual fact, once you've factored in data inaccuracies, you could be looking at a very low search volume keyword indeed.
It is widely accepted that Google's Keyword Tool isn't entirely accurate when it comes to search volumes but using exact match gives you the best data available when assessing how viable a keyword is to target.
#3 – You're targeting plural instead of singular
It is very common to see a website targeting the plural version of a keyword but in most cases, it is the singular version of a keyword that people are searching for.
I see this most often on eCommerce websites where the site owner optimises category pages and because they sell more than one product, they naturally focus on the pluralised keywords for example "tablet PCs" which actually gets 91% less searches than "tablet PC".
I will readily admit that Google is much better at determining that a singular and plural version of a keyword are one and the same, but in many cases there are still differences in the search results. Failing to target the singular keyword can be the difference between your search listing being highlighted in the SERPs (=higher clickthrough) and it can also mean your website appears lower (even slightly) than marginally better targeted pages – that could be the difference between making a sale and not.
#4 – You're ignoring conversion
This one could easily turn into a rant for me because so often I come up against clients who want to rank for [insert trophy keyword] when in actual fact they'd do better (financially) targeting a different keyword or set of keywords. I try to explain that a keyword that brings in traffic is wasted bandwidth if that traffic doesn't convert. You don't hire my company to get traffic for traffic's sake...you presumably hire us to help you ultimately make more sales.
The online world is competitive and it's only going to get more competitive, therefore making the most of every penny being invested is vital.
This makes conversion and language analysis a vital part of keyword research. The human mind is the only software capable of performing a good quality 'conversion audit' of a keyword list because whilst there are programmes out there that can filter and sort keywords to make your life easier, there's no real substitute for industry experience and SEO knowledge.
There are some very basic indicators for example prefixes such as 'buy' might be a clear indicator that the traffic from this keyword is going to convert.
A keyword conversion audit is more complex than that however since each situation and market is individual. I find existing data to be a very useful way to determine which keywords are likely to convert well. If you have goal tracking setup with Google Analytics, you can easily determine the highest converting keywords your site currently gets traffic from, try to identify patterns in your highest converting keywords and then translate and apply this knowledge to other areas of keyword research.
#5 – You're selecting keywords that are out of context
This is yet more rationale to further humanise the keyword research process because most keyword tools struggle to compute words and their meaning in the way a human would.
For example, a searcher looking for 'storage' could be looking for a self-storage centre, boxes and other storage furniture for the home or even professional storage solutions for a warehouse or office.
Opportunities for confused targeting are abundant which is why it is essential the keywords you decide to target are highly-relevant and laser-focused towards what your business offers.
A good way to do this is to search manually for the keywords in Google and see the kinds of results that come up, you will likely be able to get a feel for whether the keyword is applicable to the product or service you intended to target.
You will find a lot more how to find a niche tips by following this link.
#6 – You're failing to conduct keyword reviews
It is accepted that SEO is an on-going process but rarely are target keywords reviewed and audited. If a marketplace is shifting over time then you would also expect customer search behaviour to develop and evolve over time too – this makes regular keyword reviews essential.
In most markets, I find an annual review is perfectly adequate. Any time period shorter than this and there is a risk that targeting becomes a bit chaotic with efforts focused on new keywords before results on old keywords have been achieved or evaluated.
That being said, in some competitive and very fast moving markets a more regular keyword review may be required.
The aim of a keyword review is to:
Weed out poor performing keywords
Identify opportunities and areas for growth
Shape your SEO strategy for the future
To do a strategic and actionable keyword review you can use this adapted version of the Boston Matrix that I like to use.
Large brands use the Boston Matrix to assess the health of their product portfolio and to identify where to concentrate their resources.
You can do the same thing for your keyword portfolio.
Sort your keywords into four categories in order to better shape your search strategy for the future.
Question marks – these are keywords in areas where growth is likely but at present you're not getting the performance you'd expect. These are very often untapped keyword opportunities and you should plan how you are going to improve performance on these kinds of keywords.
Stars – high-performance keywords and loads of room for growth – find ways to capitalise on growth. My advice is to focus your resources of gaining results in these areas for maximum ROI in a short period of time.
Dogs – the poor performing keywords with little or no chance of growth – bin these in favour of other keywords, reallocate any resources to other areas.
Cash cows – the high performing keywords that show little opportunity for growth – look for ways to enhance and maintain performance whilst identifying patterns and translating this learning to other areas or verticals.
What mistakes do you see happening in the keyword research process? Please share them in the comments section below...
By James Agate, founder of Skyrocket SEO and a regular SEO contributor to leading blogs and publications across the web.
Do you like this post? Yes No
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