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Who links to content online?

If you are going to succeed in your link building campaign we need to understand that only a small percentage of web users are willing and capable of linking to your website. These are web users who have their own websites and have the time and inclination to link to content they find interesting. They are broadcasters as well as consumers of information online and are near the top of the ‘food chain‘ of web users. Some people call them the ‘Linkerati’.

The majority of web users read information online but don’t contribute or edit information themselves. The Linkerati are a small minority of web users who add new content online on blogs, forums or their own websites. They are bloggers, social media taggers, website editors, content creators, forum members & moderators. They enjoy spending time online, sharing their views and most importantly (in this context) sharing what they enjoy reading online. The Linkerati are essential to any long term link building campaign and if we are to be successful we need to understand this special group of people online.

Strategy 1: Ask for links

Manually asking for links is possibly the most well known link building strategy and although its unlikely to bring huge rewards it is a good place to start if your site has low link popularity. Form a list of possible websites who may link to your site by looking at websites that link to your competitors. Look at sites that rank highly for your target keyphrase and then use advanced Google queries or specialised backlink software to analyse who links to them as they are likely to link to you as well. Filter the list down and remove anything that looks spammy or is in direct competition with your products or services. Make sure all of the prospective sites have a links page and before you contact them make sure you link to the prospect’s website on your links page.

Writing a link request email

A good rule when writing a link request is to flatter and compliment the subject and take time to prove that you have carefully selected their website. Everyone loves to be picked out from the crowd so use this to your advantage. Also make sure to include the link text (and or HTML) that you would like in the email to keep things as simple as possible. Here’s an example:

Dear ____

My name is ____ and I work for a small independent  ____ company based in ____. I came across your website this afternoon and think that your (details of products/services) might be of interest to our customers who (will be interested because). As such I have decided to add a link onto our website for you and you can find this at ___

Please let me know if this is okay and would be more than happy to change the wording etc. if you would like. I would appreciate it if you could return the favour and add a link to (your website name) on your website as well? Something like:

(insert your link request text)

Would be brilliant and help to spread the good word so to speak. Finally, (remember to compliment their website, products, photos or something else).

Regards
Daniel Westlake

As you may have noticed, it is very time consuming to manually identify, filter and contact a decent amount of websites this way. You might be tempted to use some sort of automation but I would advise against it as much of the reason that the above approach works is that it makes the website owner feel good about their site.

Commercial link requests

Unfortunately this  approach has its limitations for larger firms, wholesalers or websites that don’t want to be associated with smaller ‘hobbiest’ websites. There could be commercial reasons why link building with just any old site would not be appropriate. For these scenarios you might need to consider a more commercial approach such as setting up a ‘customer directory‘ where you contact customers who have active, high ranking websites and invite them to join your customer directory in return for an endorsement on their site ‘we use XXX products‘. This can work well for ecommerce sites and you could even incentivise the links further by offering a personalised promo code.

Strategy 2: Write content to attract links

Another solid link building strategy is to write informative (or sometimes inflammatory) content and then use this content to attract incoming links to your site (also known as linkbait). Of course, good content takes time to research and write so you need to consider what sort of content will attract good links. As always you should write content for your website visitors rather than just the search engines. Avoid sales pitches, happy talk (we are the best, la, la) and creating any content that doesn’t add value to visitor’s experience. If you find yourself on the phone, explaining a concept or idea to your customers a number of times, then this might be a topic you could consider writing about on your business website.

Blogs are a good way to generate regular new content without the formality of normal company communications. Everyone is busy and its easy to find an excuse not to write new content for the website. If every update has to be approved by the MD, then its unlikely that your website will be able to sustain its growth. With Blogs you can make it clear that the article has been written by an individual rather than representing the whole organisation. Sure, you still have to be careful about what you say but the informality of a Blog can give you a lot of freedom to develop a writing style that you are happy with.

Here are some content ideas for company linkbait articles

• How to save money on your [topic]
• Top questions to ask your [topic] before hiring them
• How to choose your next [topic]
• Things you should consider when quoting your next [topic] project
• Latest trends in [topic]
• How become a trained / certified / professional [topic]
• Frequently asked [topic] questions
• Top [topic] products reviewed
• Interviews with top [topic] experts
• [topic] quote calculator
• [topic] success / failure stories
• Survey of [topic] firms / projects / products

And if you are really lazy you don’t even have to write new content yourself. Instead do some research online and compile a list of the top 50 [topic] resources and link to them on your article. This obviously isn’t as good as writing new content so I wouldn’t do this too often but its a good way to share some websites you have found when doing your research online.

Social media linkbait

So far we have concentrated on writing articles or lists to act as linkbait on a company website (this is an eBusiness Blog after all) but is also worth mentioning that there is huge potential for generating incoming links from social media. In this arena, the buzzword is fun rather than knowledge so videos, games, gizmos and quizzes all can work well  but its a fast moving area and what works now may soon become identified and downgraded by the search engines so be careful.

Distributing your content

Don’t leave your new content on your website and just hope that it gets picked up by visitors. You need to spend some time pushing the content out across some new channels to attract new visitors. Hopefully they will like what they see and then pass it to their visitors. Here are a few ideas to help distributing your new content:

• Mention on Twitter and encourage retweets
• Post comments on relevant blogs
• Mention on your newsletter / email / blog
• Bookmark it on Delicious
• Add to links to your email footer
• Social media mentions on Facebook, Stumble Upon & Digg
• Forum participation (be relevant & careful)
• Contact anyone who contributed to your content and say that its live
• Reach out to the community and invite reviews of your content
• Answer relevant questions on Yahoo Answers
• Promote your content through Google Adwords or banner adverts.

Other content benefits

Although this is an article on link building it is worth mentioning that adding good, regular content to your website can also bring other benefits besides incoming links. Search engines will index your content more often and and you will benefit from the development of a large site with lots of internal links. If you want your site to rank highly, you need to need to add new content regularly to not only get the search engines coming back for more but for your visitors to do so as well.

Strategy 3:  Licensing & embedding content

If you become an authority on a particular topic then you can license some of your content to be used on other websites in return for citation links or commercial fees. You can offer an exclusive on a blog post or act as a guest blogger in return for a profile link. Generally speaking you will have to write something specific for each website you want to target but this approach can be well worth it as you can get some high value links and often re-use the same article a number of times with only a small amount of re-writing.

If you are a photographer or have access to a large photo library then you can license this content in return for a credit link (Photo courtesy of XXX) when a photo is used. Likewise if you have a decent web server then you can use this resource by offering web or video hosting for local community groups in return for a credit link.

If you provide certification or a professional qualification then you can invite people to prove this through the use of an embedded logo with link back to a profile page. Examples of this in action could be the ‘Google Adwords Certification’ or ‘Gas Safe Register’.

If you have developed a tool or gizmo on your website then you could allow this content to be embedded in other websites. YouTube and Twitter have both used this approach to great effect with embedded video or twitter badges / feeds on company sites.

Okay, embedding content in this way doesn’t work for every business but if you have something that enough users will want to embed then you can have a very successful and scalable link building strategy.

Strategy 4: Affiliate schemes & endorsements

For eCommerce sites then you could consider setting up an affiliate scheme as a way to get your brand in front of new visitors but also to gain link popularity. If you are new to affiliate programs then they can seem complicated but the principle is really simple. Get people to endorse your products on their site and track the visitors they provide through a special link / cookie. Then if a visitor comes through this link and goes on to make a purchase then you pay a commission on this sale (and sometimes future sales made by this person). As you don’t pay any commission unless a sale is made then it can be a low cost way to drive traffic to your site. The downsides are that you sometimes have to join expensive networks to access the best sites and also create a wide range of advertising banners to promote your site.

Away from the traditional affiliate schemes you can use this approach to develop partnerships with carefully selected sites. They link to your site in return for a cut on the sales that come from their visitors. You will need a system to track and manage these sales but once this is ready you grow a large network of incoming links from sites who endorse your products without the upfront cost of paying for advertising.

Strategy 5: Paid links

It wouldn’t be right to ignore this last (and most controversial) of link building strategies. Although there is nothing wrong with paying for a directory to review your website, the search engines don’t look kindly on sites that offer links for sale for the sole purpose of manipulating rankings. A whole industry has been created with brokers and traders of links who tap into a market where people pay a couple of dollars for a link on a spammy site. Paid links can work in improving rankings but you need to be careful. Most link brokers will remove any links to your site when you stop paying their monthly fees so any short term gains can be wiped out in the long term. Also you might find that your website suffers from a low trust score as it could have close connection with link farms and known spammers.

The worst scenario is to get your website banned from Google for associating with sites that are designed purely to manipulate rankings. I can’t pretend that this happens very often but it is really bad news if it happens to your business website. A good rule of thumb is to consider paid links only in proportion. If you have a decent link popularity and say 10 percent of your links come from paid sources then you’re unlikely to get penalised. If however you don’t have many ‘natural’ links and 90 percent of your link popularity comes from paid sources then the search engines are more likely to issue a penalty on your SERP results.

Conclusion

In this blog post we have discussed the 5 main types of link building activity. Simply asking for a link is a good place to start if your site is new but this can depend what sector you are in. If you can be connected with a hobby or other popular activity then there can be plenty of potential for link building in this way. If you are a larger firm or in a more commercial sector then you are unlikely to get good results from just asking for links, instead you need to create website content that attracts links. This kind of link building is more sustainable in the long term but you can face a number of challenges in writing the right sort of content. Adding a Blog to your company website can make the process of adding content less formal which gives a certain amount of creative freedom to the writing team but you still have to be careful in what you say in public.

If the business has got a decent amount of content available then this can be licensed & embedded in other websites in return for link popularity. This approach is used by many of the large Internet firms to good effect but might not be applicable to many sectors. The next approach we discussed was using affiliate schemes and endorsements in return for backlinks. This can work well for eCommerce sites and is a technique currently favoured by the gambling industry. Finally we covered the pros and cons of using paid links which is something you might consider in moderation along with the other four link building strategies.

To conclude, there are many link building strategies and you need to choose a combination of techniques that are best suited to your business and goals. One size doesn’t fit all but with a carefully selected strategy and plenty of hard work you too can achieve great search engine rankings .

Search Engines use a number of factors to calculate how relevant a website is to a particular search term. Unfortunately, they don’t publish these and the SEO profession uses analytical techniques to determine which factors are most important. According to Seomoz’s ranking factors which has polled the opinions of the world’s leading SEO professionals, 4 out of the top 5 ranking factors involve links to your website from other websites.

Google assesses the number of incoming links, the number of different websites these links come from, the text used in links and whether these links come from trusted sources to help rank its results. If you want to improve your listings on Google then you need to improve the number of incoming links that match these criteria. Lets consider the main link building concepts.

Link popularity

Link popularity is a measure of the quantity and quality of links that go to a website. If you think of a link to your website from another website as a vote then you increase your link popularity by getting more votes. However, not all  web pages are equal. Pages with a lot of votes (link popularity) themselves are worth more than pages with little link popularity (votes). This concept is designed to filter out less important pages and reward popular or trending pages.

Link popularity also mirrors human behaviour, as good content will attract a good number of incoming links where as poor content won’t. Getting more quality links to your website will increase your page’s link popularity. A word of caution; quality is more important than quantity. Google uses a lot of smart calculation to filter out low quality or spammy pages & links to stop people manipulating its results (see Domain Trust below).

Link diversity

As well as Link Popularity, Google also looks at the number of domains linking to your site as a measure of Link Diversity. 10 links from 10 different websites have more value than 100 links from the same website. Link Diversity is quite difficult to manipulate as it might be easy to create a website with 10,000 pages which all link to your site but its very difficult (and expensive) to create 10,000 websites that all link to your site.

To summarise, as well as gaining a large number of links from quality sources, we need to make sure that these come from a diverse range of domain names.

Domain trust

On the subject of manipulating results we need to consider a domain’s Trust. This is a measure of the chance that this domain contains spammy or manipulative content designed to fool the search engines. If we were to manually veto the web, then trusted websites are those that contain no spam. Untrusted websites are those that only contain spammy content.

Obviously even Google would struggle to manually veto the entire web so Search Engines count the number of links you have to follow to get from a fully trusted website to your website to calculate your site’s trust. If your website is closely linked from well trusted sites then it’s likely that you are running a trusted website. Likewise, if you have lots of links from Low Trust, spammy websites then it is likely that you are running a low trust, spammy site yourself.

Google also looks at domain registration information to connect websites that although they don’t directly link to each other may be run by the same business or from the same address. If a business is running several spammy sites already then there is a good chance that future websites launched by that business are involved in spammy, manipulative practices.

So to bring this back to Link Building; as well as having a high number of quality links from a diverse range of domain names, we need to ensure that the pages that link to us come from trusted domains to avoid being penalised as a spammer.

Anchor text

The final (and possibly the most important) link concept I would like to cover is anchor text. This is the text that is inside the link i.e. the hypertext you click on to go to another page. If you use ‘click here’ for the anchor text of your links then Google will associate the destination page with the keyphrase ‘click here’. You can see this in action by putting in a Google.com search for click here which returns the number one result as being the Adobe Acrobat Reader. Why? Well thousands of websites use PDF documents and many include text like:

This document requires the Acrobat Reader, click here to download it.

This associates the download Acrobat Reader page with the keyphrase ‘click here’. Not very useful I know but the same applies to your website. If you are optimising for a particular keyphrase then it is very important to consider the anchor text of your incoming links. Most links will use your business name or website domain name so some consideration should be given to including a target keyphrase in your business / website name to take advantage of this effect. If you are a financial services company then xyzservices.com might not be as good a domain name (from a SEO point of view) as xyzfinancialservices.com if you are optimizing for ‘financial services’ as a keyphrase.

Whilst we are on the subject of anchor text, this also can be manipulated for comical or political purposes in a practice which has become known as Google Bombing. In 2006, if you entered a Google search for ‘miserable failure’ the top result would be a biography of George W. Bush. There have been numerous other examples which have been gradually filtered out by Google updating their algorithms but all of this clearly demonstrates the importance of link anchor text in search rankings.

Getting real

We have been talking about a number of quite abstract concepts but now we need to bring this back into the real world. All these linking metrics are designed to mimic human behaviour on the Internet. If a webpage or site has something interesting to say or offer then people will naturally link to this site and say ‘Hey, this is important, you should take a look’. How they do this is changing over time (and will be a subject we will cover in another post) but the most important thing to remember it is the visitors that are important and not the Search Engines.

If your link building efforts are just for the Search Engines then you might have some short term gains but you wont have as much long term success as those who concentrate on what visitors are looking for.

What’s next?

In this post we have introduced the topic of link building and covered some of its most important concepts. In the next post we will highlight some of the top link building strategies and give ideas on how you can implement this on your website.

It’s been a good year for the team at Artsgraphica but it wouldn’t have been possible without your help so thanks a lot!

So what are our online business predictions for 2010?

Unfortunately, we can’t predict the lottery but we can give you some ideas of what we think will be hot in ecommerce web design in 2010.

1. Twitter & the real-time web

The rise of Twitter and its effect on search engines is likely to continue through 2010. Expect to see improvements in real-time search results as the major players like Facebook, Bing & Google try to get in on the real-time market. At the moment, real time search results in Google are bad to say the least so expect to see continuing revisions in this area. Even if you aren’t in a sector that demands real-time then you can’t ignore Twitter as where last year people blogged about you and your products in 500 words, this year they will tweet about you in just 140 characters. That can’t be a good thing can it?

2. The year of Mobile

Every year I go to a web design conference and at least one speaker declares that next year ‘Will be the year of the Mobile Web”. I was on the way to @Media 2007 and decided I would check the train times from Kings Cross and I got ringtones with ‘Kings Cross’ in the title on my Nokia. Hardly, the mobile web I was looking for.

But things have changed, the iPhone is here (and available in Tesco) and through things like the App Store, the mobile networks have found another way to make money rather than selling ringtones. So will 2010 be the year of mobile? Probably not, but I would start to think about where your website visitors are viewing your website from. In 2010 we can’t assume they are sat at a computer in the office or at home.

3. Pay walls, monthly subscriptions & pay per play

I would expect that we shall see a number of major newspapers implementing ‘paywalls’ on their online content in 2010. Its going to be bumpy ride as some websites price themselves out of the market and others gain traffic (and advertising revenue) from visitors leaving pay-for websites. Micropayments is the buzz word here but as no one has really got this figured out then we might be looking at monthly subscriptions for as little as £2/month to access online versions of popular newspapers.

The thing they might be missing is that World of Warcraft has over 10 million monthly subscribers and that people seem more willing to spend money pretending to be orks or elves than reading the New York Times. I would expect to see more social media games break out from Facebook and into the web at large. Expect lots of free public beta versions with monthly subscriptions just around the corner. If someone could just work out a way to make a World of Facebook then they would make a fortune.

4. Price comparision & money saving online

With households & businesses dealing with rising unemployment then I expect to see the continuing growth of money saving websites. Even if you aren’t looking to renew your car insurance you can now find ways to save money on almost anything online. If you are running an ecommerce business and you are not tapping into this market then you are really missing out.

Sure, you don’t always want to be directly judged on price so price comparisons might not be for every ecommerce site, instead think about developing some really good offers, promo codes and vouchers and using this growing network of money saving websites to gain you some traffic. Some ecommerce traders might still view social media as a dirty word but maybe it’s time to look at money saving and online review websites in a different light?

Top tips for start up web businesses

Getting the basics right

I know it sounds obvious but if you are looking to market your business & products online then you need to spend a decent amount of time in the online space. Make sure that you are comfortable with the Internet & email. You don’t need to have the latest computer hardware but a decent computer will make the learning process quicker. If you’re not that sure about computers then get to know your local independent IT supplier as their support and advice will prove invaluable. Ask him about backing up your work, emails and address book so you have a fall back if the cat decides to knock a hot coffee over your hard drive. Don’t worry about having to understand all the new technology, you don’t have to be a computer whizz, but you do need to spend time online to understand your market and find your way.

If you’re working from home, its helpful to have a separate work computer from the family computer to avoid any problems with things accidentally getting deleted and whilst I am on the subject, a dedicated work area or office really helps to focus your mind.

Do your research

Search for businesses like your own online. Bookmark them and put together a spreadsheet detailing information about what you find out about their products and services. Read their websites in detail and make notes on how they describe themselves. Don’t copy, but be inspired.

Make another spreadsheet of what searches you use to find companies as this will be handy later when coming up with your initial keyword research. If you’re setting up an eCommerce website, check out who is selling the same products on eBay and the Amazon marketplace. Do your prices compete?. If not can you offer something they don’t (like free or next day delivery) until your volumes increase enough to demand a better deal from your suppliers?

The thing is that the Internet is so big that you are bound to find someone who is selling the same thing as you but is bigger, has more products and is selling it cheaper than you could. Don’t panic; do focus on what makes your business special…

Be special

Now that you understand who is out there, try to put a special spin on your products or services to target a niche, rather than the mass market. The Internet is so big that a national (or international) niche is a large enough market for a business to thrive on. Finding your niche can take a bit of thinking and to some extent trial and error but try thinking about who your customers are and the ideas should follow.

If you have a limited marketing budget (and these days, who hasn’t?) then try and be as specific as possible about your products and who will buy them. Don’t sell camping supplies, sell tents to students who pack the festivals every summer. Don’t sell the latest fashions in shoes or dresses and compete against the high street. Find out what sizes they don’t stock and sell them instead. You need to understand that as a start up business, everyone is larger than you and therefore can sell cheaper than you. On the other hand, if you are focused on what you do, you can create yourself a niche market and grow from there.

If you’re not sure what will make your business special then test trade by setting up an eBay shop and see what sells.

The Name attraction

Your business name and your website domain name don’t have to be the same. Try and pick a domain name that reflects your products or services but also includes a keyword that people will use to search online. Using a keyword like this in your domain can make make your website easier to promote on the search engines but don’t get obsessed. Try and use a combination of your business name and what you sell as this gives you a half decent chance of finding a domain name that is available.

I would avoid using acronyms in your website name and be careful about how words look together (experts exchange vs expert sexchange) when written down.

Once you have got a name then book the .co.uk, .com & .net variations on the domain name. If there are any variations (with s or hyphens) available then buy these as well, it might seem a waste of money now but in 10 years time you’ll be pleased that you don’t have a competitor using a similar domain name.

Understand your objectives

At this point it good to remind yourself that having a website isn’t the objective. The objective is to have a website that does X or helps you to do Y. If you don’t understand why you need a website then the whole project is going to be difficult at best. Sure you want to promote your business, but how is the website going to promote your business? Is the objective to establish your creditability or demonstrate your expertise? To communicate the features and benefits of your product or provide a simple way to buy online?

Once you understand your objectives, write them down and put this in the back of your diary so that at the end of the year you can check that everything is still on track. Things will have changed by then so you might cross out a few objectives and add some more but it’s a good habit to get into.

Establish a budget

Now before we get totally carried away, it’s time to establish a budget and understand what you can afford. Obviously every business is different but you need to get a grip on the finances straight away. If you’re not that confident on bookkeeping and cash flow then go and get some advice. There are plenty of organisations out there that supply support and training to start ups so don’t be afraid to ask for help in working out your first budget.

When it comes to the website, don’t blow all your money in one go on an all-singing website. Work out what your budget for the website is and then spend 60%-80% of this on the initial website build and the rest across the year tweaking, experimenting and responding to feedback.

You’ll need a budget for promotion as well. If you’re selling online then Adwords can be a good way to kick-start your sales but it’s also a big black hole that can suck the profits from your business so it’s best to get some good advice. We’ll talk about promoting your start up business on another post but again, talk to your business advisor to get some good ideas on marketing your business.

Finally, if you’re trading online, try and resist the temptation to buy a lot of products. Until you are confident on what will sell, don’t tie up your cash in stock. Think about drop-shipping as a way to experiment with your product listing but remember that the only way you’ll make real money is to take the risk and buy in bulk then sell in volume. However, when you’re starting up it’s just too much of a risk to gamble the success of the whole business on selling a container full of widgets. Work up to this gradually and you’ll have the information and experience to make the right decisions on what stock to buy and what to avoid.

Choose your web designer carefully

Now this sounds obvious but choosing a good web designer can be the most important decision you face in getting a decent website. Good designers can be expensive, especially if you are looking for a ‘full service’ solution. If you go to a larger agency then you’ll get a great service but you can expect larger fees. Likewise, if someone does a bit of web design when they have time, they might be able to give you a good price but they are unlikely to give you a reliable service. As well as getting the fees right you need to have good relationship with your designer. If they aren’t a good communicator or don’t answer the phone then don’t bother wasting your time with them.

Phone all the companies and freelancers you can find and have a list of questions to ask them on the phone. This is a good opportunity to get free advice so don’t waste it. Any designer worth his fee will be able to make suggestions and provide some ideas for you, so write some notes and make a shortlist of designers you would like to meet with. Make a shortlist of 3-5 web designers and arrange some meetings. Type up some notes on the business and your objectives (but not budgets) and email them to the designers before the meeting so that you can get the most out of the meeting.

In the meeting, expect that they have read your notes and can give you some good advice. If you like the designer and you think you can work together then ask them to write a you tender document. This should include details of the solution they would recommend, provide examples of their experience and include a breakdown costing. Remember to ask about any additional costs such as VAT or if they require a deposit and don’t make a decision until you have tenders from everyone. Go through the tenders in detail and make an informed choice of web designer.

Write and re-write

Now that you have a web designer on the case, they can work on some designs whilst you work on the website content. A picture may say a thousand words but on the Internet words are all important. If you’re not that confident with writing promotional text then start with a list of the major topics you want to cover and write a list of bullet points for each matter in that topic. Do this for all of your pages and then top up your coffee and expand the notes into prose for your website.

Remember that using the same language that people may use when searching is important so try and get these keywords in there. Also, people tend to scan read on the Internet so it’s good to break things up into small paragraphs with clear titles so that your visitors can get a good idea of your content without having to read it all.

Finally, think about adding a call to action on the bottom of each page which can help direct visitors to another page or to get in contact with you for more information.

Give your carefully written content to your web designer and with a bit of work you shouldn’t be far from launching your new website.

Launching your website is just the beginning

Now that your website is online, the proper work begins. Too many companies will put lots of effort into getting their website online and then forget it for the rest of the year. I know that your time is important but getting the most out of your new website will require a lot of tweaking, rewriting & experimenting to get it just right. Don’t think of your website as being finished, just think of your website being the most important part of your business communications and as your business changes, your website should reflect this.

Conclusion

This blog post was based on a presentation that I gave to start up businesses at eFactor in Lincolnshire giving tips for new businesses who are looking to market themselves or trade online.

This, of course isn’t an exhaustive list of advice but hopefully this should give start up businesses a good idea of the challenges of setting up a website as pre-warned is pre-armed!

Finding Forums

topic keyword + “Powered by phpBB” OR “powered by vBulletin”

Finding Blogs

keyword + “Blog powered by TypePad” OR “powered by Wordpress”
keyword + “view comments”
intitle:”blog” + keyword
keyword “become a contributor” OR “contribute to this site”

Finding Directories

keyword * directory
www directories or www AND directories + keyword

intitle:keyword

Displays pages that have the keyword in the title. You can add more than one keyword using the syntax intitle:keyword1 keyword2 but this won’t actually match both keywords to the title and will display results that include keyword1 in the title and keyword2 in the title, body text or incoming link text. If you want to match both keywords in the title, you will need to use the following search modifier.

allintitle:keyword

Displays results that have all of the keywords in the title. Good for multiple keyword searches

inurl:keyword

Displays pages that have the keyword in their urls.

allinurl:keyword

Displays pages that have all the keywords in their titles. Works in the same way of allintitle so that its good for multiple keyword searches.

inanchor: keyword

Displays pages that have the keyword in text links pointing to the page

keyword site:www.domain.com

Displays pages on www.domain.com that include the keyword in the page title, body text or incoming link text.

related:www.domain.com

Displays pages that are related to www.domain.com through topic or context.

link:www.artsgraphica.com

This should return pages that link to domain.com but the results are often limited and inaccurate. I don’t know for sure but I assume this search has been disabled by Google to stop it being abused for SEO purposes.

So why does this all matter to SEO?

Well thinking about this if you want to find sites that are optimizing for a particular keyword then a good place to start might be intitle: keyword as all smart SEOs know that the meta title is important for rankings. The same also goes for inanchor: keyword as we all know that incoming link text is another important ranking metric. Now if you could combine searches like this with a keyword then you can find some quite interesting results. Here are some examples of some useful SEO searches

keyword + “intitle:directory”
keyword + “intitle:submit”
keyword + “intitle:add”
keyword + “submit site”
keyword + “submit url”
keyword + “intitle:links”
keyword + “intitle:resources”
keyword + “inurl:list”
keyword + “suggest url”
keyword + “suggest a url”
keyword + “add listing”
keyword + “submit your website”

Hopefully this should give you some good ideas on how you can use specialist searches to help finding potential links within your topic area.

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Look at your current traffic

The first step is to look at your currently best performing keyphrases. To do this we need to look in Google Analytics and go to Traffic Sources > Keywords. You might want to look at a decent date range and select the top 100 or so keyphrases then export this to CSV for Excel. Open this up and copy the list of keyphrases to the clipboard.

More keywords… more, more, more!

Now we have a basic list of 100 or so currently performing keyphrases we need to get some more ideas. In this article we are only using free tools so now fire up your web browser and go to the popular Google Keyword Tool which is a hand tool for getting keyphrase ideas. Paste your keyword list into the suggestion box and get the keyword ideas.

Now at this point we are just looking for keyphrase ideas (we will prioritise them later) so use the shopping basket style interface to add any potential keyphrases to your list. I would recommend turning on the Estimated CPC (Cost per click) column which is turned off by default. We are looking for keyphrases that:

• Are relevant to your business
• Have a decent level of traffic (obviously this is somewhat subjective)
• Have low numbers of competitors

Sort the keyphrases by traffic and  go on and add lots of keyphrases to your list paying particular attention to anything that fulfils all of the above factors.

And then even more again…

Now we have a good selection of keyphrases in the right hand column, download this list to Excel or notepad. This will allow you to store a larger list than the maximum number of keyphrases allowed in the keyword tool. Remove all the existing keyphrase suggestions from the right hand column and take a good selection of the keyphrases from notepad and paste this back into the top suggestion box to get some more ideas. Repeat the process a few times until we have expanded the selection to a couple of hundred (but still relevant) keyphrases stored in notepad.

Take this notepad list and paste into Excel so we can sort them alphabetically:

Making decisions

Once you have a big alphabetised list we need to use the keyword tool again but this time to export the keyword information including the traffic, competitors and average CPC. To do this, remove all the keywords from the right hand side column (using the button at the bottom) and then paste a batch of keywords into the suggestion box. Keeping them alphabetised makes it easy to manage where we are up to.

When you have a batch of keyphrases in the suggestion box and click on the ‘filter my results’ link and select the ‘Don’t show ideas for new keywords. I only want to see data about the keywords I entered’ check box. This won’t find new suggestions based on these keywords but just get the data on the existing list. Fire this off and export the resulting data back into excel. Repeat the process for all of your keyphrases in batches of 100 or so so we have a complete list of all the keyphrases along with the average CPC, competitor and monthly traffic information. With a bit of formatting you should have a spreadsheet looking like this..

Now we need to put the kettle on as the next bit might take a while.

Getting current rankings

In order to prioritise correctly, we need to get information on the current ranking of each of these keywords. So fire off a Google search for a ranking checker and work your way through the list. Its worth checking at least the top 500 results and ideally the top 1000 for your website. If its got a listing (no matter how may pages down) this keyphrase should be worth looking at.

Intentions

Finally we need to include some measure of the likelihood that a visitor who is searching for a particular keyphrase would ‘intend’ to buy your product. Now this is completely subjective but it is an important factor to include. We use a simple number system. 1 is a strong intent to buy, 4 is a low intent to buy.

Now to choose

Now we have all the data we need to make some informed decisions about our keywords. Select keyphrases that have a decent amount of traffic, you have at least some listing for (i.e. your website is relevant) and the visitors have some intent to buy your services. We do this by taking the massive long keyphrase list you have generated and splitting it up into three sections:

The A-Team : These are keyphrases that are important, high traffic, relevant and you want to target now

The B-Team : These are keyphrases that are important, good traffic, relevant but not a priority right now. This allows you to keep the number of top priority A-List keyphrases down to a manageable number

The C-Team: These are keyphrases that aren’t worth optimizing as they with don’t have enough traffic, enough intent or aren’t relevant to your products or services.

Conclusion

There is no right or wrong way to conduct keyphrase research and this guide is only my suggestions on what works for us. You will find rewarding keyphrases if your research;

a) Casts a wide net and get lots of keyphrase ideas

b) Gets accurate data about the visitors & competition of these keyphrases

c) Allows you to make priority selections based on accurate data