I’ve released an update to SEO Smart Links Premium plugin which now allows users to have centralized location for their custom keywords.
It’s very simple to setup. Just upload a CSV file with your custom keywords to any location and copy the URL in SEO Smart Links settings. Set the time of the day you want it to synchronize and the plugin will pull in the latest keywords every day automatically. Continue reading → Are you using Google Analytics to track the success of your website? If yes, great, you are already doing a good job. Are you using Goals in Google Analytics? If yes, you are doing a terrific job (if no, click to read instructions on how to set them up). Goals are great because they help […] Continue reading →
One of the most difficult conversations I have with new or perspective clients is about Linkbait and content marketing and explaining how its real goal isn’t to drive sales but to build links, build awareness, and send social signals to the search engines. To make this post useful and actionable, I’m going to take you through the process/planning stage for a former client I had who has since sold his business.
IMHO the biggest benefits from social media are link building potential, brand awareness, and social media signals (see what social signals might Google use). Lets take a look at our niche:
We are going to target two groups of people because they include most of the other groups. They are “people who will read/share marine based content if it is interesting enough” and “people who will write/link/tweet about marine based content if it is interesting enough.” This is an important point to understand: we are targeting the “general online population,” not just potential customers, because our goals are links, sharing, and social signals.
So how do we get started? Let’s come up with some potential ideas for our Linkbait (see creating exceptional content for boring subjects):
Top 10/15/20 Most Beautiful/Ugly/Bizarre Creatures in the Ocean – This isn’t a typical piece of image based Linkbait. I would do all three. Just choose a different number for each one and space them out at least a month apart.
Best Places to Scuba/Snorkel in the Country/Continent/World – This is a bit of travel Linkbait but, again, it has multiple versions. In fact, you can do them as head & tail continent and refresh the posts every year like seasonal living URL’s.
Most Expensive/Dangerous Seafood Meals – This has a lot of options. You can do an info graphic of seafood prices to other food like beef and chicken. You could map graphics of seafood consumption. You could create cooking linkbait about expensive seafood, or dangerous seafood to eat (like the fugu blowfish). You can do Eco/green based content on sustainability of seafood. You can do “mom” based content like how to eat healthy seafood on a budget. You can do health focused content on seafood. There are lots and lots of variations here.
Largest Marine Mammals/Fish/Invertebrates – People like stories about giant sharks, whales, squid or octopi, and you can revisit this kind of post every 2-3 years as news/science updates (see how often should I update my content and updating evergreen content).
Most Dangerous/Poisonous/Deadly Fish/Sea Snakes/Marine Life – Again, people tie into group-think and share common fears of (and fascination with) sharks, snakes, piranhas, and general ocean life. Just be careful and don’t run a scuba piece right before or after a piece about dangerous sharks. It looks … contradictory.
Most Beautiful Ocean/Beach/Underwater photography/paintings – Again people like looking at “nice pictures.”
Now, this list is by no means all encompassing and the titles are just working concepts at this point. Hopefully they give you some idea about how you can take a niche shopping site and widen the focus to include a larger group of people who would be interested in liking/sharing/linking to your website/blog.
The next step is to start to flesh out the articles. Do a little research and figure out which one will have the best content. For example, use a service like oDesk and hire someone to research the most expensive seafood dishes, both currently and historically. Have them be on the lookout for unusual anecdotes like seafood that was expensive and hunted to extinction or seafood that’s illegal to eat. Have them give you source links so you can verify the data before sending it off to your premium content writer or infograpic artist.
Once you know about your pieces, start scheduling them and sending them out to be produced. You could push out a minor piece every 2-3 weeks and a major piece every 4-5 weeks. You want to spread out similar pieces unless you are doing a content series. Make sure you have the tail pieces in place before you push out the head (see head and tail content). As a I mentioned above, don’t push out a “Top 5 most dangerous sharks of Australia” back to back with “Best places to scuba dive in Australia.” It looks … odd.
So what are the takeaways from this post:
Ok, you made it to the end. This post has some bonus content! What if you do want to actually sell things using social media? Well IMHO you will need to do one or more of these things:
photo credit: Stephen Childs
This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review.
Linkbait and Content Marketing – What Are Your Goals
I love search data. Being able to mine through millions of search queries to find out what people are really interested in is fascinating (and useful!). Google provides search data a number of ways, including Google Trends, Google Insights for Search, … Continue reading →
Posted by Tom Anthony
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.
Faced with a new client, and having established a list of keywords they need to target, you want to evaluate the competition to find out what sites are dominating the SERPs for these keywords. However… being an SEO you’re a busy guy (or gal), and you need it done right now. I’ve built a Google Docs tool to automagically do exactly that and this post will walk you through it.
The basis for this tool comes from a report in this linkbuilding post on YOUmoz which contained a neat little ‘SERP Saturation’ report. I don’t know how Stephen made his snazzy looking report (he’s now shared a few details in this comment), but in response to a few people asking about his I thought I’d put together a tool. Here is Stephen’s report:
Cool, eh? We are going to produce something very similar, albeit not as pretty. We will automatically pull ranking data and tie into the Linkscape API to pull in some helpful metrics.
1. What does the report show?
So, what’s the report all about? It is a pretty standard report, and most SEOs will have put together similar reports in their time. It shows which domains are dominating the results pages for the specified list of keywords. It is an excellent way to quickly see who the main players are, and see a few metrics for them.
Ours will be sorted by the cumulative number of times a subdomain has appeared in the top 10 of the search results over all the keywords we specify, and will display the mozRank, Domain Authority and Linking Root Domains for each. We’ll show just the top 10 competitors in our report.
You can just duplicate the Google Docs spreadsheet I provide below, and change almost any of this to add, modify or take away as per your needs.
2. How do you configure it?
You must configure it the first time you use it:
1) If you’ve not yet done so, get a SEOmoz API key. Its free!
2) Open the Google Docs spreadsheet. In File menu select ‘Make a copy’ so you have a version you can edit (call it “Report Template” or such).
3) Go to the ‘Config’ sheet at the bottom, and enter your SEOmoz API details.
4) If you’d like to change the template for which Google URL to do (it defaults to UK for me), you can do that here too.
3. How do you use it?
Open your report template spreadsheet you just made.
1) On the config tab, paste up to 50 keywords, one per row, starting at cell B7 (its indicated).
2) Open the ‘Report’ sheet.
3) Now select ‘Make a copy’ and give it a name (“Client X Report” or whatever). This step is *essential* or the fields will not update properly (I’m working on making this not necessary – any clues?).
4. What should you see?
You should see a snazzy little report:
It shows everything I promised, and more even:
A colourful and interactive, albeit it slightly wonky, graph! What more could you want?!
5. Under the hood
You don’t need to read this section if you are neither interested in how it works or need to edit it at all. Besides which, I’m mostly just going to refer you elsewhere! A big shout out to Tom Critchlow, whose prior work contributed heavily to this little tool. Firstly, you need to read:
How To Build Agile SEO Tools Using Google Spreadsheets
Which introduces how to scrape the SERPs for ranking data. I modified what Tom did slightly as I wanted a list of subdomains, rather than pages, so there is a bit of string cropping (and fudging!).
Next you need to read Ian Lurie’s post (which Tom also helped with):
Linkscape + Google Spreadsheets. Together, at last.
Again, this I also edited. I changed the code around quite a bit, which you can see in the script editor. You end up with a function you can enter into a cell:
=getLinkscapeData(A1, 1)
The A1 is a cell reference to a URL, and the 1 is a dummy parameter to prevent annoying caching issues.
For a look at the full code for the Linkscape API interface, and some pointers on how to modify it to suit your needs I’ve put up a separate post on Using the Linkscape API with Google Docs, which includes a simpler example spreadsheet to try the code out with.
The rest of the spreadsheet is a few simple bits to filter and cumulate the necessary bits and pieces, along with a few tricks to try to sidestep some bugs in Google Apps. Nothing in the sheet is protected (there are a fed hidden columns) so you can take a look at the workings. If you have specific questions, post them in the comments and I’ll try my best to answer.
This was my first real foray into Google Docs, so it might not be particularly elegant. Also the document seems to have trouble updating sometimes – if anyone has a solution that would be great. In the meantime, if you just ‘Make a copy’ it seems to force an update.
6. Wrap up
Ok, it isn’t in depth analysis, but if you have a keyword list, and want a very quick peek at what domains are players, and their general stats, this tool gives you a quick and dirty look. Most importantly – it is free and open, so you can tweak it to your hearts content.
Questions, comments or suggestions are very welcome – post below and I’ll get back to you.