All posts by Pak Hou Cheung

The second day of SMX started with a panelist discussion on social shares, and top tips on how marketers are truly going to be influential.

Here are the top takeaways from the first morning session with more to follow later on today!

Social Shares | New Link Building from @LisaDMyers

  • Rel=Author one of the key factors of Link signals in years to come, mixing in the need of SEO & Social Media
  • If your not there already understand and begin to use Google +, as research has shown a direct correlation for companies having better SERPs because of using G+
  • The end game has not changed in terms of link building, in essence creativity is essential to build great links
  • Examples of short term Social SEO link building: post and publish blogs, articles, breaking news, infographics, competitions and interviews
  • Example of long term Social SEO link building: create a social community, developing a blog, writing white papers and making yourself seem a social authority
  • Understand your target market in making sure they will share your items, relevancy is key
  • Makes the most of what is happening now in the market

Making Waves Not Ripples: Effective Syndicatoin to Drive Social Sharing from @mrjamescarson

Friday saw the Distilled LinkLove conference in London, with an impressive line-up that included Rand Fishkin, Mike King and Wil Reynolds sharing their link building secrets.

Whether you’re agency or client-side, here is a useful little guide to link building tools and resources which Distilled gave out to help you improve on your link building activities:

Tools & Resources

Name Type What is it used for? Free / Paid
My Blog Guest Community Finding places to guest post Free & Paid versions
Blogger Link Up Community Link bloggers with content creators Free
Haro Community Link journalists with sources Free
Boomerang Browser Plugin Helping you with email outreach Free & Paid versions
Rapportive Browser Plugin Finding out more about the person you’re reaching out to Free
Multi Links for Firefox Browser Plugin Lets you open, copy or bookmark multiple links at the same time rather than individually Free
Chrome Web Scraper Browser Plugin Scraper is a Google Chrome extension for getting data out of web pages and into spreadsheets Free
Chrome Link Clump Browser Plugin Lets you open, copy or bookmark multiple links at the same time Free
Buzzstream Software Managing outreach process Paid
GroupHigh Software Finding people to outreach to Paid
Raven Tools Software Tracking campaigns and analysis Paid
Open Site Explorer Software Tracking campaigns and analysis Free & Paid
Ontolo Software Tracking campaigns and analysis Paid
Majestic SEO Software Tracking campaigns and analysis Paid
Zemanta Tactic Suggests your content to relevant bloggers Paid
Followerwonk Tool Contacting people & building relationships Free & Paid versions
Tom Anthony’ Link Profile Tool Tool Analyse your competitors link profiles and those of competitors to discover anomalous activities Free
JavaScript Bookmarklets Tool Use bookmarklets to improve efficiency of reporting and analysis Free
We Follow Tool Directory of Twitter users organized by interests Free
Citation Labs Tool Tracking campaigns and analysis Free
Linkdex Tool Tracking campaigns and analysis Free & Paid versions
Link Diagnosis Tool Backlink analysis & broken link checker Free
Link Builder from Wordtracker Tool Backlink analysis Free & Paid versions
Blog Dash Tool A permission-based blogger database Paid
Seeded Buzz Tactic Allows you to promote content to relevant bloggers Free & Paid versions

Back in December last year I wrote one of my first blog posts for SEOptimise entitled “How you can get over 79 Twitter followers in under 23 minutes – and why not to bother”.

From the title of the post, you can imagine that this post is regarding a similar topic, so you will not be required to do any of the following:

  • Write a ground-breaking blog post announcing how you have revolutionised the world
  • Give away freebies in order to be liked
  • Do any sort of “Like Gating”

like

Over the past decade, as blogging and social media marketing have become increasingly popular, some companies are now even outsourcing their blogs to be written by another agency.

I was surprised the other day when talking to a friend about how they measured the success of their company’s blog, that she mentioned one of their factors was getting more “Facebook Likes”.  At that moment I cringed, but it also gave me inspiration to write this.

Learning Objectives

Today’s post will show you how to get free likes on your blog post, but will also show you that getting 1000 Likes as opposed to 10 makes no real difference. I’ll also show you alternatives to how you can better monitor the success of your blogging campaign.

About Drapers Ecommerce 2012

Yesterday saw the annual Drapers Ecommerce Conference at America Square, London, a truly star studded event where some of the hottest brands in fashion this year (including My-Wardrobe, Reiss and Boohoo) came together to talk and discuss the changing dynamics of the World Wide Web, with 5 exciting agendas on the table:

  • Internationalisation of Ecommerce
  • Analysing the Ever-Changing Customer
  • Fall in “like” with Tweeting
  • From Browsing to Buying
  • Cross Channel Marketing

Top 32 Tweets

The event caused quite the stir on Twitter and gave some useful insight into the conference. Here are the 32 Tweets I found most useful from the event in:

Creative Link Building, Link Prospecting or even Link Scouting – call it what you will, the premise is the same:  you are looking for opportunities to build links.

Over the years there have been many different ways that people have been doing this; one of my personal favourites is using Majestic SEO and Open Site Explorer. However useful this is, I still find it time consuming and painful, until thankfully along came Linkdex which came and helped ease the pain.

5::365 - Revisiting

However helpful these tools have been in aiding my link building efforts, it is important as part of any SEO link strategy to think outside the box and establish links where your competitors are not present.

Like many others I am sure, I find quality link prospecting to be a slow process, and knowing where to begin is the hardest and most frustrating.  Hopefully, though, after reading this you’ll be able to analyse quicker and build better quality links.

My Foursquare Experience so far…

Like many other people over the past few months I have been using Foursquare quite a bit, as shown below.  I have knocked up quite a few mayorships and badges, but sadly I have already found it very monotonous and not at all engaging.

 

To be fair, Foursquare is great at the beginning with collecting the badges, stealing mayorships, getting those “Foursquare specials” and “Sharing with your friends”.  Well the last two I did not experience; working in Paddington I would presume that businesses would be flocking with specials, but sadly not, and in terms of sharing with friends I have none (on Foursquare). With myself not experiencing two of the most important factors of Foursquare, this has sadly hindered now a relationship with the platform (for now).  In what I have found is a similar occurrence to Google+, the number of “real people” on there (and active users within the UK) is, I would imagine, not staggering.

 

 

To be honest, from my school days of using Google right up to today, the search engine giant has not once stopped impressing me. From its algorithmic updates for a better user experience to its cloud based computing services, Google has captured my life and sadly, probably my soul.

Today I will be sharing with you a collection of my favourite Google search operator queries, not only to help open your mind to the powers of Google being much more than a search engine, but also to show you that knowing some of these queries will help you become better in the art of SEO.

 

6 Starter Operator Search Operator Queries

These queries are particularly helpful because they’re generally quick and easy short cuts in narrowing your search results:

Query What does it mean?
“best practice seo”  Searches for this exact phrase within “”
mobile -phone  Inclusion of – means searches for the word mobile but nothing following after phone
seo ~glossary  Brings up a glossary of information regarding that word
define:seo  Definition of that word or phrase
OR / |  Returns search queries with one of the given terms
related:  Helps list web pages related to the URL

Let’s get one thing straight first:  you will NOT be required to do the following in order to get free followers on Twitter using this method:

  1. Tweet interesting thoughts
  2. Post ground breaking news articles
  3. Be informative to your target market
  4. Interact with people
  5. Be selling a good/service to people in order to be followed

Over the past few years, as social media marketing has increased and become ever more popular, ludicrous businesses have popped up “selling” Twitter followers, with many brands also reporting the success of their social media campaigns simply from the number of increased followers.

Today’s post will not only show you how to get free followers, but also help you understand that having 100 followers as opposed to 100,000 makes no difference; it’s about quality not quantity (funnily enough, similar to SEO).