Two days, three tracks, over 50 speakers. IonSearch 2013 certainly didn’t lack in ambition, nor in potential for some insightful search marketing conversation and thought.
And it did not disappoint; we thoroughly enjoyed our in time in Leeds, and came away with plenty of takeaways. With so many talks (over 40 different talks/panels), we sadly couldn’t see everything there, but we’ve put together some of the key takeaways from our favourite sessions of the conference.
There are lots of articles available on blogger outreach, including our own! However, the challenge is in converting these steps into a scalable process. This is why I’d like to share with you our process and to talk you through some of its benefits and flaws.
As you might have read in a previous post by Rachel we use Buzzstream – among other tools – to perform blogger outreach. Placing content is time consuming and the process sometimes can be complex, especially when you’re tempted to use every tool you hear about or read about on blog posts. But tools alone aren’t enough; from what I have experienced, the key really is to have a well-organised process.
What you will need
Before you start you need to get the right tools. We use the following:
The SEOMoz toolbar – we use this tool to determine a webpage’s/websites’ quality based on page authority, domain authority and trust rank (post penguin, trust rank to me is a very important metric).
Good ol’ Google search – To find relevant websites manually using search operators (use SoloSEO to pull all possible operators with links to the search results. Here’s an example list for the keyword “nappies”)
Last February I gave you some handy Excel tips – here’s some more! Today I’m talking about array formulae.
It’s no secret that in today’s modern age, we’ve embraced a “search” based culture. Whether it’s a new artist you’ve heard of, a recipe you’ve read about, or even a news report you’ve just seen on TV; we’ve become more inclined to search about those subjects to find out more information to such a degree that our collective thoughts can actually correspond with what people actively search. As highlighted in the graph below, people tend to aggressively search for the keyword phrase “english premier league” during the month of August corresponding with the cut off date for player transfers:
In fact, you could even make educated guesses about who’s going to win a presidential election based on searches; the graph below are for the keyword phrases “Barack Obama” (blue line) and “John McCain” (red line).
I should be presenting at BrightonSEO today on a 20/20 slot (20 slides, 20 seconds each) talking about 20 SEO tools.
Unfortunately I can’t be there. Sadly my dad, Jim Gibbons, passed away on Wednesday morning having battled cancer so bravely for the last year, but unfortunately his health deteriorated very quickly earlier this week. Obviously it puts things in perspective, as these things always do, but I know my dad would have loved me to do this. He was so proud of my career and paid such a great interest in everything I do, especially speaking at events like this – mainly because this isn’t something I’m naturally comfortable at doing and I’d rather not be center of attention (I’m just like him in so many ways), but I am ambitious and want to push myself and company forward by forcing myself into creating and taking these opportunities.
So while I can’t be there today, I still wanted to share the slides with everyone who’s going along to the event.
I love you dad, this one’s for you!
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 |
Like many agencies, blogger outreach constitutes a significant proportion of the time we spend link building. In our experience, it gets great links whilst maintaining a natural link profile. Until recently, we’d been recording our blogger outreach interactions in multiple spreadsheets in a rather inefficient manner. So we decided it was time to streamline the process and we’re currently trialing a blogger outreach tool called BuzzStream.
We’ve just wrapped up a successful blog-based campaign for a client during which we relied heavily on BuzzStream and as a result, I have a few comments on its effectiveness, usability and flaws which I thought I’d share. Perhaps it would be useful to divide them into pros and cons:
Pros
Tracks all your communications in one place – you can set it so that any communication between you and an email address in BuzzStream gets saved in the contact card for that person. It automatically updates the ‘last communication’ field so that you can immediately see when you last interacted with that person. This means that someone else working on the project can see communication between another team member and the person being contacted, which is really useful if you have more than one person working on the project.
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.
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.
Excel is one of the best tools for PPC. Downloading your data into Excel gives much more scope for analysis and complex change than using a browser interface or AdWords Editor.
You may have already read Distilled’s Excel for SEO or some of PPCHero’s Excel tips, but here are my own hints.
If there’s one thing you can put into practice from this post, it is this: you can use ampersands instead of CONCATENATE().
A1&A2 is the same as CONCATENATE(A1,A2), except for being far fewer characters and not adding to the oft inevitable nightmare of nested brackets.
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Like most people, SEO practitioners reflect on the past year and attempt to improve their skills in the new year.
If you haven’t made up your mind what exactly you want to change in the coming year, check out these suggestions for 30 SEO resolutions for 2012 that draw on modern industry best practices and growing trends.
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