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If you haven’t already, you should definitely sign up for a Facebook business page for your website. Simply go here to set up a page for your business: https://www.facebook.com/business/build. Once your page is created, you will want to invite friends, customers, and colleagues to become a fan of your new Facebook business page. Next, you will want to post quality messages on your page that serve to engage your audience. Also, encourage fans to publicize your information to their friends by offering interesting information, contests, or other incentives that will drive your audience to share your page. This is a great opportunity to engage your audience and drive incoming links in the process.

Another highly regarded tool for SEO purposes is Twitter. You can learn more about setting up a Twitter account for your business here: https://business.twitter.com/. Twitter can be a great tool to help you stay involved in the conversation and encourage incoming links. One tool that will help you to find Twitter users interested in your business is www.tweetadder.com. For $55, you can open an account and look for people following topics related to your site. Then you can simply add them, and they will add you in return. This is a great way to get people to follow your Twitter account if they are interested in what your site has to offer. By sharing with them, they can then pass your messages on, and this can help you generate incoming links.

Once you’ve set up your Facebook and Twitter accounts, a great tool to help schedule posts and monitor these accounts is Hoot Suite (www.hootsuite.com). Hoot Suite offers a free or paid account; you can initially get set up with the free version for these purposes.

A more recent social media platform that has burst onto the scene in a big way is Google Plus. One big advantage of Google Plus is that the largest search engine in the world created it. This gives the platform instant credibility. With any social media platform, the usefulness of the network is tied closely to the number of active users the network is able to attract. In this regard, Google Plus has surpassed five hundred million active users. This is an impressive feat for such a young platform. In quite a few ways, Google Plus closely resembles Facebook. To create a business Google Plus page, you set it up here: www.google.com/+/business. Then, similarly to Facebook, you will want to invite friends, customers, and colleagues to click on the plus-one button Google will create for you so you can create groups in your Google Plus account. This is also known as Google Circles and is very similar to the process of liking a page on Facebook. The one big difference between Google Plus and Facebook is that with Google Plus you have the ability to categorize your sharing, so you can share different content with different groups of people depending on how you’ve categorized them. This is a great feature for content sharing through social media.

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Chapter 8

Getting Social Wins You Friends

Social bookmarking is a godsend for publishers of news sites, blogs, and other websites. Social bookmarking can introduce your site to new people with relevant interests and can drive site traffic and valuable incoming links. So what exactly is social bookmarking?

Have you ever found a website that you wanted to remember so you bookmarked it on your browser for easy reference?

If you’re not quite sure how to do this, you can find a tutorial here: ehow.com/how_5420_bookmark-web-page.html. The process will vary a bit by Internet browser.

It’s important that you understand this concept, as there are distinct similarities to social bookmarking. In fact, social bookmarking is the same as bookmarking any website in your browser. The only difference is that social bookmarks are saved on a website and not on your local computer. So it doesn’t matter which computer you use, you always have your bookmarks available to you.

Let’s take a look at how you actually go about social bookmarking.

Step 1) You need to register with the target social bookmarking website and get your e-mail address verified.

Step 2) Add the website to your social bookmarking account.

Step 3) Submit the appropriate information about your website into the title and description window.

After that, simply fill out the details, hit the save button, and you’ve successfully created a social bookmark for your site. It’s a simple process that can have a profound impact on your search engine rankings.

Now that you know how the process works, here’s an extensive list of sites for social bookmarking purposes. It’s compiled according to Google PageRank, so go nuts and get your social bookmark on.

When prioritizing your social bookmarking efforts, it’s important to note that, as mentioned earlier, PageRank is a value that Google places on a website in terms of the level of importance that it has given to a particular website. PageRank values will fluctuate between one and ten, with ten being the highest rating possible. Therefore, the higher the PageRank, the more importance Google places on the link being given out by the website.

Social bookmarking is just one part of the social strategy involved in winning on the web. These days, utilizing Facebook, Twitter, and even Google Plus for your business can help you better engage with your audience and build a strong link profile in the process. While social media still has a somewhat minimal impact on SEO in terms of factors being considered by Google’s algorithms, that impact is growing all the time, and Google has indicated that it will play a more prevalent part in their rankings in the near future. Also, leveraging social media is a great way to get your content shared so that you naturally build your incoming links. Therefore, you should be aware of some opportunities and tools to help you manage your social media presence.

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 SEO Challenge #5: Link Outreach

Look up the Meta keywords for your top 3 competitors. How many keywords were you able to find that weren’t in your initial list of targeted search terms?

 Tools And Tricks

SEO Research Tools

 SpyFu (www.spyfu.com)

Research competitors and find the search terms that are driving the most traffic to their websites on a monthly basis.

SEO Software Tools

 Moz (www.moz.com)

Moz offers a complete set of software, tools, and resources to maximize your search engine optimization. Paid members get access to their campaign-based web application, dozens of SEO tools, webinars, and full access to Open Site Explorer, a powerful resource for researching competitor link profiles.

 Raven Tools (www.raventools.com)

Raven Tools utilizes data from multiple sources, including Moz, to offer a powerful suite of tools to help you research and manage link-building opportunities. These tools are designed to help you with a range of functions, such as managing your campaign, building links, checking ranks, conducting competitive analysis, and monitoring your social media channels.

 Majestic SEO (www.majesticseo.com)

Majestic SEO is a powerful source of link information that can allow you to see the link profiles and incoming links being received by nearly any site. For reviewing the incoming links for your site or a competitor’s, this could very well be the best of the best.

 WebCEO (www.webceo.com)

WebCEO offers a suite of tools for nearly every SEO activity imaginable. Some of the more useful tools include a content submission service, backlink manager, website auditor, and rank checker.

 Buzz Stream (www.buzzstream.com)

Buzz Stream is a CRM for link building and PR/social media that allows online marketers like you manage relationships and get results, whether you are looking to increase your incoming links or gain exposure through a press release.

Website Owner Research

 WHOIS (www.whois.com/whois)

The WHOIS database contains information related to websites such as assignees, registrants, administrative information, and website creation and expiration dates.

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As an example of competitive link building, you can go to www.moz.com to use their Open Site Explorer tool under the Research Tools section. Just enter the URL of one of your competitors into the toolbar to find out who is linking to their website. This tool is free to use and can provide some great information about potential linking opportunities.

Moz will provide you with a list of sites linking to whatever website you put into their tool, which you can then download into an Excel spreadsheet for your records.

Once you download the Excel report, you’ll be able to view websites that are linking to your competition and would therefore potentially be willing to link to your site as well.

Now that you have a list of sites that may be interested in linking to you, it’s time to reach out to the site owners and make your request. In order to do this, you’ll need to find an administrative contact for the website, so I’d like to share a secret for a very effective way to find most website owners. Simply go to http://www.whois.com/whois/ and type in the website you’re trying to contact. WHOIS is a great resource that provides contact details for just about every website, as long as it hasn’t been privately registered. This can definitely be an invaluable resource when attempting to do outreach for link-building purposes.

Here’s a typical e-mail I use to ask for a link from the site owner:

Hi,

I came across your site when doing a Google search and was really impressed. I actually represent a site that (list what your business does here). Therefore, I was hoping you’d consider including it as a resource for your audience as well. The website is nameofsite.com, and I think your audience will find it to be very useful. If you need any further details, I’d be happy to provide them to you. Please just let me know, and thanks for your time.

Regards,

Your Name

In this regard, Buzz Stream (which is mentioned earlier in this chapter) can be a great tool to help automate some of your link outreach efforts. If you don’t ask for a link, you won’t get a link. I’ll warn you that this process can be fairly tedious, and the response rate will vary depending on the type of business you’re in and how competitive it is. Keep those expectations in mind. The quality of the links can be strong, but the process can be limiting based on how manual and tedious this type of outreach tends to be. I recommend reaching out to the websites that have the best potential for you to acquire links in order to make the most efficient use of your time.

At this point, I would like to state again that while there is extensive detail provided in this book about how to leverage the tools of Moz to effectively execute various SEO tactics, this is not the only resource out there. I’ve focused on Moz specifically because the tools provided by this company have emerged as some of the best and most respected in the SEO space to date. Furthermore, Moz is an all-inclusive resource to assist with nearly every aspect related to search engine optimization.

With that being said, the world of SEO is very fluid and constantly evolving. Therefore, the strategies outlined in this chapter and others have been designed to show you how to effectively use these resources for the purpose of getting more website traffic. Moz is in no way the only provider offering these kinds of tools to help manage an effective SEO campaign. My goal is to provide you with specific examples and knowledge of how these tools work so you can then use these and similar tools to create the results you want. So feel free to experiment with the various tools that are outlined in this book so that you can find the resources that work best for your personal working style and goals.

With these resources at your disposal, it’s only a matter of getting familiarized with the techniques. Once you do that, you’ll be a link-acquiring machine. You’ll have a huge advantage over the competition, increasing both your search rankings and relevance for the terms for which you are attempting to rank. The increase in links you acquire will be a huge driver in improving your search rankings.

Let’s see your competitors keep up with you when you apply all of these newfound strategies!

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I Spy a Competitive Advantage

When it comes to competing on the web, information about websites ranking in the position you are attempting to reach is tremendously useful. If you want to attain a certain rank for a specific search term, it stands to reason that the best plan of action is to replicate the strategies of websites that have already reached the position you’re after. Therefore, it makes sense to better understand what a website is doing to achieve its success.

In Chapter 2, SpyFu was mentioned as a powerful tool to research search terms. This tool can also be used to research the top organic searches driving traffic to competitor websites. Better yet, a lot of this information is available for free, without even signing up for a paid account.

Simply go to SpyFu (www.spyfu.com) and type in the name of a competitor’s website you want to investigate. For example, if I wanted to review the website www.cars.com, I would get a list of this particular site’s top organic keywords and top organic competitors:

Keep in mind that I’m focusing specifically on organic keywords and competitors since that is my primary focus in increasing overall website traffic and sales. However, SpyFu will also provide details around paid marketing as well if that’s a focus I were interested in pursuing.

As you can see from this chart, this research provides a handful of search terms that account for quite a bit of search volume on the site in question, as well as a handful of organic competitors. If you signed up for a paid account (even for a month), you would have access to a substantially larger amount of searches and competitors available in the SpyFu database. However, for our purposes, this should provide a great start for reviewing the competition.

If a competitor website appears to be doing well in the search rankings, it stands to reason that the site owner put some effort into their search engine presence. If you were able to identify the specific search terms that your competitor is using, you would be able to benefit from the hard work that competitor has already done to identify target search terms that will increase search engine traffic.

If you recall in Chapter 3, I advised against using meta keywords on your website because it can give away competitive intelligence about your SEO priorities. If you simply right-click on a competitor’s site, you can view their source code:

Then just look for the meta keyword tags and you’ll see which keywords are being targeted by the specific website.

Competitive Link Building

I cannot stress enough the impact a strong link profile will have on your search engine rankings. Getting other sites to link back to you is the best way to prove to the search engines that you are producing information and content that matters to their searchers.

In that regard, there are tools at our disposal that actually identify links being received by websites ranking for the search terms we’re targeting. Can you see the opportunity this presents?

It stands to reason that if certain sites have chosen to link to websites similar to yours, these sites might also be willing to link to your site. For this purpose, we’re going to do a little research and spy on the competition, so to speak.

For competitive link building, there are quite a few great tools out there that can provide tremendous value by helping to identify link-building opportunities.

With this in mind, here are some of the biggest tools out there that can help with these types of activities:

• Moz ($99/month and offers free trial)

http://www.moz.com

Moz provides tools to help optimize local business listings, track social media performance, conduct link research, access SEO metrics and much more.

• Raven Tools ($99/month and offers free trial)

http://raventools.com

Raven Tools utilizes data from multiple sources, including Moz, to offer a powerful suite of tools to help you research and manage link-building opportunities.

• Majestic SEO ($49.99/month and offers free trial)

https://www.majesticseo.com

Majestic SEO is a powerful source of link information that can allow you to see the link profiles and incoming links being received by nearly any site.

• WebCEO ($49/month and offers free trial)

http://www.webceo.com

WebCEO offers a suite of tools for nearly every SEO activity imaginable. Some of the more useful tools include a content submission service, backlink manager, website auditor, and a rank checker.

• Buzz Stream (starts at $19/month and offers free trial)

http://www.buzzstream.com

Buzz Stream was specifically constructed with link building in mind. It is designed to automate the link-building process as much as possible, thereby minimizing the time commitment. Some of the more popular features include a research tool to help find prioritized linking opportunities, outreach assistance to help you seamlessly reach out to potential link partners, and detailed tracking and reporting so you can identify how these efforts are paying off.

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SEO Challenge #4: Article Submission

Sign up for an account with Ezine Articles. Next, write an article that is between 550–700 words about a keyword you chose in Challenge #1. Then include an anchor link in the author resource box that links back to your website. Finally, submit the article to Ezine under the appropriate category. How long did it take the Ezine editors to approve your article?

Tools And Tricks

Press Release Submissions

 PRWeb (www.prweb.com)

A great option for press release distribution that can help you create buzz, increase online visibility, and drive website traffic.

 PRLog (www.prlog.org)

PRLog is another great press release distribution service that can help increase traffic and visibility. However, unlike PRWeb, this service is free to use, which makes it a cost-effective option for anyone looking to get the word out with a press release.

Content Writing Services

These services can provide quality article writing and web content for a very low price. If you’re in need of content to help market your website and are short on time, these services can be a great option.

 iWriter (www.iwriter.com) 

 99 Cent Articles (www.99centarticles.com) 

 Article Ninjas (www.articleninjas.com) 

 Articles on Tap (www.articlesontap.com) 

 CC Articles (www.ccarticles.com)

Hiring A Content Writer

Businesses can use these websites to post jobs, search for freelance professionals, and solicit proposals. You can evaluate the contractors applying for the job by reviewing qualifications, work history, ratings, portfolios, and skill test scores.

 Elance (www.elance.com) 

 oDesk (www.odesk.com)

Article Spinning

 The Best Spinner (www.thebestspinner.com)

If choosing to use this tool, adequate caution is advised. The Best Spinner will replace content within your article with synonyms to create multiple unique articles, essentially changing the wording of your content.

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These algorithm changes are designed to encourage legitimate link building and incentivize website owners to create communities to share information, as opposed to spinning articles and sending them out to a bunch of different websites. While these shifts in Google’s algorithms have thrown some SEO professionals for a loop, they don’t appear to have completely eliminated article spinning. I am a firm believer that article spinning will cease to exist if/when Google legitimately makes changes that limit any positive impact these activities may currently enjoy. However, given the number of SEO professionals still using this technique, it’s my belief that this hasn’t fully happened yet.

While I don’t specifically advocate the use of article spinning, it’s important to at least acknowledge its existence and current role in SEO. I’ve been asked about article spinning by multiple clients and I want to ensure that you are armed with the right information in the event you come across article spinning in your own research. Although I’m not encouraging the use of article spinning, I wanted to make mention of it since it is widely known throughout the SEO community and is currently being used by some marketers in the industry.

In the event you choose to try your hand at article spinning, the best tool on the market for that is called The Best Spinner (www.thebestspinner.com). You set up your article in The Best Spinner, and it then creates different versions of it by replacing words throughout the article with synonyms. I will warn you that the tool isn’t very sophisticated in determining the context of your words, so you will absolutely want to review the article prior to finalizing the spun versions. For example, if I were to write an article about search engine optimization, the tool would most likely recommend replacing the word engine with motor. Obviously, my article would not sound very professional or informative if it were written entirely about search motor optimization. Once an article is spun into different versions, marketers using this technique will then place the spun versions onto various article sites and pass them off as unique content.

Keep in mind that the goal with content creation is to get other sites to pick up your articles because the content is so interesting and valuable they want to share it with their audience. In turn, that audience will then share your content with other people and thereby drive natural links back to your website.

With the changes currently taking place at the major search engines, creating valuable content that makes you a thought leader in your space has become the most important thing you can do to influence your link-building efforts. So make sure you’re putting out good content and the rest should ultimately take care of itself. In this way, the content you distribute will serve as a strong link-acquisition machine for your SEO efforts.

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