7. Using the Press:Beautiful People Competitive arena Not generally Newsworthy New site Needed to create a “bang” Let’s create a storm by saying we are kicking out “fat” members
10. The correlation between links and Traffic Lessons: Good bait = good links Good links = good traffic But: Press Release links seem to need perseverance. Is there something stickier?
11. STOP! ARRET! Good links = good traffic Sustained success needs partnerships
12. Blogger Links the Easy Way Spend money and hire blogger through networks to write articles for you Is this just a paid link?
13. Bloggers the Right Way Get to know the right bloggers on a personal level Show them that you have something their readers cannot do without Bloggers LOVE exclusive just like newspapers (Especially after the Farmer update I assume)
14. Finding the Right Bloggers Technorati linked with Twitter engagement (Search for mentions of the @name) See if they are in your custom search engine (We will come onto that...) See if inner pages have (real) links/reputation
15. Tactic: Using Google to gather intelligence Search for “[keyword] add url” Use Directory.google.com (Dmoz) to find authority verticles Build a Google search engine JUST containing potentially good sites in your niche and search these every day for conversations you can participate in Combine these strategies
19. Using Google Add the relevant sites to your own custom engine Repeat for relevant sites linking to your competition (See later) Repeat again for sites that rank for your keyword THEN search for “add url” or “comment” in this database
25. Levelling the competition You MUST know your competitors’ best links and strategies You need to neutralize them or emulate (copy) them or better still... Replace them. (But see more in “traps”)
33. The Results But… Social links are not always good for Search. But does that really matter so much any more? The Lessons: You can build technology that engages with humans AND is social Playing to people’s vanity is a great tip.
34. Using Wordpress Spread the Link Love Watch it come back right at you Use Pingback to pick up mentions Competitions – top 10 [Keyword] bloggers Use the redirection plugin for link reclamation Pingomatic and social media plugins (ping.fm)
So let’s get straight into the Racy looking slides!This was a case study that came out of 2010 which stunned the world a little. The company has a USP – but ultimately was pretty mundane.So what could they do to rise above the storm?* Let’s create a storm by saying we are kicking out “fat” membersSo what kind of response did THAT get?
The media storm worked a treat…Just in case you thought they got there by accident – here’s the “quote” to the media.So how did this pan out in terms of links? Well let’s look at the date they hot the BBC. How much preparation was there?
This graph shows web domains that linked to Beautiful People and the dates that Majetsic’s crawlers picked up new domain links.So there was a sustained approach to the media campaign.Ultimately this generated links from thousands of domains. In addition, the links to the big media outlets will also have dramatically affected the company’s fortunes.
What I fined really interesting is the very close correlation between links and traffic.We can overlay traffic tracking sources link Compete.com or Alexa.com to see just how close the correlation is in this case.What is a problem here is that the noise they created was transitory. This is typical of using PR as a link strategy. Potentially very poweful, but only for a short period of time.Is there a case study of something a bit stickier?
What I fined really interesting is the very close correlation between links and traffic.We can overlay traffic tracking sources link Compete.com or Alexa.com to see just how close the correlation is in this case.What is a problem here is that the noise they created was transitory. This is typical of using PR as a link strategy. Potentially very poweful, but only for a short period of time.Is there a case study of something a bit stickier?
This actually had to check 1294 urls, so we have a program which took several minutes to run... But you can use Live HTTP headers for firefox. There are others, but most do not record whether there is more than one redirection hop. Maybe Aaron will do one in his free time?
Majestic SEO does a great job of identifying almost all of your competition’s links.
My last case study is very new and one of the most powerful link strategies I have seen.What is interesting about this strategy is that it pays zero attention to search engines.The links are transitory – mostly URL shorteners in social media formThe content changes every 24 hours so they lose there contextual relevence, making even static links relatively poor for search enginesThe campaign is entirely automated yet entirely social in nature.I call it an example of Technobait.It is Paper.li. Paper.li creates a clean daily paper of the best stories that are brought to my attention from the people I follow. It is the “Daily me”. It is always incredibly relevant to me, and would only be irrelevent if I chose my followers unwisely. It’s great. I like the content. It chooses the content based on an algorithm, tracking who retweets and likes articles that my followers follow.But that’s not the clever “link magnet” bit. It is this…
Once every day, the system picks out a few of my follower’s contributors
This is a MUCH more sustained link campaign from a standing start and is the kind of strategy which will dominate a market sector. This is almost exponential growth in link terms.But how has it affected traffic growth?
Who needs search engines to make a good link building campaign work? This growth rate is phenominal. Compete is saying that it has gone from zero to 500,000 users a month since March last year.
My secoind case study is probably 10 years old… but looking at it in the light of 2011. we find an interesting new twist to a rather old case study.It is the case study of XE.com – which has dominated the #1 spot for the phrases “exchange rates” and “currency converter” for many, many years, through a very simple link widget – one of the first that I ever saw.
On the surface, this looks like it is generating links rapidly and should therefore be generating traffic at the same rate.But note that this chart is in cumulative view, and only tracks backlinks DISCOVERY – not backlinks deletions.
The rate at which xe.com is gaining links has dropped significantly over the years, and they seem to be losing links FASTER than they are generating them.Let’s compare their traffic over the past few years with their link generation rate.