The advice was flowing at the LinkLove London conference, and if you haven’t the time to read all my summary posts then the following are the must-read tips and tools talked about at the linkbuilding conference:

general

1. Never believe something works. There is either data to support something or there is not.
2. A Panda-style update is coming to links and link profiles in 2012…
3. Don’t follow the crowd – target links that your competitors haven’t even thought of yet.
4. If you’re mediocre work on everything in your online presence, if you’re good be incredible at just one or two things.
5. Discover your weaknesses and what you need to improve.
6. Self-assess your efforts on an exponential scale – you’ll get a better idea of where you really stand. Benchmark again aspirations and competitors.
7. Make your linkbuilding plans scalable to reduce effort.
8. Test the smallest thing with the highest risk factor – experiment and gather data on one small element of your linkbuilding idea now
9. Invest and scale opportunities when the evidence backs it up.
10. Only measure success against relevant metrics – at the start links isn’t it.
11. Have an activity plan (and targets) for linkbuilding or social/community-building activity, with testable assumptions.

content

1. Generally, no SEO tactic compares to great content, no matter what industry or niche you’re in.
2. Content generation is the least expensive way to improve performance across the business.
3. Focus on what activity will achieve a lower cost-per-customer-acquisition than your competitors.
4. Content-based marketing and linkbuilding ‘wins later’ through our sources (like PPC, brand visibility) as well
5. Content-based marketing is more enjoyable and enable you to take pride in your work.
6. Content-based marketing provides benefits that are more durable and likely to last in a changing online environment.
7. Build a good ‘brand’ through content and the effort required to gain links for subsequent content is reduced.
8. Become a name or service that customers trust – it will improve click-through, conversion rate, subscription rate…
9. Find out what your audience likes and produce content that excites them.
10. Focus on what content you/your company are good at producing – play to your strengths.
11. Do things differently and bend the rules if the value is there for the investment.
12. Even if content doesn’t lead to links, you can still achieve great PR and sales.
13. PR guys always need content, so get in their ears.
14. Opportunity is everywhere if you approach things differently to the competition.
15. Great content still needs great outreach to get the best results.
16. Don’t dive straight in to a linkbuilding idea – pitch the experiment the big idea to gather evidence. Little things move forward faster.

outreach

1. Refine your linkbuilding prospect lists with onsite, authority etc data before manual outreach. Consider how some sites may be ‘scraped’ of their content for additional links.
2. In your email outreach: your gender doesn’t matter, say “Hi”, schedule them for the weekend to get best results, make sure the emails are sitting in inboxes in the morning (ready to read before the day gets busy), be persistent, ensure emails are <1,000 characters.
3. In your email outreach you need to get to know them better first. Always try to get the person’s name to improve the chance of success (if you haven’t got it don’t just refer to the business/site name – instead send a generic request) and connect with them first through Twitter to significantly improve rate of response.
4. Try different Twitter personas for different content niches to stay ‘on topic’.
5. Measure the value of the link equity your are building in terms of the costs it would take to achieve the same links through a link broker or the same traffic through PPC.
6. Don’t lie in your outreach.
7. Mention your previous successes e.g. “We were featured in the Metro”.

social and people

tools you should be using

(Notes from the London Link Love Conference)

Presenter: Will Reynolds
from seerinteractive.com

“We need to stop begging”, says Will, “And stop looking so pathetic”.

Target the ‘big shots’ – the people you want to be connected to you, the influentual guys. And these guys, unfortunately, don’t follow you.

You need to start getting their attention, start a relationship.

target acquired

Lets say you target someone like Dharmesh Shah, the founder of HubSpot.

You might be absolutely no-one in relation to this big shot – they probably don’t care about you.

iGoogle and your stalking dashboard

The platform Will uses is iGoogle, because it’s “freaking simple”. It’s all about RSS feeds, and there’s even is a Chrome plugin that tells you if there’s an RSS feed available.

1. Get iGoogle.
2. Set your goals and to-dos
3. Just f**king do it.
4. Twitter – add your target’s tweets to iGoogle. But you’ll need their Twitter ID.
5. News – add your target’s Google news feed. It can be done with a tweak of the URL.
6. Blog – stalk the blogs they contribute to.
7. Google+ – it can all be done, search for it!
8. Stalking questions – you’ll find even Quora has it. There are RSS feeds everyone, and it’s data just waiting for the taking. Even Gmail has an RSS feed!
9. See who they’re following, and be more like them. Use the Twitter API to delve into who they’re following, then export. Use Tag crowd / wordle the visualise his followers, and see what subjects/people show up.

Set up stalker tabs in iGoogle for different people, different targets etc.

stalking a publication

So, want to get in tech news? You’ll need to stalk the authors/writers. Followerwonk them, search for ‘write for [publication]’.

super advanced tip: Have coffee with the person. Meet them.

specific queries

Follow an RSS search for Twitter mentions, by your target, of a relevant term, like your home town. Find out when people are coming to you, and give them some recommendations. Answer their local questions, and you’re getting there. What about areas that you’ve got knowledge in? Search for when they mention it. Sweet, and Really Simple Stalking.

Put it into iGoogle.

Also put it into IfThisThenThat IfTTT.com.

You can load an XML feed and load them directly in Excel, getting all the data like author, titles etc.

Look at Quora queries by journalist. If they’re asking a question, they’re usually writing an article. Draw that person’s Quora questions through to iGoogle and BOOM, you’ll see their questions.

scraping

Will really recommends Mozenda for data scraping.

It’s basically a scraper within a browser. Using this you could scrape an entire list of authors from a site and their Twitter handles, because it’s clever and it actually follows links. It can even tell you when a new author is added, so you can be nice to them nice and early!

Put that data into Excel, and create a stalker dashboard. IfThisThenThat for when your target list follows you.

FollowerWonk will tell you follower relationships between people.

Pull in Google Analytics referrers into a Google Doc, then pull in MozRank etc. These are people sending you traffic, so you should check them out. Export the  SEOmoz data so you can use it

dirty tip: fake it till you make it – buy followers. It could make a difference as to whether someone will follow you.

tip: take a few bit.ly URLs they’ve shared and add a ‘+’ to see their stats.

tip: when stalking, shut up and tweet on-topic.

tip: Inboxq.com will tell you who is asking questions on Twitter.

tip: Just help people!

 

the final word

And does all this work? Well, Will’s target followed back within Google+ within two weeks.

It’s not about building links. You need to understand people and make friends. Some people may call it stalking, Will calls it helping. Friends are greater than links – do good things and good things will happen for you.

 

(Notes from the London Link Love Conference)

Presenter: Rand Fishkin
from SEOmoz 

Rand did his usual and gave a very compelling talk about the value of great content, no matter what industry or niche you are in.

Much of Google’s linking algorithm is based on links and their interpretation as a ‘vote’ for that site. But links were never really votes, and this system wasn’t really intended to benefit marketers in the way we’re using it.

The internet has changed, and sharing has evolved. The ‘linkerati’ is now much bigger – neworked creators are everywhere. 66% are social networking site users and 15% have personal websites.

social signals rising

Although they haven’t got direct access to social data from Facebook and the like, Google are getting representative sample of the social graph. While social signals are not directly or always impacting, they can create competitive rankings.

Rand explains how links are actually often a thorn in search engines’ side – as they can be manipulated. He feels SEO has become too tactical – not about getting customers, just about ranking in a certain place.

strategic marketing

The crux of online marketing is that companies need a lower cost of acquisition than competitors’, and to this end inbound marketing tactics are often cheaper.

The aim is for a good cost-of-customer-acquisition to customer-life-time-value ratio. So to achieve this lower cost-of-customer-acquisition you can focus on either:

 A: Content + SEO + social +community + press

 B: Links

5 reasons Rand invests in content rather than links

1. You win in long tail, conversion rate, organic, direct bookmarketing, community, social following, brand visibility,PPC advertising etc. Sources that win ‘later’.
2. So you can take pride in your work.
3. Strategies that last no matter what – need to build a memorable brand that has positive signals of every kind. If social connection are the future then links/rankings are worthless in the long run.
   (duckduckgo is targeting the same people that made google successful initially)
4. Reduced effort over time – SEOmoz get 400 linking route domains almost every time they publish content. They build links while they sleep!
5. Builds brand loyalty and trust.

Content enables you to know, trust and like a business. This means your click-through-rate will be higher, your conversion rate will be higher, your subscription rate will be higher…Content is by far the least expensive way to do this.

what content should I make?

Don’t limit yourself to content about your subject – discover what your audience shares and likes. Research the interest graph of people who might buy, and create content that excites them.

For example Fiskars make scissors, but have a phenomenal blog. They’ve crowdsourced the interests of their group and created a content portal powered by fans. You can brand your product to align with your content.

Remember, content can mean lots of different things: community, products, or even platforms/data. For example the site builtwith.com crawls the web and shows the technology being used to power it. It’s great to see stats of what’s being used and how pervasive a certain technology or platform, like WordPress, is.

10 examples of content marketing done right

1. Dollarshaveclub.com launch video is very funny and gained something like half a million users and $1.5m dollars o investment.
2. Everytimezone visualised – they make it easy to link to and suggest you do.
3. feefighters blog – genius to use anchor text within their tag line! Branding and SEO together.
4. Economist graphics blog – blog with charts and graphs gets lots of links and embeds.
5. Zemanta blog links tool – puts images and content in front of 800k bloggers while they’re writing, and makes it easy to link to.
6. Twitter stories – content curation and unique design
7. Slate’s partnership with Q&A site Quora – Slate take Quora’s best questions and answers and republish – you can do this internally at your company.
8. Koozai’s viral blog post via Google News – used news, video rich snippets, rel author, schema etc.
9. See Jane Work – demographically targeted office supplies try to bring a group together (similar interests, political causes etc) around the brand. Focused on passionate working women, but similar worked with ‘are Romanians smart’ campaign – used national pride.
10. Pridebait – finding, nominating and recognising people through polls, interviews etc.

the final word

But at what point does SEO become advising people on how to run their business? It depends where in the funnel you are. If an agency is just involved in SEO then focus on that, but if higher input is possible then yes, look at where cost-of-cust-acquisition is low and start investing in content.

Does great content work for every industry? Yes, but there are differences in each. Tailor-make your content. But generally it’s very rare where content isn’t a great place to start. Writing isn’t the only way to do content – if you’re great at data do that, video, or just hire contract writers. Everyone has a strength of some kind, particularly business owners.

To actually get your content in front of people, start in the research phase – find what content has made it into the press, and what people and influencers (e.g. the press) are talking about it. You can use market research surveys to find out more about these audiences.

 

 

Notes from Will Critchlow’s  presentation at Distilled’s Link Building conference in London, 30th March 2012. More coverage here.

Will Critchlow
from distilled.com

Why isn’t my linkbuilding working?

Ask “why?” three of four times. There are usually three mains problems:

• You’re not doing anything
• You’re not doing enough / you’re not doing the right things
• You’re not acknowledging your weaknesses

But there are rarer problems:

• You’re not ‘spikey’ enough – be really good at the things you’re good at. If you’re mediocre work on everything, once you’re good be incredible at just a couple of things.

1. discover

Discover what and where your weaknesses are – what you need to improve and win.

2. pitch

To new and existing clients. Big visions and small next steps.

3. experiment

Find ways to improve and persuade.

4. invest and scale

With evidence and experience in hand.

 

research

Ever graded anything out of five? Almost everyone says they’re a four. Better than average but not great. Unfortunately we live in an “exceptional takes all” world.

Will created a self-assessment for websites, with exponential scale. So to get up to 3 you need to keep pace and be better than competitors in an area. 4 needs to be an industry leader. 5 has to be ‘internet leader’ (not just in a niche).

You then ‘score’ on an exponential scale, so lowest is 0 points, next up is 1, then 2, 4, 8 etc.

This doesn’t explain the pattern seen with a lot of websites in terms of acquiring links, but it’s a good start…

So, we look at site design, content and permission marketing, as these are the easiest areas for SEOs to influence. You can climb everything up to good, or focus on one to make it exceptional.

Internal self-assessment is all well and good, but get input from outside and your Analytics.

data from analytics

Will looked at direct visitors to a piece of content plotted against the number of inbound links it received (it was for infographics).

Is your conversion-rate for traffic-to-links too low? Or are you just not getting enough eyeballs on your content?

Using analytics to find this data is good because it’s real-time and dynamic.

~0.5% of Distilled visitors link to the content. On SEOmoz it’s similar, ~0.4%. So from this they can see that Distilled has fewer links than SEOmoz because they simply don’t get enough traffic. It converts well enough, but needs more eyeballing!

You can look at the average number of new referring domains per piece of content in Analytics.

actions:

• Try out the self-assessment
• Benchmark against key competitors
• Benchmark against aspirations
• Compare gaps in quality to gaps in performance
• Run analytics to get baselines

 

pitch

The next stage is pitching ideas for linkbuilding and content.

For example, Will talked about pitching an idea to a travel site where images are shown ostentatiously large. It’s a different, nice, and very scalable to other themes/industries. And it could work to gain links.

But will it work?

This is where testing and research can work. Pitch the experiment that tests the big idea, not just the big idea. And when you’re pitching to business, think in business speak. You’re “driving footfall to point-of-sale” to let the product do it’s job.  Think about a big, fancy, flagship store in London – it’s the same sort of thing.

And make it an efficient linkbuilding tool that is scalable. A good conversion rate to links = an efficient supply chain. Thus you can either spend less for the same results, or spend more to get exceptional results. And it should get easier and the months go on.

actions: pitch a big idea but a small next step

Will says bosses like little things. It sounds cheap…

 

experiment

This can be to find out what works for you, or for someone else, or to collect data on what you know should work.

Will mentions Gawker’s editorial strategy, in which big stories and projects were rotated with the silly little things (like cat videos). Job satisfaction went up, but not if they overlapped. Big and serious or silly. Salon.com tried writing better post: 33% fewer posts achieved 40% increased traffic.

Getting better is achieved in incremental leaps, so things don’t always work. The Lean Startup methodology is to test the smallest thing with the highest risk factor.

Things like kickofflabs.com and unbounce.com are great for just testing ideas. You can really get creative and silly with off-site tests away from the main brand you’re looking at.

actions:

• Read the Lean Startup book
• Take one element of your big vision and launch and experiment ASAP
• Care about the metrics you should be caring about at that time. Just started a development process for a linkbuilding idea? Well you’re not going to have any links after a month, so don’t measure on that.

 

checklists

Will also spoke briefly about checklists and how having these can help filter and improve your ideas and linkbuilding.

• Use shorter checklists
• Communication checkilsts are a good idea
• Ask “What should I do if things go wrong?”

He used Distilled’s creative checklist as an example, saying that in their brainstorming if they can’t find ten sites that might link to that idea in ten minutes then it’s abandoned.

the final word

Have an activity plan (with activity targets) – if you’re using social then your targets will not, initially, be links. And make sure you have testable assumptions (activity > results, results > outcomes).

 

(Notes from London’s Link Building conference from Distilled)

Tom Anthony
from distilled.com

Back in the day, the problem of information retrival and search hadn’t been solved. Then, in 1997, Google discovers links and changes the game.

But links very quickly began to be gamed. Now Google have to ‘pre-filter’ links; they’re not all considered equal anymore.

The belief in the SEO community is that the value of links is decreasing in Google’s algorithm. However, it’s still strong and the spam tactics can still work. For example, anchor text is an incredibly strong signal.

changing the Google algorithm

So what are Google waiting for in changing how they view links? SEOs know a spammy link profile when we see one – why doesn’t Google seem to?

Link profile tool: dis.tl/link-profiler
Something like this can be built in very little time, so why can’t Google see it?

The problem is false positives. There are perfectly good and acceptable marketing tactics that will result in anomalous and ‘odd looking’ link profiles. It could even be that everyone in an industry niche is doing bad things, and one guy is getting good links. He’ll have a dodgy-looking link profile in comparison!

The problem is that the SEO black hats, the spammers, advance their tactics and technology at an incredibly fast rate and can keep ahead of Google. The link web isn’t clear, so it’s hard to ‘prune’ dodgy-looking areas.

Panda update

The Panda update is Google advancing into this area, effectively trimming large areas of the web that they consider ‘dodgy looking’. Overall, the effect of these changes have had positive user effect

they’re coming: link algorithm updates

So far Panda has really looked at content on site, but it’s only a matter of time until a similar process is taken on links and link signals. In fact, the SEO community believes a big algorithm will come in 2012.

Google recently revealed that they will begin to penalise ‘over optimised’ sites, but the big news was that paid link networks such as BuildMyRank have been massively hit by an algorithm update. If effectively deindexed 20-30,000 domains and millions of links.

These updates will kep on coming, and warnings are now getting sent out to Google Webmaster Tools  for those with suspicious-looking link profiles. You’re gonna get hit sooner or later chaps…

putting the love back into links

Tom believes the way Google will go is to add trust to certain types of links.

An example of this is the rel=”author” markup.

Now Google can see who is responsible for a link, and thus how trustworthy it is. For Tom the whole idea of rel-author is valuing links, and as much about defending search as entering into social.

You’ll find author stats being drawn through into Webmaster Tools, and if they include it they clearly think it’s important.

Google want to fix the web graph. Google+ and author markup gives Google access to social signals. While shares etc are valuable signals Tom doesn’t believe they’re enough, and they simply won’t replace links. However authorship is far more fundamental, as it’s combining the social and the link graph into a new, more valuable metric: AuthorPageRank.

AuthorPageRank

AuthorRank x PageRank = AuthorPageRank

Basically a fair author will mean more link equity than an unrecognised author, and a superstar author will mean even more link equity and thus AuthorPageRank.

But can it be spammed?

Well, the amount of data Google has is pretty frightening, and for social signals it’s pretty extensive. It means there a high barrier of entry for abusing these signals, as to get a fake social profile, for example, that has the signals of a trusted author will be very difficult.

focus on authors

1. Become a trusted author
2. Target trusted authors for links

Tom thinks we need to shift from thinking about “Where is a link coming from?” to “Who is a link coming from?”.

Of course it needs to be scalable to become an executable SEO strategy, and we need the tools to be able to analyse the information and make decisions. Well, by using author markup and APIs we can – we can see his social activity, his followers, his other profiles, what sites he writes for…it goes on.

Tools such as the link intercept tool from SEOmoz enable you to cross-reference sites that are linking to multiple competitors but not your site. That’ll help you find places that are writing about your niche, ripe for the ‘befriending’.

the final word

There’s so much information available about authors, we need to use it for working with people.

There might be something out there that would help find out more about authorship in content, but unfortunately it’s a secret for us LinkLove folks for now  🙂

What SEOs do need to do is think about the future effects of authorship and social connections upon links. Although at the moment rel-author is only in the closed Google environment and not hugely widespread, it could be that signals such as OpenID will be incorporated.

The link algorithm will change to consider people and social linking; that is clear.

 

 

 

LinkLove London is the advanced link building conference that everyone’s been talking about. I’ve managed to wangle my way into the conference (thanks Tim/Ben) on the condition I blog,  so here are my notes and round-ups of the best tips:

• 48 tips and 14 tools you should know
• Linkbuilding stalking made easy
• Strategic content marketing
• Golden Link Building 
• Social Sharing and SEO
• What works in SEO outreach emails?
• Putting the luurve back into links
• SEO tools and tricks from the trenches
• Link building that works

(Notes from the London Link Love Conference)

Presenter: Jane Copeland
from Ayima.com

If you think like a normal linkbuilder you’ll only get the same links others do, and you’ll miss out on the super-high-value “golden links”.

Sometimes ‘bending’ the normal marketing rules can work. Jane mentioned Michael Winner and his decision to pay the fine for driving in bus lanes, but I’ll gloss over that – the point is that he does things differently.

marketing as a linkbuilding investment

To put it into an example: The Olympic Games is coming. There could be up to 5 billion viewers, and big brand sponsoring Olympics costs shed-loads. Most people don’t have £700m linkbuilding budget. Dammit I wish I did.

Now there’s a £20,000 fine for featuring a brand on a streaker to protect from guerilla marketing, but…is that actually a £20,000 investment? Of course, she doesn’t recommend you actually do this, but you could gain a lot of links from it…

That’s Michael Winner thinking.

Of course you still need ‘normal’ or traditionally-built links and link development that goes beyond what she calls “golden links”.  It’s the ‘ground work’ that you can’t ignore – you can’t just go out to the Olympics, streak and be fine!

identify link targets

So, you want a link from the BBC eh? Do a bit of research on the site and see what kind of links are leading from the site. She showed an example of a band who had performed at a bike show and got a great link.

investment vs. buying links

Buy links and you know your outgoings and your benefits (at least month on month). If you invest in long-term content and strategies it might not come off. But it could, and the potential “golden link” benefits are out there.

zombie shopping mall

She actually brought up  couple of ‘zombie apocalypse’ experience days that the Attacats recently considered for a day out. It was shared by Simon Pegg of Spaced fame (if you haven’t seen Spaced then shame on you), and it’s visibility skyrocketed. They were social movements not links, but the change of getting a golden link went up massively.

Don’t get a link? You might get amazing PR, like a page 3 article in the Metro. And eventually, if your work is great, clever and cool, people will start doing your marketing for you.

make it real

It’s all well and good pushing out linkbait, but if it’s not a real thing that people can use/buy/get involved with then the payoff will be less. It’s often easier to generate but won’t have the long-term benefits and PR like taking part in a zombie apocalypse. That’s lasting memories  😉

outreach isn’t dirty

Outreach is not a dirty word. Don’t be shy about showing your amazing content off. How are people going to encounter the content in the first place? Assuming just putting it on the Facebook account is enough is rubbish – build it and they will come is not necessarily true.

While a long email isn’t going to to make someone interested in your content,  there are things you can do better in outreach.

1. Don’t lie: There was a horrendous example of a linkbuilder who’d pretended to be a fourth-grade student on an assignment. In my opinion that just hurts the industry.
2. Use your previous successes: If Steven Fry shared your article, then tell other people! Been featured on BBC news? Tell people!

already own the golden link?

Take great care of them. Moved a page with a golden link? Perhaps just redirect  the page instead of contacting them to change it. You don’t know how they’ll react.

the final word

There are some golden rules to remember for a golden link:

1. Opportunity is everywhere if you look at obstacles differently
2. Start with what you want; work back to what you can afford and manage
3. Think about a situation as a whole. Don’t judge sole

Jane’s message was that we often have a lot to learn from PR guys – it’s not all about gaining direct links, as there’s other marketing benefits and often the SEO benefit will come if you’re interesting and clever.

And remember newspapers and press sources are always looking for news and content. Meet them, build relationships, submit your content.

 

(Notes from the real London 2012 event: Link Love)

Presenter: Branko Rihtman
from rankabove.com and seo-scientist.com

Branko is a bit of a scientist (SCIENCE! – love it) and likes playing around with bacteria, and talks about how science has a place in SEO. Scientific principles and the scientific method are always important, and especially in investigating how social media effects linkbuidling. So, as always it relates to data:

SEO and social media

We’ve had everybody talking about how social effects effect SEO, and whether anyone should care. But what is the proof we’re missing?

We need to see a site that has only social signals and no other ranking signals. No links, nothing.

An OK example he’d seen recently is Pinterest, the current darling of the social media world. Looking at their natural rankings they don’t really rank for much, but we need a better analysis than this.

social in linkbuilding

It’s about getting the content out to as many eyeballs as possible, but Branko feels that the process can be done more intelligently and see how we can improve the link acquisition rate above just using a ‘brute force’ impressions-gathering approach.

smarter social linkbuilding

Look at those people who shared your content. What else did those people share? What else did those people like and interact with?

More than this, which of these users have talked and shared more than one of these pieces of relevant content? These users are more important to you.

Finally, which bit of content has been shared most by these people? This content is more important to you, so you should produce more like this.

Good linkbuilding results from maximum impact for the smallest effort – the minesweeper effect!

getting data

We get our information from APIs, but APIs are scary and full of code. So instead of coding things, just scrape.

He used the following APIs:

• Topsy
• Facebook graph
• Twitter API
• G+ API
• MajesticSEO API

Then use Excel and the excellent SEOTools Excel add-in (one which we like very much in the Attacat office.)

So, he used the Topsy API to scrape to see who’d shared a page on Distilled, their Twitter name, and then what other URLs they’ve shared. Pretty amazing (and slightly creepy actually) data – it’s leading you to people who like your content and what content they like to share, and you can compare against SEO metrics to see how that content has performed in generating links. Great insights.

plotting links vs. tweets/shares/likes

He then ran through some graphs visualising how many links were achieved in relation to the social sharing of that same content. These were just meant to be indicative and show a potential relationship between shares and links across different social platforms.

+1s seem to perform much, much, much better than Facebook likes or other shares, which were quite similar (with retweets in Twitter very slightly ahead). It makes sense, because who uses Google+ except online chaps and SEOs?

Remember that these ‘trends’ are not definite – they can provide ideas for content and look good in reports, but they’re not going to provide actual metrics for reporting how successful campaigns have been. And it won’t build the links for you…

the data pt.2

So from two URLs they’d got 214 twitter users, 12k URLs and 3.7K domains. Woop! Now we want to refine and trim this data.

the users

Eliminate the “selfish users” who don’t provide lasting value and identify the “power users” who are going to increase the exposure of your content. Finally, identify all the relevant users within your user list – you can use different tools to filter them by keywords, grade them according to topics, or list them by the sum of links their links achieve overall.

Tip: Don’t target the ‘top tweeters’ in a niche – your message will get crowded out and you want to find the sweet spot where a share will have most value.

the pages and domains

Next you’ll want to look at the value of the pages and domains you’ve found.

Prune out the irrelevant ones (paper.li was given as an example) and assign them with a relevance score (and keep them for future reference). There are so many data sources you can take into account, and you’ll want to use the ones that are relevant to you and store your data for future use.

the final word

Social is lovely, but the only thing that’s really going to effect your ranking is links. Just like content creation this kind of social analysis is the ‘means to the end’ for finding relevant communities and achieving links – it’s research for finding ways of generating links.

Search will evolve, and he says we should follow Google’s advice of “Try to be where search engines want you to be” – do things right and results will follow.

Branko reaffirms that we should never believe something works. There is either data to support something or there is not. Smart marketers will take this kind of analysis into account.

 

 

Want increased traffic? Want improved click-through on your search results in Google and the like? Use microdata, microformats and Schema!

Ah, I mentioned Google, now you’re interested…

 

Disclaimer: This is a bit of a techie post, and it includes discussion of code implementation. Even if you don’t understand the code please try to understand the opportunities provided by microdata, start reading the resources and chat to your developer or agency about it. 

 

what is microdata?

Microdata is HTML markup for pages used to better indicate what content is contained therein to sites including the search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo (urgh) and, from November 2011, Yandex.

For a few years microdata usage has been a bit haphazard and all over the place. There are a load of competing ‘language’ formats, and you’ll also hear them use as generic terms to describe the process of marking up the data. I’m using microdata as my generic term in this post.

Update: I’ve been informed the correct generic ‘group term’ for the three different syntaxes described below  is ‘HTML data’. 

The main three HTML data types

And how to identify them:

• microdata for HTML5
  <span itemprop=”CATEGORY”>
  .
• RDFA
  <span property=”v:CATEGORY”>
  .
• microformats
  <div class=”hCATEGORY”>

They’ve all got slightly different markup and standards. Yay!

Recently Google and Bing decided to stick their nose into things and at least recommend a standard ‘vocabulary’ using Schema.org and where Google goes everybody else follows. Using a common vocabulary means that at least we’ll all be marking up the same properties like ‘people’, ‘organization’ [sic] and ‘place’, however Schema (originally) only supported the ‘microdata’ markup method.

 

<div itemscope itemtype=“http://schema.org/CATEGORY“>
          language                       vocabulary 

(credit to SEOmoz for helping to clarify this)

 

While it’s good they’ve gone with a nice HTML5 method it’s only proper that they’re expanding out to RDFa standard to increase the accepted markup types; in the meantime alternative markups are still supported by Google so don’t worry too much if you’ve already used them.

But if you’re in any doubt or just starting then follow the Schema.org recommended microdata markup.

 

schema.org

So, Schema.org. The website is fairly well structured to help you see the different attribute categories and they include marked-up examples to give you a better idea of exactly how the markup is implemented. There’s a huge hierarchy of different ‘things’ you can markup, with ‘thing’ funnily enough being rather near the top.

The most popular ‘things’ include:

• creative works (e.g. written content, book, movie, recipe)
• event
• organization
• person
• place
• product
• review/ rating

The schema creator from the guys at RavenTools makes the application of Schema even easier – simply type in the details and it’ll wrap the HTML elements for you.

 

Google and rich snippets

How does making your data accessible to search engines help you out? How do they use microdata?

Well Google has a little something they call rich snippets – these are the extra bits of information about a page that they display in search results.

 

example 1: authors/publishers

You’ll hopefully have noticed that Google have making big inroads into social search with Google Plus my World. In a nutshell, social search makes people and authors and the connections between people more important. As such you’ll want to ensure Google knows who you are and what you’re writing, and for that you’ll need the rel=author markup. In addition to the standard Schema markup you’ll want to add rel=author and rel=me markup, and a bit of rel=publisher…Easy eh?

 

author

1. Link to your author page on the same site using rel=”author” markup:
   <a rel=”author” href=”http://www.EXAMPLE.com/profile/AUTHORNAME/”>Author Name</a>
   .
2. Link that author page to your Google (Plus) Profile using rel=”me” markup:
   .
   <a rel=”me” href=”https://plus.google.com/YOURPROFILENUMBER/”></a>
   .
3. Link your Google Profile back to your author page on the website by adding a website link within your profile information. When you add this link to your profile, be sure to check the “This page is specifically about me” checkbox. This creates a rel=”me” link to that author page.

If you don’t have a profile page on the website that features your work then rel=”author” directly to your Google profile, and add the domain of the site you’re writing for to your Google profile links.

 

Google plus pages

If you’ve created a Google Plus page for your business you’ll want to link that as well, as you’re verifying the profile is official and make it more likely to be included in Google activities in the future. It’s actually done through applying a Google Plus button/badge which contains rel=”publisher” markup.

This rel=”publisher markup should only be put on the homepage of your (multi-author) site.

If you don’t want to add the badge the the code is:

<a rel=”publisher” href=”https://plus.google.com/YOURPAGENUMBER”>

Then add your website link to your Google+ page:

1.  Go to your profile by clicking the profile icon at the top of the page.
2. Click Edit Profile.
3. On the ‘About’ tab, click Links.
4. Click Add custom link.
5. Enter a title for the link and a URL.

 

example 2: reviews

See the little stars? That’s drawing through the reviews on the edinburgh-flats.com page into the search results. Getting positive reinforcement of your offering through reviews has always been our recommended Internet marketing strategy, and rich snippets mean you’ll be seeing the benefits from the first step – the search results. If you see two competing sites from a search result and one includes a great star rating which are you going to choose?

TIP: star ratings

Although the standard markup is for five star reviews your site might work on a different scale, such as ‘out of ten’. Check out these tips for ratings implementations.

TIP: reviews vs votes

There’s a difference between reviews and votes: votes are ratings while reviews need accompanying text (“Best article on microdata EVER” or some such). You’ll also need to markup reviews differently if you’ve aggregate reviews/votes or just one.

example 3: recipes

I’m a big fan of Moroccan chicken with almonds and apricots. Seriously, try it, it’s quick and incredibly tasty. But the point being that if I’m searching for a recipe and Google returns loads of options then I need something to help me differentiate between the options, and rich snippets help me do that. Be it by the rating, the preparation/cooking time or the whichever photo I think looks most appealing, the extra data helps me make a choice and if you include this data you are more likely to be clicked.

Heck, there’s even a dedicated Google recipe search. Want in?

 

so why use microdata?

And now we come to the crux of the issue – why bother?

1. Easier for search engines
   The mention of Google earlier should have piqued your interest; if Google decides to include something in its search results then you should really be paying attention. Search engines are getting fairly good at understanding the content of web pages but they always like a helping hand, and you’ll only ever put yourself in a better position by making such information easy to access, ‘read’ and display to searchers.
   .
2. Be more relevant, get clicked more
   Provide more information to the search engines and they’re likely to show it to searchers, making your site a more attractive proposition. Some initial studies have suggested there’s a significant click-through rate uplift on pages with microdata (review) markup.
   .
3. Easier for other applications
   Hey, search engines aren’t the only ones that could make use of your data and help promote you. Apps are where-it’s-at in mobile marketing, and you’ll only gain from making your company, products and/or content accessible to them.
   .
4. Improves the web experience
   Microdata helps to organise information on the web and makes it more easily accessible for everyone: a more usable and accessible Internet is a better Internet. Plus Schema and microdata is HTML5 compliant, so by taking part you’re helping to move everybody onto a more flexible and easier to develop t’interweb. It’ll give you a warm and fuzzy feeling inside.

implementation

• Use the rich snippets testing tool to check you’ve implemented correctly and see how Google might show your data, if it feels like it. If you’re having any unexpected issues this great Knol article will tell you why you’re getting an error
  .
• You don’t need to think of these microdata elements as things that need to be added to your page. You can simply add the tags to your existing data, and they can be included within each other – for example if your recipe summary says that it feeds four people, include the “yield” span class within your “summary” span class:

<p class=”summary”>
Super tasty recipe that
                 <span class=”yield”>
                 serves four</span>
</p>

• If you’re an e-commerce site you simply have to be using microdata markup or you’re missing a trick.

TIP: price ranges

Although not officially supported, rich snippets allow the pricerange attribute if you need to display a bigger selection of prices.
.

• Continue to use Google Product feeds and Places as normal – microdata doesn’t supercede them, but marking up your data will only help your presence in natural listings.
  .
• Be careful your <div> or CSS classes don’t clash with microdata markup, and don’t use hidden divs.

 

summary

Use HTML data and microdata. BOOM! But seriously, you want to give your business and products the best chance of being seen and if you ignore microdata you’re not doing that. Don’t allow your competitors to gain an edge.

 

the useful resources

For more information see also:

• Schema.org
• Google Webmaster Tools microdata help
• Google Webmaster Tools microdata FAQ
• Rich snippets testing tool
• Microformats.org wiki