Google Authorship Troubleshooting: Article Attributed to Wrong Author

Posted by MarkTraphagen

This post was originally in YouMoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author’s views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of Moz, Inc.

One of the toughest Google Authorship troubleshooting requests we get at the Google Authorship and Author Rank community on Google+ concerns misattribution of Authorship in Google search results.

Misattribution (Google Search showing an author photo of someone other than the actual author of a content piece) occurs because over the past year-and-a-half or so Google has become more aggressive in trying to attribute Authorship. In many cases, Google will take what appears to be an “educated guess” at the author of a piece.

But sometimes, the fault of misattribution is more the site’s responsibility, and that’s when some careful troubleshooting (ok, outright sleuthing!) can often uncover the problem.

Here’s an example mystery attribution that we were able to track down and solve:

Community moderator Ann Smarty asked us to look at this result for a search for “Time-Saving Apps for Social Media Promotion”:

A very nice Google Authorship rich snippet search result, right? Only one problem. Nwosu Mavtrevor is not the author of that article! A woman named Anna Fox is, as the author box at the bottom of the article clearly displays:

So how did Google switch authors?

Step one in our investigation was to do a quick on-page search to see whether Mr. Mavtrevor’s name appeared anywhere on the same page as Ms. Fox’s article. In the majority of mis-attribution cases it turns out that Google grabbed the displayed author from that author’s name appearing somewhere on the content page.

Sure enough, there was Mr. Mavtrevor, early in the post’s comment thread:

But out of all the commenters on that page, why did Google latch on to his name for attributing authorship to the page? His comment isn’t even the first one in the thread.

Perhaps Mr. Mavtrevor has claimed Authorship for the same domain. So our next step was to search for him on Google+. Thankfully he has a rather unique name, so we quickly located his Google+ profile.

Sure enough, Mr. Mavtrevor has the netmediablog.com site listed in the Contributor To section of his profile links:

The Contributor To section of a Google+ profile is where Google looks for content that the profile owner claims to have authored. The other half of the required two-way linkage is a link back from that domain to the same Google+ profile.

So why has Mr. Navtrevor put Netmediablog in his Contributor To links? Because he legitimately is an author there!

Mystery solved! Er…not so fast…

Normally at this point, I would declare case closed and ask my Mr. Watson to write it up in his journal. But there’s more to this case.

Usually a misattribution like this where two people have linked their Contributor To to the same site occurs when the page author does not have a clear byline on the page. Google’s recent Authorship FAQ recommends “[s]howing a clear byline on the page, stating the author wrote the article and using the same name as used on their Google+ profile.” Doing that usually clears up most misattribution problems of this type.

But not in this case. Ms. Fox has a byline at the top of the article, and the name exactly matches her Google+ profile name:

So what gives now? How could Google possibly misattribute this article when it appears that every clue to its real authorship is right there on the page?

The answer was just a click away.

Page vs. domain authorship

Google allows for there to be a “default” Authorship for a site. Usually this is the Authorship profile (if any) associated with the home page of the domain.

When we clicked on Anna Fox’s byline on her article, instead of going to a unique author page for her as we expected, the link takes us to the blog’s home page. And the source code for the home page shows that Mr. Mavtrevor has his authorship markup on it, and thus is seen as the default author for site.

So it was our conclusion that Google followed the byline link to the home page and picked up the authorship attribution from there.

An ounce of prevention

Let’s get to some practical takeaways from this investigation that can help prevent Authorship misattribution, particularly for multi-author sites.

1. Give each author on your site a unique author page. Most up-to-date WordPress themes and frameworks (such as Genesis) include the option to set up unique author pages (under the Users tab). These templates automatically create a byline on each page created by a certain author, and the byline automatically links to that author’s author page. When this is the case, each author only needs to link to her or his Google+ profile once from their unique author page (and of course, link back from the Contributor To section of their G+ profiles) and they are done. Google will follow the links from their bylines to their author pages to their G+ profiles.

If your site doesn’t have such a theme, you should consider coding in author pages that are linked to by each author’s content.

2. Make sure each author’s byline name exactly matches her or his Google+ name. As mentioned above, Google now recommends that as a best practice. In most cases where we’ve seen misattribution just adding the byline name (in the form “by firstname lastname”), and placing it at the beginning of the content, are enough to correct the problem. The only reason that didn’t work in our test case above was the fact that the byline linked to the site’s home page.

3. Avoid using domain authorship attribution. Even though many themes and plugins (such as the popular Yoast SEO Plugin) offer the option to set up authorship for the home page/domain, we now recommend against using it. Google recently made clear that Authorship should only be applied when “[t]he URL/page contains a single article (or subsequent versions of the article) or single piece of content, by the same author. This means that the page isn’t a list of articles or an updating feed.” In addition, they noted that, “Authorship annotation is useful to searchers because it signals that a page conveys a real person’s perspective or analysis on a topic. Since property listings and product pages are less perspective/analysis oriented, we discourage using authorship in these cases”

Since home pages, and about pages and such don’t fit the descriptions above, authorship is not intended for them. My concern in light of these guidelines is primarily with watering down one’s Author Rank (if and when that becomes a reality). But in terms of our present topic, I also believe that refraining from attributing authorship to a homepage or entire domain will help avoid misattribution issues of the type we saw above.

Conclusion

Google Authorship is an evolving product. It has already gone through some major changes since the summer of 2011 when it first went public. We can expect that as time goes by Google will get better and better at correct author attribution. In the meantime, though, it is best to be vigilant for misattributions of your content, and to employ a triage similar to the one we walked through in this post when they happen. Follow the best practices we outlines above, and there’s hope that you’ll head those issues off before they happen.

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Long URLs now more searchable

Have you ever tried to search for a really long URL on the Majestic Site Explorer, and then noticed because of the number of characters, the formatting of the homepage has been misaligned? Well, we have now improved the configuration so all information will be contained on the one web page. By all means try […]

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3 Methods Fueled by Data and Tools to Earn More (and Better) Links – Whiteboard Friday

Posted by randfish

Most conversations about links today involve terms like “better links,” or “high-quality links.” Those are the kinds we all hope to earn, but what exactly defines a “better link?” How do we know whether a link qualifies, or is only so-so?

In today’s Whiteboard Friday, Rand clears up the confusion and offers a few clear attributes of better links, walking us through three great ways to find them.

PRO Tip: Learn more about reclaiming links at Moz Academy.

For reference, here’s a still of this week’s whiteboard!

Video Transcription

Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Today I’m going to talk a little bit about some data and tools-fueled methodologies to acquire more and better links and, in fact, some links that you may not have been able to find in other ways. So I’ll start by saying what does it mean to have a better link? Well, I mean really three things.

(A) Editorially given. By that I mean not a link that you go buy. Not a link that you go, sort of, acquire or leave on someone’s site unbeknownst to them or get listed in a directory. I mean an editorially given link in that the person who is giving the link runs the website or at least the page where it’s being given from, and they intended to link to you and want to link to you and it’s out of no other desire other than to share your site or the content that you have, the work that you are doing. They have a relationship with you, they like you, they want to recommend you. Editorially given.

(B) From a high-quality, trusted, and trafficked, well-trafficked website, something that actually might get you clicks in addition to providing link value from a search ranking perspective.

And (C) you’ve actually got a half-decent shot of getting that link. If I’m just showing you link methodologies that are going to show you, “Oh, yeah, it’d be real nice to get a link on that Whitehouse.gov page,” it’s not going to happen, man. Bad news, that’s going to be a tough one.

But these three, if we aim for these three, in particular aim for a decent shot at getting it, I think we get some good ones out of this.

So method number one, follower outreach, essentially, the practice of outreach for links, reaching out to someone and saying, “Hey, we have this piece of content you might like” or “We have this potential relationship we could build” or “Hey, I notice that you do some things that are interesting and maybe we could have some overlap here. Perhaps I could contribute in some way to something that you’re doing.”

Cool, works a lot of the time. But it’s very hit or miss. Except that the odds go way higher, way in your favor if you actually have a relationship, a pre-existing knowledge of one another and a mutual “like-and-respect” situation. That’s why outreach to followers, to people who actually already know you and like you is way more effective.

So this is Followerwonk. You could use a tool of your choice. You might find people on Plus or some of the other social metrics tools.

But Followerwonk, I can go right in here, and on the Sort Followers tab, once I’ve logged in, I can sort my followers and say, “Show me a list of them.” Then I can export to CSV. The only trick, once I export to CSV, I’m looking for people with high social authority who have websites that I might want to do outreach to, and this is such a simple thing. If you want, you can get a little fancier. You can do things like put data in here, add a column and use Richard Baxter’s Mozscape plug-in, so that you can filter by domain authority of the website that’s in their bio and only outreach to people who haven’t already linked to you.

But, generally speaking, I’ve found that even if somebody’s linking to you from one page, doing outreach to them, getting that second link, reaching out to folks, especially when you’ve targeted some of these people, this is huge value. I’ve seen outreach of this kind work tremendously well, especially because since they already know you, this guy and some dude in marketing are like, “They’re all following me. They’re following my account. That means they care about what I have to say.”

So if I outreach them and they say “Oh, yeah I checked out, I know something about them too. I’ve got their bio. I know what site they represent. I know who they are. I can interact with them on Twitter.” This works wonderfully. This is one of my favorite, favorite outreach methodologies. It starts with social.

Method two: Just-discovered competition. So many of you are probably already aware, but in Open Site Explorer, there’s this new tab called Just Discovered Links, way over on the right. It’s technically in beta, but it gets a lot of great links. It surfaces a lot of great links that are pointing to your website or to a competitor’s website.

This is the key. What I want you to do is go plug in a competitor. Start with just one, one of your competitor’s websites. Go over to the Just Discovered tab, and take a look at what people are writing about them and linking to them right now. I try and go for direct competitors, the kind of competitors where it seems like a surprise if an editorial, like a news publication or a blogger or someone in the field, an industry thought leader writes about them, but doesn’t write about you. That’s always like, “Oh, if you’re going to mention one, you should mention several.”

This is where the key comes in, because you go here and you look at stuff that was literally just published in the last few hours or couple of days, and then you do the outreach right then. You could do it through commenting and just saying something about yourself like, “Hey, I’m not going to link drop because I don’t want to be spammy, but if you haven’t already checked out Moz, we’re a competitor to site XYZ, and we’d love to connect and follow up. Maybe you’d be interested in writing a story about some of the stuff that we’re doing. I’d happy to fill you in. Reach out to me at Rand@Moz.” Something like that.

Or you could go find their e-mail contact information if you don’t want to make it public in the comments and reach out in that way. The trick is because these things have just been written, just been published, your outreach attempts go way higher. And you can look at domain authority. You can sort in order of domain authority. So you can sort of look at and say, “Oh, yeah, I don’t want to reach out to that guy, but yes, yes, yes.” Ideal.

Methodology number three: “Why you no link? Why?” I’ll show you what I’m talking about.

So this is Fresh Web Explorer. You could use another service. You could use Mention.net. By the way, I don’t mean to say that Open Site Explorer is the only way to do this. You could use Majestic or something like that for this same thing, if you’re not a Moz subscriber. But assuming you are, all three of these are part of your subscription.

So Fresh Web Explorer, I can go in and search for, this is key. I know the Fresh Web Explorer search query, it’s sort of like the Yahoo! of old, where’d you do like very sophisticated links types of searches. So make sure you’re familiar with all the modifiers. But this one, in particular, I love. It’s Moz, my brand name, minus RD:moz.com. There’s a space in between here, but no space otherwise.

The reason this works so well is because I’m essentially saying, “Show me people who have mentioned my brand name, Moz, but are not linking to any page on my site, and show me the ones that have just done that.” Because this is Fresh Web Explorer, so it’s going to show me recent stuff. Then, if I want, I can click on a specific day or those kinds of things. I can export the CSV over here.

But, basically, I look at these and I go, “Huh. Interesting. So this is four days old. They mentioned Moz, but they didn’t link to us. Man, that’s a good, reasonable feed authority.” You can get domain authority as well in the CSV. “Man, I should reach out to them. That reporter, that blogger, that writer, that person who owns that website, why did they talk about me and not link to my site?”

It tends to be the case that this is just oversight. And if you just reach out and are like, “Hey, I loved that you covered us, really appreciated it. By the way, noticed you didn’t link. Was that intentional? Could we get a link back?” Boom. It’s just super easy, high-quality link building right off the bat.

These three methodologies will all help you with those. And for those of you who are doing link-building on a regular basis, I love this format. Whether you use our tools or someone else’s, it’s a great way to go.

All right, everyone. Take care.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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From Zero to a Million: 20 Lessons for Starting an Internet Marketing Agency

Posted by NiftyMarketing

Mike’s disclaimer: This is not a post about how awesome I am, or how there is only one way to build an internet marketing agency. It’s a combination of stories and thoughts about what I have gone through building Nifty Marketing.

When I started in 2009 there was very little information online about starting, running, or growing an Internet Marketing Agency. The ones that did exist were from superstars that charged a billion dollars an hour. I am not a superstar. My company started in Burley, Idaho. Here’s a rap about my town I wrote.

My hope with this post is that a few of you who are out there hustling will benefit from doing some of the things that I did, and most of the things that I didn’t.

Start smart

I was in my final semester at BYU-Idaho and had accepted a job to be the chief marketing officer of Rove Pest Control after spending my summers during college as a door-to-door salesman for them. I thought my future was set. But, due to some changes at Rove I knew that I was going to have to have to find a different career. My wife was pregnant, we had just started building a house in Burley, and I had a full load of credits. My two favorite classes were a basic HTML class (that used Don’t Make Me Think as the textbook) and a web business class for which we had to start an online business and make/lose money. Naturally, as any true Idahoan would do, I started HugeIdahoPotato.com and sold potatoes bigger than heads to people across the country. The website sucks; I’m pretty sure I got it penalized within a year of creating it. But I fell in love with internet marketing in the process of building that site, and I keep it up as a remembrance of where I started.

Lesson 1: Start with a reason that’s more than money

After making around $100 on the site I knew that I had found my career choice. I also knew that I was going to live in Burley, Idaho, and that I wanted to bring non-agricultural jobs to the town. I can’t tell you how sad it is for many of my friends who grew up in a town they knew they couldn’t move back to if they wanted to make a decent living. I wanted to change that. I still do. It’s one of the main driving points for me. Of course you need to make money, but if that is the only thing you are looking for as a business owner then eventually you will fail. You will make decisions that aren’t for your clients, or for your staff, or for the community; you will get short-term gains and create a long term failure.

Lesson 2: Start by interning/working at an agency

This is possibly my biggest regret of my career. I started Nifty Marketing with literally no experience at all. I had no friends in the industry, I had no idea what I was doing, how SEO companies were structured, or even how to do anything beyond what I had learned in college. I dove into blogs, but at that time I didn’t know who to trust and read some really awful advice. I was not a good SEO. I was not a good PPC advertiser. I could have saved myself at least two years if I had worked for someone who could have pointed me in the right direction first.

Lesson 3: Focus on something specific

Business wasn’t going very well. I had a few clients, and I decided I needed some help, so I signed up for SEOBook. There was a feedback forum, so I posted my super-awful website for Nifty Marketing. I didn’t even own the domain at the time. (I had TheNiftyWay.com, and it wasn’t until later—by some good grace of the heavens—that the person who owned NiftyMarketing.com let it go, and I bought it for $7.99 with a GoDaddy code.) When I posted my site on SEOBook, I got brutal feedback. People told me it sucked. But someone in the forum said something that changed my life forever.

He said something like:

“You offer SEO, Web Design, and PPC. That is exactly the same as 100,000s of companies around the world, who by the looks of things are better than you at it. What can you be the best at? What can you become known for?”

The comment hit me like a ton of bricks. The few clients I had at the time were really small businesses in Idaho, and I had been spending a lot of time in Google Maps. I realized that I enjoyed that aspect of marketing, and was getting clients ranked. So, I redesigned my site, changed my messaging, and decided to focus. I became a local SEO.

Lesson 4: Start with networking, not cold calls

I remember quite vividly trying to use my door-to-door sales skills to try and cold call businesses to get work. I grabbed a phone book and called people with big ads and no websites because I figured that they had budget. What I found was that I was caller #5 for that week offering the same thing as everyone else. Worst of all, everyone “knew a guy who knows a guy who could do it” for them. So, I put away the phonebook and started talking to my friends and asking if they knew people who needed websites and marketing. That’s when leads started coming in. Then, I wrote an email to David Mihm on August 7, 2009, and asked him how I could become an expert in the local search field. This was his response:

The best advice I can give you is to optimize the local listings of a bunch of clients. The more you “play” in the space, the better you’ll get at teasing out the parts of the algorithm that really matter.

Beyond that, subscribe to these blogs:

http://www.blumenthals.com/blog

http://www.localsearchnews.net

http://gesterling.wordpress.com

http://www.searchinfluence.com/blog

http://solaswebdesign.net/wordpress

http://www.smallbusinesssem.com

http://www.hyperlocalblogger.com

http://www.sixthmanmarketing.com/blog

http://www.expand2web.com/blog

http://www.devbasu.com

http://www.martijnbeijk.com

http://www.seoverflow.com/blog

I immediately dove into every one of these sites and learned everything I possibly could about local search. I took notes, and then I started testing and haven’t ever stopped.

While doing that, I realized the most valuable networking lesson I ever learned was to simply share. I started blogging, which led to guest posts on SEJ, and I attended a few small conferences, one of which was the first ever LocalU. I offered to help any way that I could. Fast forward to 2013, and I am a LocalU Faculty Member and speak at conferences year-round. It isn’t because I am special. It’s because I am passionate about the space and I am willing to share information and help as much as I can. Almost every client we have at Nifty Marketing comes as a referral from clients, friends, blog posts, webinars, and conferences. Not one client came from a cold call. I will forever be in debt to David Mihm and the rest of the local search community for teaching me such a valuable lesson.

Lesson 5: It’s good to have funding, it’s better to have partners, and it’s best to bootstrap alone

From the first year of my business until now I have had opportunities to get funding and take on partners. I have never done it. I am not saying that it’s bad to do either of these things, but if you take a close look at our industry you will see that a lot of funded companies and partnerships don’t make it.

I remember very clearly going to dinner with some guys from Blueglass in my first year and thinking, “Man, I wish I could be part of that company.” And while I respect the founders a great deal they took a massive risk and it didn’t workout. Many of them had successful businesses before then, and while the idea of a Mega Company that can make tens or hundreds of millions is alluring, the chance of you being successful and earning more on your own is better. Sure, extremely fast growth and funding means you come to market quicker. But by growing at the slow rate of 2x per year (which isn’t that slow), I have been able to continually innovate and offer better services without taking do-or-die risks.

I am very glad I bootstrapped. I own 100% of my company. I can make 100% of the decisions about its future. I don’t have to pay a silent partner a large chunk that makes cash flow an issue. I don’t have to make short-term decisions for a board that hurts the long-term vision I have. And I make enough that I stopped caring about the money around year three; slow and steady wins the prize.

I know that there are many successful companies that haven’t gone the way of solo bootstrapping. At the top of the partnership list for me is Avalaunch Media. But in order to do what they have done you have get big enough to support multiple owners and find amazing partners that can all pull in the same direction. With around 50% of marriages failing, how many partnerships in business actually work out? They are definitely not the norm, and I respect them immensely for it.

Grow smarter

Lesson 6: You are in the business of providing a service, not SEO

I remember becoming a good SEO. I also remember getting amazing results for clients and still getting complaints from them. I thought they were the problem. Then I realized I was. I thought back to the days of pest control and remember the company training techs to take their time at customers’ houses. You see, you could service a house in 15 minutes or even less if you hustled. But if you did that, customers would complain that the work was sloppy and it shouldn’t cost so much. Instead, you should take your time, get down on your hands and knees, and look around. Take notes and pace yourself. Then, customers felt like the service was worth it. They weren’t paying for the product. They could buy the product at Home Depot. They were paying for the service.

Comparing this to Internet marketing, I knew I had done a great job gaining more traffic, but the clients had no idea what was being done. They didn’t understand what they were paying for and subsequently thought that I was unnecessary. Most small businesses don’t care or understand what a title tag, meta description, an exact match, a naked URL, duplicate content, etc is. So telling them you changed/created these in a report without actually showing them physical pictures is pointless.

We started creating custom reports with tons of arrows and screenshots explaining the work that we were doing. We starting giving them a complete list of the links and citations we were building. We stopped sending over a raw list of traffic counts and started providing analysis of the traffic that websites were getting, and our clients stopped complaining that they didn’t know what we were doing. Clear communication is what the business of service is all about.

Lesson 7: Read The E-myth

I was doing everything myself. Everything. Then, I tried to have some people on oDesk help me. My wife even did some of the citation work. The only problem was all the information was in my head. I had very little of the processes and information organized, and I didn’t have time to focus on organization when I had so much client work, sales, and bookkeeping to do. That is what The E-myth is about. It talks about the difference between being a technician and being a business owner. It talks about the need to build your business like a franchise with training manuals, easy to follow processes, and the need to not burn yourself or your first few employees out.

When I read this book, I changed my business, and I have never looked back. We were able to start hiring people locally instead of having contractors on oDesk, and we centralized information and grew. While we aren’t perfect at systems and delegation, we could have never grown without improvement in those areas. It’s still the case.

Lesson 8: Raise your prices; raise your minimums

When I was the only employee in my company, doing everything myself, I could still make good margins and be the lowest price around. I took clients at $200-$500 per month, built some websites, and put tons of hours in, and as long as I could get to where I had $40-50k per year in revenue, I had a decent wage for Burley. That was my first goal. I could be flexible with what I made and could literally have no cost other than a couple of tools and my personal time. Employees, though, cost more than time. Employees cost money. And regardless of how much money you bring in, an employee’s wage is constant. If I wanted employees that were good, there way no way I could maintain my pricing and minimums, providing the level of service that was needed. We had to raise prices. We changed our minimum to $1,500 and determined that we would do work for no less than $100 per hour. The types of clients got better, and we had enough revenue to bring in talented people who increased the quality of our work. I know that many SEO firms/companies can charge a lot more than $100 per hour, and we do as well, depending on the type of project—but for the average small/medium business this is a price that they can afford and you can do good work for.

Lesson 9: Learn when to pass on bad clients

When I was hungry I took whatever client walked through the door. I took abuse. Emails that called me names, clients who would not listen to my advice and would then blame me when things went wrong. Clients that paid three or four months late but would complain when I didn’t answer my phone on the first ring.

I kept them because I felt like I had to have the revenue. What I didn’t realize is that if I had taken the time I was putting into their project and put it elsewhere, I could have replaced the revenue plus a lot more and had a much better quality of life.

If you are not happy, then no amount of money will make up for it, so fire your bad clients, pass on the red flags, and figure something else out. Remember Lesson 1.

Retain

Lesson 10: Be trustworthy

The fastest way to lose clients and employees is to lie to them. If you want both to stick with you through thick and thin, then there has to be 100% trust. I personally think that the more transparent you can be all around the more you will be trusted.

One of our core values at Nifty is to be “willingly naked.” Not literally, but figuratively. We have to be willing to share what we learn, take feedback, tell our clients the brutal truth even if we know they don’t want to hear it. But you have to be willing to take feedback yourself.

Lesson 11: Reward your team

I am not going to pretend to be good at this. I know I should say “thank you” about a thousand times more than I do. Instead, I find myself more apt to criticize when things go poorly. It’s something I am hoping to constantly get better at. The team at Nifty is amazing and they take a ton of stress, responsibility, and problems on themselves and do an awesome job.

Here’s a few things that I have done at times:

• Thank-you gift cards


• Revenue sharing


• Company lunches


• Pop-Tarts (long story)


• Big Christmas parties


• The best office in Burley, Idaho (complete with a moose, a monster, bricks, and staked firewood)

Lesson 12: Auto-renew your contracts

When it comes to smaller businesses, I have found that month-to-month contracts that auto-renew and are paid by automatic credit card last longer than contracts that are 3, 6, or 12 months with renegotiations required. Bottom line, people don’t like re-signing up for a committed amount of time. Especially small business owners who believe the word “contract” is a cuss word.

Change

Lesson 13: Never stop learning new things

There are many search companies that fall behind. It’s because they don’t change. They keep blasting away at the same spammy links, the same old school designs, and the same tactics from 5-10 years ago, and they wonder why a massive amount of their client portfolio drops in rankings.

I personally start every morning by reading blogs, and I have for years. The staff spends the first part of every day doing the same thing, and we pass around articles that make an impression. It keeps us constantly thinking about innovation and learning from our great community. Another way to keep up is to constantly pitch to speak at conferences. You have deadlines around which you can build tests and case studies, and you will do everything you possibly can to be up on the latest news in the industry because you never know what questions the attendees might ask you.

Lesson 14: Request feedback

The best way to find issues in your organization is to request feedback from your staff and clients. The other day, we had a client that paused his account. This is usually a soft way to end the relationship. But, upon asking for his feedback, he said he loved working with his project manager and the work we had done, saying he would be back on track in 2 months. Then he mentioned he was hoping for faster results on a side project we were doing for him. Whose fault was it that he felt that way? It was ours. I took the opportunity to clear up the miscommunication and he was very grateful for it. If we hadn’t asked for the feedback, we might not have ever heard from him again and he definitely would have had the issue on his mind.

Lesson 15: Be pleased, but never satisfied

Nobody is perfect. Which means there is always room for improvement. There is always more than can be done, and there is always a better way. The day you stop growing and say that “it’s good enough” is the day that a competitor is going to come in and do more that you are willing to.

We have redone our proposal process multiple times. We haven’t ever been bad at it, but every time we go back to the drawing boards there is something more that we find that helps to bring in better clients. Right now we are testing out a live walk-through of the proposal, as compared to just sending over a PDF and asking for questions.

SAVE

Lesson 16: Content isn’t king, cash is

If you want to run a successful business of any type, then ensure that you aren’t running cash-poor. I have followed Dave Ramsey’s personal financial guidelines for my business and find that it’s very conservative. While it might limit the speed at which we grow, it eliminates a massive amount of risk.

Dave recommends having a personal emergency fund (and in this case business fund) of 3-6 months of expenses on hand at all times. That means that if you are going to pay yourself (your only start-up expense) $3,000 per month, then you should have between $9,000-$18,000 in cash before starting up. At $65,000 per month of expenses, you should have between $195,000-$390,000 in reserves. That’s a lot of cash on hand for a small business, but if clients unexpectedly drop, or major industry changes necessitate a completely new model, you will have the cash to make good decisions and not desperate ones. I started out around the six-month reserve when I was smaller, and as time has gone by and we have a more diversified revenue stream, I am comfortable between 3-4 months of cash on hand.

Lesson 17: Pay yourself modestly, and get out of personal debt

I pay myself $4,000 per month. The rest goes to growing the business, savings, and other ventures. Now, you need to realize that I live in Burley, Idaho, and it’s literally hard to spend money here. I could pay myself $2,000 if it wasn’t for Amazon Prime. But, at a very young age, my wife and I decided that we would have no personal debt and worked really hard to pay off our house and buy cars with cash.

I know many financial experts will tell you that leveraging your home is the best financing you have but let me tell you that the freedom of owning your house outright means that you can make better business decisions over the course of your life. You wont have the “what if I lose my family’s home” question circling around in the back of your mind and you can actually take bigger risks, and never make business financial decisions based off of your personal financial needs.

Lesson 18: Don’t sign up for every Internet marketing tool under the sun

Tool subscriptions are reoccurring costs. It’s very easy to spend thousands of dollars a month on different tools you don’t have the cash to do that when you start up. When I first started, I only used Raven Tools, but quickly added a list of 10 to 15 tools like Moz. Occasionally, we have to go through the list of tools and find out what we are actually using and get rid of the rest. I’m not going to pretend there is one tool to rule them all, because everyone has very different needs. The key is to quickly identify which tools work for you and which don’t, and to stop paying monthly for the ones that don’t.

Lesson 19: Diversify

If you get to where you own a successful guest-blogging company, or a successful SEO company, or a successful content-marketing company, or whatever niche you decide to work in, then realize the problem with a niche is that you are putting all of your eggs in one basket. If that basket disappears, you’re screwed.

Try going after more than one niche. We opened a division focused on SEO and website development for lawyers called NiftyLaw.com. I also owned a newspaper in my home town, and am working on some new projects so that I am not 100% reliant on Internet marketing revenue.

Lesson 20: Find a few things to help save yourself

Owning a business is hard work. It’s mentally draining, and it’s very hard to shut down your mind after constantly thinking. There will be times where you need to save yourself from burning out, so ensure that you have hobbies that can get your mind completely off of work. I golf, mountain bike, and travel with my family. I also don’t do any work on Sundays at all.

Overall

I have loved starting an Internet marketing company. It’s been hard; I’m going gray and I’m only 29.

I know that you might not agree with certain things I think are important, and that’s fine. The best part about business is that it’s a “choose your own adventure” storybook with no “right” answers.

Please add your own questions and advice in the comments. I hope that this is a post that can have more insight in the comments than the article itself, and I look forward to learning from all of you!

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How to Use Tumblr for SEO and Social Media Marketing

Posted by TakeshiYoung

This post was originally in YouMoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author’s views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of Moz, Inc.

An introduction to Tumblr

There are so many social media platforms out there today that online marketers have to be concerned about when promoting content online, that it can be easy to overlook some of the important ones.

Tumblr is one of those social networks which is often overlooked, but which has tremendous potential for SEO and social media marketing. I myself was slow to adopt Tumblr as a social media platform, but once I started using it I became hooked by its power and simplicity. Hopefully by the end of this post, you’ll feel the same.

In this post today I will be covering 1) What Tumblr is and how it works, 2) The benefits of Tumblr compared to other social networks, and 3) Actionable advice on how you can use Tumblr for online marketing, including specific content ideas.

Sounds good? Let’s get started.

Why should I care about Tumblr?

Before we get too far, let me provide some stats about Tumblr which should help put things into perspective:

• 130.5 million blogs on Tumblr, as of August 2013


• 28th highest traffic site on the web according to Comscore


• 300 million unique monthly visitors according to Yahoo


• 50% of Tumblr users are under the age of 25


• 53.5% of Tumblr visitors are female

As you can see, the numbers are massive. There are now over 130 million Tumblr blogs (known as “tumblrogs”), which makes Tumblr the largest hosted blog platform on the web, compared to the 70 million blogs hosted on WordPress.com. It has 300 million monthly visitors, basically 15% of all Internet users. And it has a demographic that is unique in that 50% of the users are under 25, many of whom are teenagers (whereas teens are reportedly ditching Facebook in droves).

Big brands have taken notice of this too. In May, Yahoo purchased Tumblr for $1.1 billion (the largest purchase of a consumer Internet company since Google bought YouTube), and many of the world’s largest brands already have a presence on Tumblr.

Clearly, if you’re not on Tumblr by now, you’re falling behind the curve.

What is Tumblr?

So what the heck is this Tumblr thing anyway? It can be hard to describe Tumblr because it combines the functionality of many different kinds of sites.

The way I like to think of Tumblr is as a cross between WordPress and Facebook– Tumblr has all the blogging functionality of a blog platform such as WordPress, but also includes all the features of a social site such as hashtags, following, sharing, and liking. Tumblr is similar to Pinterest in many ways, except instead of multiple boards you have a single blog.

So although Tumblr is one of the most popular blogging (or microblogging) platforms on the web, it goes beyond just being a blog and allows users to share and like each other’s content, follow other Tumblr blogs, and discover new content through hashtags. It’s a blog platform with built-in social functionality and incredible viral potential.

The benefits of Tumblr

Ok, so now we have a better idea of what Tumblr is and why it’s important, but what are the benefits of Tumblr compared to other social networks and blogging platforms? There are 5 key benefits:

1) Dofollow links

First the biggie. Links from Tumblr, unlike most other social networks are dofollow. Tumblr is at its core a blogging platform, and you have full control of how your tumblrog appears, including using dofollow links on your site.

Where things get interesting is when you consider the social aspect of Tumblr. Tumblr has social sharing functionality (called “reblogging” in Tumblr parlance) built right in, and if you have a popular post it will be reposted to many other tumblrogs.

The thing is that each of these reblogs is a dofollow backlink to your original post! That means if you have a post that is reblogged 100 times, your tumblr blog just got 100 dofollow backlinks! For even more fun, you can include a link within the post itself. By doing so, both your original post on Tumblr, and the site linked to within the post will receive the backlinks.

Just imagine if every time your content got shared on Facebook, all those shares were dofollow backlinks. Wouldn’t that be nice? With Tumblr, this is the case. The same is also true with Google+ (Pinterest also recently dofollowed their links), but Tumblr has a more active user community and it’s much easier to have your content go viral on Tumblr.

Of course, you will want to be careful about what kind of anchor text you’re using in this post-Penguin world, but if you’re looking for some easy, dofollow backlinks, Tumblr is the place to get them.

2) Great content discovery

Another great benefit of Tumblr is that it has a great content discovery system built into it, thanks to its use of hashtags. If you’re ever looking for great images or memes, try searching Tumblr for the hashtag, and you’ll find some good material.

The great thing about Tumblr is that people actually use hashtags for content discovery (unlike, say, Facebook). This means that by using relevant and popular tags, it’s super easy for your content to get discovered on Tumblr, even if you don’t have many followers.

I have literally created brand new tumblrogs from scratch, and received dozens of reblogs for my content, even though I had zero followers. And remember, on Tumblr reblogs are dofollow backlinks. This is definitely not the case on social networks such as Facebook, where your content probably isn’t going to get a lot of love unless you already have a large number of followers.

3) Content testing ground

Another use for Tumblr is as a content testing ground. If you do a lot of social media marketing, you probably have tons of memes and images that you are considering posting to your Facebook page, or you if you create your own memes you may have different variations of a meme that you might want to test.

One of the ways that I like to use Tumblr is as a testing ground for new content that I’ve created. Tumblr’s dashboard is chronological like Twitter vs the more curated approach of Facebook’s news feed, and the upshot of this is that you can post a lot more content at once to Tumblr than you would want to on Facebook. Tumblr fans are more forgiving of less-than-outstanding content because they can simply scroll past it, similar to how users browse Pinterest.

This makes Tumblr a great place to post a lot of content to find which pieces perform the best. Then you can take the most popular pieces and repost them to your other social media profiles such as Facebook. And all the content you produce on Tumblr has a chance of being discovered later, thanks to the use of hashtags.

4) Microsites

Tumblr is the most popular microblogging platforms on the planet, which also makes it an ideal platform for setting up microsites. You won’t get the same amount of flexibility as you would with say a self-hosted WordPress blog, but tumblrogs are quick to set up, simple to manage, and free. And if you want to switch from using a tumblr.com subdomain to your own domain name, it’s easy to switch to a domain name you own in the Tumblr settings.

Using Tumblr for microsites is a great way to build up a collection of web properties with decent PageRank that you can then point back to your main site. If you consistently post high quality content, it’s easy to get these tumblrogs to PR2 – PR4 within a few months.

Microsites are also a great option if your main brand is super serious, and you don’t necessarily want to associate it with memes and other silly content that does well on Tumblr.

5) Branding

Last, but certainly not least, Tumblr is another tool in your arsenal to promote your brand online. In addition to the other major social sites such as Facebook and Twitter, Tumblr provides another opportunity for you to establish your web presence. It’s another chance for your to engage with fans, build relationships with potential customers, and get your brand name out there, especially if you want to target a younger demographic. As the online marketer Pat Flynn always says, the best marketing strategy online is to Be Everywhere.

Content ideas for Tumblr

Hopefully by now you’re convinced of what a great opportunity Tumblr is for link building, content marketing, and branding. You may have even gone ahead and created your own tumblrog. Good work. But what kind of content does well on Tumblr?

Tumblr, like most other social sites, is a visual medium. That means that captivating images and pictures will do better on Tumblr than long form text. If you’re already conducting successful social media campaigns on sites such as Facebook and Google+, then reusing the same content you’re posting there is a good strategy.

If you want some specific example of content to post on Tumblr, here are 4 types of content that I’ve found perform extremely well Tumblr:

1) Memes

Memes are my favorite type of content to promote on social media. Memes are just the ideal type of content for people to consume and share via social media channels, and they’re viral almost by definition. You can have a lot of success just by curating funny memes related to your niche that you find across the web, but the greatest potential lies in creating your own. If you want to try your hand at making memes with some serious viral potential, check out this post I wrote for the Moz blog.

2) Photos/illustrations

As with Pinterest and Facebook, compelling images are some of the most popular pieces of content on Tumblr. This is especially true since there is a huge userbase of teenagers with attention spans that are shorter than even most Twitter addicts.

Creating great photos isn’t easy, but it’s not impossible to do if you have a access to a DSLR. Even if your camera equipment isn’t up to snuff, apps such as Instagram can take your ordinary photos and give them a vintage feel that appeals to the teen and hipster demographic.

Drawings and illustrations also do very well on Tumblr, and if you have an in-house graphic design team, definitely leverage that. Even if you don’t have graphical talent, you can go to sites such as Fiverr, Elance, and DeviantArt to get custom artwork created for you that’s specific to your niche.

If all else fails, you can just curate other people’s photos and artwork and see some results, but always be mindful of any copyright issues, and give credit where credit is due.

3) Quotes

Quotes are an amazingly easy type of content to create that surprisingly few marketers are taking advantage of. Quotes are great because they’re simple to create, even if you don’t even have any graphical talent. Just take an inspirational quote, put it over an attractive image (or even just a plain background), and you suddenly have a piece of content that can go viral not just on Tumblr, but on sites like Facebook, Pinterest, and Google+ as well. It’s super easy.

4) Animated GIFs

Like Google+, Tumblr allows you to use animated GIFs in your posts. These are incredibly popular with Tumblr users.

Now, creating animated GIFs is beyond my abilities, but it’s really simple to just take existing animated GIFs, add a clever caption to them, and post them on your tumblrog. Instant backlinks, guaranteed.

When my client asks me why their rankings fluctuate every day, I’m like…

For a great example of this, check out the This Advertising Life Tumblr. It’s an incredibly funny site, and has a PageRank of 5 to boot. You can easily find great animated GIFs to use by searching Tumblr for tags such as “animated GIF” or simply “GIF”. There are also sites such as ForGIFS which contain nothing but funny animated GIFs.

Wrap-up

Tumblr is one of the largest social media and blogging platforms in the world, yet it is often ignored by online marketers. Hopefully this post has showed you why you should add Tumblr to your marketing mix, as well as provided you with concrete content ideas you can use to drive success on your tumblrog.

I have built dozens of Tumblr blogs over the past year, and I can guarantee you that if you use the content ideas above, and post on a consistent basis, you will be able to build up a large following on Tumblr and build some strong backlinks to your sites, as well as promote your content and build your brand online.

If you have any questions, feel free to post in the comments or hit me up on Twitter. You can also check out more of my ramblings on my blog. This post was adapted from a presentation I delivered at SMX Toronto.

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Using the Correct Hreflang Tag: A New Generator Tool

Posted by Aleyda

One of the challenges that International SEOs face is correctly targeting the right web presence to the appropriate search audience. Let’s start with a couple of scenarios with these challenges so you can see clearly what I’m talking about.

If I search from a Mexican IP (using a Proxy service, to simulate being in Mexico) in Google Mexico for “comprar zapatos en linea,” which in English means “buy shoes online” I get the following results:

As you can see, Dafiti has a Mexican website version that is ranking no. 1, which is relevant in this case; but also has a Colombian version ranking no. 3 and an Argentinian version ranking no. 7. All of them are using ccTLDs, which should “ideally” give geolocation signals to Google. Additionally, there’s a Spain site ranking no. 2 called Sarenza, also using a ccTLD.

Here’s another example, this time for a couple of branded searches, first only for the brand, “edreams” in this case, which is a popular travel site with a strong international presence and then for “vuelos edreams,” which in English means “edreams flights:”

In the previous image you can see how:

1. For its brand name results, despite being searched from Google Mexico with a Mexican IP, the first result is actually the Spain web version and the second is the American one! The Mexican web version—the relevant one for this location—is ranked third.


2. For the “vuelos edreams” branded search, the Mexican web page version ranks first (yay!) but the second result shows a webpage that belongs to their Spain site.

How can you identify that you have an international search results alignment issue like the ones shown above?

The easiest way is to take a look in Google Analytics at which countries your organic search traffic is coming from, by going to the “Audience > Demographics > Location” report (along the appropriate organic search segment) and identifying which landing pages and keywords are bringing those visitors. You can do something similar with the language, with the “Audience > Demographics > Language” report.

You can also verify potential misalignment issues of any website, by checking their top rankings in the different Google international search results (not only your own but any site, which is great if you want to analyze the competition) by using Search Metrics and SEMRush. For example, checking the rankings of the Spain version of eDreams in Google Mexico:

What can we do to prevent those issues? How can we avoid ranking with the incorrect web version in some international search results, or cannibalizing them with many non-relevant Web versions? How can we provide a relevantly targeted web version to the right international audience?

The rel=”alternate” hreflang=”x” annotation came to the rescue, initially released at the end of 2011 and updated in April of this year to support the x-default value. It’s used by Google (and Yandex too) to correctly identify the language and the country targeting of web pages, that can include them as a link element in the HTML head area, in the HTTP header or XML sitemap.

So why can we still see the misalignment issues in international search results, as the ones shown in the previous examples?

From my experience, most of the time Google does a good job in these scenarios when the hreflang annotations are correctly included. You can take a look at:

• The hreflang case study (and success story) that was shared by Saurav, a SEER coworker


• The success story published by Pete from the MediaFlow


• The test developed by Grosen and featured on the State of Search blog

Nonetheless, many sites are still not making use of the hreflang annotations. Some of the issues I’ve seen come from the fact that sometimes we don’t correctly use the hreflang annotations.

Take a look at the number of questions about hreflang in the Moz Q&A Forum and Google’s Internationalization Webmaster Forum; there are still clearly many doubts about how to use it.

One of the error scenarios is the misuse of the hreflang link element by including non-supported values, especially for the region, in the HTML’s <head> area. Google specifies in its official documentation that they support the ISO 639-1 format for the language, and optionally the ISO 3166-1 Alpha 2 format for the region.

Let’s use the web code search engine Nerdy Data to find sites that, instead of including the “en-gb” value to specify that a page is in English targeting the UK (since the ISO 3166-1 Alpha 2 code for the UK is “GB”), are mistakenly including “en-uk”:

Or, as another example, pages that are including “en-eu” to specify they’re in English and targeting to the European Union (the “EU” code in this case is not supported, since regions are limited to countries):

You can see more specifically the case of Hollister—that was shown in both of the previous cases in the Nerdy Data results—how they’re targeting the UK with the “en-uk” value and also, for their general English, German, French, Italian, and Spanish versions targeting to the European Union, they add the “eu” value for the region, which is not supported:

As you can see, although we already have a couple of tools that facilitate the hreflang validation and its inclusion in sitemaps (check out the hreflang validator from DejanSEO and the hreflang sitemap tool from the Media Flow) it would be useful to have another, even simpler tool, that would serve to generate the required hreflang tags according to the languages and countries, thus helping us to avoid the previous issues.

To fill this need, I’ve published the hreflang tags generator tool:

The tool’s goal is to assist you in the generation of the correct hreflang annotations for the different language or country versions of a specific page. You will need to place these in the HTML <head> area of each of its URLs, and that will serve as a reference to generate the rest of the hreflang tags for all of your site pages, with the correct syntax and formats.

When you generate the hreflang annotations the tool allows you to copy/paste the results or download them as a CSV file, so it’s easier to use than other tools, too:

This is only the first version of the tool, and I’m already planning to include more functionality to assist with hreflang annotation generation on a massive scale. If you find any issues with it, or any feedback or ideas, please contact me via Twitter or send me an email at aleydasolis at gmail.

I hope the tool, although very simple, can be helpful to clarify the doubts about how to generate the correct hreflang annotations in your specific case. If you have any questions, please let me know in the comments!

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12 Scalable Link-Building Tactics

Posted by kaiserthesage

Link building/earning is essential in online marketing, and not just because it improves your SEO. It also helps a website be discovered (click-through visitors), generate leads, connect with other publishers (relationships), and build a stronger online brand presence.

Although establishing yourself as an authority to eventually earn links throughout the process is what search engines naturally want websites/brands to do, you still can’t disregard artificial link building (link marketing).

Link marketing is an initiative that should also be strongly considered, as this practice makes a brand more well known in its online space—and sets it up to genuinely earn links in the future.

The tactics listed in this post are from the 4-part newsletter series that I launched a couple of weeks ago. Below are the guidelines covered by the series, mostly about implementing some of the most scalable link-building tactics today. These can be used by agencies, SMBs and enterprise-level companies.

#1: Create your own database of premium images and cinemagraphs

This can be a good investment for agencies and/or companies who’re in for the long-haul (targeting specific niches).

Though this tactic may require a budget (as you’ll need to invest in hiring a professional photographer or graphic artist), this can certainly improve your link-building campaign through link attribution from bloggers who’ll use your premium images.

Once you have set up your own private gallery of rich images, you can then start making a list of bloggers that you can reach out to (in your specific niche). There are tons of bloggers who are in need of unique images that they can use, so having this as your value proposition (offering the images for free or giving them access to your private gallery) will increase your pitches’ conversion rate.

Another strategy that you can integrate to scale this type of link building approach is using reverse image search—in case other bloggers start using your images without permission/attribution. You can use tools such as Google’s image search and Tineye to track blogs/websites that have used your images.

Other helpful resources:

• How to create animated cinemagraphs


• Ultimate Guide to Link Building with Images

#2: Outdated content acquisition

There are millions of pieces of content on the web, and many of them aren’t timeless—and many are also under-maintained.

This clearly brings a lot of opportunities for link building, wherein you can search through hundreds of outdated pieces of content in your industry that have managed to get natural links in the past (or successful link bait with time-sensitive information) and try acquiring the content.

You can use Greenlane SEO’s Outdated Content Finder tool to find under-maintained content that you can still repurpose or recreate.

Contact the blog owner(s) and see if you can purchase the old page, and have it redirected to your new version of the page hosted within your domain (with updated information about the topic).

Pro tip: Tell them that you’ll still give them credit as the original creator (w/ brand mention), to enhance your chances of acquiring the content.

In choosing outdated web documents that you can revive:

• Use tools like Ahrefs or Open Site Explorer to check for links pointing to the old content.


• Assess if it’s possible to add more valuable and up-to-date information to the topic covered by the content.

Another option that you can take, aside from buying the content, is helping the webmaster update the content—this can also lead to getting a link from that very same content.

Other helpful resources:

• Create links with Outdated Content Finder


• How to buy links ethically

#3: Massive interviews

Doing interviews of popular personalities in a certain field has been one of the oldest tricks in link building, particularly for websites that are just starting up.

Doing it on a massive scale can drive a ton of natural links to a website, and can certainly get your name out in the open (like launching an interview series or designating a section for expert interviews).

I’ve seen many sites that have been successful using this tactic (like Mixergy, Under 30 CEO and Max Minzer’s Max Impact to name a few).

And just recently, I’ve seen Media Shower’s interview with me get a natural in-content link from Page One Power’s weekly roundup.

Imagine the number of links you can naturally acquire if you’re consistently sharing valuable insights from influential people in your industry—and imagine the relationships you can build with influencers by using this tactic.

#4: Reverse guest-blogging campaign

Guest blogging has been the go-to tactic for the past couple of years in the world of link building. But it seems that only a few have realized the value of being on the receiving end, acquiring content from other great authors.

There are a lot of advantages to inviting guest bloggers who really know their stuff to contribute to your site:

• Getting free expertly made content that can rank for keywords (long tails) that you are also targeting.


• Absorbing the guest author’s followers once they start sharing the content they’ve contributed to your site (more unique traffic and potential leads).


• Seasoned content publishers will almost always reference/link back to their previous works, and their contributions on other websites are not an exemption.

Find and reach out to bloggers who write exceptionally in their respective fields (and who can cover topics that are in your audience’s interests as well). You can use tools like Followerwonk to identify authors in your niche that have a strong social following.

You can also do a simple Google Search to determine if they’ve been active in guest blogging (inpostauthor:”Author’s Name”).

A few tips on implementing this tactic:

• Start with those who you’ve seen to be active in their own guest-blogging campaign. Doing a Google search to find active guest bloggers in your industry (use queries like: “real estate guest post by”) can make it easier to find them.


• Make sure you have a value proposition once you start contacting your prospects. Let them know what’s in it for them (ex: mentioning that you have bunch of readers/subscribers/followers, promoting their content, or offering to pay them for the content).


• Build relationships. It’s easier to invite people to write for your site when you’re already friends with them.


• Read their content. Make sure that you like it.

Other helpful resources:

• The Easiest Way to Bait Links—Get Guest Authors


• How to Build your Presence with Reverse Guest Posting

#5: Online billboards through long-tail content distribution

Building more brand visibility is one of link building’s vital roles in online marketing. There are many ways to get this done, but there’s one tactic that will seem to continue to be effective despite the constantly changing/evolving search landscape.

The method: distributing content (targeting long-tail search terms) on user-generated content sites that have high search share.

Pages hosted on UGC sites like Youtube, Slideshare, Pinterest and Scribd (there are a lot more, actually) obviously have better search-ranking power, especially for long-tail keywords.

The probable reasons why these domains show more often on SERPs lie in the level of trust search engines see from these domains (domain authority) and the amount of traffic, as well as interactions that these pages are getting.

Implementing this strategy on a larger scale can help generate constant traffic and brand impressions for your site (which you can consider as robust links/assets).

Steps for implementing this tactic:

• Create content based on your campaign’s targeted long-tail keywords. Repurpose them into several content formats (videos, slide presentations, infographics, comics or whitepaper/PDF).


• Upload them where it’s appropriate (content platforms like Youtube, Slidshare, etc…).


• Promote these through social and/or build links to them (including them on your blog posts or linking to them through your other off-site marketing efforts).

#6: Getting more Google+ shares

As Cyrus Shepard mentioned on his recent (controversial) post here on Moz, Google+ posts pass link equity (because the links within Google+ posts are followed).

This means the more your Google+ posts are being shared within their social platform, the more high-value links you are able to get (if you’ve included a link to one of your site’s pages within the Google+ post).

For instance, a few months back, I did a weekly roundup of the blog posts I’ve read each week on Google+. My first one was shared 40 times within the network, which means 40 Google+ profiles have just linked to the URLs I’ve shared.

Google+ is a microblogging platform that can offer ton of opportunities for marketing a brand/website if maximized.

Tips on getting more Google+ Shares:

• Start building a strong follower base (to enhance the chances of getting your posts shared). You can start by integrating Google+ with your content marketing efforts (let people know that you’re active on Google+).


• It’s a microblogging platform, so start blogging on Google+! Lengthy posts (that are useful and valuable) have higher potential for getting shared.


• Add relevant links to external pages (your website) within your Google+ posts, so that you can build links when people start sharing your posts. Link to other people’s works as well, to build relationships (and to get them to share your post too).

Other helpful resources:

• PlusBlogging: A Google+ Content Strategy


• How to build your Authority and Influence in Google+

#7: Republishing viral posts from Tumblr and Facebook

Tumblr and Facebook are definitely two of the best places to get inspiration for content creation, and are sometimes the best channels from which to get linkable content assets.

This tactic has been running around my head for weeks now (and we’re already in the process of testing it on one of the test sites I’ve been managing).

Republishing/reposting has been a norm in the social space—and is always ethical if you’re giving attribution to the original source of the content.

Basically, this tactic is about finding the most successful pieces of content posted on Facebook and Tumblr (based on the amount of likes and shares) that are related to your niche—and having them republished on your site’s blog (or if you have microsites, then that could work, too).

Given that these pieces of content have already proven themselves as interesting on social platforms, they’ll have better chances of getting natural links.

For instance, I saw the Facebook post I’ve shared above get republished on a small WordPress blog:

The republished post did well in terms of social shares, as it got 2,000+ retweets:

And the WordPress version of the FB post also got 288 links (from 81 linking domains)—knowing that a lot of people got to see the content:

How to find viral posts in your niche from Facebook and Tumblr:

You can use Google search to find successful posts on Facebook and Tumblr (by using the queries I’ve used below).

A few tips on republishing viral posts from Facebook/Tumblr:

• Always give attribution to the original creator of the content!


• Include your own insights or personal takeaways in your republished content.

#8: Reverse engineering

Knowing where your main competitors are getting their links from, as well as the entities they’ve built relationships with, has been one of the most important methodologies in search marketing.

Aside from helping smaller brands compete in search using this tactic, analyzing your competitors’ link sources also allows you to determine partnerships and understand methods that will most likely work for you.

Tools you can use to extract your top competitors’ link data:

• Open Site Explorer


• Ahrefs


• Majestic SEO

List the top domains linking to your competitors in a spreadsheet and segment them by difficulty of acquisition (how hard or easy will it be for you to get a link from them).

Another thing that you also have to consider is identifying the sites/domains that your competitors are linking out to.

You can use ScreamingFrog to generate a list of URLs that your competitors have linked out to the most.

Once you’re done assessing and sorting the list of domains linking to your competitors, and the list of domains that your competitors are linking out to, you can then start listing each website’s contact details.

You can use tools like Citation Labs (Contact Finder Tool) and/or Link Research Tools’ Contact Finder to easily generate the list of emails.

Though you must also remember that it’s not about the amount of data you have, it’s about how you can use your data to your advantage. Making use of your list of link prospects:

• Pitch them for guest-blogging opportunities.


• Do an interview of the influential ones on your list.


• Letting them know about your content(s) that their readers/followers are most likely interested in.


• Collaborate with them in content creation (getting insights from them and including them on your upcoming blog posts).


• Connecting and engaging them through interactions (through social or their already-existing communities).

Other helpful resources:

• Guide to competitive backlink analysis

#9: Improving content discovery through targeted content promotion

If you’re already investing in developing content assets on your website, then up-sizing your efforts to make them more visible to your target audience is a surefire way to enhance the ability of your website/brand to continuously attract natural links.

Because the more people who are able to see your content assets, the higher your chances to force multiply the results (more traffic, more social shares, more links, better rankings, and more leads).

There are many ways to promote your site’s great content, and below are some of the most efficient ways to build traffic that will result to more traffic:

Linker outreach

Start with those who’re really into the topic/subject that you’ve covered on your content—and have a history of sharing/linking to similar content.

The easiest way to find them is by mining your competitors’ similar content. Tools that you can use to find linkers in your industry:

• Ahrefs or Open Site Explorer—to find blogs/websites that have linked to your competitors’ content


• Topsy—to identify Twitter users who have shared your competitors’ content


• Google Search—to find people who have shared your competitors’ content on Facebook, Google+ and other social networks (using search operators)

Pro tip: You can also mine your competitors’ most-linked content assets (pages with high # of LRDs) using Open Site Explorer, as this will reveal the linkers in your industry.

It’ll be easier to reach out to them, seeing that they’re genuinely interested in the topic of your content.

Pro tip: Don’t ask them to share your content, since they are linkers, and they already know what to do next after seeing your content.

Paid social ads

Another great way to put more eyeballs on your content is through paid Social Ads—from Facebook’s sponsored stories or Stumbleupon’s paid discovery.

The best thing about these services is that you can configure your ads to only be displayed to specifically targeted users (those that are highly interested in what your content is providing).

Simon Penson wrote a great case study on how to make Facebook your primary traffic source that you might also want to read.

Related discussions

This is probably the easiest way to promote and build links to your site’s content assets. Participate in already existing discussions that are thematically related to your content (forum threads, Q&As, other blogs, and online communities like Facebook groups, etc.).

Using your content as a reference to your contributions on these discussions will make it more enticing for other people to click on your link.

Linking through your content distribution efforts

Use your other content marketing efforts—like your guest blogs, columns, slideshows on Slideshare, or videos uploaded on Youtube—to promote your site’s linkable assets.

Internal linking

I’ve always been a firm believer that internal links are the most valuable ones to have in a link building campaign, because you have full control of them.

Create more content that can stand to support your site’s content assets. This way you’ll be able to distribute Page Authority to your site’s key pages and you’ll be also able to build continuous traffic to them.

You can also utilize your site’s high-traffic pages (based on your analytics) to make your other low-performing content assets be more visible (and more inclined to receive inbound links).

Other helpful resources:

• How to build your content promotion and link building opportunity list


• How to promote and build links to your great content


• Linker Outreach—a method for social and editorial link building


• 7 online viral marketing strategies

#10: Find specific questions and answer them (long-tail link building)

People will never run out of questions to ask, especially now that the information age makes it easier for people to solve their problems almost instantly with the help of the web.

Find online discussions that pertain to the product(s) you or your client provides (from forums, Q&A sites like Quora, and blog comments). It’s best to genuinely add value to the discussion, by contributing only relevant information (and not make it too promotional).

The best thing about how the link-building space is evolving is that it’s also giving marketers new ways to build signals that search crawlers can use.

In using this tactic, you won’t necessarily need to use hyperlinks to promote or build signals to your website. Given that search engines are also using phrase-based indexing, even an unlinked brand mention will now count as a vote that’s as good as a link (based on the concepts of co-occurrence and sentiment analysis).

With this approach (building unlinked brand mentions on related discussions), you lessen the chances of getting flagged as a spammer by forum/community moderators. But always remember that you have to ensure that people will get value from what you’re contributing (think marketing!).

Another advantage of using this tactic is that you’re also building brand awareness, which can eventually cultivate branded searches (seeing that you didn’t provide a link).

#11: Link reclamation

This method is probably the oldest trick in the book of white-hat link building. Despite that fact, as well as all the changes that have been made in the search game, link reclamation is still considered one of the most effective tactics to use out there.

Reclaiming links—from links to your site that are broken, linking to the wrong version of the URL, or from unlinked brand mentions—are very much applicable to brands/websites that are active in online branding, content marketing, and offline marketing (print ads, events, etc…).

The best thing about this method is that it has a very high conversion rate for link acquisition. The main reason is that you’ve already earned the mention/citation, which makes it much easier for you to request to have the mention optimized (like your preferred anchor texts and/or the link’s destination).

Common practices that you should integrate with your link-building campaign to find better link opportunities:

• Set up Google Alerts for your brand name (and resident authors)—to track blogs/websites mentioning your brand or your site’s content.


• Use Topsy to track people mentioning your brand (or your site’s homepage) on Twitter. It’s easier to request links from them, since they’re already vouching for you.


• Make it a habit to search for mentions about your brand, author(s), product(s) or events through Google’s blog search (consider it a monthly task).
  

  

  
  


• Look for sites linking back to you that use the wrong version of the URL.
  

  

  
  


• Check incoming links pointing to your site’s broken pages (404s) using Google Webmaster Tools. They are the easiest ones to reclaim.

#12: Static marketing

Consistency is a common factor that you’ll mostly notice from successful brands on the web.

And this is something that even smaller brands can apply, especially in performing off-site marketing activities.

As perfectly described by Ross Hudgens, static marketing acts a force multiplier of future active marketing efforts through a series of branding initiatives (from naming conventions, persona, aesthetic impression, and overall brand identity).

Interactions with other people in your industry, particularly with content publishers, have been vital in today’s age of link building.

And as most of us know, to be really able to compete in online marketing these days, we need to be almost everywhere. Static marketing makes that approach much easier, as you tend to be more consistent, which enables you to become more recognizable to people active in your industry’s online space.

When your targets recognize you, you become linkable.

A few tips on how to be remarkable in your target communities:

• Use a username that’s easy to recall.


• Stick to your personal brand’s unique selling point and identity (establish expertise in a single niche first, before expanding on the others).


• Be consistent with the avatars you use in different social platforms or online communities you’re actively participating in.

How about guest blogging?

Many link builders are abusing the tactic. Google is already on to it.

The method is very effective, when done right. But here’s my personal take on it:

I don’t do guest blogging that much anymore. But when I do, I do it on Moz.

If you’re looking for more tips on link building, you can check out my blog Kaiserthesage and you can also follow me on Twitter @jasonacidre.

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