Headsmacking Tip #16: Meet the Linkerati in Person
Posted by randfish
We all know about the Linkerati by now – how to identify them, how they’re segmented and why they’re the secret to SEO. Yet, time and again, I see link builders and companies pass up amazing opportunities to earn links and attention from those who have the best ability to help your content/brand spread virally.
I’ll lay out two scenarios below to help illustrate this point:
Scenario 1: Emailing a Prominent Blogger/Writer/Journalist/Site Owner/Social Media Personality/Etc. Hoping for a Link
You/your company:
- Identify a list of Linkerati that may be relevant/interested in your business/content
- Send a carefully crafted email to each individual, hoping to attract their attention and interest
- Follow up with those who reply (and maybe those who don’t) with emails or even a phone call
- Request a review of your product/tool/site/idea
Scenario 2: Meeting that Same Person First, then Following Up
You/your company:
- Identify prominent (or even relatively less known) Linkerati in your city or at an event you’re attending
- Schedule a meeting / invite them to coffee or to tour your offices (or even just go to an event you know they’ll be at)
- Introduce yourself politely and humbly and mention you’re a fan. Exchange business cards, have a chat and let them know what you do (also helps if you can find some non-work related topics to bond on as well)
- Follow up with an email thanking them for the meeting and asking if they’d take a look at your product/tool/site/idea
I’d argue that while Scenario 1 is more scalable, it’s also potentially damaging in the long run. When you first introduce your work to someone who can help it spread, you have that single chance to make a first impression. If the relationship matters and you’re seeking a high “conversion rate” for attracting attention from the Linkerati, use Scenario 2.
The beauty of these links is that they not only create value for SEO, but often attract second-order effects like increased brand awareness, links/tweets from the followers & fans of the Linkerati, and improved odds that you’ll be positively remembered and introduced when someone mentions they need “X” (whatever it is your product/tool/site/idea does).
In-person connections have always been powerful attractors of value for me in the SEO, social media and startup worlds and when I see early stage (and mature, later-stage companies) engage in this fashion, it’s almost always positive. Just make sure you’re professional, candid, friendly and never over-bearing in your interactions; chances are you’ll get much more than a link.
Link Building Has Changed
Posted by randfish
When I first started in SEO, link acquisition was almost always a manual process. I’d search the engines for links that pointed to the competition, find relevant directories and link lists, email relevant sites and beg, borrow or bribe (aka buy advertising) to get a link. I tried reciprocal link building (and did some pretty dumb stuff). Then, as I got more intertwined in the SEO community, I found vendors who built large networks of sites, spammed blogs/forums/guestbooks and ran text link sales operations. I leveraged these services to help clients rank better, almost always with great success. Then I met Matt Cutts, found out more about Google’s webspam team, saw penalties and their impact (remember Florida?) and even found some sites we worked on in the Sandbox.
Over time, I got smarter. I read papers about Hilltop, Trustrank, Anti-Trustrank and many more. I saw sites escaping the sandbox once they’d earned greater quantities of trusted links. I started understanding that Google’s search quality team was only going to get better at recognizing and counting legitimate links (and tossing out the junk), so I focused exclusively on more “white hat” kinds of links. That’s when I discovered linkbaiting and the power of Digg, Reddit & StumbleUpon to drive traffic that would naturally link. We had success with quizzes (and after Matt left SEOmoz, he had a little too much success) and viral content that earned thousands of links overnight and started offering it as a service.
As our clientele and foci changed, we changed again. Linkbait gave way to broader viral marketing efforts. Social media marketing arose as a practical and high quality way to earn links. Our clients became larger brands and organizations and one-off link projects weren’t scalable, so we consulted on tactics like content and technology licensing, training editorial staff to earn links & participate in the social media world themselves, and incentivizing user-generated content, which in turn brought links from those users. We found ways to drive natural links to deep pages on huge sites targeting the long tail, how to combine embeddable content and user-adopted brand affinity to drive link growth. And we stopped buying links entirely.
I figured a visual history might make for a compelling view:
Now, link building is changing again. I’m of the distinct impression that the engines (nowadays referring to Bing & Google, since the others are all but out of the picture) are evolving to keep up with the web’s breakneck speed and new forms of data, along with new ways of analyzing links, are making themselves felt in the SERPs. My guesses/observations would include:
- Twitter really is cannibalizing the web’s link graph, or at least, the blogosphere’s and Google seems to be using Tweet counts in some way (though possibly only in the QDF algo).
- The acceleration rate of link acquisition and the freshness of new links is having a more dramatic impact than before, and the “old crusty links” paradigm may be fading a bit.
- Brand mentions and keyword associations with brand names are influencing the rankings more and more.
- Un-trustworhty link patterns are conferring more filters and penalties than ever before.
- QDD is as strong as ever, and vertical results are more prominent than at any time in the engines’ histories.
- Google and Microsoft both know more about traffic and surfing habits than ever before, and this data is likely being used to, at the least, quality control for potential algorithmic misses.
- Ad blindness is worse than ever (16% of Internet users are responsible for 85% of all ad clicks on the web), forcing the engines to make ads more relevant and more obvious to continue earning revenue.
- Paid inclusion is going away, and talk of potentially paying sites to be in the indices (the reverse model) is in the air (or maybe not).
- Billions of non-linked “references” flow out across the web through social media messages, emails, tweets and IMs. Someone, at some search engine, is undoubetdly mining this data to see how they can derive value and relevancy from it.
As marketers, we have to evolve or be left behind by those who can better adapt. It’s hard to see the forest for the trees right now, but I think we’re closing in on a time when real-time, social and traditional web references are all a part of the rankings equation. The future may be less about links and more about brand building and brand participation. I don’t want to be the most-linked-to site in my niche; I want to be the site that’s synonymous with my niche.
Now we just have to figure out the tactics…
What Makes a Link Worthy Post – Part 2
Posted by chenry
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 SEOmoz, Inc.
What really makes a blog post worth linking to? In my last post, What Makes a Link Worthy Post – Part 1, I took a look at the 3,800 blog posts on SEOmoz and did some analysis on a few different aspects of the posts and their affect on the number of in linking domains (ILDs). Some of the results were very interesting to me and it made me want to push it further.
I created a list of 40 SEO/SEM blogs that I read and feel are important to people in the industry and set those as my sample population. I first crawled each website and collected a list of over 72,330 different blog posts from the 40 different websites. Then over the course of the next few days, I crawled each post and collected the following information in my database:
- Blog Post Title
- Original URL
- # of Links from Root Domains (Via Linkscape API)
- # of ILDs (Via Linkscape API)
- If The Post Had Images, Lists, Or Videos
- Content of Post (No Comments or Other Text on Site)
- # of Words in Post
POSTS TITLE EFFECT ON ILDs
Does the length of the post’s title affect how many domains will link to it? The data suggests that posts with a title length between 10 and 18 words are on average more linked to than those with less or more. The data also suggests there may be a “sweet” spot around 14 to 16 words in length. The chart below was created without removing stop words.
This data proves to me that a descriptive title is what the linkerati is looking for. Going overboard on the length of the title can prove to be a bad move also.
EXAMPLES OF HIGHLY LINKED TO POSTS WITH TITLE LENGTH IN THE “SWEET SPOT”
- Google Says: Yes, You Can Still Sculpt PageRank. No You Can’t Do It With Nofollow
- Big Brands? Google Brand Promotion: New Search Engine Rankings Place Heavy Emphasis on Branding
- What Makes a Good Web Directory, and Why Google Penalized Dozens of Bad Ones
POSTS LENGTH EFFECT ON ILDs
Post length is a long debated thing out there in the blogosphere. Most bloggers will tell you that you should keep your posts around 500 to 900 words, and that might be stretching it. When it comes to SEO/SEM blogs, longer more content filled posts are more linked to than those with limited amount of content.
From the chart below you can see there is a word range that seems to collect more ILDs than other word ranges. Based on the data, the ideal length of your posts should be around 2328 to 2618 words. In my previous post, the ideal length for only SEOmoz’s post was between 1800 and 3000 words.
The chart above shows posts only up to 2812 words, but accounts for over 99.55% of all the posts. Posts that were greater than 2812 words really had a low number of ILDs. For this reason and for the display of the chart, they were removed.
EXAMPLES OF HIGHLY LINKED TO POSTS (BETWEEN 2328 AND 2618 WORDS)
- 101 Ways to Build Link Popularity
- SMX East: Give It Up
- Five Link Development Experts: A Group Interview
DEPTH OF POSTS EFFECT ON ILDs
Seos know that you want to keep your key content in as few subfolders as possible but does this affect the number of ILDs you receive? The data suggests that the depth of your post doesn’t affect the number ILDs. The graph below shows that just about half of the blogs out there place their content two subfolders deep, such as seomoz.org/blog/POST-TITLE.
MEDIA’S EFFECT ON ILDs
What role does placing list, images, and/or videos in a post play on the number of ILDs? The data shows that putting any one of the media’s in your post will increase the number of ILDs you receive. Putting a list on your plain text post could double the number of ILDs you receive. The results are even more outstanding when all three types of media are used.
Do I really believe that you can take any post, slap a picture in it and you will automatically receive more links? No, but if you have decent content and media to support your post, it will appeal to more users and in turn increase the number of potential links. I find it amazing that just by adding images and lists to your post could increase the number of ILDs by a large percent. Images and lists are one of the easiest things to create and anyone can do it, so why aren’t they? See the chart below for the full specs on adding media to your post.
TOP MEDIA POST EXAMPLES
So I’m sure you are all wondering what some good examples are of the different type of post along with the media. Below are some links to some great posts that contain different types of media and have been successful. Some of these posts should be your guide when creating new content for your site.
ALL 3 MEDIA TYPES
ONLY LISTS & VIDEOS
ONLY LISTS & IMAGES
- Big Brands? Google Brand Promotion: New Search Engine Rankings Place Heavy Emphasis on Branding
- Canonical URL Tag – The Most Important Advancement in SEO Practices Since Sitemaps
ONLY IMAGES & VIDEOS
ONLY LISTS
ONLY VIDEOS
ONLY IMAGES
NONE
TOP DOMAINS FOR MEDIA TYPE
The data shows that there were certain domains that tended to use certain types of media in their posts. Below I’ve put together two sites for each category so if you enjoy posts of a certain type you can visit their blog.
ALL 3 MEDIA TYPES
ONLY LISTS & VIDEOS
ONLY LISTS & IMAGES
ONLY IMAGES & VIDEOS
ONLY LISTS
ONLY VIDEOS
ONLY IMAGES
NONE
AUTHORITIES EFFECT ON ILDs
What role does a blog authority play in the number of ILDs? Seems like a simple question and the data seems to show that if your an authority in your niche, you will generate many more ILDs than someone who is not. Look at the chart below and you can see that Matt Cutt’s blog generates almost twice as many as its closest competitor, sugarrae.com!
TOP TOPIC THAT ATTRACT LINKS
Unlike SEOmoz not every blog places their post into nice categories and if they do, those categories will not match across all the sites. So how do we determine what topics are attracting the most links and are good topics to create posts about? We crawl 72,300 posts, determine the ILDs, and then extract the most used words from those posts to create a “super” group of keywords that result in link worthy blog posts.
The first thing I wanted to do was extract all the text and find the words that are most used in all blog posts, I was curious, aren’t you? After pulling out 27,658,728 million words and sorting them, five words came out on top: Search, Google, Yahoo, Site, and SEO. Was I surprised, no but it’s interesting to know and a good starting point.
Taking a look at the top 1% of all 72,330 posts, it was found that the words did change a little bit. Some of the top words used were: Search, Google, Site, Links, SEO, Content, People, and Social. This data seems very similar to what was found in part one of this study, with the SEOmoz data. Posts that are about link building are very popular but now we can conclude that they are attracting links. When we look at a much smaller percentage say only the top 50 posts, you find that you are getting very similar words such as: Google, Search, Blog, Link, Pagerank, and Site.
So what can you really take away from the content of the top 50 blog posts? Stick with the major engines: Google, Yahoo, and maybe even Bing, on a good day. The linkerati likes topics including Link Building, Pagerank, and Social Media. As my disclaimer stated above, these are not the rules but just observations from a small sampling of the blogosphere. If I knew the exact topic that the linkerati loves, I wouldn’t be writing here, I would be out making millions writing all day.
BIGGEST TAKEAWAYS
- The data suggests that posts with title between 14 and 16 words attract more ILDs than those with longer or shorter titles.
- Contrary to belief, the data suggests that posts with more than 900 words are attracting more links than those with 900 words. Shoot for post between 2328 and 2618 words.
- The data suggest the location/depth of your blog post doesn’t seem to have an effect on the number of ILDs you will receive but may affect your SEO work, so be cautious.
- If you’re interested in the top post with a certain type of media, check above. Also if you’re interested in the blogs that tailor to a certain type of media, check above.
- Authority plays a major role in the number of ILDs that you will receive on your post. Matt Cutt’s blog receives twice as many ILDs as the next closest blog.
- Hot topics that attract links include: Google, Search, Blogs, Link Building, Pagerank, SEO, and Social Media.
SUMMARY
In summary, the takeaways above are generalization about a small group of post from the blogosphere and should not be taken as rules but merely as a guide to help you create content that will have the possibility to generate links. Work on the authority in your niche and become that place people come to receive great advise. While you’re waiting for authority to grow, make sure that your posts included visual aids to help readers get the takeaways quickly.
SPECIAL THANKS
Special thanks to the SEOmoz team for the access to the Linkscape API. Without the use of the API this post would have never been possible.