Link Princess

I’ll be honest. It’s tough to do link building when you don’t have the luxury of working closely with SEO team who is actually optimizing the pages you are building links to. And I’ve had this experience where an internal team handles the optimization while we handle the link building.

I love the fact that I work in a search engine optimization firm with a full-fledged team of strategists, technical experts, and industry experts. But there are times that we are doing link building without having input into the keywords that are being selected, the pages that are being optimized, and the overall business strategy. Some lessons I have learned from this are:

1. Have a clear understanding of the pages you are building links for. When you jump from page to page on a monthly or bi-monthly basis, it’s hard to see true progress. Agree before the start of the project on which pages will be the primary focus of link building efforts.

2. Outline tactics that will be undertaken. Changing focus halfway through a project will not help the site nor your linking efforts. If a change of direction is requested, understand the goals that are driving the request.

3. Have keyword discussions. If your SEO-instinct kicks in that a keyword that has been selected is too competitive, too broad, or not as relevant as it could be, open the door for those discussions. Be prepared to have other options ready for the conversation, so do some keyword research before you begin to talk.

4. Have your strategy written out as best as you can along with a timeline. This will keep everyone on the same page as you work on the project.

5. Have open dialogues with the internal SEO team. Make sure that you are being kept updated on keyword changes, URL changes, or anything else that will affect your link building strategy.

6. Most importantly, define goals at the onset. This needs to be priority #1. Is it conversions? Traffic? Increased link popularity? Whatever the goals are, make sure that you are setting realistic expectations within the confines of the project and what you and your team can reasonably do.

There are lots of ways to do link building whether you are part of the actual optimization process or not, but having everything clearly spelled out is the biggest factor in not only a successful linking initiative, but in a successful relationship with your contacts for the site you are working on. It certainly presents its challenges when all you are doing is link building, but it can work and it will so long as you prioritize correctly and everyone involved is on the same page.

Well, it’s been two days since I attended the Cleveland Ladies Who Launch event. And I have to tell you, I’m still impressed. I met so many amazing women, and not just the guest speakers. The women that I met between events through casual conversation and literally “bumping” into each other. It was very celebratory and I enjoyed myself immensely.

To highlight a couple of the women and their businesses, I wanted to give them a quick shout out here:

Just Be - a company completely devoted to bringing out the best in you. I got a gift bag with an autographed copy of their thought-provoking journal and book.

Toilet Tattoos - Yep, you read that right. Totally awesome name for an interesting product.

Better Bit of Butter - I got one of Christine’s completely adorable cookies. She can customize anything and ship them to you. get your company logo or sports icon put on cookies for your next holiday party or special occasion. Absolutely too cute (and almost too cute to eat).

Jennifer Fecowycz of Creative Memories - I got tons of cute stuff in my gift bag from Jennifer including an awesome album. How did she know I was a scrapbooker??

There were tons more, but there is not enough time to mention them all. Again, I had an awesome time and I’m looking forward to watching these ladies grow their businesses!

It is an absolute pleasure to let you all know that I will be on an internet marketing panel at an upcoming event here in the Cleveland area. Ladies Who Launch, a organization committed to women entreprenuers is having a live event in Cleveland. They are expecting between 200 and 300 women to attend and learn about starting, maintaining and marketing their businesses.

The Cleveland live event will take place May 16, 2008 at the Cleveland Play House. I will be speaking about SEO and leveraging social media to promote online businesses and company Web sites. I’m very excited about it all and thanks to Margey Lowery for inviting me to speak!

Today is my birthday and I was amazed when I opened my email account to find several happy birthday wishes. Not from people, but from social media sites that I belong to. I started scouring my social media sites to find out who else has this personalize feature.

Not surprisingly, Facebook had a nice banner on my home page wishing me a Happy Birthday. There were also four friends who posted fond wishes as well including one friend who I’ve never met and actually only know through Facebook.

Next came a couple of mom blogger groups I belong to. This was really cool to me since moms are typically incredibly busy and for a site devoted to these busy women, this was especially touching.

A NASCAR site that I signed up on a long time ago for some sports-related research sent me a note as did a Quilting forum I belong to and participate in regularly.

Now, I just got an email from Borders wishing me well and sending me a 25% coupon (you better believe I’m going to spend it today, too).

Why am I bringing this up on blog? Because Web 2.0 is all about being personal. It’s all about relationships.  Connecting and getting to know people is at the heart of social media. Regardless of what your motivation is for using any type of social media, users today want to be heard. And they appreciate those who share the same passion.

So often, I have seen companies and big businesses start a blog or a social network or set up a facebook page because it’s the “next thing to do” without taking into consideration that the people who are most likely to engage in this type of activity want to be heard and want to know that their opinion matters, even if you disagree. Setting up anything that encouarages users to generate content will draw attention, certainly. But without the right mindset about how to manage it, forget it. You’re not going to get far at all.

I have a three step starter process when working with a client in building links. By knowing the following items, I get a huge jump start on my work. I ask the client:

1. What do you stand for? Not the same as a brand positioning statement, this tells me what is truly important to my client. Is it educating your customer base? Is it providing high quality products that could save their life or otherwise improve their quality of living?

2. Who are you looking to reach? Age, gender, socioeconomic background, status in life… all of those things will guide my strategies in the right direction.

3. What are you doing to better the world? Sponsorships and partnerships play a huge role in this. This also gives your humanitarian position a spotlight. If you’re not doing anything, what do you want to do? Hopefully, the answer isn’t “nothing.”

When you look at these three things and combine with an overall picture of the site (current sources of link popularity, content inventory, etc) you can create a strategy that is not the standard cookie cutter approach, but is tailored to your client, their industry, and their goals.

Over on SearchEngineLand.com, there is a weekly article series on link building by Eric Ward. This week, he has written about something that is truly close to my heart.

I, like many of you I have no doubt, rely on the internet for much needed information on a variety of sources. Whether it be tips on my favorite hobbies (I am a crafting nut for anyone who doesn’t know), showtimes for the newest blockbuster I want to go see, or a recipe for vegetarian lasagna, I go to the Web time and time again. Sometimes, my research is of a more serious nature. Like researching healthy living tips for my two small children, or learning about diabetes and how I can help my grandfather, or discovering what my risk factors are for getting breast cancer since I am the daughter of a survivor.

These topics are (obviously) incredibly important to me as well as to millions of others who are in the same predicament as I am: sifting through the muck to find out what is truly expert advice, and what is just a link to yet another drug that has nothing to do with me. That’s why I completely agree with Eric in his post called Life, Death, and Links.

It’s a known fact that black hat link builders can kill the quality content by burying it under drug ads and product pages by building a ton of links that are poor in quality, but have enough juice to shoot them to the top of the rankings. They’re doing their job, you may argue. They are also pushing non-relevant content to the top of the SERPs without concern as to what the user is actually looking for. They have taken the most important element out of the entire equation: the people who are surfing looking for vital information to make their lives better. They spend all their time trying to game the system. It’s so much easier to give the search engines what they want and (albeit patiently) build the links over time to continue push your site in the general upward direction in the SERPs.

When you are beginning work on a link development project, it’s important to start with the right information before diving into the work head first. Here are questions you should ask before beginning:

1. How many links do I currently have?

2. Where are those links coming from? Directories? Random blog posts? Educational sites?

3. Who am I looking to target? Coming up with two or three personas can be very helpful.

4. What is my brand position? How do I want the public to see my site / company?

5. What are my business goals?

6. How will I define success?

7. How will I measure statistics to determine if I have achieved that level of success?

8. What resources do I currently have to work with.

Obviously, the answers to these questions will indicate a number of things in terms of your link building campaign. Your audience will determine where you are looking to get links from. Your brand indicates what caliber of sites you are looking at and what, specifically, you will be saying on those sites. The amount of resources will determine what you can do now and what you will have to build up to.  Defining your analytics can help tie in a whole other group of individuals, or spur you into learning how to use the analytics you already have running on your site.

Of course, these are not all the questions you should ask when starting, but this is definitely a list of “must-asks” and it will open the door to all those other things that you need to learn about your company or site and how it will apply to your link building and overall SEO efforts.

People in the SEO industry tend to look at me like I’m crazy when I tell them that not only do I solely focus on link building, but I asked for the job. Let me give you a little background.

 I started at Brulant in February of 2006 and was given the task of evaluating our link acquisition process. Within weeks, I was immersed in the world of link building, reading articles from industry experts like Eric Ward among others. The world of link acquisition was bigger and broader than I initially thought and I began to experiment with all types of link building, distinguishing the white hat tactics from the black hat tactics, not that this was an easy task. Long story short, I became hooked.

I’m fascinated by the nature of humans, especially how they act online. I began to explore the concept of why people link to other sites in the first place. Eventually, I started heading up processes and building out customized strategies for clients in a variety of industries. And that brings me to where I am today.

Recently, I had someone ask me “what do you do all day?” The easy answer is “build links.” But that’s easier said than done and there is more to it than just that. So here is a look at a typical day for me:

4:00 am - the alarm starts to go off. I wake up with my head full of tasks that need to be accomplished, topics I need to research, and sites I need to evaluate. Often times, a concept/ idea that started blooming the night before is still on my mind first thing in the morning.

4:30 am - I sit down with a cup of coffee and a good book. I read a variety of things and I am always looking for new ways to connect two seemingly dissimilar things together.

5:30 am - I’m off to work, listening to books like Freakonomics, Cluetrain Manifesto, and Linked - the New Science of Networks.

6:30 am - I arrive at work (I have a slight detour to take my kids to the sitter, hence the long commute), fire up the laptop and begin working.

6:30 - 3:00 pm - This part of my day varies the most. It’s generally full of client meetings, brainstorm sessions, regroups, and reporting analysis. I also spend a good portion of this time executing a lot of our strategies. The big point about this whole chunk of time is that I often have very little time to research new things. This I reserve for evenings. In an average 8 hour work day, I have rougly 2 - 3 hours when I am not in meetings or being pulled into conversations about the status of a project.

3:00 pm - Shut down and head home. Again, I’m usually listening to a book on CD, but sometimes, I drive in silence, brainstorming ideas. I carry a digital voice recorder with me so I don’t forget anything by the time I get home.

4:30 pm - I arrive home and start doing the typical “just got home” stuff: make dinner, do laundry, give the kids a bath, etc.

6:00 pm - Fire up the laptop again, check emails and get in touch with people as necessary.

8:00 pm - Kids go to bed, so I start researching. Generally, when I research I start with one particular topic in mind and I let myself wander online, gauging how I find the sites that I do and what is typically catching my attention. I work on client projects, do research relevant to their vertical, create and edit deliverables, etc.

11:00 pm - I call it a day and go to bed. But not until I lay in bed for a bit, brainstorming just a bit more before falling asleep.

One of my esteemed colleagues (stop blushing, Charles, you know it’s true) has written a great post about the Super Bowl and Search Marketing. I’ve decided to follow his lead and take it another step deeper by asking a poignant question: How does pop culture affect link popularity?

The short answer is that they tend to fuel each other, but not always. The long answer can take on a myriad of factors to explain the chicken or the egg theory, thereby sparking a heated debate. The bottom line, like all things that are link-related, is that if something is truly not worth talking about, then no one will talk about it. The standard for what is actually “worthy” for online conversation varies from topic to topic and something that one person deems to be a “hot topic” (such as the Britney Spears saga) and what another person deems to be far more important (the election) depends on what the person values and where they are in life.

Pop culture (whether it’s Hollywood, sports, viral commericals, etc), by its very nature, shifts from day to day as to what is important and what is not. The internet is fueled by conversations that follow this trend. Can those of us who are obsessed intrigued with celebrities imagine what it would be like to go to our favorite gossip site and read the following post (or something similar):

Thanks for visiting. At the moment, we have completely run out of things to say. Please check back at another time when we think of / hear of something that will actually be worth your time. Thanks again!

Panic. Horror. Not to mention the frantic Google searches to find out just what is going on and what other sites are picking up the slack.

A great example of a widespread popculturish phenomenon occurs every year on a seemingly quiet Sunday night. The Super Bowl always leaves us with lots to talk about and this year was no exception. With the exception of the Giants pulling out what could be considered the greatest upset in the history of the Super Bowl (way to go Eli), the standard question that was asked around the water cooler/ coffee maker/ copier the next day was this: “What did you think of the commercials?”

 This year, a MySpace page was put up to house all the super bowl commercials so that everyone who missed one or all of them could go and take a look at them at their leisure. From a link popularity perspective, this has been hugely successful. The day after the Super Bowl, links to this page numbered around 630. Not bad. Not bad at all. This morning, a mere two days later that number has more than tripled to 1,960+ links. While taking a look at these links, the majority of them are coming from (surprise, surprise) blogs. There was the sprinkling of corporate and sports-related sites, but predominantly, blogs have taken the lead in pushing the link around the Web. Additionally, the page is ranking first (behind the news results) for “2008 super bowl commercials,” 18th for “2008 super bowl,” and 13th for “super bowl commercials.”

Another thing that happened that is being debated in the office, but not really online is the alleged “f-bomb” that Terry Bradshaw dropped on the pregame show. Most people say that he said “bucket head” while others swear (no pun intended) he made a remark about a hat being big enough for Howie’s f—ing head. I’m not here to settle the score. My point is that many sports experts have contended that this is not what happened and is quieting the conversation rather quickly. But people are curious.

 On YouTube, there is a video entitled “Terry Bradshaw says F bomb during Super Bowl, maybe” and when I first heard about this, I jumped over to watch it. At the time (Monday), 268 people like myself were trying to figure out what all the commotion was about and had viewed that same video. Today, two days later, that video has been watched nearly 473,000 times. The number of inlinks to that video? Only 11. Surprising? Not really. The general chatter on the internet has died down and people have discovered that the conversation really doesn’t matter anymore. We’ve now turned to more important things.

The moral of the story is that Terry Bradshaw should enunciate just a bit better. The link lesson of the story is to ask yourself a simple question. Would I read this? How does this affect my business/ services? The answer could be very revealing and your efforts surrounding it should be matched up accordingly. When planning link bait or social media campaigns, the “worthiness” of the topic will make or break your success. YouTube benefited from Terry Bradshaw; MySpace got the limelight when it came to the commercials.

There are a number of other experiments that I will be investigating because people are so fascinated with pop culture in general, but in the meantime, topics surrounding the Super Bowl have generated some serious buzz, but in very different ways.

If you don’t know who is linking to you, how do you know what they are saying? Whether it’s positive, negative, or neutral, people are talking about you if they know you are there. This is where the rest of link acquisition comes in.  There are several avenues that you can use links for monitoring your business’s online reputation. 

1. Social media – what are people talking about in your industry. The Cluetrain Manifesto is articulate in describing the internet as what it truly is: a conversation. Get into some of these online gathering places and find out what people are saying and, more importantly, what they care about. Do a search on your company name and some names of popular social media networks to see if they are talking about you. What are they saying? Do they hate your customer service? Love your products but hate how long it takes to reach them? Find out by longing on.
2. Local search reviews – This is another way to find out what people really think. The anonymity of the internet allows people to speak their minds freely and give honest feedback and opinions. What did they think of dealing with your company the last time they bought something from you or used your service?
3. Blogs – Hunting through popular blogs in your industry will give you another avenue of peeking into the ever-elusive mind of the consumer. Try running a search on your name and the word ‘blog’ to see if anyone is blogging about you.

 Once you find out what people are saying, what do you do with it? 

1. Don’t ignore it. People hate to be ignored. They want to know their concerns and thoughts have validity (and they do). This doesn’t mean you need to get accounts at all of the major social media spots and address every comment they post. But look at your internal structure, your customer service process, your shipping solutions; is there anything you can do to make things easier on your customers, both existing and future?
2. Make the changes. Equally important to identifying the problems and solutions is the actual follow through on fixing the problem. Keep checking the progress (and the social media outlets) to see if it’s working.
3. Be available. Participate if you feel it’s important, but users beware! You can open yourself up to a whole bunch more problems if you do this. If you do decide to start talking, prepare yourself for what may be coming next.