Claire is going to take us on a journey of discovery… We’ll look at what an infographic really is and why people hate them. How to create the perfect sharable infographic. How to create the worst infographic on earth. How to make sure you give your infographic the best start in life imaginable. How to get the big links while not looking like an idiot, and how to do your job and not feel as though you’re sacrificing your passion.
Infographics, they are a great topic and controversial because of the abuse, and tricky because doing great infographics is not all that simple as we think. (more…)
Ade Lewis owner of Teapot SEO gave some great tips on how to carry out SEO for small businesses for as little as £350 a month at LinkLove. Small business SEO relies on face to face relationships with the client which is very different to those who have large clients and can be executed without many meetings/interactions.
Ade has a rule about opportunities. If he gets a good opportunity, he says yes. After last year Search Love, Duncan were Ade chatting at the bar and Duncan asked if he would like to speak and next year’s event. Now Ade is here presenting to over 300 people at LinkLove. This is the same way Ade approaches small business SEO. You need to optimise as much as you can. Be really good at least one area of SEO and know enough about the others, to amplify the business.
The afternoon session at LinkLove started with Rand Fishkin giving us tips on how your CEO can be a link building and social sharing machine. Being the CEO of SEOmoz and the fact that the company has built a lot of their success with Rand blogging every single night, there is no one better to talk about the role of CEO in link building than Rand Fishkin.
SEOmoz was built on many of traits and attributes that Rand had. Every one company takes on the passion and the attributes of their founders. It is not a good or bad thing. The CEO has the opportunity to move this needle.
The third session of the day, is from Distilled’s very own Hannah Smith who gave the audience some great tips on how to build links.
What has changed, is that link building has got real, you cannot get away from it. Hannah spoke about “Sustainable ways to building links”, lots of tips. It is worth doing, but it is hard.
Hannah is jealous of Rand, he builds links in his sleep, writes a blog post, hits and go to sleep. This does not work for everyone. (more…)
#LinkLove kicks off in a new venue this year and the first speak to take to the stage was Wil Reynolds. Wil’s presentations are always interactive and interesting and this morning’s did not disappoint.
Wil Reynolds spoke about “Head Smackingly Simple: Post Conversion Link Building Tips”. He started the presentation asking us “What if getting the link was not the finish line?” Wil said that getting the links is the start of something bigger, don’t just be happy by getting that one link. He demonstrated his point by going through a lot of case studies to show how getting the link is not the end of the story. If the concept of building links was a stair stepper then what would you do?
This is a guestpost by David Sottimano who’s a lead SEO Consultant for Distilled London, responsible for managing large scale SEO projects for top UK corporations. You can find him speaking at international conferences or blogging for SEOmoz, Distilled and other high quality sites like this
If you didn’t manage to make it to either Boston or London Linklove 2012, shame on you – but don’t worry as I’m going to give you the goods right here in this post and it’s important to note this is strictly my interpretation of the presentations. If you want the full recaps, check out the Distilled London & Boston recaps.
For your reading pleasure, I’m going to break this down into major sections that your ADD can skip through as it pleases – or use the anchor links below:
The future of link building – or is it link building? Back to top
In light of recent events, this topic has become much more relevant now that Matt Cutts and the Google webspam team are killing thousands of sites. We all knew this day was coming, and it’s finally come. Rand has been preaching about long-lasting link building strategies that will pass any web spam test for some time now, but now it’s more important than ever.
I won’t say create good content, because (like you) – hearing something over and over makes me cringe. I’ve always been an advocate for creating things that matter, make me feel something, relieve boredom, make me money and lets me show off in front of friends – but I didn’t realize from a business perspective that it actually costs less to do content marketing. Oh and if you think you have a boring product, check out what these guys are doing.
Link building will always be around, but it seems like social “verification” is the way forward. Even if you don’t believe it, you can only benefit by investing in content marketing & social strategies because it will still drive traffic to your site. I for one, do not ever want to rely solely on Google – simply because they can flick a switch and crush you overnight.
Proof. Got a G+ account? Cool, log in and navigate to this URL for me please https://www.google.com/s2/u/0/search/social?hl=en Yeah, that’s right – they know where you eat breakfast too. Hat tip to Rand for showing us that little beauty.
Theory: Tom Anthony explained the traditional link graph and the concept of social/authorship verification. Using rel=author was never about the vanity, it’s about giving Google another weapon against spam.
How to figure out where you are and where you should go Back to top
We know we need to create good content, market it, create jaw-dropping viral videos – but you’ve heard this so many times you might even consider killing animals if it would help make it stop. In Will Critchlow’s session, he demonstrated a method of pin-pointing what’s holding your link building campaigns back from greatness.
Maybe you’re an industry content leader and your design just needs an upgrade, or maybe you’re not getting links because nobody in the company promotes it – or even have social accounts!?
Once you have enough responses, copy them into this excel spreadsheet and follow the simple instructions. You’ll end up with output that is an aggregation of several factors that can help you determine what’s preventing you being awesome.
Real life example
This would be the robot output: From Red to Green = bad to good. Content & Permission are problem areas.
Human output: In this scenario we can see that content & permission are the problems that are holding this particular website back in their link building campaign.
- Commercial email lists (product releases etc)
- Content-based email lists (newsletters etc)
- Company-level social media following
- Individual social media followings throughout the company
- Relationships with major influencers in your industry
- Relationships with major global influencers (journalists, politicians, celebrities)
- Traffic / blog subscribers
- Community / evangelists
Ok – can you tell how powerful this is? Why not give this to your new clients, or hand it out internally to see where you need to improve.
Will’s full presentation can be found here and contains a full step-by-step explanation of how you can achieve results by shipping the minimum viable product (experimentation).
There’s regular analysis & reporting, and then there’s researching & reporting like a boss. Distilled’s conferences are intentionally advanced and 2 presentations that defined advanced were given by Branko Rhitman and Justin Briggs.
In the interest of brevity – if you’re interested in:
How to prune out the “selfish” Twitter users that mostly tweet their own stuff and are probably doing it as an act of self-promotion and will find little interest in tweeting your linkable content, but on the other hand, might make good targets of ego-bait…
I love watching Martin MacDonald present, mainly because he’s just talking about something he loves – and it shows. The guy lives and breathes SEO and understands what it’s like on the ground level where we constantly pound the pavement for links.
A clever tactic was to hijack communities – now don’t get ahead of yourselves here, this is nowhere near manipulative or against terms of service. He found a conversation on Twitter, got involved, wrote a blog post and gained tons of traffic and links from the BBC. I’m not kidding, and he outlined the entire process in detail in his presentation deck.
Sometimes you just have to go over and above to form relationships, by being creative/creepy. Wil Reynolds shows us how he managed to get a link from a person who seemed untouchable – full deck here.
Process & tools to make your life easier Back to top
John Doherty defines hustle, and this is his set of preferred tools & link building process. I’d say if you’ve got a link from Wired.com to your personal blog, you’re probably someone we should listen to. Here’s the TL;DR version:
What (am I ranking for, do I need?)
- Find the keywords driving traffic, then run then through a free tool like Rankerizer - KeywordSpy - Use this Excel spreadsheet and pull in Analytics data using Excellent Analytics - SearchMetrics (paid) This is an incredible tool for me, gives you landscape data in a flash
Rank Trackers are a dime a dozen, but the best ones and the ones I recommend are:
There are quite a few speakers I’ve left out, however they were all fantastic. All of the speaker’s slide decks are available online – click here for London, click here for Boston.
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