Vertical Measures » Link Building Tools

7 Ways to Use Keywords for Link Building Campaign Design

Guest Blogger — Tue, 27 Apr 2010 14:00:26 +0000

Keywords are a gateway to understanding how a market thinks, acts and buys. They’re also the common language for most SEO and PPC teams, and a clear way of connecting revenues with their work in the eyes of upper management. This all makes keywords a natural place to begin discussing – and designing – a link building campaign.

(Note: To thank early adopters during the launch of their new Link Building Toolset, Ontolo is offering a 25% discount that ends today at 9pm PST on 4/27/2010. They’ve let us know that they will never be offering a discount like this again, and that the pricing is good for all future upgrades, price changes, etc.)

Money Keywords vs. Market Defining Keywords

First, a note on the disctintion between money keywords ($KWs) and market defining keywords (MDKWs). Most SEM teams are familiar with $KWs – those are the terms that they bid on and optimize for because prospects use them when looking for solutions to their pains. However, $KWs are not always as useful when analyzing a market for its link building opportunities. This requires market defining keywords, which are the highest-level terms used to describe a market. So, for an online golf retailer, the money keywords would look like [brand name, model number, driver]. The market defining keyword is, simply, golf and possibly golfing.

1) Identify Your MDFK and $KW SERPs Dominators

SERP dominators are the websites that consistently rank well in the SERPs for your $KWs as well as your MDKWs. Though you may think you know your primary search competitors, you’ll be surprised at the true SERPs dominators when you do a comprehensive analysis. Start with reading our guide to SERP dominator analysis here >> We created a worksheet and occurrence counting tool to help out (there’s also source code available for a tool that automates this process). The SERP dominators in your keyword market space are also excellent places to start pulling competitive backlink data, should you choose to develop a link prospect list that way.

2) MDFKs for Industry Link Opportunity Analysis

What link opportunities exist in your market? Your market defining keywords are an excellent place to start gauging opportunity. You can look for blogs: [MDFK blogs], news sites: ["MDFK news"], guest posting opportunities: [MDFK "guest post"], interviewers/ees: [MDFK intitle:interview], niche directories: ["MDFK Directory"], niche forums and community sites: [MDKW community], and industry associations if you’re in the B2B space: [MDKW association]. Search for each of these in Google and compare the number of relevant hits in the top ten. The query with the most relevant hits could be an area for you to query more deeply and begin developing a specific campaign.

3) MDFKs for Competitive Link Analysis

While surveying your industry for opportunities, keep an eye out for your competitors, as well as any of the SERP dominators you previously identified. Are their hostnames appearing in any of your result sets? Are they mentioned in the news sites you find? Are they the subjects of interviews? Track them carefully and you’ll uncover the PR and content-based link building moves of your competition. Most importantly you’ll get some great ideas on what’s working.

4) Connecting Existing Linkable Assets to Keywords

We wrote recently on link building assets, which are pages and resources on your site – and people within your organization – that are the most linkable to your market. This could be a PDF collection, a jobs listing page, coupons, or even your CEO (for interviews). The important thing is going from assets to the keywords that will help you turn up link opportunities. Start with your list of assets and then brainstorm their keywords. Then combine these keywords with your MDKWs and you should start to turn up some places to submit your assets or request that someone check them out for consideration.

5) MDKWs + Link Building Query Operators

MDKWs are crucial when conducting a thorough dig for ALL the link prospects in your keyword space. You conduct this dig by combining your MDKWs with link building queries, designed to root out opportunities based on their "footprints." We recommend the following tools for this:

SEOBook Link Suggest Tool

Link Search Tool by SoloSEO

The Ontolo Link Building Query Generator

6) Getting Your Money Keywords in Anchor Text with Guest Posts

One way to use your money keywords in linkbuiding is when you’ve decided on a guest post campaign, in which you write articles for publication on relevant sites that accept content submissions. In most cases you’re allowed a snippet of description, along with a link or two. Depending on your relationship with the publisher, you may be able to have more control over the anchor text. In some occasions they may allow you to even add links within the body text, especially if there’s a value-add reason for the links to be there.

7) Getting Money Keywords in Anchor Text with Outreach Requests

When conducting outreach you can request that people link to you with particular link text. However, unless you’re paying them, it’s not highly-likely that people will respond to your requests. It doesn’t hurt to ask, though you’re probably better off focusing on building high-trust editorial links to your site and letting your onsite SEO handle the rest!

About the Author:
Garrett French is the co-founder of Ontolo, Inc., creators of the Ontolo Link Building Toolset which uses your target keywords to find and grade link prospects. The Link Building Toolset reduces link prospecting and qualification time, letting you focus on the most valuable part of link building: relationships.

Guest Blogger

Good Friday SEO

Kaila Strong — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 10:59:35 +0000

I know, you probably are reading this post thinking—what does SEO have to do with Good Friday? Absolutely nothing as a matter of fact, but I figured I’d take advantage of today and write a little ditty about all the good things Friday brings to the world of SEO. If anything, at least you will have some sites to peruse while waiting for your 9-5′er week to end.

Our friends over at SEOmoz have their weekly Whiteboard Friday’s. Rand Fishkin, CEO of SEOmoz, provides video every Friday on a variety of topics. In the recent past he’s gone over: differentiating your SEO services, cloaking, how to get awesome links, and the importance of link quality.

Free tip Friday from Buy By Mom is a great resource as well. While some of her tips are standard industry knowledge, she does seem to have a few videos integrated into her site that always draw in my attention. DailySEOtip.com is also a great source for industry news. DailyBlogTips.com offers a Friday Blogroll detailing the best blogs of the week.

Avid Twitter users know about Follow Friday’s on Twitter. Every Friday users will recommend peeps that are ‘follow’ worthy by sending a tweet with their information. Many re-tweet (RT) other’s recommendations to share with their own followers. Near the end of the tweet a hashtag is entered, #followfriday, to designate the subject.

How does this help you with SEO? Many have expressed the value of Twitter for marketing. Once you are fully convinced you need to get an account, you’ll need to find people to "follow" who will hopefully "follow" you back. That’s where Follow Friday comes in. Many sites keep track of Twitter hashtags, and simply going into a Follow Friday page will give you an infinite number of Twits to follow—click @username, "follow", repeat. Hashtags can be utilized for SEO purposes as well to categorize tweets and for branding.

So, on this Good Friday be productive and take the time to keep up with all that is new in the world of SEO. And remember, every Friday is a good Friday for SEO!

Kaila Strong

Kaila is a Sr. Account Manager at Vertical Measures. She works directly with clients to evaluate and analyze their overall Internet Marketing needs, creates sales proposals and recommendations. In addition she regularly reports on client rankings, gives SEO advice to brands in a variety of industries and manages client expectations.

Kaila has a background in social media marketing, link building, SEO and content marketing. She’s an active blogger on SearchEngineWatch.com, and an avid social media user (@cliquekaila on Twitter). She brings her experience to the table with new clients and enjoys writing about her experiences as well here on the VM blog and throughout the web.

Website – Twitter – More Posts

Niche Optimization Venues

Vertical Measures — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 13:00:28 +0000

Very often, people who professionally optimize websites for search engines come to a point where they focus exclusively on the big picture of site rankings and the associated link building. While link builders can’t usually be charged with myopic vision and inflexibility in their methods, sweating the little details isn’t generally on the collective agenda either, especially when trying to promote multiple sites simultaneously.

Many times a new focused strategy or technique may not seem worthwhile because of the huge amount of top-level searching and otherwise time-consuming processes needed to begin the undertaking. Faced with the option of using tried-and-true tactics for good rankings with the major search players or experimenting with new techniques like social media, niche marketing, local search & directories, and video optimization, many will choose to do what they’ve always done in the past simply because they know they can meet their deadlines that way.

In the long run, though, most seasoned SEOs would agree that experimentation with less-often used sites like local and niche search engines pays off in many valuable ways. Not only is there simply more “link space” to be had by promoting a site across local search engines and other sites specifically devoted to the same vertical markets, but the act of using them for research brings up results that would otherwise remain hidden if the major search engines and common site tools are the only methods used.

Pushpins on the Map

Regardless of the global nature of the Internet, geography still plays a huge role in determining which sites get listed where. For example, a site that has a local store and doesn’t sell their products online has no choice but to focus their web marketing on local search engines and directories, since almost all potential paying customers have to be in their city. Using local directories for an example like that makes sense, but it makes equally good sense to use local and niche search engines and directories for a website that does every bit of their business online; it simply gives them another avenue by which to be discovered, along with precious links from generally decent and respected sites. In addition, there are a few local business sites that don’t seem to care if the business is actually local, which means that there are some free backlinks to be had from them.

Social Connections

By now it’s no secret that social media plays a large and steadily increasing role in many aspects of web marketing. From the search engine side of things, they’re valuable in all the obvious ways: Social networking platforms are often popular, regularly updated, and respected sites with an enormous amount of unique and (somewhat) organized content. Therefore, all the normal bookmarking, voting, and commenting techniques apply well to this arena. Beyond that, though, there’s an added benefit to having one’s content on a social media site: A huge potential audience. Of course, depending on what exactly is being promoted, there may not be a huge user response to whatever you’ve contributed on social sites, but that really doesn’t matter so much. It’s great when other users are really excited about something that they’ve been informed about through the network and begin to interact, because it draws search engine attention. If it’s at all possible, it’s wise to submit humorous or valuable content that only subtly resembles marketing material.

By exploring the furthest reaches of the web and even some places that seem less than worthwhile, one’s SEO efforts will be improved tangibly. Furthermore, the link builder who takes the time to do this research will certainly be exposed to different opportunities that would remain hidden if working exclusively within the confines of their historical precedent. Make sure to stop back at this blog tomorrow for part 2 of this post, where we will take a look at some niche search engines and examine their usefulness for optimization and research.

Vertical Measures

Using 404 Pages for Link Juice

Vertical Measures — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 09:22:21 +0000

Matt Cutts recently put out a blog post discussing 404 pages and how they could be used as effective inbound links by creating link juice to your website. Since that blog post went out, several conversations have surfaced on the Web talking about this concept and whether it really can work in favor of SEO professionals.

In summary, the post talks about a new feature that Google offers that converts already existing links to your site to even higher quality links, and it does so through those 404 pages that most web searchers have come to detest. Typically, when a web searcher gets a 404 page, it’s telling them that the page they’re looking for is not found. For searchers, it’s an annoyance; for website owners, its lost traffic. For SEO professionals who depend on those links, it’s lost link juice.

Now, Google’s webmaster portal allows website owners to see who is linking to these 404 pages by registering your website and using the diagnostic tools provided. And it’s free.

The news of this new site link strengthening tool has sent airwaves through the SEO world. Why? Because this new tool equates to free links. Not only free, but it’s an ethical SEO practice. Search Engine Watch newsletter continued to follow the story and talk more about what the industry was saying. Running this report will provide website owners and SEO professionals with a quick and effective way to improve a site’s overall impact on search results. 404 pages don’t pass any authority so they have to be cleaned up by either contacting the sites and getting them to change the links to the right pages, or doing 301 redirects. Some SEOs were already manually doing these 404 searches, but now Google is providing a way to do it for them. The new standard for site analysis reports should include this tool, no question.

There are a couple caveats to this new tool. First, the site must have a Google webmaster account and it takes a good amount of time to reclaim each link. However, SEO professionals interested in quality, ethical link building practices would be well-served to check out Google’s new webmaster portal.

[tags] google webmaster tools, 404 pages, link juice, matt cutts, search engine watch, 301 redirects [/tags]

Vertical Measures

A Great Link Building Tool

Vertical Measures — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 09:58:23 +0000

Today we thought we would tell you about a great link evaluation tool – Link Harvester. It allows deep database querying of the Yahoo! Search database via the Yahoo! API. As far as we know, it is the only link tool on the market which specifically specializes in allowing you to easily and quickly query beyond the Yahoo! 1,000 search result limit.

Just type in the name of whatever domain you want to check out – like one of your major competitors – and click to do a search. The information you’ll get back can be very illuminating. You’ll find out:

The number of unique domains that are linked to that domain
Their IP addresses and all unique C block addresses of any links
A break-out of all links from .gov, .ac, .uk and .edu domains.
Any domains that link from five or more pages are highlighted in bold.

How Can All This Help You?

It’s a lot of good information and definitely interesting, but what does all that information mean? There are plenty of ways you can use it.

Let’s take a look at a few examples. We plugged in the domain for a small, local brewery and learned lots of interesting information that would be helpful if you were a small brewery competing with them. For instance, out of the top 250 links, 26 were from 26 unique commercial domains. Quite a few of the links are shown in bold, which means there are a lot of duplicate links from a relatively small amount of sites. So your brewery can probably compete. Where to start? Go to the very sites that are already linking to this brewery! They are obviously open to linking, right? So why not you?

Next we took at a look at popular retail jewelry site that sells designer tungsten rings and found some fascinating statistics. They had far more unique links to their domain from a much wider variety of domains. They also had thousands of back links and, even more interesting, three links from educational domains. That sounds strange at first, but we followed those links and discovered that the links were to schools specializing in jewelry design who referenced the retail jeweler’s site as an example of a particular style of jewelry making.

For a retail jeweler’s website, it’s something to think about. How could your site’s demonstration of various styles and designs be leveraged into links to educational websites? This same jewelry site also had numerous links to fashion websites, crafting websites and Victorian interest sites. If you sell specialty jewelry, it might give you all kinds of new ideas (after you visit all of those links just sitting there waiting for you, of course). Have you tried linking to clothing and accessory sites that suit your style of jewelry? What about crafting sites, or ethnic sites if you sell ethnic jewelry?

Now that you have the list of sites to target, it time to make that all important link request. All link request emails should serve two key purposes: Let the person know you took the time to look at his or her site, and make it as easy as possible for them to make a decision to link to you. In addition, your email should include the following:

- A subject line that follows any directions given on their site. If you have not taken the time to look at the recipient’s site carefully, and you do not follow the link request directions, you will probably never hear from them.

- The site owner’s name. It seems simple, but take the time to look through the site where you want the link, and find the site owner’s name. Address this person immediately in your email, so he or she knows you’re not a spammer.

- A short paragraph that describes your site and why you feel it’s linkworthy.

- The page on their site where you would like your link to appear.

- The exact URL from your site you want them to link to and possibly your anchor text

- Your site’s name and home page URL.

- Your name, phone number and business email address.

Note the above assumes you are not offering a reciprocal link, if your are, you will need to include all related information.

So get to Link Harvester, plug in a few of your favorite competitors, and start really checking out the competition. You’ll be amazed by what you learn and the new ideas you’ll come away with.

[tags] link building tools, link harvester, link requests, link building [/tags]