My 5 Favorite SEO Strategies Exposed

My SEO Secrets Wil Reynolds, Founder, SEER Interactive

Online Success Recipe

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Questions & Interruptions

How Google Knol is killing your content is king strategy

What is Google Knol?

How Google Knol is killing your content is king strategy

How Google Knol is killing your content is king strategy

What is Google Knol?

How Google Knol is killing your content is king strategy

What does the previous page tell us about how these pages are ranked?

What info could Google pull from? •# of comments•Length of comments (hey thanks = spam)•# unique comments•Comment Velocity•Quality of commenters•Commenter velocity

How Google Knol is killing your content is king strategy

How Google Knol is killing your content is king strategy

What does the previous page tell us about how these pages are ranked?

What info could Google pull from? • Poster quality • Rating & rater quality • Content length • Freshness / versions (health) • Reviewers & reviewer quality • Similar content threshold • Inappropriate content flag (watch haters!)

How Google Knol is killing your content is king strategy

Mostly impacts content heavy sites You MUST watch out for these ranking in your space Use Aaron Walls Rank Checker for your key terms and knol.google.com as the domain. http://tools.seobook.com/firefox/rank-checker/ Impacts “how to” and hot content

Prepare for it by: •Watching, reading, commenting, voting •NOT BY WRITING •Watch hot trends (google.com/trends) and write about them quickly •People are sharing in the Adsense revenue, if these pages start ranking well someone is going to get PAID better be you!•Edit regularly, promote the heck out of them you’ll need a following, links, traffic to the page •Create a contest around adding to your Knol (Aaron Wall)•Don’t close it to editing (guess)

Tools to help you know what you are up against in SEO

One of the biggest mistakes made by people who are doing their own SEO or hiring an SEO is not properly assessing the competitiveness of their landscape against and honestly assessing their skills.

Depending on your industry you should know that David vs. Goliath is getting much harder to pull off - everyone has search in their marketing plans

Tools to help you know what you are up against in SEO

How to spot low hanging fruit opportunities that require basic SEO

Run a tool like SEO spyglass (paid) or linkdiagnosis (free) to get the spread of links to a competing site. Are most links low PR, how many do they have? How do you stack up (in the same tool).

•Are mostly homepages ranked well or do you see many pages ranking with pages that are 2-3 levels away from the homepage? •Look for links from authority sites, PR 7 and higher •Are those ranking well household names•Search news sites are competitors getting a lot of press, are they partnering with big household names

•Search Google News + archive •USE SEOQUAKE to get averages on PR, Links, etc

Don‟t Fall Victim…

Beware of the SEO MYTH!! Every site ranks well for

SOMETHING!

Linkdiagnosis

Linkdiagnosis

What I get from this tool for my top competitors:

High value backlinks What are the REAL odds that I’ll be able to get some similar ones? How many raw links do they have? What is the anchor text of the top high value links? How does your PR distribution compare to theirs? How do we compare on deep links?

2 THINGS I LIKE about this tool: •Sortable columns •Exportable to CSV for real manipulation (MACROS)

Be Careful It doesn’t do any interpretation on focus / theme of site You’ll see Wikipedia / Amazon in the top of search results and you can bump them for

stuff that is LONG tail for them but in your wheelhouse.

SEOQuake

SEOQuake

What I get from this tool for my top competitors:

Pagelinks (gives an idea on deeplinks) Domain links (domain link power) Indexed Pages

Add in Gov Links, Stumbleupon, Digg, Google Trends Data, etc = Platform

2 THINGS I LIKE about this tool: •Sortable SERPS •Exportable to CSV for real manipulation (MACROS)

Be Careful You can get blocked out of Google

Sometimes to get the best out of the dataset change your search prefs to 50 results this is likely to get you the best overall idea of what you are up against.

Competitiveness Next Steps

Now that you know the competitiveness of the landscape, you can make choices about what kinds of terms you can win with

Know what’s attainable

Top of the Tail Middle Tail End of the Tail Buy Tickets Rutgers basketball Boston Theatre Tickets Sell Tickets tickets Things to do in Arizona Superbowl Tickets University of Maryland Chicago Jazz Concerts NCAA Tickets football tickets Duke Basketball Tickets BU football tickets Syracuse Basketball Fall out boy tickets Tickets Jimmy Buffet Tickets Eagles Tickets Trace Adkins Tickets Broadway Tickets

A real example Stubhub

Tickets By location - Philadelphia - Music - Jazz

Competitor Things to do in (10 major cities) Kanye West tickets Third eye blind tickets Use this strategy until you can COMPETE Build linkbait (may take 4-5 attempts), press, a following, etc Go after more difficult terms the following year

Quick KW Research pointers • Google gives us numbers!! & you can kick them out in a CSV Google gives us top keywords driving traffic to our competitors using trends for websites (check against other tools) • Before you run off with the data, check the trend against your site…is it pretty accurate or way off? • MSN Adcenter Plugin - SPEED

Google Keyword Tool

Google Keyword Tool

Google Trends for Websites

Google Trends Pointers

• With Google Trends for websites you can also find top keywords driving traffic to your competitors “Also searched for”

• USE REGIONS to filter out foreign searchers if you don’t offer to a global audience or to find opportunities (PPC)

• USE the year to find month to month trends, or spikes in the last 30 days to find more recent spikes

MSN AdCenter Plugin

Advanced Queries to find Links

Say THANK YOU to Ann Smarty & Rand Fishkin who inspired this slide

Google Advanced Queries

Google Advanced Queries

Google Advanced Queries

www.nicholas.duke.edu/blog/davids-blog/duke-basketball/

Do you see what I see?

I SEE…

Do you see what I see?

Do you see what I see?

Who really like…

Do you see what I see?

Do you see what I see?

And have NO

Do you see what I see?

Do you see what I see?

I SEE CONTESTI SEE LINKS

All from smart queries

Google Advanced Queries

keyword "suggest url" / "suggest * url" keyword "suggest site" / "suggest site" keyword "suggest website" / "suggest * website"

Keyword companies in “city”Keyword companies listKeyword companies directory (ies)

inurl:forum / inurl:forums

Wildcard“Top * firefox” extensions – misses top extensions for FF“Top * firefox extensions” – misses top 10 firefox extensiontop * firefox extensions – could bring back too many resultsBlogsearch link:www.competitor.com

Search for sites mentioning you but not linking:Wil Reynolds –linkdomain:thinkseer.com –site:thinkseer.com

Search for sites linking to several competitors but not you:linkdomain:copounsite1.com linkdomain:copounsite2.com linkdomain:couponsite3.com

Queries + SEO Quake

Queries + SEO Quake

10 Ways to get .edu links

Ok here’s my quick and dirty ways to get them!1.Guest speak at a class/club on Internet Marketing2.Participate in the career fair at the schools who link out to participating companies3.Post your internships on schools sites that link out, make friends with the career services people so you can BEG for that link if need be4.Find professors who post and link out to the authors of publications in their syllabus if you can add value e-mail them and see if your case study or whitepaper could be used in their class5.Offer employee discounts to professors, develop an “education” license or version

10 Ways to get .edu links

1. Sponsor a marketing / technology or advertising club’s event make sure the club’s site is on the .edu and that the university links out to sponsors, there are 1000’s of university groups, from frats to golf club to Spanish club to linux club!

2. Do an advanced search on a local .edu with a word like guest speaker, or internet marketing or career fair, sign up for it in Google Alerts

3. Read the school paper, allow the editor to interview you or one of your executives as a local company or individual doing “good” in business.

4. Does your alma matter highlight graduates AND link out? 5. If all else fails donate money to universities that link out to donor

pages – advanced query!

Thanks!

Wil Reynolds – SEO since 1998SEER Interactive – Founded 2002www.seerinteractive.comCommunicate - Twitter: twitter.com/wilreynoldsFollow - Friendfeed: friendfeed.com/wilreynoldsSteal - Delicious: del.icio.us/wilreynoldsSteal – Youtube: youtube.com/wilreynoldsCall - 215-967-4461