•
Have you ever typed a question into Google and the ranking results were from a mass produced “how to” site? Even if you don’t know it…you have. Instructional, Q&A, and How-To sites have popped up in a variety of forms and many of them are having a great deal of success commercially and in the rankings simply by answering the specific questions people are asking. If your business website is not seeking to do the same, then you are missing out on opportunities to get links and to offer better service. The more information you can provide a customer the more credible your business becomes. Try going to a Big Box store’s electronics department and asking the sales clerk the difference between 1080i and 1080p in an LCD TV. Be prepared for copious stammering while they desperately seek an escape via a spill on isle 3. However, if you walk into an electronics specialty store and ask the same question you will probably get an intelligent answer which makes sense to you. Suddenly you have a lot more confidence in both your purchase and the place where you are purchasing it. The more information you can provide a customer, the more comfortable they will feel about doing business with you. And that’s just real life, online, consumer confidence and corporate credibility are only two aspects of a much more important reason to fill your site chock full of useful information. That reason? Links of course! The notion of using consumer questions to drive content development has a long history: Lisa Barone once talked about creating content to answer natural questions . Dazzlin Donna, mentions using question sites when she talks about intelligently crafting content And Debra Mastaler wrote a great piece about gleaning question inspiration from Ask.com . I’d like to go even further with these ideas of using questions to build links. This method in particular is a very special brand of link building. The kind that takes forever and makes you want to hurt people, ya know, the good kind. Step 1. Find out what kinds of questions your customers are asking. This may be easier than you think. In fact, all of the information you want it is probably accessible on your lap top without ever having be a face to face with a single human being. To start with an obvious source, the Wordtracker Keyword Questions tool is a god send in this department. The numbers associated with these questions may be a bit misleading though. For starters, the tool only goes back 140 days, so there will be drastic seasonal variances. For instance at the moment the top question for the word “how” is “How to cook a turkey.” It’s doubtful that will be the case in July. Trends and seasons are a good case for re-visiting this tool every few months. If you treat the numbers as more of “popularity gauge” than a hard fast rule you’re in the right frame of mind. And numbers aside, the questions themselves can be really telling about your customers…and in some cases about the internet using world. Like the fact that the #1 question returned for the word “Where” is “Where do Jon and Kate Gosselin live”. Really people? Aside from the keyword questions tool, there are others sites which have already done the work for you. In addition to Search Engines’ “Most Asked Questions” lists there are hundreds of sites which make a living answering peoples every day questions. As a link builder, you can capitalize on those efforts. Some great examples of sites that can work for this project are answers.com , ehow , wikihow , about.com , howstuffworks and instructables just to name a few. You may notice that Yahoo! Answers is conspicuously missing form this list, it’s GREAT for questions, but the individual pages don’t tend to have a lot of back links. Once you chose a site or sites to work with, run this search operator: Site:quesiton-or-how-to-site.com “keyword relevant to your business” This should give you a boat load of questions, and how-tos. With sites that offer more than just how-to’ instructions or have questions mixed into other information, try adding a ”who”, “what” “where” or “why” to the keyword to find entries which address questions. These results should represent honest questions that real people are asking which are related to your product or service. These are the topics that your consumers want to know more about, are you trying to be the authority on these topics? Well, why not? Step 2 . – Pick the best content Now that you’ve got some great content ideas, yeah, you could re-create an article based on every question that you find, if you can afford to create 300 articles and promote them all. Sure. But it may not be in your best interest to write a detailed article about how to cook a turkey or how to stalk Jon and Kate Gosselin. If you have limited resources, the best way to start is by looking at popularity. If a question is extremely popular you should probably address it somewhere on your site for the sake of providing good customer service. But just because a question is popular in Keyword Questions, doesn’t necessarily mean it’s something that people are linking to. This is where looking at people’s existing linking patterns comes into play. When you run the site command above, I highly recommend doing it with an SEO toolbar or plug in. SEO Quake is a good choice for this project because it automatically displays each page’s back links. Using this kind of tool will save you a LOT of time. Looking for specific instructions or an answer which already has back links you can find a pre-existing audience of potential linkers which is far better than starting from scratch. But just for your own sanity, check the quality of those back links before creating the article. Step 3 – Do it better and promote it Once you’ve picked a few questions to answer in content, it’s not enough to simply regurgitate what’s already on another site or to whip off a cheap two sentence answer barely worthy of an FAQ page. It’s important to bring something new to the party. What makes you more reliable than any generic instructional site or Wiki-what-now? You are (or should be) an expert in your space. That expertise gives you credibility. I’m much more inclined to believe a carpet store’s advice on how to get a grape juice stain out of my Berber than the insights of a pretty pony-tailed avatar. We all know club soda is magic on stains, but I’ll give you bonus points if you can tell me why. Extra Tips: If you find a question that has real merit, but the answer page doesn’t have a lot of back links or even if it does, try searching that question without any operators. Find the most relevant, ranking answers and scour those back links for decent linking prospects to add to your list of contacts. If you can answer multiple, similar questions within one article go for it; it doubles the number of people you can contact for links. Find a method of organizing your articles and research. Keep track of the articles you are creating, the websites that are linking to an existing answer for the question or questions your article will address and the contact information for those people. Make sure to use the exact question you are answering or instructions you are giving as the page’s title tag. This can help you be found as a respectable answer to the question in the future. Don’t forget a call to action, as people come into your site through these new content pages; strive to keep them moving deeper into the site. The Final Step Now that you have found and answered a burning question take that information to the people who are already linking to a less impressive answer. You should have a limited number of contacts, so be sure not to waste any of them by sending out a generic email template, you’ve taken the time to research the topic, so take enough time researching the contact to at least know their name or make an insightful comment about their site. You also have brand new content that is worth promoting so continue to search for sub-par information on the subject and let people know that you’ve just done it better. Where do you get your content inspiration from? Jennifer Van Iderstyne is the Online Marketing Director for Search Slingshot, an internet marketing company based in Albany, NY specializing in SEO reports and consulting . Jen can be found on twitter at http://twitter.com/Vanetcetera Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal . Build Links with Better
Tags:
article,
Business,
director,
internet,
internet marketing,
numbers,
people,
sales,
search-engine,
seo,
tool,
topics,
work
•
Social Bookmarking sites aren’t a huge mystery. If you think there’s some “special formula” to the Digg and Reddit algorithms, for the most part: you’d be wrong. Sure, there’s an algorithm at work there, but before you make that attempt at the front page, you need to work on the 2 major pieces necessary for success: great content, and a network of users to help promote it. The need for great content is self explanatory, and if you still need help with yours, there’s plenty of articles on the topic. But why is having a network so important? If you’re one of those people that thinks Digg power users hit the front page so often because their submissions “count” for more than others’, again: you’d be wrong. That success is based on a loyal following of literally thousands of users that follow their submissions and vote them up with and without being asked to. Building a network goes far beyond finding and adding users to your friends list. You need to participate in a variety of ways that both gets your account noticed and shows you’re willing to reciprocate by voting for, spreading, and commenting on others user’s submissions. And believe me, it’s a lot of hard work that you need to keep up on. Below is a basic guideline of some dos and don’ts roughly based on the regular habits of power users: Do: Friend, IMvite, and Follow power Users Don’t: Be a pest. If there ever was a starting point to creating a network for social bookmarking sites, making friends with the power users would be it. They have hundreds (if not thousands) of followers & friends, and a vote from them can often turn into a number of additional votes from their faithful. Also, once you’re seen in their company, people will ideally start coming to you. What you have to remember, however, is these people are super busy. They don’t have time to digg, vote, and retweet 100 links for you every day. They also don’t want to answer newb questions like: “How many diggs does it take to hit the front page?” Friend them, add them to your IM list, and follow them on twitter, but don’t ask too much of them. In fact, don’t ask a thing unless you’ve started giving first. Vote up their submissions, retweet for them on twitter, and if they IM you for a vote, make sure they know you got it for them. After a while, they’ll take notice, and before you know it, they’ll start voting up your subs without asking. If not, a simple IM request isn’t totally out of the question, but remember: once a day is plenty. Do: Participate in the SOCIAL side of social bookmarking Don’t: Be a Troll Most social bookmarking sites allow comments…use them! Commenting and participating in the social conversation isn’t just about being funny or witty. It’s about being noticed and showing that you actually took the time to view a submission. Being the first to comment (hint: especially a power user’s submission) is a great way of being noticed. Making a great comment can even get you attention far beyond the person who submitted the post, too. Sometimes great early comments get up-voted as much as the story itself…you just need to know how to appeal to the community. Spend some time reading comments to find out what gets up-voted, and what gets buried. While commenting is great way to network, here are some things to avoid: Don’t be too controversial (especially if you disagree with the article/submission) unless you’re sure the community agrees with your take..even then, your comment may end up buried. Don’t reply to comments to disagree…a flame war is not networking. Being funny is great, but remember not everyone has your sense of humor. Finally, don’t be offensive. In other words: don’t be a troll. Do: Embrace Multiple Social Networks & Technologies Don’t: Spread yourself too thin Facebook, Twitter, Instant Messaging, Skype, and the thousands of additional social media networks out there can be your best friend. Finding power users and your closest, most loyal contacts on these networks is a great way to keep multiple lines of communication open. As you network and add new friends you’ll find while most people have accounts on a number of networks, many stick to their few favorites. Twitter is a no-brainer if you want to expand your social network, while Instant Messaging ranges from AOL, Yahoo!,G-chat, and more. Using a program like Digsby can help you consolidate multiple instant messaging accounts into one simple application. Just make sure you keep a separate account for your personal or business life. If you succeed in building a strong network, you’ll likely get hammered with IMs every time you sign on. Another way to expand your reach is to join multiple social bookmarking sites. Digg and Reddit are great (and obviously the largest), but many (if not most) power users and users with larger networks are members of a number of the smaller sites as well. Being noticed on other networks (like Mixx, Propeller, and Stumble Upon) will really help you stand out, especially to users with large & powerful networks. Just be careful not to stretch yourself too thin. Maintaining a number of profiles on multiple social sites is a lot of work, so manage your time wisely. *Quick tip: remember to list and/or interlink your other social profiles when you can, and keep your user name & avatar as consistent as possible. Do: Submit content from community favorite sites Don’t: Submit commercial content As a member of a community, like Digg or Reddit, you’re likely to notice a trend when it comes to certain sites that produce front page content on a regular basis. It’s largely because they consistently break news or produce killer articles/videos/images/etc., and as a result, a large number of users regularly check these sites to submit and/or vote up their content. Being the first to submit breaking news or great new content from these sites is a sure-fire way to get noticed. It’ll also help build your profile with a fast track to hitting the front page (social networking pay-dirt). Be sure to add these sites to an RSS reader that you check regularly. On the other side of the coin, one of the quickest ways to fail in the social bookmarking world is to submit content that has no place in the community you are in. Commercial content, marketing (and yes SEO) articles, and poorly written content not only won’t achieve results, it will diminish your networking efforts. Just remember: most people hate marketers. (GASP!) They’ll down vote you, remove you as a friend, block you and even report you as a spammer. So do yourself a favor and make sure everything you’re trying to promote is WORTHY of the votes. Because even if you’ve built a strong enough network to push just about anything to the front page, it probably won’t last, and if you’re really careless, you even risk losing your account. Do: Submit content from a variety of sites Don’t: Consistently Submit content from a single site or short list of sites This concept may seem obvious to most, but you’d be surprised how many users submit their own content and nothing else. Oh sure, they’ll vote for other stuff every now and then, but their intentions are pretty clear: they’re in it for the marketing. In other words: you need to make sure you don’t LOOK like a marketer. The best way to do this is to submit content from a variety of sources. That way, when other users visit your profile (say, to add you as a friend) they don’t only see a single site* (or short list of sites) that you’re trying to promote. *This is especially true of Stumble Upon where one of the goals is to attract subscribers of your discoveries and up votes. Seeing the same site over and over on SU creates a bad user experience for your subscribers, and as a result, you’ll likely lose them. Do: Sign in, Vote up, Retweet, and Comment regularly Don’t: Leave huge lapses of activity in your accounts Even power users can’t afford to be away for too long…perhaps ESPECIALLY them, but I digress. If you take too much time away from social bookmarking activity, you’ll soon find that all the hard work you’ve done networking will start to go to waste. It’s not that you can’t take a week or two vacation if you like, but the more inactivity you have, the more you’ll find your influence dwindling. Basically, the more available you are (or at least appear to be) to vote and spread the submissions of your network & friends, the more influence you’ll have with them to push your own. Do: Perform favors (like submitting content) for friends in your network Don’t: Ask too much of your friends & contacts without giving back It’s a karma thing: the more you do for others, the more they’ll be willing to do for you. Don’t be afraid to submit content for others (as long as it’s appropriate and worthy of votes). Vote up your friend’s submissions without being asked, retweet it, and be a regular commenter of their stuff even when they simply asked for a vote. Go out of your way for them and they’ll go out of their way for you. If you start asking too much of someone, they’ll probably avoid you or simply ignore your requests from then on. So what’s asking too much? Basically asking anything of someone that isn’t a simple vote request (unless they’ve offered otherwise or owe you a favor) can be considered too much. So if you need someone to submit something for you, make sure that A) you’ve built a strong enough relationship with this person first, and B) it’s TOP quality content. Otherwise, you may never hear from them again. Do: Be a human being Don’t: Be anti-social or a computer What’s the point of “social” media if you’re not going to be social? If you want a network of “friends” or followers to fulfill some ego driven goal based on a number, by all means, automate as much as you can. But if you’re looking for contacts and friends who will be willing to do favors for you and can help you consistently reach the front page of your favorite social bookmarking sites, then you need to act like a human. Be friendly and don’t be afraid to have conversations once in a while. If the only IM-ing you do is “Can you digg this for me? Thx!” and “Dugg, can you hit this for me?”, then you’re missing a vital part of social media, and your networking efforts will probably suffer as a result. Do: Keep at it Don’t: Give up This list isn’t some secret sauce that will put you on the fast track to success. Building a network for social bookmarking sites takes a lot of work. This is simply a starting point and guideline for you to succeed and (frankly) not waste your own time. And while it’s a lot of work, the good news is you don’t need to spend all day every day on social media in order to be successful. You just need to find a rhythm that you’re comfortable with and stick to it. Persistence is everything. Todd Heim is CEO, co-founder, and SEO manager of Essential Internet Marketing, LLC , an SEM and Social Media Marketing company based in Albany, NY. You can find Todd on twitter at: http://twitter.com/ToddHeim/ Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal . Building Social Bookmarking Networks
Tags:
article,
marketing,
networking,
networks,
person,
personal,
social media marketing,
social-bookmarking
•
This being my debut article on SEJ I wanted to write on a topic that I’m passionate about. As an educator I always try to share my experiences and knowledge to help the community and my students. I figured there would be no better way for me to get started than to help you get started. Today we are going to squash some myths and shake things up a bit by creating a simple, optimized website in under 30 min. Stop Trying to be an
Tags:
article,
bluehost,
Business,
hosting,
life,
media,
seo,
small-business,
tools
•
I can’t tell you how many jobs I’ve landed just by coming up in searches for my own name in Google. Since I am an Internet marketing professional having a web presence is a must. What if you’re not a marketing professional, is a web presence something you should work on and will it benefit you? The answer of course is…Yes! As with any business your brand is what people identify with. If you are a freelancer or a consultant you are your brand. When you Google your name what comes up? How many results are of you? How many are of someone else? If someone wanted to hire you and learn more about you what would they find? These are important questions. It should also be important to you that when a search is done on your name that information pertaining to you and your area of expertise shows up. Why? The top reason “people searches” are done on the net is to establish ones credibility. Not having anything is almost as bad as finding something bad. Does your Myspace page show a picture of you flipping off viewers? That could be damaging and costly to your image and reputation. You can keep your personal profiles private, just don’t have damaging content or photo’s showing in your limited profile. How To Brand
Tags:
article,
facebook,
image,
linkedin,
marketing,
personal,
search engine marketing,
search-engine,
stumbleupon,
tools,
traffic,
work
•
In my opinion an HTML sitemap is one of the most important tactics you can use to distribute your link juice efficiently within your site. Yet many bloggers and webmasters neglect it. In this article I will explain how the HTML sitemap works, and also give you a hot tip you can use to boost your search engine optimization. First things first, what is an HTML sitemap? It is an actual page of your website that outlines the complete structure of your site, and that links to all the important pages on your site. If you want to see an example, check the Archives section of my blog. I call it “Archives”, but that is nothing more than an HTML sitemap, because it outlines the structure of all the posts I have published there month by month, and it also links to all of them. Now it is important to not confuse an HTML sitemap with an XML one. An XML sitemap also outlines the structures of your site, but the XML format is understood by search engine bots only. If you visit an XML sitemap you will just see a bunch of code. XML sitemaps are useful if you are having crawling or indexation problems on your site. That is, if search engine bots are not visiting or indexing your pages correctly. If you are not having such problems, however, having an XML sitemap is not essential. The HTML sitemap, on the other had, can be very useful no matter what. First of all because it is valuable for human visitors, as it allows them to find any page within your site quickly. Second, and most important, HTML sitemaps represent a very efficient way to distribute your link juice among the pages of your site. Ideally you want to have all the pages linking to the HTML sitemap and the HTML sitemap linking back to all the pages (you can exclude non important pages like the privacy policy or contact page if you want). One way to accomplish this is to put a link to the HTML sitemap on the main navigation menu or on the footer of your site. Finally, here is the hot tip that I promised: getting external backlinks pointing to your HTML sitemap can be very good to your search engine optimization. Why? Because that link juice will pass directly to all the pages on your site. If you get a backlink pointing to an internal page (e.g., a blog post) it will need to pass through at least one hop before it passes juice to other pages. Links to the HTML sitemap, on the other hand, pass juice directly to all other pages on your site. The next time you do a guest post, therefore, consider pointing the byline link to your HTML sitemap instead of your homepage. Daniel Scocco is the owner of Daily Blog Tips . Make sure to download his Make Money Blogging ebook if you are looking to take your blog to the next level. Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal . The Importance of HTML
Tags:
article,
daniel-scocco,
html,
money,
opinion,
pages,
search,
search-engine,
seo,
tools
•
When news came out that Bing went down for half an hour, I personally didn’t give it much thought since I wasn’t using it that time. And then the Bing search blog posted an explanation for the downtime the same time that the news about it is starting to spread. And then that’s it. But looking deeper into the meaning of things and believing in the saying that there’s a purpose for everything, it got me thinking yes, maybe there’s a reason for this downtime aside from getting into the day’s headlines, nevermind if the news is on the negative side. And I couldn’t agree more with this article saying that the downtime = happy days for the Microsoft search team. Why happy times? The fact that many people noticed Bing’s downtime is an indication that people are checking out Bing on a periodic, regular basis and not just when new features or announcement come out. Does this translate to more people actually using Bing? Perhaps yes, or perhaps no. And it’s not a good indication of usage as well. Anyway in case you’re interested to know what went wrong to Bing when it went down for half an hour, here’s the Microsoft Search Team’s explanation . Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal . Even Bing’s Downtime is Getting into the Headlines
Tags:
article,
downtime,
good-indication,
headlines,
news,
search,
search engine news,
search-engine,
seo,
then-the-bing,
tools,
translate,
usage-as-well