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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
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Twitter is all the rage, but you don’t need me to tell you that. So, yes, this is another Twitter article. But hang in there, it’s a good one! Lately I’m hearing mixed reviews about the success companies are having with Twitter. After my own successes with Twitter, I was a little surprised, so I decided to dig a little deeper to try to find out why some are having success and others aren’t. Ready for what I found? I found that the people that are really participating are getting the benefit and those that aren’t don’t see much benefit! Wow! Imagine that. LOL OK, so there is no surprise there, but it’s still interesting. It tells me there are a lot of people out there that understand Twitter is important but they don’t know why. I suspect a lot of people think just being there is enough – just having a presence is all they need. I’m seeing great Twitter background pages and great bios and a handful of interesting tweets and then it stops there. Just being on Twitter isn’t enough. You have to participate. Join the conversation. Create conversation. It’s like getting all dressed up and heading to a party and then sitting in the corner by yourself not talking to anyone all night. While you may start the evening like that, just sitting back scoping things out – eventually, if you want to have a good time, you have to join the party. So c’mon in and join the Twitter party. J I know we are all busy, I know growing a business online has gotten harder. I often hear “you mean I have to do SEO, be on Facebook, write and syndicate articles, Blog regularly AND tweet???” My response is no you don’t have to. If you aren’t looking to aggressively grow your business and use all the tools available to you, then you can pick and choose what you want to do. Any of those strategies will work for you on their own, but the key is when combined they work so well together and you get a much bigger impact. It’s building on top of your efforts rather than a single pronged approach. I know it’s a lot of work. It’s also new. We’ve never marketed like this before. It’s confusing for beginners. So, here is a quick overview of some of the tips that my clients have found most helpful. Getting Started: Understand Your
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You know the great thing about Antiques Roadshow? Aside from finding out that grandma’s ugly ceramic cat collection can actually bankroll a Caribbean cruise. It’s the idea that maybe; just maybe somewhere in our lives there are things that, with a little bit of lemon pledge and a new coat of paint, could actually become highly valuable. The same thing might be true of your website. The idea of creating great content for links isn’t new; Eric Ward was defining linkable content 8 years ago. More recently, Garrett French made a killer blue print for how to conceive, create and promote linkable content . Moreover, on Search Engine Journal, Loren Baker has educated readers on the importance of building natural links to interesting and relevant content & Ann Smarty has written about attracting links with HOW TO content . So why are there so many sites that still aren’t buying in? Maybe the idea of creating a library or searchable database is too daunting? Maybe in-depth research coupled with the time and effort required to create and market great content just seems like too much work. But unless a site features a billion-dollar brand name, funny pictures of cats or the contents of Lindsey’s Lohan’s trash, people probably aren’t throwing links at it. So what’s a small commercial site to do? I say, grab a dust rag, head into the basement and see what you already have that, with a few creative modifications, can be turned into something brand new. 1. Product
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Welcome to another edition of ‘ 7 Days of Search and Social ‘ – Well, maybe it’s the holidays or maybe it was SES, but the world was a little quieter than usual last week. But that’s no problem as the behemoth that is Google put out (yet another?) big announcement/roll-out with Real Time Search. That was enough to feed the savages on its own. Other than that, it was busiest in the Local SEO world and well… if you aren’t on your game with local… Get on it! Enough rambling, let’s get to it.
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Seems I am still running into SEOs that believe, however misguided, that conversions are somehow their domain. This seems speak to the fact that many search optimizers may not have a grip on the marketing model. While I’m not as well versed as I once was, let’s at least take a stab at this… For starters there are simply too many potential factors out of the average SEOs control that can affect the over-all conversion rate on a given website/page. I know this is unlikely a popular view, but hear me out for a few moments.
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Here’s some more Black Friday-related search statistics to digest. The Google Retail Advertising Blog (Yup, there is such a blog on Google) is reporting that online shopping searches on Thanksgiving Day and Black Friday were at its all time high this year. Searches for “Black Friday” increased by more than 20% year over year, while searches for “black Friday sales” and “black friday ads” also increased by more than 50% YOY. Likewise, fast rising search terms are also Black Friday-related and retailer specific. These include – “Walmart Black Friday”, “Kohls Black Friday Ad”, “Sears Black Friday Sales”, and “Target Black Friday Deals Online”. Amazon, which was the most visited site during Black Friday was not searched that much, may be because it was pretty much aggressive informing registered consumers of its Black Friday deals. Another interesting thing to point out is the fact that value minded searches such as “printable coupons” and “sales” are also up with 50% and 25% increase YOY, respectively. Likewise, searches for bargain deals on apparel and toys were also pretty hot with specific search for “Toys R Us Black Friday Sale”, “Best Buy Black Friday Deals” and “Black Friday Computer Deals’ as the fast rising searches during on Thanksgiving and Black Friday. Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal . Black Friday Searches on Google Increased by
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Happy Thanksgiving Week to our American readers of Search Engine Journal. This week will be marked with stuffing ourselves on turkey & dressing, watching football, napping and for most importantly for some, Black Friday shopping the day after Thanksgiving. Not all of us want to brave the 5 am morning rush to get deals at Best Buy, Walmart and other stores; as the greatness we know of the Internet and online shopping can ease our pain, and let us shop online while others are standing outside in the cold and chaos. Here are 4 online destinations to check out for finding great Black Friday deals both online and offline : Bfads.net : Probably the absolute worst domain of all of the Black Friday Online sites, BFads.net is one of the longest running Black Friday sites and has highlighted Black Friday flyer adscans for years. The site is kind of a mix of online deals and brock and mortar ads now, and still serves as an authority hub for finding Black Friday deals. You’ll also find some great Black Friday Forum interaction at bfads.net BlackFriday.com : A newbie to the mix, BlackFriday.com lauched this year on a golden domain and offers all kind of online deals updates and tips for Black Friday shopping, complete with a history of Black Friday . BlackFriday.info is again, a collection of online ads and offline information about the sales that the local Wal-Marts and Targets in different areas are having the morning after Turkey Day. Notice a trend here? A lot of these sites serve as resources, communities and affiliate sites and BlackFriday.info is no exception. FatWallet’s Black Friday : If you like saving money and tips for online shopping, then be sure to visit FatWallet and their Black Friday page. The great thing about FatWallet.com is that it’s powered by a great social community and has been around for a long time, so even after Black Friday, the site will still be around and still be of use. Offers.com is also a similar yearlong discount site which offers Black Friday 2009 Online Deals . This week, the Mrs. and I are packing up to head over to Dave Snyder’ s parents’ home for a Thanksgiving Feast and then a day of shopping over at Sawgrass Mills Mall, so unfortunately, I won’t be shopping from the peace and quiet of my home. But I hope that you all have a safe and happy Thanksgiving and Black Friday, whether you be enjoying it from the Mall or Amazon.com Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal . Black Friday Ads Online : Sites to Check
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