Build Links with Better Answers

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

Hacking The Twitter Audience

Today I discovered a Twitter tool called Trendistic.com and some interesting research by Dan Zarrella. Combining the tool and Zarrella’s reasearch can produce some interesting insights for those Twitter users looking to reach a larger segment of the Twitter audience. First the Trendistic tool. Enter any keyword to see how frequently its has been used on Twitter within the last 24 hours, 7 , 30, 90 or 180 days. Trendistic Zarrella has researched the most retweeted terms and produced a Top 20 list. Most ReTweetable Words & Phrases Inputting some of Zarrella’s terms indeed confirms a high percentage of use within the Tweet Stream. Although Zarrella’s data doesn’t correlate directly with the Trendistic tool’s data, his keywords do provide a starting point for understanding which type of language is most often used in both regular Tweets and Retweets. Consider combining Zarrella’s list and the Trendisitc tool when preparing to target segments within the Twitter audience.

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Hacking The Twitter Audience

Go Always One Directory Level Up in the URL with Uppity

Uppity is a FireFox extension that allows to go up one directory level in the URL of a webpage. This way it allows to do “reversed” browsing: from the deep page to the home page. How can this tool turn

How to Back up Your Social Media Accounts

If you are like me, you have all your major working materials stored online: I organize useful links with Google bookmarks and Delicious, store email and IM conversation with Gmail, have most of my important (collaboration) docs at Google Docs, have multiple resource collections on Wordpress and Blogger, etc. Backing up this massive amount if highly important information is actually a smart idea because the services are not owned by me, hosted by God knows who and thus having a local copy and updating it regularly would be wise. Backupify is a nice (free until January 31) web-based tool that allows to download content from a number of popular online services including: Gmail Twitter Google Docs Flickr Facebook Basecamp Wordpress Delicious Photobucket Blogger FriendFeed Here’s how it works: after signing up you will be offered the list of social media sites “to manage”: Here are a few examples : Allow the tool to access your Twitter account by Twitter auth; Login to Delicious using your login information; Connect to Flickr account by Flickr auth; Connect to Photobucket account by Photobucket auth, etc When you are done adding your social media accounts, set up the back-up frequency (daily or weekly) and delivery options: Email me every time a backup is performed Email me a once daily digest of all backup activity Email me a once weekly digest of all backup activity Do not notify me via email of any backups You can also access the archives of your backups at Backupify from any computer. The only possible excuse for not trying the tool out is the privacy concerns, here’s an extract from the service privacy policy (remember: your privacy is up to you): What information is collected about me? We only collect data you provide us at sign-up. We do not ask for any other personal information. We do not collect data without your knowledge. How do you use collected information? We don’t use it at all. The only thing we collect and monitor is general patterns of storage and service usage so that we can make sure our architecture is optimized for speed and scalability. What security measures do you use to protect my privacy? Any information we have about you is stored with strong encryption. The tool was reviewed under SEJ policy . Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal . How to Back up Your Social Media

3 Ways to Search Using Command-Line Interface

I am sure if you are reading this blog, you should love searching. So today I offering a new (somewhat geeky) way for you to search: using a command line. Basically it works like this: (1) Provide a search term; (2) Provide a shortcut that will tell the tool which search engine to use to search for the provided term. The search tool Accessible via: Serchilo Web tool, FireFox search plugin Katapulco Web tool Ubiquity FireFox addon Serchilo Serchilo is a highly customizable search tool that can be used to quickly use any search engine or site. [g seo] You can see which commands are available while you type the query: More things to take note of: Install the search plugin into your browser. Browse existing commands by category ; Add great commands, edit not so great ones; Register at the site for more handy features (define a default keyword which Serchilo will use if you forgot it, define personalized commands, etc). Katapulco Katapulco is an awesome search tool that gives access to over 90 search engines from a single search command line. It works similarly to Serchilo but it requires to input the search engine shortcut in a separate field. For example, this command will redirect to Google search for [SEO]: More things to take note of: Customize the tool by adding any search engine or site ; Suggest your own search engine or site for inclusion. Ubiquity The only reason why I am mentioning Ubiquity as the last one is that I already reviewed the tool on SEJ , so most of our readers must be already aware of the tool. Still, I couldn’t help mentioning it again because of its great features. Ubiquity is a FireFox addon that enables you to quicker access and complete multiple tasks you do daily (including search of course). Besides being highly customizable and really feature rich, it also has quite a few great plugins that allow to search and preview multiple results on multiple useful search engines including Google Trends, Digg, Urban Dictionary, Compete traffic stats, etc: Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal . 3 Ways to Search Using Command-Line

How to Quickly Check Tweets Related to Any Web Page

The idea of giving the opportunity to leave off-site comments to any page has been hot for a long time: that’s how many social bookmarking / sharing sites work (like StumbleUpon where people “review” and tag pages within the system), that’s what Google Sidewiki concept is based on and that’s how Tweeting any page works… Why it has been popular is quite clear: people are saved from the trouble to log in or filling the comment form and are given the opportunity to use their favorite web environment and instantly share their comments with their online friends. The question is how we, bloggers and Internet marketers, can keep track of those comments and utilize that off-site conversations around our web pages. This post looks at one part of the question: possible ways to keep track of Twitter conversations related to any web page : Type Instant notifications Additional tracking tools Kutano Browser addon Yes No BackTweets Browser bookmarklet No RSS feed, email alerts AddATweet Browser addon Yes No Kutano Kutano works as a browser addons (supported browsers: FireFox, Internet Explorer and Google Chrome) that hides behind a handy sidebar and notifies you of recent Tweets around any page you are landing on. In short, it works as follows: Install the addon (and restart your browser). Kutano sidebar should appear; Navigate to any web page and notice a number that appears right on the sidebar (when it is closed). This number indicates how many Tweets have been found for the current page): Click on it and see the actual Tweets in the opened sidebar: Best features: Instantly see Twitter comments on any page you are currently viewing (the sidebar is open); See Tweets to the page or to the site; See “Discussions” – i.e. recent web updates that do not link to the page directly but use a related hashtag or keyword (useful for tools, brand names, etc): BackTweets BackTweets is a popular tool that tracks and aggregates tweets linking to a particular page. It supports a number of URL-shorteners which makes the tool one of the most complete. It can be added to your browser with help of a bookmarklet which allows to quickly find Tweets linking to the current page. Best features: Create an email alert for new Tweets linking to any page; Grab an RSS feed to follow Tweets commenting on any page. AddATweet AddATweet is more about commenting using your Twitter identity than aggregating all Twitter buzz around one specific page – that is you won’t see all the Tweets related to any specific page but you will be able to track comments left using the tool. Best features: Instantly see if the page has comments by the color of the addon button; Easily leave your own comments using the tool and your Twitter identity. Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal . How to Quickly Check Tweets Related to Any Web

How to Extract Links from a Page Based on Their Placement

SEM tools is a great FireFox addon that I recently discovered and was quite impressed by ( note that I review new tools quite often, so that is not easy to surprise me ). While the tool has quite a large selection of free search marketing tools, the one I actually liked most of all was its URL extracting tool and let me share why I liked it so much. URL