Is this a good strategy?
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Okay, so let's say I have a landing page or an ecommerce website with limited content. If I start a blog and write quality posts that have anchor text linking back to my homepage, then bookmark the hell out of those blog posts, post to twitter, cite the post on Q&A websites, etc . . . would that be an effective strategy beyond the normal stuff like directory submisson and blog comments?
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I have a similar problem, 5-10 pages of static content that I need to make look more 'alive' to Google.
Sadly I cannot add too much content as it is scientific specific content and I am a mere SEOer!
I use the keyword tool on SEOMoz. Find out the keywords for your products, put them into the tool, find out who ranks highest for the words and link to them from the product's 'useful links' page.
After a month or so politely email these sites and ask them to link back to you.
Simple and effective.
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I think of it in a similar way but slightly different.
Your website is someone talking and the ranking factors are a megaphone. If you are whispering into the megaphone you will increase the volume, but it is nowhere near as good as shouting into it!
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I admit, I do need work on the delivery. It was late at night, and I was aiming more towards being of service and answering a question than getting the delivery done. Due to the hour, and being my first attempt, the channeling was a bit weak.
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With only five or ten products, you can focus your time on them and make each page for that product the best resource out there on the web for that product. Make it the type of product page a reporter would want to go to when researching that niche for a news story. Use the products, write your own review in your words, rewrite the manufacturer's description, make a chart of resources out there about those products that no one else has.
Do a search on the name of your products and look for questions people are having about it in forum sites. What are people asking when they talk to each other? What information are they trying to find out? Does that information exist? Put it on your page.
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If you want content to go viral it needs to meet the following Criteria:
1. Content must be something Interesting that grabs the attention of a particular market and encourages them to share it with their friends because it's soo awesome, cool, helpful, or interesting.
2. Make sure you have the Share buttons such as facebook like button, tweet, Google Plus, Digg, etc (Don't get too happy with the buttons).
3. Get your content infront of hundreds of folks that would be interested in sharing your content to others.
This goes back to creating linkbait, than promoting the linkbait. This is going to cost money and time, there really is no quick fix strategy unless you already have over 10,000 facebook fans, and 2,000+ digg followers.
If you don't have a large social following my suggestion would be to use Paid Stumbleupon ads and get your content viewed over 500 times and test your results to see if it has gone viral or not.
Really the best way for anything to go viral is to tap into a large crowd or funnel, so contact the large websites and get them to mention your content some how.
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Yea Jacob is right,
Before you start going linkbuilding Happy, make sure your Onsite is legit and optimized.
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When I said landing page with limited content, I meant that the landing page might be great, but that there arent many additional pages. Or an ecommerce site that only sel 5 or ten products. Besides selling, what does your site offer? That is where I figured I must start a blog to increase authority.
The reason I wanted to bookmark it so much, is to see if I can make it go viral by giving it a headstart. Are there other ways to make content go viral if it is infact "viral worthy"
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lol.... Thank you Keri and Ryan
I agree. I would spend that time on content. "Landing page with limited content" got my attention right away.
Also.... bookmark the hell out of those blog posts... that's how you put a really bad odor on your site.
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I love the "channel EGOL" approach. Big thumbs up for effort.
(You need to work on your delivery though. I didn't feel inspired).
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I've ranked position #1 for a national search term with a keyword difficulty of .46 and 86,000,000 competing results. Also ranked for a few .60+ difficulty keywords. Speaking from experience....
Your website, on-site, is presumably the only thing that you have absolute control of on the internet. Any 3rd party blogs, links, wikis, portals, Q&A, etc are controlled by someone else who can turn you off at will.
By this logic, in Google's eyes, your on-site optimization including content is the only thing you own. You can change the content to the Nth degree, same with the code.
I like to use the analogy of a bucket (your website) with a bunch of holes in it (ranking factors). The more of the on-site factors you satisfied, the more water (linkjuice) you will retain.
Another analogy is building motors. You can slap a turbo onto any motor and see an increase. (Motor = website, turbo = links) However, the V8 is going to kick out more power than the wimpy little Honda fart-cannon.
Focus on optimizing your onsite stuff, and the rest becomes MUCH easier.
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agreed!
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So submitting to ezinearticles and building web 2.0 linkwheels is childsplay when it comes to real SEO and ranking for the big terms right? Put the effort into your own website, I think I am starting to see the light!
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Wow, that was a great answer! So your basically saying stick with linkbait?
Here are my thoughts:
Infographic: not much success with this, takes too long to complete, and it seems people don't care as much anymore about these. Plus load times are a pain on the big jpg files.
free app/free tool: Since I am into coding, My method of choice! As a Make a calc or tool and use an embed code for a link back. Been working on this but finding it hard to get people to download them.
video: good idea
Poll, Quiz: really good idea
Okay so in my 2 year SEO journey I guess it comes down to this. It really is about content. Make great content, reach out a little, and the rest will follow.
Would it be mildly accurate in saying that most top SEO's dont do alot of "linkbuilding"? Rather they do "content building" that is linkworthy?
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Let me see if I can channel EGOL on this one.
My guess is he would ask why not invest that effort into adding content to the landing page or the ecommerce site itself?
The normal stuff should be producing the quality content on the pages with the conversion actions, not directory submissions and blog commenting. Make sure you've got a good destination, first.
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Hey Daniel,
I apologize in advance if this is brutal, so bare with me here :S
Normal Stuff = Is Not Directory submission and blog comments (This is just my opinion)
Also don't worry about "bookmarking the hell" out of your blog posts, I don't care if you even get 500 bookmarks for each one of your blog posts, those back links won't do much at all for you especially after the Panda update.
The Idea behind a social bookmark is to create a large following that would be willing to bookmark your content or whatever you bookmarked to the top of the homepage of that social bookmarking website/platform. Either way to leverage the power of social bookmarks you need a large following that will pass your info on, and be visible to 300+ users(this number is something I pulled out of the air).
Q&A sites are great, however they take a lot of time from your hands, also many of those links will be a nofollow link(which I am not totally against, but lets get real here it sounds like you want some quality incoming links to improve your traffic and ranking).
Daniel, if you want to generate more traffic and ranking's to your ecommerce website or a specific landing page than you are going to need these two here:
1. Content
2. Links
If you have limited content, than my suggestion would be to create quality content that a large site with a ton of traffic and a large social following would be willing to link too. This content could be a Infographic, a free app, free tool, video, Poll, Quiz, or an Article that's going to help someone solve a problem or a desirable need (Search Q&A sites figure out what peoples questions are and turn that into an article).
Once you have created this article, than go and find your link prospects (websites that would be willing to link to you), and than start emailing them individually or pick up the phone and talk to them and encourage them to give you the following:
1. Blog mention (link)
2. Facebook Mention (so their large following would be able to see your content)
3. Tweet
This is not an easy process but it's a very simple process that takes time (unless you outsource) and resources (content).
Also, if you are just starting out I would go after the low hanging fruit such as niche directory sites that your competitor's are getting links from, Blog's that your competitors are getting links from perhpas from Guest Posting, etc.
I know it's hard to get a website to link to a product page or a landing page that is asking for a sale. What you can do is build pages with articles, videos, interesting content, and than get high quality links and internal link those article pages to your landing pages. This is a strategy many major ecommerce sites are using to get higher rankings.
Here is a great Article from Debra Mastaler for beginning your linkbuilding: http://searchengineland.com/a-link-building-blueprint-the-foundation-62784
I apologize for the rants and the long message, I really hope this helps out
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