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I noticed this with one of my clients who is a real estate agent.  Our placement stayed the same, but the organic has now blended in with the local result.  One big down side right now is that it cuts our Title tag in half because the Local result is shorter.

In this Whiteboard Friday video, Rand says there is a danger in offering products for blogs to give away, simply requesting a link to your product or website in exchange for the giveaway. Could someone elaborate on what the danger is?

Is this also the case with offering products for review?

Hi All,

I'm helping a client build an e-commerce store from the ground up, which sells class rings to high school students.  Not a novel product, but they have a nice URL - WearMyStory.com, and are thinking through creative ways to reach the market by letting users share their stories with UGC.

I have some ideas, but could use some help.  I think using video/picture/essay contests for students to share their stories is a great way to get buzz and grow socially.  What I don't know is how to capture all of this great UGC for SEO purposes.  Do you know of any great sites with brilliant UGC strategies (outside of reviews, etc.)?  Do you have any examples of software companies who help you leverage the UGC into SEO gold?  I'm trying to find great examples of frameworks where sites are leveraging the UGC.

The other wall I am hitting is how to create a community when it is simply a one time purchase e-commerce product.  If a customer buys a ring (or any product for that matter), what would keep them coming back to the site?  Any good examples out there that you can think of?

Thanks!

We are just getting into guest blogging for our real estate clients and have found it to be very helpful.  I had an additional question that I was wondering if you guys could help answer.  We were kicking around the idea of adding a guest post page on our clients' sites to attract potential partners with which to work with on content creation and guest blogging.  Have any of you ever used this tactic?

We would obviously have to have strict guidelines of content quality to allow guest posts on our sites, but it seems like a potential link building opportunity if the arrangement is that we get to guest post on their site.  Seems that Rand has stated that you would not get penalized for reciprocal link building as long as the two sites linking to each other are topical and the links are in related content and not on an external links page.  As opposed to manually building a list of guest post opportunities alone, this seems like a good way to attract potential linking partners.  Thoughts?

Thanks First,

Unfortunately, a lot of these advantages of using Textbroker don't seem to be offered inside of Raventools.  For example, you get to choose the interests of the writer, but you cannot retain a writer if you have found one you like.  Essentially, each time it is a crapshoot.

I like the convenience of it being inside of the tool, but I'm not sure if I am willing to roll the dice every time.

Anyone have any experience using Textbroker through Raventools?  I like that it is alongside all of the other tools in the software, but I have no experience with the quality of content that will be returned.

Thanks for the response Alan.  We haven't explored this route yet, but I am becoming more thoroughly convinced and am practicing some tips offered by another SEOmozzer.  I agree that it seems to be all in the blog selection.

Very helpful Ryan, thank you.  Was just on botw.org and had Paul's exact question.

Don't forget the Google+ button.

I just finished watching the mozinar on "The End of Search Without Social" mozinar, and I have so many points that I want to implement for our agency.  The problem I see is that we have clients in about 20 different industries.  How do you create strong social relationships in each of these industries for your clients?  It seems that you could have more influence if you built all into your own personal profiles or your SEO company's to create that great fan base.  Anyone have success in doing it across the board?

Thanks!