How I Got A Link From The Guardian
Socrates had it right…
Employ your time in improving yourself by other men’s writings, so that you shall gain easily what other have laboured hard for
~ Socrates
If I’ve had any success as an SEO so far, it’s because I’ve learnt from an amazing community…
This post is a distillation of 29 key things I’ve learnt over the last 2 years, specifically:
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Things I’ve learnt that you rarely read in the SEO press
- My thoughts on the future of SEO
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What I’ve Learnt
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Linkbuilding
1. Outreach - Never mention the word ‘link’ in an outreach mail (Garrett French)
How about no?
2. Scale – Linkbuilding is about scalability. If you haven’t got 500k targets after ‘target identification’, you’re doing it wrong (Ross Hudgens)
He's ACTUALLY built more links than I've had hot dinners
3. Link Qualifying – If DA is less than 30, bin it (Paddy Moogan)
4. Linkbuilding Campaign Structure - Structuring links by asset is the best only way to manage a linkbuilding campaign and stop yourself getting bogged down in excel hell (Garrett French)
5. Relationships – 3 ways to to warm up a relationship fast
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Promote their content (retweet, share)
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Reference people in your content (and make them look good OR make them achieve their objectives)
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Ask people for advice regarding your content (this is the fastest and most direct way to get a relationship)
6. Outsource – All time wasting tasks via Elance/ODesk. Add the 5% of your time to the linkbuilding process that creates 95% of the value. (Ross Hudgens)
Artist’s Impression of Elance
7. What links make a good profile? I really like this breakdown from Jane Copeland. It opened my eyes to the importance of natural noise links as part of a linkbuilding strategy
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Volume (raw number of links)
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Topic Quality (semantically relevant links)
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Authoritative quality (High quality, trusted links)
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Natural noise (social media links, press release links, mentions)
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Editorial quality links
8. Follow up emails work – Enough said. (Paddy Moogan)
9. Linkbait Decision Making - If you can’t find 10 sites that will link to you in 10 minutes then you’re wasting your time on this linkbait (Paddy Moogan)
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On Page/ Technical SEO
10. Use 304 If-Modified - To preserve and prioritise crawl budget. It’s in google’s webmaster guidelines, why wouldn’t you?
11. Content Clusters – Best way to rank a medium competition page fast is with a content cluster. Interlink from primary page to related pages, and from related pages back to primary page. Ian Lurie talked about this in his latest book
12. ABT – Always be testing - If you don’t spend your time running tests and experiments, then you’re settling for being a follower rather than an industry pioneer. This test on SEOMoz recently, is a classic example
13. E-commerce Information Architecture – Ignoring the global navigation, product pages should link to 3 things: category parent, other related products, closely related categories. Products and category pages shouldn’t link to unrelated categories (Adam Audette)
14. Use sitewide text – As a way of boosting semantic relevance for your site. Who does? Portent. What sitewide do they optimise for? ‘Internet Marketing Company’. Where are they ranking for the term? ‘8’
If it's good enough for Ian Lurie, It's good enough for me
15. Want a 50% traffic increase in 20 minutes? Update title tags for the keywords that are actually driving traffic to your pages, not the ones you optimised for (Kaiser The Sage)
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Content Marketing
16. Titles – Titles should do one thing only: Get the person to read the next line.
How?
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Intrigue – stimulate interest and get people to click:
Science vs. 50 Cent: On Masturbation
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Inform – Show a clear and obvious educational benefit to the reader if they read on:
How to Consistently Build 40+ Contextual Links Every Month
17. Why Top 10 lists are so popular – Because they show the content is going to be easy and quick to read
18. People pay for magazines - They’re doing content marketing right. Copy them.
Amazing design, branding and headlines
19. Rip people off – You may have noticed that my title tag is not an original piece of work 
20. Content - Should teach people or entertain them…preferably both (Brian Clark)
21. When considering linkbait…ask 3 questions:
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Does it benefit my business?
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Does it benefit the publisher?
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Does it benefit the end user? (Ken Mcgaffin)
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Marketing
The little I’ve learnt about marketing is this:
22. Value – Use value as your fundamental metric. Am I creating value for my community? Does this content create value? Is what I’m doing today creating value for my client? Use ‘value’ as the prism through you which you analyse decisions. Not convinced? Read this Viperchill article on value creation
23. GAPS – Identify gaps in markets and leverage them. No point churning out the same shit as everybody else.
24. Mindset – Get in the mindset of the person you’re targeting. Take the time to get into their head and craft something that gets them to take action
25. Get Shit Done – I’ll let Seth cover this one…
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The Future Of Online Marketing
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26. Integrated marketing is the future
I don’t want to be an SEO. I don’t want to be an online marketer. I want to build incredible businesses for people in whatever way works, whether that’s online or offline, product driven or marketing focused.
27. Content is the future
Amazing content is an accessible USP for a business. And as markets get more competitive, USP’s are going to be increasingly hard to come by.
A killer piece of linkbait
28. PR is the future (public relations, not page rank)
If 20% of organic search clicks currently go to 5 sites, that says to me that people gravitate towards brands online. As a marketer you need to be on the top sites for people to trust you online. How? PR
29. RCS is the future
Low quality tactics can still win on the internet. But not for long. It’s only a matter of time before Google can perfectly reflect a businesses position in the real world through their algorithm.
If you want your business to stand out, you have to focus on ‘knock it out of the park’ amazing marketing. Not just from the marketing department, but as part of the company culture, from the CEO down.
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N.B. The End! Client confidentiality means I couldn’t talk specifically about how I got the Guardian link, but drop me an email and I’ll happily reveal all!
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No related posts.
Larry Kim -
Haha great article title (I wrote that SEOmoz article). I’m honored!
admin -
It was an awesome title (and article) and went straight in my Evernote. Wasn’t expecting to get busted for re-using it though!
Chris Green -
Great article James, there’s a lot of this Lind of content about, but I found this resonated with me more than usual. Some real, actionable hints there, nice one.
admin -
Thanks Chris. I really appreciate the feedback.
jovan -
That Swissotel linkbait is superb.
admin -
True. It’s next level isn’t it. Trying to work out how I can rip the concept into the industry I’m current working on (online healthcare) j
Modestos -
Nice post
I would disagree with Paddy that all sites with DA lower than 30 should be avoided. Relatively new sites would naturally have low DA but the same sites later will build up their authority.
Also, relying only on mid & high authority links will can end up being a very unnatural signals as most of the sites on the web have low authority anyway. Low authority should not be confused with low quality.
admin -
Hey Modestos, thanks for the feedback.
I hadn’t thought of that before, but now you’ve mentioned it, i’m inclined to agree. I think that excluding sites with a DA lower than 30 is borne out of a need for timesaving and prioritisation when link prospecting/link qualifying on a large scale.
However if it’s going to mess with the link profile then it’s bad news.
Maybe using DA30 as a rule of thumb when manual linkbuilding, and not being too religious about it could keep your link profile natural, but also make sure that the links you build are passing value?
Would be interesting to know what @paddymoogan thinks…
rtavs -
Gad zooks! Quite the post James. Totally agree about PR and RCS being the way forward. I am really happy SEO is starting to go that way too. It just means that the noobs will find it harder to compete and leave pleanty of room for us to dominate the SERPs.
james -
Hey Ross, thanks for the comment. So all we’ve got to do now is to get our brands featured on big websites and bend ingrained company cultures to fit with our vision of content marketing and RCS. Easy!
Paddy Moogan -
Nice article James and thanks for the multiple mentions.
The only thing I’d say (which also relates to Modestos’ comment) is that for me, these are not strict rules. The DA30 one, I often say that if people ask me how to sort and filter large sets of websites. Going back to your tip from Ross, filtering 500k link targets is going to be pretty hard unless you have some things like this to guide you. I don’t use it as a hard and fast rule myself, but if people ask, I like to give a rough ballpark.
The reality is that there are many reasons for DA to be low, this relies on the SEOmoz crawler which isn’t as powerful as Google, so a DA may be low simply because SEOmoz hasn’t discovered many links to the site yet – but they may exist.
The same principle applies with my 10 in 10 minutes idea, if I find 9 and they are really good, relevant sites, then I may not bin the idea immediately, you have to take campaign as it’s own.
Hope that helps clarify things a little more!
james -
Hey Paddy, thanks for the feedback. I’d just read your http://www.linkbuildingbook.com/ so was brimming with new ideas (most of them yours!).
Thanks for clarifying your position on DA and target identification. I think as SEO’s we’re crying out for hard and fast rules to apply to situations because it gives us some certainty and confidence in what we’re doing. But much better to engage brain and make decisions based on circumstance, and use the rules as flexible heuristics.