More Grunt Work

We have talked about a lot of methods to use to generate links, including directory submissions, blog back links, reciprocal linking, link spamming and blog commenting, this may be the last article on linking for this “period” by period i mean any thing between a week to two months, it is time we move on to more exciting topics, plus i cant think of any linking ideas right now, so here are some of the basic building blocks for a link building campaign

Key Word Research

This should be done to determine what kind of anchor texts you should use, you can do key word research either by analyzing your site or analyzing your competitions site, also you can predetermine what key words you want to compete for, when picking key words there are two basic kinds, the first and most common strategy for picking key words is focusing on the top 10-20 keywords for marketing your site. The “top keyword” concept is reinforced by SEO agencies that contract to gain rankings for 10-20 terms, maybe 30. However, those that focus on the top 10-20 terms may be missing the majority of their market, the millions of people who search for countless variations of several basic key words, so great is the opportunity here that it is believed that 70 percent of all possible key word combination’s have not yet been optimized for.

Long Tail Keywords

The strategy used for optimizing for these key words is the long tail technique , In the world of the web, where minute details are tracked, traffic is not won in the top ten terms, business is made in the “bottom hundred thousand” terms, The groups of terms that may only result in a single visit, but number in the thousands. These are the dozens of market segments that search for specific needs, specific requirements and detailed terms. Chris Anderson wrote a little book about it that you can get at Amazon, its called “the long tail”, he also has a blog on it here.

Chris Anderson also trademarked the term “the long tail”, which i think is pretty brilliant but is not what we are talking about.

Basically the terms that bring in the most traffic are the long tail terms (i hope Mr Anderson does not sue me for the indiscriminate use of his term) and you should use these terms as anchor texts on your links.

Twitter! O Twitter

Use Twitter to build links, An article about Eric Ward described how he obtained a high authourity back link via his Twitter connections, according to him

“A few weeks ago I announced a new site via URLwire, and whenever I do this I set up several alerts/trackers to see where mentions/links show up.  I also set up a Twitter search for that new URL….the new site I announced has been tweeted or re-tweeted by seven people…I discovered all of them were health experts in one form or another.  Also, all of them had several hundred followers (one had 780), and a quick check of a few dozen of those showed some overlap (expected) as well as frequent health URL tweets.  In other words, I’d found a loose community of several thousand collective Twitterer’s who had shared news about a new web site URL.

One of those re-tweets came from a librarian at a med school web site, who did one more thing with that URL. She added a link to it from the med school web site she’s in charge of editing.  What started to her as a tweet ended as a permanent link from her high trust web page.”

you can research on web sites by using tools such as click heat  maps

What’s a “Click Heatmap”?

A click heatmap is a visual piece of data that shows where viewers are clicking on your website — and as the title suggests, shows more ‘heat’ in areas that are clicked more.

They’re useful for many reasons, some of which include:

• Knowing exactly how a viewers uses a specific page.
• Seeing which parts of a page are unused.
• Seeing parts of a page that are most used.
• Understanding patterns of use on your site as a whole.
• Predicting how visitors will use your site in the future.
• Using that insight to better cater to your viewers.

Where can I get a Click Heatmap?

There are several services out there that provide wonderful heatmap applications  but ClickHeat is the one I find myself using most often… and it’s free, Once the research has been done then you create your starting back links using any of the following methods

PING

Once you create an RSS, Ping the following sites to get free links
feedagg.com,
feedest.com
feedping.com,
pingomatic.com,
pingoat.com.

VIDEOS AND ARTICLES

Make a video or get your merchant to send you a video that you can post to video sites. Make sure you link them back to your landing page, or article site or to the merchants page. This can also be considered a social media optimization method, you can then use this tool to see how well your linking program is going, You can also write articles and submit them to article directories, this will generate back links back to your site, your key word research will be extremely important in this segment too as it will determine the theme of your articles, which will help when people are searching for articles to add to their sites,  i will probably be writing on key words in my next few pieces, hopefully focusing on anchor text (which is still under linking in a backhanded sort of way).

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