I attended the SMX Advanced show in Seattle in early June. This is a great event for search/social professionals and a good audience for Optify. We sponsored this session on building authority not just links and had a booth. Below are my notes from the session which I thought was quite good with some helpful context and tips. Here is the link to the session info:
Thomas Schmitz – Schmitz Consulting
- Search engines see themselves as protectors of people
- Authority is evolving > bigger faster data center, crawl more info, process faster
- How relevance and authority get measured has changed
- Engines talk a lot about relevancy, but not about authority
- Computers don’t understand things, they understand strings
- Signals: Getting, bypassing budgeting authority
- Website architecture > good top down plus cross linking
- Canonical tags
- Google + community brand pages > if in more circles, more likely to see G+ related results
- Social signals > twitter and facebook create more content than google can crawl
- Facebook Likes/Shares is a high correlation to high rankings
- Platform and Intent: Mobile is about finding locations, Tablets are more about ready
- Ratings: who are competitors getting ratings from?
- Microformats
- Brands – links, mentions and shares. Brands are a way to separate good from bad content
- Technical Stuff like increasing page speed
- Bounce rate – google says not using, Bing says yes. Can effect authority if people block on return to SERP
- Ratings on niche search engines – good ratings on a consistent daily/weekly basis
Philip Petrescu – Caphyon – Get Deck! Interesting graphs
– Desktop SEO software – Advanced WebRanking
– Blog ranks highly within 5 minutes without inbound links – social shares and signals only on top of good domain
○ Google loves fresh content
○ Good enough to share on Facebook, Twitter and Google + > influential people share
○ Getting influencers to talk about your post > social shares becoming more important than links
– Tips
○ Do keyword research prior to posting. What are people looking for?
○ Social signals are really important early in ranking process (links take longer to set)
○ Start to lose rankings after 1 plus week. If article is good, add the linking signals to page and keep rank up
○ Links: four categories – diversity, relevancy, quality, quantity
○ Brand signals can push ranking even though relevancy is low
– Conclusions
○ Relevancy is important, but too many exact match anchor text is not helpful
○ Brand signals are more important
○ Social Signals becoming more important ranking factors
○ Getting influencers to share is important
Eric Enge – Get Slides
– The magnifier of a campaign is the influencer
– The influencer may not always have the same audience, but a bigger and difference audience
– The influencer trust factor > people respond to what they have to say MORE > not just the volume of people but the impact on that audience
– Synergy that we’re trying to build
○ Create great article > share on social network > drive new followers/fans/friencs > drives links, traffic and shares back to site
○ Step 2 – influencers boost that cycle
– Where influencer marketing lives
○ PR – great place for this if they understand the goals are links, shares, go to resource, build your authority
○ Marketing – Yes – same as PR – need to get goal
○ Executives – only if you have a charismatic person
– Find them
○ Klout – look at your categories and find lists of people by Klout score
○ Twitter – search on keyword hashtag
○ Amazon book search – search on topic for authors
○ Conference agendas – speakers at your type of conferences
○ See who influencers are influenced BY
○ Who else writes for the same blog?
– Verify Influnce
○ Track T Followers, T Following, F Subscribers, G+ Follwers, G+ Following, RSS Subscribers, Klout score by Influencer
○ Track relevance – 1 to 10 score?
– Create links that don’t LOOK natural, they ARE natural
– “Looking Natural” links you won’t get
○ Article directories
○ Low Value directories
○ Blog and forum comments
○ Link networks
○ WordPress theme
– KISSmetrics
○ Influencer marketing
○ Featured in post/video by SEOmoz – top apps we love
○ Blog with quality content
○ Lots of guest posts on other sites (Geekwire, etc.) > high quality post on good site
○ Strong Twitter presence
○ Solid Facebook presence – active conversations
○ Post great content: 3 to 4 times per week, 2/3 of posts are from guest bloggers – they share too!
○ Guest post on other sites: 3-5 times per week
○ Always building relationships with influencers
○ Great content on Facebook & Twitter
○ Cross promote on Facebook & Twitter
○ Top anchor text is all brand name
§ Getting deep links to blog pages
○ The site gets 200,000+ visits per month
Cassie – Grasshopper.com
– Small brand is capable of competing with big boys
– Small virtual phone system – toll free numbers – small budget and marketing team
– Need to target presence on big sites: WSJ, Inc, Fortune, TechCrunch
– Quality leads to quantity
– Target specific sites > how do we get into TechCrunch?
– How to make people care about re-branding to GrassHopper
○ Targeted 500 influencers with package of chocolate covered grasshopper with link to video
○ 200+ news stories
○ 900k YouTube views
○ Bad ass links
○ Ranked to #3 with a month and #1 within 3 months on GrassHopper
– Focus on targeting ego’s
○ Who to follow post, what to follow post
– Video > New Dork two years ago
○ How do we target the areas where entrepreneurs hangout?
○ We talk about them in the video
○ Got more links and acknowledged that the bait worked
– Where to begin
○ Do your research: who and what to target
○ Create something valuable: it’s got to be good or really bad
○ Tell them about it: you’ve created this great thing, don’t be annoying
– Other ego-centric ideas
○ Quote an influencer on your site or in your materials
○ Rejoiner interviewed elastic path and post on their site
○ Create lists – top SEO professionals in Seattle
– Be a little Controversial
○ Put a blog post
○ Bragged about it
○ Reached out to press
○ TiVO proof ad > picked up on ad gabber and gawker
– Create a controlled controversy
○ Target is entrepreneurs day > started a petition to create a national entrepreneur day
○ President proclaims National Entrepreneur Day – Nov 19th
– Put on Your PR Hat
○ Social, SEO, PR is merging
○ Journalists are on Twitter and source stories there
○ HARO – www.helpareporterout.com
○ Twitter – www.nytimes.com/twitter
○ Muckrack.com
○ Wefollow.com
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