Paddy Moogan Blog

New SEO Strategies and Marketing Ideas

13th December 2009 · Paddy · 1 Comment »

A few days weeks months ago I asked for some inspiration for a new blog post on Twitter.  Lisa Rhodes was good enough to reply and I’ve put her suggestion as the title of this blog post.

This isn’t the easiest blog post to write as “new” SEO strategies are few and far between, plus what one person may define as new may be old school to someone else.  So please bear with me if some of these ideas are not that new, I’m aware some of them may have been discussed before online but hopefully I can give them a bit more context and actionable for your own sites.

Link Building

Email marketing for link building

One strategy for link building is taking advantage or an existing email newsletter to assist with link building.  I’m sure most of us could build reciprocal links all day long quite easily as most webmasters are aware of the practice and will often ask for a link back if you approach them.  Now we all know that there is nothing wrong with reciprocal linking in moderation, but what you really want is a nice one way link instead.  To do this you need to offer the webmaster something else of value (no don’t pay for the link!).  Instead of a straight reciprocal, why not offer them placement in your newsletter that is going out to x number of people at the end of the month.

Don’t have an existing newsletter or can’t use it?  Create one!  Start building a good quality email opt-in list and send them good quality content on your niche.  You’ll be surprised how quickly word spreads and how fast the numbers grow.

Google Analytics for getting the link you want

Go to your Google Analytics referring sites report and pull out a list of websites that have sent you new traffic in the past week or so.  Visit each of these websites and check the link to your website – is it going to the most relevant page?  Is the anchor text what you want?  Is there an opportunity to contact the person who placed the link and ask them to tweak it?  If there is then the fact that these are new visitors means that the link was probably placed very recently and will be fresh in the mind of the website owner.

Turbo Charging Links

I first came across this a few years ago and at the time I wrote an ebook about it called the Traffic Matrix, the basic principle was building links to your website and then linking to the links.  The idea is that you are giving these links a helping hand and giving them a bit more power.  You are also helping to get the pages indexed or cached quicker so Google finds the links quicker than normal.  This technique was more recently talked about by Patrick Altoft at SMX London 2009 where it gave me a nudge to start looking at the technique again and it works very well.

Making Google count all your Links

I’ve often built a load of links to site then after a few weeks, revisited the pages and found that either the page hasn’t been re-cached yet or the page hasn’t been indexed yet (if it was a brand new page).  Now Google may be aware of these links as they don’t always cache/index a page after crawling it.  But just to make sure its worth putting some work into getting them indexed so that Google are counting those links.

There are a few ways to do this, you could bookmark the page at a few social media sites, build a few manual links to it or even auto generate a few article links to the page.

Content

User Generated Content

I’m a big fan of user generated content and think that the search engines are making this a big factor when ranking sites and can easily spot this type of content on your website.  This has been around a while but many websites don’t seem to use this very much throughout their deeper pages where fresh content is so important.  If you run an E-commerce website make sure you have a system that allows customers to leave reviews, give them an incentive to do do, even allow them to upload pictures or videos of their items if it suits.

Using Content for Link Building

The Blogstorm blog wrote last week about a new link building tool called Tynt which helps you build links from peoples who copy and paste your content.  Patrick at Blogstorm then blogged about a new link building script which does the same job but for free.

If you are producing fresh content on a regular basis either via a blog or other means, I’d recommend adding this script.  Sure some people may get rid of the link but its such an easy and fast tool to implement that its worth it.

Business Strategy

Business Integration

As the search engines improve, it is becoming more and more important for you to leverage every aspect of your business (offline as well) to help your online efforts.  Communication between departments is crucial, education of other departments is crucial.  Everyone needs to be aware of just how important SEO is to the business and what they can do to help.  I’m not saying that everyone within the business needs to become an SEO expert, what you want is for them just to have it in the back of their minds when doing their day to day tasks.

An example I can give of where this worked against me recently was when a client decided to run a great giveaway competition, however the marketing guys didn’t tell me about this in advance and it put me a few steps behind in coming up with a great link bait strategy.

SEO does seem to be becoming more connected with regular PR than ever, trust is vital as is reputation management.  If you are an agency SEO then try to schedule in some time to go to your client premises and talk to the staff who are in a position to help you with SEO and educate them.  Follow this up by letting them know when they have helped and what effect it had.  If they did some good on-page SEO on a new product page, which led to it showing on page 1 of Google very quickly, drop them an email and copy in their manager to let them know.

Customer Service and Connecting with them

I know, this hasn’t really been the job of an SEO but it should be – even more so now that we are seeing personal search results and live search which could be a potential PR nightmare if not managed properly.

I get very frustrated when I search for a client name and on the first page of Google is a rant from a past customer saying how terrible customer service is – this hardly ever happens to me by the way but still…!  I spend a lot of time trying to make sure I do everything right and do not damage a clients reputation with the work I do.  So when I see bad customer service which isn’t then followed up and resolved, its frustrating.

Let your client know that if they are not treating customers right, it is all too easy for the customer to voice their experience online and create negative PR which is easily found by potential future customers.  I know that not every single transaction can be perfect and everyone makes mistakes, but its important to monitor your reputation online and if any problems show up – deal with it straight away.

Well thanks to Lisa for making the suggestion and I hope this post has been a bit useful!