By now you’re probably well acquainted with Google Suggest. Its Google’s search tool that gives you Search suggestions as you type your query into the Google search box.

And while Google Suggest can generate some hilarious and weird results, you can also you it to quickly generate a massive longtail keyword list in minutes.

This article will show you how to combine two awesome Google Suggest scrape tools to generate a list of hundreds or thousands of related keywords in minutes. Then I’ll show you how to turn that huge list of keywords into something you can actually use.

What the heck do I want all those keywords for?

If you’re wondering why you’d want such a list of longtail keywords, wonder no more. I use this Google Suggest scrape method to find keywords for two things:

1. New content ideas– Stuck on topics to write about in your niche? Scraping Google Suggest will give you content ideas you’re not going to find anywhere else.The results Google Suggest shows you are a reflection of search activity on the web. Sure, the keyword phrases it suggests may not get a lot of searches, but they are getting some. You can use this scrape method to unearth great longtail phrases that are easy to rank for and still generate traffic.
2. PPC campaigns– Think you’ve found all the right keywords to bid on in Adwords? Maybe not.By scraping Google Suggest keywords, you can find keywords to add to your campaign that you would have never thought of.Just as importantly, Google Suggest scraping is a great way to find negative match keywords to target before you waste your money on them.

Now that you know why you want to scrape Google Suggest, let’s get into my method of actually doing it.

Step 1

Start at Ubersuggest. It’s a free web-based tool that lets you export lists of Google Suggest phrases based on a keyword you enter. Kudos to Ken Jurina for showing me this.

Enter your keyword and select your language. You can choose to scrape Google Suggest phrases from the web, news, or products searches. In this case I’ll use the web results.

Now check the txt box – that will let you download the results in a text file.

Click “suggest” and a suggestion.txt file will download to your computer. Open it in NotePad++, regular Notepad screws up the spacing.

Now I have a list of 242 “prepaid credit card” related keywords that Ubersuggest has extracted from Google Suggest.

Step 2

Here’s where the fun starts. We are going to take all 242 keywords from the previous step and look for even more Google Suggest results using ScrapeBox. While UberSuggest lets you scrape the results for one keyword, ScrapeBox lets you scrape the results for hundreds of keywords at a time.

Not familiar with ScrapeBox?  You should be. It’s a powerful way to speed up SEO tasks like keyword research and link building.

I should fully disclose here that ScrapeBox is typically a black hat SEO tool. Sure, it’s popular for mass blog comment spamming, but it’s also a versatile tool that can be used for white hat SEO too. Think of Scrapebox as a weapon – in the wrong hands it’s deadly, but it can be used for good too. And we’re all about the good.

Once ScrapeBox is open, drop that list of keywords from Step 1 into ScrapeBox’s Keyword Scraper Tool.

Select your scrape sources and search engines. There are a number of options here, and your choices will depend on the type of site you are doing keyword research for. The product and shopping suggestions are handy for ecommerce research, but for content ideas I just focus on the main search engines:

Click “Scrape” and kick back as ScrapeBox does its thing. This can take a few minutes depending on the number of scrape sources you picked, the number of keywords in your main list, and the speed of your proxies.

When ScrapeBox finishes running, I click “Remove Duplicate Keywords” and I am left with a list of 574 keywords related to prepaid credit cards.

Want even more keywords? Transfer the list you just scraped back into the main keyword list and run another scrape.

What do I do with all these keywords?

So now you have 100’s of keywords. Are they all useful? Of course not. But with a few minutes of work in Excel, you can turn this unmanageable mass of keywords to a targeted list that you can actually use. Here’s two different ways you can refine the list.

1. If I’m using the list for PPC keyword ideas, I rely on Excel’s Conditional Formatting and Sort & Filter functions to hone in on the keywords I’m interested.Let’s say I’m running an Adwords campaign offering prepaid credit cards from a major credit card provider. The client is sensitive about their brand image – they don’t want to appear to be marketing to minors.With Excel, I can use the “Text That Contains” Formatting option to highlight uses of keywords like “teen,” “kid” and “child.”This highlights all keyword phrases that contain my specified text. But the highlighted keywords are still mixed in the regular keywords, so I’d then filter the list using the “Sort by Color” option. The “Sort by Color” option brings all the highlighted keywords to the top of the list so I can review them all at once.

   

   The Google Suggest scrape method is great for finding new negative match keywords you didn’t consider. In this case I found people were using phrases I hadn’t considered, like “under 13,” which I immediately add to my negative match list in Adwords.

2. If you’re doing keyword research for content ideas, you’re going to love what I am about to tell you: With Richard Baxter’s Google Adwords API Extension for Excel you can take your list of keywords from Scrapebox and, from within Excel, grab Adwords search volume data.That’s right – no more flipping back and forth between the web-based Adwords Keyword Tool and your Excel sheet.  Talk about a timesaver. Now you can sort all your content idea keywords by search volume, which will show you where you’re best off investing your content-creation time.The Excel extension is free; all you pay for is the API costs to Google, which are negligible. High-five to John Doherty for showing me this.

So now that you know how to build a huge list of longtail keywords using Google Suggest scrapers, what are you waiting for? Get cracking! Test it out now and start generating new ideas for your website or PPC campaign.

This article is not a debate about the quality of Google’s results as of late, so let’s not go there. What this article is focused around is the change in the method of content discovery.

All of a sudden, Facebook comes out of nowhere and changes this search engine dynamic. Rather than actively looking for content and getting the most relevant results, we now sit and watch our stream and “stumble upon” information our social network shares. A very strange evolution indeed!

This Change Has Big Impacts for Marketers

Why you ask?

Think about your own searcher behavior. You have a need. For this example let’s say it is “How do I do Math?” So you go to Google, and based on that need, you type in “Learn to do math”, and get a list of results that relate to what you have actively asked Google.

Facebook couldn’t be more different. I may open up my Facebook stream and the first thing I see might be a picture of what my friend made for breakfast, and then an article they posted from SEOmoz and then another posted from Perez Hilton (which immediately gets hidden), and then what my friend made for dinner, etc.

The point is, when I sign into Facebook, I don’t think to myself, “let’s see what mashable has to say about Angelina Jolie’s leg. It just showed up.

This is the main difference between “Searching” and “Social…ing”.

New Method Of Discovery Means Different Tactics

A couple months ago, I did a study with BrightEdge and wrote about the results in Search Engine Land. Knowing that the method of content discovery was different between Google and Facebook, we set out to better understand some of the limitations, as well as find additional opportunities to better reach our audiences on Facebook.

What we found that there is more real estate within Facebook to share your message. Character lengths were different. There were about 97 characters available in the title and about 297 available in the description on Facebook. Knowing that your audience is responding to content differently on Social Media, than they are in search engines, there is a huge opportunity to appeal to them differently.

Open Graph Helper Comes to Earth

Frustrated that the only real way to see how something will render on Facebook is to test post it on Facebook or manually go into the code, find the open graph tags, and count them, I decided to ask for some help.

Graciously, Mike offered to help (awesome for me!). He and I spoke over a number of weeks to discuss the specifics and collaborate on this Bookmarklet (Open Graph Helper  <— Just drag to your bookmarks), which will do all this work for you.

The cool thing about it is, it takes into account all the limitations discovered in the BrightEdge study, and gives you a sample output of what this might look like on Facebook so you know if you are hitting the appropriate criteria.

Immediate Takeaways

The main takeaway here should be, keep Open Graph in mind. With this Bookmarklet, there are no more excuses.  The next time you write a blog post, do a site audit, or just want to see how badly a competitor is failing at this, just click on the tool.

Make sure you are thinking about the different methods of discovers. Think about the differences between your audience finding you on Google vs. Facebook, and strongly consider optimizing your Open Graph tags.

You have the control. Why leave it to chance?

The preceding article is a guest post written by Aaron Friedman who works in Digital marketing at Resolution Media. He specializes in SEO and Social media strategy. Follow him on Twitter @AaronFriedman.

Special thanks to Chris Le from Seer Interactive and Joshua Giardino for helping get the bugs out of the bookmarklet.

Tuesday

• 9am Getting Personal, Part 1: How Google & Bing Personalize With Social Connections (Spectator)
• 10:45 am Getting Personal, Part 2: How Google & Bing Personalize With Search History & Geography (Spectator)
• 1:30pm Does Google Favor Brands? An In-Depth Look (Spectator)

Wednesday

• 9am  - Google Keynote
• 10:45 am – Real Answers For Technical SEO Problems (Q&A Moderator)
• 12:00 pm – Link Building Birds of a Feather Lunch Table (Moderator) – At this birds of feather lunches I lead a discussion over food on link building with all the delegates that chose to eat with me. So come and find me on Wednesday at lunch time.
• 1:30 pm – Schema.org, Rel=Author & Meta Tagging Best Practices (Spectactor) - I’m very much Looking forward to seeing Dennis G speak
• 3:30 pm – Building Buzz On Facebook: Getting Liked & Shared (Spectactor) - Looking forward to seeing Aaron Friedman speak as I built a bookmarklet for his talk.
• 5:00 pm – Duplication, Aggregation, Syndication, Affiliates, Scraping And Information Architecture (Spectactor) 
• 5:00 pm – SEO Site Clinic (Spectactor)  - Very hype to see Rhea show ‘em who’s boss.

Thursday

• 10:45 What Search Data Reveals About Customer Needs & Desires – And How To Use It (Speaker) - I’m talking Data-mining the Target way. Don’t miss it.
• 12pm – 1:00pm Advanced SEO Birds of a Feather Lunch Table (Moderator) – Just like the other lunch table but the focus is Advanced SEO.
• 1:00 Link Building Clinic (Speaker) - We’re fielding your link building questions and helping you with actionable insights. Are you ready for this?
• 2:30 Ask The Search Engines – Open Q&A Forum (Spectactor) - I will be the heckler asking the right questions

Friday

I’m filling in last minute for Rand Fishkin at the Silicon Valley Search Engine Roundtable event from 11:15 – 12pm at Shoreline in Mountain View. More details as soon I’ve got them!

“But out of limitations comes creativity” – Debbie Allen (American actress)

I recently got the attention of an intelligent and creative blogger…via Twitter.  No, I didn’t quench the Diet-Coke desires of Ian Lurie; I did it with a tweet, referencing an SEOmoz content and blogging post:

“Are you Shure about that title? You may wanna read this epically-gnarly post penned by @dan_shure via @SEOmoz first http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/are-your-titles-irresistibly-click-worthy-viral“

Maybe Dan wanted to show his appreciation for my recognition; or, it was my pun-fused tweet that summonsed his attention, inspiring a retweet…and a quote for my own post (thanks Dan!):

“I most definitely re-tweeted you because the text you used was unique, interesting, and got an emotional reaction (I actually smiled and chuckled out loud a little bit). I appreciate each and every time someone shares an article of mine, but I’m more likely to share back with my followers if it has something new to it; a clever description, something funny… anything that adds value really.”

As his post displays, titles are important and often creatively overlooked; but online marketers do not write off the importance of content and circulation.  If you need the wake up call, read Gianluca Fiorelli’s enlightening search engine trends post about the new landscape of Google.  Gianluca calls attention to three major aspects of online marketing: technical SEO (solve SEO tech problems in under an hour thanks to Dave Sottimano), social media, and content marketing.  Addressing content circulation on Twitter hits upon two of the three concerns.

So it’s understood; we have 140 characters to play with using Twitter.  As Dan Shure suggests, we want our titles to be ‘click worthy,’ and as Gianluca’s post suggests, attending to content and social is integral; parlaying the click-worthy sentiment to Twitter’s social media platform seems like a sound decision.  Well, I think it’s a good idea. (Hopefully some people retweet, I mean, agree with me.)

While some URL lengths are a bit prolix, we can shorten them using a service such as bitly.com; as the slogan goes, you can shorten, share, and track your tweets.  A shorter URL widens tweet real estate, allowing creativity to move on in…

Twaxing Poetic

I like to consider myself a writer and poet, much like Shakespeare.  The ‘Bard’ wrote in prose (‘normal’ as my high school students called it) and in verse (both rhyme and blank, but let’s not get too into it; we’re not in copywriting class!) forms.  He often wrote his plays in verse because the rhythm of the language is intriguing and it was easier for his performers to remember (not always so easy for English students!).

While you can stray from novel sentiments, tweeting a shortened URL, you could choose to be poetic and try a rhyming couplet.  It breaks down to two lines of ten syllables (the two, respective end syllables rhyming) each.  Try it; get all the party people in the house to pen some poetry.  Here’s an example with a short URL in tow:

“Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind;/And therefore is winged Cupid painted blind. http://bit.ly/yNyoEU”

[That's 114 characters;so, it's likely many rhyming couplet derivations can fit along with a shortened URL, making for a sweet-sounding tweet.]

Let’s reference Dan’s post using my own rhyming couplet:

“If you’re in need of wit in your titles,/Be Shure to check this, its content vital http://mz.cm/AmS85H”

Let’s use another poetic example, a haiku.  A haiku is a short poem of three lines of five, seven, and five syllables respectively.  Let’s read one as an example:

the first cold shower

even the monkey seems to want

a little coat of straw

Let’s again reference Dan’s article using a haiku:

“Good content alone/left astray by lame titles/Rest a-Shure-d, there’s help http://mz.cm/AmS85H”

(only 94 characters – it fits)

I understand; many of us are not highly-invested, poetic enthusiasts; however, as Shure mentions in his post, pay attention to sound and don’t deny its seduction; poets and writers have been leveraging sound for well over 400 years.  SMO practitioners do it today; I recently observed the Cadbury UK brand, generating some sweet user-to-brand social media engagement with puns and wordplay.

I hope you apply creativity, now let’s give help further validity…

Be a Twelper

While we hope writers are creating creative titles, we can give them a little help, whipping up attention-grabbing (and possible re-tweetable) tweets.

I mentioned shortening tweets to get more poetic but what if the opposite happens?  What if shortening a tweet makes it less click worthy?  That’s not aligned with online marketing goals, right?

For instance, what if I tweeted about Dan’s article in this manner:

“Good post on creating better titles http://mz.cm/AmS85H”

It helps giving content a social push but the above is rather boring and generic.  If you don’t have the social clout of a Rand Fishkin or Danny Sullivan, you’re not calling much attention with a tweet’s presence alone.  If you’re looking to add some ‘swagger’ to your tweets, you could approach ‘influencers,’ getting them involved in your content circulation efforts, as Rand suggests in this post on generating viral content.

While it’s great to recruit ‘influencers,’ creating content’s social motion, be sure you’re not fielding a ‘Bad News Bears’ team of helpers, those who may ironically shove content out of the way of other tweeters’ interests.  As Joanna Lord reminds us in her paid search marketing post, we should really be thinking about content ‘curation,’ how we create, promote, and maintain it; brands need to devise a plan regarding content creation, implementation, circulation, and lifespan.

If you catch a cohort, fan, or follower tweeting your content but not attaching the creative ‘ring’ it deserves, try giving them a little help.  For instance, Matthew Panzarino wrote this post about using Bing on an iPhone.  Danny Sullivan must have read it and wanted to give his own title a suggestion; he did via his tweet:

Headline of this good @TheNextWeb article should have been “I Kissed A @Bing & I Liked It” tnw.to/1D9VI

— Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan) February 3, 2012

(It collected 8 retweets and 4 favorites)

Actually, I dig Danny’s title better.  It is likely people were intrigued (I was) and clicked on the content link; so, be ‘shure’ to watch how other people view your content.  Actually, I’m using Dan’s words; I should reference him.  Dan Shure calls attention to this in the comment section of his post:

“That brings to mind, I meant to mention something else as a tip; Carefully watch how OTHER people describe your content. For example, Rand tweeted this post as “How To Make An Irresistably Click Worthy Title”. If he meant to change it or not, I actually like that version a lot! And just as in your comment, I’ve often noticed others describe content better than the person who wrote it.”

So it seems the notion of ‘helping’ is out there in the Web cosmos.  Can you pick up the creative slack for a lagging cohort, fan, or follower?  It may make a difference between a click versus a ‘diss.’  Speaking of versus sentiments….

Tweet Provocative

Sometimes you write out of a sense of duty, need, and passion.  Of course, you’ll want such notions to turn heads.  What can you do to provoke attention to your content?  Dial-up a target’s handle on Twitter.  Do you remember when Rupert Murdoch was making a fuss on Twitter?  An important figure in search decided to pay him some mind, using the Simpsons as a vehicle of vociferation.

Such a great post (using the Simpsons!) caught my eye as well as Danny’s tactic of addressing Rupert in his post then calling attention via Twitter:

Dear @RupertMurdoch. Son wanted to watch The Simpsons tonight. Despite paying you 3 times for it, couldn’t. Here’s why bit.ly/wRTayA

— Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan) January 23, 2012

(It received 50+ retweets and was favorited 15 times)

Hey, if Danny is doing it, why can’t I?  I read a post by Wall Street Journal writers and entertained my own views on the subject matter, writing a post then tweeting my re-post to them:

“@SchatzWSJ @geoffreyfowler @eorden read your article in WSJ perhaps you guys can return the read-thanks: tinyurl.com/7h9srn5“

I wanted to get attention; I think that’s a way to get some.  I’m not the only one.  Jonathan Allen of Search Engine Watch wanted to get Bill Barol’s attention with his article; like Sullivan, he tweeted about it:

On Magic & SEO: Open Letter to Forbes, Bill Barol sewat.ch/wuQG9p by @jc1000000

— Jonathan Allen (@jc1000000) January 25, 2012

Being a fan and recently observing Danny’s more direct tactic, I decided to ‘help’ Jonathan’s message find its (target) audience with my tweet:

@jc1000000 AWESOME letter to @Forbes – hope @billbarol tends to clarify his words on this platform : searchenginewatch.com/article/214110…

— Anthony Pensabene (@content_muse) January 25, 2012

Jonathan ‘favorited’ my sentiment, which brings me to another point…

Favorites – Tweets for the Brand’s Soul

 Dan Shure recently tweeted, inquiring about ‘favoriting’ tweets:

“Q: Why do people favorite tweets? To save for later?”

I gave a reply:

“@dan_shure From a branding perspective, favoriting fan-motional sentiments is a positive for new and potential followers I think”

Think of your Twitter profile from a branding perspective.  When people view your profile, they can click on your favorites.  Your favorites become a prior-content ‘testimonial’ trophy case, where followers view past fan attention and celebrations of your brand’s content.  External validation is great for facilitating content movement; also, it’s great for branding and proving trust on the Web as Rand reminds in a post.

Are you ‘favoriting’ tweets from brand followers and supporters?  Why not?  Supporters are tweeting a branding masterpiece!  Additionally, followers can come upon past, favorited posts and decide to give them a retweet, re-exposing your content to the ‘Twitterverse.‘  Speaking of branding, as referenced above, some shortened URLs blindly lead viewers to destined URL.  Are you leading them righteously?

  Tweeting Ethics Effects/Affects
Many readers are accustomed to the ways of marketing.  Link building sometimes ventures down the seedy paths of link baiting, where clever marketers attempt to persuade unsuspecting consumers.  Are you baiting with your tweets?  I’m not telling you to disengage from fishing for link followers.  I am suggesting you consider the ethics of what is and what is not clearly divulged to consumers.  Danny Sullivan assuaged many concerns with his Google privacy post.  More recently, we saw levels of transparency influencing consumer views of Pinterest, a company using affiliate links.

I’ve displayed ways to persuade followers to pay attention to tweets; but, remember your responsibility to your brand’s followers and consumers – to offer an exceptional level of customer service.

Get to Tweetin

By now, I hope you won’t return to regularly-scheduled Twitter programming.  As displayed, through sweet tweets, one can intrigue, help, hurt, brand, and bait.  All that sets you apart from desired outcomes is the arrangement of characters…  What we tweet in life echoes in Tweeternity…What can you do with 140 characters?

Wednesday February 22^, 2012 was a fine day in New York City. The sun was shining. It was 50+ degrees all day. I think I skipped down the street and hummed a show tune on my way to work. I definitely helped an old lady cross the street. Once I arrived in the office I dove through my mountain of email only to come across this:

Woohoo! A guest post pitch! I thought to myself, “Hmm…well Alia that sounds intriguing.” Of course I assumed it was some sort of spam or at least just a really weak form letter, but I gave her the benefit of the doubt. So I responded with the guest posting guidelines for the blog.

If you haven’t seen the guest posting guidelines I’ve laid out, I specifically ask for new ideas based around on SEO, CRO, Personas, Web Development, UX Design, Digital Strategy, Social Media, Gameplay and Analytics. I basically ask potential guest posters for something in the same vein of what I try to write. As you might have guessed, I replied operating under the assumption that if Alia was a spammer she’d probably just give up since she didn’t have anything that met those parameters. Oh boy was I delighted to see that she responded!

Granted both of her emails clearly lacked the color that would make me think she was truly a high caliber writer looking to spread a new digital idea. However I know that I often come across as short in my communications so I took the plunge, opened the document and hope for the best.

Without further adieu ladies and gentlemen, here is “The Future of Mobile Advertising: Have a Look” in all its glory sans links and Alia’s surname:

The future of mobile advertising: Have a look

You can see a paradigm shift in advertising. From tiny text and banner ads to more sophisticated endeavors. Some are trying to catch with few games and contests while other offer some specific deals as per your location. Today, the mobile advertising is approximately 4 billion dollars business. Despite some perception of gloomy picture, you can consider the future of mobile advertising as a safe choice. To get a clear picture of its future, let’s explore the trends associated this marketing method which will help you understand its compatibility factor in the coming future:

Better interactivity with apps and ads: The use of a cell phone goes different than your laptop or TV. Hence the ads used in this medium should be different by taking the advantage of some unique things like touch screens and camera which you can do with your cell phone devices. This is considered to be the basics of interactive mobile ads, or the ideas of building ads like partial ads. The Apple’s iAds are considered to be the best in interactive ads. It helps you explore a tiny virtual world inside the ad, watch video, allow you to enter in contests and even help you in playing games and so on. Others too are joining the race with similar kinds of tools and apps for ad agencies. You can expect more powerful and interactive kinds of ads in the coming future for mobile advertising which will engage the consumers unlike the other ads do.

Awards are not empty pitchers: There are few companies like Kiip which are seen with ads based on mobile games. As you play and reach at higher levels or secure higher points you get a number of rewards like having a substantial amount of discount in their various products. Or you win a cup of coffee or sandwich with your friends for free. Hence with these short term rewards based games and some more ideas, you can expect the mobile advertising to grow in the near future. In fact the idea will work on giving people rewards or save their money for using these ads.

The rising mobile search: The mobile search advertising is already a big player of ad spending. This is the same place where Google is making huge money in mobile. In the coming years, you will see people using the mobile search for products and services with the help of their cell phones. In the coming future, you will see the advertisers embarking with more relevant and focused ads with not only based on locations but also with very precise predictability engines.

Improved analytics: Today, the tools for measuring mobile phone ad campaigns lag behind with sophistication which advertisers expect. Thanks to the regulations set forth by a number of regulatory agencies. However, in the coming years, these standards will turn mature. The companies will give their consent for what gets measured and the effectiveness of analyzing the mobile campaigns will not be a big deterrent factor.

With different devices, operating systems, screen sizes you require different mobile ads. Hence to say that the future of mobile advertising is not great cannot be justified by any means or methods. Today, the mobile ads are doing well, where we see 60 percent of cell phone users clicking these ads in their messages boxes. In fact for the coming years there is enough room for enhancements in this sector as discussed above in the article.

About the author: Alia [REDACTED] is a blogger by profession. She loves writing on technology and autos. Beside this she is fond of cameras and watches. Recently an article on Nikon Coolpix L120 attracted her attention. These days she is busy in writing an article on LED Watch.

Naturally, the bolded text in the author profile is the keywords she’s looking to build links for and the underlines are the bad grammar. I didn’t finish because the article is so bad I couldn’t get through it.

Obviously, I wasn’t going to give this post the proper burn “Alia” was looking for – it being complete garbage and all – but just for kicks I threw a line of text into Google because I was just a little suspicious due to the awesome writing and grammar. And as you might guess, it’s a completely spun article:

The highlighted text should sound mostly familiar if you were able to make it through Alia’s “guest post.”

The Right Way to Guest Post

Here’s what a proper guest post email looks like:

That is not to say that I need my ego stroked or what have you, but Anthony makes it quite clear that he is reaching out to me with context around the SEO community. He also did it via an SEOmoz private message which again shows his context. He makes it clear what he is looking to write about and why. Anthony shot his “Sweet Titled Tweets Fit the Wit in Twitter” over to me and it’s great. I’ll be posting it tomorrow.

So Alia, you got the guest post that you wanted. I’m not posting your links but what I will do is give you links to a variety of resources you can used to become better at link building. Here you go:

• Link Building – The Beginner’s Guide
• Link Building Strategies – The Complete List
• Throw Away Your Form Letters (or 5 Principles to Better Outreach Link Building)
• Broken Link Building Guide: From Noob to Novice
• A Linkbuilder’s Gmail Productivity Setup (with Outreach Emails from 4 Industry Linkbuilders)
• A New Perspective on Link Building
• Scalable Link Building Using Social Media
• 8 Tips for Blogger Outreach
• SEO Guide to Creating Viral Linkbait and Infographics
• Content-based Outreach for Link Building

Link Builders let this be a lesson to the value of the knowing your audience when you do outreach. I imagine to this person I’m just another prospect found by yet another link building tool. However if you don’t realize who you are talking to there is a large possibility that your link building efforts will result in a lot more than you bargained for.

All that said…I’m still accepting guest posts! :]

SEO Is NOT Just About Text and Links Anymore

Below, I tackle a topic I’ve been unconsciously working up to for the past few months. What do the following have in common? The related search operator, IMDB search results, and the mysterious search for fave. Anyone? Not only did I write about all three, I believe they all have to do with entity based search.

This video (hopefully) answers THREE questions:

• What is Entity Search?
• What Can Trigger Entity Results?
• What Should I Be Doing / Why Should I care?

So check out the video below. Its my FIRST VIDEO!! Woohoo! Been wanting to do a video for a while. Hope you like it!

Lots of links and references below!!!

If you don’t watch all the way to the end (why wouldn’t you?)… you should! There some actionable tips for what you can do to start preparing for entity based search!!

I will definitely be researching and writing more on this topic when I’m not so buried in work at the moment… so more slideshows, screenshots and videos too (if you liked it) to come!!

Some of the resources I have read, and you should read too… these people are smarter than me:

Named Entity Detection in Queries – SEO by the Sea

Query Re-writing with Entity Detection – Patent

How a Search Engine Might Assume an Implied Site Search – SEO by the Sea

Bill Slawski’s Explanation of ‘Fave’ – Google Plus Discussion

Entity Search Results – Justin Briggs

Freebase

So…this is an Advanced Blog?

That is not to say that this is an “advanced” blog or that you need to be able to code to post here — no. Simple topics are completely welcome if they are well-researched or feature a test with data that challenges conventions. Simply put, this blog is called “The Best Practice” because I believe that the best practice. In other words the best inbound marketers don’t just pontificate about various practices with conjecture they continually test and learn in the space and want to share those learnings.

Guest Post Topics

I’m specifically looking for topics covering:

• Search Engine Optimization
• Conversion Rate Optimization
• Personas
• Web Development
• User Experience Design
• Digital Strategy
• Social Media
• Gameplay
• Analytics

However I am definitely interested in compelling pitches outside of those things as long as they directly overlap.

How Do I Pitch a Guest Post?

Just ping me on twitter (@ipullrank) with your idea.

Guest Posting Guidelines

I ask for 3 things when writing a post for The Best Practice:

• Employ the tactics outlined in Cyrus Shepard’s 10 Super Easy SEO Copywriting Tips
• Employ Dan Shure’s Are Your Titles Irresistibly Click Worthy& Viral? post
• Blog post must be original and not published anywhere else on the web before or after going live on the Best Practice blog

That’s pretty much it.

Looking forward to hearing from more geniuses in the community!

-Mike

It’s time we go back 14 years to the time this paper was published. It’s time we start thinking about what it takes to be linked to naturally. It’s time we stop thinking we can play the long-term game by consistently creating crap content and depending on quick & easy link building strategies. While one time outreach campaigns can be successful, they’re just not sustainable.

The social world has given the Web’s content a reality check. I can’t say I have the extensive background in link building that guys like Eric Ward have, but I can say that after studying they way people have built links in the past 15 years, we’re finally becoming an internet society that Google originally thought it was correctly measuring. Just take a glimpse at the most popular link building strategies over our past time. First it was reciprocal links. Then directory submissions. Then article marketing. Finally, around 4 years ago, the term link bait started getting attention, but it didn’t really mean anything until 2009ish.

Why was link bait revolutionary? Because someone finally connected the dots between content and links. This idea was how Google was supposed to originally work; if something was great and worthy of ranking, people would naturally link to it.

What I’m trying to say here is that we need to stop thinking about building links based on manipulation, and we need to start building them based on satisfaction, because if we still think in those archaic terms, then we’re living in the early 2000’s. Manipulating search engines is starting to become a thing of the past; satisfying them is the present and future.

I hate writing about creating great content, because it’s such a simple message and one that’s been pounded into 99% of you reading this. The fact that I’m writing about content for links is because I’m trying to make a substantial point that still hasn’t been made yet. It’s this: If we aren’t consistently investing the majority of our resources in content & adding value to our audience, our days are numbered.

You know why? Because the natural link is making a comeback.

There are two reasons for this. The first is that, as stated above, links for manipulation and links without content are starting to become a thing of the past. The second is the fact that social mentions are not taking the place of links, which I will discuss below.

I inquired a group of 24 SEO Experts a few weeks ago (Mike was one of them). I asked them about the future of links and if social mentions like Tweets will ever come close; the overwhelming response was No, they won’t. They weren’t saying anything about social mentions not becoming authoritative, they were saying that links aren’t going away. The reason is simple: a link is a life long vote, and a tweet is a 3-hour one-night stand.

If I link to something, my reputation is on the line. That’s why Google has a penalty to those who link to black hat sites. If I tweet something from a black hat site, Google’s not going to penalize me, which outright tells me social & links are two entirely separate things. Links are votes that can be used as a long-term measurement; social mentions only give something their 15 minutes (or in this case, 3 hours) of fame.

Let’s get back to how this ties into the natural link. As I said, we should be aiming for links, not social mentions, for long-term rankings, and we need to start thinking about links in a natural way. If I were an in-house SEO manager, half of my link building budget would be going to content. The other half would be getting links to that content I’m creating. Essentially, I’d be contacting the natural linkers who didn’t end up linking; this is where some of those short-term strategies come into play.

In-house link builders, listen up. I preach some great short term link building strategies on my blog, such as broken link building, but the fact of the matter is that these should not be your sole source of link equity. You should always be aiming for the natural link, and when all else fails or you need a serious push, then you tap into some of these other short-term strategies. These strategies should be your Plan B.

It’s time to show rather than tell. Look at OKCupid, Cracked, SEOmoz, Daring Fireball, and The Everywhereist, just a few examples of highly linked to sites/blogs. Do you think they have a team of link builders constantly contacting webmasters to link to them, or do you think they have a team of content strategists that create killer content that naturally attracts links?

Finally, we need to stop complaining that we’re in a boring niche. I understand a lot of us aren’t talking about cupcakes or gaming, science or politics, but we need to put this past us. We need to do the best we can to steer our content in the direction of the nearest half-interesting niche. If you’re blogging about plumbing, steer towards home improvement. Create a timeless resource on DIY plumbing instillation, or a post on the top 10 plumbing fails from around the world. Either make it worth referencing, or worth sharing.

We can continue exerting our energy doing manual outreach 100% of the time, building short-term success that requires constant upkeep, or we can invest our time in creating something that people want to read, people want to naturally link to, and in the end, Google wants to rank.

If one person leaves here more focused on natural links than before, then I’ve done my job.

If you liked this post, then you’re going to love me on twitter! Also make sure to check out Point Blank SEO, my link building blog.

How to rescue your site from the grip of 1000s of low quality links.

If you own a site that has been around a few years and you have been active in acquiring links then chances are you are now fighting off the scourge of the dreaded ‘spammy link profile’.

You may think that such a thing is the result of so-called bad SEO but in some cases it isn’t. Proactive SEO? Maybe. The kind of SEO required at the time? Possibly. But not ALWAYS bad SEO.

Undoubtedly there will be sites out there that have been abused but whichever way they got there is of little significance. The black and white fact of the matter is that the thousands of low quality links, obtained with little thought nor understanding of link profiling, are the SEO equivalent of wearing a ‘I Hate Kim Jong Il’ T-Shirt in Pyongyang. They are going to get you in a lot of trouble.

The question is then; how do we escape the clutches of such a penalty in order to move forwards once again? The answer is that you first need to understand your own link profile and those you compete with before you can then do something to rectify it.

As with all complex problems escaping your spammy link profile is as much about having a detailed understanding of the issue at hand as it is taking an All Action Hero approach from the off. This is not a time to run out of the starting gates, guns blazing. Its about diagnosis before cure.

To explain how the process works we’ll run through a fictional situation using a site in the fashion niche. For a little background it had been a leading site throughout the 2005-2009 period, amassing significant revenues that were reinvested in link building to reinforce its position still further.

As a PR4 site it had powered its marketing strategy with more than 25000 directory, article submission and other low quality links, the majority of which were aggressively targeted straight at their most profitable terms. And it worked.

The issues began to creep in late in 2009 as the site began to lose out to ‘lesser’ competitors. The immediate response was to build more of the same links but all that served to do was to compound the issue.

The answer was there all along of course and it could be found hidden deep in link profile data. And these are the steps they took to fix it.

Stage One: The Analysis

We’re not talking look in the mirror and love the guy staring back here, rather the mapping of the existing link profile.

The process starts with a classification exercise of the type of websites, pages and link positions those links can be placed into.

Anchor Text

Anchor text is one of the key metrics to understand and so we spend some time mapping the first 1000 or so links to see if the profile could be creating any over-optimisation issues.

Search engines like to see a varied anchor text profile and in the example we looked at for this post there awere no major issues here. Overall densities were spread nicely across a large number of anchor text terms and of the sites linking back link juice is spread enough to avoid standing out in the crowd.

Of course when looking at data like this a broad-brush approach to every market is not going to get it done. Instead, every site should be taken in CONTEXT with those around it as what is natural in one vertical certainly won’t be in others. And this is really where competitive modelling comes in very handy.

Lots of link tools, such as Cemper’s LRT OR the new tool from Cognitive SEO allow you to perform competitive analysis and this kind of tool can be VERY useful in understanding where your strengths and weaknesses may be. Below we look at which metrics we look at in deciding what kind of tactics are needed to right the wrongs.

WebPage Type

We start with webpage type and analyze where the link comes from (i.e. – a blog, a directory, ecommerce, article directory, forum etc) to see if the site has overcooked its work in one specific area. This is usually where the problems and solutions begin to surface, as directories will generally have the lion’s share of inbound interest and will also be throwing the PR Value balance out of kilter.

 Link Positioning

Next up is Link Positioning and where on a page your links sit. Panda and other recent algo changes have made contextual links all the more important and so the key here will be understanding which links needed killing off or editing to ensure that as many as possible serve you positively.

The Black column is ‘our site’ and the yellow the top site for the term we are chasing. The same is true of all graphs here.

Again, diversity is important here, but keep an eye on things such as groups of links together, lots of blog comments links and also WHERE on the page they sit. Having too many in the header or footer, for example, could indicate paid links and/or site wides, both of which Google detests and will ‘zero value’ at best or penalize at worst.

Categories

Insight into which verticals those links come from is also important, as link relevance is a major factor in determining value.

In our fictional example our gifts retailer is in a fortunate position in having the ability to naturally reach out to all manner of niches. Links from sites about business, ecommerce, home, tech etc would all be fair game. If your site is about the Higgs Boson and particle physics, however, you should look to create a much more focused profile. 

 Others

There are many other metrics you can use to parse your data still further but we like to keep it clean and straightforward and concentrate on the above plus an analysis of the PageRank distribution to ensure that we do not have all of our links from low value domains and pages. A mix is what is important here.

Discovering banned or broken links can also be very wise as being linked to from ‘dodgy’ neighbourhoods is a little like being in the same car as a wanted fugitive. The result is never a good one. Removing them, therefore is a VERY good idea and below we can see a snippet of a ‘run’ we carried out for our fictional account:

 And we can also do the same with Site wides too:

Target found www.XXXX.com/, Keyword: XXXXX, Site-Wide (809)

The above is an example and we should be contacting said site immediately to have links removed from all but one page.

Stage Two: The Road Map

 Understanding the current state of affairs is clearly an important milestone to reach but it is useless without any quantifiable plan of action.

 The key here is NOT to overload yourself with data but rather create a priority list of changes that need to be made with those with the biggest potential to create positive change at the top of the pile.

In the example we have here our list would look a little like this:

1. Webpage type – reduce the number of directory links/increase number of High PR links
2. Site wides – search out and destroy
3. Category diversification – search out links in under optimised niches
4. Remove banned and broken links
5. Remove duplicate IP links

Stage Three: The Clean Up

And so it begins. The list above is your ticket to success. Think of it like that and the tediousness of contacting scores of webmasters will be a walk in the park.

The key is to be methodical and monotonous, as few directories or spammy sites will want to help you. Often the only way to get them to sit up and take notice, after a couple of friendly initial emails, is to make them aware that you can, and will, contact their hosting provider and request them to shut the site down if they do not comply with your request.

Personally I like the Domain Tools Whois lookup to discover who it is you need to get in touch with in the first place but any reverse ip and/or whois tool will work just as well. For further info on how you can make this stage work take a look at this guide.

Stage Four: The Content Piece

While you work on the removal of unwanted or harmful links it is important to begin the proactive piece and start looking at how you can fill the gaps in a positive way.

If, for instance, we need more PR4/5 links you should start looking for bloggers and other authority sources using Google’s blog search and social tools such as Follower Wonk to build an outreach list. All you then need is to read this piece by Mike himself on the SEOMoz blog and get out there.

At least now you’ll be much more focused on what sort of links you actually need and where they should come from, which, in turn, will help refocus your outreach efforts and gain you those links you so desperately need.

And if you still fail?

Your first port of call right at the beginning of this whole process should be a check of all other known penalty causing site issues. Right at the top of this piece we made the assumption that you had already ruled out such things as:

1. You’ve got site speed issues.
2. You’re blocking your site by Robots.txt etc
3. You’ve set up bad canonicals or redirects.
4. Your site has massive duplicate content.
5. You’ve been hacked or hit with malware.

(List courtesy of Dr Pete and his 6 ways to recover from bad links post )

And if the link optimisation piece doesn’t work then there are some great tips in Pete’s piece on how to control who links to you and how.

As well as some awesome Panda duplicate content factors to consider and explore.

Failing that it could be that the rot is so deep and smeared across your domain that there is only one thing you can do – cut all ties and start again…but that’s a story for another day entirely.

Further reading:

Below are a small number of posts related to this topic that I suggest offers further insight into this broad area:

• Understanding your Backlink profile
• Link Valuation
• Discover Link Building Activity

The basic premise is that posts on many popular blogs are scraped and placed and/or syndicated onto other websites and therefore writing a guest post containing one link back to a given sitewill have a multiplier effect once the post goes live and is scraped. This is something that I’ve noticed in the past in writing for SEOmoz. As seen below there are 103 pages that have scraped and republished the “Just How Smart are Search Robots” post that I wrote at the end of November 2011.

And for that reason alone I am on the first page (between 7 and 9 depending) for the keyword “Googlebot,” a highly competitive keyword according to Moz’s Keyword Difficulty Report.

It’s pretty safe to say that this is very powerful stuff that should be weighed when considering where to guest post.

Shareability Rate (or Share Rate)

Immediately after seeing Jon’s post I thought “this is brilliant but why aren’t we computing this for the propensity of posts on a given site to be shared.” For example as soon as a post goes live on the main blog of SEOmoz there are roughly 300 tweets immediately no matter what due to their devoted following and RSS scrapers.

For example Andrew’s post went up sometime early this afternoon and already has 537 tweets.

Computing Share Rate

I skipped the explanation of how to compute scrape rate with good reason; shareability rate will play into what I believe to the most effective way to compute scrape rate.

Share metrics are available via free APIs and or even directly in Excel via Neil Bosma’s SeoTools plugin and therefore are far easier to come by than Google results numbers. So while Jon suggested that you pull 3 random URLs in computing scrape rate, I’m going to suggest something more empirical. We’re going to pulls all the URLs for the section of the site that we want to guest post on and then pull social metrics on all of those URLs and then calculate an average of all the social metrics for those URLs. For speed and simplicity of creating this post I’m using 11 URLs from the SEOmoz blog.

1. Download and Install Neil Bosma’s SeoTools – That is if you haven’t already.
2. Download the XML Sitemap
3. Open the XML Sitemap in Excel – Hat tip to Justin Briggs for this one. I had no idea that Excel opened and properly formatted XML files.
4. Pull the Facebook Likes, Google Plus Ones, and Tweet Counts for each URL. The functions are =FacebookLikes(), TwitterCount() and =GooglePlusCount().

   
   

5. Sort the values from lowest to highest – this is important later for computing Scrape Rate.
6. Calculate the average of each
7. Calculate the average of the averages

Computing Scrape Rate

Jon talks about pulling 3 random URLs in order to determine the Scrape Rate. While this is a good quick and dirty judge of the Scrape Rate it’s not empirical. That is to say without a more empirical approach you may end up getting a Scrape Rate that isn’t truly indicative of the site’s propensity to be scraped. This is where Share Rate can inform the Scrape Rate. Using the share counts as an indication of popularity allows you to weigh the importance of pages and therefore you can get a better Scrape Rate by taking average of the 3 pages at the mean of the Share Rate.

1. Find the median of the URL list. So if there are 200 URLs the median is 100th URL.
2. Pull the median URL, the URL preceding and the URL following.
3. Pull the page titles for these 3 pages using =HtmlTitle() in SeoTools.
4. Run “intitle:” queries with these 3 page titles and record the number of results Google returns. Note: SeoTools has a function for pulling the number of Results (=GoogleResultCount) but I couldn’t get it to work properly with concatenate and and intitle query.
5. Take an average of these numbers.

Voila, we have an empirical Scrape Rate!

Conclusion

Guest posting takes a lot of time and effort and you always want to get the most bang for your buck. Scrape Rate and Share Rate are great metrics for determining how worth your while it will be to write a guest post on a given site. As always you know I’m not into all this manual labor for computing something like this so you know I’m already working on a tool… Stay tuned.

As always your thoughts and feedback is appreciated. Also big shout out to Jon Cooper on his great work!

Happy guest posting!