It’s key to educate your clients moving forward, but what about all that press from before SEO became a priority? There may be sites out there that have interviewed your clients, hosted them for events, written about their products – and they aren’t all linking over.

Image via Flickr User DavidShutter

This methodology, although intricate, will allow you to:

• Automate prospecting for all unlinked brand mentions and any C-level write ups.
• Automate determining which prospects are most likely to link over.
• Track high level influencers who have featured your client before and are likely to do it again. 
• Reach out to mid level sites that are likely to link over. 

If you’ve ever picked up a client that has previously earned press coverage you’ve probably used this advanced query:

“brand name” -site:clientdomain.com

This is the exact same tactic, but automated.

Image via Flckr User timlewisnm

Step 1) Create Campaign Exclusions in Link Prospector

Block all social networks, it cuts down on the signal versus noise ratio.

You can find campaign level exclusions in the top right hand of the screen under the “Exclusions” tab:

Step 2) Create the branded advanced query & advanced queries for leadership.

For this example, I am going to use a company that I am a huge fan of: Uber. Although their leadership isn’t listed on their site, it’s easy to find on CrunchBase.

• Garrett Camp
• Travis Kalanick
• Rob Hayes
• Oscar Salazar
• Steve Jang
• Timothy Ferriss
• Stephen (Steve) Russell
• Ryan Graves

Just because someone wrote about one of these executives doesn’t mean it’s worth asking editors and webmasters. These guys get written up all the time. If you are working with a similar start up – try to only look for relevant and recent opportunities that mention the brand to ask for links – that’s where I’ve seen the most success.

Branded Advanced Queries:

• Uber AND car OR service -site:uber.com
• Garrett Camp AND uber -site:uber.com
• Travis Kalanick AND uber -site:uber.com
• Rob Hayes AND uber -site:uber.com
• Oscar Salazar AND uber -site:uber.com
• Steve Jang AND uber -site:uber.com
• Timothy Ferriss AND uber -site:uber.com
• Stephen (Steve) Russell AND uber -site:uber.com
• Ryan Graves AND uber -site:uber.com

Step 3) Throw these into a Link Prospector Custom Report

In the Advanced Options of Link Prospector you can select “Depth,”  meaning how many results you want the app to scrape for you. You can also direct Link Prospector to scrape from regular Google results, Blog Search Google results, or both.

Depending on how much press your client has received in the past, you may not need to go very deep, but Uber has been written about by everyone and anyone, so I am going to go all the way to 1000 and use web and blog results.

Step 4) Isolate Blogs

Depending on how much press your client has received in the past, it may be a better use of your time to only prospect with sites that have an RSS feed. Could this possibly cause you to miss out on a few link opps? Yes, but what’s that compared to the amount of time you will be saving by not trudging through irrelevant sites? Blogs are easy to update, hard coded sites that don’t have an RSS feed usually aren’t.

This is a slight twist on my process for finding blogs that link to competitors.

Step 4.1) Concatenate the LP export

• Take the full list of links from your Link Prospector Paths Export
• Paste them into a new excel sheet and concatenate a “http://” infront of the URL

Screaming Frog needs the “http://” and Link Prospector exports don’t have them.

• Save this new list of full URLs into a .txt file or a new .csv file.

Step 4.2) Upload the new file into Screaming Frog using “List Mode”

Step 4.3) Create the following custom filters:

Save Custom Filter Export 1.

Step 5) Find Unlinked Mentions

Open the export and copy and paste just the URLs into a .txt or .csv file.

Upload that file as a list into Screaming Frog and create the following custom filters:

So for this example I am using

Save Custom Filter Export 2.

Now you have a list of (mainly) blogs that have not linked to your client but written about them and their c-suite.

Step 6) Get Title Tags and Meta Descriptions from Screaming Frog

Open the most recent export, once again, copy and paste just the URLs into a .csv file, or a .txt file. Run those URLs through Screaming Frog again (no custom filters this time) and save the export as a .csv.

Step 7) Getting the Root Domain

Open this .csv file and delete every column but the URL, Title Tag and Meta Description column.

Copy all the URLs and paste them into a different excel sheet.

Use [Text to Columns > Delimited] in excel to get the root domain.

Paste the root domain into the main data set.

Step 8) Get Page Rank

Use the =GooglePageRank function from SEO Tools for Excel on all of the root domains of your link prospects in column E…. this could take awhile.

If you are partial to Domain Authority, feel free to use NetPeak, it’s free and quick.

Step 9) Follow the Link Prospecting Pivot Table Process

Example Opportunities Found with this Process

• Unlinked Gigaom article  by Kate Fehrenbacher - @katiefehren - Long term opp
• Unlinked Mashable article by Emily Price - @Emily - Long term opp
• Unlinked Tech Crunch article by Colleen Taylor – @loyalelectron - Long term opp
• Unlinked Tech Cocktail article by Zach Davis - @zrdavis - Long term opp
• Unlinked Mention for the Harvard City Law Blog - A very long shot, but worth a try - Immediate follow up
• Unlinked Built in Chicago guest post by Ryan Graves, Uber’s GM - Immediate follow up
• Unlinked TechnoBuffalo article by Brandon Russell – His personal site with contact form - Immediate Follow up
• Unlinked interview on Startup Minds Blog  - Immediate follow up
• Unlinked mention on DXCN Blog - Immediate follow up
• Unlinked AgainstCronyCapitalism.org article – Immediate follow up

These were found after 20 minutes of prospecting.

Step 10) Track long term opportunities in BuzzStream.

Image via Flickr USer susivinh

Step 11) Reach out to the smaller and medium sized blogs

If you have a bunch on unlinked write ups from decent sites – reach out to them and ask for a link. Here’s an outreach template that has worked for me:

Get a good feel for the site before you send any outreach, you don’t want to rub the blogger/editor the wrong way. Sometimes it’s better to try and create a connection and offer yourself as a future resource rather than asking for a link, especially if they publish frequently.

This is a quick quick win strategy for startups. It’s for the very beginning of a campaign, when a client may be skeptical of the value your services can provide. This process takes almost no investment from their side – so it’s a great tactic to help build trust and showcase the value that you bring to the table.

The post Link Building for Startups – Find Unlinked Brand Mentions at Scale appeared first on TLC SEO.

Luckily, you can find most of the blogs linking to a competitor using Screaming Frog.

 Step 1) download all your competitor’s historic links from Majestic. Delete everything but the data in the source URL column:

Step 2) Delete duplicates and save it as a .csv file.

Step 3) Upload the file into Screaming Frog using “List Mode”

Step 4) Create the following custom filters:

For the most part, Filter 1′s export will be all blogs, and filter export two will be everything else.

For Filter 1′s export, I like to format it into a prospecting pivot table and add all of the high value link targets I find into Buzzstream.

The post Competitive Analysis Hack: Find Blogs Linking to Your Competitors appeared first on TLC SEO.

That’s why I use Link Prospector.

The custom report feature in Link Prospector can hold up to 300 custom advanced queries and can scrape in multiples of 1, 3, 5, 10, 20, 50, 100, 200, 300 – all the way up to 1000 results. It will also remove duplicates and group results by domain, get the  home page Tool Bar Page Rank, and pull title tags and meta descriptions.

How to Use Link Prospector Custom Reports

Let’s say I am launching an infographic about wine, and I want to find a large collection of sites that are hosting wine infographics.

Start by taking a look at the competitive landscape. Let’s look at the related searches for [wine infographic] (not actually using brackets).

Not much to go off here, let’s try wine illustration:

Illustrator cs2 wine and wine adobe illustrator are red flags. I need to remove the following keywords on every single query:

• -cs2
• -adobe
• -winehq

Finally, let’s go with one that is sure to get us some strong results, [wine chart].

This gives us a good idea of how to structure our advanced queries:

Prefixes:

• types
• type
• tasting
• sweetness
• pairing

Suffixes:

• 2012
• 2011
• 2013
• red
• white
• sparkling

Let’s start building advanced queries:

From here you can either concatenate all your results, or you can use the baked in tool that Link Prospector offers:

Note: the third column narrows everything down. If you are trying to get as many results as possible, add a block for just the negatives to column C.

Here’s to set up Link Prospector for bigger scrapes:

Click To Enlarge

• Web and blog results
• 100 results deep
• Any TLD is fine
• Published any time
• No filtering

Once you get the export, turn it into a quick Link Prospecting Pivot Table and go from there.

How To Scale Citation Prospecting

Let’s say I am building citations for a world-class, outstanding, unbelievable Chicago Restaurant. Do a search that triggers a local pack and copy and paste the local pack into excel.

Here’s a video of how to do it

on a Mac in Excel… gross.

For each of the advanced queries – use the address and the telephone number as two separate queries.

Click to Enlarge

The results aren’t too shabby.

If you follow the Link Prospecting Pivot Table Process, you can quickly minimize garden variety citation sources. When opening their home pages, search for “add”, “register” or “submit” and you will generally find the link to the sign up page pretty quickly.

But for local businesses, reviews from popular magazines and websites don’t only help with local rankings, they build a local presence and can bring new business in the door.

Click to Enlarge

This Link Prospector export included:

ArchPaper.com – An architectural site that happens to review spectacular restaurants.

Check Please from WTTW – The definitive Chicago food lovers show on PBS, it’s an honor to be featured.

Grubstreet, Serious Eats and Chicagoist are top notch blogs.

AndrewZimmern.com – Could we put something bizarre on the menu and as bait and try to get the producer’s attention?

The Red Eye – A free newspaper put out by the Chicago Tribune. Search for food reviews on the site and start tracking all their food journalists.

Bacon Fest – Not only does it sound awesome, they are giving out links, citations and tons of press for participating.

Recork.org – An environmental organization hosting an interactive map for locations that offer cork drop off for recycling - Awesome, let’s sign up for a good cause and get the citation while we are at it.

Chicago Foodies - This is exactly the type of readership we want to get infront of

This tactic yields a lot of high quality PR targets, as well as pulling in a ton of great citation sources.

All in all, it took 40 minutes to copy the local pack into link prospector, let the report run, turn into a pivot table and go through the first 100 results and find these high quality prospects. So stop doing grunt work – become efficient and start scaling.

The post How To Scale Link and Citation Prospecting appeared first on TLC SEO.

When I build links, I try to be as efficient as possible. Nothing slows you down like explaining how a new piece of technology works to a blogger. If someone approached you with a free product and said, “Hey add this thing to the post that will change how people interact on your site,” you’d want to learn more about its ins-and-outs too. That’s why when I do large scale giveaway and contest prospecting, I look for bloggers who have used Rafflecopter in the past. But the actual Rafflecopter widget isn’t indexable, so how do you find it?

Here’s How to Find and Wield the Rafflecopter Footprint.

Here’s a look at the Rafflecopter widget:

The widget itself is executed in JavaScript, so search engines can’t decipher it. If you try to prospect for the “**** GIVEAWAY! ****” text at the top of the widget you are going to come up empty-handed. A lot of bloggers also promote the Rafflecopter giveaways of their blogger-friend’s sites, so searching for [intitle:rafflecopter AND giveaway AND (keyword)] might find you sites that are promoting other giveaways.

I don’t want to find the promoters.

I want to find the party.

Graceful Degradation is a strategy in web design that enables a website to keep functioning for a user once certain elements (i.e. JavaScript) have been disabled. Often times the user experience becomes much more basic.

Rafflecopter utilizes Graceful degradation.

Here’s an expired Rafflecopter:

Here what it looks like with JavaScript turned off:

Here is what it looks like in the Google cache:

“a Rafflecopter giveaway”

is the footprint.

You can’t just scale this out and do a massive templated outreach campaign, though. Sites that do giveaways can be SUPER spammy, so I like to give them a quick visual inspection to get a gut feel of the quality of each potential prospect. That’s why I have quickly adopted the BuzzBar, a new feature from BuzzStream, into my link building process.

I have a toy client, so I’m going to cook up some advanced queries using the Rafflecopter footprint that will find me solid prospects that I can whittle down to a select few. I’m mainly going to go off of competitor brand terms because drop shippers and affiliates have done tons of giveaways using both my client’s brand name and the brand names of my client’s competitors.

Here are my prospecting queries:

• “a rafflecopter giveaway” AND Disney
• “a rafflecopter giveaway” AND Pixar
• “a rafflecopter giveaway” AND Crayola
• “a rafflecopter giveaway” AND Playskool
• “a rafflecopter giveaway” AND “Fischer Price”
• “a rafflecopter giveaway” AND “Dora the explorer”
• “a rafflecopter giveaway” AND Veggietales

I know this is going to send me some super spammy results, but hopefully by narrowing down my results to acceptable Moz metrics, Page Rank, and Domain age and then giving them a quick visual scan using the BuzzBar, I can separate the wheat from the chaff and find 30 solid sites to do giveaways on. That’s enough prospects for one giveaway a month for a whole year if we hit an 80% response rate and a 50 % placement rate.

This is where the BuzzBar comes in Handy

First, sort your prospects by Domain Authority. I like to reject all sites that don’t meet a minimum Domain Authority threshold, for this project I will go with nothing below a DA of 25.

Next, spammy sites may have lost Page Rank, so I am not going to mess with anything below a PR2. Here’s a site with a domain authority of 46, over a thousand inbound links and a PR of 0.

Click to Enlarge

No way would I mess with that site. Remove anything below a Page Rank of 2 and move on. After that, I am going to get rid of everything below a DA of 30.

Now it’s time to eliminate the weak sites on WordPress and Blogspot subdomains, I don’t like these sites. Often times these bloggers will transfer over to their own domain later on and leave their current site in the dust. If they have high Page Rank, high Moz rank and a decent amount of inbound links they make the cut, otherwise they are out.

Now I have ~150 prospects that I know have used Rafflecopter. Now it’s time for a quick visual inspection:

When I look for link partners, along with assessing Moz Metrics, how long they’ve been publishing  etc., the final question I ask myself is:

 ”Does someone love this site?” 

The BuzzBar let’s me determine and answer that question efficiently.

This is, hands down, the best tool I’ve used for efficient prospecting in sketchy areas of the web that require a visual scan. You can run through all your prospects and give them a quick thumbs up or thumbs down based on visual cues for spammyness. Thumbs down – they are removed from your data set, Thumbs up – they are imported as a Link Partner in BuzzStream.

Visual Vetting with The BuzzBar:

Although this site below has a self-made header, take a look at the links just below those pictures of her adorable kids. It’s all giveaways, blog hops, mentions of other blogs, and it has a link to a “PR Friendly” page, usually implying that the site is open to brokering out links. This is a bit more nuanced, but after you train your eye you can quickly spot subtly spammy prospects like this. Rejected!

Click to Enlarge

This is the lowest of the low. This site barely has any design elements, almost no original pictures – it could have been put together in under an hour – I wouldn’t feel comfortable explaining to a client why they should work with this site. Rejected!

Click to Enlarge

This site has a terrible user experience – it’s hard to read the white on white text. Anyone who really cares about their blog would have probably noticed that if it’s templated on every page. All the pictures are also commercial images – another red flag. To top it off, it’s a generic/standard Blogspot theme. Another rejection!

Click to Enlarge

 Here’s an example of a site I would like to work with. Look at the pieced together header. This blogger might not be a graphic designer, but they have put a lot of effort into creating the right look for their personal website. I feel confident just by looking at this site that it’s someone who cares about their readership and wants to publish engaging content instead of scaling posts about coupons littered with affiliate links. It gets a solid thumbs up on the BuzzBar!

Click to Enlarge

Here’s a top tier site from a visual perspective. The header is custom, the branding is consistent between her header and her logo, she’s pushing social media, and I like the voice in her writing. This is a great big thumbs up and one I would make a note to use non-templated outreach because it’s so high quality and could possibly become a long term partner after some education and mentoring on our part.

Click to Enlarge

*****

Before using BuzzStream we had to vet blogs for spammy footprints via Screaming Frog custom filters and list mode and then grade them visually (using link clump with GDocs to speed up the process). Now there is an easy and efficient way to visually grade blogs that goes right into your link building CRM. If you can set hard and fast rules and you are very familiar with the vertical, this is a task that can be easily placed on junior members of your team who can follow a strict rubric of visual analysis that you can develop and refine over time.

The post Using Graceful Degradation to Prospect for Widget Footprints appeared first on TLC SEO.

Photo via Flickr User aussiegall

It’s not my intention to talk poorly about a site I work with, but if we are going to call a spade a spade, the sites’ landing pages utilized keyword-heavy subpar content that provided little to no value to the user.

When I first started working with them, we hired a writer to rewrite all the category landing pages because they were practically gibberish. We rewrote all the title tags, too, and made their meta descriptions appealing to humans. But, at the end of the day, this was just another run of the mill e-commerce site in a competitive vertical.

Before I go any further, I want to say that I LOVE this client. They are a dedicated and driven company. As far as their business model goes, they have a ton of unique value propositions:

• Lowest prices out of their competitors.
• Bi-lingual call center with an extremely knowledgeable staff.
• Open late for west coast clients.
• Fantastic domestic and international shipping rates.

They are doing a lot of things right as a business – but none of that gets recognized by the engines. Yes, they have extremely fast load times, easy-to-use and logical navigation, “unique” landing page content and clean code, but the site doesn’t appeal to Google – it’s pretty much the same as their competitors from the bots’ perspective.

While I was pounding my head against my desk and struggling to figure out why this site took a hit from the phantom update, I realized something – they have nothing that makes them stand apart from their competition; they have no  unique ranking proposition.

There is nothing about their category landing page content that says “We deserve to rank above our competitors” They have a GREAT business and a BEAUTIFUL website, but Google doesn’t give a damn. Google rewards content, not the stuff that goes on in the real world that makes them an awesome company. In order to rank, we need a content strategy that makes every single landing page unique and engaging.

Moving to a Landing Page Content Strategy

Nick Eubanks wrote a post inspired by a tweet from Russ Jones stating that if you want to rank you need to be prepared to create one of the ten best websites in your industry. I couldn’t agree with him more.

If you want to rank you need a landing page content strategy that provides (or generates) the most unique, relevant and conversion driving content for your target keywords. There’s a lot of great sites already doing this , but here are a few of my favorite Unique Ranking Propositions:

• Solid Videos on landing pages that generate rich snippets - Zappos (Product Page & Rich Snippet)
• UGC content that allows for rich snippets – User Reviews on Yelp & REI product pages, which have video as well.
• Technology that engages users – Free People Using Instagram
• Fantastic interactivity – the Shopify and Spotify homepages.
• Free streaming rich media – Songza and Mixcloud
• Offering a freemium version of your product – SEMrush
• An intriguing persona – Ben the BodyGuard

People in the tech marketing space talk a lot about disruption: Uber disrupts the limo industry, Hipmunk and Oyster disrupt the travel space, Spotify disrupts the music industry – your landing pages need to disrupt your vertical. 

***

On a personal note, I’ve been experimenting with unique landing page content strategies that provide value and engage users, all while pushing them to convert. For that site that got smacked by Google in the phantom update, we’re in the process of adding our Unique Ranking Proposition: engaging videos and UGC Q&A content on every landing page.

EDIT: I have been working with a different site to improve their unique ranking proposition as well, here are the results.

Know a site with a great Unique Ranking Proposition? Let me know in the comments!

The post What’s Your Landing Page’s Unique Ranking Proposition? appeared first on TLC SEO.

Here’s a step by step process to cut down Link Prospector exports to just the meat and potatoes

Image via Flickr user Paul Keller

Note: If you’ve never used Link Prospector before, here is an awesome intro post from Jon Cooper at PointBlank SEO.

I just started this blog, it still isn’t ranking well for my name and it’s pretty slow to index So, I am going to use the guest post option in LP to help remedy this problem.

Let’s bust out some research phrases:

NO! this is wrong.

Image via Flickr user CarbonNYC

When it comes to prospecting for awesome guest posts, don’t type in your head terms. That is going to give you a bunch of sites that get spammed on a daily basis because they rank for really generic seo guest post terms – In order to find great guest posts you need to get creative and specific with your advanced queries/Link Prospector Research Phrases.  To find something a bit more up my alley and tailored to my interests, I went with these research phrases:

These research phrases are all pretty niche and specific. They are way more likely to find a site that I would actually be interested in contributing to.

Once the LP reports are done running, export the paths:

 

 

Step 1) Open the export in excel and save the file as .xlsx instead of .csv, .csvs don’t support tables or pivot tables.

 

Step 2) Copy all URLs from the LP export and in a new excel sheet, paste all URLs into column A.

 

Step 3) In the data tab in excel, select text to columns > delimited > and under other: put the forward slash.

 

 

Step 4) Adding the root domain column to your data

Now column A in excel is just your root domains, add a new column to the link prospector export data in excel and paste in the root domains.

Your data should look like this:

 

Step 5) Turn all this data into a table

 

 

you can now filter EVERY. SINGLE. COLUMN.

 

 

Step 6) Start Filterin’

 

Personally, I only want to guest post on sites that are .com, .net, .org. and .co.uk – and I also don’t want to guest post on anything below a PR 3.

 

 

Note: below the page rank 9 option in the filter, there is one below it called (blanks), these domains have n/a tool bar page rank, so make sure to deselect them so they don’t show up in your final data set.

 

Step 7) Prospect Evalutation

Now that you only have data that’s worth evaluating by hand, sort your root domains alphabetically and then sort your domain PR column from largest to smallest.

 

Now all the domains are grouped together and sorted by page rank.

 

Step 8) Delete Forums

 

 

Step 9) Delete domains that are irrelevant or out of reach.

Just do a quick visual scan and delete sites that aren’t a fit. TLC SEO isn’t super established yet, and I don’t think I have enough social proof/readership to swing a guest post on Search Engine Land, Search Engine Watch, Hubspot or Kiss Metrics, so I deleted them from the data set. These would be highly involved guest posts and I am going for strictly quick wins.Don’t spend to much time on this step, just delete what is obviously not a good fit – you will have time for more in depth evaluation later on.

 

Optional Protip: Hyper Qualify for Guest Posts

If you want to be efficient and only look at sites that are practically guaranteed to accept guest posts, filter the title tag column for the word “guest” or even more extreme would be “guest post”:

Note: the download at the end of this post does not include the hyper qualified guest post option.

 

Step 10) Copy all of the data in your data set into a new sheet

If you try and turn the current data into a pivot table, it will include the filtered data that is not currently showing – so you NEED to paste it into a new sheet.

 

Step 11) Turn this data into a pivot table

 

I know pivot tables freak some people out, but trust me, they aren’t so bad – and they are actually super handy!

 

Step 12) Set up your pivot table

Instead of doing this step by step, I am just going to show the final set up of in the pivot table field list, which should be easy enough to replicate on your own even with limited excel experience:

 

 

Note: Values automatically go in as sums, so you will need to go into the “Value Field Settings” menu for Page Rank )by right clicking on “Sum of Domain PR” and change it to Average.

 

 

This is what you should see:

Step 13) Sort by Page Rank

Now you have a fully set up Link Prospecting Pivot Table. When you go through the table, check out the title tags and meta descriptions. If they don’t seem like a fit, minimize the root domain and never look at that prospect again:

 

 

The goal of this isn’t to find every single guest post opportunity in your vertical, it’s to find quick wins and move on. When you find a good guest post opportunity, throw it into BuzzStream and let that software find the webmaster contact info for you, check out their last few posts via the Buzzstream RSS option and see if your content would be a strong fit.

 

This Link Prospecting Pivot Table is meant to be a living document that you can go back to again and again during an SEO campaign. When you need a guest post, just open it up and find the highest PR site (or AC Rank if you want to do a Majestic bulk look up and add it to the data set)

 

Download: Pivot tables can be confusing, so I’ve made the example Link Prospecting Pivot Table from this post available for download.

HOWEVER, by downloading this excel file, you solemnly swear that  you wont spam any of these sites with crappy guest post outreach – some of these prospects are top tier sites in our industry, if you hit one of them up for a guest post – please make sure you have something worth their time.

BONUS!!

Because Chris Dyson (of Triple SEO) is a generous and awesome bloke, he created a Link Prospecting Macro, that automates most of this process. Just make sure you have Marcos enabled in Excel, here’s how to use the Macro:

1. Import you data from link prospector into the rawdata sheet
2. Apply your advanced filters in the table on the filters sheet
3. Hit the Get Data button

Make sure to thank and follow Chris for this awesome Macro!

 

The post Link Prospecting with Pivot Tables appeared first on TLC SEO.

Note: If the keyword is in the template of your site (i.e. on every page) this process will not work, this is optimal for long tail or secondary keywords.

Step 1) Identify the Keywords you want to improve rankings for

Conductor FTW!

Conductor Searchlight is awesome for this, you can find the KWs with the most search volume that are just shy of ranking well.

Step 2) Put Keywords into Screaming Frog Custom Filters

Step 3) Run Screaming Frog & Export your Custom Reports

Step 4) Do a Majestic Bulk Upload of all your URLs to get Metrics

You need to run bulk look ups for each export, then once you export it from Majestic, delete all the data you don’t need and add a column with the internal link phrase in each export and combine all the data:

Step 5) Clean Up Your Data

Image courtesy of Flickr user State Farm

Clean up your data, if a page has zero links pointing towards it, maybe it isn’t worth your time to add that internal link. You need to use your best judgement, but if the page is lacking on link juice, I generally remove it from my data set.

Step 6) Get Your Pivot On

Throw all this data into a pivot table and select just your most powerful pages for internal links. Going off of Trust Flow, Citation Flow and AC Rank metrics allow you to prioritize your internal link building. For those of you wondering how to set up and use pivot tables, you wont find that information here… go to Annielytics for that stuff, she makes data sexy. But if you want to see how I set it up, here is a Pivot Table of SEER Interactive’s internal link opportunities optimizing for the keywords: link building, audit, international and pay per click.

The post Scaling Internal Link Building with Screaming Frog & Majestic appeared first on TLC SEO.

Image Courtesy of Flickr User xrayspx

To find directories that pass juice, I like to run a series of advanced search queries and pull the data into Excel.

Note: if scraping makes you uncomfortable, just use the directory option in Link Prospector – that tool is amazing.

First, let’s look at the language popular and powerful directories use and find some footprints:

There are a lot of variations you can use for directory footprints, but i generally go with the more widely used one. I like the following:

• “Add URL”
• “Add Site”
• “Add your website”
• “List your website”
• “Add your url”

I am only comfortable with a few TLDs for directories, so I like to add the following site operators to the search query – (site:*.com OR site:*.net OR site:*.org). If you are looking for a ton of directories, you can break up the string of TLD site searches into individual queries.

The full directory prospecting search query looks like this

[Directory footprint] [keyword] directory (site:*.com OR site:*.net OR site:*.org)

So, if I was prospecting for a home improvement client, I would use the following search queries:

• “Add your url” home improvement directory (site:*.com OR site:*.net OR site:*.org)
• “Add Site” home improvement directory (site:*.com OR site:*.net OR site:*.org)
• “Add your website” home improvement directory (site:*.com OR site:*.net OR site:*.org)
• “List your website” home improvement directory (site:*.com OR site:*.net OR site:*.org)
• “Add your url” home improvement directory (site:*.com OR site:*.net OR site:*.org)

Here is the type of site you are going to find:

Is it amazing? No. But, this site has a tool bar Page Rank of 3, I found it in Google so I know it’s not deindexed. I like the relevant keywords used in the <h1> tag and I don’t mind being listed next to any of these sites. All in all, I would feel comfortable and confident building a link on this site.

I was once at a conference where a respected SEO said, “If you are searching for directories, you are doing it wrong.” Well, I disagree. This is the only way to know if directories that would have been trusted a year ago are still in Google’s good graces.

If you need to find a TON of directories, I recommend using the SEOmoz FireFox toolbar scraper to speed up the process. I am a huge fan of this scraper, because it includes Moz metrics in the CSV export. However, I highly recommend  opening the CSV in excel and using SEO Tools for Excel to do Page Rank Look Ups [=GooglePageRank()] because in this particular case, Moz metrics shouldn’t be your first quality indicator. You need to know if these websites are still respected by Google, so having high DA is a bonus.

The post Finding Link Directories in a Post Penguin World appeared first on TLC SEO.

Note: if you have a domain that is under five letters, this is going to be pretty difficult and won’t give you nearly the amount of ROI a longer domain name will.

Obligatory hat tip: This strategy originated from a discovery Wil Reynolds made in the search church one weekend, I just figured out how to scale it.

Step 1)

Go to Aaron Wall’s Keyword Misspelling tool and put in your brand’s domain name. Check every single option.

Step 2)

Copy all of the misspelled domains, put them into excel in column A and put your TLD into column B.

Step 3)

Concatenate ALL the things!!

Step 4)

Copy and paste all of the misspelled domains into Majestic’s bulk backlinks tool and organize by amount of links.

Step 5)

Unfortunately, my blog is brand new and has zero links, but for brands this is a goldmine:

Bank of America:

Wells Fargo:

Business Week:

A lot of brands already own the misspellings of their domain names, but that doesn’t mean they are always redirected correctly.

Step 6)

Pull all the URLs that have links into excel and use =httpstatus() from SEO Tools for Excel.

Step 7)

Filter for 302s and 200s and check out the sites manually. If they are parked domains try and acquire them. If you can’t acquire them, contact the webmasters of the most valuable links and ask for the links to be corrected. If they are 302s and the brand owns them, have them change them to 301s. Easy link wins. F.T.W.

The post Big Brand Link Building: Identifying Link Opportunities via Misspellings appeared first on TLC SEO.