It’s Time to Retire SEO, Content Marketing, and Inbound Marketing

Posted by on May 17, 2013

SEO Is Dead

The Penguin 2.0 Countdown

With Penguin 2.0 coming out soon, the SEO space feels a lot like the first round of Penguin and the release of Panda.  A lot of SEOs I know are still receiving unnatural link notices from The Big G from the last iteration of the algorithm, so news of another major algorithm update has a lot of them absolutely terrified.

Google has battled unnatural linking strategies for over a decade now, but only recently have they started to pull ahead in the war.  Don’t get me wrong – black hat SEO still exists – and it always will.  These days though, it’s much more of a short-term strategy than it ever was in the past.

For black hat SEOs, that doesn’t matter too much.  It just means that their sites rank for a little bit less time overall…but when you’re making 5 figures a day spamming a site to the top of the SERPs, who really cares if you have to buy another domain and spam it to the top a week earlier than usual?

I shared similar thoughts on the Penguin 2.0 thread on Hacker News:

Black hatters these days don’t really even care about long-term rankings, they’re more about exploiting the inadequacies in the algorithm in the first month or so of a site’s life. Build it, rank it, bank cash, and burn it out. That’s the modus operandi right now…I don’t see this update changing much of that. It’s going to be great for those of us building out quality sites though!

User austenallred replied:

Exactly. If you really want to know what black-hatters do and how they get around Google’s filters, here it is:

  1. Buy a ton of domains
  2. Put up picture-based landing pages on those domains. The user only really sees pictures.
  3. Put up or spin content with relevant keywords, put it underneath the images. Google only sees a couple pictures (it doesn’t know what they are) and a bunch of really relevant content.
  4. Build a shiz-ton of links. This is where black hatters really make their money. I usually build about 125,000 links/day from completely legit sites, and to Google it pretty much looks like it’s going viral. If you know where to get the links, know how to generate the content, and can make them seem human, Google has a really hard time finding you.
  5. Link the landing pages to your money site using affiliate links.
  6. Wait until your site gets manually reviewed and pulled down.

So any somewhat decent black-hatter will have hundreds of sites in the works at any given time. The worry of taking a site down isn’t a big one, even though if you take down one site a black-hatter’s traffic could drop 3,000 visits/day.

The sites I work on usually remain up for an average of 6 months at a time, and the only way for them to be caught is a manual review. Some only stay up for a couple weeks, but some stay up for years. There have been times when landing pages are getting a couple thousand visits a day but I haven’t had time to go back through and redirect the traffic to the money site or update them from the generic landing page. Since all of the actions taken mimic closely enough what humans would do, it’s really difficult to be caught by webspam teams.

Read the full Hacker News discussion

Technical SEO: Never Going Out of Style

If there’s one thing that Google will never penalize, it’s technical SEO.  In all honestly, technical SEO should just be renamed “smart website architecture.”  Fixing these for a client:

  • Custom 404 pages
  • 301 redirects
  • Titles, URLs, meta descriptions
  • Canonical content
  • Indexation issues
  • And many more issues

is technically optimizing for a search engine, but at the same time it’s really just making the website more usable for your visitors…which is what matters in the end.  High quality website audits and architecture improvements are never going to die out.  In fact, I think that they’re more important than ever these days.

Content Marketing

Content marketing is nothing new.  It’s been hailed as the successor to SEO for years now.  Like SEO, the phrase has it’s challenges.

What exactly is content marketing?

Is it inbound marketing?  Is it creating ‘linkable assets’ and spreading them out across the web via ‘outreach’?  All of the industry jargon is starting to get a little tiring.

Content marketing, SEO, inbound marketing…it’s all just marketing.

This reminds me of the debate over the phrase “growth hacking.”  My good friend Darrin of serpIQ covered this one in depth in his post, Growth Hacking is BS…It’s Just Marketing.

The only difference between what we do as SEOs, digital marketing consultants, inbound marketers, or content marketers, and what we know as “traditional marketing” are these three things:

  1. We have more data to back up our marketing efforts
  2. We can execute faster than other marketing channels
  3. Our efforts are more scalable than other marketing channels

That’s about it.

Let’s retire these words, stop endlessly debating the minutiae of what each one of them entails, and just get back to spending time on quality marketing.

Comments: 0

How to Run a Wildly Successful Online Contest

Posted by on February 20, 2013
Contest Results

End results of a contest we ran for a client.

Note: This post is LONG.  If you want to learn super-actionable tips on running a successful contest, check it out.  If you’re not going to put it into action soon, save it for later!

Contests are a tried and true way of building brand exposure and gaining precious eyeballs in today’s attention-scarce market.  They’ve been around for ages, yet there are so many businesses that are simply doing them wrong.  When I say wrong, I mean that they’re either:

  1. Leaving a LOT of exposure on the table
  2. Not using the information that they get effectively
  3. Making simple mistakes that prevent their contest from ever leaving the ground

The good news is  that these are pretty simple mistakes to correct!  I’m going to outline how I used PunchTab to get one of my clients the results you see above: massive email list signups, better social media engagement, accurate market research, AND extra sales for the handy cost of $0 and an hour of my time.  Here we go.

 What is PunchTab?

punchtab*If you already know what it is, skip this section*

If there’s a frontrunner in the “online contest promotion app” marketplace, it’s got to be PunchTab.  While I have my gripes with these guys, they are far and away the most polished product out there for running a giveaway on your site quickly and easily…but that’s not the best part.  The best part is the automatic viral potential that they build into the app with their “Earn Extra Entries” feature.

Here’s how it works: Participants can sign up to your contest via Facebook login or email submission to earn one entry into the contest.  Immediately after they do that, they’re prompted to earn extra entries by taking different social or goal-oriented actions.  It’s a great way to get people to really engage with your brand and give you some valuable feedback or social momentum.

Choosing How Long to Run Your Contest and What to Give Away

What to Give Away

Wasabi Gumballs

Offer a prize that your market will want.

The general idea here is to give away something that is valuable enough for most people in your market to stand up and take notice.  For some markets this might be an item in the $150-$200 range, and for others it might be as small as $30.  Our item had a value of about $50, and it absolutely blew up in our market, because they tend to have a lower income and anything free is attractive to them.

The second part of the equation is to give away something that a large percentage of your market will want.  Don’t make it something obscure.  For example, if you’re giving away something for a dentist, don’t give away 50% off a root canal.  Give away something like a free cleaning or the ultimate dental hygiene product basket.  Those are things that almost anyone interested in dental care will want.

Contest Length

We found that two weeks is a solid minimum amount of time to run the contest.  If you want maximum exposure, going for a week will drastically lower the amount of entries that you get.  My client got an additional 100 entries per day after the first few days, and it started to tail off at the 12ish day mark, before picking up again right before the end of the contest.

I’d like to experiment with a month long contest in the future, but for now I would recommend two weeks as a minimum.  Anything more than a month starts to seem too far away in your audience’s mind, and they’re less incentivized to sign up in the first place.

Extra Entry Breakdown

Punchtab Extra Entries

A multitude of ways for your audience to earn extra entries

When you’re adding ways to earn extra entries, it’s important to do it right.  Here’s what I’ve seen to be effective for each type of entry.

Follow / Become a fan / Like / Google +1

Self explanatory.

Tweet

Here’s the template I used: “I just entered the @[brand twitter] contest to win [items] and more!  Check it out:”

PunchTab will automatically append the link and their own Twitter handle (nice marketing, PunchTab) to the tweet.  You’ll probably notice that a lot of people customize the Tweet to entice their followers to enter the contest via their link to earn more entries, but this is a great base template to go with.  My personal favorite edit that one of our contest entrants made is below:

PunchTab Tweet

She should probably take some copywriting lessons :p

Comment

Your audience can earn an extra entry just by dropping a comment on the contest entry post…pretty simple.  There are a couple ways that you can use this:

  1. Ask your audience what type of content they like to see the most: “What would you like to know more about / read more about on our site?”
  2. Ask your audience to share their biggest frustration with something that relates to your market: “What do you think is the most annoying part about shopping for watches?”
  3. Ask your audience what type of products they want to see that you don’t currently offer

Question

This is where we killed it with my client’s contest.  The question we asked was, “What new designs would you like to see come out of our store?” which is basically free market research.  We got over 600 answers and quickly organized them into categories.  The best part about this is that PunchTab adds the name and email of the people that answer the questions, so you can add each product request column to it’s own list in your ESP of choice and mail out to them once you create the product.  We’re still waiting on our designs, but expect very high conversions when we inevitably email out to this list.

Visit

This feature is what made the contest cost nothing for us to run.  We gave our audience the opportunity to earn another entry simply for visiting a URL…the URL of my client’s online store.  There was a huge bump in sales that day that more than covered the cost of the giveaway, so the only costs incurred were about 2 hours of time – one hour for creating the contest, and one hour for promoting it online.

Download

We didn’t use this feature, but you could have your audience download a whitepaper, case study, eBook, or any other kind of content that helps them engage more with your brand.

Pinterest

This one is fairly simple.  Create a graphic that has your logo, the items you’re giving away, and a CTA for anyone who views the image on Pinterest.  Link to the giveaway post and add this feature.  Your audience will pin that image and URL to their boards and more people will see and enter your contest via Pinterest!

Ordering Your Extra Entries

Contest Entry OrderYou get to choose the order that these extra entry methods show up in on your contest, and it’s important.  Here’s how we did it:

  1. Question
  2. Tweet
  3. Follow
  4. Like
  5. Become a fan
  6. Google +1
  7. Visit
  8. Comment

Question is first, because that’s the method that’s going to give us the most actionable feedback that has a direct impact on revenue growth. Then we go through the motions with some quick and easy social media tasks.

You might be wondering why visiting the store and commenting are last – we didn’t want to take their attention away from rifling through the extra entry methods until the very end.  Because we already got the juicy information in the Question section, the comment was less important.  Visiting the store takes them to an entirely different page, and we were unsure that visitors would remember to navigate back and complete the rest of the methods.

If I had to redo it, I would have users follow us first, and THEN tweet, and I would put visit at the very end, but this order worked pretty well for us.

Important: PunchTab has a TERRIBLE UI for this section.  You click a button to send an item to the top, so you have to reverse engineer the order that your entry methods should go in and click the last one first, then go up the line until you click on the last method (which will show up first).  No clue why they do it like this, but something to be aware of.

Promoting Your Contest

Now your contest is all set up and you’re ready to send it out to your market…

Where do you start?

Here’s what we did:

Mail Out To Your List

This should be the first thing that you do.  My client’s list was around 8,000 strong, so we got some really good initial traction on the contest here.  It helps that our target market is prone to share and spread things, but this should work fairly well with any market.

Aweber Results

Always split test, even if it’s a basic headline test!

Headline 1: “Name – Want Free SITE Merchandise? Look Inside” – 40% openrate, 21% clickthrough

Headline 2: “SITE Contest Starts Tonight!” – 36% openrate, 17% clickthrough

Body of Email:

Name,

We know we’re hitting you twice this week with updates, but you’re going to love this one.  As a SITE follower, you’re what’s made our site into the #1 destination for NICHE…worldwide.

We love you for that, and to show our love we’re giving away two free items of your choice from the SITE merchandise store.

Sound too good to be true?  It’s not .  All you need to do is enter the contest by clicking this link:

LINK

P.S. – You can get even more entries by sharing with your friends, following us on Facebook, and more!

We do this out of love for the people that have made SITE the #1 site for NICHE on PLANET EARTH.

Here’s that link one more time:

LINK

Good luck,

Team SITE

Post on Your Blog

The link in your email should be to a blog post that you’ve written and embedded the PunchTab contest on.  Have some pre-sell copy on the post, but it doesn’t really need much more than that…the contest embed will do the rest of the work here.  This is “home base” for your contest.

Fire Off To Your Social Networks

Pretty self explanatory – fire this off to all of the social networks that you’ve got going as soon as the contest is live and ready to roll.  It may be worth actually customizing the copy based on the social network instead of blasting it out through HootSuite.  Here’s what we did:

  • Facebook: Highlighted the post with a link to the blog post and a great image of what they could win if they took a few minutes to sign up.  We also used PunchTab’s Facebook box to add it to the top of the FB page just to have another spot for conversion
  • Twitter: Tweet it out, make the copy compelling!

Add the Widget

PunchTab has a great widget that can help you convert people who for some odd reason haven’t been sucked in by all of your other promotional efforts already.  If you’ve got a site that’s getting decent traffic, you can toss the widget on the sidebar really quickly and start to scoop up extra entries and virality from all of the visitors that are not hitting the contest page directly.  My client saw some great results from this, with about ~30 entries per day coming in through the sidebar widget long after the initial promotional burst happened.

Embed the Contest in Future Posts

Don’t do this every single time you  post, but as the days go on the initial post is probably is either going to fall off the homepage.  You could stick it to the top of your blog, but you might want to keep up with your regular content schedule as you run your contest, so it’s best to just drop the contest link in the footnotes of new posts.  You’ll capture new eyeballs each time you do this, which turn into more entries and a bit more of a viral boost.

Before Your Contest Ends

Do a quick push out to your social media networks and a mailout to your list (only if you have more value to offer than a simple reminder).  By doing this you get another little viral loop before the contest ends.  It’s nothing like the first day or two of your contest, but it’s good for some more entries and overall engagement across the board.

After the Contest Ends

Choose a winner: PunchTab makes it very easy to choose a random winner to the contest and fire off an email to them congratulating them on their win.

We gave our lucky winner instructions on how to redeem their prize and asked them for their address so we could ship it out to them as soon as possible.

On top of that, we made sure to have them send us photographs of them with their prize so we could use it for future contests.

Add Emails to Your List: You can export a .csv of the names and emails of those who entered your contest via email.  Depending on your ESP, you may have to have these people opt-in again to your list, but it’s no big deal – you should see a decent percentage of these people opt in.

Export Answers to Question: This is very important.  If you used the question method correctly you should have a wealth of market research to sort through and organize.

I exported my client’s list of 458 answers and sorted them into related groups, then sent it off to the client so they can develop specific products based on the groups with the most requests.  Later on, they’ll be emailing out to these groups with highly targeted copy that sells the products they asked for no more than a few weeks before.

Go Create Awesome Contests!

I hope this post helped illustrate how to run a successful online contest, as well as what it actually means for a contest to be successful.  Followers on social media websites are awesome, but there’s more to inbound marketing.  You should be able to use the contest to give your client or business a better understanding of their market, or help them develop new products, or even sell more products.  With a little bit of creativity, the possibilities are endless!

If you found this post helpful and know someone who you think would also benefit from it, please share it with them! 

-

Many thanks to Nick Eubanks of SEONick (who recently wrote a badass keyword research post), Justin Mares of Traction Book, Adam Steele of LeanMarketing, and Mitchell Wright for editing.

Comments: 10

Reputation Management: 1 Month Later

Posted by on September 7, 2012
San Diego Reputation Management

It’s been a month since my first post on reputation management and things have changed in the SERPs for my name.  As a reminder, I was ranking websites related to me in positions 1-4 and 8 about a month ago.  For a quick refresher, here’s where I was then (struck through = not me):

  1. KevinEspiritu.com
  2. Kevin Espiritu LinkedIn
  3. Kevin Espiritu Quora
  4. Kevin Espiritu Twitter
  5. Kevin Espiritu Facebook
  6. Kevin Espiritu YouTube comment
  7. Kevin Espiritu Formspring
  8. Kevin Espiritu serpIQ
  9. Kevin Espiritu Whitepages
  10. Kevin Espiritu Genealogy

Now, the SERPs for my name look like this:

Kevin Espiritu SERP Results After 1 Month
The Results

In just one short month I was able to significantly change the SERPs for my name.  I now control 7/10 results on the page as opposed to 5/10 before.  Additionally, I’ve got my Facebook ranking now.

How I Did It

The very first thing I did was to make sure that my Facebook was open for public search…and it wasn’t.  This is a very simple mistake that is easily solved by digging into the privacy settings on your Facebook profile.  You’ll want a well-optimized Facebook URL as well – mine is facebook.com/kevinespiritu.  With that change you should see your Facebook profile pop up in no time, unless you have a very common name.

Next, I made sure to heavily interlink every single one of my social media accounts with the others.  I even created an About.me and Knowem.com page in order to drop links to my Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Quora, and other web properties.

It’s Not Perfect…Yet

As you can see, there are a few pesky YouTube results that are showing up for my name.  I ended up creating the Kevin Espiritu YouTube Channel and am going to optimize that for my name to see if that shows up in a few weeks.

There’s also a result from my.opera.com.  I have no clue why someone would create a personal Opera browser account (because let’s face it, who the hell uses Opera), but if that URL is ranking, then I’m going to duplicate and optimize.  I created an Opera page on 9/6/2012 and you can find the Kevin Espiritu Opera blog by clicking that link (see what I did there?).

Next Steps

I’m going to let the YouTube and Opera properties steep for a bit and see how Google reacts to the changes.  In a week or two I’ll come out with another post reporting how these changes have affected the SERP for my name!

Comments: 0

How To Get 180 Guest Blogging Opportunities for $9

Posted by on September 5, 2012
Get Cheap Blog Outreach Leads

Cheap Guest Blog LeadsAn integral part of a SEO’s job is to build high quality backlinks for their clients.  A lot of high quality backlinks come from guest blogging opportunities, which are great ways to gain not only backlinks, but quality traffic as well.

The Problem: It’s really, really tedious to go through a list of blogs and get the names, emails, and Twitter handles of these blog owners when you’ve got a large list.

The Solution: Outsource it and get it done quickly and inexpensively!

With the help of some creative Googling, I was able to outsource this aspect of the link prospecting phase of a SEO campaign.

The result?  The name, Twitter, and email of over 180 blog owners in my target niche.  The cost?  Nine bucks.

*Note: There seems to be a little confusion about this strategy.  I am NOT suggesting you outsource collecting the list of blogs, but I AM suggesting that you outsource collecting contact information from all of these blogs.

What You Need to Get Started

To do this you will need the following:

Pretty simple.  If you’re having a tough time with the list of blogs, you can always take a look at Technorati or Google for “best blogs in ___.”  Coming up with the list is the only work you have to do to get this strategy rolling, so make sure you do it right!

Amazon Mechanical Turk

If you’ve never worked with Mechanical Turk before, here’s how it works:

Mechanical Turk is structured around the idea of a HIT, or Human Intelligence Task.  In this situation, our HIT  is going to ask the “Turkers” to navigate to a URL and collect three pieces of information:

  • Blog author’s name
  • Twitter
  • Email (or contact form link)

Create Your HIT

After you’ve created your Mechanical Turk Requester account, go ahead and click Create->New Project.  You’ll see a screen like the one below.  Select the Data Collection template and click OK.

HIT Creation

Settings, Description and Pricing

Now you need to enter all of the information related to the HIT.  This is pretty simple – a good description and proper pricing will go a long way towards making this job go by quickly and inexpensively.

I reduced the time per assignment to 30 minutes, the pay to 5 cents per HIT, and the amount of assignments per HIT to 1.  This means that only one worker will be retrieving the information for any one URL, which keeps costs lower.

Blog Outreach HIT Information

Blog Outreach HIT Pricing

Create the HIT Template

The last thing you need to do is create the actual template that your workers will see when they view an individual HIT.  If you want to copy the template that I created, here it is:

</p>
<h3>Collect the following information for the URL linked below:</h3>
<div class="highlight-box">
<ul>
<li>Blog Author's Name</li>
<li>Blog Author's Email (if you cannot find this, link to the contact page)</li>
<li>Blog Author's Twitter Account</li>
</ul>
</div>
<p>URL to Search:&nbsp;<b><a href="${url}">${url}</a></b></p>
<p><strong>NOTE: If you do not provide accurate information for these three fields, you WILL NOT have your HIT approved. Please pay attention to details so we can pay you...thanks!</strong></p>
<p>Blog Author Name:</p>
<p><input type="text" size="100" id="name" name="name" /></p>
<p>Blog Author Email:</p>
<p><input type="text" size="100" id="email" name="email" /></p>
<p>Blog Author Twitter:</p>
<p><input type="text" size="100" id="twitter" name="twitter" /></p>
<p><style type="text/css">
<!--
.highlight-box { border:solid 0px #98BE10; background:#FCF9CE; color:#222222; padding:4px; text-align:left; font-size: smaller;}
-->
</style></p>

Just copy and paste that into the HTML source of the template window, adjust to your needs, and you’re set!  You’ll want to preview everything to make sure that you didn’t miss any settings.

Upload Blog List

The last step is to upload a .csv of the URLs that you need information from.  You can use this template.  All you need to do is copy/paste the URLs into that .csv and upload it back to Mechanical Turk.  You’re then taken to a preview screen.  I would highly recommend checking and making sure that the URLs are displaying correctly, because if they’re not you are going to be paying for a lot of worthless HITs!

Let the Guest Blogging Opportunities Roll In

After paying, you’re immediately taken to the management screen where you can watch your HITs come flying in.  It’s best to just close the window and come back in a couple hours.  You can download a gigantic CSV of the information and use it for high quality blog outreach right away!

This method is extremely powerful because it makes it a LOT easier for you to get in touch with bloggers.  I think that a big barrier to high quality guest blogging, link building, and outreach is simply the tedium of doing all of this work yourself and eating up a lot of your time.  Hopefully this post has shed some light on a creative way to solve this problem for you!

EDIT: I recorded a video if you prefer that ;)

Comments: 5 Tags: ,

Reputation Management Follow-Along

Posted by on July 28, 2012
San Diego Reputation Management

Reputation management is something that can rub people the wrong way.  If you’re unfamiliar with the concept, it’s basically controlling what Google displays when someone Googles your name.  Why would this be useful?  Let’s look at an example.

Let’s imagine you Google your name and there’s a result that you REALLY don’t like.  What’s even worse, it’s not even you – it’s just someone who has the same name as you!  They might have been arrested, been filmed doing something unprofessional, or just not be relevant to what you’d like people to see when they Google you.  This is where rep. management comes into play.

The Experiment

I’m going to work on reputation management for my own name, Kevin Espiritu, in this series of posts that will act as a follow along for those of you who either would like to do this yourself or understand what you’ve hired ME to do for you.

Here’s a quick snapshot of what pops up when my name is Googled right now:

  1. KevinEspiritu.com (me)
  2. Kevin Espiritu LinkedIn (me)
  3. Kevin Espiritu Quora (me)
  4. Kevin Espiritu Twitter (me)
  5. Kevin Espiritu Facebook (strangely, not me)
  6. Kevin Espiritu YouTube comment (not me)
  7. Kevin Espiritu Formspring (not me)
  8. Kevin Espiritu serpIQ (me)
  9. Kevin Espiritu Whitepages (irrelevant)
  10. Kevin Espiritu Genealogy (irrelevant)

I’m actually doing pretty well right out of the gate.  This is because I’m active on Twitter, Facebook, Quora, LinkedIn and I do run my own personal blog.  The value of owning yourname.com cannot be understated.

The areas that I can improve on come in the second half of the SERP (Search Engine Results Page) where only one of the five pages is related to me.  I’d like to replace the remaining four with other pages that relate to me.

First Step

The very first strategy I’m going to use is to create an about.me account.  This website was practically made for reputation management and personal branding.  It lets you create a page for your name and also lets you choose your username, which shows up in the URL.  The clear answer here is to choose your name if possible.  If not, get as close to it as possible, using middle initials and middle names if you need to.  Here’s a link to the page I threw up in a few minutes.

Ideally, this page will rank somewhere on the front page for my name in the 6-10 slot, so if someone happens to get down there it will act as a hubpage for me.  They’ll be able to go anywhere that relates to me on the internet – which is exactly what I want to happen.

Next Steps

With reputation management, it’s not only about creating a SERP for your name that doesn’t contain anyone else with your name – that’s just the beginning.  Ideally, you want the results to deliver exactly what you want people searching your name to find out about you.

Now, this can get into some ethical grey areas when people who were or are involved in some unethical or illegal practices start hiring reputation management consultants, but I do not work with these types of people.  They’re on their own!

Follow along as I continue to improve the SERPs for my own name, and please contact me if you’re interested in speaking with me about your own online reputation management.

Comments: 0

Using Subreddits to Boost Traffic To Your Websites

Posted by on May 7, 2012
reddit-alien

Most of us know that social bookmarking sites are a cheap and easy way to garner links for a personal or client SEO project.  However, with ease and cheapness comes a saturation point.  A lot of SEOs simply purchased social bookmarking packages to promote their websites through these channels.  As expected, Google seems to have devalued these links as of late and is in fact penalizing many people for using them excessively.  Building a brand is the smartest thing you can do to develop long term success online.

What is an enterprising SEO to do?  Get a little more creative!  Today I will be discussing a great way to build a community, validate a niche or authority site idea, and build consistent and engaged traffic to your website.

Using these strategies, I have a guaranteed 500-1k views to my new posts on a fledgling website I’m building in a niche I’m passionate about.

Reddit has become an extremely popular social bookmarking site ever since Digg 4.0 came out.  Many Diggers, including myself, jumped ship and checked out Reddit for the very first time.  I have to admit, it looked really weird to me for the first month or so, but after that I was hooked.

The beauty of Reddit is that it allows you to create your own subreddit on any topic you care about.  You get to completely customize the appearance and styling of this subreddit as well.

Benefits of Running a Successful Subreddit

There  are a few awesome benefits to creating a subreddit.  As SEOs, we are constantly looking for new niche is and opportunities to build websites and create communities.  The beauty of running a subreddit in a particular niche is that it is much easier to build your community.  Reddit has millions of users, all of whom have diverse interests.  So unless your niche is something like “Juggling in the dark on lawnmowers,” I think it’s safe to say that there are other people out there that share your interests.

Running a sub Reddit is like testing for viability in a niche.  If you can grow it into a decent user base that likes to participate, share, and comments, you know that you got a niche with some traction.  You’ll be able to get inside the community’s head and understand what they like, what they love, and what they hate.  They will automatically generate content for you that can give you ideas for new blog posts or articles.  You can tailor your content to common questions that keep coming up.

Additionally, running a successful subreddit has some direct benefits for your websites.  As moderator, you have complete control over the sidebar and the content of the subreddit.  I would suggest placing your website as a source for additional niche content.  Make sure that you made a commitment to creating valuable and interesting content, so your site doesn’t come off as spamming.  Additionally, you should submit posts to the subreddit, which should garner good amount of attention if you been paying attention to what your community likes.

Getting The Word Out

Now that you’ve got your subreddit set up, it’s time to garner some users.  Reddit is such an interactive and vibrant community that they’ve actually created a subreddit simply for announcing new subreddits.  SUBREDDIT INCEPTION!  You can find it at /r/NewReddits and you should drop a link to your subreddit there as soon as possible.

The next step is to identify all other subreddits that are like yours.  Almost all of the large topics of interest have been taken already and are quite large.  You can petition the moderators of subreddits larger than yours for a link in the sidebar.  Most of them are happy to help, because they genuinely care about their niche and want to serve their subscribers with as much related content as possible.  It’s a good idea to create a list of related subreddits on your own sidebar before you petition any moderators.  It’s a sign of good faith to have already linked to them.

You can also set up a filter for any keyword or phrase using Metareddit.  This is a super helpful tool and you should consider donating to the creator if you find it useful.  Use the monitor tool to let Metareddit know that you wanted to start looking for certain keywords or phrases.  You can then subscribe to this feed via RSS and you now have a real-time feed of any comment containing something related to your niche.  Then you can just hop into the conversation, provide some invaluable insight and say something like, “By the way, I run /r/yoursubreddit if you want to check it out!”  You’d be surprised how many people this converts!

Keeping Active

If you don’t keep posting content to the subreddit in the early stages, it’s going to die on the vine.  You need to nurture it until it’s large enough to sustain itself.  After that you can take a backseat and just delete the spam and pop in with some great content every now and then.

I hope you got some value out of this post and I’d love to hear about your experiences using subreddits (or Reddit in general) to generate traffic to your websites!

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Google Algorithm Changes: March

Posted by on April 14, 2012
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Little late, but here are Google’s algorithm changes from March.  Ignored the ones that were less important.  You can find the entire list here.

Overall, seems like freshness improvements, anchor text improvements and synonym/LSI stuff was the focus for March.  Thought it was interesting to see that they’re pulling back their synonym detection a bit and focusing more on the keyword the user types in more.  Also, better indexing of social profiles is great, especially when using http://knowem.com/ to find all of the branding opportunities online.

Here they are:

Local SEO

Better local results and sources in Google News. We’re deprecating a signal we had to help people find content from their local country, and we’re building similar logic into other signals we use. The result is more locally relevant Google News results and higher quality sources.

Freshness

Improvements to freshness.  We launched an improvement to freshness late last year that was very helpful, but it cost significant machine resources. At the time we decided to roll out the change only for news-related traffic. This month we rolled it out for all queries.

Improvements to processing for detection of site quality. We’ve made some improvements to a longstanding system we have to detect site quality. This improvement allows us to get greater confidence in our classifications.

More precise detection of old pages.  This change improves detection of stale pages in our index by relying on more relevant signals. As a result, fewer stale pages are shown to users.

Sitelinks data refresh. Sitelinks (the links that appear beneath some search results and link deeper into the respective site) are generated in part by an offline process that analyzes site structure and other data to determine the most relevant links to show users. We’ve recently updated the data through our offline process. These updates happen frequently (on the order of weeks).

High-quality sites algorithm data update and freshness improvements. Like many of the changes we make, aspects of our high-quality sites algorithm depend on processing that’s done offline and pushed on a periodic cycle. In the past month, we’ve pushed updated data for “Panda,” as we mentioned in a recent tweet. We’ve also made improvements to keep our database fresher overall.

Improvements in date detection for blog/forum pages. [launch codename "fibyen", project codename "Dates"] This change improves the algorithm that determines dates for blog and forum pages.

Synonyms/LSI

Fewer “sibling” synonyms. One of the main signals we look at to identify synonyms is context. For example, if the word “cat” often appears next to the term “pet” and “furry,” and so does the word “kitten”, our algorithms may guess that “cat” and “kitten” have similar meanings. The problem is that sometimes this method will introduce “synonyms” that actually are different entities in the same category. To continue the example, dogs are also “furry pets” — so sometimes “dog” may be incorrectly introduced as a synonym for “cat”. We’ve been working for some time to appropriately ferret out these “sibling” synonyms, and our latest system is more maintainable, updatable, debuggable, and extensible to other systems.

Better synonym accuracy and performance. We’ve made further improvements to our synonyms system by eliminating duplicate logic. We’ve also found ways to more accurately identify appropriate synonyms in cases where there are multiple synonym candidates with different contexts.

Less aggressive synonyms. We’ve heard feedback from users that sometimes our algorithms are too aggressive at incorporating search results for other terms. The underlying cause is often our synonym system, which will include results for other terms in many cases. This change makes our synonym system less aggressive in the way it incorporates results for other query terms, putting greater weight on the original user query.

Social

Better indexing of profile pages. This change improves the comprehensiveness of public profile pages in our index from more than two-hundred social sites.

+1 button in search for more countries and domains. This month we’ve internationalized the +1 button on the search results page to additional languages and domains. The +1 button in search makes it easy to share recommendations with the world right from your search results. As we said in our initial blog post, the beauty of +1’s is their relevance—you get the right recommendations (because they come from people who matter to you), at the right time (when you are actually looking for information about that topic) and in the right format (your search results).

Images

More relevant image search results. This change tunes signals we use related to landing page quality for images. This makes it more likely that you’ll find highly relevant images, even if those images are on pages that are lower quality.

Anchor Text

Tweaks to handling of anchor text.  This month we turned off a classifier related to anchor text (the visible text appearing in links). Our experimental data suggested that other methods of anchor processing had greater success, so turning off this component made our scoring cleaner and more robust.

Better interpretation and use of anchor text. We’ve improved systems we use to interpret and use anchor text, and determine how relevant a given anchor might be for a given query and website.

Mobile

Expanded sitelinks on mobile. We’ve launched our expanded sitelinks feature for mobile browsers, providing better organization and presentation of sitelinks in search results.

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How WordPress Can Revolutionize Your Business

Posted by on June 23, 2011
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Having a website that is named and hosted is great, but the most important step is still missing. Your website needs content and a content management system to keep track of it all. Back when the popularity of the internet was just starting to increase, websites needed to be manually changed via editing the HTML.

These days technological advances have thankfully replaced that with a much better method. A CMS, or Content Management System, is a web-based platform that allows you to access the back end of your site to make changes.

Enter: WordPress

The most popular CMS out today is WordPress. While many people use WordPress for blogging, it can be customized to fit the needs of almost every business website.

With WordPress, it is possible to quickly add sales copy, pictures, videos, and much more to your website. However there are many elements to consider when adding content to your website. Every piece of content you display affects how both customers and search engines perceive your website.

Your homepage is the most important. This is the first page that potential customers see when they visit your site and as such it deserves the most attention. It needs effective sales copy, an appealing design, and a call to action that leads the customer to providing information or inquiring about your product or service.

The rest of your site deserves equal consideration. An extremely basic website will have these pages:

  • Homepage
  • About Us / Company History
  • Directions
  • Contact

Each of these pages needs to have appropriate content that is relevant and optimized. With previous clients we have created pages with pictures of satisfied customers – it boosted their internet leads considerably.

We consider WordPress the best option for most businesses looking to set up a website. Most of our projects are built around WordPress, though we will use other Content Management Systems. Our experience in creating and optimizing content on WordPress websites is second to none.

Interested in getting started? Please contact us and we’ll be more than happy to set up a free consultation.

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