Tom Critchlow, the brother of Will Critchlow, from Distilled, has had the fortunate task of helping SEOmoz with their own SEO. To begin his presentation, he compared life in an agency setting vs. life as an in-house SEO.
His presentation began by exploring the inherent differences between working at an SEO agency vs. having to do SEO in-house.
At agency you have the team, tools, knowledge, trends, etc. You (hopefully) work with a sharp team.
As an In-House SEO, you are likely under-staffed, under-equipped, alone.
As SEOmoz is not only a powerhouse SEO software company, but also thought leader in the SEO industry, Tom’s objective was to improve rankings for them in the most white-hat way possible. Therefore, goodies like Directory Maximizer were off limits.
Language, Behaviour, and Links
The start of the presentation focused on language, how it is used, its relationship to behavior, and how we need to start considering these things when thinking about links. Clearly, people are running searches in Google, not machines. If you expand your understanding of how people search, their psychology, then you begin to understand what KWs you need and which to go after.
Even before link building, however, comes content. In other words, do you deserve to rank for your KW?
The Battle For “SEO Tools”
When Tom began his case study, they realized that they needed more anchor text to outrank seobook.com for the KW “seo tools”.
Tom noticed that many people coming to seomoz.org were coming looking for help with link building. Over the years, their blog had accumulated tons of posts relating to link building, some of them outdated and irrelevant.
His solution: create a new category page for link building with handpicked link building posts that were still relevant and useful, videos, latest posts, a Q&A forum, external resources & link building experts in the SEOmoz community. The idea being that you build the page with the mechanisms and tools to rank for your keyword. Be worthy of ranking!
Social Metrics As Proof
But how do you convince your manager, or client, that the key to building links is to create an amazing resource page worthy of being linked to? Social metrics.
Social metrics are a great measure of quality. You can use this nifty spreadsheet Tom created (http://dis.tl/social-ranking) to plug in your KW of choice and URL to see social sharing.
You can efficiently use the link equity you already have, by using the “Top Pages” in OSE with Google Analytics Exports and Vlookup (to match up traffic from GA with URLs and Title Tags).
If you’re not as familiar with Excel for SEO as you’d like, no worries, Tom is a self-proclaimed Excel Ninja and has put together a fabulous resource to get you up to speed:
Tom went about looking at all of the link building posts from the past that were getting links (667 root domains to be exact, but who’s counting?), and doing a 301 redirect on them to the new all-encompassing resource they created. A word of caution before doing this: make sure you can do 301 redirects on blog posts with your CMS, or hook up with a developer who can tweak your CMS to allow you to do that easily.
User-Generated Content
Another neat thing Tom discussed was the idea of link building with communities. The infamous Search Engine Ranking Factors 2009, was pulled together by asking the community to weigh in with what they felt were the biggest ranking factors in 2009. By having massive involvement from the community, they were able to come up with an interesting and quality resource. Get them to participate, for a whitepaper or infographic, curate the responses, and then go back to them with finished product asking them to link to it.
A great piece of linkbait Tom showed us was the “How many five year olds could you take in a fight?”
Note that the creator did not actually come up with the idea, the title was found in a poker forum, and he simply created a quiz out of it with a badge at the end, for you to embed on your site with a link back to the quiz. Really smart.
The idea here is to crowdsource linkbait – questions like “which quality directories do you submit to?”, “Best examples of widgets you’ve ever seen?” - If they were remaking the Developers Cheat Sheet for SEO, what should be in it? Give the data collected to a designer, boom. Linkbait.
Instigate a process for linkbait – the best way of doing that are Guides & Cheat Sheets. Also, don’t be afraid to step outside of your normal audience. SEOmoz is not solely targeting the SEO community anymore. If they do a Web Designers Guide to SEO they can give it to Smashing Magazine.
Dominate With Your Own Private Network
Tom also highly suggested we build our own private network to share ideas about blog posts, ideas for linkbait, link building ideas, etc. You can link to each other’s content, promoting content on twitter and facebook, voting on social networks, etc.
Tips for a successful private network:
- Know everyone who’s in it.
- Be generous, share each others’ content.
- Starting one is better than joining one.
- Try to attract linkerati, not SEOs (bloggers, journalists, researchers, etc.)
- Launch it in Google groups – (should take two minutes to set up).
The final two parts of Tom Critchlow’s presentation:
- Getting Shit Done – You can read about SEO and theorize about SEO and even brainstorm amazing SEO ideas. At the end of the day the boys are separated from the men (and the girls from the women) by actually getting shit done. Meeting face-to-face, phone calls, lunches = getting shit done. Emails are not.
- The SEO Joel Test.
Tom Critchlow provided one of the most thorough and thought provoking presentations of the seminar, and it was truly interesting to see how his mind works, and what he deals with doing SEO for SEOmoz.
