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Analyze Competitors The Way Military Intel Studies Adversaries

If you do SEO for yourself, in-house at a company, or for an agency you should have some experience performing a competitive analysis when considering challenges and opportunities before launching an optimization campaign.

Goal Of This Exercise

• Find demographic data on competitors’ site visitors
• Find out what keywords competitors think are important and are actively targeting
• Find out which keywords are actually driving traffic from organic search
• Get a sense of how challenging a link building campaign might be
• Have enough solid data to back up next steps presented to clients

Raven Tools’ SEO Competitor Analysis Checklist
Mark Jackson’s post on Search Engine Watch on Competitive Analysis in 2011

And check out Taylor Pratt’s SEO Competitive Analysis Slide from SMX

Tools of Engagement

Perhaps I’m wrong in assuming this but my hunch is that many in the SEO world don’t always take the time to look at demographic data for their industry’s competitors.

Marketers and Advertisers have for a long time placed a good deal of effort into uncovering the demographic and psychographic makeup of their audiences and with good reason. The more you know the better equipped you are.

While psychographic makeup at a keyword level may be something of the future for now, (though Mike King is working hard to make it more of a reality) basic demographic data of competitors’ visitors is readily at hand.

Comscore

SEMRush

SEMRush is like the gift that keeps on giving. If you don’t have a subscription to it, no need to worry. They have a free version which gives a fairly good snapshot of what happening on a given site. But the paid version really does rock and gives you so much data to arm yourself with its not even funny.

Why I Can’t Live Without It: The ability to see Organic & Paid Keywords driving traffic to any site, as well as Top Competitors in Search at a moment’s notice is surreal. To make things even more interesting they segment keywords based on percentage of overall (organic) traffic, landing page, ranking position, and daily search volume.

To quickly see what terms your competitors are targeting the following two tools become necessary:

Open Site Explorer – Anchor Text Tab

It’s one thing to use OSE as your main backlink research tool. It’s another to jump straight to the Anchor Text tab and export the data to get a sense of how often your competitor is getting Brand Name or URL links vs. how often they get Keyword Anchor Text links.

Pro Tip #1: SEER Interactive has two great posts on exporting OSE backlink data into Excel and slicing the data multiple ways to gain deeper intelligence.

Pro Tip #2: Drag this javascript bookmarklet to your bookmarks bar to jump directly to OSE’s Anchor Text tab from any page your on (this displays the Anchor Text tab from OSE for the domain your on – also from Tom Critchlow’s post).

Screaming Frog

The Next Frontier

As this blog continues to evolve I’ll be covering competitive analysis at the enterprise level, how to do a GAP Analysis, a SWOT Analysis, competitive analysis at the social and ux level, and how to put it all into beautiful deliverables that will win you praise, awards, and new business.

Before I can tell you where I’ve been, I think it’s important to quickly address how I got here. Some of you may know that I only got into SEO and Internet Marketing exactly one year ago. And not by choice.

I was seriously considering going to grad school after spending 6 months in Israel as a research fellow in the Israeli Parliament (Knesset). While studying for grad school tests (GMAT & LSAT) I began looking for work that would be interesting, pay me enough to get by, and allow me the flexibility to focus on studying.

A boutique internet marketing agency outside of Philadelphia contacted me from a Craigslist posting and asked me to come in to discuss handling the social media accounts for some of their clients. After accepting the position I was asked if I had any clue what ‘Link Building’ and ‘SEO’ was about, and if I had any interest in learning it.

What began as a side project ultimately captured my interest to the point where I decided I wanted to pursue Internet Marketing as a career, not just a job. I decided grad school (and more loans) wasn’t right for me at this time, and began reading anything and everything SEO related.

Link Building Seminars & Conference Recaps

In March this past year (2011) my company in Pennsylvania sent me to the Distilled Link Building Conference in New Orleans. As a relative newbie in the field I don’t think I need to tell you how I excited I was to be there. The presentations were awesome, the speakers extremely intelligent and approachable, and New Orleans is just a phenomenal city.

One of the speakers kept harping on truly outdoing the competition as a means to earn links. Since conference recaps are fairly standard in the SEO world, and since I take extremely detailed notes, I figured why not take a stab at writing a killer conference recap.

I would consider myself a fairly creative person. My love of Photoshop and Vintage Posters helped me create the New Orleans graphic, and I felt that giving each speaker their own post and then collecting them on a hub page would be unique enough to get some attention.

Within a week of writing the recaps, buying the domain, posting and tweeting about it, I got links from SEOmoz, Distilled, Wiep Knol, John Doherty, and Kris Roadruck, not to mention all the sites that scrape SEOmoz.

Unfortunately I had no clue what I would do next, what I could possibly write about that might top that recap, and slowly but surely I let fear and doubt take over.

New York, New Beginnings

Shortly after that period I was offered a position in New York as an SEO Consultant with an agency that specializes in Enterprise SEO & SEM. Again, I doubted whether or not I would even like working in New York and chose to hold off on finding an apartment, instead choosing to commute from Philadelphia for 6 months.

Instead of letting my fear consume me however, I decided to be proactive just as I was when I first started 1 year ago. I’ve moved to New York, started attending meetups with other really smart SEOs and Internet Marketers, and decided to focus on sharing what knowledge I do have.

My previous experience working with small and medium sized businesses meant that more of my focus in the past centered around link building, and naturally I wanted to be able to write about methods that worked for me.

Since then however, my role here in New York has meant tackling much larger problems such as project management across multiple business units of a multi-national corporation, and a post-Panda world that can be very unforgiving to brands who don’t adapt to the new playing field.

Moving Forward

Given my workload at the current moment I’m not sure how often I’ll be able to post here. But I can guarantee it won’t be months apart.

As my experience grows in the world of enterprise search optimization, my goal is to be able to share some unique insights I gain not just relating to SEO, but digital marketing as a practice, the cross section of social, search, user experience, design, and content, and how they affect success online.

To all in the SEO community who’ve helped me get to where I am today: Thank you.

To readers who got tired of coming back to an outdated blog: I’m sorry.

And to new readers, new friends, and new acquaintances,  its a pleasure meeting you. Now let’s kick some ass.

-Tom

P.S. A good read if blogging intimidates you: 7 Deadly Fears of Blogging

Either way, there’s been some really great posts to come out in the past week alone and I decided it may be time to start putting these together for you. I know it’s nice outside, but now is not the time to day-dream about the shore, it’s time to get links!

Must Reads

These are an absolute must-read if you haven’t read them already. My personal favorite is the Ontolo Guest Post Complete Guide, mainly because it is so comprehensive, well thought out and researched, incredibly detailed and easy to understand, and yet the admission by Ben in the beginning of the post that he’s a college drop-out, not much of a writer, and that he’s never done something like that before, really hit home the message that there just simply are no excuses for not being successful at content outreach.

Link Building with Guest Posts, The Complete Guide – Ben Wills from Ontolo
Link Building for Ecommerce Sites – Targeting the Right Anchor Text – Geoff Kenyon from Distilled
A Step By Step Guide To Effective Online Article Marketing – Part II – George Aspland from eVision
Link Building in 2011 – The Todd and Jim Show – Rae Hoffman interviewing Jim Boykin and Todd Malicoat

Best quote from Todd in the interview:

I must begrudingly admit it is pretty amazing and awesome that search engines can now combine the link graph, social signals, personalization, and localization for optimal relevance in search results. It certainly makes website optimization for search more difficult (damn, we can’t just buy links anymore), but I would imagine it’s improved search user experience immensely.

Also Good Reads

Link Building Tacts In 2011: Keeping It Fresh – by Ryan Clark from Linkbuildr
Link Building This Summer – Collection of Link Building Articles and Posts from this Summer – from Wiep Knol
Link Building Tip #5 – Find Link Opportunities through Internet Superstars – Zarko Zivkovic
Let’s Skin This Social Media Link Building Cat – SageRock

If you enjoyed these links over the weekend, be a good sport and shoe the love. Also, if I missed you here, feel free to reach out to me on twitter or google+ and I’ll make sure to add your post as well.

Enjoy the weekend!

After a while I started thinking, gee – The Realm is not really that much different than the Web. (Yes, I’m incredibly geeky and compare my career to fictional medieval fantasy worlds.) Let’s explore, shall we?

King’s Landing

King’s Landing, in the series, is the majestical city of the King, the center of the The Realm, and the place where the real action takes place. In our world, King’s Landing is of course Page 1 of the search results. Because honestly, if you’re not on page 1, you’re not really in the mix, now are you?

Page 1 is no place for pushovers and chumps either. With the influx of blended search, images, news results, local listings, and audio files, this metropolis is rife with connivers looking to outnumber one another in their quest for social status and power.

Don’t come to King’s Landing unless you know how to wheel and deal – likewise, if you’ve somehow landed on the 1st page of results for your dream keyword, be ready to fight for your survival.

Winterfell

A land up north, not quite beyond the outer limits known to society, but not quite the center of action. Winterfell is a region with stand-up people, principled leaders, and folks doing the best they can. They know how to fight, how to ride horses, and how to shoot a bow and arrow. Still, reaching King’s Landing is somewhat of an elusive task. Many have no desire to go, while others can only dream.

In essence we’re talking about Page 2 of the search results. These sites have done something right to not be ranked #78, but they don’t really have what it takes to make 1st page just yet. They’ve done their directory links, and small-time link requests – they’ve cleaned up their URL structure and maybe even have some good content.

But let’s face it – nobody is re-tweeting what a Northerner puts out. They don’t have fancy infographics, or elegant video content. Northerners are quite content with the way they do things up north. Hey, there’s always local listings

The Targaryens

Yes, they did rule the Seven Kingdoms at one point, didn’t they? Don’t let their blonde hair and blue eyes fool you though. These folks have always been what we now call Black Hat. Flying in on Dragons to takeover, when everyone else is riding horses? Um, XRumer anyone?

Even after being defeated and exiled (by Panda?!? Robert Baratheon) they still find a scheme to make a comeback. They’re not bad people, they just do things a little differently is all.

The Dothraki

Out-sourced Southeast Asia spammy link builders and Horse Lord Barbarians have much in common do they not? Truthfully, there’s so many of them if they really wanted to they could at bare minimum cause some damage.

No, they may not have the same ethics and morals as the Knights in shining armor, but they can be ruthless and come to battle in full force. And while they may be hesitant to cross the river and attack outright, they might be willing to for the right price (anyone care to marry off their sister in exchange for their army?)

Brotherhood of The Night’s Watch

OK, so maybe Silicon Valley is not exactly the northern most wall before the Wild of the North, but the Webspam team at Google have an almost brotherhood like pact to protect the Realm from Wildlings, White-Walkers, Spam, and Manipulation.

Minor differences of course (we know from Kris Roadruck’s infographic, Matt Cutts wears other colors than black, and I don’t think he makes his engineers take an oath of celebacy before joining, but I may be wrong).

Really they are the foremost protectors and work diligently to ensure the Realm is free from zombies and spammers.

The Iron Throne

The glorious throne many have killed, maimed, and battled to reach.       The #1 spot in the SERPs. An almost mystical place to be, getting there is only half the battle these days. Yes, we know you’ve spent years honing your craft, building yourself, making real connections, and putting the blood sweat and tears of you and your team to get there.

Tough luck. When it comes to the heavy hitter keywords, you better take a good look around you. All those standing next to you, smiling, are planning your demise as you read this. Some rulers are confident in their position. Still, others can’t stand the pressure and become paranoid dictators whose own demise is all but near. It’s not enough to reach the throne – what have you done lately to make sure you stay there?

In these days of ruthless competition, your reign at the top may be short like leprechauns (Biggie quote – sorry had to). No one is safe. Everyone is plotting.

As the crazy old nanny told Bran:

Oh, my sweet summer child! What do you know about fear? Fear is for the winter, when the snows fall a hundred feet deep; fear is for the Long Night, when the sun hides for years and children are born and live and die all in darkness. That is the time for fear, my little Lord.

And winter is coming.

Not buying links the way you’re probably thinking. Dirty, dirty minds!

We all know know by now the power social media has (at least I hope we do!) – from building a personal brand, to connecting with like-minded folks, and even to influencing search engine rankings.

SEO professionals have a tendency to be very active on social media, and so naturally I petitioned (i.e. begged) Twitter to give me @tomharari and started a Twitter account back in November of 2011. In time I’ve been able to connect with industry leaders, meet amazing people (in person as well as online), make new friends, and learn a boat-load of SEO knowledge.

I also used my account, from time to time, to bitch and complain, as most casual social media users do, when something doesn’t go my way.

In comes Orbitz

Let me just make this one announcement before I proceed any further. I have nothing against Orbitz, I’ve used their service in the past with no major complaints. But this incident just crossed the line with me.

My Gmail account has become absolutely flooded with junk mail – so much so that it’s been my mission to unsubscribe from mailing lists that were no longer of interest or were just plain annoying. Unsubscribing from Orbitz however, was not a simple task.

After unsubscribing, I received another email newsletter from them a few days later. Normally I would mumble something unpleasant underneath my breath and just hit unsubscribe again – the only problem was they didn’t even offer an unsubscribe button this time around!

So naturally I took to the airwaves twitter and vented.

OK, maybe I was a little harsh, but I was pissed off!

Surprisingly enough, Orbitz actually listens to what is being said about them online, and cares enough to have a dedicated Twitter Customer Care team deal with issues such as these (note the customer care account is DIFFERENT than the regular account).

They reached out to me and after a few DM’s back and forth, offered me a $50 voucher. How cool is that?!?

Here’s where they missed the boat with me, and likely with others. Their company policy probably states how much can be offered by their customer care team to handle annoyances like myself. But do they take it any further and look for other ways to connect with me that will pay back their $50 expense?

The part of the conversation that didn’t make it into my screenshot was the part about me offering to write a blog post about the whole ordeal and even let them make a statement or answer questions about their processes in an interview format. I even offered a link!

Turning Lemons Into Lemonade

Sadly (for them), they did not respond to my offer. Why would a company who pays a good amount of money to have a social media consultant train their customer care team, and an SEO consultant (or SEO agency) train their marketing department, not be integrated to the point where the two play off each other for maximum benefit?

How hard would it have been for their customer care team to offer me a one line quote to use, in exchange for a link on my blog?

How about sending me to a landing page to redeem my voucher, where upon arrival I was asked kindly to Tweet something positive about their company? Social signals are now playing a role in rankings are they not?

I know there exists room for manipulation, but that exists regardless of whether they try to get a link out of me or not. People will still try to get big companies to throw goodies their way by just complaining online, with or without SEO benefit. So why not try it out?

JCPenney got caught with their pants down paying for links. Overstock.com was penalized for offering discounts to student groups in exchange for perfectly optimized anchor text links.

These large brands probably spend a good amount on social media efforts, what would it take to go a step further with their budget and try to get backlinks through existing procedures? Anyways they’re going to pay me $50 to shut up, why not get some SEO benefit out of it?

Start to ask these questions of yourself, your boss, your social media team, your SEO team, your Online Marketing Director… see where I’m going with this? Social media and SEO are too damn close to not be well integrated with procedures set in place before an incident like mine happens.

A few side notes: A) Orbitz, if you’re listening, the offer is still on the table, link and all. B) This post was originally supposed to be a guest post for Bill Sebald, who was kind enough to offer me a guest post when no-one knew who I was (nobody still does but that’s irrelevant!). Instead of me getting a link out of it, I’m giving it to him for his generosity.

Russ cautioned us that he does not endorse black hat tactics. In fact, most of those tactics are expensive, hard, take time to do well, and likely over your head. So don’t bother with it.

According to Russ Digg is all but dead. Their traffic is down and all homepage links are 301 links so only a percentage of link value gets passed along and nofollow links are likely around the corner. Great.

Now what?

Reddit. Specifically SubReddits.

Russ made one thing clear to us – if it’s not about links he doesn’t care about it. He also checks Reddit, a lot. There is a large, and growing traffic base there and with subreddits there are a diverse array of categories being explored from politics to just weird random stuff.

Of course all homepage links are followed. So what do you do? Go out and find dead and dying subreddits, ones with high PageRank but have been all but abandoned. He was able to scrape and categorize over 9,000 subreddits categorized by PR, Last Post Date, and average votes.

His example was for a cell phone company. In this case, he found a subreddit on Haiti Disaster, and would do the research on communications degradation after natural disasters. Submit it, know how many votes the average link on that homepage needs to get there, and just like that you have high PR subreddit links.

Some other social bookmarking sites he highlighted were:

1. Delicious – pr 7, nofollow, syndicated widely, easy to game (paid), if you have a yahoo account you can vote.
2. Plime – pr5, small community, and eclectic, WTF type posts, quick-to-ban, grab odd-news from Plime and submit. Don’t forget to Be A Damn Human, and actually listen to the community.
3. StumbleUpon – Russ says he’s done with it, can’t tell if he’s getting links or not.

Russ suggested we use Clicky for real-time web analytics to see people as they are coming in and from where. Find inbound traffic from forums to find conversations across the web as they happening and nurture them.

(Make sure to first register at the forum and comment on some other stories before moving to your own thread).

In this case what you’d want to do is comment regularly but don’t push it. Be willing to answer questions and be helpful, however if the community truly loses interest then just drop it.

PageRank Pinging

The most important thing to do is to follow through with PageRank pinging. Find all the referring sites quickly with Clicky, and use Russ’ linkbait pagerank pinger (see below).

Follow through on paid linking – Wait a couple of weeks, find all sites linking to the submission page (digg & reddit) and find the contact info of those sites and ask them to switch to original source. Russ recommends you be willing and ready to pay for it, for their hassle to go in and change the link. $10-$20 should do the trick

Also, you can find relevant sites to syndicate your viral infographic, and simply pay them to do top stories of the week and include yours ($20 – $30).

Russ’ tools:

If you want Russ’ tools, I believe he would prefer if you DM him directly on twitter, so feel free to follow him, ask him to follow you back so you can DM him, and be nice, respectful, and courteous. You won’t regret it.

This presentation was the first one of the #Linklove Conference, so he made sure to start off with a bang by sharing something many of us in attendance were not prepared for. The number one biggest mistake that SEOs make apparently, is believing in “quality links” as the way to dominate in the SERPs. We hear it all the time, go out and get high quality links from trusted sources and your golden, right? Wrong.

The Other New York SEO Company

Wil’s company is apparently being beat for the KW “SEO Company” by a company with 2 blog posts (in the last 3 years).

How? All manipulative type links, none of which said their company name, and many, which seemed to be ridiculously obvious paid links. Compare that with his company’s site, which has a fantastic blog that gets posted to regularly, by their entire team, and includes great research and actionable tips, that gets shared and retweeted a lot. His suggestion, when people start going off about social signals as the way to rank, at least for uber-competitive keywords, take it with a grain of salt!

Ok, so big deal, one of his competitors did some junky link building and it worked, nothing new here. How is focusing on quality links a mistake exactly? Well, one of his clients worked with a PR (public relations) agency while hiring him for SEO.

Side note: I’m personally a big fan of leveraging traditional PR methods for link building, I mean what could be better than getting an editorial link from the New York Times or CNN?

Apparently it sounds better than it is. His client was doing everything right, everything that Google and Matt Cutts says you should do. They had gotten links from the NY Times, Cosmo, Oprah, and a slew of other high quality newspaper and magazine sites. Not paid links mind you, they were being written about! The client was apparently online for over a decade, they had .edu links from research done, their keyword gets 4 million searches a month, and the CEO is someone media outlets seek out for their articles. Add to that the fact that none of their competition in the SERPs have that and you have what looks on the surface to be the most ideal situation for an SEO.

Yet with all of that working in their favor, they dropped in rankings. Hard.

“SEO History is littered with over-weighted strategies that fail…” – Wil Reynolds

Diversification Is A Must

1^st (Actionable) Lesson: Diversify! – His assessment was that their client was…wait for it…over-weighted with high quality trusted website sources, yet failed to climb the rankings. So lesson to be learned, as soon as you see one tactic start to work for you, immediately switch tactics and diversify.

Their competitors were buying blogroll links, like crazy. Clearly that was working for them, though he didn’t feel comfortable exposing his client to that level of risk. Still though, you see that working and you start thinking…

No, instead he implored us to challenge ourselves to get the same kind of links while staying in the white/grey hat store. Spend the time you would normally think of every bat-shit crazy way to build garbage links and instead brainstorm with your team to come up with something truly creative.

You CAN Battle Black Hat with Good Ideas

First, they started looking for mid-level bloggers. (Not sure where to find these guys? You can search Google Blogs, Technorati, Postrank, and use Ontolo) – They offered product reviews for links, which worked great. Still, they needed something else, a big push to get them over the hump. One of their guys came up with a “national day” around their product with the client giving away about $5,000 worth of product. The result:

• They used this to grow their email list – not directly related to links but helped client increase sales (which is the end game, right?)
• Competitors of theirs actually linked to their nearly non-branded “National Day” microsite
• The Mid-Level bloggers got in the mix, started putting the custom badges up on their blogs and linking
• The media started linking to it.
• They’ve since reached #3 in the rankings for the KW and haven’t looked back since.

So what’s the point then? Do we go out and get high-quality links or not? His take is that getting high quality links helps your more aggressive tactics fly under the radar.

The SEO Graveyard

Wil also mentioned something that sounded familiar – because if you watched his videos like I told you to earlier, you would know that he’s mentioned this before:

Go to page 8 and beyond in the SERPs for certain KWs, the SEO graveyard of sorts. That barren wasteland is filled with some great diamond content in the rough. Basically, you get all riled up and psyched that you’re going to make the most amazing resource content ever, realize its hard, then give up. Wil comes around with his metal detector looking for gold rings in the sand, finds what you built, updates it and make it shiny and new, then uses that for links. Money.

Final Mistakes – Having No Army & No Muscle

Don’t wait until you need social promotion of your work before you start promoting other people’s work. Be that shining star that cared about them before you needed them.

Twitter following can be an army.

Final thoughts from Wil’s presentation:

1. Use Twitter Search: There is a tweet every 10 minutes for “stole my phone”. Use Twitter Search to find people whose problems you can solve and get creative to get the links.
2. Ever wonder how top bloggers embed stuff… Incentivized embeds – Get in front of the right person  and incentivize them to get the ball rolling with the infrographics, etc.
3. Want to get top resources in your niche to link to you? – Have the quality PDFs, Excel spreadsheets, FREE tools – Always keep in mind: What’s In It For Me?

Rand was clearly frustrated with these results. I believe his exact words were that this was “very frustrating”, and “not exactly the best web has to offer…”

So why is this terrible crap filling up the SERPS? Because links rule, as do directories, anchor text, and exact-match domains. His least favorite tactic of the day: Article Marketing. Half because its so junky, and half because it works.

Google is trying to achieve perfect results. And so, we now start to see the rise in influence of social media citations & links. Bottom line: you don’t share crap on facebook. Think about that for a second.

Additionally, mentions (i.e. non-linked citations) and maybe some nofollow links too are beginning to make their way into the algorithm.

The Rise Of Social

Another major point in Rand’s presentation was the rise of social signals as ranking factors. My own experience has shown this to be true, at least for the time being as Google experiments with it. Look at this SERP when I search “Distilled Link Building Seminar”:

(Note: John Doherty is someone I respect and follow on Twitter. Google recognizes that in this case).

Rand made it painfully clear that he believes Google is looking for signals of “Community” and “Authenticity”, or in other words Brands vs. Generics. People prefer brands, not Google. Brands tend to have offline marketing, traffic from diverse sources, branded search query volume, authentic followed social accounts, and a physical address… Generics don’t.

34 Link Building Tips

So with that in mind here are Rand’s 34 unique link building recommendations:

1. Earn authentic tweets to your content – tweets can seemingly overpower links.
2. Become a content resource in your niche – unique research, informed opinions, news/trend analysis, multimedia content, expert contributors, quality discussion – (Q+A answers reference its resources, forum discussions link to its page, links are tweeted, etc.)
3. A blog alone isn’t enough – Higher quality > higher quantity
4. Invest in high quality video – (video xml sitemaps are, according to Rand, “like crack cocaine with carebears mating with transformers and having babies of awesomeness.”
5. Build Awesome Infographics & Visual Media
6. Widgets – Invest in calculators, Tools + Web based software that saves people time/effort.
7. Publish reference-worthy research. (Ever thought “God I’m so frustrated with this *, I wish there was a ___ (answer that question )
8. Leverage current events in content.
9. Worry about usability & user experience. Find amazing designers & pay them (look for people who’ve only posted 1 or 2 things before, so they will probably be cheap and looking for clients)
10. Compare how you format text blocks with those who lost out in Farmer/Panda
11. Build Robust About Us Pages (we’ve been in business for over a decade, see 37signals.com (Highlight ‘major milestones’ of business). Provide real contact details for real humans
12. Earn + Display Testimonials / Press Mentions (do this if you deserve to rank, deserve to get customers, deserve to be mentioned in press).
13. Optimize your conversion funnel
14. A process for testing searcher satisfaction – ask them to write 10 things they’d ideally want to see. Does your site have those? If not, shame.
15. Getlisted.org – see what local listing places your missing out on.
16. Go to each of the more about this place, go to the places mentioning your competitors, link OPP!!
17. Build authentic social profiles. Not sure where to start? Try facebook, crunchbase, twitter, slideshare, reddit, quora, stumbleupon, linkedin, about.me, stackexchange, youtube, scribd, and Wikipedia.
18. Earn branded search traffic. How? Either spend a fortune on TV or… tweet out your ranking in search that creates a ton of branded search.
19. Diversify your visitor traffic sources – long-tail of the web (Direct traffic, referring sites, etc.).
20. Get your brand name in the web’s headlines – news.google.com/archivesearch
21. Earn citations in “hard-to-get” places –
22. File patents, fund scholarly research + get papers published at academic/scientific places (google scholar)
23. Create twitter/facebook/stumble/reddit centric content –
24. Get your great design listed on all the design portals
25. Discover where big brands get links (wetsuits #2 & #3)
26. Investigate brand “mention” sources – “brand” –site:brand.com
27. Find where relevant pages on edus, govs, orgs, ac.uks, etc. have earned their links!!
28. Followerwonk to find key bloggers, connectors, and news sites aware of your brand + resources
29. Host/Sponsor/Attend events, meetups + conferences = lanyrd.com to find conferences
30. Earn citations on industry portal/forum/discussion sites (boardreader.com).
31. Get your brand included on key, industry lists (Wikipedia/category/internet marketing companies). Go to the discussion tab not edit button, and suggest site X be added. This clearly has a higher percentage chance of working).
32. Seek properties operate by trusted entities (Use advanced search queries linkfromdomain:.edu linkfromdomain:.gov – in Bing)
33. Use your bio/profile as a link accumulator
34. Make your RSS feeds “full content” and include appropriate, good links back to your site in posts (seeking out potential syndicators is awesome, too).

And finally, STOP getting links, and start earning them! – You have to be willing to trade short-term gains for long-term WINS.

Having Kris come on to present immediately after Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz was perfect in contrasting the two worlds that seemingly dominate our industry. Kris’ company, Click2Rank.com operates in what he calls the Grey Hat world of SEO.

The SEO Soup

The start of his presentation was actually pretty basic and more of a refresher course than anything. The highlight of his intro was his explanation that we as SEOs should not strive to achieve the perfect links from the best website in the world, but rather to look at it as a soup of sorts with everything adding up. An anchor text link from a crappy site and a brand link from a high authority site, it all adds up.

He suggested finding someone from digitalpoint.com forum to get 400 directory links, mainly for IP diversity if anything. In that sense he told us to stop caring about nofollow – nofollow will still carry the IP diversity factor.

Save time when possible. KnowEm is a great resource and will create hundreds of social networking accounts for you at a modest (though not cheap) price.

Oh yeah – and PageRank is dead forever, so stop worrying about.

Algorithm vs. Manual Review

Kris also assured us that numbers are in our favor against Google. It doesn’t matter that their PhD’s are smarter than you – Microsoft still can’t beat piracy. Think algorithm not manual review.

Another goodie – listen to self-cannibalizing groups. Sit in the digitalpoint.com forum and listen to what doesn’t work, then don’t do that!

An idea he shared which is not new, though is great in low-to-medium difficulty niches, is to get blog post or article ideas from Google suggest, then get your copy from textbroker.com, and put it on a WordPress site. Well, a few actually.

Vary the themes, put unique logos, have an about page, 5-6 post backfill, about 20 posts scheduled with images and link out to other Authority sites. Oh, and don’t forget to comment up a few of your posts.

Mass Hosting Options
www.aseohosting.com
www.seowebhosting.net
www.biggest-hosting.com
www.seohosting.com (hostgator)
Don’t use: www.hostseo.org

Multiply your efforts. You can use “The Best Spinner” to spin your articles and make them extremely unique, then use Link Farm Evolution. And finally, you can use ManageWP.com, which will let you manage all blogs from one dashboard!

Kris put on a fantastic presentation, and certainly wowed a bunch of us with some of the tests he’d done over the past couple of years. If you’re not already following him on twitter, make sure you do!