Last month I spoke at Think Visibility about Getting the Links that Matter. Part of my presentation focused on getting the attention of the person you want to get a link from. The traditional method that most people go with is email – I pointed out that a phone call is better but we are all geeks and don’t like using the phone 
I have found a neat way to still use someones email address but perhaps find out more info about them so that you can contact them through some other means. If you install an Outlook extension called Xobni, you can find social media accounts held by the person you are emailing. You can see an example of this in the screenshot below. (The blurred parts are my email and phone number)
In this example, I can see that the person I’m contacting also has Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin accounts, so there is the possibility of contacting them via one of these accounts as well as their regular email. You can even use a combination of both, perhaps a tweet followed up by an email. It can also help if you haven’t already got the persons name, chances are that you can see their full name from their Facebook account as well as seeing part of their profile.
Using xobni you can also see links between yourself and the person you are emailing, for example if one of your other email contacts has already contacted this person, it will show up in the sidebar. This can be very useful because you have “an in”, you can mention this other person in the email and it may help get the persons attention.
This is just another small tip which can make a big difference to your link building conversion rate and give you a little bit more chance of getting a reply and getting the link you want.
Tags: link building, links that matter, xobni for link building
Very quick post today on link building, this one is for ecommerce websites who have offline shops as well.
I’ve noticed that some shopping centres throughout the UK have their own websites, they often list the shops inside the shopping centre with details of opening times, location etc. Some of them also provide a link to the official shop website too.
I’ve found an example using the website for the Bullring Shopping Centre in Birmingham, Ann Summers. Honestly it was the first one I came to that had got a link to their website! Well, maybe not the first but the first that caught my eye
So if you have a client with offline stores, draw up a list of all of their stores across the UK and see if any of them are within a shopping centre. If they are, you know what to do!
Tags: ecommerce seo, link building, SEO, seo strategies
Well its done – my first ever conference presentation is over. I was very nervous but looking back on it – I’d love to go back and do it again! I’m glad I wasn’t the only one who was presenting for the first time – Paul Carpenter has written a great post about his experience and I can relate to a lot of it.
I’ve already written a post over on the Pin Digital blog which reviews the presentations I attended and the conference as a whole. Rather than bore you with the same stuff here, I wanted to take a more personal angle of the whole experience. So I thought I’d write about the things I’ve learnt from being a speaker for the first time, as well as once again being an attendee.
Being a First Time Speaker – Oh Shit!
I can still remember submitting my application to be a speaker, it was the night before I was due to fly to New Zealand for 3 weeks. The closing date for applications was whilst I was away so it was a case of now or never. I had to quickly think of a topic I felt comfortable talking about and would be of interest to the Think Visibility crowd. After a quick chat with my mate Paul Forcey, I decided to submit a presentation on link building. I knew I wasn’t very well known in the industry so I wanted to make my subject stand out, so I decided to talk about actually getting important links rather than just where to find them.
A few weeks later, after my fantastic New Zealand trip, I got an email from Dom accepting my application. Now, this is pretty much what I said out loud after I read the email -
“Oh shit I didn’t think he would actually say yes!”
Closely followed by -
“Oh shit what did I say I was going to talk about?”
After a chat with Paul again, I worked out what my presentation was going to be about!
I started to note down little things that I thought I wanted to include, printed out articles, made notes on them and wrote down the process we were using at Pin Digital for our link building. It was actually a massive learning curve and the process of preparing for the presentation actually led to me re-thinking some of our own practices and re-writing some of them.
1. If you are the next speaker and are watching another presentation before you – stay at the back close to the door!
I went to see Sarah Carling‘s presentation before mine, it ran on time but I could have done with giving myself a few extra minutes to get my presentation loaded on my laptop and have a quick flick through the slides. I also had a technical problem with my laptop which made me panic for a few minutes, not the best preparation! So I could have done with making a discreet exit a little early so I could get ready without rushing.
2. Networking and making friends is key to a great conference experience
For many SEOs, they will only pick up one or two golden bits of info from a conference which they were totally unaware of before. This is no bad reflection on the content, its just the nature of SEO that brand new stuff is often blogged about before a conference anyway. Therefore the best bits of info are often found out whilst having a drink in the bar afterwards, so take advantage and go to them!
SEOs are a friendly bunch too! Don’t be afraid to go over and strike up a conversation with a group of people and just introduce yourself. I’m not the most confident of people when it comes to doing this but once you’ve met one or two people, you’ll be surprised how quickly you make more friends as they introduce you to others.
3. If you have extra questions, go ask the speaker!
I don’t think I’ve come across a conference speaker yet who wasn’t happy to give a few more minutes of their time to answer questions. From a speakers point of view, I found it very encouraging that I was being asked questions and enjoyed speaking to more people. I’m sure others feel the same!
Tags: link building, thinkvisibility, thinkvisibility 2010, thinkvisibility 3
Thought I’d do another post on SEO Rank Monitor which I reviewed last week, I wanted to show a quick way to get your keywords into the software with tags attached. SEO Rank Monitor allows you to group sets of keywords together using tags. This is a great feature as you can quickly filter your keywords by group and see which ones are performing better than others. This is very helpful as sometimes you can work on a few keywords, which will then have an effect on other keywords within the group. So using SEO Rank Monitor you can see these changes easily.
How to Import Keyword Groups in SEO Rank Monitor
1. Put your keywords into Excel in your first column, then in the next column add the name of the keyword group, eg:
2. In the next column, enter the following formula:
=CONCATENATE(A1,”|”,B2)
3. Drag the formula down the rest of your cells so that you get something like this:
4. Highlight the cells in the column you just created
5. Login to SEO Rank Monitor and go to Settings > Keywords and paste in your keywords, click Submit
So now you will be able to filter your keyword rankings by tag and narrow down your results better! If you are a regular user of SEO Rank Monitor, you may also want to checkout my post on Exporting Keyword Rankings.
Tags: keyword ranking software, SEO, seo rank monitor, seo rank monitor tips
As regular readers will know, I love Google Analytics. Its a great piece of free software and can tell you a lot about how users interact with your website. However it can’t do everything, sometimes you need something a bit more advanced to tell you more details about users. I’ve spent a lot of time looking at various Analytics products which help spot problems with converting a visitor into a buyer, one of the products I came across was Clicktale.
I noticed that they have a free trial so I decided to install Clicktale on this blog to get an idea of what it can do. I was pretty amazed with what I learnt and what Clicktale can do, even with just the free version. With the free version you get access to click heatmaps which show you were people have clicked on a certain page, you also get access to scrolling heatmaps which shows you which section of a page people keep their attention on the most. A great application for this would be if you have an ecommerce website and wonder whether people actually scroll all the way down a long product page.
The best part of Clicktale for me though is the opportunity to watch actual videos of browsing sessions by real users. So you can see exactly what they did as they browse your website. This really is valuable information which is also very actionable. You can make an assessment on what people do on their site and change your design or calls to action to suit. Although there is a drawback – if you are a large website recording hundreds of sessions, you can’t aggregate them into one movie like you can with heatmaps etc. So this is a potential issue.
One thing that I learnt from the analysis run on my blog, is that the blog post titled “New SEO Strategies and Marketing Ideas” which is linked from the right hand side, attracted more clicks that any other blog post in that section of the page. So I know that this kind of content is of high interest to my visitors. But it also tells me I may need to work on my other blog post titles as they attracted very little attention! You can see how this data was shown to me in the image below -
Clicktale have a free trial version which gives you a good idea of what it can do, I’d recommend just giving it a try and seeing what feedback you can get from this. I’m sure you can get some good, actionable tips just from the free version. If you are running an Ecommerce website, I think software like Clicktale is essential.
Tags: clicktale software review, Google Analytics, SEO, usability software, web analytics, web analytics software
