In London at this moment the ProSEO seminar, organized by Distilled, is going on. There is a great line up with great content. Our blogger Annabel Hodges is there. She will be writing about several sessions there. Here’s the first one.
First up Rand looks at how to avoid losing all your links to twitter, instead of your own site.
Social sharing is gradually replacing traditional page linking. So are pages linking out less? Actually it doesn’t seem so. People aren’t linking out less, but good content isn’t getting links the way it used to.
How can we still earn traditional links?
1. Embeddable content – value-add widgets
- Everyone’s favourite – Infographics, make it sharable in the right way, ie. Copy/paste option – if you make it easy for people to embed it, your results will always be better.
- Badges – make sure your visitors have to earn them. This adds in a scarcity factor so when they do get actually get that badge, they are much more likely to feature the badge
2. Reference material – be the source, publish first!
- Create awards and rankings – top lists of other people in your industry, e.g. techmeme leader board
- Citation-worthy explanations
3. Syndication – look for niches where content is low but demand for it is high, then supply it
- Identify sites in your industry that already syndicate from someone else then get in touch
- Stick to niches without twitter adoption
- Find sectors where traditional blogs/forums dominate conversation – Many of these ‘old-school’ sites have followed external links (nb. don’t abuse!)
4. Friends, partners, customers, vendors (see my charity post)
- Ask you customers to give you a link, be on your friends & family blogroll
- When you are re-ordering from your vendor, use that leverage to get specific link (you can afford to ask for that keyword anchor text this time!)
5. Twitter itself
- Don’t forget Twitter’s own content! – Re-use those tweets, turn them into actual content
- And use industry leaders’ tweets, it’ll make them more likely to share it
6. If you can’t beat em, join em
- Twitter can send a lot of direct traffic
- Target the right people, those that send the right traffic. Queue an SEOMoz correlation test on who the ‘right’ people are, featuring many exciting-looking graphs.
- e.g. avg # of tweets per day, followers/following ration, twittergrader score – correlation test. Klout score = random. Twitter grader not bad. So as a guideline, the higher the Twitter Grader rank, generally this tends to have higher CTR.
As an indicator – the average CTR across 254 shared links was 1.17%
Rand also mentioned that for his tweets, he’s found that using the template: phrase/link/phrase works best on a CTR level.
