Chris W. Smith

3 Ways To SEO Someone Else’s Site (And Benefit From It)

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(originally posted on DesignBigger)

All the time, we’re told that all of our efforts should push traffic only to our site. We should be building links to try to raise domain authority, take advantage of referral traffic, and building up rankings for our site. While we can’t abandon those ideas altogether, sometimes there are moments where stepping outside of that thought pattern can really help us in the long run.

1. Great PR, Bad SEO

If you’re doing content marketing the way you should be, chances are, you’ll have some writeups in various publications. Ideally, if you get a great review from the local newpaper calling your business the best in town, you’d want that to show up when someone searches your brand name, right? Unfortunately, most of the traditional-media-turned-online-media are still pretty bad at search optimization.

Getting a branded search to show that glowing writeup will do great things for your conversion rate, so take some time to point some branded links towards that resource. You’ll help build up the link profile (and the authority) for that page, which hopefully will flow back down to your site. But, more importantly, that site will show up for someone searching for information about you, and perhaps be a little more convinced that you have what they’re looking for.

2. Pass The Authority

Sometimes there are keywords you really want to go after, but they’re just too competitive, or you’ve got a brand new site that hasn’t quite taken off yet. That doesn’t mean that you’re left high and dry. Just because your site doesn’t have the weight to show for that keyword, there are plenty of properties you can control that do.

This is where social media properties can be a great asset. Not just your company page on Twitter and Facebook (although properly optimizing those can help out), but the “second tier” stuff like Eventbrite and Slideshare. If you do ANY sort of presentations, upload them to Slideshare. You can control nearly any aspect of the page, and optimize it pretty nicely. If you get a fair amount of action on that Slideshare presentation, you’ll show up on the front page of the site. That will get your presentation ranked for some pretty competitive keywords, and in turn, drive some educated and interested traffic back to your site.

You could do something similar for Eventbrite if you’re in a business that does events. Create your event invite, and optimize the page for the keywords you’d like to rank for. Tying the Eventbrite into your social networks will promote action on that page, and in turn, will push it up, giving it a solid chance to rank well.

Here’s where it starts getting even more meta: guest posting. If you don’t have much in the way of blogging, or an already established authority, it might be a little more difficult, but if you can swing it, it’s worth it.

Find a blogger that ranks well for your niche, particularly, a keyword or two you’d like to rank for. Offer a guest post, but don’t ask for a link back. Yes, you read that correctly. You’re much more likely to get a “yes” to a guest post if you make sure that you aren’t asking for a link. You simply want to provide an awesome post that’s associated with you and your brand name (an unstructured citation). When you’re shopping for guest-posting opportunities in the future, this will give you a leg up on the link-hungry wolves going after every blogger out there.

3. Six Two Degrees Of Seperation

This is a little bit of the first tactic, mixed in with a little bit of black-hat tactic, but cleaned up a bit to keep your site safe from harm.

Sometimes, you’ll get what should be a great link from a great, high-authority site. But, you’re just not getting the traffic you think you should from it. Maybe it just wasn’t a relevant or a popular idea yet, and kind of got buried in the noise. It might not have even been indexed. If it’s on a high-authority domain, it may be worth it to point some links at it to give it a bump. Once you help it get indexed and show the search engines a little bit of traction on it, often, it’ll start to inherit some of that high authority and begin to rank much better. It’s a great case for re-posting on your social media profiles, dropping a comment on a forum you frequent already if it’s a pertinent article, or (and here’s the little bit of black-hat for you) testing out that directory that you aren’t really quite sure about yet.

Just remember though, what goes around, comes around. Don’t get crazy and blast it with spammy links. As Wil Reynolds could tell you, that sort of thing can come back to haunt you.

Finally…

This all boils down to one idea: increasing and enhancing the rankability of other sites that can directly affect you in a positive way. The better those guys do in search, the more business that’ll be pushed your way. Search engine marketing sometimes takes some odd and unique ideas, and this is one that can work for you.

Twitter As An Authoritative Backlink

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A while back, I did an experiment trying to prove that while Twitter links are marked as nofollow, that they actually ARE followed.

I had a registered, but never-used domain. Google searches for the domain name yielded zero results. I published a simple, static HTML page (no possibility of trackbacks/pinging/RSS/etc.), and tweeted a link from a public Twitter account (the published link was nofollowed). Within 16 hours, the page was picked up and indexed.

This alone tells us multiple things:

  1. Links on Twitter accounts can be followed, regardless of the link state. I’m sure that some spammy accounts are “sandboxed” and not followed, but for the sake of discussion, we’re referring to good accounts.
  2. The next logical step here is to push for a self-hosted short URL service. Even though most services (like bit.ly) do 301-redirects, it’s better for it to redirect from your own domain.
  3. Links from good Twitter accounts are a probable ranking metric.

My personal Twitter account currently has a SEOMoz Page Authority of 58. That’s pretty respectable. So, it’s not crazy to assume some of that will get passed (Google did crawl the link, after all). If nothing else, it’s a great way to get a site indexed quickly!

Backlinking: High PR vs Relevancy

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In my most recent research, I’ve come to discover that the high PR versus relevancy debate is less important than most think.

The typical procedure for creating backlinks (from high PR sites) usually goes as follows: pick a keyword or a couple of keywords, start linking from high PR sites, and then wait for the traffic to come in on those keywords via boosted SERP rankings.

The relevant linking is much more drawn out. Join some sort of community, build a relationship, and people will naturally link to you, but most likely from low-PR sites that are usually, in the end, NOT relevant.

For the most powerful linking strategy, we need to combine the best parts of both procedures, and create one supercharged backlinking plan.

High-PR advantages:
1. High PR (obviously)
2. Bigger PR voting to Google

Relevancy advantages:
1. Narrowed scope of potential visitors (however, for normal backlinking, this isn’t really something we should worry about yet)
2. Diverse spread of anchor text

Take a look at the italicized items: High PR and diverse anchor text. I’ll skip the high PR one, since we all know that high PR is preferable, and focus on the second one; diverse anchor text.

Unless you stumble upon something that becomes an Internet meme overnight, building a lot of links in a relevant, organic manner will take months. The only benefit from this method is the diversity of anchor text that links back to your site. While you might have a site dedicated to “green widgets”, you could easily have anchor text linked from someone’s blog that reads “cool widget”, and yet another that used “cheapest widget I’ve found online”. Extrapolate a decent organic linking pace over a year, and you’ll have a respectable amount of backlinks with hugely varying anchor text.

Now, with the amount of refereeing that Google (and the other search engines) have been doing recently, it’s starting to become less easy to quickly build a library of links without unwillingly participating in the Google Dance.

So, how can we avoid this? Internet memes seem relatively unaffected by the Google Dance, yet it’s possible for thousands of links to a site to happen overnight.

By creating backlinks with a very diverse (15-20 at least) set of widely varying anchor texts (albeit linking back to one or two key pages), it’s possible (but not guaranteed) to sidestep Google’s penchant to temporarily penalize a page that suddenly gains a large number of incoming links. We know that this likely to work in most scenarios because of the way that Google already handles hot trends: by not penalizing seemingly organic waves of backlinks. It also gives the impression that the links are much less likely to be automatically generated, and the endpoint site is more likely relevant within a larger cross-section of varied, but related contexts for your subject/keyword..

Essentially, you’re creating your own “hot trend”, and because of the varying anchor texts, you’ll have a stronger position over a greater number of what should be longer-tail keywords (if you follow the formula for creating your anchor texts that I’ll show later).

Here’s the formula that I typically use, and seems to work fairly well:

50-60% of your anchor texts should be keywords containing the root keyword that vary slightly. For example, “red widgets”, “blue widgets”, and “green widgets” would all be good if you want to target “widgets”. You could even do something like “widgets repair”. They should all be (assuming you have a single-word keyword) 2 or 3 words, but preferably 2 words.

Some people will tell you that it doesn’t matter what the rest are, as long as they are somewhat relevant, but I disagree. I’ll take about half of what’s left (20-25%) and make up a short sentence with your keyword in it, and create a phrase anchor text. “I found a shop that repairs the special edition orange widgets for half of what the dealership does.” I would then use the full sentence for linking, and actually link only the italicized text as the anchor text. I will also make about 10 variations of sentences, repeating them only a few times (if at all).

As far as the rest of the links (20-25%), I will usually pick 3-5 high-converting, long-tail keywords (use AdWords to test for click-through rates from Google), and backlink those without ANY modification to the word itself.

So, to recap:
50-60% – Variation of primary keyword
20-25% – Phrase within a sentence, loosely-related to main keyword but highly relevant
20-25% – Only long-tail keywords, higher traffic ones with good conversion preferred

Try out this method in your next round of linking, and see if you can skip the Google Dance altogether!

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