When Outspoken Media started working with Shem Cohen on strategic planning, team building, and organizational development, though, I stumbled upon more “ah-ha!” moments in our daily operations. They reinvigorated my love for the industry and Outspoken Media in general. Turns out, my assumptions about productivity and working with others were false and were hindering progress, not facilitating it. This is what I learned about making assumptions.

Assumptions Crush Productivity

Assumptions are easy to come by in this industry and I believe many online marketing strategies are based on them. This is an industry-wide challenge, because misreading analytics data can quickly lead to lofty assumptions, which can derail a campaign. It’s important to minimize them as much as possible to improve productivity and show results.

During the self-discovery and team exercises, I was able to learn what is important to my coworkers regarding work processes. Knowing this makes it easier to determine when and how to approach people involved in a specific project. Now I can get the best possible results when working on a project. With motivational knowledge at my fingertips, I am able to pull actionable work and feedback from the team, which makes my process more efficient, and in the end, results in even more successful campaigns for our clients.

Assumptions Are Not Goal-Oriented

Assumptions are placed on people, whereas goals focus on the big picture. Rather than working from a set of assumptions about a person or a task, refocus on the purpose of work–both your personal purpose within an organization, and the higher purpose your client is trying to achieve. This will make it easier to come up with high-performance link building methods and a content marketing strategy that converts. It’s also more fulfilling on a personal level when you can understand the reason for something, not just that it was assigned.

Remember also that your priorities may not always be the biggest priorities for everyone else. I had to realize that the answer I wanted wasn’t always the highest priority for the client or team. I can’t take that stuff personally. Rather, I had to anticipate answer times and schedule my work accordingly. This assumption isn’t a new one that came out of the work we did with Shem, but it is one that helped me become more proactive in scheduling and management of my pieces of the project puzzle. It’s why we created the link building strategies spreadsheet, to help navigate obstacles in an organization and still get the job done.

Assumptions About Motivations Create Roadblocks

If we work with assumptions as the norm long enough, they become just that, and efficiency is lost. My first months at Outspoken were spent assuming my co-workers knew what motivated me. That was a problem. During some of the self-discovery processes with Shem, I was able to share with my coworkers the things I discovered about myself. One of my discoveries was that I need projects and processes to happen in steps with feedback. We implemented this on a large audit which we split into sections, which helped us tackle issues as they came up, not as sweeping changes at the end of the project.

If we hadn’t shared with each other our motivating factors and how we work best, we would all be making assumptions about one another and creating unnecessary roadblocks. We see assumptions every day in the workplace, and especially in SEO. An executive assumes they know what keyword they need to rank for, and agencies assumes the executive’s motives are uninformed. The truth is, both parties may be wrong and right. The executive may know his business and goals better than the agency, but the agency may better understand the obstacles to achieving those goals. Before fighting over assumptions, clarify motives. Goals can be achieved through methods that make both parties happy.

Don’t let assumptions ruin an otherwise great project or working relationship with your coworkers. Get to know their motivators and use them for good in your organization. It will make working together exciting, and the results stellar.

Embracing Your Extrovert in Business
Three Lessons for Business and Life
Aligning Keyword Strategy with Corporate Goals
Corporate Culture for Introverts

If it seems a little suspect though, it probably is, and it won’t end well. Just yesterday, Search Engine Land posted about Google “releasing a new search algorithm it hopes will better catch people who spam its search results or purposely do things to rank better.” So let’s hope your brilliant idea isn’t the SEO tramp stamp!

What is the SEO tramp stamp?

Links back to your site in your client’s footer. It’s shameless self-promotion, and speaks volumes about the types of links you’ll shoot for in client campaigns. The SEO tramp stamp is link spam of the sketchy variety, and here’s why we say no to it.

Your Link Spam Just Threw You Under the Bus

Because Google relies heavily on its link-based algorithm, and because the links you plop in the footer aren’t there because of merit, your tramp stamp is quite arguably link spam. Wait, isn’t spam bad for SEO?

Yes it’s bad for SEO, but this kind isn’t considered by all to be bad because it produces ranking results. “But, so do a whole bunch of other shady link building techniques!” I’d be willing to bet that the same SEOs who tramp stamp the footer would balk at other spammy techniques, but for some reason, this one prevails.

The reason this is bad is because it shows that spam is not beneath you, and gaining links in an editorial manner (which are much more meaningful, valuable, and built for longevity) may not be your strong suit. That’s bad, and not in the cool Michael Jackson sort of way.
So if spam is your strong point, your short-term victories are not scalable, and won’t produce long-term results. And we know long-term results mean everything to the business owner who is trying to make a prolonged, sustainable profit. If your clients barely stay in business, how can you?

Your Stamp Hurts the Trust and Relevance of Your Clients’ Sites

I’m all for the quick wins when it comes to link building, but a quick-win link doesn’t have to compromise your client’s site, or your integrity as an SEO. You wouldn’t link to your client from your own footer because the link isn’t relevant, it provides no additional value to your site, and you know the link juice could be used strategically elsewhere on your own site. You don’t like link juice leaks, and neither does your client (if they know better).

Yeah, but does it work?

Sure it does. Even if it isn’t the Willy Wonka golden ticket in your backlink profile, there’s a good chance it is helping.

I’ll give you a quick example. I recently came across an SEO/Web Design company that is killing it in the local SERPs. I do, however, know of other local companies that are delivering a higher caliber of work with their SEO consulting (and design chops).

I jumped into Open Site Explorer, and in a mere five seconds, I was able to see that the majority of backlinks on the first two pages of results were coming from keyword-rich anchor text in their clients’ footers. The average Page Authority of each link was 49, and the average domain authority was 53.

Not the highest P.A. and D.A., but if they’re getting tons of these links over the years, from a multitude of .coms and .orgs that are aging, that’s surely helping them rank really well, at least locally.

So yes, it works. And yes, it has worked for a long time. So when is Google going to drop the guillotine on this tactic? Google is already dropping the hammer on less than valuable/relevant links, so the tramp stamp can’t be far behind. SEO tramp stampers: Just like the tramp stamp tattoo fad, so too will your link popularity fade. Get to work on increasing your quality signals now, before it’s too late. Get to know about the Google over-optimization penalty, though. SEOmoz has a whole Whiteboard Friday video that, which you should watch.

Bad Neighborhoods Breed Bad Link Karma

Unless you’re actively involved with link building for each client that has your link stamped in the footer, you’re just asking for trouble. The point being, you have no idea how they are building their link profile, or if there is any quality to them at all.
For all you know, they are out buying links, attaining tons of links from seriously low quality pages, and creating a bad neighborhood for you to be linked to. I suppose you could check every client’s backlink profile on a regular basis—or you could spend that time building quality links back to your site instead! The latter would be so much more beneficial to you in the long run.

Recently, Wil Reynolds of SEER Interactive posted about the issues they were having with rank (banned in Google for 12 hours, to be exact) and he commented, “Oh one more, watch which clients you link to, that’s all I’m sayin.” Along the same line as a bad link profile linking back to you, if you’re linking out to a site that is involved in shady practices, the bad link karma can go both ways.

People Hate to Get Burned—So Do Your Clients

How many times has your site gotten spammed? Your e-mail?
Just as we can’t stand getting caught in the quagmire of spam, they can’t stand it either. Some SEOs, though, are taking advantage of a client site only to get more business for themselves. Those who are succeeding at self-promoting, footer-link spam are only preying on those who don’t know any better (clients).

• If you were hired to implement an e-mail campaign for a client, you wouldn’t slip an ad for your SEO business in it, would you?
• If you were hired to run a social media campaign for your client, you wouldn’t tweet about your business would you?
• If you create an infographic for a client, you don’t link back to yourself, do you?

Spend Time on Quality Self-Promotion and Links

Rhea recently shared a link building spreadsheet, and even if you’ve already taken a look at it, it deserves a second and third look. If you haven’t seen it, download it and use it because there’s no excuse for crap links. You’ll know what works, how much time you need, and who to get them from. In the meantime, let’s look at a short list of things you can do to promote yourself and get quality, meaningful links back to your site:

• Create engaging, meaningful, sharable content
• Create educational content
• Give something away
• Create tools, widgets, badges
• Sponsor events
• Use PR outreach
• Participate in social media marketing
• Write guest posts
• Create contests

The list of link building strategies (originally published by Jon Cooper) is long and I get it—it takes work. But hard work pays off, and the SEO tramp stamp isn’t work at all. Think about it. The tattoo tramp stamp looks desperate (no offense to the ladies…or men) and cheap. It has that nickname for a reason! Don’t give your client a bad reputation for personal gain. We’re better than that as an industry.

If you haven’t been able to attend a LinkLove conference, add it to your list of things to do as an SEO because the rapid-fire presentations are varied and chock-full of actionable tools, techniques, and trends that can easily translate into further success for your campaigns. In three simple words, LinkLove doesn’t disappoint.

Not sure how to attend a conference? Here are some tips:

Now, let’s take a look at some of the key takeaways from Linklove that resonated strongly with me, and how we at Outspoken Media will make use of them for our clients, and for our internal processes.

F#$%! Link Building—Rand Fishkin

In Rand Fishkin’s presentation “F#$%! Linking Building—Content Marketing FTW,” (slides here) he truly drove home the point that social signals continue to be increasingly important to search engine algorithms. While links are still important, appealing to the social side of the web is key to staying in line with where the search engines are taking the algorithm. Later in the day, Wil Reynolds spoke about cultivating relationships socially for links, but Rand’s point about great content and social signals is surely a foundation for actual content to link to. Beyond that, creating content that drives long-term value to a website is vital.

Simply building links doesn’t cut it, from either a tactical or strategic point of view.

At Outspoken Media, we’re already sticklers for good content strategy, and we have a great content strategist, so the biggest takeaway for me was how to use tools to help crowdsource content topics built for longevity. Some of those tools include followerwonk, Topsy and Google Discussions, which can all help generate kickass content ideas aligned with satisfying a need for an audience in any niche.

Best in Show: Tools for Building Links—John Doherty

I was fortunate enough to meet John after his presentation, and he’s a super nice guy who happens to have a robust link-building tool belt to work with. There were so many tool descriptions in his presentation, I felt like a kid in a candy store. As much as I like to be a purist, nothing can replace having good tools at your fingertips that help streamline your process, save you time, and give you a competitive advantage. And like John says, the right tools “speed up parts of link building so we can focus more on outreach.”

See John’s complete presentation for yourself, but let’s look at a handful of tools I’d like to use more in our everyday work lives here at Outspoken Media.

Tools That Stood Out

Link Prospector by Citation Labs
Manually prospecting for links is a necessary skill for SEOs and link builders. It teaches you how to quickly evaluate link prospects, but the process can be a slow one. That’s where Link Prospector comes in handy. The tool allows you to enter the keywords you desire, and choose the type of link prospects you’re looking for—blogs, interviews, charitable sites, directories, guest-posting, and many more. Using the common (and not-so-common) search queries used by pro link builders, Link Prospector saves you a lot of time and returns lists of prospects that you can save in your profile as campaigns. Once that heavy lifting is done, you move on to evaluating the link prospects, and then on to pitching!

Engag.io
Apart from a lot of emphasis on social signals and building social relationships for better link building, John seemed pumped about using this social conversation tool, as am I. The tool is free, and it serves as a way to visualize and track online conversations in order to build better, more meaningful relationships. Touted as an inbox for your Facebook and Twitter accounts, this tool seems like the right tool at the right time for keeping conversations together.

Building Targets, Relationships and Links—Wil Reynolds

I hadn’t seen Wil speak in person before, but I’ve certainly read enough posts, seen enough tweets, and watched him on video enough times to know he is a very intelligent and engaging speaker. My expectations were definitely met, and then some.

Wil talked about stalking—but the good kind of stalking! If you weren’t able to see the presentation, it’s really his tongue-in-cheek way of making four points (at least, four for me) about building relationships for more links and shares:

1. If someone seems like an influencer in whatever space you’re trying to dominate, forge a relationship. Find out as much about them as possible and appeal to their needs. Stalk them, which means help them. Share with them. Connect with them.
2. If you run into roadblocks when trying to collect as much data as you can about them, don’t give up. You’ll most likely find a solution right around the corner.
3. Work smarter, not harder. Wil presented some clever and time-saving ways to stalk the influencer by collecting data all in one place with your iGoogle page so you’re always in the know and can easily handpick the ways you make a connection. Helping someone with a question or concern is the most successful means of creating a relationship with that person.
4. Relationships, relationships, relationships. This can’t be underscored enough. Through our link building efforts, we understand the importance of building a rapport. But when you build a relationship, you have an exponentially better chance of not just getting a single link, but getting multiple links, multiple shares on social media, and creating a relationship for long-term value.

How to Measure and Report on Link Building—Justin Briggs

Justin is no stranger to Outspoken Media (you can read his post about Content-based Outreach for Link Building right here on our blog) and I was super-impressed and inspired by his presentation at LinkLove.

Justin was very frank with everyone on how most reporting is done (number of links, rank and traffic, etc.), and how, more often than not, this practice can miss the mark on more valuable and meaningful metrics. While link building is concentrated on the hustle and nose-to-the-grindstone hard work, there’s an entire financial side to it for the client and the link builder.

For example, if you’re just building links for the sake of having something to report at the end of the month or quarter, however you do your reporting, you’re missing the biggest point of all—your client is probably looking to increase revenue, market-share, and/or influence, not just get links. There’s a financial piece to link building, and if you can deliver reports based on revenue, you’re not only satisfying the client, you’re most likely being more strategic in the types of links your targeting. Both of those practices outweigh the number of links, the simple rank report, and the simple traffic report that many link builders are churning out each month.

A takeaway from his presentation is that if you change the way you’re reporting, and focus reporting on revenue in relation to content and links, it can help you strategize content differently, and help your team come up with even more engaging ideas.

Marketing with Pinterest—Colby Almond

Colby Almond says he doesn’t look for attention. He’s that guy who likes to be behind the scenes. That’s about to change, though, because he gave an incredible presentation about marketing with Pinterest, and he had some amazing data to back up his strategies.

Colby outlined the specific types of content that attract clicks, the exact sizes the content should be, and even the best times to pin that content. He coined the term “instructographics” because of his discovery that how-to content gets the most click-throughs. Colby showed the audience examples of instructional content combined with images. Keep your instructographics simple and engaging with only a handful of steps, using images that match each step. The ideal size of each image should be 500px wide, and no more than 2000px high. When it comes time to pin your content, the peak times for repins and clicks is 6am and 6pm Monday through Friday and 8pm on Sundays.

Prior to watching Colby speak, I had seen some of the value that Pinterest has, but after his presentation, I gained a new respect and came to more realizations of the huge marketing value that exists with Pinterest. And guys, if you’ve been avoiding Pinterest because “it’s just for women,” you’re missing out!

At Outspoken Media, we’re already generating ideas for marketing with Pinterest, and can’t wait to see where it goes. You should be, too.

Until Next Year, LinkLove

It was so exciting to attend LinkLove Boston with Rhea and Michelle. We’re already implementing many of the ideas we heard there. Thank you Distilled, all of the speakers, and Boston. See you next year, and we hope you can make it there as well!

Outlined below you’ll find what I’ve called the power audit. It will give you a 1000-foot view of the page you’re looking to get a link from and help you determine whether it’s worth the effort. From there, you can do a little more investigating to strategize how you’ll approach your prospects. You can also download the Link Prospect Power Audit PDF and print out a desk reference version of the steps.

So, get your list of link prospects together (the one you put together with the help of these link building tools) and begin the elimination process like so:

Step One: Does the site offer value?

Watch out for sites that:

• Were built just to sell ads.
• Are a “thin” affiliate.
• Accept paid links.
• Have malware or other warnings.
• Are doorway pages.
• Were built for search engines, not users.
• Do not offer relevant, unique content.

If it passes the initial snuff test, head to Step Two.

Step Two: Does the site have suspicious outbound links?

Watch out for links that:

• Do not appear to be related to the content of the site.
• Link to spammy sites or sites in a bad neighborhood.
• Are hidden in the code or content.
• Appear to be paid and not disclosed.

Step Three: Does the site look “healthy”?

Verify the site is:

• Indexed in Google.
• Has Pagerank.
• Has inbound links*
• Is linked to from related/content-relevant sources

*Review backlink history by using a tool like OpenSiteExplorer.org or MajesticSEO.com. Group the backlinks by domain and check again to see if the top links are from sources relevant to the content on the page/site. Not all of them have to, but the top links really should contain relevant content links.

Step Four: Does the site get traffic?

Run it through either google.com/adplanner or compete.com and get a bird’s eye view (not exact) of how much traffic the site gets. This will help you determine if you can expect any click-thru traffic.

Step Five: Decisions

If your prospect has passed your micro-audit, the URL should be saved in your master list (an Excel file would be fantastic, or use a paid solution Raven SEO Tools or Buzzstream) for later. This is a link you should go after. The idea here is to grow your master list of prospects so that you can then spend more time with it later. When your list is complete, you can determine what type of link you hope to get (e.g., a guest post, directory listing, site-wide link, etc.) and start to strategize your approach/pitch.

It probably goes without saying, but if your link prospect doesn’t pass the audit checklist, move on and do not pursue the link (or do so cautiously).

Link Prospect Power Audit PDF

This strategy is built for speed and it should help the SEO new to link prospecting learn how to flex their link audit muscles. For the more experienced link builder, it’s a good way to get a quick overall picture and/or help train other link builders to spot good prospects. By no means should it replace a full-on audit of link prospects as there is much more that goes into finding and qualifying them, but for those who need a strategy on-the-fly, this works great. The power audit is just a piece of the link building pie, so from here you’ll want to develop an actionable link building plan.

Go ahead, download and print out the Link Prospect Power Audit PDF and use it as a quick desk reference of all of the steps I’ve outlined above.

What are Regular Expressions?

Regular Expressions are text patterns that can contain combinations of alphanumeric and special characters. If you’ve ever had the need to use Wildcards, you’ll recognize the similarity. The text pattern that you create with Regular Expressions (RegEx) is used to match and describe characters and words — think of it as more powerful filtering. Using RegEx in Google Analytics can help merge tech with marketing, taking your data beyond the standard goals and filters available to you in Analytics. Although we’re only talking about the pipe today, know that there are 11 other RegEx symbols that can be used in conjunction with each other in a multitude of combinations to extract really meaningful data.

For SEO, you can use RegEx to create more robust filters, or goals that match multiple pages, and make your funnels more specific. More data, I know, but done right and it’s better data. More meaningful, more important.

An Example

Let’s say you’re optimizing for “Christmas Fruitcake Recipes.” When you look at your organic keyword data in Google Analytics, you get a long list of every phrase that sent traffic to your site during a given period. Now, here’s where it can get more interesting. We can use a regular expression to filter that keyword data to gain even more insight. We’ll use the example I’m talking about to filter our imaginary data using the RegEx known as the pipe.

What is the RegEx Pipe and What Does it Do?

The pipe is probably the simplest RegEx that you’ll use and it simply means ‘or’. Simple as that. If we used the pipe (and why the heck would we) in written English it would look like this:

Have you been naughty | nice

(I intentionally left the question mark off that because that character is a RegEx too. No gain in confusing you from the start).

The above phrase would read “Have you been naughty or nice”

Show Me How to Use This RegEx!

In my example above, I am optimizing for “Christmas Fruitcake Recipes” but I want to only see keyword and organic traffic data for phrases that include ‘fruitcake’ OR ‘recipe’ and keep the rest out of the list. To do so, I’d look at my organic keyword data (remember, at this point it’s just a long list of all phrases that sent traffic) and set my Advanced Keyword Dimension to Matching RegExp and type: fruitcake | recipe. (Remember, the pipe is that character that is most likely above your Enter key). My new list of keywords will now only contain phrases that have ‘fruitcake’ or ‘recipe’ and filter out all the rest. I can now see how much traffic the phrases (with either of those words) are sending organically. Simple, but useful example.

I encourage you to learn more about RegEx and then decipher my holiday greeting below! And, if you have a better one, comment and let us know!

Happy (Holidays | (Christ|x )mas) | (Ch|H)anukk?ah | Kwanzaa

[This post is part of our 12 Days of SEO series where we'll be publishing a different nugget of knowledge related to the sounds of the season. We'll be updating the 12 Days of SEO page as new posts are published.]

Golden Link #1

http://mentionmapp.com

Mentionmapp is a simple tool to help you discover groups of people that Twitter users connect with the most. Simple: Enter a Twitter handle and watch a map of connections appear. Thicker lines indicate more interactions and recent mention between individuals.

Mentionmapp for Link Prospecting
If you’re always looking for new ways to build links, an immediate opportunity with Mentionmapp lies in discovering contact webs. Using the map, make a list of Twitter handles and corresponding websites (their profile information is displayed in the tool) in an Excel spreadsheet. Those who make the list are probably worth seeking a link from. After making a healthy list of prospects, run the Web sites of those prospects through a backlink service. If you use something like Open Site Explorer, export your backlinks to a new spreadsheet.

Run a backlink report for your domain. Now, compare the links to your domain with the link prospects you identified before. Remove the duplicates in Excel and what remains is a list of sites you want to attain backlinks from since they haven’t linked to you yet. Even better, you’ve got their Twitter handles. Consider setting up a list on Twitter to keep tabs on their activity and see where there’s an opportunity for you to request a link, provide content with a backlink, or develop potential partnerships.

If you’re not already following the people on that list, do so. Also, read Elf Emily’s post for Twitter n00bs if you need a little more help on getting the most out of Twitter.

Golden Link #2

http://analyzewords.com

Analyze Words is great because it helps you determine the personality of the Twitter handle you’re about to pitch. It does this by analyzing the words a Twitter account used most recently. Then it assigns sentiment and other psychographic labels to the Twitter account. Wouldn’t it be nice to know the personality of the person you’re about to pitch so you could better approach them? I’d like that, and this tool makes it easier to do so.

Golden Link #3

http://www.ispionage.com/

The free tools (they also have a paid suite) available from iSpionage are great for both quick and comprehensive competitive keyword and content intelligence.

SEO Data
With the SEO portion of their reports, you can get PageRank data quickly, along with a graph showing the number of pages a domain has in the top three spots on Google (as well as pages in the top ten).

Keyword Research Anyone?
In addition to interesting PPC and organic value data you can use to make something awesome, check out the related keywords that are generated (and delivered with search volume) for further keyword research:

The report helps you find new keywords, but takes it a step further and finds high-volume phrases your site isn’t targeting. Generate new content to support these phrases, and you’ll give your audience something that may have been missing.

Golden Link #4

http://www.silktide.com/products

While there are a handful of tools here, I chose to try their SiteBeam product. I can’t speak for the other tools on the site. What this tool does is analyze your Web site, and create a presentation or PDF based on the results.

I like it for two reasons. For the more seasoned SEO, it provides a lot of information and metrics in an easy-to-manage format—perfect for a very quick audit, but I’m not sure it should replace anything from an SEO purist standpoint. The second reason I’d use this is to help train newbies to understand some of the basics of an audit. Reason being, each metric it returns comes with a brief explanation as to why that metric is important. Using this tool, you get everything from SEO to social media to technical data to writing quality and spelling and more.

Why I Like it for Link Building

First off, this wouldn’t be my end-all tool for auditing a competitor’s site, but I could get a sense of what’s working for them—and against them—in a short amount of time. I’d use the reports to look at internal links and how they use anchor text to link pages, their popularity (including social metrics and inbound links). The incoming links tab pulls from SEOmoz data and gives me a paragraph summary as to how the tool thinks their link strategy is working. Again, my best advice for using this tool is for a quick and dirty audit to provide initial insight, and as a teaching aid for those new to the industry. This is especially true if you’re trying to teach the importance of, and connection between, on-page factors being synergistic with link building and social efforts.

Golden Link #5

Wait a second! No link, you say?! Well, you’re right. Now that I’ve shared my link finds, tell us about one of your gems that you might not usually share with others. Come on, it’s the holiday season…share! Post your tool pick in the comments and let the conversation begin!

[This post is part of our 12 Days of SEO series where we'll be publishing a different nugget of knowledge related to the sounds of the season. We'll be updating the 12 Days of SEO page as new posts are published.]