Link Builder

Getting ranked on the 1st page of Google can send a large number of visitors to your website. One of the most important factors in getting ranked on Google in front of people searching for local businesses in your area are reviews of your business that exist online.

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Getting exposure on Forbes.com or CNBC is supposed to be for the most elite of elite companies. But with access to just a few simple tools and the discipline to spend 20 minutes per week, any business can get coverage on major media outlets and grow their business.

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Distributing press releases is not something that should be done specifically for SEO.  Reason being, they’re not as powerful as they used to be in boosting website authority. While you might get links to your website when the press release is distributed online, Google knows that these links are all coming from the same press release and the links are therefore discredited quite a bit (if not completely).

There are much better ways to get links to your website.

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The webinar today went great and we had a lot of unique businesses in attendance. We hope to see all of you on the next scheduled webinar.

Recap of Webinar Content

We discussed ways that you can boost your website’s authority with the goal of increasing your search engine rankings and online revenue.

We’ve published a recap video that you can view to look back on key concepts or see what we covered if you were unable to attend. Note that we keep the recap videos shorter than the actual webinar content to allow for brief viewing.

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We had a great event recently discussing how you can use blogger outreach to grow your business. By forming relationships with bloggers in your industry and providing them with compelling content based on your experience, you’re both winning: the blogger gets great content to share with their audience while you get exposure for your business, traffic to your website, and increased search engine rankings over time.

We also shared a special offer with attendees. In short, we can manage your entire blogger outreach campaign for you, including content creation and getting that content published to authoritative blogs within your industry. We’ve built relationships with numerous bloggers in many different niches which enables us to get content published quickly. We can share examples with you personally.

Contact us to discuss this opportunity if you’re interested. We only take on 2-3 new clients each month since we’re operating at pretty close to full capacity, so if you’re interested let us know reasonably far in advance of when you’d like to start your campaign.

Below are links for attendees to some of the tools and resources we discussed:

• Tools to create infographics and an example
• Tools to create screencast videos- Camtasia (recommended, but paid) and Camstudio (free)
• Creating in-person videos – Kodak ZI8 and video editing software
• Cartoon videos – DropBox example and PowToon.com to create your own
• SEOmoz / Open Site Explorer to identify popular posts on existing blogs – awesome 30-day trial
• Quickly list all of the suggested searches Google has for a specific topic- UberSuggest
• Get content ideas for Q&A websites and tutorial websites
• Google “Advanced Search Operators” to use Google to find prospective bloggers to work with
• Use Twitter to find guest blogging opportunities
• Sources for metrics used to prioritize bloggers: website traffic (Compete or Quantcast), SEO authority (SEOmoz or Google Page Rank), Twitter followers (via seeing Twitter profile), and recent blog post activity (Google site search).
• Tools for monitoring blogs efficiently: Flipboard or Google Reader and Pocket.
• Tools for engaging with bloggers efficiently: Hootsuite
• Boomerang for Gmail helps you schedule emails to send in the future, manage followup efficiently, and much more
• Measure exposure from your campaign: new traffic to your website (segmented referral traffic in Google Analytics), new website links and SEO metrics related to those links (Raven or Google Docs), and social media engagement with your content (Social Mention or Sprout Social).

*We’ll be doing another full webinar or blog video about how to use Google Docs coding features to quickly build your list since there was a lot of interest in that. Details coming soon, but make sure you’re on our events list.

Jon Tucker, Senior Strategist here at Compete Marketing Group, recently published a guest blog post with Vistage International. Vistage International provides executive development to CEOs of companies around the world through unique CEO peer groups.

The full post discusses ways that SEO fits in to many businesses and can be found here. Leave a comment there to receive replies directly from Jon, as he’ll be moderating the comments section for the post.

Getting links to your website is an important part of increasing your Google rankings- but it’s not easy to do. We’re always working with our SEO and link building clients to come up with unique ways to get links.

In some cases, creating a photo slideshow that can be shared within your market can be a great way to do this.

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In order to increase your Google rankings, it’s important to always be pursuing link building- that is, you should be constantly getting links to your website so that Google can see that you’re an authority in your niche.

The problem here is link building is not easy to do.

Link Building Opportunities Are Everywhere

While basic link building tactics like directory submissions might seem obvious, finding ways to outsmart your competitors and get unique links can be challenging unless you know where to look. When we work with our SEO clients, we take the time to look deep into every aspect of their business and develop a very unique link building campaign that leverages aspects of their business that competitors can’t duplicate.

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A large focus of pursuing search engine optimization (SEO) to increase the Google rankings of your business involves studying the market and competitors. Specifically, it’s important to identify why certain websites rank on the first page of Google in your market and how they differ from your website.

Think of ranking on the first page of Google as a “club”- the websites that are ranked are in Google’s “first page club” for specific reasons and your website may not be there if you don’t look similar to Google in terms of the metrics Google considers when ranking websites.

Here’s a glimpse of the analytical process we go through to learn specifically why competitors rank in your market, how your website differs from them, and what you can do to get into “the first page of Google club”.

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While going to trade shows and conferences can help you network with others in your industry, it can also be a great way to gain website traffic and links to your website.

“Live blogging” is basically providing real time commentary about an event while you’re there. You can do it via Twitter, but for this particular example you should be using your blog instead since you want people reading about the event on your website and linking to your content.

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