2010年6月14日 星期一

*How to Get Links in Tough Industries
*by Paddy_Moogan
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/e3tjSeTPsCk/how-to-get-links-in-tough-industries


Posted by Paddy_MooganHowdy
SEOmozzers I’m Paddy Moogan I work for Distilled in the UK office.
This is my first SEOmoz post, hope you find it useful and I look forward to
your feedback. How this post came together...
A few weeks ago we decided to try to help people who do link building in
industries where links are not always easy to come by.  We created a
form which asked people two questions - What industry do you
work in that you believe it is very hard to get links for? If you
could get a link from one website in your industry, what would it be?
We've received loads of great replies and I'm going to cover as
many as possible here.  The second question was optional and didn't
have to be related to the industry.  Any websites not related
to an industry will be covered at the end of the post.  I'm hoping to
do another post soon which will cover the rest of the submissions.
My Approach My usual approach to link building is
based on the site itself and identifying what makes that website link
worthy, obviously I can't use that approach in this situation!  Instead
I'm going to suggest asking yourself four questions -
Important Note: Please do not bypass "Why will they
link to me?".  This is probably the hardest question to answer and
will require work to get right.  Link building is hard work mainly
because you need to spend time creating content that someone wants to link
to, if you put time and resource into this part of the process, the rest
isn't as difficult. I'm going to follow this process for some of the
sites on this list so that even if non of these sites are in your industry,
you can still use the same process to identify link building opportunities
for yourself.  The rest of the sites will have some quick tips and
ideas for getting links. Industries that are Tough to get Links
for Here are some of the suggestions we had submitted for tough
industries to get links for. Veterinarians
Who you want a link from:  Any person who owns a pet
and a website How you are going to get their attention: 
There are lots and lots of forums and online
communities out there based around various types of pets.  Joining some
of these and posting a few bits of free veterinary advice would certainly
get their attention. How you are going to get a link:
Start a Q&A section where users can submit a question and
receive free advice from one of your expert vets.  Capture a persons
Twitter, Facebook or website address when they ask a question.  Then
prioritise questions by those who have a website and answer those
first.  Ask them to share the answer on their website as a thank
you Add a Jobs Board to your site, if you have a Wordpress blog here is a
method on how to do it.  Allow other Veterinarians to post job
vacancies to your site and encourage them to promote it on their own
site. Ask users to submit photos of their animals and award a prize
for the cutest - design a badge for them to use on their website with their
pets picture on it - link this to the competition page.  SEOs seem to
love cats so I had to include a least one picture! Image source
Quick Link Targets: Veterinarian Business websites, this
search of Dmoz gives you a few good sites to contact
 Jewelry Ecommerce  Who you want a
link from: A jewelry making website or blog How you are
going to get their attention:  There are lots of active
forums in this industry where you can make contacts and provide good
information.  This Twitter
list search also provides you with lots of people to contact and
interact with. How you are going to get a link:
Run a competition and ask designers and students to design a piece of
jewelry which you will feature on your website.  Put all the entries on
your website and encourage the entrants to share the link and get their
friends to vote for them Create a page on your website that
calculates the current price of gold, allow it to be shared easily and
embedded on other websites.  You can approach pawnbrokers and see if
they want to use the calculator on their own website and credit you with a
link Link bait ideas - Men are notoriously bad at buying jewelry
and always need help figuring out what to buy and in particular what size
ring to buy.  A Mens Guide to Buying Jewelry would work quite
well.  Another idea would be to name the top x ways of proposing to
your girlfriend.  I wonder if this
would make the list :) A bit of a combination of the previous ideas
- create a calculator that will tell a guy how much he should spend on an
engagement ring Quick Link Target:
Bonus ecommerce tip for all sites which have offline
stores - find out if any of them are within a shopping centre or
complex.  If the complex has a website listing all of its shops, ask
them for a link.  Here is an example of a shop doing this from the Bullring
Shopping Centre in the UK -
iPhone Apps for the SEO Industry I have to admit,
this was one of the easiest ones on the list, SEOs love to link to cool apps
especially SEO ones! Ideal person to get a link from: An Experienced
SEO Blogger with a Large Following How to get their attention: 
The SEO industry is very active on Twitter, start following your link target
and RT them, ask them questions and generally be nice! How you
are going to get a link:  If it is a paid app, give
out free copies to top SEO bloggers for them to review If the app
is not yet public, give them super secret behind the scenes access to it so
they can test it - in exchange for a review If the app is already
public, when you add a new feature, ask SEO bloggers to beta test it for
you. Quick Link Targets: Submit your App to
all of these, they give you a link back form your App page http://www.apple.com/webapps/
http://www.igoapps.com/

http://www.appstorehq.com/developers http://appshopper.com/
Electric Bikes Who you want a link
from:  A blogger who loves anything eco-friendly, ideally
they will have a bicycle of their own at the moment How you are
going to get their attention:  There are several online
communities that you could leverage for outreach.  These include
cycling activists and associations, many of whom are active on Twitter such
as http://twitter.com/CTC_Cyclists. 
There is also the "green" community who encourage the use of
eco-friendly products. How you are going to get a link:
Create a calculator which tells someone how much they currently
spend on a petrol car or bike along with how much damage this does to the
environment.  Make this shareable and send it to bloggers who talk
about environmental issues Setup a classifieds section of the
website where users can sell their old bikes, you can then ask them to
include a link from the British
Cycling website if they are a member of the association
Quick Links:
http://www.swindonclimate.org.uk/ElectricBikes - there are lots of sites
like this in other areas
http://www.energysavingtrust.org.uk/Resources/Product-reviews/Nigel-s-eco-product-reviews
- get a product review
http://www.atob.org.uk/Electric_price_tag.html#h7 - sorry I know that
one is a nofollow!
http://www.ecobusinesslinks.com/electric_vehicles_bikes_conversion_parts.htm
Sound Masking Link bait idea - overheard
office conversations.  This has the potential to be a funny piece of
content but with a serious end to it - the need for sound masking in an open
plan office.  A good example may be the Head of the HR department
speaking about employees in an office which has no sound masking, this could
lead to a title such as "Office Conversations you wish you hadn't
heard" etc. Image Source
These guys have created a few graphics to
help people understand what sound masking is.  This could be executed
and presented in a much better way.  You could create a "before
and after" graphic of a sound masking installation to show the effect
it has on the workplace.  This could even be tied in with some nice
stats and graphs on how it improves efficiency as well.  Eg after sound
masking you can expect an x% increase in efficiency. Business
Training - Business NLP There is an active forum here - http://nlp-experts.org/forum.php
which seems to have a small Twitter following as well.  The guy who
runs this seems to have some authority in the area and a network of websites
which help promote his main business.  If you do a backlink check on
the forum you'll find some of these as well as other NLP sites you could get
links from. Classifieds/Online Marketplace
Here I'd focus on certain sections of the site, for example if you have a
section with classified ads for used cars.  Focus on this sector and
how to get links, one idea would be to go out to car enthusiast
websites and offer them a widget or feed which displays a few of the
classified ads on their website.  This would work well if you found a
site with a focus on a certain make such as BMW.  You could just give
them a feed for this section so that it will be of interest to their
users. Here is an example of how Auto Trader are doing this on the Guardian website - If
you have a pets section, you could also use the ideas outlined above in the
Veterinarians section. Fashion Shopping Portal
Ecommerce websites are often seen as difficult to get links for, I can
see why as it's hard to attract links to a product page or category
page.  The solution is to think about the industry as a whole and what
content you can add to other parts of your website to get links
flowing in.  There are other methods which I talk about in the next
section. I'm going to cheat here and repeat a tip - add a jobs board
which lets fashion students see an updated list of jobs.  The reason
I'm repeating this tip is that you can try to get links from high value
pages such as this
and this. 
Another approach would be to write a guide on How to Get a Job in the
Fashion Industry, if you can make this a good guide then you will appeal to
loads of websites including this one.
Link Building to an Ecommerce Site with thousands of
Products The challenge here is finding a solution that is
scalable, manually building links to thousands of individual pages isn't
very practical.  Here is a great
article written by Rob which gives you a few starting points. 
There is also this head-smacking
tips from Rand which is very scalable no matter how many products you
have, its just a case of automating the follow up email. I genuinely
think that the key to a successful strategy here is to get your customers to
do the link building for you.  Try to add user generated content to
every product page along with making products as easy to share as possible
via social media.  Here is an idea of enhancing a standard
product page where buyers can leave reviews - Get customers to upload
their videos and photos of their new product to you, then when it has been
approved, drop them an email to let them know.  Within this email
include a line similar to the head smacking tip I've linked to above. 
Ask the person to blog about the content or share it with friends. 
Again this is very scalable as it can be automated after the review has been
approved. Gambling Ok, I'll admit this is a
difficult one!  I'd take a similar approach to link building for
ecommerce sites, there needs to be another angle built into the website to
attract links.  People are not going to naturally link to a small
gambling site without a very good reason.  So give them a good
reason, one may be - Holding the licence to a famous brand that has
been turned into a game - an example being movies that are turned into slot
machine games.  You can reach out to the online communities around the
brand.  Also, many online slot machines started their life as an
offline game - try reaching out to users of the offline game and ask them to
spread the word that there is actually an online version too
Clothing - No Branded Stuff I'd target a very
specific market here to get links from - fashion students.  If you are
not selling branded clothing, then you can appeal to young, creative
clothing designers who want to make a name for themselves.  You can
contact Universities and Colleges to ask if students want to contribute
designs to your site in exchange for some publicity, they could link to it
from the University website to help promote it.   The other
angle here is to contact individual fashion students with their own blogs
such as this one who
may want to take part themselves, then link to their design once it is live
on your website.  I also found this competition
which you could do an online version of. Web
Hosting A quick win here would be to ask sites who use your
service link to you from their website.  In the same way a web design
firm may receive a link, its something that Fasthosts seem to do as you can
see on this website.
Also submitted with this industry was a website that is hard to get links
from, the site was http://www.php.net so
I'm going to include this here as well. http://www.php.net/links.php Here
are a few ways to get links from this page: Publish a news
feed, you can do this by hiring a guest author if you have limited in-house
resource If you have a member of staff who speaks another language,
ask them to start writing a section on your site in that languauge
Create some cool merchandise - the geekiest the better!  A t-shirt
which is only funny if you are a PHP coder could work quite well
There is also the possibility of getting a link from http://www.php.net/conferences/ if you
run a conference on PHP. Components for Microsoft Visual
Studio This is quite a big area which can improve the scope
of the websites that you can target.  I found http://www.mcmsfaq.com/links.asp which
links to a number of websites who work with various Microsoft
technologies. Another quick win would be to ask for a link from the
companies you work with, especially if you do any work with .NET on their
websites or have build various components of their systems. Websites
that people struggle to get links from  Here are a few websites
submitted to us that people wanted to get a link from. http://www.reiclub.com
This is a Real Estate Investing website, they have a few different forums on various
topics.  You can have a link in your forum signature but they have a
number of rules to follow.  Make sure you are contributing to the forum
and helping people before you start dropping links, otherwise I doubt
the links will stay there for long. If you are a money lender you
also may stand a good chance of getting a link from this page
http://www.reiclub.com/hard-money-lenders.php http://www.statefarm.com
State Farm is a US based insurance website, there isn't an obvious way to
get a link but it is possible if you are an agency.  You can get a profile page which
includes a link to your website. http://www.education.gov.uk/
This one immediately struck me as being difficult, not just because of
the domain name, but because of the page they have in the top right corner
called "Linking" which outlines their very strict linking
policies! So lets be creative - get them to tweet a link to your
website.  Ok this can be difficult but there benefits go way beyond the
link itself on this one.  Their following is around 3,000 people, a
tweet from them could bring you a lot of traffic and links from other
sites.  You'd also get a link from their homepage as they display the
latest tweet from their profile, looking at the frequency of their tweets,
this link could be in place for a few days.  I'll admit this one is a
bit sneaky but it could get you a link from their homepage and bring lots of
attention. Bit of free advice for the Department of
Education As a sidenote, this website is showing at Google
Toolbar PR0 which I found strange.  Turns out that they recently moved
domains which is a valid reason, however their old site - http://www.dcsf.gov.uk/ is using a 302
redirect.  Unless they are planning to take the redirect down very soon
I would use a 301 instead! Finally - www.seomoz.org This was actually
the most popular site that people wanted to get links from.  This may
surprise you but there are a few ways to do this! Get your Moz
points score above 100 to get a followed link from your profile.  Read
about how to get Mozpoints
here Write a good blog post and it could be included on Youmoz along with a link to you
Put extra special effort into the post and it could be promoted to the
main blog - bringing you lots of extra attention, links and readers. 
This is a great example of how putting extra effort into creating content
will benefit you when it comes to getting quality links Well
that is it for now, please let us know what you think and of course if you
have any additional tips please add them in the comments.  You can also
catch me on Twitter if you
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2010年6月12日 星期六

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The New York Times bans use of word 'tweet' http://htxt.it/btkj

The post update will be working soon.

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2010年6月11日 星期五

Today is the day ...

It's been a while busy travelling, and from now on the time is mine ...
I am back and new articles will be on the way.