How to Use Social Monitoring Tools for Link Building

Link building is a very important part of SEO, links are how you let the world know about your site. Not all links are equal. Some links are very valuable others are mediocre and others are really bad news. Obviously you want as many of the good links as possible.

Now you probably want to know “How do I find good link building opportunities?”

Many link builders use a technique known as competitor back link analysis. This is where you use tools to identify links pointing to your competitors and aim to get links from places where they have achieved links.
Another way to find places you might be able to attain links from is by monitoring the web for your brand, or for people talking about your products and services offered and looking for opportunities to link.

One way you can do this is by using social media monitoring tools. Tools which monitor social media will present real time conversations which could provide an opening for you to join the conversation and add something to it.

A good place to begin is to see what people are talking about by using Twitter search. You can use the search to look for people who are talking about things related to your business. Often people tweet links to websites that have a particular subject matter, these websites could be the ideal places for you to release content or join the conversation.

There are also plenty of free social monitoring tools that will help you identify where people are discussing related topics. One good tool to find websites which are discussing the topics which relate to your business is Google Alerts.

Google Alerts lets you track web mentions of any word or phrase and is one of the fastest ways to discover new content that gets published on the web. You can get alerts to your inbox of via RSS and you can tailor this to filter results by media type (News, Blogs, Video, Discussion and Books).

There are quite a lot of free and paid tools to help you see what people are talking about online and these will help to identify places where links can be built. The beauty of this method is you are going to be discovering themed links. Building links from sites which are related to your subject matter have always been better than links from non-related websites. These links are very valuable and can offer greater SEO benefit over a link from a site which is based around a non-related subject.

Using Forums for Link Building

What is a Forum?
A forum is an Internet message board where ideas and views on a particular issue can be exchanged. They are great places to connect with others who have similar interests to you. Forums are typically centred on a specific topic and therefore are ideal for getting expert advice and finding people with a certain interest.

What is a Forum Signature?
A forum signature is a piece of text (sometimes an image too) which can be placed underneath any comments you make in forum posts. This is normally created in the control panel of your profile and can be set to automatically insert underneath all of your comments. Typically people include a link back to their website and give some details about their name and job title.

The Problem with Forum Links
The problem with forum links is spammers. For years underhand link builders have used forum signatures to create keyword rich anchor text links to websites without providing participating in the discussion.

How to Use Forums Correctly
Forums are ideal places to display your knowledge and expertise on a particular topic. You must however, be sure you are joining a community in order to share or give knowledge; a spammer can be spotted a mile off. If you are there solely to advertise this will be apparent and your efforts will not be appreciated by the community. You can also get banned by the forum moderators.

Use forums as a place to support your company by sharing your knowledge and creating a favourable impression to members of your community. Forums now often have a bad reputation among the SEO community as in the past they have been used by spammers only to get a link from the forum signature.

The best way to approach using forums is to look at it as a branding/PR exercise. If you get a link back it’s a bonus. If you are providing useful advice and information to the members of the forum there is a high chance people will visit your website.

There is also evidence that brand mentions do have some SEO benefit, so even if the forum does not provide a live link it is still worth participating in very relevant forums as these can still drive relevant traffic to your site. Also the better you can answer a question the more likely it is your answer will appear in SERPs

Top Tips for Forum Participation

• Stick to forums that are related to your area of expertise
• Ensure your profile is up to date with all your correct contact information
• Help members by answering questions to the best of your knowledge
• Do not spam
• Engage with forum moderators and those with a high post count

What Questions Should I Ask New SEO Clients

Here are a list of questions I would ask new SEO clients before starting work?

1.    What analytics tracking do you use?
           a.    Can we have admin access?
2.    Do you have Google Webmaster Tools set-up?
3.    Who are your main competitors?
4.    Who is your ideal customer?
5.    What type of customer do you not want?
6.    Which are the top search terms you would like to rank for?
7.    What are your short and long term goals?
8.    Do you have any other domains which you own? (Specifically this refers to issues with duplicate content, proper use of redirects, linking opportunities.)
9.    Do you have any strategic partnerships we can leverage?
10.    Who manages your website?
           a.    How easy it is for us to make onsite changes?
           b.    What is the process when requesting on site changes?
           c.    What are the expected lead times when making changes to the site?
11.    How often can you provide us with content?
          a.    Do you have a resource who can keep us updated with company news/updates?
          b.    Are you able to create the following types of content:
                    i.    Articles
                    ii.    PR
                    iii.    Slideshows
                    iv.    Videos
                    v.    Podcasts
                    vi.    Infographics
12.    Have you done any SEO work before?
13.    What other forms of marketing do you do? PPC, Email, Display, Affiliate, PR, Print, Social Media?
14.    What do you want people to do when they get to your site?
15.    Which geographic location do you wish to target/focus on?
16.    What are your success metrics for the campaign?
17.    Anything else you think would be useful that has not been covered?

SEO Ranking Elements

When looking at why certain sites rank above others I would investigate the following metrics:

URL: The current page ranking for the specified term.

Page Authority: This predicts the likelihood of a single page to rank well. The higher the score the greater chance that page has of ranking well. Page Authority is worked out on a 100-point, logarithmic scale. Therefore, it's easier to grow your score from 20 to 30 than it would be to grow from 70 to 80.

Domain Authority: This predicts how well a website may perform in the search engines. It is useful for comparing one site with another. Again he higher the score the greater chance that website has of ranking well. Domain Authority is also worked out on a 100-point, logarithmic scale. Therefore, it's easier to grow your score from 20 to 30 than it would be to grow from 70 to 80.

On page content: Content is King in SEO and this column analyses how the ranking pages are utilising content on the page. Search engines use content to help identify what each page is about.

Internal Linking to/from the Homepage: Internal website linking is important to help link juice to flow around a website. Typically the most authoritative page on a website is the home page and should therefore successfully link to the pages on the site in a way that passes as much link juice as possible.

Anchor text used to link to the Homepage: Anchor text is the text that appears in the HTML code of a link e.g. the anchor text of this link would be engineering jobs:
 <a href="http://examplesite.com">engineering jobs</a>
Search engines use anchor text as a signal as to what the page being linked to may be about.

Domain Age and Sub-Domain Age: The age of a domain has a big impact on ranking ability this is because domain age cannot easily be faked. Older domains are likely to have more links pointing to them and will probably have built up a certain level of authority which comes with age.

Main Keywords Used On Page: The search engines use on page content to determine the relevance of a given page for a search query; the amount of times a term appears on the page can impact on the ranking of that page in the SERPS. The table counts up the main terms the page appears to be focusing on.

Total Links to Root Domain/Sub-Domain: Search engines use links as a way to determine the most relevant page for a search term. The more links you have pointing to a page the higher the chance of ranking well for a term, although there are other factors which also impact the value of links. This includes the anchor text used in the link and the quality of the site which the link has been generated from.