Create Own Blogs

As a webmaster Link Building seems like a very daunting task; with so much misinformation, poor advice and varied personal opinions on the web it’s not hard to see why most people can be confused as to where to start – the most common questions I get asked by clients and friends are:

What are the best types of links to build?
How many links do I need to get to the first page of Google?
Should I use the same keyword anchor text or mix it up with brand terms?

Well all of that is relative…

Invariably my answer starts by asking them more about their competition. Competitor analysis is a very important part of the link building puzzle. By understanding what your competition are doing to hold on to those all important and much sought after search engine results then you too can learn more about the types of links you need, what type of anchor text and generally the volumes of links you might need to rank well.

With so many tools available in the market place and the large amounts of data that can be produced by them it has never been easier to snoop on your competitors. In this post I am going to carry out a competitor analysis for Cash Cow UK, a free to use internet auction site, so you can understand a little more about the processes I use to analyse the link profiles of my clients competitors.

Using the free to use Google Keyword Tool I normally find 50-100 keyword phrases that my client wants to rank well for to get more traffic to their site. I then run a quick Google search to find out who the top 5 ranking pages for those keywords are and make a note of them. (There are some more advanced automated techniques that I use to do this but for now I want to keep it simple)

For the purpose of this case study I am going to just focus on 3 key word phrases:

Online Auction – 60,500 UK Searches per month

Online Car Auction – 8,500 UK Searches per month

Free Online Auction – 1,300 UK Searches per month

Intuitively you would think that eBay would be top for at least 2 of these search terms however they only appear once in these SERP’s and in position 2, this is very common to find when you ask a client to tell you more about their market as they often over state and under state their competition’s online presence.

I have decided to look a little more at the back link profiles of uk.madbid.com, ebay.co.uk, uk.ebid.net and totalbids.co.uk in order to find some quality link opportunities. The two tools I would recommend are SEO Spyglass it’s free to trial and less than $100 for a license or you could try the SEOMoz pro tools again it is free to trial but its $99 a month thereafter, however it provides lots of great data, including Social data and tonnes of great reports.

Below is the output from SEOMoz’s Link Metrics Comparison tool, as you can see there are lots of external links pointing to eBay and ebid however Total Bids who we saw were ranking very highly for Free Online Auction only have 200 external links. So I will probably start here to understand this better.

What we are interested in here is the Domain Authority (DA) and Page Authority (PA), this is a value calculated by SEOMoz based on the quality of links that are pointing at the page. SEO Spyglass does not have DA and PA but it does give you the Google Page Rank of the linking page and linking root domain which can also be useful to determine good quality links.

Go to Open Site Explorer and input the page you want to analyse; in this case I have input www.totalbids.co.uk

As you can see this page has over 1100 links from over 100 different domains, it has received only 7 Facebook shares and 1 tweet. This looks like quite an easy link profile to investigate to find some great links.

Firstly we want to look at the Anchor Text, this is very easy to do in both OSE and SEO Spyglass:

As you can see a lot of their anchor text is just their brand name there are very few links containing the keyword that they rank well for. I would say over 50% of their links don’t have any mention of Online Auction or Free Online Auction. This means that we are working in a niche where quality counts.

You now want to export the links report into Microsoft Excel by using the Download to CSV function. I normally only export the domains and followed links so that I can see what type of site they are and to determine how easy or difficult it will be to obtain the link. I normally don’t export no follow links as these are often just blog comments and have very little link value.

Now you want to do the same for all of the link profiles of the other competitors and add them to your list. You should now have a master list of several hundred if not thousands of domains to target.

I normally then sort the lists of domains by DA or Page rank and categorise them as one of the following:

Info Site – low quality information site
Education or Government Site – hard to find links
News Site – quality newspaper or news site e.g. Mashable
Article/Press Release
Blog –possible Guest Blogging opportunity or product review
Web Directory – easy to obtain by submitting a link

Then in the same spreadsheet I then put a few notes and actions I have taken e.g. when I sent an email to the webmaster, contact details of the blogger etc.

Advanced Tip: If any of the blogs have a Twitter Account, be sure to make a note of it and write down the number of followers they have and their Klout Score. This will help you determine whether they are a key influencer in their niche and how much effort you should put into getting a link on their site. You can easily find someone’s Klout score by visiting www.klout.com/(username) where (username) is their Twitter username.

Now that you have your list of sites to approach for a link you need to decide what your approach will be. How much time will you spend chasing that elusive link and what can you do to get it.

I normally approach link building with the easy links first I list the site on all the directory sites that I have found and if they are paid directories I will sum up whether or not the quality of the site is worth paying for the link to be added or not. I usually do this by looking at the DA and PA of the pages my link would appear on and whether it would be just as easy to get a free link from another source.

As for the article and press release directories I will submit a few pieces of content to these if they have a good DA but I really don’t value these types of links and I believe the Search Engines have devalued these types of links over time too. However SEO is not just about getting links it’s about getting traffic and brand recognition too so a few press releases/articles now and again never hurt.

If it is a lower value blog or site that I want to target for a back link then I may simply send them a nice email asking for a link adding to their article, in this case their list of eBay alternatives. With this link analysis I also discovered a number of Blogspot, WordPress, Squidoo and other web 2.0 properties. I would consider making some web 2.0 properties myself if I couldn’t persuade the owner to give me a link. For the higher quality news sites and blogs then I will spend time getting to know the blogger or webmaster in order to get a guest post, share an infographic I have created or perhaps get them to review my client’s product. This is where you want to target your most efforts, a link from a few high profile web sites can catapult your site in to the big time so this is where you want to be creative and invest your time.

I hope you found this guide useful and hopefully it’s given you some insight into how easy link building can be by researching your competition.

+Chris Dyson

Scrapebox is well known in the SEO community as a Grey Hat, Black Hat, Yellow Polka Dotted Hat link building tool that is mainly used by blog commenting spammers. If you have ever spent any time reading blogs you will have seen the stereotypical comments on blogs. They usually say things such as “Great Blog Post thanks for sharing” with a keyword rich anchor text link to a site selling fake Ugg boots.

I know a lot of my regular readers will have a heart attack at the recommendation of using Scrapebox as a “White Hat” Link Building tool. A lot of people in the SEO community hate the thoughts of automated link building and the sheer mention of a tool such as Scrapebox makes their skin crawl. I can already imagine several people ready to jump down to the comments and tell me that tools like this are ruining the internet…

Well “Soapbox White Hatters” I’m going to show you a way that you can actually use Scrapebox to make the internet a better place… in fact a safer place for all!

So what is this Scrapebox Link building technique?

This link building technique utilises some of the free plugins that you can get from Scrapebox, the main tactic in this technique is to find a compromised or malware infected site and open a dialogue with the site owner in an attempt to receive a link either via a Guest Post or by suggesting the site owner replaces broken links with your own.

Scrapebox currently costs $97 (there are a few coupons on the net for $57 if you search around) and for the amount of time and money this tool will save you it is more than worth the investment. Scrapebox allows you to harvest thousands of URL’s from Google and Bing in no time at all and by entering your own custom footprints e.g. “submit * guest post” [keyword] you will find lots of guest blogging opportunities for your niche quickly. You can also import .txt files with lots of different search terms to put your harvesting on steroids.

The first free plugin you will need is the Malware and Phishing Filter once you have installed this plugin it allows you to search a list of sites from Scrapebox to find sites that have been compromised by some form of Malware. If you have Google Webmaster Tools setup on your websites then Google will normally inform you that a site has been infected by malware. Sadly many bloggers and small business owners rarely check their sites for malware and not everyone knows how to setup Google Webmaster tools.

Import your list of scraped URLs into the Malware checker and run it. This will flag up any site that has been compromised by some form of malware. You now want to export all of these bad urls and using the OSE check for PA/DA of the pages. Starting with the sites with the highest authority I then work down my list.

You can run the list through the Scrapebox Whois tool or use Scrapebox itself to check the contact page for any email addresses. You do not want to visit these sites as there is a risk that your computer maybe infected by a virus.

Now you want to send an email to the webmaster informing them of the malware issue on their site and send them a link to some helpful blog posts on how to fix malware infected sites. (If you haven’t checked out John Doherty’s blog post on SEOMoz about outreach email then make sure you do!)

You obviously do not want to ask for a link at this point. Depending on the quality of the site it might be worth using your hustle to track down alternative contact details too such as phone number, Twitter Handle, LinkedIn profile etc.

I have had a very good success rate in contacting webmasters using this technique and quite often I find that they are very grateful for you pointing out the problem on their website. Now that you have the dialogue with the site owner I will leave it to your imagination as to what approach you use next to obtain the link. But, this a good time to check the site for broken links or pitch a guest blog as the webmaster will probably have to recover the content on the site. I have even had a few webmasters offer me the chance to buy their sites for a small fee as they don’t have the time or inclination to fix their site and keep it up to date anymore!

So there you have it one way in which you can use a well regarded spam tool to speed up your link building research and to help make the web a safer place.

More Scrapebox Goodies.

I’m going to cover off a couple of other tasks I like to use ScrapeBox for when I am carrying out my day to day role, and hopefully I can show you some great ways to save time and speed up those monotonous processes. There are a lot of extra applications for ScrapeBox and I am going to leave it to your own judgement as to the “ethical” use of this tool.

How to find Blogs to Guest Post on using ScrapeBox

I know guest blogging has been getting a lot of stick recently and quite rightly so. Some link builders have been really abusing this great tactic over the past few months; but I am sure you won’t be doing that will you now.

In this guide I am going to run through some screenshots so you can see how easy it is to use. I hope you are pretty up to speed with your advanced Google search operators, because you’re going to be dusting them off once you get your hands on ScrapeBox.

In this guide I am suggesting ways to find guest post prospects but you could just as easily use this method to find blogs to place infographics, videos or whatever other outreach projects you are working on.

You want to add in your main keyword in this case I am looking for SEO blogs to write for
You select “Custom Footprint” and add in your different footprints
Select the search engine(s) you want to scrape e.g. Bing, Google, Yahoo

Click the “start harvesting” button and go grab a fresh cup of coffee
Once you have finished harvesting your URL’s you want to remove the duplicates (and you can also use ScrapeBox to lookup the PageRank of the domain)
You then want to export the list into a CSV file
I then like to do some basic prospecting to qualify my targets e.g. Web Design, PageRank or mozRank, RSS Subscribers, Social Media presence

I am not going to cover off best practises on pitching your guest posts in this article but if you want some good pointers on outreach I suggest you read my blogger outreach interview.

How to use ScrapeBox to Check for Broken Links

Another ScrapeBox tool you will find quite handy is the bulk URL check, especially if you have a big list of URL’s to check on a regular basis.

Oh and did I mention, you don’t even need to buy a license for this tool it’s completely free!

All you have to do is open the tool and then import a list of links you want to check in one text file. Now upload another text file you want to add in your URL’s. There are two options here you can either check a link to a specific URL is live or just check a link to the domain is live. It only takes a few minutes to check your list and then you can export the failed links and check with the webmaster to see why it may have been removed.

How to use ScrapeBox to Scrape Google Image Search

Do you suffer from your images being stolen by webmasters without attribution? Well you can use Scrapebox to search Google for your image and then return the URL’s. The best way to do this is to make sure your image file names contain a set of random letters and numbers that will make it easy for you to find them e.g. dog-photo-xc345.jpg

You can then do a quick Google image search with ScrapeBox for “dog-photo-xc345.jpg” and the URL’s will be revealed. I would then personally load this list into ScrapeBox and use the WHOIS lookup tool to find the contact information for the domain owner and reach out asking they provide a link to your site for fair use of your image.

“Haters gonna hate… Scrapers gonna Scrape…”

As I mentioned at the start of this post there are lots of other great uses for ScrapeBox such as this article on ScrapeBox Keyword Research and also some additional ScrapeBox Tricks and Tips by Dan Bochichio.

If you have any more Scrapebox tips and tricks drop them in the comments below.

Spice Mag

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So what is this Scrapebox Link building technique?

How to find Blogs to Guest Post on using ScrapeBox

How to use ScrapeBox to Check for Broken Links

How to use ScrapeBox to Scrape Google Image Search

“Haters gonna hate… Scrapers gonna Scrape…”

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