Just a few weeks back, I luckily attended MozCon in Seattle, USA. For the unaware, it’s an SEO Conference ran by SEOMoz.org – developers of nifty SEO Tools and providers of great SEO resources for beginners AND uncool nerds like myself.
In a sentence – MozCon is like Disneyland for SEO’s, jampacked with super-geeky SEO Magic Tricks and great chances to meet and say hello to others in the search industry (the open bar afterparties helped).
Highlight sessions included great Link Building tips (@wilreynolds), inspiring speeches (@randfish, @bobrains, @avinash) and in particular Martin McDonald (@seoforumsorg) ranked Pos 1 with a goldmine of examples how Google COULD be manipulated/broken (if that’s your style, a few people gave him flak, but bravo I say).
MozCon left me with some great geek-level SEO ideas I’d like to share – some from speakers, others manically concutted in my head during sessions, which were then scribbed in my infamous SEO bible.
If your the sort of person (like me) who punches the air in glee when you did a cracking bit of internal linking, you’ll find these useful.. (I hope)
My Top 5 SEO Ideas Learnt/Scribbled @ MozCon
1) Using ‘Mention’ Finders for Link Building
Tools such as Google Alerts, Rowfeeder & Topsy can be used to easily find mentions of your business name and brand terms across Websites, Blogs & Social Networks. Email or even tweet the webmasters and bloggers who mention you in the webpage, but don’t link to you.. yet.
Google Alerts will auto-emails you mentions of brand terms in search & google news results. Topsy will find business-mentions in Blog Posts that have been virally shared across Social Networks and Rowfeeder will create a spreadsheet of all keyword/hashtag/username-mentions on Twitter & Facebook.
2) Learn Competitors Keywords with N-Gram’s
Looking to find out what SEO Keywords your clients competitors are targetting without having to delve into backlinks or maybe, a dusty old META Keywords tag? The Gramanator uses n-gram model sequences to identify the most-recurring words or phrases on a page. Great little app!
3) Run Blog Competitions for Industry-Relevant Links
If you work with an industry that has a passionate community surrounding it, try this. Publish a competition on your Blog inviting the community to post on their OWN blog to tell you (this is the linkback) and their readers why they ‘love’ the industry they are in – if you can think of a better question, go for it.
Incentivise the competiton with a relevant giveaway-prize (e.g. a free copy of Adobe Photoshop for budding Web Designers) and you may end-up with several industry relevant links, at a low cost, all ‘naturally’ gained.
4) Getting your Twitter followers to give you Links
Export.ly (http://export.ly) creates a downloadable excel spreadsheet of all Twitter a profiles followers, including their Bio & Website URLs. Contact your clients followers who follow their business, but don’t currently link to their website.
5) Add Automated-Internal Links to your Twitter-Widget
Using a script to auto-link the first suitable mention a of specific keyword in body copy to a relevant SEO page isn’t a brand-new idea, but this was. If you publish your client’s latest twitter updates on their webpage, setup a script to auto-link every mention of a suitable SEO Keyword and link it to the relevant SEO Page.
Of course, these links maybe short-lived, but why wouldn’t you do it? You could consider begin archiving all your tweets on a webpage or subdomain, but you’ll need to consider duplicate content, robots.txt and rel=canonical management.
eCommerce brand Zappos have setup a twitter sub-domain which gives a few examples of the above in action.
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Would I attend MozCon again? In a heart-beat, plus, I love free SEO t-shirts, USB sticks, pens and er.. ok, no wonder I get strange looks on the street.
That’s your lot!