Outreach can be hard work and often it can appear that you’re not making much ground. But the reality is, so long as you’re implementing effective Outreach, the results and rewards will come. And the good news is, each successful Outreach campaign builds upon the next. The more sites and blogs you reach, the further your reach becomes.

But what is effective Outreach?

In this article I will deliver Five tips to keep in mind when engaging in Outreach that will help make your efforts that much more effective and efficient.

Be Patient – Possibly the number one thing to remember. Yes, you would like to contact a site or blog and ask for a link or mention and have them give it to you immediately. But the fact is, it’s not going to happen. Remember, you’re wanting to build a relationship, one that will benefit both you and the target of your Outreach, not just today but for years to come. Building a genuine relationship takes time but the rewards are worth it. So don’t become frustrated and don’t become pushy. Let the relationship develop and let it reward you as it grows.

Be Sincere – Don’t just spam accounts with form emails or make glib mentions of articles on Twitter or forums. Read their work and offer genuine comments. Make a contribution and offer them an insight or present a question that will encourage them to open in a dialogue with you. You don’t just want to be noticed. You want them to notice you as the person behind your site or blog, someone they will want to build a relationship with. In other words, be genuine and be yourself.

Be Generous – Don’t be stingy. Promote the work of the blogs or sites you want to reach out to. It’s an easy, genuine and effective way of getting their attention. You’d be surprised how many will respond to you and it’s an great way of starting a dialogue. It’s a public display of approval of their work. And who doesn’t like a compliment? Also don’t be afraid to promote the work of rival blogs. Have faith in the quality of your work. The blog might be a rival, but if you feel your work is superior to theirs, then any link or mention exchange is going to be of greater value to you than them in the long run.

Be Consistent – Invest a set amount of time every day to do Outreach. Even if it’s only an hour Don’t just pile a lot of work into a week or few days and then leave it for a week or so. That’s not an efficient Outreach strategy. You need to be consistent and engage with those you are reaching out to regularly. That doesn’t mean interacting with them every day, but you do need to do Outreach every day, building on existing relationships or seeking out new ones. Not only is it the most effective way of maintaining and developing these burgeoning relationships, but by applying yourself to the task each day, you’ll find you learn more about what works for you and what doesn’t. In effect, you become better at Outreach.

Be Realistic – Yes, you would love to get a mention or a link from a high powered Twitter account or blog. And if you have quality content, it’s something that you should definitely aspire to. But no matter how good your work is, a high power account isn’t going to take any notice of you until you’ve built up your profile. So aim for those Twitter accounts or blogs with a similar reach as yourself. If you have 300 followers on Twitter, engage with accounts with between 200 and 1,000 followers and as you engage with these accounts, you’ll soon see your followers rising. Surf the crowd and soon enough you’ll have enough followers to get yourself noticed by the bigger accounts.

This is a guest post by Andrew Brocker, blogger at BettingExpert.com

To see why I found this pretty hillarious, just read the text on the site they are offering to SEO: mogmedia.co.uk (which used to be my consultancy homepage until 2007).

Come on guys! If you are going to blind spam anyone with a .co.uk domain, you might want to filter out other SEO’s first

As part of our SEO expansion, we are looking to fill a number (more than 10) vacancies in our London offices.

If you are a great SEO, and would like to work for OMD, a part of Omnicom then this could be the opportunty for you:

SEO Vacancies:

SEO Associate Directors

We currently have the requirement to add several Associate Director level SEO’s to our expanding team at OMD.  This is to handle existing work and major new account wins.

The successful applicants for this role will have strong experience in running SEO campaigns, including in depth knowledge of both on and off site ranking factors to an expert level.  Applicants must be up to date with the latest developments in SEO and be passionate about search marketing.   Experience of working on major accounts for large scale enterprise customers, either in house or within an agency is a clear benefit for the right candidates.

Furthermore they will be independent in their approach, able to hit the ground running and capable of managing their own team with client facing skills.

This is a top level SEO job working with some of the biggest client accounts in the UK – if you are a top level SEO then this is perhaps the biggest opportunity to further your career within the United Kingdom.

Required skills:
on-site technical SEO analysis
off-site linkbuilding experience across multiple disciplines
Google analytics to an expert level, other packages an advantage
Webmaster tools proficiency
an expert understanding of any of the following is an advantage: html, css, LAMP, enterprise CMS frameworks.
Social media awareness (well-established presence an advantage)

please submit your CV to: seojobs@omddigital.co.uk .

SEO Client Managers

We have the requirement to add several SEO Client Managers to our expanding team at OMD.  This is to handle existing work and major new account wins.

The successful applicants for this role will have experience in working within organic search, preferably agency-side. Additionally full knowledge of the mechanics of both on site optimization and linkbuilding are required.

The right applicants will be capable of taking a lead role within client accounts, be well spoken, accountable and have a proven track record of success.

This is a unique opportunity to work on some of the UKs biggest brands search presence and further your career within the framework of one of the world’s largest digital agencies.

Required skills:
on-site technical SEO analysis
off-site linkbuilding experience across multiple disciplines
Google analytics to an expert level, other packages and advantage
Webmaster tools proficiency
an understanding of the following is an advantage: html, css, LAMP, enterprise CMS frameworks.
social media awareness  (well-established presence an advantage)

please submit your CV to: seojobs@omddigital.co.uk .

SEO Executives

We have the requirement to add several SEO Executives to our expanding team at OMD.  This is to handle existing work and major new account wins.

The successful applicants for this role will display a high level of interest in organic search and have a basic understanding of how search engine algorithms work and how you would apply best practices to big brand websites to improve their presence.

The correct applicants will be well versed in Microsoft office tools including excel, word and PowerPoint.

This opportunity would allow you to work with and learn SEO within one of the best SEO teams in the UK, working exclusively on big brand, blue-chip multinational accounts.

Full training will be provided to the correct applicants.

Required skills:
knowledge of basic on and off site optimisation, or demonstrable desire to learn quickly
knowledge of google analytics
English fluency required, other languages an advantage
social media awareness

please submit your CV to: seojobs@omddigital.co.uk .

SEO Copywriters

We have the requirement to add several SEO Copywriters to our expanding team at OMD.  This is to handle existing work and major new account wins.

The successful applicants for this role will be passionate about creating compelling, world class content for use on both client websites and third party properties.

The correct applicants for this position will be experienced in using Microsoft office tools and have an existing portfolio of content that they have produced.

Having worked within a transactional ecommerce website will be an advantage, but not required.

Required skills:
Strong knowledge of Microsoft office tools, including word and excel
English fluency required, with a high level of experience in content production.
other languages an advantage

please submit your CV to: seojobs@omddigital.co.uk .

Anyway – the thing that has prompted this post, bringing me fleetingly out of blogging retirement was a discussion I had on Friday night with an old friend of mine (we’ve known each other for over 20 years), Alistair Shaw.

The friend in question is a “crack ninja superstar rock hero” (or however else you should refer these days to people that are good at their job) PHP developer.  Together over the years we have worked on quite a few projects together and I am in no doubt as to his expertese.  Basically, I respect his opinion in a lot of matters – but this proved to be a bit “controversial”

AS: “so, this SEO thing, its dead now right?”

MM: “I hope not, Ive just started a new job as head of SEO What makes you say that though?”

AS: “well, I remember back in the day we used to just add a keywords, make sure the title tag and meta descriptions etc. were right, buy some links and stuff would rank.  That doesnt work anymore does it?”

MM: “so you’re boiling down search engine optimization into keyword stuffing and link manipulation? What you don’t realise is that SEO has developed, ranking factors are measured in the hundreds, sites have become more complex along with the algo & finally, the stakes have never been higher with increasing PPC costs and a widening long tail.”

Editors note: The conversation then wound on for some time about the finer points of SEO.  And some rather excellent Polish vodka thanks to the guys at SearchMarketingDay.

It is indicative though of one of the major problems we face as an industry. The lack of recognition across a diverse range of other disciplines.

The fact is within the advertising and marketing industries SEO is not respected (enough) as a skill in its own right.  PPC doesnt suffer from that fate, as google have done a fantastic job in teaching people about the uplift of paid search campaigns.

Even within web development, SEO is regarded by many at best as irrelevant, at worst as snake oil.

Search Engine Optimization needs a makeover.  Heck, it needs an extreme makeover.  If someone wants to grab the industry by the scruff of the neck and start shouting from the rooftops about it, we should all be grateful, not critical.

The few that are doing that right now are either under recognised, or overly criticised for gaining status within a small industry.

I implore you all people – take the time out to
TEACH SOMEONE what SEO actually is.

TEACH SOMEONE how SEO is more cost effective than PPC.

TEACH SOMEONE how you can use natural search to engage target demographics.

JUST TEACH SOMEONE. Please.

Rant over.

This coming Monday the 16th and Tuesday the 17th of May, I will be speaking at SMX Advanced in London.

On day one I will be moderating the “Advanced Link Building, Link Alchemy” panel, in which Patrick Altoft (branded3), Rob Millard (Distilled), Kelving Newman (Site Visibility) & Pete Wailes (Strategy Internet Marketing) will be speaking.

On day two, I’m presenting a session on how to engage with consumers on Twitter as part of the “Beyond Search, Leveraging Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin” alongside Matt Lawson (Marin) and Merry Morud (aimClear).

Both sessions promise to be huge, with great insights on both SEO linkbuilding and social marketing, but I understand that a lot of my blog readers are not based in the United Kingdom or are not able to make the conference itself, which is why:

LIVEBLOG is now live updates appear below automatically!

I cant speak highly enough of the resources that SEOmoz provide their PRO customers, and for a limited time only, they have extended an offer to all members here at seoforums.org – a FREE 30 DAY TRIAL!

All you need to do to get the best SEO tools available for free, is sign up through the banner below!

So sign up right now, and take your SEO to the next level!

As you can see the results look like:

Forums.seoChat.com
seoForums.org

Anyone else seeing this?

+ interestingly about two months ago they stopped capitalization within adwords results.  Not sure why the different approach.

Its a great industry to work in (lots of nights out, constantly evolving marketplace etc) but one of the drawbacks that we struggled with historically has been content sourcing. While there are a million things that can be said about most artists (just look at Justin Bieber on twitter as point in case), the actual mechanism of buying your tickets isn’t the piece of the value chain that fans are interested in or indeed passionate about.

However since the MayDay update, the writing has been on the wall for all eCommerce sites, big or small – either get content, or get out.

That’s pretty much the same message in both the Panda and MayDay updates, so why people are all of a sudden upset I’m not really sure.

Data Capture

I track competitive SERPS for around 700 queries – these are primarily “artist name + tickets” searches – for instance “Kylie Minogue Tickets” is a good example.  If you’re interested I use Advanced Web Ranking by Caphyon for this reporting, I’ve found it to be the most dependable of all my rank trackers and I fully endorse it.

Big Losers

Lets look at an example:

SoldOutEventTickets.com

Sold Out Event Tickets are the oldest of all the secondary ticket marketplaces in the UK (probably in Europe for that matter) and are part of TicketMaster, the monopolistic entertainment ticketing company with an overwhelming market share worldwide.

For years now they have maintained competitive rankings down purely to a few factors:

1) domain age
2) links from Ticketmaster (again, the authority in this vertical)

They have never however invested time or money into:

1) unique content (all theirs is aggregated from a variety of sources, and whatever is unique is so far below the fold its irrelevant to the random surfer.
2) social interaction (they have none)
3) UGC (reviews etc)

The screenshot below shows my Advanced Web Ranking data comparing yesterday to today:
(please note, this screenshot was taken a few hours into my AWR scrape, I will replace it with the full update tomorrow)

Its important to point out at this point that this isnt the only site affected in this update, in reality the “lower order” of automated sites have all been hit to a certain degree, but as this example have consistanly ranked well down to domain level factors the drop looks particularly bad.

Running the same analysis on the fresher generation of sites,  they are up on average – not in my opinion due to any improvements on those properties, just that SoldOutEventTickets and other players with similar site structures have been penalised.

Analysing Site Content

Take a look at these pages as a direct comparison:

Kylie Minogue
Sold Out Event Tickets – Seatwave

Take That
Sold Out Event Tickets – Seatwave

As you can see on the above examples, the affected site is missing “unique” content, UGC, and social signals.  This is nothing new, this is really the SEO 101 stuff that google have been preaching and reputable SEO’s have been practicing for years now.  This update is just weeding out sites that havent followed the mantra of google in the 21st century.

Arguably the domains that have been booted in this update had few “page level indicators” of value, all of the strength that was keeping them ranked well came from domain level metrics.

If that’s the case then this update is probably good for “the little guys” out there that have the mobility to create great content, but don’t have a monolithic domain behind them that’s unfairly perhaps creating results that have meant they can outrank better content on smaller sites.

The Sum Up

If you don’t have a content rich site, you’re not going to get any love out of google any more.  Make sure your sites are well updated, fresh, have compelling content and data, utilise UGC, push social signals etc.

IMAGE DISCOVERY CREDITS:
I asked on twitter earlier if anyone had any “good” images of panda’s to use, the first one was suggested by Simon Panting, a self proclaimed apple fanboy and purveyor of banter, the second was suggested by Bob Meijer, a good friend of mine and co-incidentally a London based googler.

This is something that I’ve been through a few times before so as soon as these changes occur it generally means a late night, lots of coffee and much concern.

Around 2am I finished my analysis and pretty much knew what was going on, but needed to wait until this morning to publish the findings just in case it was a matter of GA being slow to update (that doesnt happen anywhere near as often as it did 3 or 4 years ago, but it was still a possibility).

Google Algo Update: Lost in Translation

Since September last year, I’ve been using a plugin here on seoforums.org which auto translates all of the content on pageload to a new URL in the members selected language of choice.  It then saves that page into a cache database to increase performance for future pageloads (refreshing every so often depending on the page type).

So far this just sounds like pretty common google translate spam right?

Wrong.
The plugin also detects posts made in foreign languages and translates them out to all 30+ other languages used here on seoforums.org – therefore (and lots of people do this) you can see people posting in greek, speaking to someone posting in arabic, and someone else speaking in French.  Each one of those posts are seen in each users native language as defined when they signed up.

Its a beautiful system. That is NOT google auto translate spam, that is a legitimate translation use of their API in my opinion.

The Setup:

when I started using the plugin, I registered each of the subfolder sites as specific websites in Google Webmaster Tools, as you can see from this screenshot.  I then went on to geo-target each of the subfolders to the relevant countries.  Linkbuilding to these subfolders has been entirely organic (I’ve never bought a link for this site full stop).

I’ve also submitted a specific XML sitemap for every regional variation of seoforums.org and each of the sites within GWT is correctly reporting the search queries, volumes, site speed etc. all as you would expect for any other site.

In short, I didn’t do this “a la spam” site – I built it properly.

The Results:

until yesterday I was pleasantly surprised with the results.  After a slow-ish start it was building up a nice % of overall google organic traffic.  Over the last week or so these landing pages have been receiving more or less a thousand additional visits per day, at a bounce rate no worse than the rest of the site (and much better than some pages in english – but thats another story).

As you can see from this graph, there was a heck of a fall off sometime yesterday:

Additionally, when searching google.co.uk with a site:seoforums.org command, you saw lots of “junk”, ie. the homepages for each foreign language was listed in the top 50 results.

This wasn’t really a great UX, but then how many people actually search with the site: command that aren’t SEO’s? Furthermore – as I’d submitted each sub folder as a different geo-targeted site  so frankly google shouldn’t have been displaying them in the .co.uk results anyway.

I must stress that I DO NOT BELIEVE that my use of the google translate API in this case is spammy.

Its creating a legitimate forum in dozens of languages, and allowing people of diverse nationalities to discuss topics in their native languages.  Some of them (ie. the Spanish one) are great translations. I know some are rubbish, but I’m relying on google’s own API for quality.

My Conclusions:

it does appear that google yesterday rolled out an algo update which has improved their detection of auto translated pages and removed them from the index.

That will be of benefit to most consumers in removing yet more of the junk that has been out there for some time, but in my case I do feel a little let down – there is no other way for me to translate a site which is 100% UGC and updated constantly.

Its probably regarded as at least grey hat by most of you.

I’m not condoning the use of it as a strategy, Im just saying that you “could” do it for entertainment/experimenting purposes only ofcourse.

Harness the Power of Your Affiliate Links for SEO

Its reasonable to expect that most eCommerce sites have an affiliate tracking system already – if not, then start one right now… Dont even read the rest of this post just GO DO IT.

So working under the assumption that you already have an affiliate program in place lets look at examples of the links:

1) Traditional AffNetwork Redirects
these are the worst of them all, and look something like this:

Whats happening here is the traffic is going to the affilate network first (in this case its a buy.at link) where its picking up an identifier cookie before redirecting you to the merchants site using Javascript.  The only winner here as far as SEO is concerned is the affiliate network, not that they would be in a position to use it in this specific example.

2) Landing script query string URL’s
this type of link is much more uncommon with the affiliate networks, as its harder for them to “ensure” that the cookie gets placed – but if your affiliate network has asked you to place a script on your website then this is the type of link that’s being used:

In this example, a piece of JS that you embed in the header or footer of your website is detecting the presence of the parameters in the query string (ie. affid=243513), creating the relevant cookie, then on the confirmation or sale success page its passing the details based on the cookie to the affiliate network.  This approach is better for the SEO of the target site, because you can use rel=canonical to recoup some of the lost strength, but its still, well, messy isn’t it?

A Solution: Pagerank Transfer Protocol

This is a handy piece of Javascript that we came up with to try and harness the strength of these types of links:

a) include code like this in the header:

<script type="text/javascript" language="javascript"> <!--
if (window.location.hash.length > 0 && window.location.hash.indexOf

("#rxtp:") == 0) {
var ux = unescape(window.location.hash.replace("#rxtp:", "http:"));
var q1 = ux.indexOf("?");
var q2 = ux.lastIndexOf("?");
if (q1 != q2)
ux = ux.substring(0, q2) + escape(ux.substring(q2));
window.location = ux;
}
//--> </script>

b) format your links like this:

http://seoforums.org/#rxtp://seoforums.org/member.php?u=1

in the above example, the link strength (lets call it pagerank for simplicity sake) is going to the homepage of seoforums.org, whereas the user actually gets delivered the page /member.php?u=1 (which just happens to be my profile page in the forum section.

Therefore, to utilise this strategy, you would structure all the URL’s in your affiliate feeds as so:
[clean link address]#rxtp[url with tracking parameters]

Bingo, in a couple of minutes you have managed to get the link strength out of hundreds to millions of links through your existing affiliates, and as those guys are more likely than not targetting the same terms as you are with their linkbuilding and on site optimization, those links are about as relevant as you are going to get.

This strategy is actually used in the members badge plugin I’ve built for seoforums.org, where members can embed images like this one onto any other webpage.  When one of their users clicks on the badge, it takes them through to the members page, but the pagerank (again, hate the use of that term but you know what I’m meaning) stays at the homepage of seoforums.org.

Just hover over the image to see the link, then click on it to see where you end up.

Its not all rosey though.

Before you all start shouting (or copying and pasting that code above), let me point out that his system is far from perfect on a few fronts.

Firstly, in its very makeup it has a footprint of redirecting the browser using javascript.  Thats not something that is normally advised, furthermore the code itself is a dead giveaway that you are using this technique – its in the header of your website after all.

Finally, it does slow down pageload times fractionally as it checks on every server request whether the string #rxtp is containted in the URL.

If you are considering using this code, I would strongly advise that you spend some time and mix the code up a bit, rename the value’s, call it from an external JS file – whatever really, just make the code your own.

A better solution, BE the network.

Leaving footprints when you are doing “dodgy” stuff is a big mistake.

You should strive to leave zero footprint that is recognisable whenever you do things that change the link landscape at scale.

A much better solution is to detect the traffic source based on the http referer, then embedding cookies into the browser specific to that affiliate.  This requires both some server side database work, and is pretty much impossible to control if you are using an affiliate network.

The easiest way to incorporate those kind of links, lets call them “transparent affiliate links” is to use your own affiliate software.  This is a script that you run on your own servers and your affiliates log directly in to it to see their stats etc but as you control the network, you can use clean linking to your hearts content and every single link to your website is PERFECT – with no query strings or redirects to worry about.

There are a few software packages that do exactly this, but the only one that I have used is Post Affiliate Pro by Quality Unit – its a class piece of software that takes a week or two to really get used to, and the full version is around a thousand dollars, BUT for that $1,000 I’ve managed to build millions of links.

Thats a whole lot cheaper than buying them!