Interacting with the folks who report on your chosen industry on Twitter – through being conversational, helpful and never overly promotional – is one of the quickest, and most cost effective ways to get noticed by your industry media.

All you need to do is find them. And here are a few ways you can do so.. here’s how.

Twitter Directories

You can easily use free directories, such as WeFollow to identify industry reporters and/or bloggers. By searching for tags like “reporter“, “journalist and “media” you can identify folks that would be applicable to your industry and begin following them on Twitter.

JournalistTweets.com

Journalist Tweets allows you to browse the tweets of various reporters, even limiting your search to journalists covering certain countries and a small range of specific topics. It also allows you to search for specific keywords.

Let’s say you’re a mortgage broker. A quick search for “mortgage” allows you to see which reporters are talking about the topic so that you can follow those focused on your specific topic of relevance and begin to build relationships with them.

Muck Rack

In my opinion, I’ve saved the best for last. Muck Rack tracks the tweets of journalists from all of the major news and media outlets and separates them into a detailed list of “beats” that you can browse to find reporters for specific niches. Operate a site about recipes, food or cooking? Check out the Food and Dining beat to find the reporters writing stories that your site would be relevant for.

Once on a specific beats page, you can view a listing of all reporters classified for that beat (and not simply wait to see who is actively tweeting for that beat), click to see a listing of the links they are dropping in their tweet stream (so you can see what type of stories and angles they find interesting), and you can also click “mass follow” to follow all the reporters from that specific beat.

The Rules of Engagement

Now that you’ve found the media/reporters relevant to your niche, you need to engage with them.

And to be clear:

THIS DOES NOT MEAN SPAMMING THEM WITH YOUR LINKS.

Follow them. If they post something of genuine interest to you, comment on it and give them feedback. Watch for them to ask questions and be helpful to them whenever it is possible for you to do so. You don’t need to spam them.

If you engage, in a real and genuine way, they will recognize your name after a while and might look into what you do or if you’re lucky, follow back. If you can succeed in building the relationship, you may have a good shot of being “who they think of” the next time they need a quote or opinion for their next story.

Have you ever written a blog post or an article and after publishing it, gotten an email telling you that one of your links is broken? It happens to all of us once in a while. But what happens to the links that slip through the cracks and remain broken? They become unused link juice to the site they’re aimed at, and in an algorithmic era that treats links as its largest form of currency, unused link juice is like throwing money on the ground.

Some might argue that a broken link or two here and there won’t really affect things much… much like picking up a nickel or two that you find on the ground isn’t going to make an impact on a person’s income at the end of the week.

But what if you could find a way to have every nickel, dime, or silver dollar someone ever dropped near you automatically deposited to your bank account without ever having to look on the ground or bend over to pick it up? Would you do it? Unfortunately, we can’t do that in the real world, but lucky for us, we can do it in search engine optimization.

First things first and to be clear, a 404 is never a solution for a moved page. If you move any webpage, you should create a 301 redirect to transfer the old link juice (and users) aimed at the old page to the new page.

But, what if you didn’t move the page and simply deleted it and don’t have a page that carries the same information as the old one? Or what if the page never existed in the first place and the broken link was simply the result of someone else’s error during a copy and paste? You have a few options you could choose from, and the top three are:

Option 1: User-friendly error (404) page
You create a page that explains the page the user is looking for no longer exists. You ensure the page serves a 404 header to the search engines to make sure the search engine doesn’t think your error page is the new version of the missing page, and instead knows that the missing page no longer exists.

• Pro: Great usability

• Con: Essentially forfeits any link juice aimed at the original page

Option 2: Relevant Redirect (301)
You redirect the user and search engine utilizing a 301 redirect to the homepage of your website, or the homepage of the section that page used to exist within.

• Pro: You transfer all the of the link juice aimed at the old page to the home page or the closest section page.

• Con: The user isn’t sure why they are being redirected and get confused. Now, you could also cloak the page you redirected them to in order deliver a message to anyone coming from a 404 error explaining that their page can’t be found and that they’ve been taken to a different page as a result, but then you have to worry about tripping some type of filter in Google since cloaking is something they typically frown on and is difficult to find intent algorithmically in (good cloaking like this and bad cloaking as in spam).

Option 3: Custom non-404 error page You redirect the user and search engine using a 301 redirect to an error page that serves a 200 header to the search engines and shows users a custom error page that has a message explaining that the page can’t be found, and offers them the ability to search the site or/and see a selection of the more important pages on your website. This non-404 error page serves as a sort of net, catching all of the broken links aimed at your site and transfers their link juice to one single page that can then take that collective link juice and “redistribute” it through to the important pages of your site.

• Pro: Great usability and transfers the link juice aimed at the old page to a single page that you can then use to redistribute to the pages you most want to have it.

• Con: If you have a lot of broken links pointed towards your site, you could end up with an error page that begins ranking in the search engines (though, if your “catch-all” page for broken links has more links than your “real” pages and begins to outrank them, you might consider getting a better link development strategy for your main site pages).

Which method you choose will depend on your top priority (usability vs. SEO vs. safety vs. a little bit of aggression). As of this moment, I can’t see any reason option three would be objectionable to the search engines, as in my opinion, it is no different than siloing/sculpting, a practice that Google Engineer Matt Cutts has gone on record saying that Google doesn’t frown upon. However, since this would also prevent some companies from hijacking your 404 pages since they wouldn’t serve a 404 header, you never know if they might change their mind. ;-)

When use of the phrase “linkbait” first started to achieve critical mass, some dismissed it as nothing more than a fad that would be dead in a year. Some truly understood linkbait and tried to explain it while some of those who grasped it ran with it and went on to profit from it (and still do). Below, what linkbait really is and where its value lies.

What Linkbait Is

“Linkbait” isn’t some internet fad or “new” way to “game the Google algorithm”. It is simply the name for the online version of what has been going on offline for years. If magazines perfected the linkbait title, then politicians perfected linkbait promotion. In fact, politicians are guiltier of “linkbait” than even the most talented social media exploiters. Let me to show you what I mean:

Politicians	Linkbaiters
They brainstorm for a big event they can hold to gain attention from the press and the masses showcasing themselves as a good candidate.	They brainstorm for a big content piece they can write to gain attention from the press and the masses showcasing themselves as a good website.
During the event, they shake hands with individuals and appear to take notice and recognize each individual’s unique story.	While writing the content piece, they link out to other articles and appear to take notice and recognize each article’s unique story.
They invite the media to the event, put out press releases, encourage their supporters to publicize and endorse the event, make special outreaches to groups and demographics they feel will endorse their candidacy and call in favors from celebrities and/or other public figures to help promote their event.	They contact the media via email, put out online press releases, encourage their twitter followers to vote for and re-tweet their story, make special outreaches to websites with demographics that they feel may want to link to their story and call in favors from Digg power users and StumbleUpon gurus to help promote their content piece.
They hope that all the effort they’ve put in and favors they’ve called in result in a favorable showing in the press which earns them media coverage, new supporters and eventual donations to support their campaign.	They hope that all the effort they’ve put in and all favors they’ve called in result in a favorable showing in the blogosphere which earns them media coverage, new subscribers and eventual revenue to support their website.

Why Create Linkbait

You’ll find some who will say that any linkbait engineered to be linkbait is a bad thing. And to them, I say you’re wrong. Linkbait done correctly often takes over a week to research, write and format and receives a ton of traditional online marketing along with the social media plays.

The point of linkbait is not to gain some backlinks from Digg, Mixx, Reddit or any other social media site. Whether or not Sphinn, Propeller or StumbleUpon nofollows their links has absolutely zero bearing on our desire to reach their homepages. Linkbait is all about visibility. Visibility to the masses via social media (and a hope that they will write about our content on their blog as individuals) and visibility to a targeted niche by writing a piece that promotes many of the medium and higher trafficked sites within it and then letting them know about it and hoping they promote you back.

You often hear a lot about “gaming Digg” [Digg is the example here, but insert the name of any social media website] and the opinion some have about the atrocity of asking friends for votes… but the reality is, it doesn’t matter how a story gets to the homepage. Whether the votes were all natural or done by the same person utilizing 100 Digg accounts in a way that avoids throwing a red flag up to the Digg algorithm or mods (and no, I’m not recommending that) – if the story doesn’t belong on the homepage, you better believe that the community will bury it within a matter of minutes.

Social media is only one part of the linkbait promotional pie. If you think linkbait is all about hitting the Digg homepage and profiting from those who click through when they click on your ads that day, then you don’t get it. As a matter of fact, one of the most successful pieces of engineered linkbait I personally have even done was buried on Digg and did poorly on almost all of the social media websites. But it gained 900 links, is the most trafficked page on our website and even though it ranks number one for the commercial term the linkbait was about, the page still gets more direct traffic through links than it does search engine referrals month after month after month. Now that’s what I call linkbait.

What Linkbait Isn’t

The big story this week has been the possibility of Google penalizing “fake Linkbait”. But, a fake story on a reputable website, to me, isn’t “linkbait”. It’s a fake story on a reputable website that pulled a con on the media. Money.co.uk will pay for it in their own way as those who were duped in the ruse are likely to hold that grudge, and withhold future publicity over it, for a long time. The niche media in our own industry may want to think twice about calling a con “linkbait”. There is enough ignorance in the mainstream media on the topic without further adding to the confusion.

A few weeks back I did a post on my blog about creating Firefox quick search bookmarks. I was surprised at how well received it was, though I think people were most pleased with the fact that I had created a download of a very small selection of the large list of SEO related Firefox quick searches that I use.

If you’ve ever seen me do a site review, you’d know I appear lost without my laptop, which contains all of my quick searches. Since the small list of general SEO ones I previously published was well received, I figured I would create a download of some of the ones I find to be great tools in my link development efforts. I can’t give them all away, but anyone who spends a lot of time doing link development should find these pretty useful. So, grab the original shortlist of general SEO Firefox quick search bookmarks (some of which are used in link dev) and then grab this expanded list of link development Firefox quick search bookmarks (to download either file, right click and save as).

The following is a listing of the searches contained within the link development specific download:

• Google Link Search: I don’t think this one needs explaining, except to remind newer SEOs that this listing is far from complete, as admitted by Google, and only shows a small sampling of your inbound links. Also don’t assume that because you see a specific backlink when doing a link: command that it means it carries any weight.
• MSN Link from Domain Search: Shows you a listing of sites that a specific URL is linking to. For example, you can see what sites Search Engine Land is linking to with this command.
• Google News Search: Allows you to search Google news specifically, which I’ve found handy when trying to identify and organize the Linkerati in a specific niche.
• Google News Site Search: Allows you to quickly identify if a publication is listed within Google News as a source of news content. To me, this is one potential signal of the quality of and value in obtaining a link from a specific site.
• Digg Popularity of a Website: Does a Digg search for any stories that have been submitted from a specific URL, buried or not buried, front page or non-front page, to show you the success or non-success of a site’s social media attempts. This can also help you identify which competitors truly are competitors in the social media space and which competitors seem to be ignoring it so that you can fill the voids they leave by not paying attention. A much better way to see the Digg popularity of your website than fad widget sites like Diggularity.
• PRWeb Search: Searches all press releases at PRWeb.com. I use this search to identify the companies and websites that are seeking publicity within a site’s niche and to get ideas for the content that will allow us to develop some killer links based upon new discoveries within an industry.
• YouTube Search Ordered by View Count: Self explanatory as far as what it does in regards to finding YouTube videos. This helps us identify competitors that are developing views well surrounding our topic area, allowing us to not only learn from their success, but to also take a look at the sites that have linked to their videos on YouTube. This gives us a more specific listing of “Video Linkerati” to contact when we have a big push on a video.
• Yahoo Answers Open Questions: This will search Yahoo Answers for open questions containing your search terms. Regardless of nofollow links, Yahoo Answers is a traffic driver in a lot of categories and we find being active in those categories helps us develop branding and visibility that leads to traffic and outside links.
• Yahoo Search to See if a Site Is Linking to You: Does a quick search to see if a specific domain is linking to your website. It’s useful in helping you not repeatedly contact the same sites, especially if you bought a website and don’t have records of previous link development efforts.
• Ye Old Digg Mining: Does a Digg search to find stories that reached front page without being buried on a specific topic, listing the oldest first. This can often help you come up with some great topics for killer content (I will not use the overused but often misunderstood word “linkbait”). If you think Cosmo hasn’t been repeating the same stories for decades upon decades, you’re very wrong. They simply take the same topics and attack them from fresh angles.

Lastly, one I couldn’t include the code for because you first need to create a custom search engine with Google (you can see an example of an SEO related one in action here): Searching Your Custom Search. I like to set up custom search engines for my niche– only putting in the high quality sites I’ve developed relationships with and/or hope to develop relationships with so that when we’re searching for something to link to on a specific topic (and thus, creating a quality outbound link), we can simply search the sites we know to be the best of the niche to do so (don’t forget to include your own). This has worked best for us the bigger our industry or niche is.

Link development, before search engines polluted the process into a currency for search engine rankings, was all about promotion. Links were simply a natural side effect of promoting your website. And one of the most tried and true methods of promotion is PR (as in Public Relations, not Pagerank).

“The American Heritage Dictionary defines PR as “the art or science of establishing and promoting a favorable relationship with the public.” A public relations firm does this mainly by promoting favorable news.” – Wikipedia

Link development is essentially an online PR campaign that promotes favorable content to the public (who are also known as the linkerati) in an attempt to foster goodwill (which, if we’re lucky, results in links as well).

How To Get The Attention of Those Who Link

Identifying the linkerati is pretty easy. But knowing that you need to get links from bloggers and people in the limelight is pretty obvious. The real question is not who needs to take notice of you, but how to get them to actually do it. And since know we’re all tired of hearing untested theory, I’m also going to give you actual examples of how we’ve caught the attention of the linkerati, which a successful site needs.

Develop Your List

Developing a list of the Linkerati isn’t hard, but actually sitting down and doing it can be a little time consuming. Create a spreadsheet and start entering data such as:

• website addresses
• contact information (phone, physical address, or any combination available to you)
• specific editor names (when applicable; especially needed for larger sites) and contact information
• the angle the particular writer or site tends to take on your topic (e.g., do they usually only pick up breaking news or do they also give light to time saving tips or how to guides)
• columns for the date last contacted
• response received
• times they’ve linked to you (think positively!)

Scour your niche for the most respected A, B, and C list bloggers you can find (regardless of whether you’re currently B, C, D, or “who?” yourself) along with online and offline news writers and columnists. Look for writers who are already interested in your topic or link to your competitors. Once you’ve created the list, you’ll be able to actually use it. If you’re lucky, eventually a percentage of that list will turn into “friends of the site” and become your network within the niche.

Make Contact

Don’t wait until you need something to start reaching out to and introducing yourself to the linkerati. Send out personalized (I cannot stress the importance of personalized here; not only do people not want to be mass mailed, but mass mailing them where they can see the entire linkerati distribution list for your niche you spent a day creating is not the smartest move) emails introducing yourself and your site and tell them you’d appreciate any feedback or suggestions they might have. The point is not to get anything or any links at this point. You’re simply letting them know you’re alive.

For the linkerati without traditional contact methods (some bloggers don’t welcome email contact) or even publication methods (top forum posters would be an example), start getting involved in the conversations they’re involved in. The best way to a hermit blogger’s or top forum poster’s heart is to become a contributing and non-obnoxious member of a society they care enough about to create or take part in every day.

Create Something Worth Discussing

People hear the term linkbait and too often think of “99 ways to save money on your student loans” (no doubt a problem inexperienced and ignorant marketers have encouraged with spam). Linkbait is essentially any good [insert whatever you created here] with a “take notice” title that is promoted well, either by the content creator or by evangelists (paid or unpaid) of the site (and has been around offline for years). Linkbait, done professionally and done right, is content worth talking about (providing you don’t forget to promote it).

1-2-3 Punch Time

If you’ve followed the above steps, you’ll have a list of the linkerati in your niche, have already been in contact with them without trying to pitch them, and will have a piece of killer [insert creation here] you’re ready to market. Scan your linkerati list, decided who it applies to, and start contacting each one. Wash, rinse, and repeat as many times as it takes to get them to notice you. Chances are, even if they don’t link to THIS story, they might at least sign up for your feed or remember your brand name for when they do find a reason to link to you.

Keep In Mind:

1. Do not send these people an email about every standard post you write.
2. Once you get their attention or see they’re reading your feed, tone down the “Hey I’ve got a great story you can link to” email and step up the “relationship building” emails that have nothing to do with your specific stories.
3. If you fail to get a specific linkerati’s attention after several tries, it may be time to start custom tailoring an article aimed directly to them if you really want that link.

It Really Works: Real Life Examples

We do a lot of networking, aka public relations, aka contacting of the linkerati. We wait until we have something of extreme value to contact the whole list, and we sometimes create special pieces to attract a few of the linkerati with a stronger scent being wafted in their direction. And we’ve had a lot of success.

• After begging repeatedly to get a link from the main page of a site linking to competitors, we did an article about the topic of that site — really long and in depth — and made sure they knew about the feature where we (honestly, integrity to your audience is most important) gave them a great review when we talked about their site within it. Two days later, the site put up a quote from our article on their main page with a link to the article. The best part is that it’s huge because they want people to see we loved them and while it is to a subpage, it brings us a lot more traffic than a link shoved at the bottom of their homepage.
• After 14 emails over a 6 month period to a specific blogger, we created a piece with an angle like the ones he most often picks up on his site. It took an entire day to create, but he picked up the story, subscribed to our feed, and has since linked to us three additional times without any effort on our part.
• One of my editors has a habit of sending “Way to go!” emails to the linkerati in the niche when they do a particularly great post. As a result, he was invited to guest host a podcast with a very large blog within the niche, who also has the largest podcast audience, a week before we launched our own podcast show for the site. In addition to being exposed to a ton of new potential subscribers and listeners, the page accompanying the podcast has several links to deep pages on our site.
• After receiving the third press release we had put out for an 18 month old site (we make our linkerati list aware of press releases in the same way we would linkbait), a top offline niche publication contacted us to offer one of our editors a column in their publication. The offline publication has an online companion, so in addition to having our site put in front of 60,000 offline subscribers every month, the online version contains links to our website(to both deep and main pages) as well.

With a little bit of effort, patience, time, and a public relations strategy (and, of course, a quality site), you can build links that are traffic driving, timeless, and algorithm resistant.

]]> http://searchengineland.com/public-relations-the-other-important-pr-in-link-development-13640/feed 0 http://searchengineland.com/how-depending-on-quality-content-can-actually-cost-you-links-13462 http://searchengineland.com/how-depending-on-quality-content-can-actually-cost-you-links-13462#comments Tue, 26 Feb 2008 16:51:13 +0000 Rae Hoffman http://searchengineland.com/beta/how-depending-on-quality-content-can-actually-cost-you-links-13462.php

“Content is king.” If you’re like me, you’ve heard that phrase more times than you can count. And for the most part, it’s true. Truly unique content can make or break your link development campaign. If you have it, you’ll find attracting quality links takes minimal effort for exceptional results. Without it, you’ll find link development to be a daunting and uphill battle. But while content may be king, you’d be well advised to remember that even the best king can be dethroned.

Build it and they will come

I’ve heard it many times: I’ll just write quality content and the links come without effort.

If you’ve uttered that statement, or if you truly believe it, let me tell you one thing: You are not developing links via that method — you are losing them. And depending on how good your content is, you could be losing them by the thousands. If you think I’m nuts, read on.

Competing with compelling content

Earlier this month, one of our websites got an amazing scoop about a consumer electronic product that was about to be released. We were given the details of the product, along with some photos with the requirement that we protect our source at all costs and not release the information until a certain date. We had no problem complying. We knew this scoop would be a big deal in our industry.

On the date we went live with the story, we quickly saw the largest site in our niche was linking to the story. We were crushed, however, when we went to their site to see they had amended a post they had done two days earlier about the impending release and added a few photos that linked to ours because we had additional angles on our photos that they didn’t have.

Our scoop was no longer a scoop. Curious as to how we hadn’t heard about them breaking it before us when it was live for two days, we started doing some searching. Not a single news site had picked up the story and only one of the industry forums had.

The website that had scooped us had long become complacent with being the largest in our niche. Their promotional efforts, while probably a little inferior to ours since we focus on promotion of multiple websites and not just one, were almost none. Their site was king, their content was king, and their content always attracted links with no effort.

Get the story out there

Their dependency on their content requiring no promotion to eventually develop links turned out to be a big break for us. We quickly contacted every large tech blog we knew would be interested in the story. We tipped off some of the other niche blogs that had yet to blog about it (which were all of them), pointing out our post. We hustled our content to any party who might be interested.

The result was that we hit the front page of Engadget, Gizmodo, Crunchgear, and every other tech blog in the industry that day. We developed over 1000 links to that story over the next two weeks in the trickle-down effect that followed. The competitor whose content was king? They developed 40 links to their story over that same time period and none were of the quality of the web’s largest tech sites that were linking to ours.

Build it, then tell them about it, and they will come

Their complacency on depending on their quality content simply doing the promotional work for them cost them 960 links at face value — not counting the authority, true Pagerank, branding, and, more importantly, the tens of thousands of unique visitors that resulted in hundreds of new feed subscribers to our site.

You can’t depend on quality content alone. Doing so can cost your site in the same way it cost our competitor’s website. Even the best content should start being promoted as soon as possible upon publication.

The following tips should be able to help you start to develop effective promotional methods for quality content:

• develop a media list for the topic area you’re working in to be able to push your best pieces to (be highly selective)
• become active in the community by interacting on forums, blogs, and with writers for the big industry sites (aka, develop contacts)
• learn about social media and become knowledgeable of, if not involved with, social media sites, and be aware of their demographics
• learn how you can take angles on pieces to receive traffic and citations from big sites your site may not normally appeal to with straight niche writing
• link out when it makes sense and follow up with notifications to companies or people who have been mentioned or cited in the article once it has been published
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