The range of data sets available is enormous, with 16 nations currently spear heading open data initiatives, and countless private organisations publishing data online – the US alone has published more than 400,000 data sets. This free data presents an opportunity for anyone with a creative mind to produce something of real interest and, in return, acquire quality inbound links to their website.

Furthermore, both the US and UK governments actively encourage their data to be used to create web based apps. These apps can be submitted to http://data.gov.uk or http://www.data.gov and many are rewarded with an authoritative link.

This article will look at how you can use public data to produce something of value and how to attract links by marketing your creation effectively.

Sources Of Public Data

There are a number of organizations and institutions that offer free data including governments, universities and non-profits.

International data is available from both the IMF and the World Bank, each providing online portals containing thousands of free data sets. Country specific data can be found through a number of sites. Currently, the majority are US based, with the most extensive data sets found on websites including: USA.gov, FedSats.gov, American Fact Finder and SeachSystem.net.

Recently, the UK Government has also created a website which provides a one-stop-shop for data from their various governmental departments, and more countries are poised to follow suit in the near future.

Tableau Public provides a comprehensive list of hundreds of free datasets which are updated monthly. In a fitting example of their business model, they have also compiled these data sources graphically, ranked by data quality, relevance, ease of download and compatibility with their excellent data visualisation software:

Data Catalogue from Tableau Public

Tip: The UK and other governments have “freedom of information” legislation. If you can’t find the specific data you are looking for within the sets made publicly available, you can make a written request for the information.

For example, why not use the Freedom of Information Act to ask the UK Government about their PPC spending and write an article or create an infographic around this? I guarantee links will flow if you do!

Ideas For Using Publicly Available Data

Most of the websites mentioned above present their data in a raw format which is usually of little value to the reader and almost impossible to gain insight from.

There is a huge opportunity here to unravel the raw data into visually striking information that is powerful, easily digested and succinct. It is also an opportunity to create something that will be shared and more importantly, create inbound links.

How to most effectively achieve this is dependent on your imagination and creativity, but some ideas could include:

The scope for using public data is huge, and the potential rewards are great. Below are a number of websites that have successfully used public data to create useful, eye-catching apps:

• A Tool to Find  On time Flights
• A Crime Quiz
• A Dashboard of Council Spending
• A Chart of Fuel Prices
• A  Widget providing Country Travel Advice

All of the above pages received links from their respective .gov websites. The ‘on time flight tool’ even received a link from Whitehouse.gov.

Your creation must look professional for maximum impact and viral potential. If you have an in-house team of designers and programmers you could request that they create something of similar quality to the examples above. Alternatively, you can use Elance or Odesk and outsource the creation of your idea.

Tip: Try to think of an idea that can be cross-marketed. For example, an interactive chart which highlights the tax on gas could be of interest to both car enthusiasts and tax related websites/publications.

Marketing Your Idea

Marketing is essential to maximise the exposure of your design. This does not have to be expensive or wildly creative, as a huge amount can be achieved with four simple, but effective, methods:

A.  On Page Coding

From an on-page perspective, you can ask your developer to embed a code beneath any charts, images or infographics that you create. This will allow other websites to feature the images with a link back to your site. See the example below:

This HTML will allow other websites to link back to your site easily

Y can also include social widgets which make it easier for people to share, recommend and +1 your creation – increasing the chances of it going viral.

B.  Notify Data Sources

The owner of the dataset will usually be very interested in any tool created using their data. Contacting them and making them aware of your creation will often result in an inbound link just as both data.gov and data.gov.uk link back to any apps on their sites.

Not only will this provide a high quality link but it could also create interest and traffic to your tool. Journalists and other publications researching similar data may learn about and investigate your creation through these links, potentially further increasing exposure and links from these third parties.

Using advance search queries in Google, you can find galleries and sites that specialise in featuring infographics and other interesting data. Tableau Software has a Gallery of links to websites that have used their software to visualise data and Killer Infographics allows you to submit infographics that you create.

Tip: If you are using an external company or contractor, ask them to feature your design on their website or within their portfolio. This is another easy way to gain backlinks.

C.  Issue a Press Release

A press release is a great way to let major newspapers and publications know about your creation and any significant research findings you have found from the data. If your press release is unique and contains interesting analysis, newspapers and online publications may use some, or all, of the article and link back to your site.

D.  Outreach To Related Blogs

In addition to the press, you can also contact blogs that have related themes to the data you used. For example, if you created an interactive map of property prices, you could contact real estate and finance blogs informing them of what you created and any key findings.

If your website does not receive many visitors, one piece of advice that Vince Blackham recommends is trading your viral content for a link. In allowing another, high traffic, site to publish your content, you will ensure much higher exposure, and in turn, create a greater flow of traffic and PageRank back towards your pages, providing exposure to your brand and content.

This may seem counter intuitive but this technique could gain more exposure for your content compared to featuring it yourself, helping your site in the long-term.

There is so much free data out there, it’s just a matter of using your imagination and creativity to identify ways it can be used and visualised. If you know of other free data sources or have created apps using public data, lets us know in the comments below – I’d love to hear about them.

Image used under ‘Fair Use’

Curated Lists

OK, I lied. You do have to use Google for this, but not nearly in the capacity you would with normal searches.

With lists, you have less sources to sift through but the value of the sites far outweigh normal SERPs.

My favorite searches — thanks to SEOmoz — are:

• Top/best lists, ie “top 10 Atlanta music blogs”
• Curated lists, ie “list of Atlanta music blogs”
• Twitter lists, ie “site:twitter.com inurl:lists ‘music bloggers’”

The best part about starting with lists is that someone has already done the work for you. Once you have a good stack, save them to the project that you’re working on. Then, save them in your Bookmarks or Evernote according to category type so you can use them across multiple projects.

Blogrolls & Recommend Sites

Ever landed on a site wondering how you got there in the first place?

That’s Internet surfing at its finest, and the best way to go from link prospect to link prospect. When I find an potential site, the first thing I look for is who else they find interesting by going through their blogroll. Not only does it plug me into the industry, but it brings me a pocketful of other prospects.

Heads up: If none of the sites are related or they’re overly keyword optimized, more likely than not they’re paid links and won’t bring you as high quality prospects.

Facebook Likes & Twitter Tools

On the same note as bouncing through blogrolls, Facebook Likes are a great way to find more sets of related sites. I already check out the social pages of a site I’m interested in to get a better idea of how much influence they have, so when you’re on their Facebook Page, see what other Pages they Like. They’re usually partners, friends, people they’ve worked with before, or other sites the company owns.

For example, I was looking for wedding websites for a limousine company I was working on and went through The Knot’s Facebook Likes and came up with other wedding sites, vendors, florists, bridal shops and more.

In addition to Facebook, Twitter has an abundance of tools that you can use to find the people you need to talk to first. I use Listorious to find a list of people tweeting on a certain topic. You can search by either Twitter lists or people.

Tweet Adder is another great tool to find related Twitter users. You have to pay for it, but you can a working version with the free trial. Once you have the Twitter user, export that data into an Excel file with their website and stats.

LinkedIn Searches

Like Twitter, LinkedIn is a great way to find the people you need to contact first rather than finding the source. Using their various search filters, you can par down sources based on keywords and location.

Look for the actual content curators for your keyword; let’s stick with “music bloggers.” To do this, search these without the quotation marks:

• “music writer”
• “music” filtered by location and/or writing and editing professions
• “music blog” or “music blogger,” filtered by location
• “music editor,” filtered by location

You can also use LinkedIn if you have the website or the company but can’t find a person or email address outside an info@domain.com, which rarely get you anywhere. You can read more about how to use LinkedIn specifically for SEO on this article on Mashable.

Guest Blogging Communities

It’s a shame I didn’t find these earlier because they are probably one of the best ways that I save time when finding opportunities for guest blog posts. Guest blogging communities are sites dedicated to helping bloggers who are looking for guest posts get in touch with people who can provide those guest posts (and vice versa). Blogger LinkUp and My Blog Guest are two of my favorites. You will need to put in your due diligence and check the quality of the blogs as some of them are sub par.

On the same lines, I also swear by H.A.R.O. I’ll subscribe to topics related to my clients and if one matches up, I’m able to get my client interviewed for these publications, which typically includes a link back to their website.

What are some other ways to find link prospects without using Google, Yahoo or Bing?

My objective in using these tools is, of course, building links, so I’ll go over the tools that I use and show you how I’d use them. And hey, they’re all free!!

For the record, I’m not interested in competitive analysis, analyzing sites, using social media (with one notable exception, and my exclusion here is only because that topic has been well covered both on this site and elsewhere) or examining existing backlinks. I’m interested in using these tools to help with finding new link sources and creating new content.

Also note, we don’t automate anything that we do. I know that we could (and probably should) but these are all tools that we use having that mindset. When we send out link requests, they’re usually pretty targeted so we spend lots of time upfront finding those sites. We aren’t interested in copying anyone’s link profile.

Our main timesuck is definitely discovery so any time I can find a cool tool to help with that, I love it. If you’re lucky enough to get things done through lots of automation, then I’m jealous, but if not, hopefully some of these tools can help you a bit.

For Link Outreach Generation

As much as I would love to totally streamline how we build contacts, I have not yet found a method that works for my link builders due to the way that we build links (it’s a bit old-school.) However, Buzzstream’s Blogroll List Builder is the closest thing I’ve found to being something that will work well for us.

It’s a very cool little tool that accepts a list of blog URLs and returns a downloadable list of blogroll links on those sites. If you have a good, relevant list of blogs to start with, this could definitely lead you to some cool sites and save time.

You still have to do your homework or you’ll be inundated with irrelevant sites, but this one is seriously promising.

For Search Term Discovery & Content Ideas

We have multiple clients and around 20 link builders/content team members so when it comes to discovery, we use many different methods. Some link builders prefer to just crawl around in the SERPs. Some like to sit down with a group and brainstorm.

However, the following tools are ones that we have found to be very useful in triggering new ideas for Google searches, anchor texts, guest posts, and new content for the sites we work on.

I’ve been using Wordtracker for a decade it seems. The Keyword Questions tool is really nice because once you enter your search phrase, it gives you a list of the questions people are asking about that topic and tells you how many times the questions were asked. This is great for helping you figure out what people want to know so that you can write about it.

After you do one search, you are asked to register but hey, it’s for a free account! You get 20 searches for the month so choose them carefully.

The Solo SEO Link Search Tool remains one of my favorites, as when you’re building links all day and you’re just dead tired, this tool makes more searches so easy. Just enter a phrase and it generates a list of more advanced search terms that link straight to the results in the engine that you select.

Pinterest: yes, it’s the latest fad and it can be a massive time waster, but if you use it correctly, you can get tons of great ideas for content. For those of us who like visuals, this has serious potential. If you choose to see what Everyone is pinning, you can drill down into more relevant categories.

Let’s say that I’m building links for a gardening site, so I’ll see what’s being pinned in Gardening. I see a ton of pins about seed bombs, which have interested me for awhile but we haven’t (theoretically) yet written about them on this imaginary gardening blog. Since 5 pins are different seed bomb photos that I see above the fold, this is a pretty good bet for me for my next post that will hopefully generate some links. I might also do some discovery for seed bombs to see if I can find good link targets.

Uber Suggest is powered by Google Suggest. You can select the language you want, whether you want to search the Web, news, or products, and get a downloadable text file. If you click on a result, you get deeper results and it’s all nicely alphabetized. This is great for discovery ideas for both pursuing link targets and generating ideas for guest posts and content.

Touch Graph allows you to visualize related topics. You put in a topic and it returns all kinds of related data such as phrases used for related searches and domains that are related. I think it’s especially good for tangential relevance (where something is related to something else in an indirect manner.) You can click on a graphed result and get related information for it, so the potential for drilling down here is fantastic.

Google’s BlogSearch can be particularly good for finding blogs so you can keep an eye on the homepage in case a new and relevant post pops up where you could get a link. If you’re using Google alerts, you might even set some up for the blogs that you see there.

Google Adwords Keyword Tool is great for finding new keywords to use in search. I always come back to this one because I also do a bit of PPC for a client.

Soovle is getting a lot of attention and it should. You can get search results from Google, Wikipedia, Amazon, Yahoo, Youtube, and Bing. Each result is linkable to the original source.

There’s also a link to the top daily internet keywords that’s alphabetized. This is fantastic for giving you ideas for popular searches you can use for discovery or writing content. There are also some “secrets” that are too numerous to include here but if you use this, check them out and see if they help. You can also choose different engines/sites to use for your search and customize this tool further for your needs, which is really nice.

In order to not rehash all I’ve said about free alerts I’ll suggest that you read an earlier post about that as it’s something that I highly recommend for keeping abreast on new potential link targets. It’s also a great way to see what your competitors are doing in case you’re missing a great opportunity.

Just for the record, this is a very small list of tools (that we’ve tested and like) that could work for you (for a bigger one look here). If you have something that you love that is free and useful for discovery, I’d love to hear about it in the comments.

 SEO:  “So, I’m concerned that we’re not proactively link-building and that may have a negative impact on our high quality in bound traffic.”

Executive:  “But when I type-in the company’s name, we are number one in Google.”

SEO:  “Yes, well you are getting personalized results AND there’s a lot more to . . .”

Executive:  “Don’t worry, we have a lot of PageRank juice all over our website.” 

SEO:  “But the amount of converting traffic has declined over the past . . .” 

Executive:  “Besides spiders really like our platform.  Robots do too.” 

SEO:  “OK, I’ll go clean up all that PageRank juice.  Where’s the mop and bucket?”  

The purpose of this post is to provide SEO’s with a series of metrics with which to evaluate your link profile as well as a series of visuals with which to scare MBAs into action. (Or at least approving a budget.)

While I’ve written against benchmarking within your own industry; for internal reporting to business executives, comparing your company to competitors can be extremely effective for galvanizing support and loosening pursestrings.

To make your job easier, I’m drawing data entirely from free tools – primarily Blekko, Majestic and SEOmoz. The former offers SEO data after every search; the latter two offer products: Site Explorer and Open Site Explorer, not to be confused with Yahoo’s . . . . errrr . . . Site Explorer.

For demonstration purposes, I’ll compare Urbanspoon to OpenTable, now that both are in the online reservations space. Accessing these tools is pretty easy and there are more than a few browser plug ins that aggregate some reporting. I use SEO for Chrome Extension for a very quick, cursory look.

Of course, the obvious starting point is a simple overall metric.

Google PageRank is an obvious (and simplistic, poor, inadequate, misleading) choice, that many fallaciously believe aggregates all of that delicious Google Juice into a simple number.

Both SEOmoz  and Majestic offer a variety of metrics on a 100 point scale – Domain mozrank (SEOmoz) and Domain Authority (Majestic) are their respective attempts to calibrate Page Rank.

The problem with overall metrics, of course, is that they tell a very, very small part of the picture.

Instead, let me suggest a variety of supplemental metrics that are both actionable and highly scary (read: competitive) to MBA types.

Competitive Domain Diversity Ratios

I prefer to use domain diversity to evaluate the quality of linkbuilding campaigns. It’s not a perfect metric; however, it more accurately reflects genuine linkbuilding initiatives than sheer link volume. Looking at the sheer number of links entirely misses the point.

To wit – a single site with a footer link could generate thousands, even millions of links, all of which are completely useless.

Get domain diversity from Majestic under the Linking Domains tab – be sure to update the pulldown for “pages on this root” (below). In Blekko, just do a search for your site, click, seo underneath the result and then hit “inbound links” under Domain SEO.

On SEOmoz’s OpenSite Explorer, make sure you look at the entire domain by using the drop down “pages on this root” and then running the report.

Note:  you only get three freebies daily with SEOmoz; at some point, Majestic prompted me to create a free account too, which gave me enough reports to write this article in one day.

Compare these three reporting tools and graph:

Cumulative Domain Diversity from Majestic

Graphically depict differences in domain diversity over time with Majestic’s historic reporting.

This requires a free account with Majestic to get access to their cumulative domain report and graphically compare your site with up to 4 competitors.

Non-Homepage Links

The true art of an SEO’s linkbuilding lies in the ability to drive links to interesting content, not your PR team’s ability to drive stories that link to the homepage (although these links are extremely valuable.)

Look at your homepage to non-homepage link ratio. (You are shooting for the lowest percentage of links going to your homepage here.) I can do this easily with Blekko, Majestic or SEOmoz data.  Here’s the reporting from Majestic:

Just run reports for both the Root Domain and the Page and calculate a ratio of homepage:overall on both links and domains. Below is the data from Majestic with 5 different domains:

Again, if you can look at this from a link perspective, it tells a very different story than the domain perspective. My strong bias is that domain comparison is much more reflective of overall organic link strength of a site.

The next three graphs are based on the assumption that overall link strength is reflected in your long tail results.

Ideally, you should see growth in both the number of landing pages and the number of different keywords brining traffic to your site. You can get both of these from Google Analytics (and obviously can’t get them for your competitors).

Number Of Landing Pages

Number Of Keywords

Sitemap:Crawl:Index:Entry Ratio

Finally, the grandaddy of all data wrapped into a single visual. This reviews the effectiveness of all of your pages at driving traffic. This is based on the assumption that the better your link profile, the more pages you’ll get crawled, the more pages will be indexed and the more pages will get traffic.

You can make pretty scary graphs that would make any MBA Strategy 101 class proud by turning these into stacked area graphs in either absolute (to show progress over time) or relative (to show the percentage of your pages that don’t have a chance of getting any traffic).

Today, I want to advance that concept a bit more. Let’s look at how the external world of the Web views your business. If your business is like many others, there may be a fair bit of confusion out there about the business, among the most common questions:

• Where is it located?
• What is the website URL?
• How can I contact the business?
• Why are there conflicting or duplicate listings in different directories?

If that confusion is severe enough, a legitimate profile for your business in local search or on a business directory might not be attributed properly by the Web search engines to your business. And when that confusion affects the backlinks to your website (not to mention your potential customers!), you lose.

There’s little doubt that a little clean-up effort of your online business profiles will help you get more link juice and get found by more customers.

Many Brands, Many URLs

To start off, what is the URL of your company’s website?

Many companies will ask, “Which website?” Oftentimes companies own several brands and/or registered trademarks, and if they are smart, they will reserve those terms as domain names. After all, it’s better that you own your brands rather than leave them to your competitors.

When a company owns multiple domain names, it is best to select a canonical domain name and configure the rest to redirect to the canonical domain using an HTTP 301 redirect, which passes any link juice earned by the alternative domains along to the canonical domain. That’s a good thing for SEO.

However, often companies acquiring multiple domain names over time end up having several domain names listed within their company’s business profiles on the Web (if any are listed at all!). This is particularly true for businesses that don’t actively capture existing or establish new business profiles for their company on the key business directories.

This is where the confusion comes into play. And you’ll never benefit from a confused search engine.

Canonicalize Your Business Listing, Starting With The Business Name & URL

Just as it’s important to be consistent with your URL canonicalization within your site, it is important to be consistent with your business profile listings on the Web.

One of the best ways to do basic link building among small business directories is to make sure the big business directories have accurate and consistent data. The data from the major sites often trickles down to the lesser sites.

You need to go out there and check out how the most important directories list your business.

No doubt you’ll find inconsistencies between sites, not only with your canonical URL, but even across your business name (are you officially called XYZ or XYZ Company or XYZ, Inc. or something else?), as well as your business postal address, your main phone number, even other data in your business profile.

Your goal should be to make that your business profiles between various local search and business directories are identical. That way, the search engines know that when they see a profile for your business, the citations count toward your business (especially that exact canonical URL, which is a backlink!).

Gathering Your Canonical Business Data

Create a list of the canonical data you want your all of your business profiles to contain. I suggest these for starters:

• Business name (use the exact same words in the name with consistent spelling and punctuation every time)
• Business address (look up your business address on USPS.com to get the exact postal service format)
• Phone number (if you have a toll-free number, use that as your primary, otherwise use your local number with area code)
• Fax number (include area code)
• URL (the canonical one, typically including the “www.” prefix and the trailing “/” forward slash)
• Email (a general address is best for generic listings, such as info@example.com)
• Social media links (the full URL for your account pages, typically for Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn)

You may have additional data to add to every profile, such as business hours, payments accepted, brand names carried, languages spoken, even product images. The more data you can add to your profile, the better it is for all, customers and search engines alike.

Start With Local Search

To kick off this campaign, let’s start at the top: Google Places (aka, Google’s local search service). But first off, make sure Google Preferences settings has your correct location registered (that way, you’ll get the right local search results). Then see what’s already listed for your business by typing your business name and your city in the search bar.

When you see the Google Maps push pin icon in the search results, that’s the local listing result. Review the data for inconsistencies from your canonical data list, especially the company URL. (Also check the map shown in case there is a discrepancy between the address and the map location.)

Just as important, look for duplicate local listings (this often happens with companies that have relocated in recent years). Unless you already have captured your Google business profile, most likely you’ll find some data to update, and you’ll certainly have more data to add to make the profile complete. If by chance your business is not listed, you need to get it added right away.

I recommend that you check the status of your business profile listing, then capture ownership of the profile (or create one brand new if needed) in the following local search venues:

• Google Places
• Bing Business Portal
• Yahoo! Local
• Mapquest Local Business Center
• Citysearch
• DexKnows
• YellowPages
• SuperPages
• Yellowbook
• Patch.com

You’ll start with the local search portion of the top US-based search engines, then move on to the major telephone directory guide sites, and finish up with a site that hosts local information in 23 US States. Each one offers an extensive business profile, which most of the time is barely populated with data. To capture or create a business profile listing, create a login account with the above sites, then search for your business.

In the results, each site offers its own way to claim your business listing, so follow their on-screen instructions. You may need to set an option to indicate, as you did with Google, where you are located so you get the local results you want.

Note that the above list or graphic is not complete, but it’s a good start. Be sure to do some research for other local search venues specific to your area.

Continue With Business Directories

Once you have your local search business profiles nailed down, it’s time to move on to capturing or creating business profiles in relevant business directories. Depending upon the nature of your business, you might consider some of the following directories:

• Better Business Bureau Online
• Best of the Web
• HotFrog
• InsiderPages
• Local.com
• Manta
• MojoPages
• TripAdvisor
• Yelp
• Yodle
• GetListed

Note that many of these directories offer both lightweight, free business profiles as well as richer, more highly promoted directory profiles for a monthly fee. I am not affiliated with any of these entities, and I am only suggesting that you register for the free business profile options so you can create a detailed business profile with a canonicalized backlink. If you want to pay for more services, that’s your call.

Wrap Up With Social Media Profiles

It’s also important to make your business profiles on your most important social media sites consistent. Some of them expose only a little business data, whereas others allow you to create a full-blown business profile for free.

Where you can, add your canonical business data, including your business URL, in your social media account profiles, such as in those listed below:

• Facebook (create a Facebook Page for your business and complete the profile)
• Twitter (Be sure to list your business URL, but there’s little else to list here)
• LinkedIn (create a Company Page and complete the profile)
• FourSquare (capture or create your business listing)
• Gowalla (capture or create your business listing)

Forced Data Inconsistencies

Note that the business profiles between directory and local search sites are not perfectly consistent in what data they request or in how they display it.

Don’t fret over such inconsistencies (for example, when the URL displayed in the profile omits the “www.” URL prefix despite the fact that you carefully included it in your canonical URL).

If a site has done this to your data, it’s done it for everyone, and the search engines are smart enough to recognize that the inconsistency here is not your fault. And since you added all of the other canonical business data consistently between profiles, the search engines will still be able clearly recognize that profile still represents your business.

Your business is described on the Web in a number of venues, such as business directories and local search. The listings these sites have were either created by you the site owner or by culling together random bits of odd information from potentially dubious sites around the Web. These business profiles are usually incomplete, often contain erroneous data, and are unreliable.

By taking the effort to capture or create accurate and complete business profiles using consistent, canonical data, including the ever-important URL (which serves as a nice backlink to your site), you make your site stand out from the crowd, you ensure the data is valid, and you make the listings useful to all Web visitors, humans and search engines alike. Get those backlinks and the rest of your verified business data out there for the world to see.

Unfortunately, with link building, you are usually left counting on someone else to do the job that’s so important to you. You actively ask another webmaster (or blogger, online author, or worse yet, a casual, social media user) to link to a page on your website. You depend on them to do the job right. You can even give them explicit instructions on the exact URL to use as part of your link building request. But unfortunately, while you can lead that horse to water, good luck in getting it to drink!

The problem of broken inbound links is all too common. Your intent with link building is typically to promote a specific product, a download, a subscription, or something that is important to your site. Heck, you might even just be promoting your site for general public exposure.

So what do you do when after making the big effort to find the right, relevant website, identifying the right technical contact on that site, and asking that person for a link, but they toss a typo in the URL that points to a non-existent page?

If you spend many a good hour in the link building process, you’ll inevitably find a certain percentage of those efforts that should have been good instead will go for naught. And worse yet, once those bad links are published, if the linking site is an authority site with significant influence in your community on the Web (and isn’t that who we pursue for link building?), that broken URL may begin to propagate, unfixed, across the Web.

Remediating Link Disaster

So what do you do when you discover an inbound link you worked so hard to earn is broken? If there is only one instance, you should definitely invest the time to reach out to the linking site’s technical contact and ask that he or she resolve the problem. Unfortunately, it’s rarely the case that there’s only one.

In these days of viral content, there may be dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of broken inbound links, pointing to numerous pages. The idea of asking hundreds, if not thousands, of webmasters to fix their individual broken links to you is surely a daunting, if not futile, task.

Worse yet, with the daily flood of post-it-and-forget-it content on social media sites like Facebook and Twitter, it may be extremely hard, if not impossible, to get the sources of the broken links changed. And if one of those bad links goes viral, it’s a heartbreaker.

Right? Well, not necessarily. If the broken link at least has your domain name correctly spelled, you have a chance to throw a metaphorical net around that valuable Net traffic and bring it back under your control. Here’s how.

How Many Broken Links Do You Have?

You first need to get a handle on the scope of the problem. I suggest using your Google Webmaster Tools account (you do have one, right?) to check the status of your site.

Once logged in, go to Diagnostics > Crawl errors > Web tab. Check to see how many Not Found errors you have.

Google’s list will include all 404 errors, generated by both pages on your site and those external sources attempting to link to pages on your site. The report includes a list of broken URLs on the site, the HTTP error (404), the number of links on which the broken URL is used (this data is hyperlinked, so you can drill down to see the exact pages that use the bad link), and the last date crawled in which the broken link was detected.

Note that if you are so unlucky to have a large number of 404s, you can download the data from Google Webmaster Tools in CSV file format to review offline as a spreadsheet. Unfortunately, as of when this blog post was written, this download was not problem free.

In the test run I made using the link Download all sources of errors on this site, while the downloaded CSV report did include the number of pages on which the broken link appeared, it did not include any drill-down data identifying those pages, despite the fact that this data was available in the online tool. (Dear Google, Please fix that! Thank you! Your pal, Rick).

Correcting Very Commonly Repeated URL Errors

If you have one (or a few) consistently mistyped URLs that are commonly used (or perhaps gone viral), you may be able to easily capture that otherwise lost traffic by setting up a 301 redirect on your webserver for each broken URL (this assumes you can infer what the intended destination URL was supposed to be).

Depending upon which webserver platform you use (the process is different between Apache and IIS, but the result is the same), setting up a 301 (aka permanent) redirect tells the search engines that the URL used originally is no longer valid, but an updated one is available.

This gets the link user to the page they intended to see rather than a 404 File Not Found error, which is good! As a bonus, since 301s are permanent redirects, search engines also transfer any link juice from the previously broken URL to the valid URL on your site (even if that valid URL’s page is one you just created as part of the broken link recapture process).

So instead of asking countless (and undoubtedly unresponsive) webmasters to fix their broken links to you, you just fixed it from your side. That’s a big win for you, your site, and your customers!

Capturing Future Broken URL Traffic

Setting up 301s is a great way to go to fix known, frequently hit broken URLs. But some large sites that have been around for many years will likely have hoards of one-off broken links.

Sites will also suffer from mistyped URLs at the browser command line. And we haven’t even contemplated what to do about all of the unknown broken URLs yet to come! For these scenarios, I strongly urge you to set up a well-designed, custom 404 File Not Found error message page for your site.

What is this? A custom 404 error page is one you configure your web server to show whenever it generates a 404 File Not Found error. So instead of getting the generic white browser page with the stark 404 error message text, the user can instead see a page using the same site design shown across the rest of your site, including your built-in site navigation scheme, and better yet, a text box used for intrasite search.

You should also put in a soft, short message apologizing for the missing page, but invite the user to try to find the desired content with the site navigation and search tools you’ve provided.

At a minimum, this custom page can help reduce bounces from your site, thereby increasing the chances of keeping a potential customer on your site and getting that conversion. For more information on this process, check out an article I wrote for the Bing Webmaster Center blog titled, Fixing 404 File Not Found frustrations.

Note that custom 404 pages do not earn you the ever-desired link juice you want in the broken inbound link. The link still generates a 404. The presence of a custom 404 page is merely a stop-gap measure in an attempt to keep potential customers from abandoning your site when the content/item they desire is on your site, just not shown in their browser’s generic 404 error screen.

As such, even if you do set up a custom 404 page, still keep a sharp eye on your broken link report in Google Webmaster Tools. If a few new links turn into a runaway problem, set up new 301 redirects for those broken URLs and capture that link juice back for your site.

How About Domain Name Typos In Broken URLs?

Well, that’s a rough spot to be in. You won’t have any easy access to that kind of information in your webmaster tools. However, with your business knowledge, you will likely already know if your domain name is liable to be misspelled and what the most probable misspellings are. As such, if the misspelled domain names are available, you should look into buying them and set up 301s to capture that traffic for your intended site.

If a domain name is already owned (and hopefully not by a squatter!), the best you can hope for is attempting to work with that site’s webmaster to find out if they do indeed get broken deep links that are wildly unrelated to their site architecture.

If so, ask if they will permanently redirect any such common link traffic back to your site rather than have it bounce as a 404 on that site. At a minimum, ask if they could list your site on their custom 404 page! However, if that site’s webmaster is exceptionally cooperative, perhaps they might even consider setting up a link to your site on their home page to let users know how to get to your site, their intended destination.

Hey don’t laugh! It does happen!

I have an example to share. I recently had to download the wonderful shareware graphics app Paint.net, but I forgot the product’s home page URL, so instead of doing a navigational query in search, I browsed directly to www.paint.net to get it. Unfortunately, that’s not the right URL for the app. However, the owner of that domain very kindly works with the folks of the Paint.net app to offer a link to the right page, www.getpaint.net. This is a terrific example of customer-first thinking on the part of that domain owner, and I was impressed (and grateful).

It’s A Wrap

Link building is valuable for SEO, and thus is a worthwhile exercise in which webmasters and SEOs should invest their time. However, with the external dependencies of relying on the generosity, if not trusting in the technical competence, of unknown individuals on those external sites, your hard work may not always bear fruit.

However, by keeping tabs on your site’s broken links report, you can identify opportunities to reel in that lost traffic by setting up 301 redirects. To make sure all users who attempt to browse to a non-existent URL on your site get at least a small taste of its design, style, and most importantly, its main site navigation scheme and optimally its intrasite search, set up a custom 404 File Not Found page.

Now go forth and link build with impunity, knowing you’re ready to handle any mistakes made by those good folks who otherwise are willing to link to us!

It’s no wonder that question and answer sites continue to gain in popularity, and while I’ve viewed them as a great free or inexpensive marketing and personal branding tool for awhile now, it’s only recently that I’ve come to see how useful they can be at helping everyone build links and do better SEO.

Think about how you’d search online if you weren’t ultra-familiar with search engines and data. You’d use longer-tailed queries probably, for one thing, and you’d hopefully be better able to hone in on more relevant results in the SERPs. Now think about all the ways questions can help you when you’re marketing online.

Now, there are some amazing tools out there for keyword discovery of course, but look at how different our keywords would be if we used a traditional keyword tool (in this case it’s Google Adwords’ tool) vs. a Q&A site (Quora, in this example):

Google Adwords Tool

Google Adwords data for NYC Restaurants

Quora

Quora questions

As you’ll see, both searches give you some results that aren’t exactly what you’re looking for but are indeed related. (Obviously, if you’re going to be eating cupcakes, you’ll need a nice place to run right?) Using the above example, think about using Q&A sites for the following tasks.

Keyword Research For Content

Let’s say you’re writing new content for your New York restaurants site. Using the above data, you can see both popular phrases used when searching for what you have to offer and you can see other related bits to add in.

Maybe you’d not yet thought about desserts (pie and cupcakes in this case) as being something to work in, yet the Quora data triggers an idea for a separate piece of content about all the great places to buy those in Manhattan.

Key Terms For Use With Social Media

New ideas are always helpful when using social media, as you can better see which phrases to use to attract your targets and interact with them.

I have mentioned Followerwonk before as it’s a fantastic tool to use to see how Twitter users describe themselves in their bios, and having new phrases gleaned from Q&A data means you can expand your search here as well.

Others use Followerwonk in hopes of finding you, too, remember, so if they’re relevant, these new phrases can be added to your bio.

Followerwonk

New Ways Of Discovering Potential Link Targets

If you use manual searches in order to discover link targets, Q&A sites can give you tons of new ways to phrase your queries. I absolutely cannot live without the Solo SEO link search tool for generating queries as it alleviates all that pesky typing and leads you straight to query results.

Instead of just using your typical “New York city restaurants” phrase here, use a few other ones gleaned from what Q&A sites say that people are talking about.

These same new topic ideas will work with advanced search queries, straight up manual discovery in any search engine, and directory searches.

New Ways Of Discovering Potential Sources & Topics For Guest Posts

Similar to what I said regarding keyword research for your own copy, this information can easily help you narrow down your guest post searches (maybe instead of just looking for sites wanting posts about NYC restaurants you’ll now look for sites seeking posts about desserts in the Northeast) and give you ideas on new content.

Quora is my favorite for keeping updated on related questions and can be great for triggering ideas for new posts, with their “Someone adds a related question to a question I’m following” email option. Sometimes creativity strikes when you least expect it in your inbox, so I’m really loving this functionality.

A Few Popular Q&A Platforms

• Yahoo Answers
• Quora
• Answerbag
• Answers

Since there’s always something new popping up, just go and search for Q&A sites and I imagine you’ll find new ones. I’d suggest trying a few out in order to find which ones work best for you, too, as we all have our individual preferences and different marketplaces to work in.

Now to conclude, I’m not at all suggesting that we abandon traditional keyword tools or use Q&A in order to replace anything we use to do a better job with link building.

However, I am suggesting that diversifying your methods is a good idea, and using popular community sites to do that right now can only better your results.

But what is link bait, what makes it work and why does it fail?

What Is Link Bait?

Link bait is content designed from conception to go viral. The goal is to produce something so awesome your friends will share it with their friends, your friends’ friends will share it with their friends and so on.

In theory, if you to create the perfect viral link bait, people keep sharing and sharing until everyone on the Internet sees your creation.

In the diagram above, you send your link bait to four people. Each of your friends share it with four people. Each of them shares with four more and so on. Four become Sixteen. Sixteen becomes sixty-four. Sixty-four becomes 1,024. In this perfect distribution, 1,108 people will see your content and it keeps growing.

Great link bait earns links. Those links increase domain authority. Higher domain authority generates better search engine rankings. Or at least that’s the SEO theory. But as we are about to discover, one cannot simply decide to publish link bait and have it work.

Just like SEO, making link bait work is difficult. If fact, you’ll quickly realize that link bait means different things to different websites.

Link Bait Strategies

Over the years, link builders have identified a few common link bait strategies. Lists vary, but they generally look like this:

• News Stories
• Debate Articles
• Attack Articles
• Resource Lists, How-to Articles and Infographs
• Humorous Stories
• Incentive Pieces (Contests, Awards)

A good place to learn about each strategy is The Link Baiting Playbook: Hooks Revisited by Todd Malicoat.

Link Bait Is About Links

For SEO purposes, we are interested in sharing. You want people to write about your link bait on their websites, blogs and on their social media accounts. It would be a shame if 10,000 people saw your link bait yet none of them actually linked to it.

While sharing on Twitter and Facebook is a good start, the gold standard is to earn permanent links on websites and blogs. This is why tutorials and infographics are popular. Website owners and editors only link to content that they think their readers will find useful.

Before you spend time and effort on production, identify specific websites that might post and link to your content. The folks at Distilled recommend you get five actual commitments from bloggers before you spend a dime on your link bait. That’s sound advice.

While you want dozens, hundreds or thousands of tweets, shares and links, try thinking like a sniper instead of a B-52 bomber. Every country has snipers. Only a few can drop the bomb.

If Link Bait Is So Terrific, Why Doesn’t Everyone Do It?

The sad truth is even the best link bait flops more often than succeeds. For many, this leads to disillusionment and surrender. To succeed, you must commit to the long-haul up the river into the heart of darkness.

Link bait is like baseball. If a professional ball player gets on base 3 times for every ten at bats, he becomes a star and hall of famer. Today, the on base percentage for the entire Major League is 32%. That means even pro players fail seven out of ten times.

Set reasonable expectations and don’t beat yourself up when you know that you did a good job.

Audience Size & Popularity

If you or I tweeted, Today, do something good for someone you do not know, we might get a handful of retweets. But what if certain other people posted this; what might happen?

• Niche celebrities Guy Kawasaki or Rand Fishkin—25 to 100 retweets
• Cult celebrities Neil Gaiman or Amanda Palmer—100 to 1,000 retweets
• Global celebrities Lady Gaga or  Justin Bieber—1,000 to 100,000 retweets

Popularity matters because it creates leverage. Having more people to message directly increases the opportunity for content to go viral.

Guy Kawasaki and I could create and publish virtually identical inforgraphs, but Kawasaki’s version is far more likely to go viral because he has over 300,000 followers on Twitter, plus one of the most read blogs on the Internet.

If you ever wondered where the value is in making connections on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter or other social media sites, here is an important example of ROI potential. Your friends and contacts are your first generation. The more friends and contacts you have, the greater your link bait success rate will be, assuming that you publish quality link bait.

The ROI here is not sales, it’s influence. You are publishing and promoting link bait to get links, not to make customers. Influence leads to links. Links lead to rankings. Rankings lead to lead generation. Lead generation leads to sales. The investment, by the way, is networking and friend making.

You don’t have to be Lady Gaga either. Sure she can launch a thousand ships, but her fans don’t create content. Focus your friend making efforts on Web editors and writers in your business space and you will grow the type of influence your need.

Help your link bait travel. Add embedding code and social media sharing icons. Tell people to pass it along. Make it insanely easy for people share your content and give them specific calls to action to do exactly that. Ask three times. Before your link bait, after and alongside your share buttons and embed code.

Noise

The social Web is a busy place. Chances are good that you scan through posts and messages, looking for things that grab your eyes. Your time is limited so the more friends you have online the less carefully you scan. Those posts you pass over, I call noise.

Noise can turn this:

Into this:

When it comes to link bait your content must stand out above the noise. There is no average, just outstanding or meh.

Noise increases over time too. When I began promoting events and content on Facebook I was a lone pioneer. Today Facebook feels like a raging river of marketing messages. I can barely keep my head above the torrent. Twitter is the same.

Is your link bait truly delicious? If you cannot be your own harshest critic, then make sure you have blunt, honest advisors to run your ideas and drafts past.

All link bait gets accompanied by messaging. Whether it is on your blog or social media account, make certain you make your accompanying text as enticing as your link bait.

Timing

Be careful if you use social media to promote your link bait. If you are not on Twitter when a friend posts, you may never see it. The half-life of a bitly link is three hours. This is why people carefully select when they post important links.

Some strategies involve tweeting when Twitter is busiest so more people will the posts. Other strategies prefer tweeting during off-peak traffic times or in weekends, with the hope that less people posting will make it easier for a message to get seen.

Pre-write and schedule your posts. I like to tweet important links three times — morning, noon and evening. However, I am not going to tell you that my strategy is the best for you. Every market is different. Watch you social media space, try different strategies and figure out what will work.

There are tools that automatically schedule tweets and other social media post for you, supposedly when they will be seen by the most people. I don’t trust them. Apparently they work for some people, but I think this is because using the tools make them change their behavior and tweet more often.

Hope & Prayer

I see a lot of link bait released into the wild with a hope and a prayer. People who do this know they don’t have a big audience to get the viral snowball rolling. What they are praying for is this:

They want an influencer, someone with a large audience, to see and share their link bait with her audience. Because so much content gets put out on the Web every day, this is a low percentage gamble.

By now, you probably know what I am about to advise. Invest the time to connect with influencers and get to know them well enough to ask if they will share something before you even roll-up your sleeves and work on your link bait.

Who should you connect with? Watch Twitter and see which influencers converse with their friends. Neil Gaiman is a huge influencer, except he has over 1.6 million followers, so it’s going to be rather difficult to enjoy a virtual cup of tea with him. Look for people like Ian Lurie who has eight-thousand followers, engages in conversations and links to cool stuff.

Do Not Campaign

Lots of marketing is done as campaigns. It has a start and an end. Social media is not a campaign. You cannot decide to turn-on social media, drop a dozen link baits, then turn your social media off.

Just like you cannot ignore the friends you go to bars and ball games with, you must keep nurturing your online relationships. This is why I call social media networking friend making.

Know The Value Of A Link

While it is practically impossible to know the actual value of a link, this is important because you’re spending actual money on your link bait.

At some point, the value you receive must exceed your costs. Since link bait is for SEO, links are the best measure of success. Therefore you have to know the value of your links.

There are lots of ways to price links, none of them perfect. But try telling that to the CFO. I suggest estimating how much it would cost to place each link as small banner ad since this is a white hat approximation.

Get an experienced Internet media buyer to do this estimate for you and only count links on actual article pages. Your link will fall off any page that changes over time.

Since link bait is for SEO, treat any sale from a link bait referral like a direct credit. Add the amount of any sales to your earned-links ROI estimate.

Don’t be afraid to make up-front investments, especially when you are starting out. But at some point, though, you need to look at your wins and losses and decide whether or not you are having a winning season.

If you spend $10k and get 1,000 links, that’s $100 per link and a steep price to pay. If you get 30,000 links you spent 34₵ a link, much more palatable. 100,000 links? 10₵ a link.

Last Word

I have one last thought for you. All infographs may be link bait, but not all link bait are infographs. They may be all the rage right now, but infographs are expensive, few designers do them well and there’s a heck of a lot of competition out there.

Why not start with some excellent blog articles with some outstanding images? If you ask ahead of time for some link commitments it will be just as effective and much cheaper. That could save you from burning out before achieving success.

I love the idea of only having $100 to get started because many times, having less money means you have to get more creative. So, since I’ve spent my theoretical $100 already (in the post above), everything else I’d advise is free.

So far we’ve set up social media accounts, used a few free tools in order to find more Twitter followers, analyze our Twitter work, and keep abreast of all of our online mentions.

Advertise Your Business The Old-School Way

If you don’t already have business cards, use some software to print some out or call in a favor to your friend down the block who works in a printing shop. You don’t have to get fancy here, as my goal is simple: I want you to be able to show someone your URL.

Put these cards up on bulletin boards at the community center, drop them in fishbowls to win free meals at restaurants, and give them out to anyone who asks what you do for a living. The takeaway here? You’re getting free visibility.

General Online Branding

Add your URL to your email signature. Set up a Google profile page that lists your URL. Check Knowem to see if your blog/brand is available on a ton of social media sites. While they have a great package that secures these for you, since we’re going for free here, I would advise making use of the service in order to quickly see which ones you should grab. You’ll see what is available along with links to go sign up yourself. It’s time-consuming but, again, free.

Guest Post On Other Sites

Find other bloggers in your industry and ask them if you can write a guest post for their site. This is a great way to get a link back to your own site, build personal brand visibility, and start to become a part of the community.

Find 10 sites that have posts on them with which you don’t fully agree. Ask to have your on take on the subject posted. Find 10 sites that have posts that give you ideas to flesh out further, and do the same.

Find 10 sites that deal with your subject but aren’t regularly updated, and ask if you can become a regular contributor. You’d be surprised at the number of webmasters who will ask you to send them more content once they’ve seen your (quality) content.

For straight up guest post/article searches: (and thanks to Solo SEO’s Link Search Tool for the list. Why reinvent the wheel?)

• pet insurance guest writer
• pet insurance guest blog post writer
• pet insurance submit content
• pet insurance submit article
• pet insurance submit post
• pet insurance submit blog post
• pet insurance add article
• pet insurance add blog post
• pet insurance add content
• pet insurance guest blogger wanted

However, not everyone advertises that they accept guest posts, so make sure to contact bloggers in your area even if they don’t say they’re asking for guest posts. In addition, there are services such as My Blog Guest that can help put you in contact with sites that accept guest posts.

Conduct Interviews

Interview someone in your industry. People love talking about themselves. You’ll raise exposure for your site through the interview and hopefully generate some favorable mentions/links from the person whom you interview.

Answer Questions

Give out free advice. This helps build your personal brand, causing people to seek you out. Go to Yahoo Answers and search for questions in your area of expertise, and answer them. Do the same with Quora. Both of these services also tweet certain questions and answers, further raising visibility.

However, don’t stop there! There are indeed others that may suit you. Here are two more that I think have good visibility potential. (Please note that just like with almost anything, you’ll occasionally see spammy stuff and possibly offensive material on these sites.)

Sites like Answerbag lets you create a question in poll-format, should you choose to participate by asking and not just answering.

Answerly is a helpful site because it provides you with results from multiple FAQ platforms.

Find Your Audience

Use Icerocket in the same way that I previously advised you to use Followerwonk…to help find potential followers/fans. This service lets you search blogs, the web, Twitter, Facebook, news, and images. It also has a feature called Big Buzz which shows nicely grouped results from all of those areas.

Since I can’t find a Facebook-specific tool for this, I use this one. (Please let me know if you know of something though!) Another cool thing about using Icerocket to help you connect with people on Facebook is that you can both go to the person’s Facebook page and you can directly visit the links people post, which in my example are mainly YouTube videos of Bryan Ferry.

If I had a blog about Bryan Ferry (and I should) then I’d be able to use this to connect with other fans on YouTube, possibly subscribing to their channels and letting them know about my own channel (which of course I would have being a Bryan Ferry blogger.)

*Depending upon your niche, sites like Flickr and YouTube might be the right fit for you. Both these sites can help you draw people in with visuals, but skip both if your area of expertise isn’t something that lends itself to photography and video.

Use Evernote

This application is definitely the one I’d choose if I could only pick one. I write blog posts in it, use it for travel, clip screenshots, recipes, etc. It’s invaluable to me and it’s available as a standalone app on your computer, on the web, and as a mobile app.

If you’re a blogger, I imagine you’re constantly having new ideas for posts and looking for cool things to write about. This app makes that so easy. It’s free but you can do a premium subscription. However since I’m in the free section here, let’s go with that for now. Free.

Be Real, Be Nice

Be nice. I cannot overstate the importance here. I know that it can be trendy to be snarky and argumentative, and that can certainly help you build links, but most of the time, if you’re a jerk to someone, that person isn’t going to ask to interview you on his or her site. People don’t tend to reach out to someone when they’re afraid of being a target or being ridiculed.

So what if we had $500 to spend? Still inexpensive, as far as marketing budgets go, but it’s not outrageous. Here’s how I’d spend my extra $400.

Research Potential Link Sources

Grab a $29 daypass for Link Research Tools and research the heck out of your competition. This gives you 3 link prospecting reports and 3 backlink reports (which you can use to see who links to other blogs in your niche.) Use this information to find webmasters who might be willing to link to you, and reach out to them.

Dress People

Have 10 t-shirts printed from Cafe Press at a cost of around $140. You can create whatever design you like (I vote for squirrels.) Yes, do another contest…everyone who mentions your blog on Twitter/Facebook gets entered into a drawing to win a shirt.

Anyone who’s willing to add you to their blogroll gets entered twice. Also, offer a contest for the best blog post written about why said blogger should win your shirt. Winner gets a free shirt and one for a friend. $140

Sponsor A Local Event/Meetup

If you’re lucky enough to have a local community that shares your interest, this is a great way to get your name out there. Simply laying down a $100 bar tab will make at least 10 people very happy. If there’s an existing event that is in your niche, offer to sponsor it, at least partially. Since we’re dealing with a smaller budget here I’d say not to go above $100.

Meetup is a service that lets you enter your area of interest and a location so you can easily find something near you. If nothing is out there, you can start something here. You can also just look for meetups in your local area, as you don’t have to be tied to your exact niche. $100.

Do What Makes Sense For Your Niche

With the remainder of the budget ($131) I’d pick and choose from the following, depending upon my niche:

• Get nicer business cards. $100
• Sponsor one more $100 meetup. $100
• Wait a month or two, then repeat one of the $50 contests listed above. This gets fresh eyes on your site. $50 (or $100 if you repeat them both)
• Do the same thing with the t-shirts, with a new design, in a month or so. $140
• Be a community giver in your area. If a local fundraiser is happening and a group is requesting sponsors, spend what you can. You’ll get a mention and possibly a link. $10 and up
• Buy some Google Adwords ads for a month. A small budget can still bring you good visiblity. $50 and up

As you can see, there really is a lot that you can do for free or very little. Time is usually a major factor in the success of any marketing effort, and just because you have loads of cash to throw around does not at all mean that you’ll be successful.

Even if you do have a large budget, pretend you don’t, even if just for an hour, and think about what you would do if you didn’t. You’d be surprised at all the creative ideas that will fill your mind.

If you’ve done it, you will know that while it’s fun and interesting at times, it’s also a serious pain. It’s inefficient, it’s tedious, and you’re likely to keep running into the same sites over and over. Sometimes it’s nice to sit back and let the link potentials come to you using a variety of free alert tools.

Alerts are a great way to stay informed about what’s being said. You can use alerts just to monitor your brand or a keyword and stay informed, or you can view the information sent to you as a new place to get a link, however you go about doing that.

This has been particularly helpful when a blogger advertises that he or she is interested in guest posts on a specific topic or a new page about a topic that we market is indexed. These are great opportunities for new links.

You can set up both web and social alerts so that you can be notified when:

• your brand has a new mention
• your competitors have new mentions
• there is news about your industry
• your competitors write new guest posts
• a site seeks out guest posts about your industry
• someone asks a question about your industry that you could answer
• content with critical keywords you track is indexed
• new industry-relevant sites appear
• key players in your industry are mentioned
• a link with your desired anchor has appeared for a competitor
• a blog comment mentions you, your brand, your competitor, or your keyword
• a negative experience surrounding your brand has occurred
• a positive experience surrounding your brand has occurred
• a potential new customer appears, asking about your product

How To Use Web Alerts

Google alerts: I use this as my catch-all for mentions. You can set up basic alerts or customize the alerts using advanced search operators as well, which can be very handy. You can set up the alerts to let you know as something happens, daily, or weekly, and you can narrow down the list of sources to news, discussions, blogs, video, realtime, or just search everything.

In addition, you can choose to get only the best results or everything and how the alert gets to you (email or RSS feed). I usually get everything, at least when I do a new alert.

There’s also a handy preview that lets you make sure you’re going to be getting the result that you’re after. This is particularly useful when you’re using advanced operators. I’ve found that I can use the negative function a lot with these, mainly to weed out certain keywords or sites. You can also get alerts in multiple languages and set up to 1000 alerts.

For brand and URL mentions to monitor your reputation, this is a must-have. For some keywords that I want to monitor, I’ll have it set to send me a daily email listing all the new results, but for brand/URL mentions, I like to have it come to me the second something new is picked up, especially because it’s not wise to ignore a brand mention when you could easily email and ask for a link to be put in.

Also, Google advanced search operators are way too cumbersome to go into detail about any more than I have here, so I suggest that you do a good bit of reading about all the various ways you can use them.

How To Use Social Alerts

Monitoring social media is becoming more and more critical due to its massive popularity with just about everyone. If you use Twitter you’ll see that many people complain, fuss, and talk about bad experiences.

If you’re being complained about, responding quickly can (hopefully) help you from garnering further bad reviews from the immediate source and others. Many people who start out complaining on social media will go on to write blog posts or articles about their bad experiences, too. There’s a link you really don’t want right?

By monitoring and responding to negative mentions, you can hopefully turn the situation around to your advantage and, if someone decides to write about it, your link will have a much more positive sentiment. Responding to positive mentions can also help you build links, as there are some people who write about positive experiences as well.

Social Mention is a catchall alert system for social media that bills itself as being like Google Alerts, but for social.

You get a daily alert email that lets you know what is being mentioned on social sites. Like Google alerts, you can customize your sources (blogs, comments, bookmarks, etc.)

Social mention is a great backup system for the specific Twitter and Facebook alerts, but due to its daily email (and not real-time notification) I would caution you to use it alongside other real-time alerts. Otherwise opportunities could be lost.

They also have a pretty cool widget that you can display on your site to show a feed of what’s being said about your brand. Sounds a bit dangerous though doesn’t it?

Twitter Alerts

There are a few good ones, with new ones popping up now and again. I’d suggest trying them out as some can be inconsistent. If all else fails, just search for your brand or URL in Twitter every now and then.

Google Alerts can also pick these up, but if you do a lot of promotion on Twitter, you’d be wise to sign up with a service that is specifically dedicated to Twitter alerts (I like Twilert.) This is a great way to be alerted to new content on Twitter that may interest you. The same as with Google alerts, if someone tweets and is asking for a guest post or pointing you to new relevant content, that’s a good linking opportunity.

Facebook Alerts

I love HyperAlerts for this, as it sends you an email whenever someone posts or comments on your Facebook page. While I confess to finding this the least useful for my purposes, I do realize that people will occasionally post something interesting on your wall, so it’s worth checking out (in case you can, ahem, get a link.)

(Debra Mastaler listed some other good alert services here last year as well.)

At the very least, you’ll want to use alert services to monitor your own brand of course, but they really can be a great source of potential linking opportunities. Even if a site doesn’t look promising right now, it’s still worth noting somewhere and going back to later, and it’s also a great way to find potential influencers on Twitter, for example, whom you can follow, interact with, and maybe earn a link!

Don’t ignore the impact of quickly resolving bad situations that come to your attention via social media alerts, either. These can cost you customers and send them to your competitors, and, as mentioned above, have the potential to flood your brand SERPs with negative mentions, causing even further loss of viable traffic.