SEO Werkt!

by Nick Stamoulis

More than one site owner has asked me how many links they should build each month, or how many links they can expect my team to build for them as a full service SEO client. Since so much of SEO seems to follow “best practices” and “guidelines,” with very few hard and fast rules (although they do exist and it’s important you know what they are), many site owners are looking for a quantifiable way to measure and control their SEO campaign. Unfortunately, when it comes to link building it’s hard to give an exact number of how many inbound links in a given time period is the “right” amount. Obviously 1,000 links overnight might catch the attention of the search engines, but what happens if a piece of content should go viral? You can’t control how many people link to you and would you want to pull the plug on something that is doing a great job of building inbound links when it can be so hard sometimes to find great, new places for link building?

One of my new SEO clients recently asked me how many links they could expect to see in the link building reports I send out at the end of the month. I did my best to quantify it for them but realized there are too many variables to give an exact number. For instance, let’s say that we wrote a press release on their behalf and included 4 links in the content. That press release might get published on a dozen sites (48 links) or it might only get picked up by 5 (20 links). But then again maybe it gets picked up by a major news source and gets a ton of online media attention resulting in dozens, if not hundreds, of links. I can’t say for sure one way or the other what will happen. I might leave comments on 30 blogs on their behalf, but I can’t control which ones get approved and actually go live. We might write a new blog post and promote it on social media, but I can’t make people share/reTweet/post it. I can’t control every aspect of a link building campaign, no matter how much I may try.

I like creating a link building strategy when working with a new client so they have a good outline of the work we intend to complete for them over the coming months. However, that link building strategy is not set in stone; it’s more of an overview. New link building opportunities like a guest blogging invitation or local event that we can leverage online might pop up at random. Should I not take advantage of those opportunities because they aren’t in the strategy? Of course not! Link building is hard enough; there is no need to pass over great links when they come your way. In 6 months a client might launch a new product, which means there will be new content on the website, a press release, maybe a few paid blog reviews, a lot of social activity, promotional blog posts and much more–that could be a huge influx of links one month that doesn’t happen normally.

The key to link building is to approach it naturally. It is not a formula, no matter how much we try to make it one. The search engines like to see a slow and diversified approach to link building–it doesn’t have to be the same each month from now until the end of time. Link building activities come and go and vary in importance, which is why you never want to put all your eggs in one basket or pass up a good link opportunity when it comes your way.

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Twitter is one of those services that’s always mentioned with a “but” – and it’s always about money. The service, which is widely accepted as the most possibly current news source on the web on pretty much any subject, also has the stigma of being unsustainable and a ‘flash in the pan’. So when I saw that they’d put on a commercial during Nascar and Nascar had pointed to their specialized #Nascar hashtag chat page several times during the broadcast, I knew Twitter was finally taking steps to address the “but”.

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If you like to follow news and events for your city and happen to live in one of the 51 cities worldwide that Frrole curently covers you’ll get a kick out of the webapp. More »

An infographic from Schools.com (with a hat tip to Mashable) gives a little insight into the world of social media and news.

It’s popular to think that social media is replacing traditional news outlets as many people’s source of news. It’s popular because it is true. Of course, just because something is popular doesn’t mean it’s the right way to go. In fact, what is popular can often be confused with what is easier and oftentimes, easier produces inferior results.

The data in the infographic is intriguing and makes one wonder if people will learn to be more discerning as to where they get their news from or if we will continue down the road of not being able to tell fact from fiction in online news. Take a look for yourself.

So where do you stand? Do you trust social media as a news source? Do you want to believe everything that is reported as news in social media or is that a bad idea? What is the balance and how can it be struck so we are more well informed vs. misinformed?

• Scoopinion: Stories we read.
  
  A crowdsourced, personalized news source… curious how it differs from the billions of othersn ow

Remember the old Techmeme of a week ago, before the new design took effect? Sure, the new design is easy on the eyes. But is it better?

Personally, I’m already used to the new look, other than the sponsored posts stuck in your face in the new middle column (push those to the right, please, where ads belong). But some people just can’t let go of the past—people like Eric Marcoullier (founder of OneTrueFan, Gnip, and MyBlogLog).

Marcoullier hates the new design so much that he created a Chrome extension to revert it back to its old look. The main feature he cannot live without is the underlined links. In the new design, the underlines are gone, making the site much cleaner with more room to breathe. But it also removes a key part of the information density which makes the site so useful, argues Marcoullier.

Techmeme’s headlines and excerpts now makes it look more like a blog or other primary news source than a link aggregator. Partly that is because the links have been de-emphasized. Marcoullier thinks it is easier to parse the different sources when they are underlined than when they are separated only by a comma and spaces that make them look too similar to the excerpted text below the main headline. You can see a before and after below.

Which one do you think is more scannable? I always found the underlines too cluttered. But seeing them here next to the new look, Marcoullier does have a point that the source names in the “More” section now tend to bleed into each other when the conversation gets too dense.

As Google Plus begins to win its followers, we’re seeing a bit of a culture shift on the users of the network.  As with any new technology, the first adopters tend to be a close-knit bunch, and out of them, inevitably, come a few users who stick their nose up at any earlier, unsophisticated options.  Browsing Reddit, the best social news source on the web, I found corroborating evidence.

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Pet Peeves: Washington Post Facebook App

Recently I noticed in my Facebook timeline (yeah, i look at that) a lot of links to interesting stories with the “Washington Post” logo on them. Trusted news source, so why not click? Being greeted with a pop-up asking me to grant a Facebook app permission just so I can read articles I always used to read anyway. Kudos to getting more people to post your articles, WaPo, but making people give access to an app just to view them is really creepy. To be fair, if you deny the app you are taken directly to the article (not so, it seems, with other similar publisher apps) but it’s still creepy to me. Blech. It’s important to consider the user experience when taking advantage of a popular platform. There’s a give and take. Does WaPo cross a line there? It does for me.

Liz Strauss and Quitting Klout

There has been a lot written lately about problems with Klout (the social media influence scorekeeper) and why it makes some people uneasy (score is too simple a metric to be useful, “algorithm” is unexplained, potentially horrific privacy stories). Liz Strauss recently wrote a more detailed and heartfelt post about why she opted out of Klout (now that, thanks to Danny Brown and others, one can actually do that). Am I moved to quit Klout? No, my curiosity remains, and the potential use as a (very) minor tool in finding out the right people for the right conversations and messages remains. I’ll support people wanting to leave for these legitimate reasons, but I’ll remain patient.

Whither Gowalla (Owning Your Stuff Part 9,000,000)

For those who like Location-based social media services: a few months ago, Gowalla changed how it works, focusing on users telling “stories” rather than merely checking in to a location and posting said checkins to Twitter and Facebook. As a way to differentiate from Foursquare, it made sense. But I found the idea to be more work than I wanted to devote, so I used the service less.Now that Gowalla has been purchased by Facebook and is essentially being dismantled, I am reminded of the “owning your stuff: mantra that I like to mumble on occasion. Gowalla users don’t have a lot of content stored that they are going to miss; not like if a service like Tumblr or Posterous went away. But it is a reminder that if you rely on an outside service for anything, you run the risk of that service going away and having to change course. I have worked with clients who ran campaigns with Gowalla. A tighter integration would be more troublesome, but it is also hard in this social media environment to run up some sort of consistency if services keep rising and falling. Part of the environment, I’m afraid

Apple’s Social Media Policy Leaked

So, an Apple store employee is fired because her rants about apple online to friends saw the light of day. So, Apple’s restrictive social media policy was leaked. As a PR person, I have always had problems with Apple’s closed culture. Maybe friends would expect me to rail against Apple’s fascist-state communications regime. Not at all. I think that while restrictive, the Apple ethos is quite clear, and seemingly within their rights (I’m not a lawyer. Whoopee). Don;t talk smack about your employer- or anyone/thing- anywhere unless you’re ok with it coming back to you. Period.

Losing My Stuff

I have been travelling again lately, and have begun to realize that the things I have lost or left behind on trips might be able to tell their stories.

“Remember me? I’m your Ray-Ban sunglasses you left in that Nissan Cube you rented in San Francisco in 2010. Oh fine, you thought you would wait until your next trip rather than spending the small pile of cash to have me shipped back. How can you be surprised that I had disappeared from the lost & found when you finally came back to claim me? I’m an attractive pair of sunglasses- you lose, and I’m seeing the world through different eyes now.”

“Well weren’t you clever? Throwing me in the front seat of the rental car in Orlando because I wasn’t worthy to take the holiday party snaps- a “snap” decision you made after parking. Oh sure, you were going to toss me back in your bag the next morning on the way to the airport. Seems I’m still here, big-shot, stuck between the seat and the gear-shift, waiting for the next renter to liberate me. I’ll bet you’re glad you already uploaded your last crappy photos to Flickr. Enjoy your next camera, bought in a rush to replace me, on the cheap no doubt. Feh.”

“I seem to have found my way to the Land of Doug’s Lost Pan-Mass Challenge Baseball Caps. Remarkable, considering you only misplaced two (or was it three?) of us in your house, the rest being spread around in Las Vegas, San Francisco, and Maine. Enjoy that new light blue cap. It sets off your eyes (not). Putz.”

Flipboard started a great app trend where news is aggregated from a variety of sources including links of people you follow and, presumably, find interesting. These curated news sources come from the usual social network suspects: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and others. However, until now, “others” has not included Google+. To my knowledge, News360 for the iPad is the first to allow people to add links posted by people in their Google+ Circles as a curated news source. The app is available for free in the iTunes App Store.
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