Salutations, flappers and dappers! Today we come to you from the golden age of the Internet. That’s right, the 1920’s! SEOmoz’s resident Whiskbroom has put on his finest glad rags and is going to give you some knowledge, strictly on the level.
OK, you got us. We’re not actually in the 1920’s. But some of those old techniques that we all used in the past still work in 2012 and into 2013. Let’s all watch Rand tell us all about them.
What older techniques are you still using and seeing great results? Let us know in the comments below.
“Howdy SEOmoz fans, and welcome to this special edition of Old Tyme Whiteboard Friday. Now, this week on Whiteboard Friday I want to talk to you about the major search engines: Lycos, Northern Light, HotBot, AltaVista, Infoseek, Yahoo, Webcrawler, and Dogpile. Now these fine search engines are going to help your visitors get to your website. The website is a very important page. It’s on something called the Internet. My understanding is there are tubes, system of tubes that connect so you can get to them, and the way to get to the top of these search engines, none other than, starting with keywords.
Keywords are the cat’s pajamas. You must have keywords. You want to repeat them as often as you can, stuff them into your titles, put them in your meta keywords tags, your meta descriptions tags, all over the page if you can. If I could have a page that was just a big list of keywords, I would do it.
Next, doorway pages. These are magical. The doorway page is a great way to stuff keywords into a page and yet show that only to the search engines and not have to force it upon your users, because, as we all know, visiting a doorway page can get a little, you know, rough. So you want to gazoozle a bit and show the search engine your doorway page.
Next, submissions. Submissions are very critical if you want to earn a happy cabbage. Now, to do direct submissions, you need to find all the search engines that I’ve listed up here, plus many hundreds of others. Remember that many hundreds of secondary search engines power these major search engines. You want to get into those so you can get into these.
And last, but not least, directories. Directories are critically important. Submitting to the directories, getting included in the directories, you can’t be fimble-fambling around here. You’ve got to do the hard work and get in the directories.
All right, everyone. In addition, to our Old Tyme Whiteboard Friday, we’re going to do a little bit of serious Whiteboard Friday, but first a drink. It smells like heaven. Don’t want to take too much at work here. There we go. Just take my handy . . . burns like heaven. I feel better already.
So old-tyme SEO had some weird things going on with it, but, in fact, there are some classics from the late ’90s, from the early 2000’s that still work today. We’re going to help you with these.
First off, reciprocation. Actually, that feels ridiculous. Reciprocation, if you help other people out, they, in turn, will help you. I don’t just mean this in terms of you link to someone else and they’ll link to you, although that can be helpful. But what I mean is if you help someone out doing something, something on social media, something with their website, you can often get them to pay that back to you. I’ll give you one of the best examples I’ve got.
We love to send tons and tons of traffic to other people’s websites through the Moz Top Ten. When we do that, when we drive traffic from SEOmoz’s email subscribers, about 250,000 people subscribe to the Moz Top Ten, that drives traffic to those sites, and then those sites all tell people, “Wow, I was in the Moz Top Ten. You should subscribe to it.” Wonderful way to play reciprocation and to get something back for giving something out.
Being on the jiffy with your keyword research and targeting. So this is really interesting, because what I mean by on the jiffy is getting to a keyword before it makes its way into the common keyword research tools. This is mostly the AdWords search tool. Before Google has volume there, you can find phrases that have come out in news, new brand names and products, things that bloggers are talking about, things people are searching for and talking about on social media, trending items. Those things will have search volume next month, but they might not make their way into the keyword research tools for 30 or 60 days. That means you can jump the gun and be ahead of any of your competitors. Using search suggest for this is actually a really smart way to go too, because a lot of the times, those search suggest terms don’t make their way into the AdWords keyword research tool.
Improving on the good works of others. I’ve been shocked to see, you know what, we have this inside our heads, as content producers, that we have to produce something very unique and different. But great artists steal, and it is just fine to take something else on the Web that’s a good resource, that you think, “Man, that’s solid but I could do it better,” and do it better. We’ve had tons of success with this.
SEOmoz, when we first started out, I used to use Vaughns-1-pager around SEO ranking factors. Then I thought, “I wish there was a better one of that.” We made our own ranking factors, and it worked out great. We got statistical data and the opinions of lots of SEOs and aggregated them, so it wasn’t just me saying what I thought was important. That worked very, very well. It got us a ton of notoriety and citations and links.
Empathizing with the needs of your audience. This is one area where your distance from your customers hurts you. The further you are from your customers, the worse off you’re going to be. But the closer you are, the better you can be. If you can spend time with your customers, talking to them, figuring out, “Hey, what do they need? What do they like? What are they missing? What do they not understand,” not just about what you’re doing, but about anything that’s going on in your field, about any topic that a large percent of your customers are having, even if it doesn’t really relate to what you sell or what you do, you can produce content and provide solutions, basic easy tools, a resource guide or a list. You can contract this out to somebody who might be an expert, to have them come in and produce the content for you, a video, a landing page that describes all these problems, a downloadable white paper, a research document. This kind of stuff works wonders in terms of not just getting engagement, but also targeting new keywords, reaching your audience, and making them delighted.
And finally, requesting action at the pinch of the game. So, a lot of the time we will do things that I think are a little bit foolish in the inbound marketing sphere. One of my favorite examples, worst examples too, is you get to a blog post and you look at the top and on the sidebar, and it’s just filled with all these things asking you to share and subscribe and become my friend on Facebook. You kind of think to yourself, “I’ve never been here before. How do I know that I want to share this on LinkedIn, and pin it on Pinterest, and put it on Facebook?”
Ask in the pinch of the game. Once they’ve finished reading the article, then, at the bottom, right, that’s the time to potentially ask. This happens all the time. For example, someone’s just purchased something from you in an e-commerce store. One of my favorites was this store that I bought some supplies from, and they sent, in their email, in their thank you email and confirmation a, “If you had a great experience with our product, with our store, we’d love to get a link from you, and here’s a little embed you can put on your site, saying that you’re a customer.” What a great time. Don’t ask for it before you’ve done a good job for me. Ask for it after you’ve done a great job for me. That’s the pinch of the game.
All right, everyone, I hope you’ve enjoyed Old Tyme Whiteboard Friday, and we will see you again next week for another edition, sans chopped mustache and ridiculous costume. Thanks everyone. Take care.”
