We can all agree that a large timesink in outreach link building is site prospecting. Who really wants to spend the time to go through a bunch of pages on a site to figure out if the site is worthwhile? Further, if you’re following the “Throw Away Your Form Letters” principles then you are looking for content on a blogger or webmaster’s site that is of interest in order to start a conversation – but that takes a lot of time too. It would be awesome to scale that process wouldn’t it? Now, there’s an app for that.
I had the idea that if I spidered a site and matched the URLs with social metrics and then used natural language processing to figure out the core concepts of every page I could tell at a glance whether a site is worth my time and what content (if any) is popular. Note: I have purposely left out Linkscape’s metrics from this as I don’t believe we should waste API calls on what may be many worthless pages. You should identify the worthwhile pages and head over to Open Site Explorer. Sound good? Ok, let’s do this!
Natural Language Processing Explained
Of course Rand is a pro so he titles his posts properly therefore the concepts “creative,” “typography” and “ux” come as no surprise here, but for less savvy writers and people who write more colorfully you may not be able to tell what a page is about from just the title. Also you get a better sense of what keywords, concepts or topics a computer will associate with a given page.
At a glance you can guess that the page is about some sort of incredible music performance and there were puppets involved. You’d be wrong thinking that it was Rock music though, but that’s just the gift and the curse of ambiguity of words. In other words after 5 seconds you are about 90% correct as to what the page is about without ever looking at it.
Your New Best Friend SiteSkout
There are a few options that will affect the speed at which this all happens. You can have it spider a site from a given URL just like you would Screaming Frog or Xenu but be warned single-threaded spidering is slow. So I would suggest you use Screaming Frog for your spidering and just dump the URLs to SiteSkout or use the HTML or XML Sitemap because it will just crawl those URLs for scraping purposes instead of crawling through every link trying to determine the URL of every page on the site.
Bring Your Own API
So for SiteSkout I’m encouraging users to bring their own API keys. The tool is built on 4 keys so it will run without it, but to ensure stability, signup for your own Textwise API key.
- Step 1: Register – Textwise has a very painless registration process, all you need is a name and email address.
- Step 2: Find your API key – Your API key is hidden away in your profile, grab it and save it somewhere like a text file.
- Step 3: Plug it into SiteSkout. SiteSkout will cookie your Textwise API for you so you don’t have to enter it every time you use the tool.
Applications
My motto is “all actionable everything” so let’s talk about how this data will help you do more effective link building.
Prospecting a Site
The obvious application is that it helps you prospect a site; if you mash this data up with a Screaming Frog export what you get is a macroscopic view of what the site is about at a glance and then a microscopic view of what a page is about without ever visiting the site. Use VLOOKUP on the URLs and bring all the data together. I’d suggest using the heading tags, level, inlinks, outlinks, external outlinks and hash columns from Screaming Frog in concert with this.
Outreach Material
In my eyes the real power is in that you now easily have something to talk to the webmaster/blogger about. You now at a glance can determine the most popular content on the site and the magic inherent in that is social proof works both ways. That is to say if something is popular it makes sense that you would contact the writer about it. Your link target will be disarmed to a certain degree because they are very likely to have received a lot of praise and correspondence via social media and email because of their popular content. In short, SiteSkout helps you take out the cold calling aspect of link building.
Like I always say, Context is King!
I’d love to hear your thoughts and success stories with the tool in the comments below! There’s bound to be some bugs in this, please just hit me on twitter (@ipullrank) if anything goes wrong for you. I continue to update these tools with feedback from you until they are running super smoothly. Also this tool is NOT an SEOmoz tool and any errors or failures are my fault, not the wonderful team of developers at the Mozplex, so if you run into any problems ping me not them.
