If you’ve been watching Team USA, you’ve noticed the unbeatable dominance! No other team has the fundamentals down, the speed to keep up, or the ability to reach as many areas of the court like Team USA. They have a team of individuals that are well rounded, making them spectacular players.
Similar to Team USA we want to provide you the tools and methods to win the game called Search Engine Optimization. These tools and tips will make your team more scalable, measureable, and more viral. With this simple game plan, you can play a successful SEO campaign.
First Quarter: Use Query “Fundamentals”
This is important because it is a fundamental technique of SEO, link building through search queries. Out of all search queries out there, we’ll focus on the move known as Guest blogging queries.
Say if we’re trying to build a link for a Kobe Bryant crossover highlights page, here’s how the evolution of guest blogging queries should look like:
- Guest post
- Write for us
- Guest contributor
- Guest blogger (Tip: get specific)
- Basketball guest blogging
- ~Basketball guest blogging (Tip: ~ will include synonyms)
- Basketball intitle:guest blogging
- Kobe Bryant Site:ESPN.com (Tip: after you know the site, search for specific content)
- “Kobe Crossover” Site:ESPN.com
Second Quarter: Link “Lineup”
The quickest and arguably efficient way to get your first few prospective links is through lists. Roughly 60% of industries out there have a directory, or list that names all the players. If there isn’t, Google can help you identify many of them through organic results from simple queries, also observe the advertisers on the right side as well. For example: Basketball Bloggers.
Few Starters:
- Alltop
- Dmoz
- Yahoo Industry
- Technorati
- Xmarks
- Social Media Channels: Facebook, Twitter, and the many others.
Third Quarter: Social “Fast Breaks”
These methods and tools will help youleverage the power of social media. With these tools we seek to find out opportunities for link-building. The simplest way is to look for phrases like: guest post, guest author, writes for us, guest blogger, etc.
You can then scale this with tools like FollowerWonk.com which let you compare twitter profiles, determine audience reach, identifying influential users, and look for common relations. Find accounts similar to yours, and compare your profiles to see how well you’re gaining traction. If you have multiple accounts targeted at specific topics, this will be the greatest tool in consolidating your followers, and eliminating duplicates. It even goes further to help you find influential users by region, followers, and keyword relevance.
Fourth Quarter: Analysis “Assist”
Often time teams will watch competitors’ film of past games. The reason is that it reveals what they’ve done, and what they’re doing. The same thing goes for SEO, knowing your competitor’s backlink profile often aids you considerably in building your own links. Using one of the many tools out there (Open Site Explorer, AHrefs, Blekko, MajesticSEO, and Raventools) can help you get a link profile. Combining profiles of competitors will reveal easy “steals” in terms of links that’ll be low hanging fruit for you to get such as directories, lists, or even blogs. After you grab some of those quick wins, you can go into more depth analysis by ranking links by PR scores, amount of outbound links on each, and many more other factors.
Further Resources:
5 Advanced Guest Blogging Queries
Comprehensive List of SEO & Social Media Tools
Optimize Gmail for SEO Linkbuilding Tasks
