Sultan Sayed (SEO Expert Mumbai)

Friday, March 7, 2014

5 Things I Wish I Knew as an Agency Marketer - Whiteboard Friday

Working as an agency marketer is tough. I did it for a bit over two years and learned a lot of lessons. Along the way and since I have reflected about what would make me more successful as an agency marketer, and now that I am in-house at HotPads.com, I've come up with five things I wish I had known as an agency marketer. Never fear though, as there are some tidbits in there for the in-house crew as well!

For reference, here's a still of this week's whiteboard!

Video Transcription

Howdy Moz fans. Welcome to Whiteboard Friday. My name is John Doherty. I currently lead Marketing at HotPads.com. Thank you Moz for having me back here on Whiteboard Friday. It's been a while since I've been here. I'm super-excited to be back in Seattle, able to get here on the camera and talk to you guys about a few things that are near and dear to my heart.

I've been at HotPads for about four months now. I joined them in San Francisco a few months ago, moving out from New York City to lead Marketing for HotPads, working with some of the other rentals businesses as well under the Zillow Inc. umbrella, both on the consumer side and the business-

to-business, B2B side.

But I worked for an agency for a couple of years. I worked for Distilled, based in New York City, and obviously I worked with a lot of clients, small clients, large clients, took a lot of pride in building relationships with my clients and getting things done. Distilled is phenomenal at that, and I felt like I learned a ton. I learned a ton about clients. But over the previous couple of months, I've really been reflecting and trying to figure out: What is really the difference between agency and in-house marketing?

I wrote a post about it on my own personal website, JohnFDoherty.com, which I don't write on there often enough. But I published a post on there recently about that difference. But today I want to take a little bit more focused approach to that, and I want to talk to you from the in-house perspective about five things that I wish I had known when I worked as an agency marketer working for clients.

So I have five points for you. Let's run through them real quick. First one is your client is the industry expert. What I mean by that is your client knows their industry, their vertical better than you know their vertical. You may be able to look at it from a domain authority perspective, who's ranking, who's creating content, who has social media going, who has a full-

fledged marketing team built out, who's just playing around, and who's spamming, who's building link networks. But you don't know their vertical, and you don't know their business. You don't know their monetization model nearly as well as they do.

So while you know the tactics, and one of the great things about agencies and one of the super valuable things about agencies is that you know the tactics and you can see across verticals. You know what's working in travel and what's working in real estate and what's working in video. You know what's going on across the broader spectrum. So that's where you can really add value to your client. You can tell them tactics, and you can tell them tactics that work across different verticals that they may not have thought about. But at the end of the day, they're the ones that know their business, and they know their vertical, from a business perspective, better than you do.

The second one is learn the whole marketing team. This is one that I struggled with early on in my career at Distilled. I was very focused on SEO, especially technical SEO, focused on site architecture and content and things like that. So I made sure to get to know the SEO. I made sure to get to know the SEO team, who does what, what's everyone's skills, all of that. For a long time, though, I failed to get to know their bosses. I failed to get to know who runs the marketing team. I failed to get to know the different sides of the marketing team and who does what. For example, in a big company, the marketing team may have five people in PR and three people in SEO and two people in email.

So talking tactics, such as email marketing strategies, with the SEO team when the SEO team has no ability to change the email marketing tactics isn't going to get you a long ways. However, this can be super valuable when you're talking with the SEO team about how they are going to be able to get buy-in with other teams to work together collaboratively with them to get more done on the SEO side. It's the old you scratch my back, I'm going to scratch yours sort of mentality.

The third is never forget that, as the agency, you are the outsource solution. Whether you like it or not, no matter how closely you get to your client, no matter how well you get to know them, no matter how often you go down to visit them, you are still the outsourced solution. You are not working there in-house with them all the time, part of the politics, seeing what's going on, knowing what the roadblocks are, knowing why certain things aren't getting done, or why certain things do get done. At the end of the day, you are still an outsourced solution that you were brought in for a reason. That's not necessarily a negative thing. Actually, from the in-house perspective now, I don't believe that's a negative thing at all, because you were brought in because you're the expert. You're the expert in SEO or technical SEO or link building or content marketing or social media marketing. You were brought in because that is what you own, and that's what you are known for, and so that is exactly the reason why you are there, not to be part of their marketing team.

However, what I learned in my time at Distilled is the closer you can get to the team, to the in-house team, the better you can get to know them, the more successful you are going to be.

This brings me to my fourth point. As an agency marketer, you're actually less responsible for results than you may think that you are. What I mean by this is ultimately the in-house team is the one that is responsible for the results. Myself, at HotPads, I am responsible for driving traffic, which drives leads which drives the business. If I hire an agency, you are not going to be responsible for driving traffic. You're going to be responsible for giving me deliverables that I can then use to go and turn into actionable things for my development team to do or for my marketing team to execute on.

To be successful as an agency marketer, what you need to do is you need to make sure that you are communicating with your client. That is the first and foremost, that you are communicating with your client, telling them when things are going to be in their inbox, what you're going to be delivering, why you are delivering it, what you're going to deliver next based off of the deliverable that you are currently working on, or spending a lot of time reporting. Honestly, I was really bad at this when I was at Distilled, reporting to my clients and telling them, "This is what we've done over the previous month, and this is what we're going to do over the next month."

That alone is invaluable to an in-house marketer, because then, as in-house marketer, if I'm given that from my agency that I'm working with, I can then go and set expectations with my bosses and tell them, "This is coming down from this agency. I expect it on this date. These are the things that they've done, and this is what we're doing with them."

Finally, this brings me to my fifth point, which is deadlines actually matter less than you think. Deadlines for deliverables actually matter a lot less than you might think. The reason for this is in-house marketers are very, very, very busy. Leading marketing at HotPads, I'm doing SEO. I'm helping out with the content strategy, helping my content manager with the content strategy, helping her meet the right people and get buy-in from the right people and figure out when to publish things and where do we publish things, and how do we push it on social media. I'm helping me email marketer get to know our developers and talk with people up here in our Seattle office, the email marketing team up here to find out what they're doing. We're strategizing about emails. I'm helping my link builder find new places to get links. We're strategizing about link building and measuring that and measuring the ROI on that.

So I'm very, very busy. Everyone on my team is very, very busy. All in-house marketers are very, very busy. We're all over the place. We're touching all sorts of different parts of marketing at some point and working very, very collaboratively, and I would suggest that any very successful in-house marketing team is all working collaboratively and not siloed away from other teams.

So all of this is to say that I really don't care about deadlines, and most in-house people aren't really going to care about deadlines. What's important for you as an agency marketer is going to be communicating with your client when something is going to be delivered. If you're going to be late, communicate that with them as soon as you're able to. If it's going to be a week late, let them know why. Things come up. Everyone understands that things come up. Maybe another client had an emergency. Maybe there was an algorithm change that they were hurt by, that their CEO is about to fire the whole marketing team if you don't jump in. Clients understand this. So what you need to do is you really need to communicate with them as soon as possible, as often as possible.

As an in-house marketer, speaking to the in-house guys for a second, you need to tell the agency exactly what you're dealing with, exactly what your responsibilities are. What keeps you busy day-to-day? There's nothing more frustrating as an agency marketer than being like, "Why can't I get a hold of my client? I know they're around. I know they're in there. Aren't they just like sitting there building links?" The answer is no. They're not just sitting there building links. They have a lot going on. So to be successful as an agency marketer, you need to find out from your clients exactly what keeps them busy day in, day out. So then you are able to not be a pain to them, but rather to help them do their job even better.

So these are five things that I wish I knew as an agency marketer now that I am in-house. Once again, my name is John Doherty. You can find me on Twitter, DohertyJF, and I'm happy to be back here. Please leave any comments you have below in the comments section. Thanks a lot. Have a great weekend.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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5 Things I Wish I Knew as an Agency Marketer - Whiteboard Friday

Posted by dohertyjf

For reference, here's a still of this week's whiteboard!

Video Transcription

However, what I learned in my time at Distilled is the closer you can get to the team, to the in-house team, the better you can get to know them, the more successful you are going to be.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

from Moz Blog http://ift.tt/1e8rCaH

Are Links Losing Value in Google's Algorithm? - Whiteboard Friday

Posted by randfish

There are some great arguments to be made on both sides of the question of whether links are losing value in Google's algorithm. In some ways, it seems that they are -- and in some, they're more valuable than ever. In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand explores both sides of the argument, offering some concrete advice to SEOs on how they can navigate today's waters.

Here's the link to coverage of Google's testing removing links from the algorithm, and to the roundup post where links as a ranking signal are discussed (in particular, check out Russ Jones' reply in the comments). For reference, here's a still of this week's whiteboard!

Video Transcription

Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Today, I want to talk a little bit about links losing their value in Google's ranking algorithm.

So Google recently came out and talked about how they had tested a version of their search engine, of search quality algorithms, ranking algorithms, that did not include links as a ranking signal. Of course, a lot of SEOs went "Wait, they did what?"

But it turns out Google actually said they really did not like the results. They didn't like what they saw when they removed links from the ranking elements. So maybe SEOs are going, "Okay, can I breathe easy, or are they going to keep trying to find ways to take links out of the ranking equation?" Certainly, links for a long time have been an extremely powerful way for SEOs and folks to move the needle on indexation, on rankings, on getting traffic from search engines.

I'm going to personally come out and say that, in my opinion, we will continue to see links in Google's rankings systems for at least the next five and probably the next ten years. Whether they continue to be as important and as powerful as they've been, I think is worthy of a discussion, and I do want to bring up some points that some very intelligent marketers and SEOs have made on both sides of the issue.

So, first off, there are some folks who are saying, "No, this is crazy. Links are actually growing in value." I thought Russ Jones from Virante made some excellent comments on a recent blog post where some experts had been asked to do a thought experiment around what Google might do if links were to lose signals.

He made some good points, one of which was as Google filters out . . . so let's say I've got this webpage on Google, and as I filter out the value that are passed from some links through algorithms like Penguin or through filtration systems that remove either Web spam or low-quality links or links that we don't find valuable in our relevancy algorithms, it actually is the case that these other links grow in importance. In fact, as Russ wisely pointed out, many of the other kinds of signals that Google might potentially replace links with, things around user and usage data, things around social signals, all of those things actually can be validated through the link graph, and you can use the link graph to add additional context and information about those other signals. So I think there's a point to be made.

People have also pointed out that as we get into this world where no-follow is very, very common, a lot of websites putting no-follow on there, social sharing is oftentimes a much more common form of evangelizing or sharing information than linking is. Before we had the popularity of Facebook and Twitter and LinkedIn and Google+ and all these networks, that social sharing would have been bloggers and people in forums linking out to these resources.

There's also, unfortunately, created a lot by Google themselves, and Bing to a certain extent, too, there are many, many webmasters and site owners and editorial specialists on the Web who have a fear of linking out. They worry that by linking to something bad or if they link out and then something happens to that website they link out to, that maybe something will happen to their site.

As a result, it's actually become a greater and greater challenge over time to earn editorial links for everyone. This is interesting because it actually suggests that there is more value when you do earn those editorial links. So I think there's a very credible case to be made.

On the flip side, there are SEOs who are pointing out, hey, look links are definitely a diminishing signal because there are elements in a ranking system, and anytime you have elements in a ranking system and you add new signals of relevancy, new signals of usefulness, of importance, of popularity, whatever those are, the pie chart has to squish those in. Then, the portion that used to be links, all of this stuff here, just this portion is still link-

based. So links become a smaller piece of the pie chart.

One good way of explaining this is think of, for example, Olympic ice skating, where you have judges who give rankings. Those judges, they'll give a score -- a 7.5 and an 8.5. They have criteria that they look at. As new criteria get added, the criteria for other pieces necessarily becomes a little bit less important.

Now, in Google's ranking system, it's not quite the same logic. We don't have a pie chart that can add signals and remove signals. It's not like everybody has a score out of just 10. But the ability of pages and sites to move up in the rankings is influenced by the elements that are in here in a similar fashion.

So what really should SEOs do? What should we take away from this sort of debate and discussion and this testing of Google by removing links from their algorithmic signals and not liking those results? Well, in an ideal world, in a best-case scenario, as a marketer, the way that I believe we should be thinking about this is to invest in the marketing, in the tactics and channels that provide value in multiple ways.

By "multiple ways," I mean provide value in terms of branding; provide value in terms of direct traffic; provide value in terms of growing my social network; provide value in terms of growing my e-mail network, in terms of growing my influence and thought leadership in this sphere; all those kinds of things.

If I can get those multiple ways and still earn links? So content marketing is one that a lot of SEOs and marketers have been investing in because it does these things. Content marketing means that I get social shares. It means that I get more social followers. It means that I grow the people who pay attention to my brand and are aware of my brand. That content can also earn links, which helps me in the search engine rankings. That's the ideal world. There are many forms of this. Content marketing isn't the only one.

It can also be good, not quite as good, to refocus the energy that you might currently be expending on building all kinds of links and instead concentrate very carefully on the few links that really matter. As we've seen here, even for those who are arguing, "No, it's becoming less important," it's not becoming less important. Those folks are saying, "Hey, there are a lot of things getting filtered out, and it's harder and harder to earn the good editorial links." Focusing on getting those is still very valuable.

Do not do these things -- keep getting any and every link. We've talked about this many times on Whiteboard Friday. You guys are all familiar. Especially the non-editorial kind. It's too dangerous a world. If you're building a site that you want to last in the search engines for a long period of time, many months and years in the future, you can't afford to be actively, proactively going and getting non-editorial links.

Please, don't ignore the value that you get from activities that might not directly earn you a link -- things that could get you brand mentions and grow your brand, things that could build up your resource of content, things that could build up your social channels -- just because those things don't earn you a link.

A great example of this one is a lot of folks have been talking about guest posting. Of course, I did a Whiteboard Friday right before Google made their announcement about guest posting. Guest blogging, guest posting, in that classic SEO for a link fashion, is not a great idea. But it can still be a great channel to earn brand awareness and attention, to earn direct traffic. I mean, a lot of folks can post on forums, on sites that earn them an additional audience, and that additional audience in the future might turn into people who share and link and become customers. So that's a beautiful world. Don't ignore the value of that.

I'm sure there's going to be some great debate and discussion in the comments, and I really look forward to hearing from all of you. Take care. We'll see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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SearchCap: The Day In Search, March 6, 2014

Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Yahoo Rolling Out Indoor Maps (via Nokia) Yahoo has started to integrate indoor maps into its newly upgraded mapping product. Even though Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer...

Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.

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SPONSOR MESSAGE: Webcast – Link Building in 2014

Webcast: Link Building = Successful Marketing. Join us Thursday March 27th to hear link building expert Jon Ball, Page One Power’s Co-Founder and CEO discuss – New techniques for strategic long-term link building success; Does guest blogging really work; Is there a way to leverage your...

Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.

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Yahoo Rolling Out Indoor Maps (via Nokia)

Yahoo has started to integrate indoor maps into its newly upgraded mapping product. Even though Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer didn’t want to go head to head with Google in “local” (read: maps), Yahoo has been improving its mapping and local search user experiences of late. The inclusion...

Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.

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Thursday, March 6, 2014

An Introduction to PR Strategy for SEOs

Posted by SamuelScott

This post was originally in YouMoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author's views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of Moz, Inc.

In case you missed it, Googleâ€™s head of web spam, Matt Cutts, wrote this on January 20: â€œOkay, Iâ€™m calling it: if youâ€™re using guest blogging as a way to gain links in 2014, you should probably stop.â€

Three days later, Jen Lopez of Moz responded with this excellent post on â€œguest blogging with a purposeâ€:

As with anything, you don't want to be out there trying willy-nilly to get your posts on every blog for the sole purpose of building (probably bad) links. It's important to have this tied to your business and marketing goals, as you would with any other tactic. SEO is only one piece of the larger strategy, and if you focus solely on writing posts for link building purposes, you're missing out on a ton of other possibilities.

In Lopezâ€™s post, I commented in some detail that â€œguest postsâ€ are really just another name for what the public relations industry calls â€œby-lined articlesâ€ and that the goals of the two should be identical. In response later in that thread, Lopez and Everett Sizemore invited me to elaborate on the â€œPR side of SEOâ€ in a detailed Moz post.

Well, letâ€™s get to it!

Marketers, Assemble!

(photo courtesy of Marvel Studios)

First, letâ€™s set the record straight.

As Iâ€™ve written elsewhere while using â€œThe Avengersâ€ as an example (Joss Whedon fans, unite!), "SEO" is actually just a slang term for a collection of best practices -- it is doing web development well, content creation well, social media well, PR well, and so on. This is why successful SEO, and digital marketing in general, necessitates that companies â€œassembleâ€ a holistic, integrated team with expertise in numerous disciplines. And that includes public relations.

Rand Fishkin once tweeted a similar sentiment:

Here, Iâ€™ll cover how PR relates to content and linkbuilding.

PR By Any Other Nameâ€¦

I can already hear the groans: â€œBut, wait! Iâ€™m not a PR flak! Iâ€™m an inbound marketer!â€ I completely understand â€“ as a former journalist, who only later went into SEO, I specifically had been looking for something in marketing that was not PR. But the fact remains that much of inbound marketing is just PR by another name:

Are you interacting with influencers, journalists, and bloggers on Twitter? Sure, you can call yourself a â€œsocial-media marketerâ€ â€“ but you are really doing PR

Are you pitching guest posts by-lined articles to news outlets and other online publications? It is not â€œguest post marketingâ€ â€“ it is PR.

Are you e-mailing people in the hopes of getting links, mentions, or anything similar? Itâ€™s often called â€œe-mail outreachâ€ today, but it is just doing PR via a specific communications channel

It took me a long time to accept the fact that a lot of what we do as â€œSEOsâ€ is actually, well, PR. But the sooner that we accept that fact and throw away our preconceived notions about PR, the sooner that we can start to learn, adopt and benefit from its best practices.

Hereâ€™s the kicker: Technologies and communications channels change, but people do not. Publicists, for example, may contact reporters with Twitter more than the telephone today â€“ but it is still one human being talking with another human being. And PR experts know how to work with people. Social media is often just a communications channel â€“ and not a discipline unto itself â€“ that can be used by PR professionals, customer-service representatives, lead generators, and more.

The Basics of PR Strategy

There are many types of PR. But since the idea for this post was born out of a discussion on guest posts, I will discuss PR strategy here specifically on pitching content and story ideas to journalists and bloggers. This is a brief summary of some of the ways that The Cline Group works with our PR clients â€“ and the resulting â€œhitsâ€ (in PR-speak) give them the added bonus of gaining quality, natural links and social media exposure as well!

The first thing to understand is that public relations is an art, not a science. There are specific, defined ways to create XML sitemaps, ensure that Google can crawl and index a website, avoid duplicate-content issues, reduce page-load time, and more. PR methods, however, can vary as drastically as the number of people using them.

Here, I will present the overall strategy that The Cline Group uses in our public-relations work. This strategic, step-by-step process delivers the best results.

1. Goal Identification

PR is not an end. It is a means to an end. The goal is not to â€œget coverageâ€ â€“ the goal is to get coverage that supports a companyâ€™s overall business and marketing goals. Here are some examples of our PR clientsâ€™ goals:

We want to gain VC funding or to exit by selling

We want to maximize downloads of our mobile application

We want to gain more leads who will become users of our B2B software

We want to build our brand through authoritative content

It is useless to create a PR strategy without first having a clear sense of the objective.

2. Target Market Identification

The PR team must then research and compile a list of the general targeted audiences based on the goals that the client established. Here are some for the above examples:

Investment: Angel investors, start-up founders, corporate VC funds

Mobile Downloads: People who would be interested in a mobile app (of the given type)

B2B Leads: The business owners, executives, and managers who would be interested in the solutions that the B2B software provides

Content: The people who would be interested in the information that the content communicates

3. Messaging and Positioning

Once the goals are determined and the target markets are identified, then the PR team can determine the positioning (how will you brand the company/individual/product/content to the target markets) and messaging (what text, images, and more will you use to communicate the positioning).

Take one of our mobile-app clients, MediSafe Project. Which of the following pitches do you think would be more likely to interest reporters, and, in the end, their readers?

â€œMediSafe reminds people to take their medication.â€

â€œA year and a half ago, Bob Shorâ€™s diabetic dad asked him if he had seen his dad take his insulin. Bobâ€™s answer, â€œNo, I didnâ€™t see you take your medsâ€ was interpreted by his father as â€œNo, you havenâ€™t taken them.â€ His dad overdosed that day, which Bob says was the reason he and his brother Rotem created MediSafe, a collaborative app that helps keep track of long-term medication.â€

The second example is the opening paragraph of a Cult of Mac article. That coverage came from positioning MediSafe as a personal story rather than as just another random app.

4. Media List Creation

The next step is to compile a list of the outlets â€“ and the most-appropriate writers at those outlets â€“ that are read by the identified target audiences. The importance of this phase of the process cannot be emphasized enough.

An ideal media list should usually be comprised of publications that have all of the following (in both PR and digital contexts):

The publications that are read by the target audience

The specific writers at those outlets that will likely be most interested in what you are pitching

Publications with large readerships

Outlets (and writers) with large social-media followings

Publications whose online sites have high Domain Authority

When compiling media lists, remember that time is a limited resource. There are only so many hours that a PR team can devote to a campaign. At one extreme, they could send the same, generic press release to thousands of outlets via a wire service and just hope for the best. At the other extreme, they could focus all of their efforts on a single reporter at a single outlet that is highly desired. A simplistic example: Say a PR executive has one hour of pitching time â€“ should he or she spend one hour on one outlet or five minutes each on twelve outlets? Usually, you want to be somewhere in the middle.

5. Press Release Development and Pitching

The final stage is to craft the actual pitches and press releases. Sometimes the same press release can be used. Other times, it is best to create individualized, tailored releases for each type of outlet or each specific reporter. It just depends on the context.

One example of online pitching will be discussed in the next section.

A good PR strategy can lead to great SEO results such as this outcome from one single campaign for iOnRoad, a mobile app that was later bought by Harman International following our work (the PowerPoint slide originally contained an animated GIF of Hugh Laurie â€“ a.k.a. Dr. House â€“ from back in his British comedy TV days):

This one campaign netted 591 quality links from 253 authoritative domains â€“ and a lot more.

Whether digital marketers are promoting a company, a product, or a piece of content, those who use this general strategy will be many steps ahead of the competition. Sizemore once summarized the importance with the following statement in this essay of his:

If I had to choose between your average link builder and an expert PR professional who knew how to approach and interact with media outlets and presented well on camera, Iâ€™d go for the public relations person any day of the week.

Twitter's a PR Gold Mine

Twitter specifically is an invaluable tool for PR pitching â€“ but it must be used strategically and wisely in this context.

My colleague Scott Piro, our EMEA Managing Director and Chief Strategy Officer, has written a guide to using Twitter for media relations. I highly suggest that Mozzers read his essay for more details (not that Iâ€™m biased!), but I will summarize some of his points here:

Many busy reporters do not answer their phones and receive countless e-mails, but they do pay attention to Twitter

Writers will often say in their Twitter bios whether they want (or do not want) to be tweeted with pitches

Twitter is public, so do not give away too many details of an exclusive story â€“ switch to e-mail or the phone as soon as possible

Link to a press release somewhere online (on a company website or on a wire service)

Know your audience and when to be more formal and when to be more friendly

Piro also gives two general examples of Twitter pitches:

The Benign Intro: @journalist Do you accept story pitches? If yes, whatâ€™s the best way to send you one? THX

The FYI: @journalist I emailed a story idea to your [media outlet name] address. Hope u can take a look; I think itâ€™s rly a good fit

PR: The Old and New Off-Page SEO

Iâ€™d like to close this post with the rest of my comment on Lopezâ€™s earlier Moz essay:

When I was a journalist, the point of submitting freelance articles or op-ed articles was to publish a piece of quality content to build your "brand" (as a writer or pundit). It was not primarily to get links (especially when links did not exist before the public Internet). In PR, companies submit what are called "by-lined articles" to build a brand and raise awareness of your company among the readers of a certain publication. (If you sell widgets, then you want exposure in a media outlet that is read by people who buy widgets.) It is not primarily to get links. Today, it's called "guest posts."

The same is true today. When my company gets articles in specific, targeted media outlets for clients, the point is first to build a brand and second to get referral traffic (and hopefully leads or sales) via a link in the author's biography or elsewhere. No-follow or not, it didn't matterâ€¦

I now advocate that no one do anything with the primary purpose of "getting links." Do the great content, promote it on social media, and the links will come naturally, indirectly, and organically. You are earning them and not building them. One of these links are worth ten of the others.

Example: My agency gets a client a great by-line article in a great outlet. The article may contain a (do-follow or not) backlink or not. But it doesn't matter -- the exposure is what matters. Then, the readers will see the content and perhaps write about the company on their own blogs with links. It snowballs from there. But in the end, it's not directly about the links. As long as a company does all of the "SEO" best-practices, the good links will come themselves over time.

I would submit that this is what Google still likes. It is "guest posting" for reasons other than links. The same is true for press releases -- you distribute news releases to get coverage, not links. The links will then come later.

It all comes down to what Iâ€™ve called the â€œPR-based SEO processâ€:

The idea can be summarized as such:

Do something newsworthy

Create newsworthy content based on what has been done

Promote the company and content

Repeat as often as possible

Linkbuilders often ask themselves: â€œWhy would this website want to link to us?â€ Reporters ask a related question (at least to themselves): â€œI get dozens of pitches a day â€“ why should I write about you?â€

If you can answer this question, youâ€™ve got a great head start. As I wrote in the linked post above:

What can a company do that would interest journalists? The possibilities are limited only by the imagination â€“ release a new product, hire a big-name executive, conduct an authoritative analysis of the state of the industry, and so on. Then, create quality, engaging content in the context of the action â€“ a blog post, an infographic, a press release, a video, a podcast, and so on.

The next step is crucial: use traditional public relations to promote the companyâ€™s news â€“ and use online PR and social media to promote the content created for the news to obtain backlinks, citations, and social-media mentions. This practice will yield far better online PR results than just stuffing backlinks into meaningless press releases.

Hereâ€™s the secret: Reporters want to write about you. Years ago, space in a newspaper and minutes in a broadcast were limited. Journalists could be picky. Today, however, they know as well as we do that â€œcontent is kingâ€ and the way to maximize traffic and (for their purposes) advertising revenue. Writers are under constant pressure to write and write and write since websites can support an almost-infinite amount of content.

So, it can be easier to convince them. Just give them a nudge through the strategies that weâ€™ve presented here.

For more details on SEO and public relations, I invite you to see my SMX Milan 2013 presentation and notes. I will also speak on a similar subject at SMX West in March 2014. I hope to see you there!

from Moz Blog http://ift.tt/1fa2foD