Archive for March, 2009

Kristal Kraft asked me to make this short video about REBarCamp Denver 2009.  Enjoy!

REBarCamp Denver from Justin Smith on Vimeo.

So I’m right in the middle of a link building campaign for a large site, and one of the tactics is guest blog articles.  If you’re not familiar with this, it’s a great way to build traffic and links, and all you have to do is create some quality content and be willing to give it away…

So here are a few basic tips.  This is not meant to be comprehensive, but will at least get you started:

Here is how to do it:

1. You choose a blog you want your article to appear on.  (be picky)
2. You approach the author of the blog to make sure they accept guest articles (most of the good bloggers do)
3. View past articles that have been published on the blog to get a good sense of the topic and quality
4. Write your post (make it truly valuable and unique otherwise you’ll be wasting your time)
5. Submit the article to the blog.
6. Get rich and famous  (some results may vary)

Best Practices:

• Do your research (know what the other blogger likes and doesn’t like)
• Make it relevant and valuable to the other blog’s audience.  Don’t write about what your audience is interested in… write something valuable for the other blog’s readers.
• Make it clear up front to the blogger that you want a resource box at the bottom of the article.  (this is where you add your link!)
• Once it’s published, promote the heck out of it.  The other blogger will appreciate this, and you’ll reap most of the benefit.
• Explore your opportunities to become a regular contributor.

What’s the Point?:

• Free links from blogs of your choice.  (if you don’t count the time investment)
• Expand your reach to target other blog readers
• Traffic from popular blogs.
• Extra brand awareness.
• Subscribers.  The saavy blog reader will recognize that you wrote the article and visit your blog to subscribe.
• A new relationship with a blogger that loves you for taking the time to add quality content to their site.

In this video, I talk about a couple of simple ways you can find out how popular a keyword phrase is, and the general level of competition.  This is done through Google’s keyword research tool, and a simple check of the titles in the Google results for that query.  By the way, here are a couple of sample search queries that may help you along the way:

1. “my keyword phrase”  (your phrase placed in quotes)
2. intitle:”your keyword phrase”
3. inurl:”your keyword phrase”

Hope you enjoy the video!

Practical SEO Competitive Research from Justin Smith on Vimeo.

In this short video, I’ll explain how you can identify a no-follow link using a special plugin for Firefox called: Search Status.  Enjoy!