Only When the Words Outdo the Silence

I’m a bit late to this party, but I just came across an article on Wired about Google, its algorithms and a line that made me pull Ludgwig Wittgenstein‘s book off the bookshelf.  Before the quote, head to Google and Bing and search for “mike siwek lawyer mi.”  Compare the results:

But that wasn’t the whole story. “People hold on to PageRank because it’s recognizable,” Manber says. “But there were many other things that improved the relevancy.” These involve the exploitation of certain signals, contextual clues that help the search engine rank the millions of possible results to any query, ensuring that the most useful ones float to the top.

…

Google’s synonym system understood that a dog was similar to a puppy and that boiling water was hot. But it also concluded that a hot dog was the same as a boiling puppy. The problem was fixed in late 2002 by a breakthrough based on philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein’s theories about how words are defined by context. As Google crawled and archived billions of documents and Web pages, it analyzed what words were close to each other. “Hot dog” would be found in searches that also contained “bread” and “mustard” and “baseball games” — not poached pooches. That helped the algorithm understand what “hot dog” — and millions of other terms — meant. “Today, if you type ‘Gandhi bio,’ we know that bio means biography,” Singhal says. “And if you type ‘bio warfare,’ it means biological.”

What does this mean from an SEO perspective?  What does poached pooches have to do with SEO?

It means you should blog more.  Write posts about topics related to your business or product.  Do you sell soccer cleats?  Blog about your favorite team’s games on a weekly basis – games where soccer cleats appear.  Link back to your own site.  Not only that, but comment on other blogs about these games and link back to your site.  Then, if someone connected to you through a social media account searches for information on a game you covered on your blog, you can appear on their first page of Google results because of Google Social Search.  Seriously, it’s time to loosen the reins. Actually, I’ll take it a step further, require socialism.  And, those same topics/industries/soccer games you’re covering with your blog posts, use that information to guide some truly outside of the box link building:

Hot dog is to baseball game as your business is to what?

The “you” in this case means your products.  When conducting a competitive link analysis, the focus should not be to mirror the incoming link portfolio of your competitors – how you differentiate yourself from them in this area means the difference between ranking in position A versus position B vis – a – vis traffic, leads, revenue.

Certainly target those links that fit your definition of a linking prospecting: are you targeting low-hanging fruit during this excavation and, therefore, looking for sites with a “Submit” link or are you expanding your list of sites that require an email to the webmaster and are by definition much harder to acquire?

But don’t forget to take a look at the page of the prospect itself; look at its title tags; look at its meta keywords; look at its <h> tags.  What keywords are used on the page?  Is the linking prospect describing your product in a way you hadn’t thought of?  If so, then you’ve found information that can be utilized to find more linking prospects, using advanced search operators, where your competitors might not play.  Let’s take a real world example…

Let’s say I’m doing a competitive link analysis for a conferencing/video conferencing/web conferencing client.  From the research I’ve done for the campaign, I know that one of the biggest players in the web conferencing space is GoToMeeting.

Step 1

• Go to Google and enter [link:gotomeeting.com].  Peer at the backlinks Google is showing for GoToMeeting

Step 2

• Notice the third result is a) .edu link and b) the title tag reads “Teaching With Multimedia”

Step 3

• Visit the link to find out what keywords are used in the other tags, URL and content
• This information will help you figure what keywords to use when doing more link building/prospecting

Step 4

• Observe…
• Title tag: Teaching With Multimedia
• Meta keywords: Multimedia Teaching, Educational Tools
• Meta Description: Teaching with Multimedia Methods, Tools, Compromises and Payoffs John Jackson, M.Ed., Dir. of Educational Technology University of Virginia School of Medicine…
• <h> tag: Web Conferencing
• Content: Make sure to find out where the link to the competitor’s site is located and what content surrounds it.  In this case, it’s located under the Web Conferencing (h3 tag) section.  This is an obvious categorization, but for other verticals/pages you might find that those in the .edu world describe your product in a unique way

Step 5

• Take the keywords you found in the title, meta , <h> tags and content and use them to find other link prospects.  So, for example, head to Google and enter [teaching with multimedia "web conferencing" inurl:edu]; voila, you’ve got another set of results that serve as link prospects!

Notes

• The assumption in this type of link building is that, in this case, the School of Medicine at the University of Virginia is likely not the only .edu website that describes “web conferencing” in terms of  ”Teaching With Multimedia”.
• Sometimes the results returned for a query like [teaching with multimedia "web conferencing" inurl:edu] won’t provide results that allow you to contact the webmaster – this is a prime example since the link prospects are massive institutions.  However, the results are still valuable because they provide you with regular ole sales prospects – that is, perhaps a demographic your sales people should contact about purchasing your product.  Or, ideas for creating content that might be attractive to a prospective demographic you hadn’t thought of before.
• The key is to recognize that different groups of users describe your products in a plurality of ways; be sure to dig deep to find out how you’re described.

Happy link building!