Joel Liu's List: SEO

• Get your customers to link to you. If you have partners you work with regularly or loyal customers that love your brand, you can use this to your advantage by sending out partnership badges - graphic icons that link back to your site (like Microsoft often does with their partner certification program). Just as you'd get customers wearing your t-shirts or sporting your bumper stickers, links are the best way to accomplish the same feat on the web. Check out this post on link requests in order confirmation emails for more.
• Create content that inspires viral sharing and natural linking. In the SEO world, we often call this "linkbait." Good examples might include this Peak Season Ingredient Map from Epicurious, this Interactive Graphic Explaining Hand Signals Used on Stock Market Trading Floors from the New York Times, or this Video of an iPod in a Blender from Blendtec. Each leverages aspects of usefulness, information dissemination, or humor to create a viral effect - users who see it once want to share it with friends, and bloggers/tech-savvy webmasters who see it will often do so through links. This high quality, editorially earned votes are invaluable to building trust, authority, and rankings potential.

• 1. Build a "101 list". These get Dugg all the time, and often become "authority documents". People can't resist linking to these (hint, hint).

• 32. It is pretty easy to ask or answer questions on Yahoo! Answers and provide links to relevant resources.

   

  33. It is pretty easy to ask or answer questions on Google Groups and provide links to relevant resources.

• By happenstance, the site/property group owner, Tim, who is a staunch Republican, made a t-shirt on a whim that said "Don't Trust This Man" and had an arrow pointing to a picture of Barack Obama. He wore the shirt out to lunch one day and got a large response from both Democrats and Republicans alike. Being the diligent marketers that they are, Tim's team immediately started thinking of ways they could channel this buzz into their Plumber Surplus marketing tactics.
• I think this link bait campaign is both brilliant and problematic. The pros are that it takes advantage of a current hot topic, one that's generating constant buzz and attention: the upcoming presidential elections. I think that "Don't Trust This Man" is an extremely clever concept--it's definitely attention grabbing, and it both sparks curiosity in the uninformed user and is controversial to a politically-savvy user. Best of both worlds, I'd say.
   
   Now for the cons. As I mentioned before, the topicality of the link bait is weak. Using a political agenda to promote plumbing merchandise may be questionable in the search engines' eyes. Additionally, I wonder about the relevancy and topicality of the links that Plumber Surplus will attract from these various blog posts. They likely won't be from other home improvement stores or wholesalers, but rather from regular folks with personal blogs or websites or from political sources. Thus, will the links hold much weight since they won't be on-topic?
• Lastly, the rules don't even explicitly state that you have to link to Plumber Surplus or the other site at all. I'd assume that a good chunk of the folks who'll blog in order to win a free t-shirt will mention the site but won't link to it, and the ones who do will probably just use the domain name as the anchor text, meaning Plumber Surplus isn't really building a large number of optimized links. It seems like a missed opportunity.

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