iEntry 10th Anniversary
RSS
Contact
 |
|
SEOmoz´ Matt Inman On Linkbaiting 
By: Joe Whyte 2007-09-18 Joe Whyte got a change to interview Matt Inman (aka oatmeal) at the recent SES conference in San Jose. Matt is a chief technology office at SEOmoz and is the guy behind... ...the SEOmoz tools as well as the recent SEO quiz. He is also well-known for coming up with very creative linkbaiting campaigns (using quizzes) for his own dating site, Mingle2. Here is the full transcript of the interview. SMS: This is Joe Whyte with Matt, better known as Oatmeal, from SEOmoz. Hows it going, Matt? Matt: Its going pretty well. SMS: Cool. So Ive been looking at Mingle2 quite a bit recently and its starting to pick up some real tension " some real traffic. Something Im a big fan of is all those quizzes that you give. So tell me a little bit about the reason why you build those quizzes, where you come up with these great ideas, and the results side. Matt: Sure. When I started marketing the site, I was doing it the way Ive always done it " which is, I was mostly going for digg bait, Top 10 articles, sensational piece articles, things like that. And I had some success with it. It was good for building my domain authority, getting it out of whatever age filter there was, because Mingle2 is a 2007 domain. Unfortunately, linkbait in that regard doesnt get you very well targeted in your text. You can get close " if youre trying to target fishing, you could write an article called the funniest fishing videos or something. But its not the exact anchor text you want. So I built a quiz called how geek are you? that I knew would appeal to bloggers and geek enthusiasts " people who have the ability to make links. And I just kind of built it as a test and it got huge. It got tens of thousands of takers and so I instantly saw an opportunity where I could essentially rank for any term I wanted with viral badges, quizzes, and things like that. So from there I started building a bunch of others. I built one " the next one I built was how many HTML elements can you name in 5 minutes. And that one fell flat on its face because thats really hard to do and no one can do that. So I started getting pretty creative with it. I tried to appeal to peoples vanity with how x are you? how this are you? One of the ones that was hugely successful " and was great because I built it in about an hour and a half " was a widget called whats my blog rating? You entered your blog URL and it comes back with MPAA rating such as R or PG-13. Its really simple. All it does is it goes to your blog and it finds out how many words there are like cusswords, words like murder or explosion, words that would be indicative of an R-rated film. People can then post my blog is rated PG-13 or my blog is rated R. With this thing " people took this quiz, like, tens of thousands of people. All with the anchor text all pointing right at my home page. So, three months out of the gate I was ranking for free online dating. That was the target I targeted first because online dating " I actually didnt think I could do that. I thought it was a little too overwhelming. So I thought, well, Ill start with free online dating which is less competitive. SMS: To be able to rank for such a keyword thats so competitive is amazing. Online dating " youd only think an authority site thats been around for a long time could do something like that. So its a really interesting technique that youve been able to master. Matt: Yeah. Its cool to show people too, because I see so many SEOs complaining about oh, my domain is not holding up or Im in the sandbox or whatever you want to call it. And I go, I have a domain that I registered six months ago thats ranking for very, very competitive terms. It just goes to show that Google has all these signals it uses to rank pages " age is one of them, relevance " but of all those signals there is one you can control and one you can overpower every other signal with, and thats links " the sheer volume of links. And so after accruing 80,000 links to the site, thats how I was able to make that. SMS: And that was in 3 months time that you did that? Matt: I did. I think for free online dating it was after three months. And then online dating was about a month later. In the past six weeks, my schedule has been crazy so I havent been able to do as much viral link bait. But Ive started to rank for every city in America plus the word singles " so, Los Angeles singles I think Im number two. Houston, Chicago. SMS: So obviously youre creating different pages to support these different keywords, right? Matt: Yes. Theyre not going to the home page. I set up specific geo-targeted pages. So basically any time a user signs up and they enter their city name, actually they get filed into a specific page for that name. So if they have a very specific town " small and in the middle of nowhere " and I search for that town and the word singles, typically I show up in the top 10. SMS: Wow. Pretty amazing. Matt: Yeah. So theres a linkbait strategy there " a link strategy " that is also an internal site architecture strategy that allows the site to be indexed and well-received by the engines. SMS: And its really important to be able to " as an SEO " to be able to constantly think outside the box because with the different filters and the different " like, for instance, Matt Cutts says, dont do reciprocal linking now. Were going to start having people report page links etc., and its just becoming increasingly more difficult to utilize these old-rule tactics. You know, going out and getting a bunch of forum links or doing article syndication is not as effective as what can be done these days. Matt: Yeah. And I dont understand. I get those reciprocal link emails all the time. SMS: Yeah, me too and its horrible. Matt: Me, I just dont understand the strategy there. It just seems so one at a time. Theres not a lot of " it just seems a really simple SMS: Whos going to respond to that? And if they do, what kind of site is that going to be anyway thats going to respond to something like that? Matt: Yeah. I mean, leveraging social media is definitely the way to go right now. And the important thing to remember, too, is that in a year or two, that may not even be the case. We have to continually keep being creative. SMS: Right. So, what else do you do? After you build this quiz, how are you going to leverage it? Do you kind of just let it be or do you " what are the target sites that you go after? Matt: Right now, the quiz page itself that has all my quizzes and gadgets and viral stuff has a huge audience of people that have already linked to it. LiveJournal is actually a huge source of traffic for me, because it gets spread across hundred of thousands of these live journals. So if I launch a quiz right now, it almost has a pre-built audience, so thats an advantage. Initially though, what really helps with it was " I tried marketing quizzes to digg. Unfortunately, they got buried. Digg will bury anything from Mingle2 at this point. SMS: They have a tendency to do stuff like that, especially with corporate sites and sites that are more commercial. Matt: They do. Yeah. So thats why Ive kind of toned down my digg marketing, just because its not as effective. Its so night and day, unlike something like StumbleUpon where everybody loves that site. Everybody is traffic, and its great. Its so unpredictable too. One day youll submit something to StumbleUpon. Youll get a little trickle of traffic and then itll go away. And youll be very sad. And then a month will go by and itll be BOOM! And youll get a huge surge out of nowhere. I dont get what makes things rise and fall, but StumbleUpon is a huge part of the traffic as well. SMS: Cool. And to just kind of wrap it up, something that I really like that youve done is after you take the quizzes " you did the how much is your body worth? Matt: The cadaver calculator. SMS: Good advertising. Matt: Yeah. That was awesome. That was on USA Todays blog. That was on MSNBC. SMS: That was amazing. I loved that thing. And then you did " what was the other one? It was on zombies? Matt: What are your chances of surviving a zombie attack? SMS: Yeah. The zombie attack. Matt: Yeah. The best advice I can give someone is just to be creative with it and try it. I was thinking about myself and what am I into? What would be a quiz or a viral widget that I would want to take that would be fun? SMS: It seemed like that when you did that, there were a lot of zombie movies coming out at the same time. Matt: Yeah. 28 Weeks Later. SMS: 28 Weeks Later came out. And then Im just thinking that this guys really smart because hes kind of feeding off of the buzz thats already been created by the movie. So at the end you get this badge and the people " how successful is that campaign? How many people actually put that badge on their site? Matt: The zombie badge? SMS: Well, any badges that come off of the quizzes. Matt: Usually between 4 and 6 thousand. SMS: Wow. Matt: Its a hard metric to gauge because I use the site numbers and I use technorati to see what fresh ones are coming in. But typically each badge gets between 4 and 6 thousand backlinks. SMS: And is that all in one push or does it continue to grow. Matt: It continues to grow. And thats whats great about the strategy too is Im not actively link building. Right now, as Im sitting here talking to you, people are taking my quiz and building links for me. Its just self-perpetuating. SMS: Aaron Wall has quoted this term I think as self-reinforcing authority. Thats what youve done for yourself, and youve done a great job. Matt: Thank you. SMS: Well, thanks a lot, Matt. I really appreciate you stopping by. Comments Tag: SEO Add to  Del.icio.us |  Digg |  Reddit |  Furl Have a bookmark! -  About the Author: Joe Whyte is a regular contributor to Search Marketing Standard Magazine blog and is the owner of HybridSEM.com. Joe has been doing SEO, SEM and online marketing for over 5 years, helping Fortune 1000 companies improve their traction, conversion and search engine placement online. Joe-whyte.com |
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| SearchNewz
is an iEntry, Inc. ® publication
©
All Rights Reserved. Newsletter Archive - Privacy Policy - Legal - Sitemap - Contact Us - RSS Feeds - Newsletter Signup |
