SMX London 2010 Round-Up (Day 1) Part 2

by Alex on May 25, 2010

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So to the continuation of my write-up of day 1. Follow this link if you missed the previous part to my SMX London 2010 round-up. This continues on the SEO side of things, and focused on advancing the fundamentals.

Quick note: Still waiting on Vimeo limit to get a video of Dixon up!

Link Building: Outside The Box

Andrew Girdwood kicked off the meeting in good style, letting us all know about some tools he uses to make the most of his link-building efforts. Here they are again for those who missed out (note: I’m not going to explain what each of them do – their respective websites do that much better than I can in this post):

Another valuable reminder was to TAKE NOTICE OF YOUR 404 ERROR LOGS! There is usually some a lot of valuable traffic that’s being wasted here, and we only make it more difficult for ourselves by not filtering that back in to live content.

Another great tool I got out of this was Tag Crowd. This tag cloud generator can be used for getting a snapshot image of what a web page is about. Not only is this useful for keeping a record of your own ‘noise’, but it’s a useful tool for scraping competitor websites.

Onwards and upwards, Kelvin Newman from Site Visibility presented a list of 15 methods to obtain links from University/Government sites. Many of these ideas prove that by thinking a little outside the box, you can achieve solid and authoritative back links.

Universities:

  1. Reach out to academic bloggers. There are many educational institutes that have blogs, and authors that contribute to them.
  2. Offer a student discount for your product/service. Then ask for a link from Universities to advertise this.
  3. Give out positive press about the University – most will report the good news to their readers.
  4. Participate in a scheme. This could include taking on graduates for work experience. You get a free employee and a link, the student gets valuable experience, and the University are proactive in placing students. Win-Win.. Win.
  5. Sponsor student events/sports teams. This will cost you a small amount of money, but the exposure will be worth it.
  6. Deliver a careers talk. Universities are always trying to be proactive in preparing their students for employment.
  7. Advertise a job through their careers services.
  8. Become a case study. Offer to help out a student(s) with their dissertation and allow it to highlight a success point of your company.
  9. Become boycotted. This one is slightly off the wall, but if it does happen you may as well get some free publicity from it!

Gov:

  1. Consider launching a community website. Local authorities love to integrate with local communities in any way they can.
  2. Set up a charitable website. How can you raise money for a local charity?
  3. Look for government business directories… They still exist!
  4. Host a local event. Get a live band in, offer the local bakery and butchers a free pitch for managing the BBQ. Invite the local school to host a play or talent contest. Oh and don’t forget to give the local pub a free advertisement, sometimes it pays to be kind ;)
  5. Start a campaign that the local council will support.
  6. Job websites are one of the few commercial websites that Government sites link to.

A big thumbs up to Kelvin for coming up with these ideas.

That’s it for this post, before it starts to get too long. Next part coming soon!

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