Enrichment Depot – Profiting on the Net

Sometimes it’s the little things in life….Boomerang for Gmail (and Outlook) is an incredibly useful, lightweight, powerful link outreach app.

Link building has a special place in the SEO industry. Beyond being one of the harder skill-sets to master and acquire, link building is likely the most important element of an SEO campaign.

Link building can also be the most difficult job to:

• Scale internally and externally
• Train someone to do efficiently
• Outsource
• Hire someone for

How to hire link builders and how to train them are certainly worthy of their own (upcoming) blog posts but this post is going to sing the praises of a Gmail and Outlook plugin that is essential for my link building workflow.

Boomerang for Gmail (and Outlook)

Outside of the really cool name this plugin makes my workflow much more streamlined and efficient.

I don’t use Outlook so I’ll be focusing on the Gmail plug-in here. The Outlook plugin has most of the functionality of the Gmail edition (minus the Send On options) and you can check out the Outlook version here.

The key benefits to using Boomerang (referencing the Gmail app going forward) are:

• Schedule emails to be sent at a later date/time
• Set reminders on emails so they pop back up at a specified time
• Set email reminders from your smartphone

Send Emails Later

You can install Boomerang for Gmail here. You can use this for Gmail and Google apps and you’ll need to use Firefox or Chrome.

You’ll manage Boomerang in two places; you can get to it in your Gmail toolbar:

From here you can access your scheduled messages to make any changes and access various help and how-to’s.

The other area where you access Boomerang is in the email dialogue box. When you go to compose a new message or click to reply to one you’ll see the Boomerang button and see all the options available for sending the message:

If you click on anything other than the specific time option at the bottom, the message is scheduled straight away.

If you need to access your Boomerang-ed messages, just go back to the top Gmail toolbar, click Boomerang, and click access Scheduled messages.

The other cool option when composing a new message is listed right below the subject line. From here you can have Boomerang return the message to your Inbox if no one replies or even if they do (marked as unread, starred, etc; these options can be changed in the “access scheduled messages” option on the top Gmail/Boomerang toolbar option):

You have the exact same option when replying to messages as well.

This is incredibly useful for a variety of link building actions such as:

• Tracking the effectiveness of email pitches
• Scheduling a bunch of pitches to line up with various promotions and outreach campaigns, in one shot
• Using in conjunction with Gmail’s canned responses for scalable link outreach and management
• Never forget about a link prospect
• Make Gmail a self-contained link outreach system for staff members
• Avoid awkward time zone issues on email deliveries if you have staff outside your targeted market’s location

Email Reminders

While the Send On features are the most useful for link outreach, the Reminder functions can be useful as well.

Boomerang has Gmail-like functionality in the way it auto-offers a solution. Here you can see I’ve got a Staples coupon that expires on January 16th. Boomerang is asking me if I’d like to return this to my inbox on that date:

Outside of that functionality you can click the Boomerang reminder icon in the toolbar to get the reminder options available to you:

So rather than setting something in your calendar or in your task management application, you can use Boomerang to re-populate the email when needed.

You can add a condition to this and say that you only want to be reminded of the message at the selected time “IF” no one responds, simply by checking that option above. Otherwise, it will come back whether someone responds or not.

You can also use your iPhone, Blackberry, or Android to set up a message for yourself to arrive in your inbox at a certain time with their mobile option.

Privacy Concerns

Letting an app access your data on mail.google.com shouldn’t be taken lightly. Here is what they say about privacy:

Why does Boomerang for Gmail need access to my email account?

Like most other Gmail plugins, we need access to the full email data to be able to move and send messages. In our queries, we only store the headers of the message (subject, sender, time) so that we can uniquely ID the message you want to schedule. We don’t store any message text.
Does it mean you have my Gmail password?

No, we don’t have access to your Gmail password. You are authorizing through Google’s official OpenID system.

Sign Up for Boomerang

You can get a full-featured pro account trial for free, for 30 days here. I am anxious for them to release the open/click tracking for even deeper link outreach analysis.

If you are looking for a more enterprise level solution, with team-wide tracking and monitoring, please check out our reviews of Buzzstream and Raven Tools.

SEO Spyglass is one of the 4 tools Link-Assistant sells (individually) and as a part of their SEO Power Suite.

We did a review of their Rank Tracker application a few months ago and we plan to review their other 2 tools in upcoming blog posts.

Key Features of SEO Spyglass

The core features of SEO Spyglass are:

• Link Research
• White Label Reporting
• Historical Link Tracking

As with most software tools there are features you can and cannot access, or limits you’ll hit, depending on the version you choose. You can see the comparison here.

Perhaps the biggest feature is their newest feature. They recently launched their own link database, a couple of months early in beta, as the tool had been largely dependent on the now dead Yahoo! Site Explorer.

The launch of a third or fourth-ish link database (Majestic SEO, Open Site Explorer, A-Href’s rounding out the others) is a win for link researchers. It still needs a bit of work, as we’ll discuss below, but hopefully they plan on taking the some of the better features of the other tools and incorporating them into their tool.

After all, good artists copy and great artists steal

Setting Up a Project for a Specific Keyword

One of my pet peeves with software is feature bloat which in turn creates a rough user experience. Link-Assistant’s tools are incredibly easy to use in my experience.

Once you fire up SEO Spyglass you can choose to research links from a competing website or links based off of a keyword.

Most of the time I use the competitor’s URL when doing link research but SEO Spyglass doubles as a link prospecting tool as well, so here I’ll pick a keyword I might want to target “Seo Training”.

The next screen is where you’ll choose the search engine that is most relevant to where you want to compete. They have support for a bunch of different countries and search engines and you can see the break down on their site.

So if you are competing in the US you can pull data the top ranking site off of the following engines (only one at a time):

• Google
• Google Blog Search
• Google Groups
• Google Images
• Google Mobile
• YouTube
• Bing
• Yahoo! (similar to Bing of course)
• AOL
• Alexa
• Blekko
• And some other smaller web properties

I’ll select Google and the next screen is where you select the sources you want Spyglass to use for grabbing the links of the competing site it will find off of the preceding screen:

So SEO Spyglass will grab the top competitor from your chosen SERP will run multiple link sources off of that site (would love to see some API integration with Majestic and Open Site Explorer here).

This is where you’ll see their own Backlink Explorer for the first time.

Next you can choose unlimited backlinks (Enterprise Edition only) or you can limit it by
Project or Search Engine. For the sake of speed I’m going to limit it to 100 links per search engine (that we selected in a previous screen) and exclude duplicates (links found in one engine and another) just to get the most accurate, usable data possible:

When you start pinging engines, specifically Google in this example, you routinely will get captcha’s like this:

On this small project I entered about 8 of them and the project found 442 backlinks (here is what you’ll see after the project is completed):

One way around captchas is to either pay someone to run this tool for you and manually do it, but for large projects that is not ideal as captcha’s will pile up and you could get the IP temporarily banned.

Link-Assistant offers an Anti-Captcha plan to combat this issue, you can see the pricing here.

Given the size of the results pane it is hard to see everything but you are initially returned with:

• an icon of what search engine the link was found in
• the backlinking page
• the backlinking domain

Spyglass will then ask you if you want to update the factors associated with these links.

Your options by default are:

• domain age
• domain ip
• domain PR
• Alexa Rank
• Dmoz Listing
• Yahoo! Directory Listing
• On-page info (title, meta description, meta keywords)
• Total links to the page
• External links to other sites from the page
• Page rank of the page itself

You can add more factors by clicking the Add More button. You’re taken to the Spyglass Preferences pane where you can add more factors:

You can add a ton of social media stuff here including popularity on Facebook, Google +, Page-level Twitter mentions and so on.

You can also pick up bookmarking data and various cache dates. Keep in mind that the more you select, especially with stuff like cache date, you are likely to run into captcha’s.

SEO Spyglass also offers Search Safety Settings (inside of the preferences pane, middle of the left column in the above screenshot) where you can update human emulation settings and proxies to both speed up the application and to help avoid search engine bans.

I’ve used Trusted Proxies with Link-Assistant and they have worked quite well.

You can’t control the factors globally, you have to do it for each project but you can update Spyglass to only offer you specific backlink sources.

I’m going to deselect PageRank here to speed up the project (you can always update later or use other tools for PageRank scrapes).

Working With the Results

When the data comes back you can do number of things with it. You can:

• Build a custom report
• Rebuild it if you want to add link sources or backlink factors
• Update the saved project later on
• Analyze the links within the application
• Update and add custom workspaces

These options are all available within the results screen (again, this application is incredibly easy to use):

I’ve blurred out the site information as I see little reason to highlight the site here. But you can see where the data has populated for the factors I selected.

In the upper left hand corner of the applications is where you can build the report, analyze the data from within the application, update the project, or rebuild it with new factors:

All the way to the right is where you can filter the data inside the application and create a
new workspace:

Your filtering options are seen to the left of the workspaces here. It’s not full blown filtering and sorting but if you are looking for some quick information on specific link queries, it can be helpful.

Each item listed there is a Workspace. You can create your own or edit one of the existing ones. Whatever factors you include in the Workspace is what will show in the results pane as factors

So think of Workspaces as your filtering options. Your available metrics/columns are

• Domain Name
• Search Engine (where the link was found)
• Last Found Date (for updates)
• Status of Backlink (active, inactive, etc)
• Country
• Page Title
• Links Back (does the link found by the search engine actually link to the site? This is a good way of identifying short term, spammy link bursts)
• Anchor Text
• Link Value (essentially based on the original PageRank formula)
• Notes (notes you’ve left on the particular link). This is very limited and is essentially a single Excel-type row
• Domain Age/IP/PR
• Alexa Rank
• Dmoz
• Yahoo! Directory Listing
• Total Links to page/domain
• External links
• Page-level PR

Most of the data is useful. I think the link value is overvalued a bit based on my experience finding links that often had 0 link value in the tool but clearly benefited the site it ended up linking to.

PageRank queries in bulk will cause lots of captcha’s and given how out of date PR can be it isn’t a metric I typically include on large reports.

Analyzing the Data

When you click on the Analyze tab in the upper left you can analyze in multiple ways:

• All backlinks found for the project
• Only backlinks you highlight inside the application
• Only backlinks in the selected Workspace

The Analyze tab is a separate window overlaying the report:

You can’t export from this window but if you just do a control/command-a you can copy and paste to a spreadsheet.

Your options here:

• Keywords – keywords and ratios of specific keywords in the title and anchor text of backlinks
• Anchor Text – anchor text distribution of links
• Anchor URL – pages being linked to on the site and the percentages of link distribution (good for evaluating deep link distribution and pages targeted by the competing site as well as popular pages on the site…content ideas )
• Webpage PR
• Domain PR
• Domains linking to the competing site and the percentage
• TLD – percentage of links coming from .com, net, org, info, uk, and so on
• IP address – links coming from IP’s and the percentages
• Country breakdown
• Dmoz- backlinks that are in Dmoz and ones that are not
• Yahoo! – same as Dmoz
• Links Back – percentages of links found that actually link to the site in question

Updating and Rebuilding

Updating is pretty self-explanatory. Click the Update tab and select whether or not to update all the links, the selected links, or the Workspace specific links:

(It’s the same dialog box as when you actually set up the project)

Rebuilding the report is similar to updating except updating doesn’t allow you to change the specified search engine.

When you Rebuild the report you can select a new search engine. This is helpful when comparing what is ranking in Google versus Bing.

Click Rebuild and update the search engine plus add/remove backlink factors.

Reporting

There are 2 ways to get to the reporting data inside of Spyglass

There is a quick SEO Report Tab and the Custom Report Builder:

Much like the Workspaces in the prior example, there are reporting template options on the right side of the navigation:

It functions the same way as Workspaces do in terms of being able to completely customize the report and data. You can access your Company Profile (your company’s information and logo), Publishing Profiles (delivery methods like email, FTP, and so on), as well as Report Templates in the settings option:

You can’t edit the ones that are there now except for playing around with the code used to generate the report. It’s kind of an arcane way to do reporting as you can really hose up the code (below the variables in red is all the HTML):

You can create your own template with the following reporting options:

• Custom introduction
• All the stats described earlier on this report as available backlink factors
• Top 30 anchor URLs
• Top 30 anchor texts
• Top 30 links by “link value”
• Top 30 domains by “link value”
• Conclusion (where you can add your own text and images)

Overall the reporting options are solid and offer lots of data. It’s a little more work to customize the reports but you do have lots of granular customization options and once they are set up you can save them as global preferences.

As with other software tools you can set up scheduled checks and report generation.

Researching a URL

The process for researching a URL is the same as described above, except you already know the URL rather than having SEO Spyglass find the top competing site for it.

You have the same deep reporting and data options as you do with a keyword search. It will be interesting to watch how their database grows because, for now, you can (with the Enterprise version) research an unlimited number of backlinks.

SEO Spyglass in Practice

Overall, I would recommend trying this tool out. If nothing else, it is another source of backlinks which pulls from other search engines as well (Google, Blekko, Bing, etc).

The reporting is good and you have a lot of options with respect to customizing specific link data parameters for your reports.

I would like to see more exclusionary options when researching a domain. Like the ability to filter redirects and sub-domain links. It doesn’t do much good if we want a quick, competitive report but a quarter or more of the report is from something like a subdomain of the site you are researching.

SEO Spyglass’s pricing is as follows:

• Purchase a professional option or an enterprise option (comparison)
• 6 months of their Live Plan for free
• Purchase of a Live Plan required after 6 months to continue using the tool’s link research functionality.
• Pricing for all editions and Live Plans can be found here

In running a couple of comparisons against Open Site Explorer and Majestic SEO it was clear that Spyglass has a decent database but needs more filtering options (sub-domains mainly). It’s not as robust as OSE or Majestic yet, but it’s to be expected. I still found a variety of unique links from its database that I did not see on other tools across the board.

You can get a pretty big discount if you purchase their suite of tools as a bundle rather than individually

Recently we had the pleasure of interviewing one of my favorite link building experts, Melanie Nathan. Melanie has been involved in online marketing since 2003 and is a wonderful writer on all things link building in addition to being a well-respected link builder by her peers.

Melanie runs CanadianSEO, an internet marketing company based in Canada. You can check out some of her posts from the web here, follow her on Twitter here, and follow her on Google Plus here.

We hope you enjoy the interview!

So I see you started your career by running a successful e-commerce store, which you then sold off to a US company and then you moved into the client side of things. When did this all start and how did you decide to get into online, e-commerce stuff?

The e-commerce stuff started in 2003. My husband and I were operating a successful brick and mortar auto repair/aftermarket accessory store in Edmonton, where my husband’s dad (a skilled mechanic) would fix the vehicles and we would bling them up with cool accessories like euro tail lights and hid lighting kits. When we found out that our main manufacturer would be willing to drop ship their products directly to our North American customers, starting an online store seemed like no-brainer.

I fell in love with SEO shortly after that, mostly through experimentation with various e-commerce shopping carts and my frustration at not being able to find a decent one (at the time).

Some SEO’s love the idea of running their own sites rather than working on client sites based on the difference between the ratio of profits to labor on your own sites versus client sites (relatively speaking). Some SEO’s like doing both to help diversify their income streams, and some like pure client work. What lead you to decide to get into the client side of things?

I’m happy working for clients because I have a genuine interest in helping people and it’s extremely gratifying being able to impact someone’s life in such a way. On top of that, the work is constantly changing and I can pick and choose my projects therefore it never gets boring.

If there’s a downside, it’s that I don’t get many opportunities to experiment with different techniques or work on personal projects. This is why I’ve been slowly making time for the leap into the ‘other’ side of SEO (tool creation, affiliate marketing and yes, even some BHT) with some domains I own.

I figure, if I’m offering professional services, it’s best to be as experienced as possible in order to best serve my clients. If this leads to me eventually moving away from the client side of SEO though, then I might be open to the possibility.

If you’re interested in co-developing a link building tool or an affiliate site, ping me and we’ll talk

You’re well-known as a link building expert and you’ve written extensively on the subject. Can you walk us through how you approach/plan out a new client’s plan (generally speaking) and talk about which tools you use and why?

Site owners mainly hire me in order to see measurable movement in the SERPs for their top keyphrases. This means, to help my clients stand out (where Google is concerned), I first need to see what they’re up against. I therefore always start with competitive research.

Among the tools I use are; SEOmoz Open Site Explorer & Competitive Link Research Tool. I’ve also been using SEOProfiler Competitive Backlink Intelligence tool lately. I also use Yahoo Site Explorer (I’ll sure miss this when it’s gone!) and, of course, Google itself.

I look for such things as; rankings of the site, number of root domains linking, quality of backlinks, backlink velocity and social media mentions. Once I chart out what each competitor’s link profile looks like, what I need to do in order to differentiate my client, becomes pretty apparent.

After that, it’s all about looking for prospects and then developing realistic ways to acquire links from them.

I read, and actually have Evernoted (is that the new word for bookmarking?) your Search Engine Journal post on “6 Super Tips For Creating a Natural Link Profile” and some of things you talk about there (back in 2010) might have helped sites weather parts of this latest Panda parade of updates.

Those tips are logical, solid, but require a good amount of work. Do you find that link building failures are a result of trying to look for shortcuts too often or just not being willing to really put a lot of natural effort into link building?

Thank you for Evernoting (love this) and mentioning that post.

In my experience, the majority of link building failures happen simply because the linkee was too busy thinking about THEIR needs rather than the needs of the linker. They also take shortcuts that often decrease their own chances, such as; sending bad email pitches and/or using generic email subject lines and/or using poor grammar etc.

Link building offers awesome rewards, but it can be an incredible amount of effort. If you’re unwilling or unable to put in that effort, I guarantee you’ll be disappointed with the results.

Of course, in some areas these kinds of natural links can be harder (sometimes much harder) between different sites. Do you think link building opportunities are existent enough in each market irrespective of the competition (big brands, strong sites, etc)?

Or, is it more of a budget issue on the client side when it comes to being unable to complete for really competitive stuff?

I’m always up for a challenge and I have yet to encounter a niche or market where links weren’t readily obtainable. Unfortunately, sometimes the techniques required to attract those links, just don’t fit within the client’s budget. In these cases, I recommend starting out small and, as the client sees more and more ROI, they’re happy to increase their budget. After all, some link building is better than no link building.

As far as eventually competing on a large scale, I’ll just say that most people grossly underestimate the power that high-quality links can have.

What are the key points you look for when identifying link opportunities? Do you consider pure link value to rankings and/or consider links that might be no-follow if they have the potential to bring targeted traffic to the site?

The main thing I focus on when selecting link prospects is; relevance. The link absolutely has to make sense or I won’t waste my client’s time on it.

After that, I look at the overall quality (How many links on the page? Is there any PR? Does it rank for anything?) and, to save a bit of time, I like to run it through the Raven Quality Analyzer (which tells me how many backlinks, indexed pages, age of domain etc). I do all of this in order to determine how much Google trusts the site and the likelihood of a link from the site directly affecting my client’s rankings.

As for nofollow links, let’s face it, clients don’t pay me to get them links that aren’t heavy hitting so I generally don’t pursue them (unless there’s a specific reason for doing so such as trying to help a paid link profile appear more natural). I don’t build links in humongous quantities though, so it all evens out.

If you’re building links for your own site though, I would never recommend turning down a link that makes sense…. even if it was nofollow.

As a provider of services, I see that you also offer a full suite of services. Has that evolved over the years from being mostly a link building company to now being a full service company?

Do you find this differentiates you from other providers and is that well-rounded approach one you’d recommend for someone starting a link building company today?

CanadianSEO has always offered a full line of SEO services, however over the years I’ve learned from experience that it’s the LINKS that get you where you need to be in Google hence why I’ve made link building my main focus. I now look at web design/site optimization and content creation as necessary steps in making sure your link efforts will have the desired effect.

Not sure if this sets me apart, but my clients are happy therefore I would probably recommend this approach to anyone running a SEO company. You absolutely have to be capable of attracting/acquiring/sourcing valuable links though, and this is something that apparently not every SEO is willing (or able) to do.

So let’s say you are advising me on how to become a better link builder or a better manager of link building teams. What would your top 3 points be and what are maybe the top 3 myths or over-hyped points I should avoid?

Become a better link builder/manager by a) developing a system for tracking progress b) learning how to be persuasive to get what you want and c) never sacrificing quality in order to meet a deadline or fill a quota.

As far as myths, it may surprise many people to learn that both paid and reciprocal links are still effective as part of an overall link building strategy. I’m always trying to emphasize that Google doesn’t know as much about your links as you think it does. Especially when it comes to how your links are obtained. Yes, they do watch for certain obvious things (rate of links acquired, unnatural use of anchor text etc) but it’s totally ok to be creative. In fact it’s best. As long as you’re being logical, you’ll get the results you’re looking for.

Other than that, I still roll my eyes at people who say PageRank doesn’t matter when it comes to links. Hi, um, have you heard that Google still uses PR as a metric of quality? I’d like to offer those same peeps a link from a relevant PR0 or a link from a relevant PR7 and see which one they jump at.

Not that PR should be the ONLY metric you use when determining the value of a link prospect, but if you’re interested in making any impact on your rankings, it should definitely be taken into consideration.

For tracking link building efforts and for tracking the links you secure, do you use tools for that (like Raven or Buzzstream) or do you do that internally?

I still do it all internally/manually via custom Excel reports. Guess I’m still old-school in that regard.

A typical link report includes such data as; link URL, link anchor text, Google cache date, Raven Quality Score, relevancy info, link type, PR and link status. It has everything my clients need in order to see the progress of their link campaigns and its also great for keeping me organized as I’m often building links for many sites at once.

Please tell us what you think are going to be the most important aspects of link building going forward in this age of rapid algorithm changes and social signals?

Many people assume that link development is decreasing in importance, but this is far from the case. Links are still the simplest way for search engine spiders to judge the reliability of a webpage. However, the way that search engines view links is changing.

I’ve definitely seen (what I consider to be) evidence that Google is using social media mentions as a measure of quality. In an age where Facebook ‘likes’, Tweets and Google +1’s can be readily bought and sold though, one has to wonder about the longevity of such a system.

I almost feel sorry for Google in that no matter what they try to use as a measure of quality, there will always be ways to game it. I think this is precisely why they’re trying to move away from organic SERPs by diversifying them so much. It’s an imperfect system and I seriously don’t envy the position they’ve put themselves in.

As always, those that can keep up and adapt, will ultimately have the most success.

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Thanks for your time Melanie! You can stay up to date with Melanie over at Twitter and Google Plus.

Melanie runs the show over at CanadianSEO.Com; a web marketing firm that offers web design, SEO, link building, and content creation services.