International SEO Blog

These are some tactics that I use to cultivate a targeted twitter following. I welcome your thoughts and feedback and urge you to add your own techniques in the comments!

1) Having your twitter username reflect what you’re about is key.

• You can change your twitter username in settings. However this may confuse your followers who will then see a different name. I changed my username early on and It didn’t have much of an effect if any on my followers, but this step is not without risks so you have to make your own judgment call here.

2) Make sure your Bio reflects what you tweet about.

3) Upload a background photo to your twitter profile that reflects what you tweet.

4) I try to tweet as on-topic as I can.

 
• This is just a preference of mine, I try and limit the number of “eating a turkey sandwich and enjoying the sun” type tweets but that’s just me.

My motto is follow to be followed, I don’t care about my twitter ratio because I use twitter to network and keep my ear to the street. I would rather follow tons of people who are in the same industry in order to share ideas with as many industry professionals as possible. I use twitter for 2-way communication.

5) Follow those that follow you; use socialtoo and/or tweetlater to automatically follow your followers.

6) Follow the super stars in your industry; I use wefollow to find the superstars.

 
• Most will not follow you back but you will learn allot.

7) Unfollow those that unfollow you. (socialtoo/tweetlater)

 
• Except the superstars (totally up to you)

8.) Follow those that are interested in the same topic(s), I use monitter to search for those who mention things I’m interested in as well.

9) Follow the superstar’s followers

 
• This is key, if someone is following a superstar in your industry they are most likely interested in the same things as you and are more likely to follow you back.

More and more tweeps are following those that follow them, this is the base of the “follow to be followed” technique. I also see that when I follow someone interested in the same industry as myself they tend to follow back.

When you find a superstar in your industry (before you start following their followers)

10) Click on those that you follow; and start unfollowing those that do not follow you back.

• You can’t DM those that don’t follow you back so just remove those that Don’t say “Direct message”

• You can do this automatically with socialtoo, you can even give it parameters like “unfollow those that don’t follow me back after ____days.

11) click the superstars twitter profile. Read their latest tweets to get a feel for what they are all about.

12) Then tweet something that you feel will resonate with their tweeple. If the superstar tweets about international business then find an interesting article from the economist and tweet about it. This way when you start following their followers, the first tweet they will see from you will be on-point and this will increase the chances of them following you right back.

13) If you are a blogger; blog about the topic of interest, then tweet about it before you start following the superstars followers. This way the first tweet they will see from you will send them to your blog about a subject that they are interested in.

Add your own tactics in the comments, I would like this to be a free flowing list of ways to use twitter.

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The best option when targeting a specific country with your international SEO effort is to have the Country Code TLD as well as having your website hosted in that country, i.e. http://www.bonjour.fr hosted in France.

If you can’t get hosting in the country for whatever reason, the second best option is to have the country code TLD. i.e. .fr

If both of those options are not available to you then you should set up a specific subdomain for the country you are targeting. http://fr.bonjour.com/

Check out the Matt Cutts video that explains this. It is the last point discussed in the video but the entire video has great insight into what’s new in Google for 2009.

I’m not sure if this is old news or not but its good news for Link Building. I just discovered a great consolidation of tools that helps with link building. The two tools are Yahoo Site Explorer and SEO Quake.

While doing a backlink check on my site in Yahoo, I had inadvertently left SEO Quake on. (Usually I turn it off when I’m not using it because it slows my browser down) When the backlinks loaded, SEO Quake analyzed each back link that I have! This is great because it allows you to sort your links by PageRank, Age, Alexa, even by the amount of backlinks your backlinks have.

If you are going to use these two tools together, you have to be careful because the tool will query Google and yahoo pretty hard which allot of times will result in them shutting you out. (If this happens you’ll have to wait a couple hours until they let you back in.) One thing you can do is go into SEO quake, then go to preferences, advanced and where it says “parameters request delay” enter in “1500″ also enter “1500″ in notifications close delay. You should also check “use cash”.

This should let you query the engines without them getting upset and kicking you out!

If they still kick you out, download tor Identity anonymity This tool will swap your IP address with other tor users every 10 min. This should keep the engines from kicking getting mad at you!

PR: wait… I: wait… L: wait… LD: wait… I: wait… wait… C: wait… SD: wait…

When building links for a .com targeting the US, you have so many options for building links…

• Directories
• Blog commenting
• Article sites
• Social media sites…..

However for a specific country TLD like a .fr the possibilities are so constrained. Not only do you have to search for sites located in France but you also are constrained by the sites niche. It’s a double edge sword so to speak. Searching for French sites in your niche that offer links is like looking for a 4 leaved clover.

However, there are allot of directories! Most that I have found are very high quality as well.

Here are a few that I like

• creations-entreprise.com/
• seek.fr
• netguide.fr/

There are even a quite a few niche directories. If you are willing to search! The best way to find those are to do a back link analysis on your french competitors. You discover where they are referenced and you add your site there as well.

I have even found some social media sites hosted in france.

• ziki.com/fr
• cv.com

I also post on French DoFollow blogs however it is quite slim pickings to find one in your niche. I have put together a French DoFollow blog search engine with quite a few.

I welcome your comments and invite you to post any ideas you have or strategies you use for French Link Building. and French SEO.

photo credit to solarplaces.org

I have been doing some hunting and have dug up some dofollow search engines. I have not been able to personally check all of these so I am counting on everyone to help me out by leaving their comments below. Please let me know how you feel about these. Also, If you have your own engine that you are working on feel free to email me CybernautSEO(at)gmail.com and I will add it to the list.

Absolutely do not spam these! Just search for blogs in your industry and add value to the conversation.

The post on Social Media Link Building Network is comming soon.

<!– I just read an article on the negative aspects of using URL Shorteners. According to Jamie Sirovich President of SEO Egghead, Inc. Using short URLs is the best way to scare your readers, dilute your brand and squander your link equity. He points out some definite limitations that I have to give him credit for. For example; what if your favorite URL service goes under? All of those links you built using short URLs would disappear.

However a there are a few things that he left out. I understand that some may use URL shorteners for phishing and rick rolls and that some of us have fell victim to such abuse. That being said, I feel the community at large should not suffer for the few abuses, and that the benefits of one URL shortener specifically, cligs (I’m not being paid to promote their service) far out way the potential down side. 

First of all the analytics you get from using a clig is excellent for measuring the traffic you are getting from your link building, twitter posts and over all Brand Promotion on the web.

Speaking of brand promotion; with cligs you can set the ending to whatever you want (your brand name for example), which is a great way to explain the page that is being linked too as well as get some keyword focused link text where you otherwise may not be able to.

Also I have already wrote a post about this but you can specify which page a visitor links to based on what country they are in when they click the link. Check out International link building with cligs o ya that’s a clig!

As for squandering link equity; cligs uses 301’s so you’re fine there too. Oh one last thing, you can change the destination of a clig whenever you want (great for you grey/black hatters). But from a white hat perspective, you could use this function if you no longer want to promote a certain page on your site because you made new content with the same theme. You would just change the destination and all of your links would point to your new page.

<!– /* Try viewing this blog in firefox!

I’m sure you are aware of cligs url shortener. If not this is a URL shortener that gives you plenty of options including renaming the ending to describe the page it lands on, (great for keyword focused URLs). It gives you analytics for each of your “cligs” which is great for assessing the traffic you get from a single URL.

My Favorite attribute is of course the International SEO implications. You can specify exactly where your visitor lands based on the country they are coming from with a single clig. Thus when link building internationally, you can have your French visitors land on the French page and your Spanish visitors land on the Spanish page of your site. Brilliant!

International SEO and Link Building with Cligs

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Try viewing this blog in firefox!

This International Link Building strategy is fairly comprehensive but if done right it can really be a great method to supplement your link building efforts.

Note: this is just one small portion of a comprehensive strategy.

Basically it’s a link filtering process that results in a list of high quality, relevant links that will have a high likelihood of linking to you. This will work for any link building strategy but since I am all about International I will skew this tactic a bit in order to stay on topic.

Step one is to go to SEO MOZ and go to the juicy link finder tool. I’m sure this is in most link builders tool box anyway, but if not it’s (~$79 bucks for an account). Set the number of returns to 200, Type in your keywords. Download this list to excel. Do this for as many keywords as you like (the more the merrier)

Step two; Set up a Google Custom search Engine. Copy all your URLs into your custom search, set it to “only the pages that I have entered”. Or you could enter them in at the domain level to search each site in its entirety. Now you have a “Googlable” list of highly relevant pages or sites that mention your keywords and have high page ranks, as well as carry a significant authority. If you are targeting a specific language or doing international link building, go into “regular Google” and set your language preference. Then in your new custom search you can type in your language and pull up only high quality relevant sites in your target language. Try these queries that are meant to find sites that allow you to submit a link, or ad a url to their resource list.

“suggest * link” OR “suggest * a * link” OR “suggest * site” OR “Suggest * a * site” OR “suggest * url” OR “suggest * a * url” OR “add * link” OR “suggest * an * url” OR “add * a * link” OR “add * site” OR “add * a * site” OR “add * url”

“add * a * url” OR “add * an * url” OR “submit * link” OR “submit * a * link” OR “submit * site” OR “submit * a * site” OR “submit * url” OR ” submit *a * url” OR “submit * an * url” OR “favorite * links” OR “cool * sites”

“cool * places” OR “directory” OR “directorys” OR “directories” OR “recommended * links” OR “sites we recommend” OR ” * industry * resources” OR “favorite * sites” OR * our * favorite sites”

I realize that some of these are redundant but this is meant to be a catch all. Once you search the queries, go through each link one by one and use your normal discretion to pick your “even juicier links”.

What you should be left with is a sizable list of highly relevant authoritative sites that have a high probability of linking to you. Now you should organize your list based on the type of link that makes the best sense for each link.

For example; you may have some links from sites that except article submission. You could have some blogs on the list, there could be some sites that would make good link exchange partners or there might be sites that warrant you to personally contact for a link.

Do follow blogs are a great way to increase your backlink profile. Though some argue that blog commenting (even on dofollow blogs) will not improve your rankings or authority. Well I would completely disagree with this. Primarily because Matt Cutts has said repeatedly that the best way to build links is by blogging. Well in order to be a blogger you not only have to blog but you also must participate on others blogs by submitting comments.

Why would Google discount these links? These are legitimate human reviewed links. If an administrator feels that your blog comment is a spammy one they just delete it. If you add to the conversation they let it fly, just as if they added the link themselves. So For these reasons participating in the blogosphere is one of the best ways to increase your backlinks.

CommentHunt which is my favorite dofollow blog custom search Engine, (for a complete list see DoFollow blog search engines) has international blogs in its database and are great for international link building. Just go to Google and in preferences set the language you are targeting. Then go back to CommentHunt and search for your keywords in your target language. This should bring up blogs in your target language that mention your keywords. If you are looking for French do follow blogs I have a custom search engine that only searches french blogs on my international seo tools page

However don’t just comment on dofollolows for the sake of links. Do it for the conversation and the added benefit of traffic. If you take this approach you will inherently leave more insightful comments to intrigue other readers to follow your link to your site. And you are increasing the chances of the administrator accepting your comment.

So only leave your links on blogs that are relevant to your own, leave insightful comments that encourage readers to visit your site, and comment on nofollow blogs as well as dofollow.