Spiders can be scary, but you can’t deny how effective they are. Take the Cellar Spider, AKA Daddy Long Legs. When one of their webs gets old, they use it as scaffolding to build a new one. This happens over and over again until you get a mass of cobwebs.
Considering that there’s literally a web of information out there on a topic you’re trying to establish your leadership on, Daddy Long Legs’ approach is worth considering. Most SEO efforts are focused on getting YOUR stuff — white papers, studies or other docs — ranked high in search queries. But there’s no reason why you can’t use the other people’s already highly ranked content as scaffolding to build your own intellectual web to achieve the same ends.
Here’s how:
1. Assemble the keywords you anticipate customers (I’m going to say “customers” but I mean any targeted audience) are using to learn about a topic.
2. Run ‘em through the top search engines. Sit back and consider the terawatts of power, gigabytes of
storage and millions of people hours that went into compiling the list of results before you. They’ve worked for thousands or and potentially millions of other searchers. This is your scaffolding.
Among the results are blog posts, forums, news articles, wiki entries, YouTube videos, Slideshare decks and Flickr pics. Every one of those types of media have comment boxes underneath. Use them! Post comments, post links to your studies, use the publications and blogs that come up as a hit list for byline pieces.
Be strategic, be authentic, thoughtful and don’t be overly talkative. Recognize that if you’re articulating a complex, sophisticated and nuanced vision, the followers you want to attract are already paying very close attention to these hits. They’ll see your contributions to the conversation and then follow your links back to your own intellectual web.
These comments will not be indexed. Pretty much all comment infrastructures have a “nofollow” line of code in the HTML that tells search engines to ignore what comes next. But the end result is the same. People searching for information on your topic will find YOU.
A few tips:
When making comments, a lot of blogs allow a unified sign-in like DISQUS. It allows you to build a profile based on all your comments online. If people like one thing you’ve written under a DISQUS account, they can click on it and see everything else, further drawing them in to your point of view.
Don’t forget to use specific search engines for blogs, like Icerocket and Technorati to find prominent discussions to show up in.
When news breaks, be sure to join in the conversation. Search engines increasingly track the “real-time web” and recognizing that those results will be on top and then using ‘em is about as useful as SEO can get.
Remember, it’s a web. Customers don’t have to land in the center for you to capture them. Find a strand, yank on it and reel ‘em in.
This is the fourth of five posts marking the first ever Thought Leadership-SEO Week. Be sure to take the poll on how companies are using SEO for thought leadership, how to use SEO to promote white papers and how the psychological principle of closure affects SEO.
