CHAPTER 12

Electrify Your Content: Promotion and Link Building

One of the guiding principles behind an “optimize and socialize” approach to content marketing is the impact of content discovery: If it can be searched, it can be optimized. If it can be found, it can be shared. Part of our understanding about customers comes from the topics that are of interest to them, which we synthesize into social topics and search keywords. Content plans incorporate those topics and keywords into information and media that will guide prospects through the sales funnel to purchase, share, and refer. The missing link with great content is that it isn’t great unless people can find it. That’s where content promotion, outreach, and link building come into play.

In the world of search engine optimization, links from relevant websites to your content have traditionally been one of the most significant external influences on how web pages were sorted in search results. The incorporation of social signals, such as content and links shared within social channels, has augmented web-page-to-web-page links in a significant way. For example, Google has made a number of changes, including the tighter integration of Google+, into search results through its social search initiatives and the addition of its new Personal Search option, “Search plus Your World,” which draws content from your network on Google as well as content from the web at large.1 Promoting content to your network on Google+ can result in more “pluses” of your content, which can influence the ranking of that content for users who are logged in to any Google service.

The tighter integration between Google users’ social network content with the search engine experience means content publishing, promotion, and networking on Google+ is essential for companies that expect to be found in Google search. For context, imagine the hub and spoke content publishing model we discussed earlier with Google+ as a spoke. Content published on the hub can be promoted on the various spokes, or distribution channels, in order to increase visibility to end consumers, to influencers who may further promote the content to their networks, and to those who are prone to share and link.

For example, on a daily basis we publish blog posts on www.toprankblog.com as part of our content marketing strategy. Each topically focused blog post is automatically syndicated through an RSS feed created by our blog software, WordPress. That feed is shared with various syndication services, as well as more than 46,000 people who have subscribed to the feed. At the same time, each blog post is automatically promoted to the 16,000 people following the @TopRank Twitter account using TwitterFeed. Another automatic promotion channel for the blog involves RSS to e-mail through a service called FeedBlitz, which reaches more than 4,000 additional subscribers. Automatic promotion of content through social channels is something to be careful of. Use it too much, and readers will see your activity as overly aggressive. If you promote too little or not at all, your content may be missed in the mass of content being shared every second on the social web. (See Figure 12.1.)

Along with automatic promotion of content, there is manual promotion and outreach. Continuing with our own best practices as a walk-the-talk online marketing agency, the blog posts on toprankblog.com leverage the social networks we participate in, such as Facebook, personal Twitter accounts, LinkedIn, and Google+. According to what we know to be effective and important to our target audience, titles, descriptions, and timing of promotion will vary according to the social channel. Twitter promotions can use tools like Timely or Buffer, which analyze your Twitter network’s tendency to retweet, and schedule the publishing of your tweets in such a way as to maximize the likelihood of sharing. That tactic can promote blog posts, public Google+ and Facebook posts, YouTube videos, or any other type of public social media content.

Other manual promotions of blog content are dependent on the type of media. If a YouTube video, an infographic, or a SlideShare presentation is embedded in a blog post, then any third-party syndication or reposting of that media can link directly back to the original. A number of image hosting services, including Flickr, Picasa, and Pinterest, provide additional channels for image promotion. The same is true with video hosting services outside of YouTube, such as Vimeo or Viddler, which can help promote your video content to new audiences. The mix of promotion channels depends on the content, your intent, and the nature of the communities that you’ll be sharing content with.

With content promotion and social sharing, it’s important to build trust and credibility among the community of members so that they will interact with and share your content. If your content promotion approach focuses solely on your own material, then you may quickly be designated a social narcissist and blatant self-promoter. The percentages can vary, but a 70 percent mix of third-party content combined with 30 percent of your own is a good ratio. Obviously, this can vary according to social channel and your reason for participation. Personal accounts may lean closer to 20 percent self-promotion, whereas brand social accounts are expected to share their own material and may approach 40 percent self-promotion. You’ll need to determine through firsthand experience what the best mix is for your purposes and adjust accordingly. As a starting point, you can’t go wrong sharing useful third-party content first.

Along with automatic and manual social content promotion is social outreach. Content promotion objectives include exposure to end consumers, influencers, and people who are authors themselves and link to interesting things discovered online. Outreach can be a very effective method of gaining exposure and links from highly influential people, blogs, and publications in your industry. Known as online media relations or social media PR, the practice of cultivating a list of industry movers and shakers with powerful social networks requires intelligent homework, patience, and creativity. Here are a few tips on researching, romancing, and engaging with influencers for outreach with a particular emphasis on Twitter, blogs, and journalists:

• With a channel like Twitter, use followerwonk.com or klout.com to find individuals who focus on certain subjects and who also have healthy networks. To find journalists, use muckrack.com or lists maintained by specific newspapers or publications like nytimes.com/twitter. The qualitative aspect of an individuals influence needs to be determined by direct observation of their social network activity. Do they get retweeted (by humans) often? Do they stay on topic? Do they communicate in a credible way? Will they respond to you or follow you back?
• Making a connection through any other social network should emphasize being useful. With Twitter, start by following and even making a Twitter list of those you’d like to engage with. Retweet their messages, and respond to their tweets on occasion in a meaningful way. Once you are followed back, you can send a direct message, although if you are creative, public requests can work just as well.
• Effective pitching on social networks and media for outreach, including blogs, must focus on being relevant. That means the people you reach out to should be directly relevant to the topic you’re promoting and prone to tweeting, blogging, sharing, or writing articles about that same topic. Promoting gray-area relevancy is a surefire way to be ignored or to become known as a “flack,” as bad pitch media relations pros are called in the public relations world.
• Blogger outreach is something I try to do every day. For 15 minutes each morning, I look at a selection of bookmarked news websites for stories on which I can make meaningful comments. Those comments link back to my blog or Facebook account, depending on the comment management service. I also look at top news for targeted topics in Google News or other newswire services to find relevant stories on platforms that allow comments or the ability to e-mail the author. In a number of cases, the comments I’ve made were called out or positioned above others, “sticky post” style, which was even more desirable than being mentioned in the article, since I controlled the content being presented without any editing.
• As you develop connections with influential members of the community and industry, your ability to be useful must be complemented with a skill for suggesting relevant story ideas or content that you’re promoting. If it’s observed that a journalist for a technology publication likes infographics, create a blog post curating compelling graphics and then send that journalist a link to, or even mention his or her name in, the post as being the inspiration. When it’s relevant, the journalist may mention the blog post and even link back to it. Editorial links that are also easy to share socially are the new currency for ranking content on the search and social web. The relationship can be mutually beneficial, too. Bloggers and journalists are always looking for stories or perspectives they can use, and you are looking for media coverage and the sharing of your content. It’s a win for readers, too, when great stories are shared in relevant ways to interested communities.

The key to effective content promotion through social channels is to provide social networks, your community, and search engines with a steady stream of relevant, interesting content that gets shared and linked to. Those behaviors are powerful signals that will be rewarded with top search visibility and mentions wherever your prospects are looking.

POWER UP WITH LINKS

Links are like electricity, and web pages are the lightbulbs of SEO. Google’s PageRank is a representation of link authority for web pages and has been a key area of focus for most SEO professionals since Google came on the scene in the late 1990s. While the importance of links between websites for rankings is being debated by some in the SEO industry, the ability for links to deliver visitors to brand content and serve as a conduit to content for search engine bots remains essential.

The biggest asset for attracting links is content that is worth linking to. In the same way that you plan content for specific audiences in terms of motivating them to a particular outcome, certain kinds of content are prone to inspire people to link. As long as you expect to attract search and referral traffic to your content, you’ll want to engage in ongoing link acquisition.

One of the most effective tactics for link building is to create content on other websites that links back to whatever page you’re promoting. Bloggers and news websites are constantly on the lookout for contributors, so finding relevant websites that accept guest posts, or those that can be persuaded with your great content to accept a guest post, can become some of the most valuable links to acquire. Content creation is one of the highest-impact SEO tactics, but it’s also one of the hardest.2

USE CASE SCENARIOS FOR LINK-BUILDING STRATEGY

There are many different link-building tactics, but a proper link-building strategy must first consider the nature of the website being promoted and its starting point. To provide some context, here are three common starting points for link building that my team at TopRank Marketing has encountered numerous times over the past 10 years. Understanding your starting point can help guide you where you want to go.

A Shiny, New, and Linkless Website

If a website is brand new and just launching, pay attention to the authority and relevance of the first sites that link to that resource. Many new companies would do well to consider publicity and media promotion as worthwhile investments for creating awareness for buyers as well as industry bloggers and media. Submitting a new domain name to 500 third-rate directories and social profiles, never to be used again, doesn’t paint a very useful picture to Bing or Google compared with links from on-topic bloggers, local or trade media, and industry news websites. With a new website, managing expectations is important, especially if the business is in a competitive category. The quality of links (i.e., sources that are authoritative and relevant) will always be more important than the quantity of links, but certainly the ideal is to achieve both. Linking strategy for new websites often focuses on social channels, as well as long-tail keyword phrases, for which the company can gain visibility more quickly.

An Established and Randomly Linked Website

In contrast to a new website, a company site that has been around for 10 years and has engaged in media relations activities, advertising, and content creation may have a substantial number of links from a wide variety of credible sources. However, if the business has never invested in link building with specific attention to source, anchor text, and destination, then the impact may not be so beneficial. Without SEO insight, inbound links to the company may use random anchor text to mismatched destination pages, causing the presence but not the relevance that link building can achieve. As a result, the link sources may be diverse in a way that does not give a specific keyword-rich signal related to the topic that for which a web page or digital asset is most relevant. Linking to a home page 5,000 times using the anchor text “click here” is not nearly as meaningful as using “Tom’s Natural Toothpaste” and linking to a web page specifically about natural toothpaste. You should try to reclaim links with requests to link sources to modify the code to use more desirable anchor text in order to make the links more useful to search engines and the people who click them.

A Heavily but Questionably Linked Website

Our third starting point example is of a website that has a substantial number of links—an almost unbelievable number of links. This situation is one in which a company, or its gray-hat SEO agency, has acquired links using methods that are not in compliance with Google’s recommended best practices. In other words, it may have been buying links from other websites for the specific purpose of increasing search engine rankings or, worse, resorting to old-school black-hat SEO tactics such as using bots to create links from the comments of blogs that haven’t posted in more than six months. Such tactics may have worked in the past (or may even still work), but it is inevitable that either the search engine will identify the tricks or competitors will turn the company in to create an advantage for themselves. In many cases, these tactics can cause a website to be removed from search results altogether, causing serious damage to the business, since it cannot attract new customers through search. In cases of “spammy” links, they need to be identified and removed. At the same time, a qualitative link-building strategy based on useful, optimized content should be initiated to balance the percentage of good links with those that are not well regarded.

LINK-BUILDING TACTICS

Now that we have some of the groundwork established with a few example approaches to link building, we can get into the tactics designed to provide a variety of quality links to optimized content.

Link Audit

A link audit consists of identifying a baseline of your current inbound link footprint. It answers questions about the quantity, quality, source, and anchor text of the links to the website you are trying to promote. There are several tools to help you do this, including MajesticSEO.com and OpensiteExplorer.org. (See Figure 12.2.)

Link research and tracking tools will give you a way to identify the current linking profile of your website, the linking profile of competitors, new link opportunities, trends in link acquisition over time, and the different types of links that are currently in place. Link types and attributes include:

• Anchor text links
• Follow or no-follow links
• Image links
• Redirected links
• Links from other web pages

Measuring information about the links to relevant pages of your website from other websites will help identify the quantity and quality of your website’s link health compared to other sites that may be outperforming you on target keyword phrases. Considerations with a link audit include the following:

• What search-friendly links have you acquired over time?
• What is the authority and topical relevance of the link sources to your site?
• What pages do they link to?
• What anchor text is used with links to your site? Is it relevant to your destination pages?
• Which links are broken?
• Which areas of your site have too few links or irrelevant links?
• Where are the social link sources, and to what pages?
• What type of content attracts the most relevant links?

After auditing the link health of your own website and doing some competitive link research, you can go about developing your link-building approach.

Develop a Link Strategy

The link-building strategy that is best for your website will be based on a variety of factors, including the content you have to promote, the keywords you are targeting, the competitiveness of your category, the amount and quality of new content you are going to publish and promote, your social network participation and size, internal resources, and expected rate of link acquisition. (See Figure 12.3.) Acquiring links individually or one by one can be very time-consuming, so a link strategy should account for finding the right mix of high-value targeted links as well as tactics that will scale link acquisition. Ultimately, the goal of link building is to drive direct traffic as well as provide search engines with a relevant quantity of signals to aid in crawling and ranking web pages.

Link strategies can vary according to these considerations. For example, a new website that has 50 web pages may decide to employ a mix of online PR tactics for its initial link building. Some of those tactics could include:

• Press releases sent through online news distribution services like PRWeb or PRNewswire
• Guest posts published on other blogs
• Contributed articles in industry publications
• Links from industry publications
• Rated lists of prominent, well-networked individuals or resources in the industry
• Infographics that represent compelling views or data relevant to the target market
• Contrarian views or counterpoints to trending news in the industry (with comments shut off on the blog, forcing others to link to you when responding from their own blogs)

Op-ed pieces can also be very valuable, because newspapers and similar publications are often viewed as an authoritative and credible source of content. Links from the online version of a news website can send traffic and substantial link popularity.

In the second example above, we discussed a site in which links exist, but are not focused. An effort may be made to update content that has the most links and to reach out to those link sources and ask if they will change the anchor text to use words more consistent with the optimization of the destination pages. A successful modification of anchor text could result in a notable number of on-target, on-topic inbound links to your website, giving Google and users a crystal clear idea of what the destination page is about. Link text such as “more information” is ambiguous and simply not helpful to readers or search engines in understanding the topic of the destination page.

For the site with abundant risky links, the strategy might start with the identification of unsavory links in the link portfolio and an effort to disengage from the purchase of those links. In the case of having “bad neighborhoods” linking to your website, requests can be sent to site owners to remove the links. Search engines understand that sites cannot control who links to them, so a focus on increasing the percentage or ratio of good links to those that are not is a better investment than chasing link removal from obscure scraper websites.

How to Evaluate Links and Link Sources

Hunting individual links is rarely scalable, but some things are important to know when it comes to evaluating a good link. Examples of what makes a good link include:

• Overall domain authority
• Quantity and quality of inbound links to the source page
• How on-topic the source page is
• Whether the link includes the exact-match anchor text
• An annotation or descriptive text next to the link
• The number of other outbound links on the same page
• The age of the link
• Position of link on the page
• Whether the link is follow or no-follow
• Social shares of the link

A good link should deliver relevant visitors to your website and provide search engines with a clear and focused topical connection between the source and destination pages. Some important considerations for link evaluation include:

• Link relevance. If the link comes from a site that is relevant to your topic, it is worth much more than a link that is unrelated to your subject matter.
• Link authority. This is based on how authoritative the source of the link is. There are a couple types of authoritative sources. One example might be a site like that of the New York Times. Because the New York Times is a widely distributed media source, it is assumed that attention to detail is paid when it comes to fact checking. Another type of authoritative site might be an expert source on a niche topic, such as searchenginewatch.com. While these two types of sites are very different, they are similar in the fact that they are well respected and known for releasing quality information.
• Link trust. This relates to how trusted a link source is. If you have a large number of links coming from a source that is known for spamming, those links will not be of as much value as those from a trusted destination.

Basic Link-Building Tactics

Once you have run an audit of your existing links and determined what makes a quality link, it’s time to search for targeted link sources. The outreach, content, and social promotion discussed earlier in the chapter will achieve awareness, traffic, and links, but in most cases you have no control over the anchor text with links that come from promoted content. A combination of editorially diverse link sources and anchor text in conjunction with targeted and specific text used to link to your web pages is the winning combination for building link authority to your content.

As it relates to link building, content is the promise, and if the content is true to what customers care about, and the promotional language is relevant and executed properly, the links built as a result of that promise will be beneficial to your SEO strategy. Beyond promotion of great content, there can be a lot of value for basic link building with specifically targeted keyword phrases.

Backlink Analysis

Competing search results with rankings higher than your pages often have certain sites linking to them that are not linking to your site. Backlink analysis is a tedious, but necessary, link research tactic to identify competitive link opportunities. The process can be pretty straightforward:

• When you are not logged into a search engine, do a search for one of your target keyword phrases.
• Document the URLs of pages and media that rank organically in the top 5 or 10 search results for your target keyword phrase.
• Import the URLs of those pages into a tool such as MajesticSEO.com to identify the quantity and quality of links to each of the pages that are ranking in the top 10.
• Review the link sources to identify which sites are linking to competing search results that are not linking to any page on your website.
• Review the source pages to identify possible link opportunities. If a competitor link source is a list, e-mail the webmaster to add your site to the list. If the link source is a how-to article for a resource (noncommercial) website, write a new and improved version of the article and offer it to the site owner with a link back to your site for author credit. If the competitor link comes from a blog post, offer to write a guest post for that blog that offers a more compelling set of tips or a countering opinion that includes a link back to your site within the post or from author attribution.

Backlink analysis can be sped up with specialty SEO tools or by using an SEO expert who has deep experience with this kind of link research. Longtime link-building experts, like my friend Eric Ward, at http://letter.ly/linkmosesprivate, offer practical how-to information on finding high-quality, editorially relevant links that are good for attracting customers as well as search engines.

Social Profiles

Some social media platforms will allow you to add your company website address and create a followable link. Typically, forms have to be filled out, and the intention of those sites is that you will actually participate. If you simply add a link and never take any action, then the link that you acquired is not going to be worth much. A link source page is only worth as much as the quantity of quality links pointing to it from other websites.

Commenting

Websites or blogs that allow comments can be excellent link sources because you control the content around your link. Comments should always be useful, and it’s worth spending the extra time to provide helpful insights and then link to resources that you’ve published on your own website or blog. Many blogs employ the rel=nofollow attribute to their comment management systems, but those links can still send visitors, and the content of the comments you make can inspire the authors to include your link destination as a rel=follow link in their next blog post.

Social Sharing and Bookmarks

Encourage social bookmarks and news submissions of your content via services using passive methods like a widget embedded in the template of your article pages or blog posts. Make it easy to share and save your content to social destinations. Some social bookmarking services will make a copy of what you bookmark or a static web page of the bookmarked content, including a crawlable link back to the source.

Guest Posts

Write for blogs and include a link to your content in the body copy or in your author bio. In the course of getting to know websites that already rank well on the keyword phrases you’re targeting, you may notice that they often accept guest posts. Contact the website owners or blog editors and suggest a compelling post that would be valuable to their readers. If it makes sense editorially to link from within the guest post to your own website, be sure to use relevant keywords as the anchor text. Guest posts can be one of the highest-impact targeted link-building tactics you can use. The icing on the cake with guest posts is that the links are not only good signals for search engines but that high-profile sites can send substantial traffic as well.

Curated Lists and Directories

Directories are not as effective as they once were, but there are specific directories for both blogs and websites that still serve useful purposes. At TopRank’s Online Marketing Blog, we manage a list of more than 100 blog directory submission links at www.toprankblog.com/rss-blog-directories/. Don’t expect a lot of traffic from these links, but niche links can augment an overall linking effort. If a quality directory has a relevant category with other reputable websites or blogs in it, then it may make sense for your content to be among them as a useful information source. Curated lists have been around as long as the web has. In fact, curated lists of links were pretty much how people discovered new content before search engines existed. Every industry has websites and blogs that collect and link to useful resources. Find those quality lists, and suggest your site or specially created on-topic content as another valid resource to be added.

Job Listings

When promoting jobs for your company on the web, always include a link back to your site. Job postings are often syndicated to aggregators, so one listing may be promoted to multiple syndication partners as well as shared on social networks. We worked with an industry association that wanted to attract more traffic to its job listings pages. This national association had many regional chapters throughout the United States. In order to inspire relevant links back to the main job listing page, the headquarters offered the regional websites a widget to embed that would show new job listings automatically. The widget also included a clean, do-follow link back to the main job listings page on the national association website. As a result, the regional sites were able to provide a useful feature to their website at no cost, giving members reason to visit. The national association job listing pages received an increase in direct link traffic and a substantial increase in search engine traffic using keywords related to the link-building campaign.

Contributed Articles

Industry websites and news and magazine websites often accept articles from subject matter experts. Establish a relationship by commenting on a news site, and share links to other content you’ve written for other credible websites and blogs. When you suggest a contributed article to the news or magazine site, consider these simple tips:

• The suggested article must be relevant to the publication and offer value to its readership. Original and thought-provoking ideas do well.
• Suggest ideas for more than one article. Share abstracts that include title and description, with a hook or premise for the article.
• Be prepared to show credible evidence of your work on your own site or other highly credible sites that you’ve contributed to.
• Don’t be discouraged, but do be persistent. Don’t suggest the same thing over and over. Tie your ideas into current news and trends in a way that offers insight that competitor publications are not covering.

Press Releases

Many companies limit the publishing of press releases to their own website or through e-mail to a handful of industry journalists and bloggers. To potentially gain a substantial number of links from other relevant news sites and blogs, distribute press releases through a wire service. I have been using PRWeb since 2001 in this way (parent company Vocus is a TopRank client) and have received as few as 10 and as many as 1,500 inbound links (to a single press release) from different domain names as a result of distributing it through PRWeb. Really good releases might get 100 unique inbound links, but with today’s common methods of discovering, consuming, and interacting with news, they’ll also attract social shares. Many blogs and other news sites subscribe to new release distribution services like PRNewswire, Business Wire, Marketwire, and PRWeb. When those news sites and blogs see press releases they like, they will often republish the press release, including good links back to your website. Journalists use news search to look up past press releases and research stories, which presents another opportunity to be found and linked to.

Sponsored Content

Many newsletters in different industries accept advertising or sponsorship. Newsletters sent via e-mail are often archived online or have landing pages that can be found through an index, through links from the company website, or through search. We discussed optimizing internal company newsletters for search in Chapter 10, which can drive additional traffic. Find newsletters in your industry that will link back to your website if you buy an ad or contribute a short article. The exposure through e-mail can drive traffic to your website, and the online version of the newsletter that includes your ad or guest article with link can help send even more traffic and assist with search engine ranking. This is a situation whereby a newsletter that accepts guest articles or ads also happens to archive past issues online in a way that can be found by search engines. Purchasing links outright for SEO purposes is against Google’s terms of use.

Reviewing Blogs and Offering a Badge

My company’s BIGLIST of search marketing blogs has resulted in over 64,000 inbound links to our company blog from relevant search marketing blogs, many of which are competitors to our agency. (See Figure 12.4.) When reviewing blogs, be sure to focus on quality, and be consistent. Offer reviewed blogs a way to show off their recognition in the form of a widget or badge that links back to the list or recognition page. Include your blog’s logo on the badge for improved brand awareness whether blogs use it to link back to your site or not.

Live Blogging

If you attend an industry conference, live blogging presentations can be a great tactic for building links. Sometimes, the presenters mentioned in the posts will link to the live blog post as media coverage for their company. Still others will link and share on the social web because there is no other record of their presentation.

SOCIAL LINKS

Social links are basically the links included in status updates, tweets, and links included from other social sharing platforms. For the most part, links that come from social media websites employ a no-follow attribute that instructs search engine crawlers not to follow those links for discovery or ranking purposes. But there are some instances where those links do count, according to an interview with Danny Sullivan conducted by representatives from Bing and Google, and there has been confirmation from both major algorithmic search engines that they do consider links within social media content to determine ranking.3

While Google uses more than 200 different signals, including PageRank, to determine how pages are ranked, links discovered in public social streams can also have influence on web page rankings. With Google’s Search plus Your World update in January 2012, the importance of social content sharing and growing your social network is just as important, or more so, than old-fashioned links. The volume and quality of social interaction, coupled with the influence of those you’re interacting with, can have a noticeable impact on the search visibility of your content for people logged in to Google.

KEYWORD TO LINK MAPPING FOR SUCCESS

When planning your link-building strategy, map your list of keyword targets to the types of optimized content you’ll be promoting. The focal point of your content-based link-building tactics should be concentrated on search phrases or social topics your brand wants to be known for and found under. At the same time, it’s okay to use some variations of those keywords. Not every website will link to your web page exactly the same way. In fact, it would probably look unnatural if your website had 5,000 new links from different domain names in one week all using the exact same anchor text. Focus on content your customers care about, and optimize that content for search phrases, social topics, and especially for social shares and inbound links. Make it drop-dead easy for search engines to see your content as the authority on topics that matter to your customers. With a quantity of quality links that are relevant, your content will light up on the search and social web, bringing more customers and attracting even more links.

ACTION ITEMS

Notes

1. Official Blog, Google, accessed January 2012, http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2012/01/search-plus-your-world.html.

2. “MarketingSherpa’s 2012 Search Marketing Benchmark Report SEO Edition,” MECLABS, accessed January 2012, http://www.meclabs.com/training/publications/benchmark-report/2012-search-marketing-seo-edition?8907.

3. Danny Sullivan, “What Social Signals Do Google & Bing Really Count?” Search Engine Land, December 1, 2012, http://searchengineland.com/what-social-signals-do-google-bing-really-count-55389