Support Dash is a customer support web-app for WordPress theme & plugin providers.  I know this may not be a product you’re personally interested in, but if you have any friends or colleagues that you think would use Support Dash, please tell them about it!

I’ve got plenty of SEO work ahead of me, so I’ll have a lot to write about here.  My upcoming posts will be about doing SEO from the perspective of a bootstrapped startup, and I’ll share some general marketing tactics as well.  I may not post regularly, but I’ll be back here to publish new content whenever I can!

I’m Back! is a post from SEO Discovery, a blog with a free SEO Tutorial and courses for link building.

The desktop application can be used to find backlinks leading to your site, or to discover your competitors links.  If you’re not sure how that’s helpful, I’ll run through some practical strategies in a moment, but first…

SEO Spyglass does a FANTASTIC job of finding links

Want to see what I mean?  Take your website’s URL and run it through Backlink Watch, Open Site Explorer, & SEO Spyglass. No tool will find all of your links, but you’ll find that SEO Spyglass reveals way more links than other tools.

Before I continue, you should know that you get unlimited use with the free trial which you can download here.

SEO Spyglass will find a large percentage of any site’s backlinks and also analyze each of the links for you.  The program returns data on every link such as:

• Page Title
• PageRank
• Dofollow/Nofollow
• Anchor Text

This data will help you understand exactly how another site is ranking.  You can find out what they’re using in their anchor text, what types of links they’re getting, how many links they have, etc.

SEO Strategies Using SEO Spyglass

So you can find backlinks, woot, but how is this useful?  Here are a couple ways I use the software to perform better in the search engines.

1) Backlinks Arbitrage

Here’s a common scenario: you’re trying to rank for a keyword and you’re not #1.  The good news is that somebody has to be #1, and they are a backlink goldmine for the savvy SEO.

You can run their site through Spyglass to find and analyze their links.  The next step is to start copying.  Some links like blog comment links can be copied in just seconds.  When you get the same links as them you’re essentially canceling their advantage.

2) Competitive Analysis

You’ve got a keyword you think could be a winner, but you need to gauge the competition in the SERPs.  The quick and dirty method is to check for any major authority sites, and run over some other basic metrics for the top sites like PageRank, number of pages, Alexa ranking, etc.

When you’re ready to really get into your analysis, you can run each of the top sites through SEO Spyglass.  This will give you a much better picture of what it takes to rank and you’ll save countless hours and dollars from avoiding some niches and entering the right ones.

3) Finding Link Opportunities

You can literally run any site in your niche through SEO Spyglass and find tons of new link opportunities.  When you know where everyone is getting their links, it becomes easy to build them on your own.

Download SEO Spyglass for Free

Just so you know, I used the free version for months.  I got the full version primarily so I could save reports, and also surpass the 1,100 link limit.  Overall, it’s one of my favorite SEO tools of all time.

SEO Spyglass Review is a post from SEO Discovery, a blog with a free SEO Tutorial and courses for link building.

The idea is to upload a video to Youtube targeting a keyword of your choice.  Next, create what I call a “satellite channel” and optimize the channel entirely for that one keyword.  The purpose of this channel is not to rank for your keyword, but instead to boost the rankings of the video on your main channel.

Before I go any further, here’s an example of how I used this technique to get the number #1 result for a product review keyword.

At the time of writing this, my video has the following ranking results:

In Google:

Ubot Studio Review – #1

Ubot Review – #6

In Youtube:

Ubot Studio Review – #1

Ubot Review – #1

I have my sleeves full of tricks when it comes to Youtube (find them here), but this one is a bit different.

This is the satellite channel that I created.  As you can see, it is entirely optimized for the keyword “Ubot Review”.

These are the steps I took to optimize it:

1) Change username to keyword

By using my keyword as my channel’s name, I got my keyword in the title tag, h1 tag, and also in the URL.  As you probably know, these are all extremely important on-page SEO factors.

If you can’t use your exact keyword just add an additional word at the end like “101″ or use an article like “a” or “the” somewhere in it because it will be ignored.  While Youtube isn’t great with stemming, they generally tend to cancel out stop words.

2) Add a link to main video

The next step I took was to put a link to my main video that the channel was created to boost.  When editing your channel’s sidebar, there is a spot where you can add links to any URL you want.  Use your keyword as anchor text and link to your main vid here.  Because it’s an internal link, it’s dofollow.

3) Add a link to main channel

For good measure, I added a link in the sidebar to my main channel.

4) Create three videos optimized for related keywords.

Two of the videos I made were optimized for related keywords that came up during my keyword research.  The other one targeted the same exact keyword.

Each of these videos simply linked to the full review here on my site in their description.

The reason for this is two-fold.  First off, they will get some traffic and may grab rankings of their own.  This is why I link directly to my review here so I can profit from that traffic.

Secondly, they create additional relevant pages that link back to the satellite channel.  Basically, this is internal, tiered link building.  Here’s a visual representation for my visual learners:

In my opinion, there’s no link Youtube likes more than a link from Youtube.

I still have a lot of things to try, but this is the basic formula that worked well for me.  By no means do you need to follow this rigidly, but I think the idea of utilizing Youtube satellite channels is very handy and effective for increasing video rankings.

Another tool I use and would recommend for video rankings is Traffic Kaboom (my traffic kaboom review)

In reference to future content, do you like posts about Youtube and video SEO?  I have some more stuff I could post if it’s an area of interest.

Increase Youtube Video Rankings with Satellite Channels is a post from SEO Discovery, a blog with a free SEO Tutorial and courses for link building.

Websites come and go online.  Webmasters build sites and grow their audience, and sometimes they stop for one reason or another and abandon their web property.  When this happens, there is a cheap (or sometimes free) domain available that has years of hard-earned links already leading to it.

You can find these expired domains and use a simple 301 redirect to pass all of the link juice to your site (well most of it counts).

I’ll put my money where my mouth is right now and show you an example.  Here is a Typepad site (click to verify) I registered for free using Typepad Micro that has over 6,000 links.  Here is the Open Site Explorer data.

This site has loads of links from high PR websites like StyleHive and I got it absolutely free.

Now that you know this stuff is real, let’s get into the process.

How to Find Expired Domains

I have come up with a fairly streamlined approach I like to use, and it starts by visiting web directories.

Website Directories like Best of the Web or Dmoz are a good starting point for finding expired sites.  Many sites were added to these directories years ago and have since become expired.

First, navigate to the niche your site would be in.  Most likely, the sites in your niche will be listed over a couple dozen pages, usually 1-9 and A-Z pages.  Visit each one and run Check My Links, a free Chrome extension.  This will quickly locate any broken links on the page.

Domain Hunter Plus is another Chrome extension that works quite well and has some additional features beyond Check My Links.  However, I like using CML so I can easily spot exactly which links are broken on page.

The tough part about this technique is that you have to find unregistered domains that also have decent link profiles.  It can be upsetting finding an available domain just to discover it has a really weak link profile.  But don’t worry, we’re just getting started!

Diving Deeper

Any expired and available domain found directly in a web directory is a quick win.  However, it usually takes a little more searching and savviness to find the good domains.

The next step is to visit every single site in your  niche in the directory you’re browsing.  That’s right, visit every single site listed in your niche, one-at-a-time.  Just take it one at a time and make sure to write down where you last stopped.  This will last you a long time and lead you to a LOT of link opportunities.

The first thing to do when visiting a new site is to run a quick broken link check on the homepage.  This is especially useful if the site has a blogroll.

Blogrolls are the holy grail of expired domain locating.  If you come across any Blogger sites, they almost always have a blogroll and if they link to a broken Blogger site, you may be able to snatch it up for free.

After you run a broken link test on the homepage, run the site through a backlink checker like SEO Spyglass.  In SEO Spyglass in particular, after you analyze a website’s backlinks you can find any inbound links coming from 404 pages.

In the “Links Back” category, these pages will be labeled as “No (Page Not Found)”.  This will provide you with even more broken links and expired domains to investigate.

If you haven’t noticed by now, you won’t take one single path during your exploration.  Just from the broken links leading to one site you could end up with another 20 sites leading you to link opportunities.  It is the web after all

Getting Clever

After spending some time searching, you will likely amass a list of domains that aren’t being hosted currently, but aren’t available for purchase.  There are two things you can do with these domains:

1) Find more broken links by running them through SEO Spyglass

2) Use them for Broken Link Building

If you can’t get the domain, use Open Site Explorer or Majectic SEO to find the top pages AKA the ones with the most links.  If the link profile for that specific page is decent then throw the page into the Wayback Machine to see what used to be on the page.

Next, recreate a better, updated version of the resource on your site and email all the webmasters linking to the broken page.  Let them know they have a broken link and that you have a new, similar resource they can switch the link to instead.

I’ve done this before with doshdosh.com which by the way is a link goldmine for anyone in the IM niche.  Just know you won’t be the first to get to it

 Taking Things Further

Every single site you visit in your niche is full of link building opportunities.

I know that my original example is about finding an expired domain, but if that’s all you’re looking for you are missing out.  You’re going to be visiting so many sites in your niche, it doesn’t make sense to ignore all the other opportunity, such as…

1) blog commenting

If you visit a site in your niche with a blog, why not stop and leave a comment?  Better yet, get a really relevant link from their site by using this search string:

site:theirwebsite.com Your keyword

This will search in Google for the page on their site most relevant to your keyword.  Comment on this page for the strongest, most relevant link possible.

2) guest blogging

If you come across sites that have blogs then you’ll probably find some that accept guest posts.  Add them to a list or start one if you don’t have one for guest blogging opportunities.

The opportunities for links and higher rankings will be in your face, so don’t ignore them.  After some searching and a few links, you’re bound to come across your 6,000 link goldmine.

How I Got 6,000 Links in 1 Hour is a post from SEO Discovery, a blog with a free SEO Tutorial and courses for link building.