On A Mission

March Madness is right around the corner so many people are tuning into their favorite team and thinking about their bracket selections. So today we are going to be taking a look at the Boston Celtics Facebook page.

Specifically, we will analyze one aspect of a site’s success: creating intentionally named and placed hyperlinks to increase site traffic and therefore search rankings. Paddy Moogan, co-founder of Aira, a UK digital marketing agency puts it like this:

“A hyperlink (usually just called a link) is a way for users to navigate between pages on the Internet. Search engines use links to crawl the web. They will crawl the links between the individual pages on your website, and they will crawl the links between entire websites.”

Why do links matter? Search engines don’t just look at the content of a page, they also analyze the number of quality links pointing to a social media page or website from external sources, and the quality of those hyperlink “referrals” that reside on other sites or in user commentary.

We are using Moz, a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) organization that has a number of tools to assist marketers in their quest to help organizations get in front of audiences.

Using the specific URL for the Celtic’s Facebook page we can see this is a page with a great deal of authority (79/100) with 362 sites that link to the Celtics, boosting Facebook page traffic with close to 29k inbound links. I was surprised there weren’t any ranking keywords on the Celtics Facebook page:

Looking through the first fifty in-links of the Boston Celtics Facebook page (sometimes referred to as back links or inbound links), almost every single one is coming from various links on Reddit.com, the social news and entertainment aggregator.

Looking at all links, we see other sites are connected with the Celtics Facebook page including YouTube, USAToday, Yahoo Search and Marca, a Spanish sports newspaper. Presumably these links are contained in their content posts or fans comments and can also help to boost the Celtic’s site popularity:

In the unstructured world of social media that most people live in, referred links typically come from online users who want to provide information or promote someone or something to their followers.

There are many implications for link analysis in other categories too, like book authors or speakers who want their writing or brand cited or co-cited by journalists, academics or other authors.

As for the Boston Celtics, they have already built a mega brand. In terms of expansion including influencers, I’d look to further understand how the Celtics audiences break down to identify growth potential, develop content that incorporates ranking keywords and hashtags, with expanded focus on its Spanish-speaking fan base.