This is Part 4 of my comprehensive walkthrough and review of Scribe 4.0.
(Check out Part 3 – Link Building.)
Finally! I’ve made it through all the main feature areas of Scribe 4.0 to the last one, Site Connections.
This one isn’t over in the edit area like the other three – instead, you have to go over to the left-hand WordPress menu, and under the Scribe menu, choose Site Connections.
You enter your keyword phrase and click the button, and you get a site score from A-D, telling you how difficult it will be for you to get people who own a higher level of authority for that term to link back to you.
I got a B, which is pretty impressive given that YouTube SEO is fairly tangential to what the Rowboat Media website is all about. It said “you have a lot of connections, but need more for this phrase.” By connections, they mean backlinks.
Who are these people with the authority?
In theory, Scribe will return a list of sites which rank for the chosen keyword, along with any contact information they can find on the admin of the site – email address, phone number, etc. so that you can consider engaging with them. I saw this work in the webinar. However, on the evening I was running this test, repeated attempts produced the blank results shown and the following error:
I wasn’t terribly chapped about this, because I know the functionality is brand new and it involves pulling and aggregating data from a remote location – therefore, lots of points of failure. Plus, I feel that Scribe is so powerful even without this new feature that it didn’t really matter.
Scribe will also show you people who are influential in social media for that phrase, including their Klout Scores. Unfortunately, when I clicked the first couple of links, I got 404 errors. Again, I’m sure the kinks are getting worked out:
Conclusions About Scribe 4.0
All in all, I was incredibly impressed with the new features Scribe has added in my absence, and with how it has taken what seems like a really “soft” subject – content marketing and relevance – and found a way to quantify many aspects of it with hard data, and suggestions driven by that data, that are easy to understand.
We all have to become content marketers rather than “keyword optimizers” in the new world of search, and Scribe does a great job of leading writers through that. I would venture to say that instead of handing one a fish, it gradually, through repeated use, teaches one how to fish off the content marketing pier.
The Copyblogger crew states that it could take about a week and a half-dozen posts to really get the hang of how it works – I suggest it could take less, especially if you’ve read an introduction like this one.
You can use Scribe on as many websites as you like, with a single API key – the only limiting factor is the number of evaluations in your plan.
All subscribers get both the plug-in and access to the web interface.
More information, plus a 30-minute demo video, is available on the Scribe SEO website.
Scribe 4.0 Review – Part 1 – Keyword Research
Scribe 4.0 Review – Part 2 – Content Optimizer
Scribe 4.0 Review – Part 3 – Link Building