Posted by great scott!

Crawling and Indexing. Without them you can"t rank. If you can"t rank, you can"t get search traffic. If you can"t get search traffic, your online marketing efforts are going to suffer; and in our industry that is a colossal FAIL.

This seems like simple stuff we all take for granted, but it"s critically important to understand what you must do--and avoid--to make sure your site is regularly crawled and then maintained in the primary index of each of the major engines. Even if you think you know it all, take a few minutes to watch this week"s Whiteboard Friday...you may just realize you"ve been ignoring some critical ranking factors.

SEOmoz Whiteboard Friday - Crawling & Indexing from Scott Willoughby on Vimeo.

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Posted by randfish

I"m not always a fan of Guy Kawasaki"s work, but really enjoyed his post on the OPEN Forum - A Dozen Don"ts for Entrepreneurs. I thought I"d take a stab at replicating it with some of my biggest warnings for those in our field.

For the list below, the word "clients" is interchangeable with "marketing manager" or "executive team" for in-house SEOs.

1. Don"t Create False Expectations
   Clients are just like everyone else - when you exceed their expectations, they love you. When you disappoint, they"re angry. Make it easy for yourself and don"t oversell. If anything, undersell your abilities to do great things and let them be surprised. It"s a hard thing to do, particularly in a competitive bidding environment, but humility and hard work often shine through in presentations and good clients will see that and honor it.
   _
2. Don"t Ignore Analytics
   Website analytics, both visitor traffic and third party metrics, are important parts of SEO. When things are going well, even if best practices aren"t being followed, it can be wise to match up data and trends to see what"s made a real difference. Don"t undertake an SEO project unless you have at least the essential data points (this also comes in handy once changes have been implemented and your work starts to have an impact).
   _
3. Don"t Always Take Your Client at Their Word
   If you talk to lots of clients, you"ll find that none of them have ever spammed the engines, bought a link, accidentally cloaked for Googlebot or hidden text, yet the statististics tell another story. Never assume your clients are being dishonest, but always watch out for activities they might not be aware of (or might not have realized were problematic). This goes beyond just white and black hat - we had a client who thought they had a couple dozen active domains; turns out they had nearly a hundred - canonicalization alone has been a big project and a big return.
   _
4. Don"t Get Into Projects with People You Don"t Like
   If ever you get a "funny feeling" about a client, move on if you can possibly afford it. Some people just don"t click together, and when interpersonal relationships aren"t working, projects have a way of not working out, either. It"s always better to get out before something"s signed than after.
   _
5. Don"t Give an Unqualified Answer Unless You"re Extremely Certain You"re Right
   If you"ve been reading SEOmoz lately or hearing me speak at conferences, you"ll notice that my advice comes with a lot more caveats than it used to. It"s been a tough lesson, but there"s very rarely a "this is ALWAYS better than that" in the field of SEO. Exceptions abound, so cage your language accordingly.
   _
6. Don"t Confuse SEO & Sales
   If your client comes to you wanting to drive sales with SEO, make sure they"re keenly aware of the multiple responsiblities inherent in such a request. Yes - SEO can drive lots of high quality, targeted traffic at the perfect moment for capturing the sale. But NO - SEO cannot convert that visit into dollars. If the website sucks at turning visitors into leads, do the right thing and recommend CRO (Conversion Rate Optimization) before they dive into SEO.
   _
7. Don"t Rest on Your Laurels
   If you"re not paying attention in the SEO world, even for just a few weeks, you can miss massive changes. Look at June! We"ve had a reversal of position on nofollow and Javascript links from Google, a new engine/algorithm/brand from Microsoft, adoption of rich text formatting in the SERPs, evidence that header tags may not be as valuable as we thought and data suggesting that alt attributes are highly correlated with good rankings. Stay ahead of the curve and devote some resources to industry news - you owe it to your clients and yourselves.
   _
8. Don"t Undervalue Your Work
   SEO is hard work. For every consulting hour, there"s days of research, testing, reading, surfing and experimenting. Don"t undersell your services or accept that what you do doesn"t provide tremendous value. If you"re being undervalued now, consider how terrificly trackable SEO really is and show them the data. It"s almost always on your side.
   _
9. Don"t Believe Everything You Read
   Yes, even here at SEOmoz! We certainly try our best to provide high quality, accurate information, as do many other great sites on SEO, but no one is right 100% of the time, and, more importantly, not every piece of advice is applicable for every business or every situation.
   _
10. Don"t Underestimate Dev Contributions
    I was recently asked "what"s the biggest roadblock to SEO," and didn"t need to think for 10 seconds before quoting Mr. Ballmer"s infamous adage "Developers! Developers! Developers!" If you get bandwidth cycles for SEO projects, use them wisely. If the developers have made critical SEO errors, don"t be quick to criticize - you"ll make enemies, and, oftentimes, be guilty of hypocrisy. Stay humble, prioritize the big pieces and make sure you have the resources before you commit to improving traffic.
    _
11. Don"t Overstate Your Influence or Abilities
    Just because you have the ear of some important minds at Google/Yahoo!/Facebook/etc. doesn"t mean you can influence change within these large organizations. I"ve heard a lot of stories from companies that worked with SEOs of how they promised to get their penalty lifted or special treatment from an engine because they got a response to an email they sent to a search engineer. Perhaps an even better rule is - don"t promise something you can"t personally control and deliver.
    _
12. Don"t Get Overconfident and Dismiss Other Marketing Channels
    OK, yes - SEO rocks. But don"t forget how valuable other marketing activities like email, PPC, CRO, affiliate programs, even display advertising can be for the right scenario. Once you"ve found the SEO hammer, it"s easy to see every problem as a nail - I"ve certainly been guilty of it. If you can resist, think holistically and provide the best answer from a strategic (rather than tactical) level, you"ll become even better and more valuable to your clients.

Your turn - any "don"ts" you"d recommend to fellow SEOs?

p.s. If you haven"t read the whole Malcolm Gladwell vs. Chris Anderson with Seth Godin weighing in thing, it"s pretty worthwhile :-)

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Posted by randfish

My good friend, Aaron Kahlow, posed an interesting question during the Online Marketing Summit yesterday afternoon in Portland, OR. Aaron asked:

If a client came to you with $1 million to invest in a single Internet marketing channel, which one would you choose?

Obviously, the question is a bit ridiculous (given that there"s no additional detail provided), but it"s designed to elicit an "off-the-cuff" response to a challenging scenario. The answer, of course, is "it depends" - and therein lies the rub. On what does it depend? Well... That"s what I hope to answer with this blog post. My goal is not to solve the issue for an individual campaign, but from a very strategic level - asking questions like "where is the company today and where does it want to get to?" then applying those answers to the selection of marketing opportunities. Let"s start by defining the macro-level channels themselves, then examine how we"d reach the right conclusions.

Internet Marketing Channels

• Display Advertising
  • The process of placing ads on third-party websites with the goal of creating branding awareness and/or generating traffic
  • Examples: Banner ads, video ads, interactive ads, overlays, interstitials, etc.
• Email Marketing
  • The process of collecting email addresses from potential leads and marketing to them via email messages
  • Examples: Email newsletters, brand building emails, conversion-focused emails, etc.
• Pay-Per-Click Advertising (PPC) 
  • The process of bidding for placement at search engines (major or niche) to earn visibility and traffic when relevant queries are performed
  • Examples: Google Adwords, Yahoo! Search Marketing, Business.com Advertising, etc.
• Online Public Relations
  • The process of generating media from primarily online outlets in order to earn branding and traffic
  • Examples: PRNewswire, PRWeb, Internet media focused PR agency work, etc.
• Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
  • The process of earning rankings in the "organic" results of the major search engines (Google, Yahoo!, Bing)
  • Examples: Keyword research, on-page optimization, link building, etc.
• Affiliate Marketing
  • The process of incentivizing other sites to push your product in exchange for a share of the revenue they drive
  • Examples: Commission Junction, in-house affiliate programs, etc.
• Social Media Marketing (SMM) 
  • The process of leveraging social media platforms (small and large) to earn visibility and traffic
  • Examples: Facebook Group pages, Twitter marketing, pushing content on Digg, etc.
• Viral Content Campaigns
  • The process of generating creative content that will help spread your branding/marketing message and earn traffic
  • Examples: Linkbait production, viral videos, guerrilla marketing, etc.
• Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) 
  • The process of improving the path from landing to conversion to get more leads/signups/customers
  • Examples: Split & multivariate testing, click-through-rate improvements, purchase-process simplification, etc.

Some of these may overlap - for example, viral content campaigns may simply be a means to an end of better search engine optimization - but as they can all be separate entities, engaged in for their own purposes, I"ve made them distinct.

Primary Variables to Use in the Selection Process

Although other factors should certainly play into the decision making, these three elements are excellent for narrowing down the options:

• Company Goals - What are the top priorities for the business to achieve?
  • Brand Awareness - the current marketplace doesn"t have enough familiarity/comfort with your brand to visit, engage or purchase from you.
  • Education - the market for your product/service needs to be created; potential customers don"t yet realize the problem they need you to solve.
  • Raw Traffic - your business is monetized with advertising and needs more traffic/page views.
  • Sales - your business has clear market demand on the web that needs to be drawn to your site and converted into leads/sales
• Budget - How much do you have to spend on your marketing effort(s)?
  • Very High: in excess of $1 million
  • High: $100K - $1 million
  • Moderate: $25K - $100K
  • Low: $5K - $25K
  • Tiny: <$5K
• Available Talent - What personnel with free bandwidth or trustworthy, outsourced vendors do you have available? 
  • Strong Dev Resources - you have technology staff ready and able to make changes to your site to support marketing goals
  • Strong Creative Resources - you have writers/artists/brainstormers poised for action
  • Strong Search Resources - you have search marketing talent prepared for battle in the results
  • Strong Social Resources - you have strong online networkers set to engage the Twit-Face-Digg-o-Sphere

General Tiers of ROI, Effort & Cost by Channel

These are based on my personal opinions (though, based on conversations, they appear to reflect the experiences of many web marketers and internal marketing departments). 

I suspect there will be lots of contention about these, particularly from marketers who specialize in non-tier 1 activities. I do think that over time, activities like social media marketing and viral may move to tier 1, but as yet, I believe that companies haven"t seen the same consistency or trackability in ROI from these as Tier 1 channels. The eMarketer research I showed this weekend certainly suggests that these newer investments may have a chance to prove themselves fairly quickly.

Formulas for Choosing the Right Channel

Once again, I"m using my own opinions and experiences, but you can use this same format to help with your own decisions, even if the ordering is somewhat different:

And of course, last, but not least, there"s the strengths of your organization to consider. If you have amazing talent in these fields, that might sway you to lean more towards particular activities as shown below:

• Strong Dev Resources - lean towards:
  • CRO
  • SEO
  • Viral Content (particularly dev intensive stuff like tools, widgets, etc.)
• Strong Creative Resources - lean towards:
  • Viral Content (particularly written/graphic content that can be produced in a standard CMS)
  • Email (great copywriters write great emails)
  • Display (great designers make great ads)
• Strong Search Marketing Resources - lean towards:
  • SEO
  • PPC
• Strong Social Resources - lean towards:
  • Social Media Marketing
  • Viral Content
  • Online PR

That wraps up my brief, high level summation of this tough question, and hopefully it can help some marketers and marketing departments to find the right paths for their organizations/clients.

I"d, of course, love to hear your feedback and ideas as well.

p.s. OMS Seattle is tomorrow, and I"ll be speaking there in the afternoon - hope to see some of you there!

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Posted by RobOusbey

We all like links from big sites right?

Whether it"s in an editorial article, a guest post, etc, it"s great for sending some strength and trust to your site. However, the drawback of links from big sites, is that you might find it"s on a small page. The newly published page will take some time to get indexed, much of it"s strength (certainly initially) is likely to come from internal links, and it"s unlikely to have a great crawl rate.

The front pages of sites, on the other hand, tend to have a much greater diversity of domains pointing to them and a good crawl rate. Furthermore, Google is likely to look with suspicion at an old article that suddenly gains a new link, compared to site front pages which have new links added to them more often, and legitimately.

So, this suggests that a link from the front page of a small site may be better than a link from an inner page on a large site.


As an example, I dived into the Lifehacker archives, and found their coverage of a handy looking tool, Programmer"s Notepad 2. Let"s imagine that the site owner had done the work to contact Lifehacker, foster a relationship and ultimately get them to post coverage of the app. You can now see their link on this page:

• lifehacker.com/5105267/programmers-notepad-2-helps-you-code-wrangle (mozRank: 0*, mozTrust: 2.5)

(* N.B.: this page is fairly old, and has been rated by Linkscape - the mozRank is just very very low and rounds off to zero.)
Of course, they"ve also been mentioned by smaller sites. I imagine that these sites either found out about them through the grapevine, but I like to think that the app"s owners also fired off a few mass emails to programming / web dev websites to say "Check this out, we built it and I think you might like it."

So check out some of the small sites that have linked to them from the front page:

Domain	URL MozRank	URL MozTrust
www.pappons.com	1.28	1.12
www.jasonbadams.net	1.78	2.36
links.tecwiz.de	2.08	1.39
dintiradan.ermarian.net	2.49	2.54
www.deleyna.com	2.33	3.24
freeware.startingiseasy.com	3.30	3.00

(Ordering the Linkscape report for the Programmer"s Notepad 2 site, by "mozRank Passed to URL" suggests that Lifehacker.com first appears at around the 400th page in the list.)

The downside of a link on the strong-front-page-of-a-less-strong-site is that it isn"t going to be around forever, and may be removed at somepoint. However, the strength passed in the mean time, combined with the quick indexation of the links will be beneficial.

This works particularly well when you can contact smallish sites in a very relevant niche. To find those sites, I currently recommend having a drill down in these directories:

• www.Blogged.com,
• dir.Blogflux.com,

and also that you look for directories of sites in that niche. For instance, whilst trying to find some UK craft websites this week, I found that Craftyblogs.co.uk was very helpful. There are bound to be similar niche lists for almost anything you need to look for.

In summary: when planning your linkbuilding strategy, don"t forget that whilst links from strong domains can be useful, weaker domains can often pass more strength if you are linked to from the front (or other strong high level) page.

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Posted by Sam Niccolls

(NOTE FROM RAND: Please welcome Sam Niccolls, SEOmoz"s newest addition to the consulting team - we hope you all like him as much as we do!)

A lot a marketers focus optimization efforts at the bottom of their conversion funnels. One effective way to examine conversion rates at the bottom of the funnel is to create a custom segment that excludes visitors who bounce. As this segment gives you a view of your engagement data that only shows interested visitors, this is a great way to inform site changes. After all, these visitors are the ones who are most likely to convert into paying customers.

But what about the top of the funnel? Are too many of your visitors leaving on arrival? If so, delve deeper into which pages are causing you the most bleeding. And don"t get too far ahead of yourself with site changes before you first identify your highest volume SEO entry pages. To make site changes without looking the top of your conversion funnel is to rent a tux before finding a prom date. It costs a lot and it leads to embarrassment.


Yet many sites still don"t think of pages other than their homepage as landing pages. It is not just pimple popping amateurs making this mistake, either. Numerous startups and online retailers, who get 80% of their overall traffic from Google, fall into the trap of designing individual product pages that rank well, drive 50-60% of their overall traffic, yet have bounce rates over 75%.  

Avinash Kaushik, Google"s Analytics Evangelist, always says your homepage is not a golden door through which all your visitors will pass. And he"s right. Search engines have flipped the funnel. Every page that drives traffic is a landing page. But just because Google decides your homepage doesn"t mean you can"t optimize the performance of your lower level pages. Do you have underperforming product listings, profile pages, articles, or other entry URLs?

If so, here"s a quick checklist to revamp your lackluster landings:  

1) Reassuring Policies
If you have reassuring polices, whether they are privacy assurances, guarantees, rebates, returns, or whatever else, tell your first time visitors about them. These don"t have to be flashing lights or neon arrows, but look at how scannable your "deep content" pages are. Two things that can be tremendously effective are graphics and icons. In the absence of any images, however, a single line saying "We never sell your personal information" can do a lot. And don"t bury these reassurances at the bottom of the page. Put them at the top of the page, or next to your e-mail collection field (if you"re collecting e-mail from the page).  

2) Testimonials
You have raving fans, right? I"m sure there are at least a couple in the woodwork. Why not let them sing your praise as part of your introduction to your visitors? Landing page optimization is not a cocktail party. It"s okay to brag a little. Especially if it means improving your bottom line. Amazon does a great job of prominently exposing five star reviews on their product level pages, as does Yelp. Both are good examples to look at.

3) No Credit Card Forms
Single page forms are one thing if you are running a free trial period. Just last week I saw some massive returns for an e-commerce site off of some landing pages they created for an SEM campaign where they offered a 14-day free trial. But SEO landing pages are different. They are typically part of your internal site navigation. Plus, they are really more like first dates than "take it or leave it" offers. For this reason, don"t be too forward. Show some leg and entice your visitors to click a second time, but save the credit card forms for further down the funnel. I am not saying you can"t open the kimono later, but buy your visitors a drink first.     

4) Email Collection
If you have a newsletter, blog, or another way that you maintain an ongoing conversation with customers, you should offer a field for people to subscribe via e-mail and RSS. This might not impact bounce rate significantly, but this type of e-mail collection is inexpensive and it is a great way to increase user retention. Several websites whose sign up button treatments I like are Futurenow, Mint"s Blog and Fred Wilson"s Blog. As you can see, Mint doesn"t show a graphic for "sign up by e-mail," which is a wasted opportunity. More than likely e-mail will comprise the majority of your subscribers. So make e-mail sign up as easy as possible. 

5) Look at Bounce Rate by URL
Unless the volume warrants it, don"t analyze individual URLs; analyze URL structures. For example, say you have an article subfolder on your site --  http://www.yourdomain.com/articles/title-of-post. Rather than looking at each individual article, run a landing page report and look at your pages in aggregate. As a sum, what pages are hurting or helping you the most? Where are you retaining visitors? Where are you losing them? If you can learn anything from your most effective pages, apply those learnings to your least effective pages. Whatever your RegEx writing tells you, focus on making the most global changes possible. In other words, change things that will have the greatest, most immediate impact such as headers, persistent a or c columns, and first time user treatments.  

Whatever you glean from your landing page analysis, abandon the myth of the golden homepage. And if you are not thinking of your "deep content" pages as landing pages, identify your biggest opportunities and let your design team go to work. There is probably a lot of low hanging fruit. Besides, if you don"t, you might find your website dateless at the conversion prom, and nobody wants to be standing in the rain with a wilted dandelion boutonniere. That"s a fate I wouldn"t wish on the worst of websites, not even Danny Dover"s favorite domain.

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Posted by great scott!

This week, Rand is joined by one of our in-house data geniuses, Ben Hendrickson, to talk more about some of our recently released correlation data to support guidelines for SEO best practices.

While correlation doesn"t always equal causation, it"s still very interesting to look at the attributes and features high ranking sites tend to have in common.  Comparing this data to known and accepted SEO practices can help to reinforce widely held notions or give us some insight into how the algorithms are changing; both important areas of analysis for successful online marketers.

SEOmoz Whiteboard Friday - Correlation, Causation & SEO from Scott Willoughby on Vimeo.

Want to learn even more about what Ben discovered in our data correlation analysis?  He"ll be presenting his detailed findings at our SEO Training Series Seminar right here in Seattle, August 24th & 25th.

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Posted by jennita

Is it just me, or is it getting on hot in here? Well it IS summer time again, and this year there are some interesting (both national and global) summer online marketing conferences happening. Some of the mozzers will be attending and/or speaking and I thought this was a great time to let everyone know where we"ll be, and in some cases, where we"d like to be!

Online Marketing Summit: Portland - June 29, 2009 and Seattle - July 1, 2009

It"s always great to participate at local events, and Rand will be speaking at both OMS Portland and OMS Seattle next week. These are coming up quickly but if you"re in the area, they are a "must" attend. The OMS events focus specifically on all forms of online marketing from SEO to paid search to content management. They are full day events where attendees get a chance to learn in their own backyard.

SMX Singapore – July 2-3, 2009

Our own Gillian Muessig is speaking on SEM for the CEO at SMX Singapore, as well as doing a site clinic. The speakers come from across the globe to provide both beginner and advanced paid and organic search topics. This year they have focused a couple of their tracks on the current financial situation, which will help attendees understand how to navigate (heh, get it, a search conference... nevermind) budget issues. Asia is a hot area right now for online marketing, and Singapore is the place to be!

Pubcon London - July 4, 2009

Now this is the kind of conference that we all wish we could attend! Pubcon London is a one-day event that sticks to the "Pub"con roots, with an afternoon of talking shop at a pub. If you have attended Pubcon Vegas or South before you"ll know that the pub part is where you get the most out of conferences anyway. Apparently there hasn"t been a Pubcon London in a few years, so this would be a great time to mingle with some of the great search marketers.

SMX Sao Paulo – August 4, 2009

Although it"s only one day, SMX Sao Paulo is packed full of online marketing goodness. Everything from case studies, onsite analysis, ROI, social media, paid links and SEO (at least that"s what I could gather from the site which is in Portuguese ;).

SES San Jose – Aug 10-14

I will be attending SES San Jose and covering many of the sessions for the moz community. You know me (ok, maybe you don"t) but I"m most interested in the "Geek Speak Track." We"ll have to see if they get geeky enough for me! In addition to the 3 days of sessions based on various search marketing tracks, there are also 2 days of additional training workshops. The lineup is phenomenal and hearing Clay Shirky speak at the keynote on the first day will definitely be a highlight for me!  If you"re going to be there, and you see me wandering around, please say hello! (ok, say hello even if I"m not wandering around.)

SEOmoz Pro Training Series 2009 – Aug 24-25, 2009

You better sign up for this one ASAP! From what I hear, the SEOmoz Pro Training Series seats sell out quickly and there are only 220 seats. ;) This year we have a wicked line-up of speakers, topics that will blow your mind and of course, plenty of networking and parties to soothe the soul. I could really go on and on but Scott has already done a great job of explaining all the details. So hurry up now and Sign Up Now!

Whew, those are some serious educational opportunities! I"m sure I"ve missed a few, so please let me know if there are any to add, and whether you"ll be attending. It"s always great to meet people from the moz community!

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Posted by great scott!

It"s that time again and we"re happy to announce the 2009 SEOmoz PRO Training Series: Tips, Tricks & Tactics seminar is now on sale. Last year, we sold out within hours. This year - with a line-up including Todd Malicoat, David Mihm and Vanessa Fox - tickets will go even quicker.

The PRO Training Series: Tips, Tricks & Tactics seminar isn"t a conference. There won"t be any sales pitches or waffle - just clear, actionable advice on the latest tips, tricks and tactics that advanced SEOs are using.

And after a hard day"s work, you"ll get to network with the speakers and other attendees. We strictly limit the number of places to 220, so this is an incredible opportunity to network with leaders in the search marketing field and peers from across the industry.

The Details:

Where: Seattle, WA
When: August 24th and 25th
How Much: $899  ($599 for PRO Members)

You want killer, actionable content? We"ve got it! 15 awesome modules covering every facet of organic online marketing:

• "SEO is Nothing Without Content"
  • Tips for Scaling SEO into Editorial Content Creation
  • Tips for Baking a UGC & SEO Souffle
  • Speakers: Rand Fishkin
• "Structurally Sound: SEO for Site Architecture"
  • Tips to Maximize the SEO Value of Your Navigation Systems
  • Tips for Very Large Sites (50,000+ Pages)
  • Speakers: Rand Fishkin
• "First You Get the Keywords, Then You Get the Money"
  • Tips for Competitive Keyword Analysis
  • Tips for Choosing Keywords to Target
  • Tips for Building "Perfectly" Optimized Pages
  • Speakers: Ken Jurina, CEO of Epiar
• "How to Make SEO Reporting Sexy"
  • Tips for Which KPIs to Use vs. Avoid
  • Tips for SEO Data Visualization
  • Tips for Analytics-Driven Action
  • Speakers: Lindsay Wassell, SEO Consulting Manager
• "Make SEO Tools Work For You"
  • Tips for Getting Value from SEO Tools all over the Web (Danny)
  • Tips for Getting Value from SEOmoz Tools (Nick)
  • Speakers: Nick Gerner, Linkscape Architect & Danny Dover, SEO Consultant
• "Sustain Verticality for 3 Rounds"
  • Tips for Local Search SEO
  • Tips for Image & Video Search SEO
  • Tips for News Search SEO
  • Tips for Taking Advantage of Rich Snippets
  • Speakers: David Mihm, Founder of DavidMihm.com & Matt Brown, Co-Founder and COO of Define Search Strategies
• "The Pacman Chunk of the Piechart: Getting Links"
  • Tips for Manual Link Building: Finding the Right Link Sources & Converting Them
  • Tips for Designing Content that Can Earn Links
  • Tips for Incentivizing Natural Links
  • Tips for Badges & Widget-Based Links
  • Speakers: Tom Critchlow + Rand Fishkin
• "Good vs. Great: Why Some Startups Make the Leap and Others Don"t"
  • Speakers: Dharmesh Shah, Founder of Hubspot and Blogger at OnStartups
•  "Presentation Off: History of SEO (Todd) vs. Future of SEO (Rand)"
  • Speakers: Rand Fishkin vs. Todd Malicoat
• "Social Media Investments that Bring Real ROI"
  • Tips for How to Define Business Goals & Metrics for Social Media Campaigns
  • Tips for How to Craft Successful Linkbait
  • Tips for How to "Go Popular" with Viral Content
  • Tips for How to Use Twitter & Facebook for Link Generation
  • Speakers: TBD
• "Researching the Search Engine Algorithms"
  • Tips for What to Pay Attention to in Google"s Algorithm
  • List of Correlations Between Data & Rankings
  • Tips for What"s Different Across the Various Engines
  • Tips for How to Conduct Your Own Search Engine Tests
  • Speakers: Ben Hendrickson, Linkscape Architect
• "Reverse Engineering the Competition"
  • Tips for Competitive On-Site/Page Analysis
  • Tips for Competitive Link Analysis
  • Tips for Competitive Strategic Analysis
  • Speakers: Tom Critchlow, Head of Search Marketing at Distilled
• "Staying Inside Search Engine Guidelines & Dealing w/ Penalties"
  • Tips for Avoiding the Most Common Penalties & Bans
  • Tips for Identifying Penalties vs. Basic Rankings Drops
  • Tips for Fighting Your Way Out of a Google Penalty
  • Speakers: Vanessa Fox, Founder of NineByBlue
• "Conversion Rate Optimization"
  • Tips for Designing Landing Pages that Sell
  • Tips for Designing & Pricing Promotions
  • Tips for Building Email-Signup Funnels
  • Tips for Email Marketing
  • Speakers: Ben Jesson, Founder of Conversion-Rate-Experts.com
• "Building a Kick-Butt In-House Web Marketing Team"
  • Tips for Focusing Everyone on the Right Metrics
  • Tips for Organizing Your Team"s Responsibilities & Personnel
  • Tips for What to Do In-House vs. Contract Out
  • Speakers: Conrad Saam, CMO of Avvo.com

As you can see, we"ve cherry-picked some of the best SEOs in the business to deliver two days jam-packed with priceless hints and secrets to elevate your SEO game.

Rave Reviews About Last Year"s Seminar

An excellent high level seminar with substantial advanced tactics. Having attended numerous SEO conferences, this had a much greater ROI.
-Greg Patterson, President, Mojo Juice Inc.

Chock full of detailed strategies, theories and practical explanations of very advanced search optimization methodologies. It was worth every penny (and more, but don"t tell Rand I said so!).
-Marty Martin, Director of Web Strategies, Leisure Publishing Co.

Better than any other SEO conference I"ve attended and the price was less.
-Mike Perez, President, High Ranking Websites, Inc.

Top 5 Reasons You CANNOT MISS OUT:

1. We’ll be presenting never before seen data from SEOmoz’s internal SERPs analysis projects. If you liked the material from my SMX Advanced presentation, you’ll love this.
2. The founder of Hubspot, Dharmesh Shah, will speak about how to build a great startup. If you’ve never seen Dharmesh present before, you’re in for an incredible treat.
3. Ben Jesson’s Conversion rate optimization tips session will bring you more ROI than you can imagine. Ben & his company, Conversion Rate Experts, have helped SEOmoz add more than $1 million to our bottom line this year just from tweaks and tuneups to our landing pages and marketing messages – they’re the best in the business.
4. It costs only $899 ($599 for PRO Members) to attend! That’s 2-3X less expensive than other shows, and we guarantee you’re going to walk away with an incredible amount of knowledge and phenomenal networking opportunities.
5. After hours events are built in! Both Monday and Tuesday night will feature classic SEOmoz networking events with food, drinks, bowling, pool tables and more.

There are only 220 seats available this year and in 2008, we practically sold out in just 72 hours so don’t miss out – Sign Up Now.

But wait! There’s more! Due to the amazing success of our training seminars, we’ll be holding a second event on October 19th and 20th in London, UK, in partnership with the folks from Distilled. Moz colleague and Rand"s slidedeck archnemesis, Will Critchlow, has helped craft an incredible lineup of speakers and sessions (and they"re fighting a re-match of their infamous Presentation Face-Off from SMX London). If you are based in the UK or Europe (or anywhere else around the world, and simply have a penchant for airplane food), don’t miss out on our "Across the Bloody Pond" Edition of the PRO Training Series.

Remember: these seminars sell out every year so reserve your seat to the Seattle or London edition of the 2009 PRO Training Series: Tips, Tricks & Tactics while they"re still available!

Special DVD Pre-Order Offer

When you register for either seminar you"ll get a special offer to Pre-Order the DVD version of the SEOmoz PRO Training Series: Tips, Tricks & Tools at a ridiculously low attendees-only price. Watch for your offer during checkout.

Can"t make it to either seminar? We still love you. Even though you won"t get all of the awesome networking, parties and opportunities to ask the experts your specific questions, we"ll still let you Pre-Order the DVD version at an incredible early bird price! For just $249 ($149 for PRO Members), that"s 50% off the retail price,  you"ll reserve your copy of the DVD edition of the PRO Training Series: Tips, Tricks & Tools at the lowest possible price and guarantee the earliest delivery as soon as it"s available (early November estimate) 

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Posted by randfish

I"ve gotten a lot of email recently from folks asking what they can do to get involved in the world of search marketing and SEO. Tonight, Mystery Guest and I attended the Seattle Job Social event and had a really interesting experience talking to people about SEOmoz, the positions we"re hiring for (SysAdmins of the Northwest, please email us!) and the field of search engine marketing. The same issue came up again and again - how do I break into that market?

I want to be very honest with this post (and with all my posts), so I"ll say first that I have only my singular experience to rely on. I haven"t done lots of job seeking in the field (in fact, the last resume I have is from the 1990s, when I was too young to consume alcohol). However, I can share those skills that have proven valuable to me over time:

1. An Analytical Mindset
   Being analytical means collecting data, sifting through it, and recognizing patterns. It doesn"t always mean exhaustive research (though that"s a great trait to have as well). It can sometimes mean the ability to see an outlier, form a hypothesis and act on it with the right mix of impulsiveness and caution.
2. Knowledge of How the Internet Works
   It took a few years for me to grasp how "the tubes" operate - everything from HTTP status codes to IP addresses to the ways in which a server can communicate with a web browser - once I did, my job became much easier, particularly when talking to developers reticent to engage in SEO projects.
3. Empathy with the Perspectives of Search Engineers
   I"ve found that the more I think about things from an engineer"s point of view (someone who cares far more about the search experience for a user in aggregate than the problems presented by a singular example), the more most (not all) search engine moves make sense.
4. A Solid Background in HTML
   I don"t think I could have ever been decent at SEO if I didn"t intuitively understand the tags and markup that comprise web pages. 8 years ago, I could hand code a page from scratch, and while I would probably need some cheat sheets to do that today, viewing source code almost never stumps me anymore.
5. An Ability to Find Common Ground when Meeting People
   Networking is critical to success in any field, but in SEO, where natural suspicion from potential clients, developers, other marketers, investors, etc. exists, I"ve found it to be the branch you hang on to when the river"s about to drag you into the waterfall.
6. Strong Memory for Relevant Data
   Pulling relevant examples off the top of my head - whether they"re from previous experiences, the blogosphere, presentations from an event or observations in the sphere - has been a terrific contributor to my consulting and speaking. Now if only I could do a better job remembering names...
7. Illustration & Diagraming Skills
   OK, so I"m not going to win any prizes for my art, but I can at least communicate quickly and intuitively in a visual way on a whiteboard or for a blog post.
8. Comfort Speaking in High Pressure Scenarios
   I"ve told the story in the past of how I spoke at a conference in 2005 sandwiched between Chris Anderson from Wired & Meg Whitman from eBay. After I somehow, miraculously pulled that one off without making an idiot out of myself, I"ve never really felt pressure on camera or in front of an audience again. I barely even get an elevated heart rate on stage anymore (which has helped with dry cleaning bills, too).
9. Being a Stubborn Jackass
   No, seriously! I refused to accept that, back when Gillian and I were under mountains of debt and couldn"t pay the rent, we needed to pack up shop. I refused to concede that SEO was bullshit back when everyone around me in the web world told me it was. After I got into SEO, I refused to believe that there was no Google sandbox, even though far more experienced operators didn"t believe it for a long time. After SEOmoz launched our SEO Tools, I refused to accept that we couldn"t build our own web index, even when very smart people told me there was no way.  Sometimes, sticking to your guns, even in the face of conventional wisdom, turns out to be the right move.
10. Humility & the Wisdom to Accept that You Will Be Wrong
    There have been plenty of times when I"ve had to swallow my pride, admit that I was wrong, and accept that I"m probably going to be wrong again. I"ve never learned more than I have when I royally screw something up. And, as my wife likes to remind me - I"ll never be important enough that I don"t have to come home and scrub the toilet.
11. A Thick Skin
    The SEO field is filled with a lot of unprofessional conduct (and I fully admit to being guilty of plenty myself, particularly in the first few years after I started this site). You have to anticipate negativity and be ready to not just not respond and shrug it off, but to be warm, courteous and hospitable even in the face of demeaning antagonism. It"s not enough to turn the other cheek - you also need to reach out with a handshake.
12. Proficiency in Written Communication
    Particularly since my experience began in SEO on forums and blogs long before I had a public face or persona, the ability to write well and effectively transmit a message to a curious audience has been, possibly, the greatest catalyst to my personal growth in the field.

I would be presumptuous to suggest that these traits will serve everyone well or that they are the "best" abilities to have. In fact, a huge missing component that I wish I could write on that list is the ability to code in a few languages. I think I"ll always be a weaker SEO because of that, but I also know that the time it would take to plug it up is time I don"t have (and I"m lucky to be surrounded by a team of 9 guys and JLo to help me out when programming issues arise).

Your turn! I would love to hear the traits that have helped you best in your own careers.

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Posted by Danny Dover

Update: Google representatives responded to complaints of the Google News delay with the following explanation:

"The spike in searches related to Michael Jackson was so big that Google News initially mistook it for an automated attack. As a result, for about 25 minutes yesterday, when some people searched Google News they saw a "We"re sorry" page before finding the articles they were looking for." - Source

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 First and foremost, let me extend my best wishes to the family and friends of Michael Jackson. I can only imagine the pain of losing a close friend and then having to watch it play out on a global stage. He made an extraordinary impact on the world and although not perfect, he is a teacher even in death (as evidenced by this post).

The following is a timeline of how the news of the Prince of Pop"s death traveled across the internet. Not all the times are exact (they might be off by up to 5 minutes) and not every source is included. All times are GMT.

From an internet marketer"s perspective, I found this story fascinating to watch unfold. I was impressed by the speed of information distribution and very surprised to see which site posted the news first. Wikipedia is still the fastest news aggregator. It was faster than Twitter and much faster than Google.

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19:21 - One of Michael Jackson"s employee"s calls 911

The next forty-nine minutes are best described as the calm before the storm. The Los Angles Fire Department arrived at Jackson"s rented mansion in Bel Air and family members were alerted of the news.

20:10 - (Story Breaks) A small entertainment site called x17online.com breaks the story.

They post photos and a brief story a full 20 minutes before the much larger entertainment site TMZ.com posts the news. Information goes live on the internet. BOOM!

20:30 - TMZ.com posts "Michael Jackson -- Cardiac Arrest"


TMZ.com posts the story on its homepage and the story is distributed to hundreds of thousands of people via RSS. My guess is they paid a pretty penny for the image above and it paid for itself ten fold with all of the links TMZ got from the story.

21:12 - Wikipedia reports Jackson"s Cardiac Arrest


A member of Wikipedia adds the news of the Cardiac Arrest to Jackson"s Wikipedia article. This is well before any other news or social media source.

21:20 - TMZ.com posts story of death

Report of Jackson"s death starts to show up on RSS feeds and eventually Twitter. It is 11 minutes before the first person clicks on a bit.ly link to TMZ.

21:30 - CNNbrk tweets that Jackson goes to hospital

The official CNN account tweets to its 2 million followers that Jackson went to hospital after suffering from a cardiac arrest

21:31 - First bit.ly link to TMZ story

The first bit.ly link about the story is clicked by someone which leads them to the TMZ article.

21:45 - Wikipedia freezes Michael Jackson page

After an explosion of edits to Jackson"s Wikipedia article, editors take the step of locking it down in protective status.

21:46 - Wikipedia article discussion has first reports of Jackson"s death (Note: Event updated 6/27/09 due to new information)
Wikipedia editors first mention Jackson"s death on the article discussion page.

21:50 - bit.ly link reaches high of 2,500 clicks a minute


Bit.ly link to TMZ hits high of almost 42 clicks a second.

22:03 - TMZ story on Jackson"s death is submitted to Digg

A bit late to the game, the story that would eventually go on to be one of the most dugg stories ever is first submitted to the site.

22:11 - TMZ story goes popular on Digg

The story is moved to the front page of Digg where its distribution erupts.

22:19 - "RIP Michael Jackson" tops Trends on Twitter


Story takes the next step and appears on Twitter"s Trends. Tens of millions of Twitter users now can see the story.

22:20 - MSNBC.com Confirms Jackson"s Death

One hour after the news of Jackson"s death hits the internet, the first mainstream news source publishes a confirmation article.

22:25 - CNN.com Confirms Jackson"s Death

CNN, out maneuvered by TMZ and MSNBC, confirms Jackson"s death.

22:27 - Wikipedia first reports Jackson"s death

Wikipedia editors get enough evidence to post Jackson"s death.

22:34 - Approximately 2000 mentions a minute of Michael Jackson on Twitter

Mentions of Michael Jackson hit an all time high on Twitter with nearly 1,500 a minute. That"s almost 20% of all tweets at that time!

22:38 - Twitter starts to overload. First signs of the fail whale

Twitter starts to falter as a result of the massive spike.

22:40 - First stories of Jackson"s death make it on Google News

1 hour and 20 minutes after the story is first posted on TMZ, Google News starts to report the story.

22:46 - Google News Results of Jackson"s death start showing up on the results page for the query "Michael Jackson"


Google News results top the Google results page for "Michael Jackson".

22:58 - Googlebot crawls CNN twitter feed

Google starts returning CNN"s twitter feed in "Michael Jackson" SERP and provides link to cached version.

23:00 - "Michael Jackson Died" shows up in Google Trends

Google trends updates and show"s "Michael Jackson Died" as hottest trending item.

23:18 - 4chan.org goes down

4chan members temporarily overload servers. I mention this mostly because I find it really funny. ;-p

23:47 - "Michael Jackson Heart Attack" and "Michael Jackson Cardiac Arrest" show up as suggested search on Google Homepage for "Michael Jackson"


Indirect news of Jackson"s death (if someone types "Michael Jackson") shows up on Google"s homepage.


My Take Away:

Google has a really big problem and SEOs need to pay attention.

(Note: I choose Google rather than the other search engines because it leads them in all of the aspects I mention below. Everything I say about Google applies even more to the other search engines. I only have a basic idea of how difficult the technology problems are with the issues below. For better or for worse, I hold Google to a higher standard and I am not afraid to expect more.)

First, a little background information. I believe it was Ben Hendrickson who first mentioned to me the existence of three separate time priorities when indexing the web. He pointed out that the current version of Linkscape crawls and analyzes the slow moving web with a delay of about 4 weeks. (This is damn impressive given an index size of 54+ billion pages.) Blogscape (PRO Only) is much faster and aggregates the fast moving blogosphere of millions of feeds with less than 6 hours of delay. While impressive, we are still trying to catch up with Google and have started to run into the same wall as them. Sites like Twitter, have created a new real-time web. It is only in the order of perhaps hundreds of thousands of pages but indexing it is almost useless with a delay of more than a few seconds.

The events of Thursday demonstrated that Google is falling behind in the emerging real-time web. It was 3 hours and 17 minutes after TMZ first announced Michael Jackson had experienced cardiac arrest before it appeared as a auto completion suggestion on Google"s homepage. In the computer age that is a huge amount of time. It is 3 hours and 17 minutes during which consumers may choose to go somewhere other than Google to get the information they want.

As SEOs, we largely rely on the success of Google for our incomes. These are the same incomes that put food on the table for our families. It is easy to think that Google"s technology is flawless, after all, it really is incredible. However, it is experiences like the events of Thursday that reveal how truly vulnerable the search engines are.

For me it was humbling,

Teaser: SEOmoz does have a plan for the real-time web and we are excitedly working on it. More information to come in the future. :-)

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If you have any other story sources that you think are worth sharing, feel free to post them in the comments. This post is very much a work in progress. As always, feel free to e-mail me or send me a private message if you have any suggestions on how I can make my posts more useful. If that"s not your style, feel free to contact me on Twitter (DannyDover) Thanks!

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Posted by randfish

(Intro: This post continues a series of personal growth focused entries. It doesn"t have much direct, applicable SEO value, so feel free to skip if that"s what you"re seeking)

I"ve learned more in the last 9 months than at any previous time in my life - about myself, about this company and about the worlds of venture capital, entrepreneurship and startups. And, in the spirit of transparency (one of our guiding principles and an ideal I haven"t been maintaining as well as I could of late), I want to share, to talk about where SEOmoz is today and why we"ve decided to explore additional capital opportunities. In fact, I feel compelled - because even if only 100 people, or 10 or just 1 learn something here they can apply to themselves, it will be worthwhile.

Segments in this Post:

• Brief History of SEOmoz
• How Outside Capital Helped Us
• SEOmoz"s Growth 2007-2009
• A Short Story that Led to a Decision
• What I"ve Learned About Myself
• My Top Advice for Other Entrepreneurs
• Got Questions? I"ll Try to Answer

A Brief History

Let"s start back in August of 2007. SEOmoz was tiny - 8 people growing a business out of a 1,000 sq. ft. office in Seattle"s University District (man, do I miss that place) and two people who believed it was going to be much, much bigger - Kelly from Curious Office and Michelle from Ignition. It"s only in retrospect that I can really appreciate their foresight, because when they invested $1.1 million in the company that November, I was an SEO geek who wanted to use that funding to solve an SEO problem. My dream was to better understand the web"s link graph and how the engines could use that to rank sites & pages. I should have been thinking about the problems faced by those wanting to do SEO and how a scalable, technology solution could be used to help them - like what Vanessa Fox did when she built Webmaster Tools inside Google (more on that later).

Our first round of capital raising was very unique, and for that reason, may be less applicable than other advice on the topic. Nevertheless, I"ll try to share that experience and the macro and micro-economic factors that impacted it.

Investment Data via NVCA Press Alert

You can see that not only was 2007 the most active year for venture capital investment, but that Q4 of 2007 was a particularly high spike. It"s probably not surprising that SEOmoz took its funding in this type of environment - possibly the best time to raise money from an entrepreneur"s perspective since 2000. Why? Because when deal flow is very high, terms tend to be more entrepreneur friendly. Ours certainly were.

It"s uncommon (though not unheard of) for a firm like Ignition Partners, with over a billion dollars under management, to put so little capital into a company. Between Ignition & Curious, the amount raised was $1.1 million, less than half the size of their next smallest public investment (Crunchbase has a list here, though SEOmoz"s funding amount is inaccurately reported as $1.25 million, and the participants inaccurately listed as 1 - and Ignition does do some smaller deals that aren"t listed). Quantity wasn"t the only outlier - our valuation, the terms themselves (things like vesting, board structure, preferences, etc.) were very good and the deal closed quickly. Today"s funding environment could be a very different story. As you can see from the charts above, the floor fell out in the VC markets last October, and although May 2009 may have been a step forward, entrepreneurs who seek capital today shouldn"t expect  seed or series A rounds to look the way they did in November of 2007.

SEOmoz was also helped in this deal by an important factor I think every startup should consider - WE DIDN"T NEED THE MONEY. We were already profitable and growing, already had a brand name in the industry and had attracted interest from multiple investors. I think that every entrepreneur who"s considering startup-dom should think about establishing those goals before they go for institutional capital - a profitable, growing company with a product that"s on the market and a brand name that"s well known makes you:

• A) Lower risk to investors
• B) Interesting to multiple parties and multiple kinds of investors (angels, VCs, private equity, etc.)
• C) More confident in every step of the process
• D) Able to walk away from a deal you don"t like

This psychology is so powerful that I can"t imagine doing it any other way. If I wanted to build a travel portal to take on Kayak.com, I"d start a great travel site (maybe even just a really interesting blog), build up some brand recognition, use advertising or low-cost premium features to drive revenue and only after those numbers made for a compelling story, approach investors. I"d use that same formula even for a capital intensive business - start with cool ideas, great writing and valuable resources, become a hub for your industry, show web traffic and positive interest, then go fundraise.

We started as a consulting business - in fact, SEOmoz is on a .org TLD because when I started the site, there wasn"t even a business behind it (even the name "moz" comes from the ethos of open sharing pioneered by folks like DMOZ & the Mozilla foundation). Gillian and I were running a website design & development shop and learning SEO because our customers needed it and we had no other choice. Eventually SEOmoz got so big and popular as a blog that it made sense to conduct business under that name, and a few years later, we realized consulting wasn"t the right way for us to scale this incredible community around us. Those decisions - made much more by accident than grand vision - gave us the credibility and the story that made investors excited.

And yeah, it didn"t hurt that Q4 of 2007 was probably the best time to raise money in the last 8 years.

How Outside Capital Helped

Taking the outside investment proved to be an excellent decision, and, to be honest, even in today"s market, I"d still consider raising money if I were in the same position again. Outside capital made me a better entrepreneur, focused our company more seriously on the things we needed to do and made us more accountable and metrics-driven. Some companies feel that pressure internally and can build those processes without external help. We needed that external pressure and it"s been remarkable. I"ll try to detail some of the big ways investment has helped us:

• Metrics Requirements - Any outside investor will require reporting of specific data points about the business from financial, HR, marketing and development perspectives. You"re probably doing this already inside your business, and we were as well, but experienced outside perspectives distill the list into the critical pieces, identify important missing criteria and work with you to help develop the raw numbers into actionable data.
• Accountability - A lot of CEOs and company leaders choose that job because it means they"re in charge. And while that"s certainly an enjoyable perk, bringing in outside investors makes you accountable again - not in the same way a typical boss does, but the responsibility and pressure to perform. In many small companies, very few people beyond the CEO and perhaps one or two others are fully aware of the company"s performance or lack thereof - and when things go south (or simply don"t go as well as predicted), no one"s there holding your feet to the fire. If external pressure can help you excel (as it has with me), then funding provides a great benefit. 
• Board Meetings - Rarely in small companies does leadership take a regular hard look at their priorities, strategy and direction (Will & Duncan, you"re the exception, not the rule). Board meetings provide that gut-level check on every facet of the business, and let you step back to see the forest for the trees. They"re not necessarily fun, but they will make you a better entrepreneur (and if they don"t, it means you"ve likely chosen the wrong board members).
• Thinking Long Term - Running a business is incredibly hard, and startups, doubly so. With so much time and energy devoted to turning the flywheel, it"s easy to miss an opportunity or ignore a fundamental problem that"s outside the scope of the day-to-day. Professional investment means you"ve got a partner watching out for precisely that issue.
• Adding Experience to the Team - Every new person we add to SEOmoz, that"s the biggest team I"ve ever led. Every dollar of revenue that comes in is the most money I"ve ever managed. With outside investors, they"ve seen and been through much bigger and can help guide you along the path - whether it"s filled with potholes or littered with opportunities that just need to be scooped up.
• Networking Opportunties - VCs know a lot of very important people. From strategic operators at big companies to C-level executives at startups to government, charity and press, you"ll rarely find a more connected group. This shouldn"t be surprising, as networking is one of the biggest value-adds VCs advertise. The problem is that for most entrepreneurs, myself included, the need for these networks is few and far between, so it seems less valuable than it really is - once your company is in a position to either do big enterprise partnerships or be acquired, those connections can "make or break" the firm.
• Oh Yeah, the Money  - Did you know VCs also provide capital? Yep, it"s true - and having dollars to spend when you"re a creative entrepreneur with a great plan is pretty awesome.

There are probably a dozen more ways that venture capital investment has helped SEOmoz, and I"m certain that many of them will be immeasurable and possibly even invisible. All of this isn"t to say that VC doesn"t have it"s downsides - there are a few, and it pays to be aware of them:

• Funding is a Time Suck - I"m personally feeling this right now (as I"ll explain later), and it"s important to be aware of the opportunity cost of seeking investment. For most startups, the CEO and the executive team are essential to running day-to-day operations of the business. When you take time out to build slide decks for investors, meet with VCs, network amongst your contacts and field calls, it pulls time & energy away from the company.
• Control of Your Business is Diluted - VCs build company boards. In our scenario, the board is comprised of three voting members (Gillian, Michelle & myself) and one observer (Kelly). This structure means that company management and founders have the deciding vote in any contentious issue (only one has ever arisen on SEOmoz"s board). In a future round, though, we expect that another 2 members would join the board - one individual from the investment firm and one independent member we all agree upon. Just to be clear, though - even in our scenario, there are certain types of votes which must pass with 100% of the board"s approval (mostly things like sale of stock, funding, etc.).
• You Have a Boss - OK, it"s not a typical boss and you don"t report to them on a regular basis, but you do have someone who watches your metrics and performance closely and can replace you if/when that performance is unacceptable. One of the most significant powers the board holds at any VC-backed company is the ability to fire the CEO.
• You Have Fiduciary Obligations - Legal documents bind you to operate the company with its interests, not your own, at the heart of your decisions. This impacts quite a bit of the decisions you make at a company, particularly when you switch from something like a longtime, family-run business (such as ours). It"s definitely good for the company (and good for your own internal discipline), but it can be painful at times.
• Your Exit Options are Limited - Retire, walk away, close up shop, sell for a low price because you don"t want to go out for higher bids or you particularly like the buyer - these options (and many others like them) become challenging to impossible, once you take outside investment.

As you can tell from my opinions above and my previous advice to myself, I"m a big proponent in spite of these potential detractors.

2007-2009 Growth 

This company looks very different than it did just 2 years ago, and I"ve been lax in sharing the kinds of numbers and data about the business that was once a signature of my blogging (see 2006 and 2007 financials, for example). While there"s a lot that I"m obligated not to share, I"m going to go right up to that line - not just because I think it will make this story more interesting, but because it"s part of our guiding principles.

Full-Time Employees

It"s tough to build this chart, because the number of full-time folks fluctuates even inside a single year, but I"ve done my best to approximate the annual averages.

PRO Members

PRO membership has really taken off in the last 6 months - and while we doubled membership from 2007-2008, we were able to do that in just the first 6 months in 2009.

Revenue

Sadly, while I can"t share exact numbers, this chart does give an accurate concept of where we are. 2009 is shaping up to be a very exciting year. Although I also can"t show margin numbers, I will say that from Nov. 2007 to Nov. 2008, SEOmoz burned capital (approx. 3/4 of the investment we took). Starting in Dec. 2008 and continuing each month through to June 2009, we"ve been profitable and rebuilt a respectable cash reserve (of course, if you ask Sarah, we still need to sweat every penny of it).

Visits to the SEOmoz.org Website 

 

Traffic is growing nicely as well, though what this chart doesn"t show is that 2009 has been virtually devoid of the types of "linkbait" that were a hallmark of the site in 2007 (and much of 2008). We"ve found that while those efforts can produce great traffic boosts and link growth, we need to focus on conversion rate optimization and the PRO membership product before we return to viral content generation.

A (Not-So) Short Story that Led to a Decision

Last October, just after we launched Linkscape, SEOmoz started fielding between 2-4 calls per month from venture capital firms seeking to place investment. These are exciting, flattering and fun calls to get, and in those initial conversations, the focus makes for an ego-padding chat. It"s pretty easy to see why these investors were so interested - no, not because SEOmoz itself is all that awesome (they didn"t even know much about us when they called) - it"s because of the potential market for SEO:

Via eMarketer"s Search Spending Swells Worldwide & Online Marketing Effectiveness

SEO is at or near the top for four different categories:

1. Where marketers get the most conversions
2. Where they get the most branding impact
3. Where they are planning to re-allocate budget
4. Wherethey are planning to increase spend

VCs love this stuff, and they love it even more when the market as a whole appears to be big and growing:

_
Data Source: SEMPO State of the Market Surveys

A predicted spend of just over $2 billion on SEO in 2009 suggests that SEO may finally be earning some respect, just as the growth in PPC spend slows its acceleration rate. Richard Zwicky"s SEM analytics company, Enquisite, is an example of this market shift commanding respect. Enquisite"s raised over $11 million in venture capital in the last few years (including a series B round of $8 million in February) . His favorite mantra is the disconnect I wrote about last october:

PPC: 88% of all SEM spend VS. SEO: 11% of all SEM spend

PPC: 10% of all search clicks VS. SEO: 90% of all search clicks

Markets don"t stay this inefficient for long.

No wonder investors have jumped at opportunities like those Richard presented with Enquisite and others like Conductor ($10 million raised in April), Marin Software ($13 million raised in April), Optify ($2.75 million raised in Oct. "08) and Yield Software ($6 million raised in June "08). And no wonder they were calling up SEOmoz, hoping to learn more about us and see if there was an investment opportunity.

Despite these inquiries, our board meetings in October & November were very operational and tactical. We were at the tail end of turning around from cash flow negative to positive, and there were some high stress moments, capped off by a working "product" meeting in early December. At that roundtable, I presented some concepts for SEOmoz"s future product direction and got shot down. And thank goodness I did.

The problem with entrepreneurs like me is that our creativity, emotional attachments to technology and love of product "coolness" can sometimes get in the way of making things that real people find really usable & useful. When that happens, it"s even more essential to be surrounded by smart, secure people who feel up to the challenge of challenging you.

After the meeting ended, I spent a lot of time thinking strategically about where we needed to go. That thinking ended up in dozens of notepad pages, and I"ve shared a few below:

My goal was to get to the core of the "SEO Problem" with a software product, and luckily, I didn"t have to go that road alone. Adam Feldstein, a longtime friend of mine, joined SEOmoz in January and we spent an entire week together in the mozplex"s meeting room, diagramming a product evolution we"ve come to call "Turbomoz" internally (much as we did when Linkscape was called "Carhole").

Adam and I presented a walkthrough of our new plan in early April to a packed room, including the SEOmoz board and several internal folks. The feedback was terrific - they loved not only the product itself, but the simplicity, the design, the intuition behind it and the potential to reach a lot more of the market than just the intermediate-to-expert level SEOs that make up the majority of our members today. An early version of "Turbomoz" is set to release in late September.

A few weeks later, I headed to Boston, where I got to spend a lot of time with a great friend and mentor, Dharmesh Shah, the founder of Hubspot and blogger at OnStartups. Dharmesh and I talked a lot about our two companies - how they"re growing, what the economic downturn has impacted, where we see opportunities and what makes a startup successful. It was a tremendous learning experience, and something I can"t recommend enough to others. If you"re currently running a business and can find someone with a similar model who"s willing to exchange information and ideas, do it. Being a CEO can be a very lonely job - even close friends and family won"t be able to empathize in the same way another CEO can. Many cities even have startup support groups (although they"re not usually called that, exactly).

My visits with Dharmesh inspired me to be more self analytical and more self critical. If there are things in the business that aren"t working, places where opportunity isn"t being executed upon, and chances to make a difference, I owe it not only to myself, but to our investors and, most importantly, to my employees to make the change. As the late King of Pop said, "start with the man in the mirror."

Just a couple weeks later, I landed in San Francisco. If you haven"t read the back-and-forth between Silicon Valley vs. Seattle VC/entrepreneur/tech startup, check out Glenn Kelman (Redfin"s CEO) comparing the two, Michael Arrington responding & Glenn firing back. There"s a grain of truth to the staments they make:

Sure Seattle is beautiful (Kelman talks about lakes and outdoor stuff a lot in his post). And if you want to have a balanced, healthy lifestyle, that’s a great place to do it. If you don’t think you have what it takes to make it in Silicon Valley, maybe Seattle or other mini-tech hubs is the place for you. But the best of the best come to Silicon Valley to see if they’re as good as the legends that came before them. It’s a competitive advantage to be here. And if you aren’t willing to take advantage of every possible advantage to make your crazy startup idea work, perhaps you shouldn’t be an entrepreneur.

The "valley culture" of depriving oneself of everything else except work really does exist, and it"s easy to become both enamored and afraid of it very quickly. But I also agree with Glenn that:

So even though all of us in Seattle would probably concede that Silicon Valley is generally better for startups than anywhere else, that doesn’t mean that we have to agree with Michael that Silicon Valley is always better, or better in every way. For starters, people in Seattle have helped me in an open-hearted, small-town way that I might not have found in the Valley.

And where Michael and I really disagree is on whether it is good some times to be away from all the me-too Valley companies trying to make money on Internet ads, even though he complains about them every day on TechCrunch.

I was very lucky to get some of that same "open-hearted, small-town" help, even in the Valley. A few years ago, Michael Eisenberg introduced me to Nirav Tolia, a former EIR with Benchmark, and the two of us have become fast friends. Nirav"s just launched a great startup - Fanbase - and has introduced me to a number of terrific entrepreneurs, nearly all of whom have great interest in SEO. At dinner one night, a fellow CEO (Thomas Layton of Metaweb), crystalized the question that had been weighing on my mind for the last 8 months - should SEOmoz take another round of funding?

Here, word for word (to the best of my memory), is what Thomas said to me:

Let"s make this easy. I"ll give you three things, you prioritize them, and I"ll tell you whether you should take the money.

1. Do you want to be the CEO and in control of the company"s destiny?
2. Do you want to make the most possible money from an exit?
3. Do you want the company to achieve the most and become the most it can be?

I don"t actually remember which one I picked on the spot... I think I struggled a bit to be confident in my response, and that"s because honestly, I hadn"t been asking myself that question, even though it"s something every CEO/founder should inherently know. A few days later, though, the answer was clear - #3. I want SEOmoz to be all that it can be. I believe in SEO. I believe in the people here. And I believe that with the right help - and another dose of all the positive things our first round brought us - we can achieve even more remarkable things.

Thus, we"re exploring the VC path, talking to those folks who"ve been calling and thinking a bit more seriously about a series B. It"s not something we"re definitely pursuing, and plenty of circumstances could change our minds about whether it"s the right option. As the media is quick to remind us, valuations and deal terms are not great right now, and with SEOmoz in such a strong position, we can afford to be patient, be picky and choose the right partner.

What I"ve Learned About Myself

• I do well with external pressure, even when it"s critical. I think that comes from childhood, when my Dad was obsessed with my grades and it made me work harder.
• I get inspired by those who"ve achieved amazing things. I want to meet more people like that and spend time with them - it"s a remarkable experience.
• I need to do a better job of thinking long term, even when I"m mired in the day-to-day. CEOs are supposed to be visionaries, and it"s irresponsible for me to be slacking off.
• I need to find ways to outsource more of my personal workload and trust others to do as good a job or better than I could.
• My stubborness is sometimes useful, but I need to do a better job of letting go when the situation warrants.
• I"m so lucky - so much luckier than I"ve ever considered - to be where I am. Thankfully, it appears I"m not alone - if Malcolm Gladwell"s Outliers (worth reading, BTW) is right, everyone who gets to do these kinds of exciting things in their lives owes that opportunity to the people around them, and I"m no different.

My Top Advice for Other Entrepreneurs

• Don"t be too scared of taking venture capital - it gets a lot of negative press, but in the end, you and the VCs want exactly the same thing - for your company to succeed magnificiently.
• Find VCs you love to work with - people you want to be friends with and spend time with and drink beer with. Find people who care not just about your company, but about you personally. I think this has been the best part about Michelle & Kelly on our board - they don"t just care about the numbers. They care about us. Seriously consider being flexible on deal terms if it means working with the right people (though often those "right people" are the same ones who"ll give you the best deals).
• Be relentlessly self-analytical and self-critical. Work hard to identify your flaws and pad them with team members who can compensate. My relentless optimism and cavalier march to spend money to grow the company is tempered by Sarah"s risk intolerance. It"s a great balance, and every company needs it.
• Leverage the entrepreneurial community around you. If my experience is any guide, CEOs and startup founders love to help and guide others - and that culture isn"t limited to Silicon Valley or Seattle or Boston, either. I"ve had friends from New York City to Reykjavik to Shanghai, Sydney, London and Nashville lend their time, their networks and their advice. I only hope that I can do as well to help others.

Questions & Answers

In the spirit of this post, and of SEOmoz"s guiding principles, I"d like to open the comments to questions and offer to answer anything I reasonably can in a post next week. You can also feel free to email me if you have private questions. One quick thing I"ll say is that for those seeking VC, three resources have been of great help to me - OnStartups, VentureHacks and Hacker News.

I sincerely hope this blog post has brought you value and helped bring a little more transparency to a world that"s rarely seen outside of Sand Hill Road meeting rooms.

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Posted by MikeK@DanconiaMedia

This post was originally in YOUmoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author"s views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc.

It"s been said here before: Press releases are much less powerful than they used to be for SEO purposes. While churning out news releases and submitting them to free sites may not do much, the medium can actually be more powerful than ever if used right. Convincing a single reporter or high-profile blogger to pick up your news is infinitely more beneficial than posting worthless releases all over the place and Digg"ing and StumbleUpon"ing them with your multiple accounts.

I have a somewhat unique perspective about news releases. Not too long ago, I worked full-time as a newspaper reporter, and my inbox was regularly inundated with press releases. Some of them caught my attention and were turned into lengthy stories. Others, however, failed to captivate me or my peers and, as a result, went nowhere.

Here are some tips on how to craft your releases in a way that increases the odds of them getting noticed by the media:

Get to the point. Make it clear from the get-go what your release is about. Don"t try to be cute. I used to get releases all the time from PR people who buried the news or tried to get creative with their writing. Sometimes, I couldn"t for the life of me figure out what some releases were even about. If you"re looking for a creative outlet, press release writing is not the avenue. Try writing a short story.

At least pretend you"re objective. Obviously, you have a vested interest in what you"re writing about, but it"s still important to craft your releases like down-the-middle news stories. Avoid unnecessary adjectives; most adjectives are unneeded. You don"t want your release to read like an advertisement. Pick out the newsiest element and concentrate on that.

Speak English. I see releases all the time that are stuffed with industry jargon that most people do not understand. Don"t assume that what you"re writing about is a familiar subject for the people who"ll read your release. Dumb it down. Assume your release will be read by the densest guy in the room.

Send it out manually. Instead of just dumping your releases into submission sites and hoping someone important notices, email it yourself to media outlets and bloggers you think might be interested in it. If you"re publicizing a new product, send your release to newspapers in the company"s area. If you can, find out which reporters cover the relevant beat and send it to them directly; that usually only takes a phone call.

Have good timing. If you"re looking for coverage, sending your release out on Election Day or after hours on a Friday is goofy. Those are good times to release bad news you"re obligated to report – any White House spokesman will tell you that – but it"ll do you no good unless your story is wildly sensational. News outlets are typically more desperate for copy during the summer months and around holidays.

Act like a human. Interactivevoices" post about getting a link from CNN.com – the only PR10 news site – illustrated this perfectly. There"s no harm in picking up the phone and calling reporters directly to see if they"re interested in your story. For all you know, the only thing preventing your news from being published is an over-finicky spam filter.

Don"t beg. When I was working as a reporter, I didn"t realize why some sources were so hellbent on me including links in my stories. Now I know. If your link is relevant to the story, the reporter will probably include it. If not, you"re still getting good publicity.

Of course, all of this will only help if you actually have something worthwhile to say. If you think there"s nothing interesting to say about your enterprise, you"re probably wrong. You just need to think long and hard to figure out what it is.

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Posted by Danny Dover

Update: June 23rd 2009 - The comments on this post have been fantastic. Be sure to read them to learn a lot. I also reworded some points to make them more clear. (Damn language is always getting in the way of my words! :-p ) Specifically, the 25 footer links is not a hard limit, it is merely a number for context. You can read more below.

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Below are some of the new best practice methods we use at SEOmoz for our consulting work. This list is not all inclusive meaning there are many factors that are not included here. Instead, this list contains only the best practices that changed after we recieved new information in the field and our team member Ben Hendrickson statistically analyzed search engine rankings and our index of the World Wide Web.

These SEO best practices will help provide a tested foundation to be used for crafting a solid search engine optimized website.

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Title Tag Format

Best Practice:

Primary Keyword - Secondary Keywords | Brand
Or
Brand Name | Primary Keyword and Secondary Keywords

Reasoning:

We recently finished our first round of intensive search engine ranking factors correlation testing. The results were relatively clear. If you are trying to rank for a very competitive term, it is best to include the keyword at the beginning of the title tag. If you are competing for a less competitive term and branding can help make a difference in click through rates, it is best to put the brand name first. With regards to special characters, we prefer pipes for aesthetic value but hyphens, n-dashes, m-dashes and subtraction signs are all fine.


The Usefulness of H1 Tags

Best Practice:

H1s are important for users but not necessarily for search engines anymore.

Reasoning:

Our correlation data shows that H1 tags do not carry the same ranking weight that we had originally presumed. We think they are very important for establishing information hierarchy and helping with algorithmically determined semantics, but they seem to be less important for search engine optimization. We recommend them on all pages as an aid for users but don’t stress the importance when other opportunities for SEO improvement are available.


The Usefulness of Nofollow

Best Practice:

We recommend using rel=nofollow for thwarting would be spammers of user generated content. We also recommend using it as an incentive for creating active users. (At SEOmoz, we remove the nofollow of profile links after the user has earned 100 mozPoints.)

We DO NOT recommend using nofollow for PageRank sculpting anymore.

Reasoning:

The recent announcement from Matt Cutts changed our policy. We think the new policy detracts from the overall health of the internet but feel obligated to go along with it to make sure our customers get the best rankings in the search engines. We have theories and tests running to help determine if this is, in fact, the best course of action to recommend, and we"re also looking into alternatives for sculpting the flow of link juice such as complex Javascript redirection systems, iFrames, etc.

It can still be useful for preventing comment spam (like its original use) but it is no longer useful as an aid for establishing information architecture.


The Usefulness of the Canonical Tag

Best Practice:

The canonical tag is still young and is only useful as a hint to the search engines to prevent duplicate content. It is not the silver bullet that webmasters are looking for. (nor the droids for that matter)

Reasoning:

When the nofollow tag was first released, it took a while before we could measure its affects. The search engines are likely still tweaking how they treat it. We know from public statements that this tag depletes juice like 301 redirects but it is too soon to judge its importance/value. When possible, we still recommend architectural solutions to prevent duplicate content (potentially employing solutions like the hash tag).


The Use of Alt text with Images

Best Practice:

We recommend including alt text for all images on all publicly accessible pages. We also suggest adding images with good alt text to pages targeting competitive rankings.

Reasoning:

We have two reasons for this. First, we believe that all users regardless of limitations should be able to use the internet. This includes people with disabilities and computers trying to use semantics to make information more useful. Secondly, our correlation data showed that alt attributes were a much more important metric for high rankings than we would have thought. While correlation is not causation, it seems unwise to ignore the data and we"re therefore recommending the use of good images with good alt text for pages seeking to rank on competitive queries.


The Use of the Meta Keywords tag

Best Practice:

If it is not a problem to let your competitors know your keywords and you are trying to rank highly in Yahoo, the Meta Keywords tag can be useful. Note: This is different from what we have recommend in the past.

Reasoning:

We recently updated our policy on this after DJ Paisley sent us a rather convincing e-mail (and we subsequently re-tested). Initially we"d suggested not using the meta keywords at all. Our argument was that this tag was abused in the early days of the internet and was no longer useful. We thought they were not used by the modern search engines and simply provided a way for competitors to automate the process of competitive analysis.
After running some tests (they are still running so this data is preliminary) we have seen that Yahoo does indeed use this tag for ranking although it is a minor factor. That said, we believe that Google and Bing ignore this tag and it doesn’t affect their rankings. We are still concerned about the competitive aspect of this piece, and that factor, combined with the smaller market share of Yahoo! and the seemingly low value this singular piece provides even for that engine, dilute any suggestion to employ it for now.


The Use of Parameter Driven URLs (I.E. www.example.com/product?param=1&param=2)

Best Practice:

We don’t recommend using them. If they are absolutely necessary (Due to something like an established CMS configuration) we recommend no more than 2 parameters.

Reasoning:

The search engines have been very clear on this. Their crawlers can parse and crawl parameter driven URLs but it is much more difficult and often leads to duplicate content issues. This is backed up by our correlation data, which showed that pages with static URLs tend to rank higher.


The Usefulness of Footer Links

Best Practice:

Use footer links sparingly. We recommend no more than 25 relevant internal navigational links. This number is not a hard limit and it is important to be mindful of intent when choosing keywords.

Reasoning:

We have seen many examples of Google penalties tied directly to abusive footer links (that "magically" lifted upon removal of the keyword anchor text stuffed footers). Manipulative links in footers are easily detected algorithmically, and appear to have automated penalties applied to them by Google.

   
The Use of Javascript and Flash on Websites

Best Practice:

We do not recommend using Javascript or Flash for any navigation important to search engines.

Reasoning:

Although we believe the search engines can crawl Javascript and Flash in a limited capacity, we choose not to add the risk. Their ability to parse these languages is inferior to their ability to parse HTML and choosing to code in the former can lead to lower search engine rankings.

   
The Use of 301 Redirects

Best Practice:

We recommend 301 redirects as the best way to redirect webpages but warn that they do have disadvantages.

Reasoning:

Our tests and public statements from search engineers have made us reasonably certain that 301 redirects deplete between 1% and 10% of link juice. This is an acceptable penalty if it is necessary to make one URL lead to another URL and other options are unavailable. It is also much better than the alternatives (javascript and 302 redirects) which pass very little if any juice at all. Meta refreshes, in our testing, appear to function similarly to 301s (from a juice/rank passing ability). However, since the engines recommend one over the other, we do too.


Blocking pages from Search Engines

Best Practice:

The Meta Robots tag (noindex, follow) is generally a better option than robots.txt. Robots.txt files are useful but should be used sparingly and only if a meta robots tag is not an option.

Reasoning:

Robots.txt do stop search engine crawlers from visiting a web page but they do not keep them from being indexed (see DaveN"s recent post on this topic). They also create a black hole for link juice (as the engines cannot crawl these pages to see any links on them and pass that juice along). Thus, we strongly prefer the meta robots tag with the "noindex, follow" parameters for keeping pages out of the search engine indices. As an added bonus, this usage also allows link juice to be pass for all links on the given page. :-)


Google Search Wiki"s Affect on Rankings

Best Practice:

We don’t recommend spending any time or resources on search wiki.

Reasoning:

We think it has very little affect, if any, on rankings. We have not seen any evidence of it affect on global results. We think it might help identify some spammy queries but is likely just another data source Google is using to separate it from its competiton.


The Affect of Negative Links from “Bad Link Neighborhoods”

Best Practice:

Link neighborhoods are a real thing but the affect of links from bad neighborhoods on good neighborhoods is minimal if the links are not reciprocal.

Reasoning:

We have been able to gain an excellent perspective on the internet through the creation and manipulation of Linkscape. We found it was very easy to algorithmically detect neighborhoods (or hubs). We think it is highly likely that the search engines use these to establish subject authorities.

That said, the internet is a very messy place. Legitimate websites receive spammy links all of the time (SEOmoz itself receives hundreds every month). The engines know about this phenomenon and take it into account. It is still possible to get negatively affected by bad links but the links must make up a large percentage of the total inbound links for a given site and the site must be relatively poorly linked-to by legitimate, trusted resources.


The Importance of Traffic on Rankings

Best Practice:

The metric of visitors to a given site is not used to help determine rankings.

Reasoning:

While traffic and rankings correlate (Websites with more visitors do usually have higher rankings) neither causes the other. It is simply that more popular websites receive more links and more links cause higher rankings. We have heard statements from search engineers that "time on page" was used for a short time as a ranking metrics but turned out to be a bad signal. Instead modern search engines prefer the “absence of a click” on a search engine results page as a better metric for detecting when their results need upgrading.

We also have reason to believe that metric of “unique visitors” (as opposed to total visitors) from web analytics software is fundamentally flawed. It, like Alexa.com, is rarely accurate but frequently messaged. Our suggestion is not to trust unique visitor counts nearly as much as raw visits for comparing the traffic sent to a site from various sources or comparing traffic growth from month to month.

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If you have any other best practices that you think are worth sharing, feel free to post them in the comments. This post is very much a work in progress. As always, feel free to e-mail me or send me a private message if you have any suggestions on how I can make my posts more useful. If that"s not your style, feel free to contact me on Twitter (DannyDover) Thanks!

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P.S. From Rand: I made a presentation on some of this data recently for Hubspot"s Inbound Marketing University, so I thought I"d embed the slideshow below for those interested. If you"d like to see the full presentation, you can register here (I think).

#6 IMU: Advanced SEO Tactics: On Beyond Keyword Research (GF401)

I also wanted to add that these policies are from a meeting the SEOmoz team held to determine what we"d recommend as best practices for Q+A, blogging, on our own site (which I know is sorely lacking - we need more dev hours!) and to consulting clients. Danny took great notes and composed this post to help share that publicly.

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Posted by Lucy Langdon

The aim of this post is to describe a few of the ways SEO agencies (or, in some instances, in-house SEO"s looking for more budget from the boss) can use SEOmoz to pitch and close SEO projects.

We use SEOmoz at several different stages in our sales process.

Pre Sales

A customer rings up and says "I want to rank first page for bicycle shop". While they"re on the phone, the sales team can figure out a few different things about this client using a range of "moz tools.

Whether they have a clue what they"re talking about:
See where they currently rank for this keyphrase, check out their performance on the toolbar and maybe (if they"re going on a bit), do a quick crawl test.

What their chances are of ranking:
Stick their keyphrase into the Keyword Difficulty tool (along with the Wordtracker count) and see how strong their site needs to be in order to rank. You should already have a good idea of the rough strength of their site from the toolbar information and the crawl test.

The usefulness of the "moz tools here is how quickly you can use them to gain some useful insights about potential clients. You haven"t sold anything yet, but nor have you expended a great deal of time or energy working out whether there is anything to sell.

Pitching

So you"ve got the attention of your boss or a potential client- what now? There are lots of routes you could take, but a natural one would be to show your boss or the client the opportunities open to the site and, crucially, make them understand the work that would be needed to fulfil that potential.

Recently, we"ve used Linkscape to do this with great success. Run a report for the site and have a look at the domain mozRank, Domain mozTrust and the number of external links from unique domains. Now look at a few competitors that outrank the site you"re interested in and see where the differences are. I find circles and arrows useful at this point. That shop that wants to rank for "bicycle shop" needs to understand what the competition is like on the first page.

If you, your client or your boss wants some help visualizing this, take a look at this great little feature in the "moz Labs (only Pro).




Being able to display the data in this way is great for getting across to a non-SEO what needs to happen in order for their site to perform as well as their competitor/s. I"d also recommend that you take a little time to explain what each of the axes a) means and b) means for their site. If, for example, the site has potential to rank well for longtail traffic, it would be most excellent if they could appreciate that links from high Trust sites and lots of links from a diverse range of unique domains are the way to go. You can pull all of this out of a Linkscape report as well of course.

Closing

The last step in this process is to close the sale. With all this Linkscape data at hand, you are ready to outline what you will do to fulfil the potential that this website has. Make sure you connect your proposal to the metrics that the site owner now understands and appreciates; sell the benefits of each deliverable using these metrics and then, in turn, connect them to what the site wants to achieve.

If you need some ideas for deliverables, have a look at the Pro Top Pages tool. Looking at the site you"re working with will let you know if there"s any naturally linked to content, which could either be promoted more heavily or imitated in some way. Looking at the top pages on a competitor"s site will show you exactly what"s working for them and, if you show it to your client or boss, will reassure them that the work you"re proposing has succeeded elsewhere. Fingers crossed, this tool will also help you along in the actual SEO strategy for your site (whether that"s creating some linkbait or going after directories).

We"ve found that a final sweetener to the deal is to reassure clients that we"ll be keeping a close eye on the impact our work has. For this, we tend to set up a few terms in Rank Tracker alongside analytics data.

It"d be great to hear of any other ways you use the "moz to help you pitch and close SEO work either internally or to potential clients. Thanks.

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Posted by randfish

Many years ago, when I first started in the search marketing industry, several instances of the debate around "themed links" flared up, cooled off and reared their head again. Nowadays, it makes infrequent, though periodic appearances in the thinking, recommendations and forums of the SEO world, and I thought it would be wise to revist the issue, lay out the discussion points and get folks talking about their experiences, tests and intuition.

The basic tenant of the themed links debate revolves around the theory that search engines run calculations to identify "neighborhoods" of topically-related content, and then consider links from sites/pages on these topics to be more important or valuable than those from unrelated neighborhoods. Here"s a visual take:

While personally, I"ve seen little evidence that an algorithm like this exists at Google, Yahoo! or MSN/Live (haven"t honestly done enough Bing investigation to feel confident making statements around their practices), I"m very curious to hear your thoughts.

_

Let"s open this up in the comments - do you think themed links matter? Can you do well without them? Is there reverse-theming (where links from outside your neighborhood or from diverse neighboorhoods provide more benefit)?

p.s. For more on the origins of this theory, see Authoritative Sources in a Hyperlinked Environment by Jon Kleinberg (warning PDF) and notes on the HITS algorithm lecture from the Math Explorer"s Club at Cornell University.

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Posted by randfish

There are some very different schools of thought out there regarding 404 error code pages. Some SEOs recommend:

• Never allowing them - 301"ing every error page back to the home page or an internal category level page to preserve the maximum amount of link juice (in case someone links to a broken URL)
• Letting any erroneous/mistyped URL 404.
• Something in between - 301 some kinds of 404 pages and not others.

I"m generally in this last group. I think there are times when it pays dividends to let a URL 404, both for accessibility and search engine reasons. I also don"t think it"s intuitive or semantically accurate to 301 every 404 page on the site - it certainly pays to build great custom 404s (good piece with examples on that here), but to simply have your homepage appear when a URL is mistyped or a link breaks doesn"t send the right message to users or search engines.

When faced with 404s, my thinking is that unless the page:

A) Receives important links to it from external sources (Google Webmaster Tools is great for this)
B) Is receiving a substantive quantity of visitor traffic
and/or C) Has an obvious URL that visitors/links intended to reach

It"s OK to let it 404.

Recently, though, Lindsay and I were faced with a tough call on a consulting project. The client has a site that receives a ton of search queries, many of which map to their category and subcategory level pages (which are more landing pages than search query pages, but also serve to address the search keywords). The client also has a number of search pages that have no content (either because they"re for mis-typed, nonsense or mis-spelled searches or because they simply don"t have content for those terms). Some of these pages earn links, some get a moderate amount of traffic and up until recently, they"ve essentially existed as error pages that resolve with a 200 code.

What to do?

Our conundrum contained a few critical elements. We don"t want the search engines wasting bandwidth crawling and indexing junk pages (especially since the site is monstrous and needs that crawl/index power to flow to the right sections). We also don"t want users to have a bad experience and while the error pages effectively communicate the right message (there"s no results for this query), semantically the pages should really 404. Finally, of course, we don"t want to waste any of that precious link juice that"s flowing to some of them.

The solution turned out to be a compromise - we"d 404 the pages, but keep track of those that earned links and any substantive level of traffic and try to build better experiences for those pages (sometimes a 301 to a sub-category page, sometimes to a results listing and sometimes we"ll actually add content to those pages and make them resolve). We hope that this lets us have our cake and eat it, too.

We"d love to hear your thoughts around 404s and SEO in general, as well as on this specific scenario (and others like it). 1000s of SEOs are smarter than 2 :-)

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Posted by rebecca

"The time has come," the Walrus said,
"To talk of many things:
Of shoes--and ships--and sealing-wax--
Of cabbages--and kings--
And why the sea is boiling hot--
And whether pigs have wings."

We can talk about the temperature of the sea and the possibility of winged pork some other time; for now, I want to talk about one thing, and that"s how ridiculously good Up is. Seriously, Pixar can do no wrong. Go see it if you haven"t already. Oh, and this is my last post as an SEOmoz employee.

What"s that, you want to talk more about that second piece of news? Oh, fine, be that way. After 3 1/2 years as an SEOmozzer, I"ve decided to part ways with the company that introduced me to Internet marketing. Rand received the company credit card statement in the mail and saw that I charged $7500 worth of ShamWows to the corporate account, so I had to turn in my key and clear out my desk. Now he"ll have to clean up his office spills with measly paper towels. Sucker!

Actually, the fact of the matter is that while I greatly enjoyed working at the mozplex, I felt it was time to venture off and explore bigger opportunities elsewhere. I haven"t finalized my new job yet but have received numerous offers from potential suitors and am planning on holding a rose ceremony within the next two weeks to crown my eventual employer (it"ll be like an episode of The Bachelor, only with fewer whores). In the meantime, I"ve set up an Internet marketing blog called Fresh Edge Media that will be the new home to my snarky ramblings about SEO. Go visit it and become a FEMbot! FEMbots are the new mozfans! I may also accept the occasional SEO contract or freelance Internet marketing work, so send some stuff my way if you"d like to help ensure that I have a roof over my head.

SEOmoz has been a great home to me these past few years. I"ve become close friends with my coworkers and have gotten some great mentoring from my bosses. I"ll miss having lunches with the devs, giggling about Q&A with Jen, working on contracts with Lindsay, and making fun of Danny"s ever-changing facial hair. Most of all, though, I"ll miss the great community at SEOmoz. You guys sure know how to make a gal feel special, and I feel truly privileged to have interacted with each and every one of you. SEOmoz would be nothing without its readers, and I thank you all for being such friendly, loyal members.

I"ll still pop in every once in a while to post comments and to berate my successor for not catching a typo or deleting a spam comment, but you can also catch me at my new marketing blog my hobby athlete blog, on LinkedIn and on Twitter. You can also email me at relizkel@gmail.com if you want to say hello or if you"d like to lure me into a lucrative new job position (I can be bought easily--good thing I"m not a government spy). I"ll likely announce where I end up via Twitter and on my blog in the coming weeks. Until then, enjoy this photo montage (I recommend humming Green Day"s "Time of Your Life" to yourself as you peruse). So long!

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Posted by great scott!

This week"s Whiteboard Friday addresses everybody"s new favorite topic: Google"s "new" treatment of nofollow and how it creates a massive reservoire of lost link juice.  Everybody under the sun has written about this (SEOmoz included) in the last couple of weeks, so we decided to do a little roundtable (squareboard?) pow-wow on how best to deal with the problem.

Rand is joined by Nick Gerner, Ben Hendrickson, and Lindsay Perkin-Wassell to discuss possible solutions for pluging this nofollow leak.  The video is a bit longer than usual, but it"s an important discussion. Those of us who have seen great results with nofollow-based PageRank sculpting now need to consider what impact (if any) this new announcement will have on our sites and those of our clients, so let"s commence the weighing of options...

SEOmoz Whiteboard Friday - How Do We Plug the Nofollow Leak? from Scott Willoughby on Vimeo.

Technical note: There was a slight problem with the tape that mangled the first few seconds of Rand"s introduction, hence the abrupt opening. You may also notice some strange compression artifacts due to the same problem. Also, since I didn"t have enough individual mics for everyone, the sound is a little bit worse than usual...my apologies. -Scott

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Posted by randfish

The blog post - PageRank Sculpting - from the head Google"s Web Spam team is a critical read for SEOs worldwide:

So what happens when you have a page with “ten PageRank points” and ten outgoing links, and five of those links are nofollowed? Let’s leave aside the decay factor to focus on the core part of the question. Originally, the five links without nofollow would have flowed two points of PageRank each (in essence, the nofollowed links didn’t count toward the denominator when dividing PageRank by the outdegree of the page). More than a year ago, Google changed how the PageRank flows so that the five links without nofollow would flow one point of PageRank each.

It"s valuable to recall the illustration I put up on Google"s initial announcement of this change:

This change in Google"s treatment of nofollow links comes with some very interesting additional advice/clarification:

Q: Okay, but doesn’t this encourage me to link out less? Should I turn off comments on my blog?
A: I wouldn’t recommend closing comments in an attempt to “hoard” your PageRank. In the same way that Google trusts sites less when they link to spammy sites or bad neighborhoods, parts of our system encourage links to good sites.

Many in the SEO field have long suspected that linking out to good places can provide a positive benefit, but I"m afraid that"s going to be very hard to quantify and therefore difficult to justify. In all honesty, I believe we"re going to see SEOs and websites revert to what I"ll call "old-school" PageRank sculpting - the kind prevalent prior to the existence of nofollow.

From now on, if you wish to sculpt PageRank, you"ll want to use one of the following classic PR sculpting methodologies:

• Option A: An embedded iFrame on the page containing the links you don"t want the engines to follow (remember not to link to the iFrame URL, and potentially block it using robots.txt)
• Option B: Links that call a Javascript redirect script with access blocked for search engine bots (as Google is also now crawling basic javascript and counting links through it)
• Option C: An embed in Flash, Java or some other non-parseable plug-in that contains the desired links
• Option D: Settings that turn off links for non-cookied or non-logged-in visitors

Tragically, while this action won"t hurt spammers or those seeking to manipulate Google, it will seriously harm many thousands of sites that have employed nofollow internally as it was long considered a best practice (and messaged as such to the SEO community by the same source as this reversal). I suspect it will be several years and many re-designs before a lot of sites are able to clean up this solution-turned-problem.

I"m saddened to say that given this change, we, as SEOs, are going to have to also recommend the best practice that comments (in all forms of UGC) no longer accept links. While Google has said that linking out to "good places" provides some value, that merely suggests that webmasters and site owners should select good resources editorially and link to them with live, followed links. Comments that contain links, unfortunately, will actively detract from a site"s ability to get pages indexed (as they"ll pull away link juice from the places that need it). It"s likely that a plug-in for Wordpress that sends comment links out through uncrawlable Javascript or uses iFrames will emerge in the very near future.

This is a disappointing move from Google on many fronts:

• It allows malicious operators to actively hurt a site by adding nofollowed links in comments, forums and other open submission arenas.
• It removes the protection webmasters thought was afforded by nofollowing links (you may not get hurt for linking to spam or paid links directly, but you"re now indirectly hurting your site"s PageRank flow)
• It casts doubt on Google"s credibility with future messaging to webmasters (Danny Sullivan covered this when he wrote about the loss of backwards compatibility)

While I"m personally frustrated, I"m also thankful to Google for publicly messaging this in an honest, open way. I hope that in the future, we"ll get this notification in a more timely fashion. SEO consultants and in-house analysts are going to have their work cut out for them over the next few months.

BTW - Although Google has almost certainly messaged this honestly, we"ve got some tests running to make sure this is the case (with both the nofollow and the iframe/javascript solutions). Results will be posted here once our tests have been confirmed. We"re also going to be making changes to how Linkscape"s mozRank scoring system, modeled around similar intuition as PageRank, will treat nofollowed links in future indices.

p.s. Danny Sullivan"s comment on Matt"s blog post is also an essential read (and re-iterates many of the points above). A few valuable excerpts:

With this change, I can still get the $4 if I simply don’t allow comments. Or I show comments, but I use an iframe, so that the comment actually reside on a different page. In either case, I’m encouraged to reduce the number of links rather than let them be on the page period, nofollow regardless. If I’m worried my page won’t seem “natural” enough to Google without them, maybe I allow 5 comments through and lock them down after that.

Rather than clarify things, I feel like this is what your post is going to do -- cause people to consciously reduce the number of links they allow on their pages. We’re going to see an increase in iframe usage or other techniques to reduce links and flow more PageRank to the remaining links, for those who really worry/believe in such things.

It"s been a long time since we had such a fundamental shift in SEO best practices (maybe the canonical URL tag, though it"s effectiveness has been questioned and this PR sculpting reversal isn"t likely to inspire confidence).

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Posted by jennita

Last Friday I attended and spoke at the Jane and Robot Search Developer Summit in San Francisco. The idea of the conference was to cover technical SEO topics and help train developers and others. The 100 attendees (or so) were a mixed bunch; developers, SEOs, managers and the like.

The event was coordinated by Vanessa Fox and Nathan Buggia. The sessions covered site architecture, Microsoft and Open Source Stacks, and working with rich, interactive content. In addition to the sessions, there were round table discussions in which attendees had a chance to ask the experts questions, in small groups. In fact, having a fairly small group allowed many to get their questions answered one-on-one.

The day went something like this...

• As people trickled in, I helped get them signed in, handed out Bing t-shirts and asked "could you spell that for me?" quite a bit.
• Vanessa Fox kicked off the event with "Developers Are A Vital Key in Search Acquisition" and got everyone in the mood.
• Next up, Maile Ohye discussed Site Architecture and best practices. She also fielded quite a few questions (actually she answered questions throughout the day) and gave a great, informative presentation.
• Dennis Goedegebuure from eBay.com spoke about how eBay fixed some of their issues... I can"t really give too much detail here or I"ll be forced to pronounce Dennis"s last name 50 times. But he did give us this awesome gem: New-Pulse.ebay.com
• Then it was time for the most delicious meal in the world, well at least in the conference world. :) There were some serious raves about the little white cookies
• After lunch, Cesar Serna, Nathan Buggia and myself spoke to the the very loud and boisterous "Microsoft Stack" group while Kenny Hyder and Todd Malicoat spoke about the "Open Source Stack." Ok I"m lying here, we had 9 people in our session (and a couple of them were there to show their support) but they did have some great questions. I heard that the Open Source session was great as well, and from the laughs coming through the room dividers, I"m sure it was awesome.
• Yay! Cookie break!
• For the last official session of the day, Vanessa Fox and Damien Bianchi spoke about Flash, Silverlight, Javascript, etc. I heard the discussion got pretty heated towards the end but unfortunately I missed that part of it.
• Finally we got to the round table discussions. [see photo above] These were really great and led to a lot of interesting interactions. Well, except for the fact that Mystery Guest was the only one to sit at my table "Microsoft Technologies: IIS and ASP.Net" and she had no idea what either were. heh. Other than that they seemed to go over very well. Even after Vanessa let everyone know there were appetizers, beer and wine, many people decided to keep talking rather than eat and drink. huh?
• Before I had to run off to the airport (only to find my flight an hour and a half delayed) I chatted with some great people and had more yummy food and a beer. I definitely wish I had been able to hang out with the group longer.
  

Personally, I got a chance to meet pretty much everyone attending because I helped check people in. This was great for me, since sometimes the developer in me kicks in and I find myself standing in a corner, staring around the room, thinking I should probably go talk to someone. heh.

The venue was beautiful and the greatest part was that the people were genuinely engaged and interested in learning. Sometimes at large conferences it can be difficult to participate in the sessions... or perhaps it"s simply that people are intimidated to ask a question in a large setting? Either way, there were many interesting questions, lots of people sharing and many smiles.

Really, overall I had a great time and have to say that the food at the event was absolutely superb. I think I may even go on record by saying that it was the best food I"ve ever had at a conference (sorry SMX Advanced, you used to be my favorite!). I also seriously think that having awesome food and drinks helped people to stay engaged and the drinking definitely helped get people talking. :)

A few takeaways

• Google will now show sitelinks for individual pages, not just home pages (we noticed this the night before actually!)
  
  
  
• If you have a porn site, separate your family friendly and adult images into different directories. heh.
• You don"t have to have your keywords in a directory specifically, as long as it"s somewhere in the URL
• Check out New-Pulse.ebay.com - this was demo"d by Dennis Goedegebuure from eBay. This is a great tool to see most popular searches, most popular stores and the most watched items per category. Seriously cool stuff.
  
• You can get an internal search box on Bing based on
  
  • Query volume (not sure what the number is though)
    
  • Simple site search - the search can"t use javascript, etc
    
    
• There"s one lady at Microsoft who picks all the photos that show up as the background on Bing.

The Technical SEO

In general, I"m a huge advocate of helping and training developers to understand SEO more in-depth. Often I picture a harmonius world of developers and SEOs holding hands and working together. (yea, yea quit laughing - it could happen!) Developers hold the key to many SEO projects and the more they know, the better.

I"m really hoping that the "SEO Developer" becomes a trend in the industry. Sure, there are many SEOs who are quite technical but there are only a small number who can also claim to be developers. I"ve personally always liked the term "Technical SEO" and often use it when describing what I do.

At the Jane and Robot Summit I was asked whether I felt it helped me as an SEO to have been a developer. My answer was swift and loud, "YES YES YES!" Now, I don"t think that all SEOs should be developers, but it has definitely helped me. I explained that I think I often look at a website from the inside out, rather than the outside in. It helps when doing site audits (or well anything really) if you have in-depth knowledge of how everything works technically.

I definitely hope that we have more technical SEO conferences, workshops, summits, conventions, trainings...whatever you want to call them. Helping developers to understand SEO is a very good thing in my book. The more you know, the more you grow! (ok... cheesy)

Now I have a few questions for you, my dear reader (yes I"m assuming there may be only one - especially with the PageRank hubub going on next door):

1. What"s your stance on SEO Developers, or Technical SEOs? Take them or leave them?
   
2. More seriously, do you think it helps an SEO to have a development background?
3. Can developers and SEOs live in peace and harmony (and do we really want them to?)
4. If you were at the event, please add anything I may have missed!

Also, check out twitter and #janeandrobot to see what other"s said about the day.

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Posted by Nick Gerner

Last night we rolled out our latest Linkscape index update (we call it "index13" internally).  From a data perspective we"ve got a few things wrapped in here that might interest you guys:

• 53 billion urls (our biggest index to date)
  
• 500 billion links
• Everything crawled within the last two months
• We crawled every blog post pulled from Blogscape up until May 1
• We"re now counting # of Root Domains linking to a Subdomain instead of Subdomains linking to a Subdomain

In this update we"ve focused on a small amount of growth, up-to-date fresh data, and including the fast moving web, which has traditionally been difficult to capture for us.  So go check out some reports, links, and top pages.

In light of the recent discussion across the SEO world about revelations about nofollow, here are some stats on nofollow usage we"ve observed:

• nearly 15 billion links (~3% of all links) using the nofollow attribute
• over 11 billion of those were internal (73% of instances of nofollow)

I don"t pretend to know what motivates these internal usage of nofollow, but this is certainly consistent with the hypothesis that nofollow is used extensively for internal architecture reasons.  We"re looking into this issue a great deal.  Be sure to check out WBF this week :) This update calculates mozRank as Rand describes as the "old" way.  We"re working on changes to include the "new" behavior and when we get that out (in about  a month) we"ll include some notes about correlations and changes.

We"ve also been keeping a close eye on adoption of rel=canonical.  Our data shows a low, but growing level of adoption.  We"ve got just over 38 million instances.  From our anecdotal view we"ve seen it used pretty successfully on a few large sites.  But I know there"s still a lot of skepticism about it in some cases, so your mileage may vary.  Still, it"s not hard to include, so it might be a worthwhile investment regardless.

Shortly after each index update we also update our list of the Top Domains and Top Pages on the web.  So be sure to keep an eye out for that data being updated very soon.  Another thing we"ve been doing since launch is saving Linkscape reports. So if you"re looking for history of sites and pages you"ve run in the past, be sure to check those out.

In addition to the index update, some of you may have read about a new addition to our SEOmoz Labs offering, a Linkscape Visualization Tool, which we"re very happy to make available to you.  As usual, this is a prototype, providing some advanced functionality we hope to include in future versions of our products.  In the meantime head over to Labs and check out what else we"ve got :)

The visualization tool itself provides a lot of neat features that make what we"re trying to do with Linkscape much more intuitive:
What we"ve done is to lay several key factors onto a radar graph to illustrate the comparison between these two sites.  Radar graphs are a bit fancy, but the idea is pretty neat: each leg represents a different dimension.  For instance to the upper right we"ve illustrated that shopstyle.com beats revolveclothing.com on a pure external link count, but revolveclothing.com beats shopstyle.com in terms of domain diversity of those links.  Overall these two sites are competitive with each other, but the larger shopstyle.com area suggests that shopstyle has a slight edge from a pure link profile perspective.

We"ve powered a few consulting gigs of our own with this kind of visualization and it makes a great way for clients to see visually how they stand against competition, how internal pages compare to a site"s homepage, and where the greatest weaknesses between two pages lies.  But we don"t just visualize the data.  We also provide the raw data in a table:


So far it seems like that "Overall Score" is pretty well correlated with ranking for sites with similar content.  So we feel like this is a pretty good view of a page"s link profile.

 More importantly we"ve built some of our SEO experience and analysis into suggestions and next steps:


These suggestions are a good place to look if you want to know your biggest strengths and weaknesses.  And we"ve got some contextual links to get some more information.

So try out the tool and the new index and let me know what you think!

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Posted by MichaelC

This post was originally in YOUmoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author"s views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc.

We all know by this time about the benefits of converting your parameterized URLs to human- and crawler-friendly URLs, but the stock tools of the trade (ISAPI_Rewrite, mod_rewrite, etc.) don"t necessarily scale all that well when you have a large number of categories, product pages, etc. I"m going to walk you through what it takes to code this yourself, and I think you"ll find it"s less scary and complex than you thought, and gives you a number of benefits in terms of ongoing maintenance, flexibility, etc. 

Overview  

• The core problem: your site uses parameter-happy URLs, but for SEO and user-friendliness you"re dreaming of semi-readable URLs instead.
• You"ve got a lot of content, mostly coming from the database.
• The number of products, categories, subcategories, etc. mean the prospect of trying to create (and maintain!) rules for ISAPI_Rewrite or mod_rewrite makes you run screaming into the woods.

In doing your own URL rewriting, you"ll have 4 primary issues to deal with:

1. Existing inbound links: redirecting the old URLs to the new URLs via 301 redirects
2. Intra-site links: converting the parameterized URLs to the readable versions everywhere YOU link to them in your own site
3. Serving content: when you get a request for the new URL, handling it with the parameterized page invisible to the user (and the search crawler)
4. Duplicate content issues

If you"re fuzzy the whole redirect thing, read Jennita"s post on URL rewrites and 301 redirects.

For clarity (and because it"s Case Study month at SEOmoz :-) we"ll use my honeymoon registry and travel site, www.thebigday.com, for our examples. We group the resorts on our site by destination and sub-destination - e.g., Hawaii -> Maui -> Fairmont Kea Lani. I"ll do the examples in classic ASP, but it should be very easy for you to see how to convert my logic to PHP, ASP.NET, etc.

We serve up a hotel page using an ASP page called /Package.asp. It takes 3 numeric parameters, 1 for destination (Hawaii in this example), 1 for the sub-destination (the island of Maui), and 1 for the resort itself (Fairmont Kea Lani). What we really want to show is something more like this:

/TravelSpecials/Hawaii-Maui/TheFairmontKeaLaniMaui.htm

Note that I"ve worked another important (to me, anyway) key phrase into the URL (travel specials) for SEO purposes. "ISAPI_Rewrite?" you say? Fine, if you have just a handful of categories and product names...and they never (or rarely) change. In this example, our rewrite "rules" are essentially translating between names and ID numbers by looking up either one in the database.

How it"s going to do its magic:

Inbound Parameterized Links

You want to 301 redirect

/Package.asp?dest=2&subdest=51&resort=123

to

/TravelSpecials/Hawaii-Maui/TheFairmontKeaLaniMaui.htm

You need a function that creates the readable URL from the parameters:

Function MakeFancySchmancyUrl (nDestID, nSubdestID, nResortID)
Dim sFancyURL

sFancyURL = "/TravelSpecials/" & GetDestName (nDestID) & "-" & GetSubdestName (nSubdestID) & "/" & GetResortName (nResortID) & ".htm"

MakeFancySchmancyUrl = sFancyURL
End Function

 - GetDestName(), GetSubdestName(), and GetResortName() are functions you need to write that retrieve the English name of the component given the ID, BUT....you need to do a little "cleanup" on the names (all of them) to make sure you get decent URLs coming out the other end. 

Here"s an example of a resort name that would behave very badly as part of an URL without cleanup:

St. Regis Princeville, Kaua"i

Essentially you"ll want a function that simply removes any non-alpha character in the name and returns the (probably shortened) result, and each of the Getxxxx() functions must do call this on the names they return. Some people have used the technique of also embedding the IDs in the URL as well as the names. While that does simplify the look up process, I"ll admit, I do think it reduces the readability of the URL to the user, and doubles the number of "words" in the URL that the search engine might be looking at. To me, it"s the equivalent of putting duct tape on your website.

Intra-Site Links

You"ll need to go through your site, find all the places that reference your parameterized URL (e.g., /Package.asp) and replace those with a call to MakeFancySchmancyUrl().

Safety net: Keep in mind that if for some reason you miss converting any of your in-site links, the mechanism for 301"ing inbound links will take care of those for you.

Now, your parameterized ASP page is going to be called in two ways:

1. By users or search engine (in which case they need to 301 to the readable URL)
2. By your 404 handler (next topic, don"t worry!), in which case you DO NOT want to redirect...you want to follow through the logic on that page to actually produce the HTML content

Serving Content

When someone clicks a link to /TravelSpecials/Hawaii-Maui/TheFairmontKeaLaniMaui.htm, whether it"s a link on your site, from a SERP, or from another site, we"ve got a little magic to perform, as there isn"t really a page with this name (or with those folder names, either!).You"ll need to create a custom 404 error handler (if you haven"t already), and in there, look for these requests and hand them over to the /Package.asp page to show the content. 

Here"s our example:

On Error Resume Next

Dim iPos, sPageHit, cnList, cmdList, sUserID, rsUserWebPage, sGuestPassword, chTmpRegTypes

PageHit = Trim(Request.QueryString)
iPos = InStr (12, sPageHit, "/", 1)
sPageHit = Right (sPageHit, Len(sPageHit) - iPos)
sPageHit = LCase (sPageHit)
Dim sPageLeaf, iDomainEnd

sPageLeaf = LCase (Trim(Request.QueryString))

iDomainEnd = InStr (sPageLeaf, "thebigday.com")

If (iDomainEnd > 0) Then
sPageLeaf = Mid (sPageLeaf, iDomainEnd + Len (sThisPageDomain))
End If

"See if it"s one of our static URLs that needs to be converted:
If (Left(sPageLeaf, 8) = "/travelspecials/") Then
Server.Transfer "/Package.asp"
End If
...

If it"s not one of our magical virtual pages, then the logic continues on to actually display a 404 page. Note that Server.Transfer will delegate the responsibility of spitting out the page content to /Package.asp BUT the user will still see the full readable URL in the browser, and the browser will get a nice happy HTTP 200 OK response.

In /Package.asp, you"ll need to:

• Parse out the destination, sub-destination, and resort name
  
• Look up each in the database and get the parameter equivalent
  
• Fetch whatever data from the database you need for the destination, sub-destination, and resort to display the content on the page

Next question: how do you know inside /Package.asp if you"re supposed to 301 to the readable URL, or if you"ve just been transferred to by your 404 handler? Simple, actually...

Handling the 404 Handler Bit

In IIS anyway, the 404 handler has the original URL requested in its query string, pre-pended by 404. The full query string for our example would be:

404;http://www.thebigday.com/TravelSpecials/Hawaii-Maui/TheFairmontKeaLaniMaui.htm

So, just look for:

404;http

as follows:

sFullQueryString = LCase (Request.QueryString)
If (Len (sFullQueryString) > 8)
Then
If (Left (sFullQueryString, 8) = "404;http") Then
Call ExtractResortParms (sFullQueryString)
End If
End If

Our function ExtractResortParms() above will parse the query string, pull out the destination name, subdestination name, and resort name, and attempt to look those up in the database. 

If anyone would like to actually see what my version of ExtractResortParms() looks like, email me...it"s not very exciting, just fun & games with Mid(), Left(), and InStr() etc.

Now, remember that the resort name, etc. in the URL isn"t generally going to match what"s in the database, as spaces and punctuation will have been stripped out....Fairmont Kea Lani became FairmontKeaLani. So you"re not going to be able to do an indexed look up of the name--instead, you"ll have to retrieve the whole set of possible names into a record set and walk the record set, running your name cleanup function on each name, THEN see if it matches what you extracted from the URL. If those record sets are going to be very big (say, over 100 records), you"ll want to do a little optimization for performance. For us, the list of destinations and sub-destinations are both short enough that we don"t worry about this, but for the resort name, we parse the destination and sub-destination first, then retrieve just the list of resorts that match those, which results in a much smaller list. An alternative that"s pretty good performance-wise is to add a field to the database table for the "cleaned" name, and simply call your cleanup function in the content management page where you add/edit the content element, then put an index on the new cleaned name column.

301 Redirection Bit

If you didn"t see 404;http in the beginning of the query string, then you"ve probably been linked to using the parameterized URLs and need to 301 to the readable version. "But," you ask, "since you have the parameters now, why not just look up the friggin" content and show it now?" Because, grasshopper, you want any link juice from your old URLs to be carried over to the new readable URL. So, pull the parameters out of the query string.

For example, the link will be something like

/Package.asp?dest=2&subdest=51&resort=123

And the redirect, using that fabulous function you wrote earlier to make your readable URLs:

Response.Status = "301 Moved Permanently"Response.AddHeader "Location", MakeFancySchmancyUrl (nDestID, nSubdestID, nResortID)

Gotchas

If you"re renaming products occasionally, you could find yourself leaking link juice here and there...for example, let"s say Princeville Resort is renamed to The St. Regis Resort, Princeville, and someone linked to our page a while ago as:

/TravelSpecials/Hawaii-Kauai/PrincevilleResort.htm

Of course, that"s gonna get the user a shiny real-life 404 (and no link juice) as there will no longer be any resort found whose name "cleans" to "PrincevilleResort". Two options (your choice will depend on how frequently things get renamed):

1. If they"re few and far between, you can add a few manual 301"s in your 404 handler.
2. You can create a table of resort name history, and each time your content management code changes the resort name, add a record to this table.Then, if your resort page handler doesn"t find a match for the name, it looks up the cleaned name requested in this table.
   

Duplicate Content Issues

If you"ve spent any time learning how your customers shop, you"re well aware that the categorizations of your products that are most logical and convenient to you aren"t likely to be the way your customers think about your products, and you"ve probably already got a number of different ways to group your products,which means that a given product page might appear in a number of different URLs using the above scheme. In our case, we not only group resorts by destination, but also by type of experience and by brand. If this is the case, you"re going to need to tell the search engines which version of the rewritten URL is the "main" one, and that the others are really the same page. Time to use the new rel="canonical" trick. In our case, we have our categories (e.g., "all-inclusive", "spas", "luxury", etc.) coded as pseudo-destinations, so what we do is look up the primary destination ID that the resort belongs to and fabricate the URL for that:

<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.thebigday.com<%=MakeFancySchmancyUrl (nDestID, nSubdestID, nResortID)%>">

Conclusion

The above might LOOK like a lot of work, but seriously shouldn"t take you more than a day, especially if you ask questions of people like me when you get stuck or confused :-)

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Posted by Tom_C

Google Authorization is a topic which crops up a fair amount in our day-to-day search wanderings. Not really because clients are asking if we"re authorized but more because they always claim that previous SEO companies they received pitches from claimed to be Google Authorized SEO consultants. Unfortunately (fortunately?!) no such certification exists so we have to set them straight.

In addition to that, there seems to be some confusion around what the different levels of certification are with some people in the SEO community so I thought it would be a good idea to write a post explaining the different kinds of certification and how you go about getting them. In order from easiest to hardest:

Google Adwords Certified Individual

This is the most common form of Google certification and is the easiest to get. According to the Google advice the following is all you need to do in order to become a Google Adwords Certified Individual:

• Accept the rules of use. These basically say things like "don"t be evil" but in a few more words.
  
• Manage at least one Adwords account in an MCC (my client center) for 90 days.
• Have a total spend of at least $1000 (or equivalent local currency) in your MCC during the 90 day period.
  
• Pass the exam.

For most people, the exam is the main focus of the certification. It costs $50 each time you take the exam and I think you can take it as much as you like. Everyone at Distilled who"s taken the exam has passed first time and this shouldn"t pose much of a problem so long as you"re familiar with Adwords and have studied the lessons. It"s worth noting that you should take a look at the lessons even if you"re familiar with Adwords since they can cover things such as invoicing as well as questions about the whole spectrum of ads - from search ads to content network and banner ads. Make sure you"re familiar with the whole system, not just the stuff you use every day.

The format for the exam is 100 questions in 90 mins and you need at least 75% to pass.

The benefits of being an adwords certified individual is that you get a funky badge like this:


And you also get a professional status page hosted on Google which verifies your status which you can link to (can anyone say badge-bait?!)

Google Adwords Certified Company

A Google Adwords Certified Company is basically a company which contains a few certified individuals and has a much higher total spend in the MCC, here"s the requirements from Google:

• Have a billing and mailing address in one of these countries
• Employ at least two individuals who are qualified individuals (see above) - note that they need to be qualified with the same MCC.
• Have a minimum spend defined by the country you"re in (see here for a list) - in the US and the UK the required spend over a 90 period for the MCC is $100,000.

The major hurdle to becoming a qualified company is the spend in the MCC which is a lot bigger than for qualified individuals. Not only must you have this spend but you need to keep that level of spend over any 90-day period which can be tricky as clients come and go, especially if you"re running seasonal campaigns.

The benefits are very similar to above, you get an updated badge like this:


And a similar professional status page on Google as before.

Google Analytics Authorized Consultant (GAAC)

Unlike the Google Adwords authorized individuals and companies, Google Analytics authorized consultants are much rarer. You"ll see why in a second when I detail all the hoops you need to jump through in order to become qualified!

Here"s the Google page detailing the requirements, I"ve done my best to summarise below. The biggest change however to the above qualification is that it"s not based on an exam or a form you fill out but it"s much more like an interview. You need to submit a document detailing all the reasons why you should be an authorized consultant via email to THE GOOGLE. Your email should provide evidence of the following:

• You offer a range of stand-alone Analytics services including implementation, configuration, training and consulting.
• 3 verifiable, paid, expertly deployed Google Analytics projects with at least 3 different clients who Google will contact for references. These case studies should show all kinds of things including, interestingly enough, examples where you have customised the GA code for your clients.
• A proven expertise in web analytics including blogging, speaking or white papers.
• At least 2 employees who have taken and passed the GAIQ test.

As well as these initial criteria there are also ongoing criteria which you must meet which are:

• Sending at least one employee to the Google Analytics Authorized Consultant summit (held once a year in Mountain View, CA) at your own expense.
• Providing a report at the end of each calendar quarter detailing all GA projects you have worked on during that quarter including client names and results achieved.

Depending where in the world you are, sending an employee to California could be quite pricey so it"s quite a commitment. I wonder also how the second requirement influences the companies ability to sign NDAs. Anyone who works with a Google Authorized Analyitics Consultant should be aware that they may well have their details shared with Google.

That all said, the benefits are much more tangible for being authorized. There are less than 100 authorised companies world wide! In addition to being a member of this exclusive club you get the following benefits:

• Possible client referrals from Google sales teams
• Elevated technical support for Google Analytics
  
• Listing on the Google Analytics Partner page
• Invitation to attend annual GAAC summit at Google offices
• Access to an exclusive GAAC web forum to share ideas and technical tips with Google and other GAACs
• A fancy badge like this to display on your site:

Google Website Optimizer Authorized Consultant (WOAC)

And last on the list is the Google Website Optimizer Authorized Consultant badge. I think this might actually be slightly easier than the GAAC certification but since the list of authorized companies is smaller I"ve put this one last on the list.

To get authorized you need to follow a similar process to the GAAC - you need to email Google with a document detailing how you meet a load of criteria defined by Google. I"ve summarised here, your email should display evidence of:

• Having designed and implemented at least 3 verifiable and successful Website Optimizer experiments with 3 different referenceable clients.Google specifically requests that you provide screenshots of the tests you"re running so they"re looking for quite in-depth references here.
  
• Proven expertise including blogging/speaking/white papers etc
  
• Providing a range of services dedicated to Google Website Optimizer including setup, training, and consultation.
  
• Being willing to attend and pass Google Website Optimizer technical training sessions at a Google office. (Sessions usually last a few days and are held once per year in Mountain View, CA, USA). It"s not explicitly stated but I presume this is out of your own pocket as with the GAAC.
• Being able to commit to launching a minimum of 3 Website Optimizer experiments per quarter.

Like with the GAAC the benefits are worth having. The list of Authorized Website Optimizer Consultants is only 33 companies long! As well as being on that exclusive list you also get:

• Elevated technical support
• Co-marketing opportunities
• A listing on the Website Optimizer Partners page
• A fancy badge, as always:

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Posted by great scott!

MozPal and Local Search maestro, David Mihm, is back this week to continue our look at the world of Local Search.  This week David takes us through some of the fundamentals of performing SEO for Local Search by explaining how Google uses information from different sources, and what you can do with those sources to help your local rankings.

If you watched last week"s Whiteboard Friday, you"ll recall that Google uses information from their Local Business Center, certain trusted providers like InfoUSA, Acxiom, and Localeze, as well as certain data from their webcrawl to determine local rankings.  In the video, David and Rand walk through a chart of these info sources and how you need to tweak them for different aspects of your business.  For your convenience, I"ve recreated the chart here:




As you can see, one of the most important things you can do is to simply make sure your business is properly submitted to the LBC and Trusted sources, and that your contact info is accurate and consistent across all of your listings.  You can also do some active management and search for web references to make sure mentions of your business are using the correct contact information.

There are also very important considerations for where and how you categorize your business, as well as where you"re receiving reviews and mentions. They can all have a big impact on your local rankings and your location prominence with Google; watch the video to learn more about how to dramatically improve your local search rankings without building a single link.

SEOmoz Whiteboard Friday - SEO for Local Search from Scott Willoughby on Vimeo.

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Posted by rebecca

A couple weeks ago I went to Sweden to speak at IMC Stockholm. I had a really lovely time exploring the beautiful city as well as speaking at IMC and networking with marketers from all over the world. I thought I"d provide a recap of my trip and share some conference coverage with all of you who didn"t attend the conference but are curious as to what it entailed. Enjoy!

Stockholm: A Photo Recap

In a nutshell, Stockholm is beautiful, I had a great time exploring the city and I definitely want to go back and visit again. Here are a few photos:

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Posted by Danny Dover

Learning SEO can be a daunting experience. To make this process a little easier, I have broken down my method for learning SEO into bite-sized chunks that can be completed in 30 minutes or less. I have also tried to create a mechanism to make it easier to get help and expand personal networks.

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Twitter Participation:
I think the best benefit of learning SEO is getting to know the SEO community. As an experiment to facilitate this, I propose the following. While you complete the tasks below, feel free to share your progress on Twitter with the Hash Tag #30MinuteSEO. This will make it easier to find people who are doing the same thing and willing to help you. :-)

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Learn the Basics:
Your first group of tasks will teach you the fundamentals of Search Engine Optimization. You get to start slow by reading some helpful articles.

30 Minute Tasks:

• Read the new Beginner"s Guide to SEO (30 mins) - This is the table of contents for the upcoming revision to the Beginner"s Guide to SEO. (Note the ‘Parts’ are links to full articles.) I recommend this version over its predecessor because its material is more focused on today"s SEO landscape.

Example Tweet on Twitter: Finished reading the Beginner"s Guide to SEO http://bit.ly/19cBGq #30MinuteSEO

• Read Google’s Starter Guide to SEO (30 mins) - Isn’t reading two beginner guides to SEO redundant? The information might be, but this will teach you to recognize and appreciate Google’s perspective on SEO. (As a side note, notice the juxtaposition between the message Google is saying and the SEO unfriendly URL structure of this page. This is your first chance to study the difference between what Google says and how Google acts. Oh snap!)

Example Tweet: Finished reading Google’s SEO Starter Guide http://bit.ly/Lv4GU #30MinuteSEO

• Build a Basic Website (4 sets of 30 mins) - The Beginner"s Checklist for Learning SEO will guide you through the process of building a basic website and teach you the basic SEO skills you need. (I apologize for linking to my own work. I wouldn’t recommend it if I didn’t believe it was worthy.)

Example Tweet: Does anyone have any SEO advice for my new website at www.example.com #30MinuteSEO


Start Using Your Skills:
Your second group of tasks requires applying the theories you just learned. These tasks are presented as SEO challenges that will utilize everything you learned in the previous section and depend on your own creativity. Note: The work for these will take about 30 minutes. The time it takes for the content to actually get indexed may be much longer.

30 Minute Tasks:

• Rank for a long tail phrase (30 mins) - Choose a long tail keyword phrase and figure out how to rank for it. When I did this exercise nearly two years ago, I chose “fat people falling”. Please be aware that the subject manner and the language of the ranking page may be NSFW. It was written for a very specific audience and may be offensive to others. Hint: See if you can figure out how I got this page to rank with only one inbound link.
  

Example Tweet: Look what I rank #1 for: “Orange Jean Jacket” #30MinuteSEO

• Rank in the top 10 in a local search (2 sets of 30 mins) - Find an actual small business that you appreciate and volunteer to do SEO at no cost. When I did this two years ago, I chose the preschool I originally attended and helped them rank in their area. Hint: Read David Mihm’s Local Search Ranking Factors

Example Tweet: If you are in the Seattle area, be sure to check out Example Pastry #30MinuteSEO

• Rank an image (30 mins) - The image vertical is one of the most confusing search realms to work in. Dive in and see if you can get a relevant image to rank for a phrase of your choice. Hint: Read Google Image Search Ranking Factors

Example Tweet: Look at the third image result on bing.com for “example”. Awesome! #30MinuteSEO

• Rank in the top 10 for a popular term on YouTube (30 mins) - Compared to the search engines, ranking in YouTube is a piece of cake. Try to rank for a semi-competitive term with a worthwhile video. When I originally did this, I ranked for a popular culture phrase and my relevant video made me $10,000 theoretical dollars. Hint: Read YouTube Ranking Factors

Example Tweet: I now rank #4 on YouTube for “Example” #30MinuteSEO

• Outrank Google (3 sets of 30 mins) - This is an exercise with the domain-related metrics. Find a REALLY long tail phrase that Google ranks #1 for and see if you can create a page that can outweigh the domain strength of the big G. I have been experimenting with Google"s spam filters and I am seeing if I can outrank Google Webmaster Central forums with my awesome website What Is The Best Thing To Do With a Colt with Five Hooves.com

Example Tweet: You think SEO is difficult? I outrank Google for “Example Toe Jam” #30MinuteSEO

• Pitch SEO to a real client (2 sets of 30 mins) - This is the hardest but possibly most important task on this list. Go out and find a small business and sell them on your ability to do SEO. You will likely learn a lot about SEO and yourself in this process.

Continue Learning:

After completing the tasks above, it is a good idea to spend 30 minutes a day reading SEO blogs - I recommend the following:

1. Search Engine Land - Authoritative up to minute search engine coverage.
2. Search Engine Roundtable - High quality coverage of SEO as it evolves.
3. SEOmoz Blog - SEO blog with a focus on teaching SEO. (Disclaimer - SEOmoz pays my bills and may have been the bearer of my first child. The jury is out.)
4. Sphinn - A fair amount of fluff, but generally the first source to break inner-industry news.
5. Alltop SEO - Great source for SEO News. Highly recommended the SEOmoz community in the comments below this post.

Example Tweet on Twitter: Enjoying this post at searchengineland.com/post/example/ #30MinuteSEO


Study Advanced SEO:
This group of tasks has less direct return on investment but can lead to big wins. I try to complete these at least once a month.

30 Minute Tasks:

• Review ultra competitive Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs) (30 mins) - Watch the progress of SERPs like “Buy Viagra”, “Real Estate” and “Payday Loans”. Most of the techniques used to rank for these are Black Hat but it is important to know what you might be up against.

• Find a site that outranks Wikipedia and try to figure out why (2 sets of 30 mins) - This will likely help you with later work. Wikipedia’s domain strength is incredible. Find and study the sites that outrank it because they generally use the best SEO tactics.

• Attend search conference parties (4 sets of 30 mins) - Don’t get distracted by the people exchanging short term tricks and tips. Instead, mingle and start to talk to some of the most interesting people you will ever meet.

Extra Tasks:
These tasks are more difficult and only indirectly apply to SEO

• Write up an SEO-oriented resume (2 sets of 30 mins) - From what I have seen, when businesses are facing hard economic times they look inward to see what current assets they can maximize. This means that SEO is a great skill set to have when companies are looking to attract free search engine traffic. Hint: You can add your resume to the SEOmoz Marketplace

Example Tweet: Check out my resume at the SEOmoz Marketpace http://bit.ly/APg9j #30MinuteSEO

• Review HTML Tags (30 mins) - In the same way that the typewriter dictated the course of keyboards, (the QWERTY layout was originally designed to prevent collisions on typewriters) HTML dictates the course of the internet. Become an HTML expert and your skills will apply for the rest of your life.

• Sign up for Social Media (30 mins) - If you haven’t already, sign up for Twitter, Facebook and any other social media sites that you find interesting. Start building your personal brand and make it work for you.

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If you have any other tasks that you think are worth sharing, feel free to post them in the comments. This post is very much a work in progress. As always, feel free to e-mail me or send me a private message if you have any suggestions on how I can make my posts more useful. If that"s not your style, feel free to contact me on Twitter (DannyDover) Thanks!

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Posted by randfish

I read two blog posts this week that touch on a fascinating subject, and both are worthy of perusal:

1. How Google Profiles SEOs from Wolf Howl
2. Google Openly Profiles SEOs as Criminals from Outspoken Media

The basic premise is that Google"s web spam team, a division of their search quality unit, is especially aggressive about researching the backgrounds & projects of individuals in the SEO and webmaster space. These "operators of interest" have their activities monitored with greater scrutiny than the web community as a whole, and find that the rules/standards may be applied quite differently to their websites and web marketing efforts than those of their less "on the SEO radar" peers.

As it turns out, the subject of these particular anecdotes, Michael Gray"s Viral Conversations and Rae Hoffman"s BBGeeks.com, are not alone. SEOmoz itself has, several times, come under similar scrutiny and requests. Several years ago, for example, we were warned by a representative from one of the major engines that maintaining live links on our user profile pages (see, for example, Rishi Lakhani"s) would cause potential problems. To compensate for this, we shifted policy so that only after earning 100 mozpoints (garnered through commenting, thumbs and submission of YOUmoz posts) would we remove the nofollow from the external profile link.

We were recently also asked to remove Google"s PageRank score from our SEOmoz toolbar. We have an update coming in early August that will take that functionality out of our mozBar, but add some other cool features to make up for the loss. Obviously, many thousands of companies and organizations employ PageRank in their toolbar and applications, but because SEOmoz falls under an "operators of interest" designation, we"re likely to continue to receive scrutiny of this kind.

I strongly suspect that Google gets a lot of perceived value from this endeavor in at least one of two ways (and possibly both):

1. The 80/20 Rule of Spam: 80% of the manipulation that hurts Google"s results is caused by 20% of the manipulative SEOs. This 20% likely has some correlation with the "operators of interest." By keeping tabs on some meaningful chunk of the manipulators, Google can prevent a portion from affecting their results.
2. Public Relations: I"d venture a guess that 50% of active SEOs keep abreast of where, when and how Google takes action against their peers and the messaging they send out. Much of the other 50% hears the most important of these "through the grapevine." When big targets are taken down or warned, it filters out into the broader sphere of search marketing. The recent flap on PageRank Sculpting is an excellent example - a single interview answer during an event led to companies considering changing their entire implementation of a long-held best practice.

Personally, I think that while it"s valid to register dissatisfaction with the inequity of how the rules are applied, these complaints are unlikely to have a meaningful impact on the way Google does business. Instead, I think that this topic presents a number of takeaways for business owners and SEO operators:

• Decide Whether it Pays to Become a "Well-Known" SEO
  Reputation in the search marketing field is excellent for growing your potential client base, getting more and better job opportunities, increasing your networking potential and, of course, boosting external social validation (the pinnacle of Maslow"s Hierarchy and an udeniable human quality). However, it can hurt how Google perceives the "intent" of your marketing activities. Link building practices that could pass for "buzz building" might be considered manipulative and straying into gray/black hat territory is likely to be considered "purposeful" and thus subject to longer, harsher penalization (since Google presumes you "know what you"re doing").
• If Your Company Engages an SEO, Make a Smart Disclosure Decision
  At SEOmoz, we request that our clients provide references and public testimonials (and permit us to use them in case studies). As a result, we have to be exceptionally careful about all the SEO initiatives that we recommend. CSS badges with "almost" matching anchor text isn"t good enough. Footer links with optimized anchors are a danger zone. Rewarding user-generated content with links in a blatantly/manipulatively messaged fashion is off the table. Link buying? Forget about it. Many other tactics fall into this arena. We, along with many well-known, transparent SEO companies have to abide by a stricter set of rules than those who operate behind the veil of non-disclosure.
• If You"re "On the Radar," Carefully Consider Your Projects
  Many of the most well-know gray/black hat SEO operators choose very competitive niches that are high risk and high reward. These folks regularly complain that they receive undue scrutiny compared to others in the same field. And while, yes, it"s unfair that Google penalized your site and links and left your equally spammy competitor unscathed, it"s also to be expected. Operators of Interest are like the daughter that"s always getting into trouble. Sure, her sister might have been equally late after curfew on Saturday night, but she doesn"t have a history of mischief.
• Think About Intent Wherever You Practice SEO
  Google"s Terms of Service and public messages are merely the beginning of the "rules to play by." It may be frustrating to imagine a massive, unspoken set of guidelines by which you must abide in the SEO field, but if you can justify your moves with the mantra "I"m doing this for engines, not users" and the caveat "I"d happily show this process to someone on Google"s web spam team," you"ll be much safer in the long run.
• Prepare for Greater Scrutiny in Competitive Arenas
  Operating in the PPC world (Porn, Pills and Casinos)? Or even the high-value, high visibility verticals one echelon below these (travel, finance, online education, web hosting, etc.)? Prepare to have both greater competition and a greater incentive to spam (because many others are engaging in it). Unfortuately, if you"re an "Operator of Interest," these fields are even more challenging because you need to maintain anonymity or stick closer to the guidelines than your lesser-known peers.
• Plan to Be "Reported" for any Gray/Black Hat Activity
  Google receives many, many thousands of spam reports, both through webmaster tools and their public spam report form every month (maybe every week at this point). While the SEO world complains bitterly about those who talk about manipulative practices on their blogs, the vast majority of all spam reports are known only to Google (and are certainly far more damaging, more specific and more useful) than what happens in the public blogosphere. It"s in the interests of your competitors to spam report you - and the more visible you are, the greater the chances you"ll be reported. At every conference I"ve ever been to, representatives from Google receive in-person spam reports from SEOs - this is not a unique practice and those who would engage in anything that crosses the line should expect to get reported.

Hopefully, this information/advice will help make you better at understanding the risks and benefits of publicity and of Google"s operations in the realm of web spam. I"ll make a rare theologic reference:

Grant to us the serenity of mind to accept that which cannot be changed; courage to change that which can be changed, and wisdom to know the one from the other.

I don"t think we (the SEO community) can change Google"s approach to web spam or the ways in which they apply standards differently to different parties, but I do think we can accept it as the way things are and use that knowledge to make better decisions about how we do our jobs.

BTW - I don"t want to suggest that I or SEOmoz is upset about being on an "operators of interest" list. Many great privileges accompany the increased scrutiny and we"re both grateful and humbled by the opportunities and kindnesses shown to us across the search community.

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Posted by great scott!

In this interview from SMX Advanced 2009, Rand talks to mobile search guru Cindy Krum of Rank-Mobile.

Cindy starts off by noting the excellent SEO Audits panel at SMX Advanced, saying it"s one of the best sessions she"s seen.  Fortunately if you missed it there are lots of great write ups on the session (Lisa Barone"s recap has lots of good links in it).

The discussion then moves to CIndy"s true area of expertise, mobile search. In particular she reviews some of the things she discussed in her presentation on Adwords for Mobile, including why you should treat the iPhone as a separate ad group, whether you should consider traditional WAP browsers, the difficulties of monetizing mobile ads, and more. 

Cindy"s a true expert on this stuff, so if you play in the mobile space or you"re just curious about it, this interview is definitely for you. For more, you can read CIndy"s blog, or follow her on Twitter (@suzzicks)

SEOmoz Interview - Cindy Krum on Adwords for Mobile from Scott Willoughby on Vimeo.

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Posted by RobOusbey

As diligent Search Marketers know, it"s quite a good idea to get links from strong/trusted sites pointing to yours and combine this with building a single link or two from a large number of smaller websites.

For some people, this second part can seem the most daunting - whilst there is a person you can talk to if you want a link on every page of timesonline.co.uk, there"s nobody you can call or email to get a link from every small website or blog. The difficulty of building such links is compounded when you realise that this work should be done using anchor text of the term you want to rank for.

Rand mentions domain diversity in this Whiteboad Friday post. Here"s a quick primer for increasing the domain diversity of your backlink profile.

1 - Linkbait

Build it, and they will come. And if it"s good enough, they"ll share it with other people by linking to it. This category includes any content created and published specifically to attract links. The various forms of linkbait cover perhaps the most popular techniques of getting a natural looking link from a wide number of sites that has been used in recent years. To make it extra useful, linkbait can work particularly well for targeting particular keywords - read more in the later points.

For a detailed primer in the ways of the "bait, you can"t really do better than SEOmoz"s Viral Marketing and Linkbait guide.

2 - Widgets

Since badges & widgets don"t fall under the description of linkbait used above, they can be considered quite distinctly. They exist to give value to the page they are embedded on. Links included within them typically take the form of a "credit" that doesn"t need to be followed by a user to enjoy the widget/badge - but the search engines" algorithms barely notice the difference.

Create something cool (and cool doesn"t necessarily need to be complicated) that people want to embed on their site, and you can watch the links roll in. This works particularly well for getting your branded terms in the anchor text.

3 - Press and Publicity

Great PR (or, in fact, terrible PR) can bring links to a site, without you actually having to create any specific content for the campaign. Make sure that your press / publicity mentions an official website; if people hear about your company in the media and the story is interesting enough to share with others, then you"ve increased the chance that they"ll link to your site at the same time. (Plus, each TV/radio/newspaper that covers your story may also link to you.)

4 - Affiliate Schemes

There are a number of question marks over the existence, technical aspects and transparency of "SEO friendly affiliate schemes". However, a well thought-out scheme will benefit you as a retailer as well as your affiliates.

Allowing the affiliates to link to you from a variety of their sites, as well as from other blogs, forums, etc., will contribute to increased domain diversity for each of your product pages.

5 - Customer / User Outreach

Last year, Rand"s very first headsmacking tip was to ask people who"d bought from you to link to you.

You don"t just need to be an e-commerce site to do this though. If you manage a forum or other site which people can register on, then drop them an email after their first post, for instance, with an invite to link to you. You may even consider asking your users for their website/homepage/blog when they first sign up, so that you can filter them and only email people with a website. (Or, with a little more work, only email people with DmT > 2.0 :D )

6 - Have broad appeal

You can avoid reducing the number of potential sites that can link to you by being appealing to as wide a range of people as possible.

For example, if you"re a blogger regularly writing about sewing, try dropping the odd post about knitting or other crafts just to help broaden your potential for sites interested in linking to you.

Likewise, unnecessary NSFW content on your site is likely to reduce the propensity of other sites to link to you. (Of course, it might make others more likely to link, but there"s a balance you have to figure out.)

Getting the Anchor Text You Want

A couple of head-smackers coming up, but use these tips wisely to build relevance for the terms you want.

7 - Keywords in the URL

A significant proportion of links to any page will just use the page"s URL as the anchor text, so make sure that the slug already includes the keywords. (If you"re doing your on-page SEO properly, this should be a given.) Remember that if you"re going to create a short link (e.g., for Twitter), this link will get republished in a variety of places, so use a service such as bit.ly that lets you include keywords in the short link.

E.g., for the page http://www.example.com/products/shoes-and-clothes/trainers, you should probably try to use bit.ly/trainers

8 - Strong launch with good title

When a strong account launches your linkbait on any social media site, it gives it the best chance of getting seen by more people. A well chosen title can also increase visibility of your content within that site, but it can be even more useful than that.

When people link to your content, they may often use the title of the page. However, when linking to content they found through a social media site (such as your linkbait pieces) they often use the same text that was used on that site. (This makes sense; if it was a great, well crafted headline, people should want to use it too.)

So, make sure your clever Digg/Reddit/etc headlines contain the keywords you"re after.

Finally, when I told my other half that I was going to write a blog post today about domain diversity, I asked her if she had any ideas how to get lots of people to link to your content. Her answer was "Put a picture of a kitten on it." Well, it"s worth a shot, I guess.....

(Via Cute Things in Bed.)

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Posted by rebecca

Happy June, evvabody! Here"s what happened last month in case you were bedridden with swine flu:

Best Blog Posts in May 2009

1. If I Could Go Back In Time & Give Myself Some Advice, This Would Be It. If Rand could turn back tiiiiiime...if he could find a wayyyyyyyyy...Rand hops into his DeLorean and gives his 2007 self some advice, including "Use email marketing," "Invest in your affiliate program," and "Don"t try to rip off the Libyans."
2. 10 Resources That Changed How I View the Internet. Danny shares some stuff that"s substantially changed his view of the Internet. (Spoiler alert: his view of the Internet largely consists of porn.)
3. URL Rewrites and 301 Redirects - How Does It All Work? New hire Jen gets all Mr. Wizard on us and gives us a handy step-by-step of how URL rewrites and 301 redirects work, complete with lovely visual aids.
4. Rewriting the Beginner"s Guide Part X: Measuring and Tracking Success. Rand has finally completed the Beginner"s Guide series of blog posts. Now all we have to do is slap that beeyotch together and add an appendix and Bob"s your uncle.
5. Whiteboard Friday - Link Farming. Rand talks about why link farming is bad, m"kay.

Best YOUmoz Posts in May 2009:

1. The Real Power of Twitter. Dr. Pete knows what the REAL power of Twitter is, and he shares it with all of us. (It"s people! Twitter is peeeeeee-ple!)
2. Weapons-Grade SEO Part 1: Laying the Foundation. Colewhitelaw teaches us how to create a "profoundly optimized" site that"s largely self-sustaining.
3. Utilizing Twitter in a Link Building Campaign. Nicchenet shares some link building tips the ol" Twitter way.
4. The Seven Deadly Sins of Company Blogging. Chris Lister debuts a sinfully good list about common blogging missteps, and he tops it all off with Gwyneth Paltrow"s head in a box. (Okay, maybe not that last part.)
5. Lost in the Ocean of Ghost Writers. SEMWarrior shares his struggle to find a quality ghost writer. I know what he means, what with them always spontaneously bursting into flames and turning into skeletons and whatnot...wait, that"s Ghost Rider. Oh. That explains a lot, actually.

Tool Updates and Launches in May 2009:

• We beefed up our Rank Checker tool into a new Rank Tracker, which allows you to track the rankings of various URLs over time. You can download previous rankings into CSV and receive rank alerts via email. Huzzah!
• We had some issues with the Linkscape API as well as some server issues this month. Sorry about that--things should be more stable now (we"re now giving Timmy 5 Red Bulls a day, so that human-powered hamster wheel should spin more continuously from now on).
• This isn"t a tool, but last month we contacted various people in the search industry about what they think are Google"s most crucial search engine ranking factors, and we"ve just received their responses so expect an updated Search Ranking Factors guide within the next month!

Monthly YOUmoz Contest Winner

Last month the monthly YOUmoz blog theme was social media marketing. We received a good chunk of submissions (many of which were about Twitter) that I"ve listed below:  

• Putting Out to Score on Social Media
• The Right Way to Leverage Social Media
• The Real Power of Twitter
• Quantifying Social Media: Cost Per Conversion
• Social Media Sites the Future of SEO/RM or Just a Fad?
• Do Twitter Accounts Need Scale?
• How to Utilize Twitter Trends for Amazing Blog Traffic
• Utilizing Twitter in a Link Building Campaign
• Companies Playing on the Social Media Playground

Wow, look at all those entries! We had a lot of great posts, but there can be only one winner this month. So, without further ado, paging Dr. Pete, Dr. Pete, you"re wanted in the winner"s circle so we can feed you a carrot and brush your glossy coat. Pete wrote a great, simple, straightforward and practical post about the best way to leverage Twitter, and not only did it get promoted to the main blog, it won him a lovely $50 Amazon.com gift certificate. Congratulations, Pete!

YOUmoz Theme for June 2009

And the YOUmoz theme for June 2009 is (drumroll please)...case studies (I"ll display our nifty badge once it"s been deployed)! We"ve kept it simple--all we want is to hear some great case studies from you guys. Whether you"ve got a personal anecdote or you have a client example, please share them with the SEOmoz community. We want to hear both success stories and failed attempts--submit them all! They should all prove to be a great learning experience (besides, sharing is good, as we all learned in kindergarten). Start cooking up your blog posts and submit them today!

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Posted by great scott!

In this interview live from the floor of SMX Advanced 2009, Rand talks to Lyndsay Walker from Canada"s Web Shop about Microsoft"s new search engine, Bing.

Lindsay offers some good insight into how SEOs should go about learning how best to optimize for Bing, as well as some of the nice features it has for international geo-targeting.

SEOmoz Interview - Lyndsay Walker on Bing from Scott Willoughby on Vimeo.

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Posted by rebecca

Stories, news, and other notable items from the past 3 weeks:

• Enquisite launches Enquisite Campaign for general users, enabling folks to improve their organic search rankings by capturing real-time search data and providing ROI tracking. It"d be cool to hear feedback from any of you monkeys if you"ve tried out the service.
• Andrew Goodman follows up Part I of his "Is Guy Kawasaki Singlehandedly Ruining Twitter?" post with Part II. Tune in for Part III: Is Guy Kawasaki Rendering Women Infertile Because of His Tweets?
• Lyndoman tells us to do "smash a brick into the face" link building. It"s a great pairing with "kick you in the balls" viral marketing and "spit in your mouth" analytics.
• Rand is interviewed by Wildfire Marketing Group. My boss gets interviewed so often that I wonder what"s left to talk about. Tune in for next week, where I ask Rand burning questions about his feet size, what side of the bed he sleeps on, and whether he"s an innie or an outie.
• In case you haven"t noticed, Digg is replacing their shouts feature with the options to share via email/Facebook/Twitter. What the hell is the point in having a friends list on Digg then? Make up your mind, you stupidly addictive site.
• DuckDuckGo, a new search engine, shares its most common queries. Unsurprisingly, sex, porn and boobs are common staples.
• Cesar Serna releases his first iPhone app, a PPC calculator, thus making paid search nerdiness available on the go.
• Via MyWifeQuitHerJob.com, here are things about their business that didn"t go according to plan. I"m assuming "Pantsless Fridays" fizzled pretty quickly.
• Cre8asite teaches us how to avoid Wordpress duplicate content problems with Google.
• Andrew Girdwood says we should be thanking Matt Cutts, not criticizing him. Okay, thank you, Matt!

• SEO Optimise provides 41 ultimate tips from SMX London 2009, thus saving you the cost of attending. Thanks for that!
• You don"t know jack about online PR...well, according to datadial, that is.
• Cre8asite gives the middle finger to the Arial font and makes out with Verdana. Arial gets all emo and starts posting angsty videos to YouTube.
• According to Wired, search sucks but Microsoft is here to help. Indeed, Bing launched recently and has already proved to be very useful.
• Andy Beal blogs about how 74% of employees agree their social media shenanigans can ruin their company"s reputation. Also, regarding Sex Panther cologne, 60% of the time it works every time.
• Gather "round the campfire, kids! It"s time for a brief history of social media!
• Via Search Engine Land, here are 7 reasons to keep bidding on your brand terms.

• Your "awwww" clip of the day: a banker catches ducklings hopping off the roof of the bank and guides them to safety.
• DirJournal provides us with 6 classic articles every SEO should read. Just missing the list is Rand"s post about why the meta keywords tag is a top ranking factor and should be used by everyone :P.
• WellWrittenWords has the ultimate list of web tracking applications. Now you can track evathang!

YOUmoz entries:

• Looking for Feedback from the SEM Community on Our Business Model. Kenja asks the YOUmoz community for their input on his website that offsets carbon footprints for businesses and their shipments.
• Does Google Care About Legitimacy Anymore? DustinMa wonders if Google cares about damaging and unfounded reputation management results like Rip Off Report.
• The Seven Deadly Sins of Company Blogging. Chris Lister ties seven common blogging pitfalls into the 7 deadly sins.
• Piggybacking Off Of Survivor. Imarker talks about how he leveraged interest for Coach Wade of Survivor to bring traffic to his soccer website.
• GFGI. Yoshimi says enough is enough and that lazy SEO noobs should stop bugging people for answers to easy, basic questions and to just go f*cking Google it.
• URL Rewriting: Increase Organic Traffic By Using Dynamic URLs That Look Static. Adwb gives a lesson on URL rewriting and provides some nice examples of bad URLs that need fixing.
• Quantifying Social Media: Cost Per Conversion. Mitch Turck talks about the cost per conversion and cost per acquisition for social media marketing and campaigns.
• Social Media Sites the Future of SEO/RM or Just a Fad? DustinMa wonders about the longevity of social media marketing.
• Do Twitter Accounts Need Scale? The Lost Agency analyzes Twitter and wonders if it can begin to replace other paid campaigns.
• How to Utilize Twitter Trends for Amazing Blog Traffic. Kandice Day shares how she uses Twitter Trends to bring traffic to her blog.
• utilizing twitter in a link building campaign
• Companies Playing on the Social Media Playground. IGoMogul wonders if social media renders corporate websites irrelevant/obsolete.
• Can Rand Do No Wrong? RoryCarlyle ponders why almost nobody thumbs Rand down on our site.
• Getting Value from Search Conferences. StatMatt shares ways to get the most out of attending costly search conferences.
• Was the Google IO Android Phone Giveaway a Paid Links Violation? MM Agency wonders if Google"s recent Android phone giveaway was technically a paid link scheme to bribe recipients to blog about the phone and link to it.
• Hiding From Your Competitors. Teifion shares a tactic from Mikkel deMib about how to hide your site from your competitors.
• The Cookie Conundrum. DanaDV wonders about the proper way to handle a cookie issue with his geographic websites.
• Five Web Writing Tips That Pay My Bills. Webwordslinger shares 5 tips that will improve your writing on the web.

Best of YOUmoz:

• Weapons-Grade SEO Part 1: Laying the Foundation. Colewhitelaw shares valuable strategies on how to evolve your site into a "living ecosystem of link strength" to help grow your business.
• Utilizing Twitter in a Link Building Campaign. Nicchenet shares a cool strategy on how to use Twitter to build relevant contacts and obtain links.
• 7 Reasons Why You Might Not Be Making Money As An SEO. JoelJonathan lays down some tough love and shares reasons why you"re not bringing in the big bucks as an Internet marketer.

New additions to the SEOmoz Marketplace:

Featured job postings:

• SEO manager for BlueGlue in West London, UK
• Contracted penalty remediation for a webmaster in NY
• Director of online marketing for ROBLOX in Redwood City, CA
• Senior SEO consultant/head of search for Blueclaw Media in Leeds, UK
• Organic SEO specialist for Bloosky in San Clemente, CA
• B2B SEO consultant/client services account manager for Search Engine Partner in West Palm Beach, FL
• Inside sales position for Imagine Consultation in Atlanta, GA
• UK-based freelance SEO copywriter/article writer
• Web designer and programmer for Medex Arabia in Damascus, Syria
• Online SEO & PPC marketer for shiply.com in London, UK
• SEO specialist for MSH.net in Cologne, Germany
• SEO director for ClickFuel in Boston, MA
• Senior SEO manager for ABCNews.com in New York, NY
• Account representative for Marcel Media in Chicago, IL
• PPC campaign manager for Astonish Results in Warwick, RI

Featured companies:

United States:

• Efelle Media in Seattle, WA
• The Sayre group in the US
• RescuedSites.com in Lockport, NY
• Cartisien Interactive in Seattle, WA 
• Raisor Marketing in CA
• CB Web Innovations in Burlington, NC
• Acsys Interactive in Farmington, CT
• Tampa SEO Training Academy in Tampa, FL
• Coalmarch Productions in NC
• Search Engine Partner in West Palm Beach, FL
• SEO Treo in Santa Monica, CA
• Frankel Coaching Group in Coral Springs, FL
• Segnant Technologies in Irving, TX
• Webhead Interactive in Tampa, FL
• Remote Backup Systems in the US
• Mankato Web Design in Minneapolis, MN
• Polar Design in Boston, MA
• Justmake Media in Columbia, SC
• Pacific Tech SEO in CA
• WhatsTheBigIdea.com in Saugerties, NY
• Ethos Digital in Falls Church, VA
• Piepho Media in Edina, MN
• Siatomic in Greenwich, CT
• HEROweb Marketing and Design in Springfield, OR
• SEO conductor in Austin, TX
• Astonish Results in Warwick, RI
• Hidden Millionaire in Madison, MS
• IS Support in Houston, TX

UK / Europe:

• BlueGlue in Reading, UK
• Creare Group in Leicestershire, UK
• Exponetial in France, UK and the US
• OxfordSEO.com in Oxford, UK
• Network Marketing in Leeds, UK
• WAM-Referencement in Lyon, France
• WebDistortion in Belfast, Ireland
• Weborganique Referencement in France
• Lavora Marketing in Cheshire, UK
• Periscopix in London, UK

Asia:

• Asia Affiliate in Singapore
• WebReinvent in India
• Activa Group in Damascus, Syria
• Intellact in Mumbai, India
• 123-SEO in Kalyani, India
• DesignersX in Chandiagrh, India
• Indian SEO in Bangalore, India

Australia/New Zealand:

• Optimum Results in Wellington, New Zealand

Miscellaneous:

• VisitorCamp located frickin" everywhere

Featured resumes:

Currently looking:

• Donny Gamble is looking for clients who are in need of SEO and SEM work.
• Julian Duc is an Internet marketing specialist who is seeking a challenging SEO/Internet marketing position anywhere in the world.
• Brian DeLoach is a web developer and designer with a focus on SEO and information architecture.  

Happily employed:

• Vikram is an SEO for Gold Crest Software who is looking for SEO or SEM positions.
• Muhammad Al-Sharifi works for Activa Syria.
• Juan Jose Calvo Ramos is an SEO professional with seven years of experience in SEO, SEM and Internet marketing.

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Posted by great scott!

David Mihm, Local Search guru and author of the new Local Search Ranking Factors, stops by Whiteboard Studios to discuss how business owners can get listed in Google"s Local Search Results.

Despite how powerful local and geo-targeted search has become, only a tiny fraction of businesses actually claim and verify their listing with Google (via the Google Local Business Center). The vast majority of listings are cobbled together from crawl data and information from trusted sources like the Better Business Bureau and other business directories such as InfoUSA, Acxiom, and Localeze.

Watch this video to learn how the engines build their local business listings and what you need to do to ensure you show up when your local customers perform searches.

SEOmoz Whiteboard Friday - Local Search Inclusion with David Mihm from Scott Willoughby on Vimeo.

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Posted by randfish

It"s been a long time since we had a differential diagnosis post here on SEOmoz, but we"ve been getting lots of comments and emails requesting some mysteries, so here goes:

#1 - Who, Exactly, is Awesome, and Why?

I agree with the sentiment of the second result, Google is an awesome product, but this ranking is very bizarre given the content and links pointing to this page/site. The other engines certainly don"t agree that it belongs anywhere near the top of the SERPs.

#2 - Bing and the Hash

In the past, search engines have been known to ignore the hash in URLs and treat internal anchors as invisible to their link graph. While Bing has done a lot of things right and earned Microsoft some of the best praise they"ve received in years on the search front, treating internal anchors as separate URLs could cause a lot of problems. In this example, it"s a relevancy issue, but in other cases it could seriously screw with canonicalization in the link graph (and force webmasters to re-think their use of the hash in URLs).

#3 - Where are the Cheap Books?

The Half.Ebay.com URL is an odd one to have at the top of these results. Not only is there a much more relevant "books" page at http://books.half.ebay.com, there"s also no mention of the word cheap anywhere here (and precious little anchor text pointing to this page with that term either). It almost makes me wonder if Google"s doing something with synonyms to rank this page here.

OK - now it"s your turn to solve the mysteries above. Please reward valiant efforts and great insight with thumbs up!

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Posted by randfish

After my post last night and the many follow ups from around the SEO sphere, I (along with most observers from the world of search) strongly anticipated clarifying statements from Google"s representatives at the SMX Advanced conference. Unfortunately, there"s very little to report. The best I have comes from secondary sources, albeit relatively trustworthy ones:

• A large number of people queried the head of Google"s web spam team, Matt Cutts, about the issue. Responses ranged from "no comment" to "the PR team would like me to stay away from that."
• Another member of Google"s team noted that PageRank sculpting on unimportant pages like "register," "login," "privacy policy," etc. is OK and shouldn"t hurt your site.
• A great many webmasters and SEOs are still shocked by the announcement because as recently as the last few days, they"ve still been seeing positive effects when employing the tactic.

The official line from yesterday that PageRank that was thought to be "conserved" by nofollowing unimportant internal links now "evaporates" rather than flowing to the remaining live links is among the most talked-about and, in my view, confusing subjects the SEO world has faced in a long time. It"s very unlike Google to publicly message something in such an offhand fashion without accepting and answering questions on the subject more deeply.

This issue is compounded by many SEOs here who entirely disbelieve the messaging and think it was either a slip-up or purposeful misdirection. The evidence most frequently cited is the video Matt Cutts released only a few days prior to SMX Advanced indicating that while PR sculpting may not be the best activity, it"s certainly OK to use it and you won"t "evaporate" PageRank by placing a nofollowed link on your page. This video was well covered in this Huomah blog post:

Right away he talks about it being your right to do as you please with your website, including controlling “how the PageRank flows around within your site”.  For those that are still unconvinced that PR truly does flow around a site, it should clear that up for ya.

He then mentions that it “is not the first thing that I would work on”. That he would work on “getting more links” and developing “higher quality content”. That is interesting on a few levels;

1. While internal/external linking is important for your on-page SEO, one has to consider the ROI for any given SEO activity; no budget is infinite. All things NOT being equal, working on more links might be a better use of staff time.

2. Part of any modern link building/SEO program is content (creation, syndication, placement) and one should be putting these aspects fairly high in the activity pecking order.

We read about all the finer details of the SEO process all the time in this industry – but rarely do we hear about resource management. One has to think about SEO in terms of cost efficacy of an activity as there are budgetary considerations to be had.

This is excellent advice, and consistent with Google"s previous messaging around link sculpting - it"s not the highest ROI activity for SEO, but you should use it as you see fit and where you find benefit. The sudden change during yesterday"s session has certainly caused some to question the credibility of the statement. As I noted in yesterday"s post on this topic, a modification of this scale (affecting nearly 3% of all links on the web) should have had a massive impact that webmasters worldwide could feel in their site"s indexation and rankings, as well as see in the toolbar PageRank update from last week. As neither of those have been reported, the new statement"s credibility is in even more doubt.

To paraphrase an SEO I respect a great deal (but whose permission for attribution I didn"t get):

Google is frustrated with PR sculpting and they"re seeing too much of it. Thus, they"re using this messaging to try to stop people from using it as much. If you"re a good SEO and you know what you"re doing and you run the tests, I bet it still works fine. It"s just that Google wants non-advanced webmasters to stop screwing around with their link graph and stay away from excessively using nofollow in ways that hurt indexing and relevance.

I find this to be an exceptionally good insight and the argument I personally subscribe to. Just as Google"s messaging about dynamic URL rewriting was overly cautious and their advice about paid links is a bit overzealous, so too is this message about link sculpting. These messages don"t mean we can"t rewrite dynamic URLs to be static, don"t mean that we can"t engage in link building that has some commercial crossover (so long as it"s not direct link buying) and, most recently, don"t mean that we can"t sculpt with nofollow. They"re simply warnings to be cautious and be aware that Google is watching these issues and worries about them - fair enough.

The last point I"ll make is that, like Danny Sullivan, I worry when Google changes messaging around SEO activities and best practices. To, in his words, "lose backwards compatibility" is extremely frustrating for site owners, SEOs and everyday webmasters who only occasionally dip their toes into the SEO field. It"s very simple for those SEOs who want to sculpt with nofollow to switch over to something like iFrames blocked by robots.txt (or cookie-based links or Flash or external Javascript calls, etc.) to "hide" links from Google that they show to visitors and receive the same benefits. It"s also frustrating that, if true, this now means one can sabotage a competitor"s SEO by adding many nofollowed links in comments or other UGC areas (by "evaporating" percentages of the PageRank that will flow).

Let"s hope that clearer messages on this issue emerge soon and that they resonate with the hundreds of tests many SEOs are surely performing on this subject as I type. Inconsistency builds distrust and all of us want Google"s messages to be trustworthy, even if they slip up from time to time (after all, who among us hasn"t?).

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Posted by randfish

Today"s article from Search Engine Land: Google Loses "Backwards Compatibility" on Paid Link Blocking & PageRank Sculpting is a must read, but it"s frustratingly hard to understand Google"s position shift on the topics. In this post I"ll talk briefly about the "change" and how it may affect webmasters and SEO best practices, as well as examining some of the bizarreness that surrounds this issue.

First off, an excerpt from SELand:

So today at SMX Advanced, sculpting was being discussed, and then Matt Cutts dropped a bomb shell that it no longer works to help flow more PageRank to the unblocked pages. Again — and being really simplistic here — if you have $10 in authority to spend on those ten links, and you block 5 of them, the other 5 aren’t going to get $2 each. They’re still getting $1. It’s just that the other $5 you thought you were saving is now going to waste.

Further, it was explained that YouTube wasn’t doing sculpting way back in 2007 as a way to boost certain video content. Instead, it was that YouTube randomly shows some video content and didn’t want these random selections to perhaps gain more authority than they should. And even with the change announced today, that still works. In the past, the unblocked videos got more authority money and the blocked ones got none. Now, the unblocked videos still get authority money — just not as much — and the blocked ones still get none.

Let"s do a quick visual explanation of what"s supposedly happened:

I have to say, I"m a little skeptical that this is an accurate and fully honest description of what Google"s changed. It"s certainly possible, and historically, their representatives at conferences haven"t been known to issue directly dishonest statements, but at the same time, this is a massive shift in how PageRank is calculated and seems unlikely to me to have a positive impact on search quality.

I suspect the change is because many people have been abusing nofollow internally to attempt to game Google as well as abusing it in the sense that they"ve actually hurt their site"s relevance and quality in the results (this latter seems more likely to me). I"ve mentioned in the past that you need to be very careful with PageRank sculpting as a practice, but let me illustrate again with a quick flowchart.

Basically, PR sculpting is useful on large domains, with thousands of pages and issues getting those deep pages enough link juice (PageRank) to stay in Google"s main web index and appear for long tail search queries. Historically, in our consulting business, we"ve experienced terrific results sculpting the flow of PR to deep pages and growing the indexation rates of those sites. If Google has made this shift, we should expect those positive results to reverse themselves, but to date there"s been no outcry of lost rankings and traffic to deep pages from the sites we"ve worked with. Of course, finding correlation in the web environment is nearly impossible due to the lack of a static landscape, but still....

The funny thing about all this to my mind is that if Google really has changed to treat nofollows as link "sinks" that consume PageRank but don"t flow it, they"re really only screwing over the sites that are only semi-familiar or semi-serious about SEO. Savvy SEOs are just going to go back to the old method of PageRank sculpting that existed long before nofollow - creating links that robots can"t see or follow (in Flash, in external Javascript calls that are blocked, in plug-in content, etc.) to get around the issue. It"s sad, too, because it rewards those paranoid SEOs who didn"t listen/believe Google"s acceptance of PR sculpting with nofollow and kept doing it the old fashioned way, and casts doubts on whether we can trust future messaging around SEO best practices, too.

I"ve got to say this is one of the more bizarrely counter-intuitive moves I"ve seen from Google, but I still think we don"t have the whole story. Let"s see what the follow-up questions and answers bring before we make any drastic decisions.

p.s. Via Linkscape, we can see that ~2.7% of the 474,779,069,489 (474 Billion) links in our index are nofollowed, and of these, 73% are internal links. We"re talking about a massive change to the web"s link graph, affecting more than 9.3 Billion links - for more stats on this front, see my old post, Lessons Learned Building an Index of the WWW.

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Posted by great scott!

Acquiring users and getting them to take an action on your site is the absolute core of web marketing. Whether that action is making a purchase, signing up for a newsletter, registering for a demo...it doesn"t matter, if you"re doing business online, your job is to acquire users and get them to take an action.

There are a million ways to go about this process, but it"s crucial for yourself and your clients to understand the funnel (particularly in terms of search patterns) that takes a potential customer from a vague notion of a want/need to converting on your site. You"re probably thinking that you already know your highest converting search terms, but you may be surprised. Watch this week"s video to learn about some important steps in the conversion funnel that you may have overlooked.

SEOmoz Whiteboard Friday - Path to Conversion from Scott Willoughby on Vimeo.

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Posted by JoelJonathan

This post was originally in YOUmoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author"s views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc.

I feel like a mosquito in a nudist colony because I just don’t even know where to start with this one. Let’s just go for broke and see what happens:

1. You Can’t Manage People – Even if you think you can “out-SEO” Rand, Aaron Wall, and Wikipedia to boot while riding a scooter down a hill with one brain tied behind your back as you make fun of Matt Cutts’ momma to his face, then guess what? You still need some skill managing people if you ever want to scale your income up dramatically. After all, even multi-millionaire, 1 hour a day worker Markus Friend pays people to do all of the tedious tasks that he needs done for his mega popular and mega profitable dating website.
2. You Aren’t Organized – You can only let your list of link partners" contact info that you should have kept up to date go stale for so long or forget to pay your copywriter for so long or spend too much time trying to find the password for your client’s site for so long, etc. etc. before you begin to see a serious increase in stress and a serious decrease in your productivity and ultimately your money making potential.
3. You Spend All Day on Forums/Blogs – If the majority of your time is spent reading about SEO instead of doing SEO, then your income will never be what it could be. Of course, I am not saying that reading and learning about SEO is not important, and in fact it is extremely important to always be learning, but you and I both know that it can be easy to justify what is really just mindless browsing as “SEO training”.
4. You Have No Process – The value of your time decreases if you have to keep repeating and trying to remember steps that you should already have documented. Call it an SEO cheat sheet, call it a list of steps for researching a new niche, call it whatever you want to call it, but write it down and document what your plan of action is so you don’t waste valuable time thinking about what to do instead of thinking about how to best do what you need to do.
5. You Don’t Take Risks – Whether this means striking out on your own to start your own firm to do SEO work for clients ($ potential if you are good but also some risk) or whether it means getting serious about spending some time and money to do in house SEO for your own website(s) ($$$ potential if you are really good but of course some risk as well), you have to take some risks in order to really maximize your SEO earning potential.
6. You Are a Cheap Son of a Gun – If you don’t believe in yourself enough to invest in tools that will make you a better SEO, then good luck because that is all you have – luck. Think of yourself and your SEO education as an investment. Pretend you are putting yourself through “SEO School” and spend some money all the while realizing that this investment in yourself will pay off in with a higher future earning potential.
7. You Treat SEO as a Hobby – I’m going to tell you something that you may not enjoy reading… SEO is work. There, I said it and now I feel better. SEO has fantastic opportunities to make a great deal of money if you are smart, willing to learn, and you work hard. However, the same principles for offline business success hold true online in the SEO realm as well. There is no magic elixir that shoots through your cable modem into your PC and right through your mouse into your fingers that makes any halfhearted lazy SEO effort you might muster up instantly fill up your bank account. Work smarter AND harder and SEO can make you a lot of money. Treat SEO as a hobby at your own risk if your goal is to make money and not just have fun.

I run a domain name tools website and I see a lot of awesome risk takers that work long hours and research domain names until they are blue in the face, and then they pounce on great domain names that will likely make them quite a nice sum of money in the future. On the other hand, there are some who maybe don’t put in the necessary research and just snap up what-ever.info piece of junk domain name they come across that strikes their fancy, hoping that their domain name “lottery ticket” will pay off big in the future.

Be someone who is dedicated to working hard and making a lot of money as an SEO. Hopefully these 7 reasons are a help to you as you strive to be the best SEO you can possibly be and make the most money possible.

 

BONUS REASON: “7 Reasons” just sounds better than “8 Reasons,” but maybe even the #1 thing that can hold back your long term SEO money making potential is a Short Term Focus. A long term focus wants to provide loads of quality content and offer an enjoyable user experience while a short term focus is concerned only with “gaming” the search engines or exploiting flaws in the system with no regard for long term user loyalty. Concentrate exclusively on the short term to your own money making detriment.

DISCLAIMER: I love SEO and think that SEO is a lot of fun. Money is, of course, not everything, and there is nothing wrong with doing SEO purely for enjoyment or as a hobby. That being said, making a lot of money doing SEO is also a lot of fun.

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Posted by randfish

It"s late night Sunday and rather than bringing you exciting news from the world of search and SEO, I"ve got some explaining to do. For those who hadn"t noticed, SEOmoz has some serious downtime and errors this weekend. Starting early morning Saturday and running through to Sunday, many parts of the site were inaccessible due to either A) an exceptionally unlucky set of simultaneous hardware/software failures on our host and backup servers, or B) the act of a vengeful Norse god (Odin, we"re looking in your direction).

In any case, this catastrophe was exacerbated due to our recent hosting move - whenever you"re shifting host locations, there"s a certain amount of finger crossing to be done, particularly with relation to data backups. Jeff & Mel did a great job here, but this unlucky strike had a few casualties which couldn"t be recovered.

• Most significant was the loss of the last two weeks of stored data from the Rank Tracker tool. We will again migrate all rankings saved before the Rank Tracker launch, but rankings and settings stored after the launch are not retrievable. We cannot apologize enough for this loss and have taken steps to ensure that this will not happen again.
• The Rank Tracker tool itself is still down while the migration completes, but should be back up in the next 24 hours. When the service returns, you will find significantly increased limits for manual rankings run per day and for automated rankings as well.
• A smaller data loss may be noted for saved Linkscape advanced reports. Some reports run in the last day or so may not have been saved. We have added 5 Linkscape credits to all accounts to accommodate this.
• Blog posts, user profiles, Q+A questions, marketplace profiles and any other database-reliant content created between Saturday afternoon (when the site briefly recovered) and Sunday midday (when our last round of failures/attacks occurred) is irreparably lost. Again, we"re taking steps to ensure that backups will be secure and solid for the future, hopefully making this a one-time only event.
• Other fragments of data, including some Q+A questions, blog post & YOUmoz images, profile pictures and other database elements from the past 2 weeks may also have suffered. We"ve recovered nearly everything (and possibly got all of them), but if you notice some oddities, this is most likely why.

For PRO members, we"re doing our best to make up this weekend"s events to you with greater access to those tools hit hardest. We"ll also work tirelessly this week (despite the SMX Advanced conference in Seattle) both to prevent future mishaps like this and to provide a high level of support for anything you need.

To our readers, visitors and regulars - I offer my personal apology. I know that you like to read and use SEOmoz on the weekends, and I"m sure this interfered with your regular course of business. We"ve got a great team of developers here at SEOmoz, and I"m incredibly proud of their performance under fire over the last 48 hours. Rest assured that all of us will put our shoulders to the wheel to make data integrity and uptime priorities over the weeks and months to come.

Thanks for your patience and understanding,
Rand Fishkin, CEO

p.s. Our thanks also to ex-mozzer Jane Copland, whose quick eye and catlike reflexes over IM brought the site issues to the attention of our dev team very early on and probably saved us additional heartache.

p.p.s. A few other areas are affected - Labs, Q+A Search & our RSS feed. We"re working to get these back online today as well. If you find anything else, please post in the comments; we appreciate all the help!

UPDATE 2: We"re going to go down for a couple hours around 1pm Pacific, 4pm Eastern today in order to secure our data in additional locations. We hope to be back up by 3-4pm Pacific this afternoon. You can follow the SEOmoz Twitter account for the latest on this front.

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Posted by Tom_C

Hello hello, today I"m going to talk a little about Google Local. The things I"m talking about aren"t necessarily new or ground-breaking, but I think it"s important to expose them to the Moz readership as Local isn"t something that"s talked about all that often on here and there are quite a few intricacies which you should be aware of when dealing with local optimisation, particularly for clients who have many locations and who rely on using a bulk upload to Google Local.

Before I go any further, there"s some really, really smart people who talk about Google Local optimisation and I"ve been chatting with them recently - I strongly recommend that you check out the further reading at the bottom of this post as they go into a lot more detail about a lot of this stuff than I do (and they probably know more about it than I do too!).

Why Do You Care About Google Local?

There are two reasons to care about Google Local. The first is unbranded traffic. The second is branded traffic.

1) Unbranded Traffic

Over the past 6 months or so Google has become incredibly aggressive with displaying local results in the main listings. These almost always come in the form of a 10-result one-box (kind of like a 10-box, I suppose). It used to be the case that you had to refine your query with a location before you saw any Google Local results, such as Hotels in Leeds:


Notice how this 10-box is the very first result that users see - even appearing 3rd or 4th in the 10-box can generate more clicks than a #1 ranking in the organic results just below. That"s pretty staggering. That means that for these super competitive travel queries, if you want traffic you need to be optimising for the 10-box before you think about optimising for the regular organic listings.

But wait, trouble is on the horizon because Google is becoming even more aggressive with its 10-boxing and it"s starting to display 10-boxes on regular search results without a geographical modifier if Google knows where you"re searching from. Take, for example, a search for "IT support" which generates the following result for me:


Notice that handy 10-box slipping into the results without me specifying my geographical location? Scary, huh. So in short, generic competitive queries are generating 10-boxes. If you want to grab that head traffic then you"d best go about some Google Local optimisation pretty quick.

2) Branded Traffic

Ok sure, generic queries are generating 10-boxes so that gives me some potential to aim for, but surely my navigational branded search queries are safe, right? Right?! Unfortunately not; take a look at this search for "napoleons casino leeds" (one of my old poker haunts), which generates a local listing above the regular organic result:


Well that"s ok, right? Surely that local result is controlled by me? You would think so, wouldn"t you, but actually in many cases that"s not true. Keep reading below for examples of when this goes wrong.

So that covers WHY you should care about Google Local - now let"s cover some of the issues.

Issues with Google Local

Here are a few of the common issues I have come across dealing with Google Local

Spam, and Lots of It

I recently did an analysis of the top 10 hotel searches in the US as determined by the Google Search Suggest (I know, pretty unscientific but I wanted a random snap shot):


I then analysed the 10 results in the 10-box for each search result - a total of 100 local results - and found that 15 of them were spammed in one of the following ways:

Spam in the main index:

Take a look at this 10-box from "hotels in boston". Can anyone spot the odd one out?


Yeah, of course the last one, which is a locksmith rather than a hotel. Easy. The real question is, how many of you spotted the other odd one out? Look at D carefully - you see that the listing appears correctly - it"s for the Club Quarters Hotel, which is indeed located in Boston, but the URL actually sends you to www.elephantcastle.com (which, incidentally, is a chain of bars which has a location in Boston; it"s not the website for the tube station in London).

The reason for this occurrence is that the Elephant & Castle bar and the Club Quarters Hotel have the same address - and Google is trying to merge the listings and doing a pretty poor job of it.

Spam in the details of the Google Local Index:


Take a look at result C - you see that the hotel listing appears correct but the URL is www.cheap-hotels.usa.net. This certainly isn"t a case of merging listings since the www.cheap-hotels-usa.net URL isn"t a genuine site. So why does this spam happen? Well, it gets even worse - click through to the details (by clicking on the reviews link) and you see this:


It"s a pretty strange listing - not only is the official website not listed, neither is the cheap-hotels-usa site. Instead, it"s now linking to a spam blog on blogspot. Why is this? Well, the reason is that there"s an edit button on the listing. And that leads to a free text edit of the Google Local information, including the URL. I"m really not sure why Google allows this free edit - in the past they"ve come out and said that the majority of edits are genuine and that may be true for niche small stores, but for the main competitive terms it"s just overrun with spam. There"s a few weeks delay on the data that gets edited here feeding back into the main Google Local index which gets displayed in the 10-box, which is why the cheap-hotels-usa URL is still being used in the 10-box.

Here"s the shocking part - if you own a hotel chain and submit a bulk upload to Google Local, this bulk upload isn"t trusted enough to prevent this free text edit function being displayed for your hotel.

Language

So Google Local, which you"d think would be designed to handle local queries, actually sucks really badly at local language searches. The problem is that, as far as I can see, there"s only one Google Local index worldwide compared to all the local indexes you get for google.co.uk, google.fr, google.com, etc. This manifests itself in a few ways, but the most important one is this - only one language version of a page can be listed in Google Local. So if I search for "madrid hotel" in google.co.uk:


And google.es:


You see that I get a combination of .com (English) and .es (Spanish) results. This is handled reasonably well because there"s a leaning towards .es sites in google.es. Cool! But the problem comes when you have two versions of the same content in different languages; whether it"s on a subdomain, subfolder or local TLD, it doesn"t matter to Google Local -- you can only have one listing for one location. So the Hotel Regente in the above example (which has multiple languages on the site) can only ever rank with the Spanish homepage, even for searches in the UK, in English. That sucks, right? I really wish there was a way to fix this - Google is really good at detecting this in the regular SERPs, so it"d be great to roll that language/geotargeting detection into the Google Local indexes as well.

Verification

This is the third issue and it relates to the above issues. If you have a large number of geographical locations (physical stores or hotels, for example), then registering them individually can be a real pain. Imagine having to coordinate hundreds of different local verifications all with consistent data and accurate information. But you don"t need to do that, right? Surely you can just submit a bulk upload? Well you CAN, but as shown above a bulk upload just isn"t that trusted by Google, so the only option is to verify them individually which is nigh on impossible if you have many, many locations...

Advice

So what"s the point of this post? Well, it"s two-fold. Firstly, it"s to highlight some of the issues Google Local is facing at the moment so that you can understand better how to optimise your site (or your client"s sites). Secondly, it"s to offer a few tips which you can start mulling over and hopefully put into practice:

1) Don"t rely on a bulk upload unless you have to

Given the ability of webmasters to edit local listings and given the relatively untrusted nature of the bulk upload, I urge you to try and register individually the locations/properties you want in Google Local.

2) Only create one listing for each individual location

Even if you have multiple language pages or multiple properties at the same location, ensure that only one of them is registered with Google Local. At the moment they"re not good at handling businesses with the same address.

3) Think about using KML Geositemaps if you have many locations

If it"s unfeasible to register all of your properties individually (or even while you"re putting that process in place), consider using a Geositemap since this should be more trusted than the bulk upload, as it relies on the same sitemap file verification process which is intrinsically more trusted than the upload process since it"s tied to your domain.

Further Reading

And last but not least, if you want to know more about Google Local, consult these resources as they cover a lot of the issues I"ve touched upon in a lot more detail!

• Mike Blumenthal"s Blog on everything to do with Google Local
• David Mihm"s 2009 Local Search Ranking Factors
• Matt McGee"s Blog on all things Local
• Martijn Beijk"s blog
  

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Posted by randfish

I"m currently working on re-authoring and re-building the Beginner"s Guide to Search Engine Optimization, section by section. You can read more about this project here.

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Where to Start with Web Analytics

That which can be measured can be improved, and in search engine optimization, measurement is critical to success. Professional SEOs track data about rankings, referrals, links and more to help analyze their campaigns and create roadmaps for success.

Recommended Metrics to Track

Although every business is unique and every website has different metrics that matter, the following list is nearly universal in appeal. Note that we"re only covering those metrics critical to SEO - optimizing for the search engines - and as such, more general, but still important metrics may not be included. For a more comprehnesive look at web analytics overall, check out Choosing Web Analytics Key Performance Indicators from Avinash Kaushik"s excellent Web Analytics Blog.

#1 - Search Engine Share of Referring Visits

Every month, it"s critical to keep track of the contribution of each traffic source for your site. Broadly, these include:

• Direct Navigation (type in traffic, bookmarks, email links w/o tracking codes, etc.)
• Referral Traffic (from links across the web or in trackable email, promotion & branding campaign links)
• Search Engines (queries that sent traffic from any major or minor web search engine)

Knowing the percentage and exact numbers will help you identify strengths and weaknesses and serve as a comparison over time for trend data. If, for example, you see that traffic has spiked dramatically, but it comes from referral links with low relevance, while search engine and direct type-ins fell, you"ll know you"re actually in much more trouble than the raw numbers would suggest. You should use this data to track your marketing efforts and to serve as a broad yardstick for your traffic acquisition efforts.

#2 - Vists Referred by Specific Search Engines

Three major engines make up 95%+ of all search traffic in the US (Yahoo!, MSN/Live & Google), and for most countries outside the US (with the notable exceptions of Russia, China, Japan, Korea & the Czech Republic) 80%+ of search traffic comes solely from Google. Measuring the contribution of your search traffic from each engine is critical for several reasons:

• Compare Performance vs. Market Share - By tracking not only search engines broadly (as the screenshot above shows), but by country, you"ll be able to see exactly the contribution level of each engine in accordance with its estimated market share. Keep in mind that in sectors like technology and Internet services, demand is likely to be higher on Google (given its younger, more tech-savvy demographic) than in arenas like cooking, sports or real estate (where the percentages might be closer to the estimates from firms like Comscore).
• Get Visibility Into Potential Drops - If your search traffic should drop significantly at any point, knowing the relative and exact contributions from each engine will be essential to diangosing the issue. If all the engines drop off equally, the problem is almost certainly one of accessibility. If Google drops while the others remain at previous levels, it"s more likely to be a penalty or devaluation of your SEO efforts by that singular engine.
• Uncover Strategic Value - It"s very likely that some efforts you undertake in SEO will have greater positive results on some engine than others. For example, we frequently notice that on-page optimization tactics like better keyword inclusion and targeting has more benefit with Live & Yahoo! than Google, while gaining specific anchor text links from a large number of domains has a more positive impact on Google than the others.If you can identify the tactics that are having success with one engine (or that are failing to succeed with others), you"ll better know how to focus your efforts.

If you find your site underperforming at one of the engines (based on broad market share numbers), don"t immediately panic. Remember that search engines have demographics and biases just like any other referral source. For example, in the US, Google"s market share is supposedly between 65-70%, yet the vast majority of sites we"ve ever worked with (and those reported by our friends and colleagues in the search marketing industry) show that 80-85% of traffic share from Google is actually far more common. A number of theories exist to support why this happens:

1. Yahoo!"s top queries are navigational (their number one query is Google, for example), while Google"s queries are more informational
2. Many experts believe (and some have private data to suggest that) Yahoo! has a preference for sites participating in their paid inclusion program
3. Yahoo! refers a large amount of traffic to Yahoo!"s own properties (Google, meanwhile, seems to have a similar love affair with Wikipedia)

Don"t just rely on Comscore, Hitwise or Compete.com data to tell you what percentage of share an engine should provide - make sure to investigate. You can do this by running PPC ads on the various engines (and comparing impression data), checking rankings across the engines (if your Yahoo! rankings are just as good or better than your Google rankings, it"s not missed opportunity; it"s lower volume), and making sure you haven"t made any dumb mistakes (blocking other engines" spiders, using the meta robots NOODP to control listings at Google, but forgetting to use NOYDIR at Yahoo!, etc.). 

#3 - Visits Referred by Specific Search Engine Terms/Phrases

The terms & phrases that send traffic are another important piece of your analytics pie. You"ll want to keep track of these on a regular basis to help identify new trends in keyword demand, gauge your performance on key terms and find terms that are bringing significant traffic you"re potentially under-serving (e.g. you rank well and get visits, but don"t have content that helps the searcher accomplish their goal).

You may also find value in tracking search referral counts for terms outside the "top" terms/phrases - those that are important and valuable to your business. If the trend lines are pointing in the wrong direction, you know efforts need to be undertaken to course correct. Search traffic worldwide has consistently risen over the past 15 years, so a decline in quantity of referrals is troubling - check for seasonality issues (keywords that are only in demand certain times of the week/month/year) and rankings (have you dropped, or has search volume ebbed).

#4 - Conversion Rate by Search Query Term/Phrase

When it comes to the bottom line for your organization, few metrics matter as much as conversion. However, analytics often misstates the impact of conversion rates from the last referral, clouding the true picture of what brought a visitor who "converted." For example, in the graphic above, 4.46% of visitors who reached SEOmoz with the query "check backlinks" signed up to become members during that visit. What we don"t know (at least, from this simple analysis), is how many of those visitors had already signed up, how many signed up during a later visit, or even what percentage of those visits were first-time visitors.

The real value from this sort of simplistic tracking comes from the "low-hanging fruit" - seeing terms/phrases that contintually send visitors who convert and increasing focus on both rankings and traffic from that keyword referral as well as improving the landing pages that visitors reach. While conversion rate tracking from keyword phrase referrals is certainly important, it"s never the whole story. Dig deeper and you can often uncover far more interesting and applicable data about how conversion starts and ends on your site.

#5 of Pages Receiving at Least One Visit from Search Engines

Knowing the number of pages that receive search engine traffic is an essential metric for monitoring overall SEO performance. From this number, we can get a glimpse into indexation (how many pages the engines are keeping in their indices from our site), and, more importantly, watch trends over time. For most large websites (50,000+ pages), mere inclusion is essential to earning traffic, and this metric delivers a trackable number that"s indicative of succes or failure. As you work on issues like site architecture, link acquisition, XML Sitemaps, uniqueness of content and meta data, etc. the trend line should rise, showing that more and more pages are earning their way into the engines" results. Pages receiving search traffic is, quite possibly, the best long tail metric around.

While other analytics data points are also of great importance, those mentioned above should be universally applied to get the maximum value from your SEO campaigns. Additional sources to read on this topic include:

• SEO Metrics that Matter (from Stephan Spencer of NetConcepts)
• Advanced Google Analytics Tips for SEO, Part I, II and III (from Huomah)

Free Analytics Software

Many very high quality analytics products are available entirely for free. These can be installed either on your web server to collect and analyze log-file based data or in the code on your pages (as javascript) to capture individual visit data. Without software, you"re up a creek - raw log file analysis is extremely tedious and time consuming and many organizations don"t even have the ability to access their logs. Use software and track - and don"t worry - the free options are not only better than nothing, they"re pretty darn good.

Recommended free analytics software pacakges include:

• Yahoo! Web Analytics (formerly Indextools)
• Google Analytics
• Clicky Web Analytics
• Piwik Open Source Analytics
• Woopra Website Tracking
• AWStats

While choosing can be tough, at the time of publication, our top recommendation is for Google Analytics (so long as you have few privacy concerns and don"t mind the brief data delays), followed closely by Clicky. Once the Yahoo! Web Analytics beta opens to the public, that would also be a top suggestion (and SEOmoz itself has run on Indextools/Yahoo! for the last 3 years). If you cannot use tracking code on your web pages and need a log-file based solution, AWStats is our top recommendation, though any log file based tracking will suffer from the inability to track clickstream paths, first time vs. referring and other important metrics as accurately as cookie/session based software.

Paid Analytics Software

There are dozens (possibly hundreds) of paid analytics solutions, but for the purposes of this guide, we"ll list only the most popular services:

• Omniture
• Fireclick
• Mint
• Sawmill Analytics
• Clicktale
• Enquisite
• Coremetrics
• Urchin
• Lyris / Clicktracks
• Unica Affinium NetInsight

Unfortunately, we don"t have enough experience to recommend one particular package over the others, but you can read some very good analysis and comparisons, including:

• 2007 Web Analytics Shootout, measuring the difference between how different analytics software pieces track data (from Eric Enge of StoneTemple Consulting)
• How to Choose a Web Analytics Solution - from Bryan Eisenberg way back in 2003 (but still a relevant and quality piece)
• A Complete Guide to Web Analytics Solutions - from ConverRater.com in 2006 (some data, such as separationg of Omniture vs. WebSideStory, is less relevant today)

Metrics for Measuring Search Engine Optimization

In organic SEO, it can be difficult to track the specific elements of the engines" algorithms effectively given that this data is not public, nor is it even well-researched. However, a combination of tactics have become best practices, and new data is constantly emerging to help track direct ranking elements and positive/negative ranking signals. The data points covered below are ones that we will occasionally use for our clients" campaigns and have proven to add value when used in concert with analytics.

Metrics Provided by Search Engines

We"ve already discussed many of the data points provided by services such as Google"s Webmaster Tools, Yahoo! Site Explorer and Microsoft"s Webmaster Tools (in part 8: Search Engine Tools & Services). In addition to these, the engines provide some insight through publicly available queries and competitive intelligence. Below is a list of queries/tools/metrics from the engines, along with their respective applications:

• Google
  • Google Site Query - e.g. site:seomoz.org - useful to see the number and list of pages indexed on a particular domain. You can expand the value by adding additional query parameters. For example - site:seomoz.org/blog inurl:tools - will show only those pages in Google"s index that are in the blog and contain the word "tools" in the URL.
  • Google Link Query  - e.g. link:www.seomoz.org - unfortunately, in 2004, Google removed most of the value from this query by changing the results to show only a sample (and not even a relative or consistent-pattern sample) of links. These can include nofollowed links as well, and are not ordered by importance. We don"t recommend employing this query.
  • Google Trends - available at Google.com/Trends - this shows keyword search volume/popularity data over time. If you"re logged into your Google account, you can also get specific numbers on the charts, rather than just trend lines.
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  • Google Trends for Websites - available at Trends.Google.com/websites - this shows traffic data for websites according to Google"s data sources (toolbar, ISP data, analytics and others may be part of this). A logged in user account will show numbers in the chart to indicate estimated traffic levels.
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  • Google Insights for Search - available at google.com/insights/search - this tool provides data about regional usage, popularity and related queries for keywords.
• Yahoo! 
  • Yahoo! Site Query - e.g. site:seomoz.org - note that a standard site query will automatically redirect to Yahoo!"s Site Explorer, but advanced queries that include additional parameters such as site:seomoz.org inurl:rand will show Yahoo!"s standard results format. You can use these much in the same way as the Google site query to see the number and list of pages Yahoo! has in their index for a particular site.
  • Yahoo! Link & Linkdomain Queries - e.g. linkdomain:seomoz.org - as with site queries, these will redirect to Yahoo! Site Explorer unless additional parameters are employed. For example, to see only links to SEOmoz.org that have the word "google" in the title tag, you"d use the query - linkdomain:seomoz.org intitle:google. Yahoo!"s link queries are the most robust and accurate of the major engines, but do include nofollow links (and don"t separately mark these, which can cause trouble separate value-passing links).
• Microsoft
  • MSN Site Query - e.g. site:seomoz.org - just like Yahoo! & Google, MSN allows for queries to show the number and list of pages in their index from a given site. Unfortunately, MSN"s counts are given to wild fluctuation and massive inaccuracy, often rendering the counts themselves useless.
  • MSN IP Query - e.g. ip:216.176.191.233 - this query will show pages that Microsoft"s engine has found on the given IP address. This can be useful in identifying shared hosting and seeing what other sites are hosted on a given IP address.
  • MSN AdCenter Labs - available at adlab.microsoft.com/alltools.aspx - a great variety of keyword research and audience intelligence tools are provided by Microsoft, primarily for search and display advertising. This guide won"t dive deep into the value of each individual tool, but they are worth investigating and many can be applied to SEO.
• Ask.com
  • Ask Site Query - e.g. site:seomoz.org inurl:www - Ask.com is a bit picky in its requirements around use of the site query operator. To function properly, an additional query must be used (although generic queries such as the example above are useful to see what a broad "site" query would normally return).
• Google Blog Search
  • BlogSearch Link Query - e.g. link:www.seomoz.org/blog - Although Google"s normal web search link command is not particularly useful, their blog search link query shows generally high quality data and can be sorted by date range and relevance.

Employing these queries & tools effectively requres that you have an informational need with an actionable solution. The data itself isn"t valuable unless you have a plan of what to change/build/do once you learn what you need to know (this holds true for competitive analysis as well).

For more detail, see the Professional"s Guide to Advanced Search Operators, an extremely detailed and thorough resource on this subject.

Applying Data to Your Campaigns

Just knowing the numbers won"t help unless you can effectively interpret and apply changes to course-correct. Below, I"ve taken a sample of some of the most common directional signals provided by tracking data points and how to respond with actions to improve or execute on opportunities.

Fluctuation in Search Engine Page & Link Count Numbers

The numbers reported in "site:" and "link:" queries are rarely precise, and thus we strongly recommend not getting too worried about fluctuations showing massive increases or decreases unless they are accompanied by traffic drops. For example, on any given day, Yahoo! reports between 800,000 and 2 million links to the SEOmoz.org domain. Obviously, we don"t gain or lose hundreds of thousands of links each day, but the variability of Yahoo!"s indices means that these numbers reports provide little guidance about our actual link growth or shrinkage.

If you do see significant drops in links or pages indexed accompanied by similar traffic referral drops from the search engines, you may be experiencing a real loss of link juice (check to see if important links that were previously sending traffic/rankings boosts still exist) or a loss of indexation due to penalties, hacking, malware, etc. A thorough analysis using your own web analytics and Google"s Webmaster Tools can help to identify potential problems.

Falling Search Traffic from a Single Engine

If a single engine is sending you considerably less traffic for a wide range of search queries, a small number of possibilities exist:

• You"re under a penalty at that engine for violating search quality or terms of service guidelines. Check out this post on how to identify/handle a search engine penalty.
• You"ve accidentally blocked access to that search engine"s crawler. Double-check your robots.txt file and meta robots tags and review the Webmaster Tools for that engine to see if any issues exist.
• That engine has changed their ranking algorithm in a fashion that no longer favors your site. Most frequently, this happens because links pointing to your site have been devalued in some way, and is especially prevalent for sites that engage in manual link building campaigns of low-moderate quality links.

Identify the problem most likely to be the culprit and investigate. Forums like Cre8asit Forums, HighRankings and Google"s Groups for Webmasters can help.

Falling Search Traffic from Multiple Engines

Chances are good that you"ve done something on your site to block crawlers or stop indexation. This could be something in the robots.txt or meta robots tags, a problem with hosting/uptime, a DNS resolution issue or a number of other technical breakdowns. Talk to your SysAdmin, developers and/or host and carefully review your Webmaster Tools accounts and analytics to help determine potential causes.

Individual Rankings Fluctuations

Gaining or losing rankings for a particular term/phrase or even several happens millions of times a day to millions of pages and is generally nothing to be concerned about. Ranking algorithms fluctuate, competitors gain and lose links (and on-page optimization tactics) and search engines even flux between indices (and may sometimes even make mistakes in their crawling, inclusion or ranking processes). When a dramatic rankings decrease occurs, you might want to carefully review on-page elements for any signs of over-optimization or violation of guidelines (cloaking, keyword stuffing, etc.) and check to see if links have recently been gained or lost. Note that with sudden spikes in rankings for new content, a temporary period of high visibility followed by a dramatic drop is common (in the SEO field, we refer to this as the "freshness boost").

Don"t panic over small fluctuations and with large drops, be wary against making a judgement call until at least a few days have past. If you run a new site or are in the process of link acquisition and active marketing, these suddden spikes and drops are even more common, so simply be prepared and keep working.

Positive Increases in Link Metrics without Rankings Increases

Many site owners worry that when they"ve done some "classic" SEO - on-page optimization, link acquisition, etc. they can expect instant results. This, sadly, is not the case. Particularly for new site and pages, and content that"s competing in very difficult results, rankings take time and even earning lots of great links is not a sure recipe to instantly reach the top. Remember that the engines need to not only crawl all those pages where you"ve acquired links, but index and process them - given the almost certain use of delta indices by the engines to help with freshness, the metrics and rankings you"re seeking may be days or even weeks behind the progress you"ve made.

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And with that, ladies and gentlemen, the Beginner"s Guide content is complete! Actually, I still need to write up the very important appendices, including the glossary, list of links to other resources, and credits, but I"m hopeful to get this done soon (and it"s about time - I started way back in October of 2007!).

As always - comments, criticisms and recommendations are greatly appreciated.

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Posted by rebecca

Stories, news, and other notable items from the past week:

• Google crashed between 8:40 and 9:55 ET yesterday, preventing people from Googling to find out why Google wasn"t working. Oh noes!
• Speaking of Google, they recently overhauled Google News as well as updated their blog search algorithm, and they"re allowing trademarks to be used in US Adwords copy. Geez, no wonder there was downtime. Methinks Google needs a little R&R.
• Congratulations to Barry Schwartz--he and his wife just had a baby girl. Mazel tov!
• Now I know what I should work on the next time Rand"s out of town at a conference (wait, that"s next week...*evil laugh*).
• R.I.P. 3D Realms. Your perpetual release date for Duke Nukem Forever made for a lot of Internet lulz.
• Ladies and gentlemen, Frankenfrog! It"s alive! It"s ALIIIIIIIIIVE!!!

• Brian Carter shares the 4 steps of social media marketing. I think step 1 is that you do not talk about social media marketing.
• Todd Malicoat talks about how link building for SEO is like picking up a girl. I"m sure his girlfriend is thrilled with the analogy. :P

• Jennifer Horowitz dissects the seven deadly sins of social media. It"s a well written and clever look at how one needs to succed with social media marketing.

YOUmoz entries:

• What The Celebrity Apprentice Can Teach Us about SEO. Nicchenet shares some parallels between one of her favorite reality TV shows and search engine optimization. 
• The Right Way to Leverage Social Media. Hornedogey talks about some popular social media campaigns that were memorable and successful.
• Can a Site Gain International Traffic with Links to Babel Fish Translations? Sexteta wonders if linking to Babel Fish versions of one"s website can help increase international traffic to the site.
• How Much Format Counts in the Rankings. John CMS talks about the difference a user-friendly format can make when it comes to ranking a page in the SERPs.
• Lost in the Ocean of Ghost Writers. SEMWarrior shares the negative experience he had in trying to hire a quality ghost writer.
• Gaining Organic Trafic via Indexed Internal Search Results Pages. Navin has done some experimenting with creating and indexing internal search results pages, and he shares his process with the YOUmoz community.
• Competitive Data Acquisition and Analysis. Saurav Kneoteric talks about competitive analysis and how to incorporate competitive intelligence into a business"s marketing plans.

Best of YOUmoz:

• Domain Names, Cybersquatting, Politics and the Law. Wredlich shares some information about cybersquatting laws and the difference between cybersquatting and identity theft.
• The Real Power of Twitter. Dr. Pete prescribes us all a dose of how Twitter is valuable to him, and we happily gulp it down and ask for more.

New additions to the SEOmoz Marketplace:

Featured job postings:

• Contracted organic SEO and online marketer
• SEO specialist for Invodo, Inc. in Austin, TX
• Director, Search and Performance for First Rate in Sydney, Australia

Featured companies:

United States:

• BenjaminMarc.com in Long Island, NY
• Easy Street Interactive in Manchester, NH
• Kudzu Online Marketing in the US
• GILL Media in Tampa, FL, as well as Canada and Honduras
• Back40 Design Group in Edmond, OK
• Apples 2 Apples in Montrose, CO
• The Kali Network in Santa Clara, CA, as well as India and Russia
• A Greater Town in Montclair, NJ
• Zoetic Interactive in Fort Lee, NJ
• Engagence in the US
• tdburns in Graham, NC

Canada:

• KKT Interactive in Hamilton, ON

UK / Europe:

• WebWise Search in Morecambe, UK
• Igentics in Cambridge, UK
• 10Best Solutions in France and the UK

Asia:

• Diolt Web Marketing in Karachi, Pakistan
• Analyza Technologies in Pune, India

Featured resumes:

Currently looking:

• Punit isn"t much for words, but he apparently knows how to do web design and how to attract traffic to websites and blogs.
• Digital marketer is available on demand in London, UK.
• Rodion Matveev is looking for an SEO/SEM position at an authority Internet marketing company.

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Posted by randfish

Dear 2007 Rand Fishkin,

Hi there - it"s me - your 2009 self. I know it"s highly unlikely you"ll ever get this email, but who knows? The flow of time could chaotically spasm and somehow drop a printed copy of this on your lap - stranger things have happened. And, in that unlikely event, here"s a few quick things you should know:

• Take the VC Money - it"s going to make you a better entrepreneur, a more serious company and fund some very exciting technology.
• Don"t Turn Down the Extra Funding - $1.1 million will get you through fine, but 2007 valuations were awesome, and that extra million they"re offering will make great things happen even faster.
• Build Linkscape, But Make Usability, not Features & Data, the Focus - the technology is amazing, sure, but most SEOs and Internet marketers have a very tough time understanding how to apply the information. You don"t have 20 minutes to explain it in person to everyone, so make the interface as simple, intuitive and usable as possible (and rely on existing nomenclature wherever possible).
• Start Using Email Marketing ASAP - You have no idea the power of a well-crafted email campaign.
• Learn to Delegate Better - Hire people who can do the things you"re spending your time on now. Just because you"re good at something doesn"t mean you should be doing it. Your job is to lead, to craft the vision and to evangelize. Whatever you"re doing now that isn"t those three things, stop and recruit someone who"s better at it than you are.
• Remember What SEOmoz Is - at its core, your company is about making something complex & mysterious into something simple & understandable. That"s what the tools, resources and services in PRO should do.
• Development & Scalability are Your Big Challenges - concentrate on hiring great devs and build small, nimble, self-sufficient teams
• Hiring Friends Works - Gather the smartest people you know, trust and like and bring them aboard; it doesn"t work for everyone, but it"s working great for you.
• Get Religion About Conversion Rate Optimization - Design, launch, test, measure, improve and repeat for every aspect of the conversion process on the site, from blog page landings to the last step of signup.
• Don"t Invest in Marketing via Booths at Events - The ROI just isn"t there, and the cost is tremendous.
• Do Invest in Your Affiliate Program - There are a lot of Internet marketers serving SEO-style content who don"t have great ways to monetize it. Just putting a link in your footer is not going to get them excited.
• Learn Relentless Focus - Find the most critical things the business needs for the next six months, make them the everyday focus of every person and hour you can spare and cut out everything else to the point where it hurts at least a little. Only then will you have the focus you need. 
• Buy a Scooter to Commute to the Office - Just make sure you buy some motorcycle pants to wear on rainy days.
• You, Rand, Are Not the Customer - Get over it, and build products that someone who just learned SEO last week can use.
• Establish Guiding Principles Now - Don"t wait; just write them down, work on them until they make sense and post them on the wall in big font.
• Last, and Most Important; Get Married - It"s unbelievably excellent in every way.

And now, in a rarely used tactic, I"m pinging some friends from other web startups to ask them what they"d like to tell their past selves. Dharmesh Shah from Hubspot, Richard Zwicky from Enquisite, Seth Besmertnik from Conductor, Will Critchlow from Distilled, Kelly Smith from Inkd, Glenn Kelman from Redfin, Ethan Lowry from Urbanspoon and Chris Winfield of 10e20 - can I convince you to write an advice letter to your former incarnations?

p.s. Anyone interested in more on this topic should check out my recent interview with the gang at Wildfire Marketing for Thought Leader Thursday.

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Posted by RobOusbey

At this week"s SMX, Rand made a comment about two big brands that ranked at #2 and #3 for their industry"s generic keyword behind an exact match domain. Referring to SERPs Click-Through-Rate data, he suggested that you could calculate how much more traffic the larger brand could receive from the keyword by moving from position 2 to position 1.

At the risk of getting a stern talking to, I"m going to have to ask: really? I"m confident that where you see a well-known brand"s site next to an anonymous brand, the recognised name will get a disproportionate number of clicks. The location of each user"s click can"t be modeled by some exponential decay function; the titles, descriptions and URLs (including the goodwill associated with a strong brand) will have a significant effect on click through rate.

So, there"s our opportunity to stack the odds in our favour. If it"s true that more than 50% of people click on a result other than number 1, this means that most people disagree with the search engine"s judgment as to which page best satisfies their query. And what about all the searches that don"t result in any clicks at all?

Quite a few sites appear to be thinking creatively to improve the number of clicks they receive, so here are some tips you can implement in order to get more visits from any keyword, without having to improve your ranking.

Use language that sells

Use compelling language in the snippet where possible, by placing sales-orientated text near the first occurrence of the target phrase. For example, in the screenshot below (and overlooking any brand loyalty that people may have to Amazon or Game), the idea that a Wii Remote has free delivery is more compelling than knowing it can be used as a sword AND a paintbrush.

If you"ve got a strong brand, use it

Remember that sometimes there"s no competition for clicks when the user has their destination in mind before seeing the results. For instance, a user may know they want to go to Wikipedia when they search for "The Shirehorses" and head there despite it ranking at #3.

A very similar thing is likely to happen for product / shopping searches, where the searcher has brand loyalty to a particular retailer. I imagine that Amazon receives a similar amount of traffic (if not more) than Canon does for the search "canon 400d" - this might still be a destinational search.

To see an example where users might avoid the official site in a branded search, consider another London venue: is it easier to find the opening hours on the official Sketch site, or on the View London page?

Cover all the bases for organic DKI

Fake your way into using dynamic keyword insertion for organic search. Although Google still prefers to use the meta description of a page as the snippet when possible, in a search of more than a couple of words, it often needs to pull a quote from the page in order to show text relevant to the search. By using the exact match of popular variants of your search terms (particularly ones with valuable searcher intent) within your text, you can have the search terms highlighted in your snippet in order to demonstrate high relevancy. (Of course, you should be doing this anyway if you want to target those particular terms.)

The example below shows three of the UK results for "choose an engagement ring". The user doesn"t want to know how to buy one, doesn"t want to know the etiquette, but wants help choosing one - the third link is likely to get the click.

Don"t give everything away too early

Let"s say a searcher needs to know the height of Mount Everest in inches, or can"t remember the order of parameters in PHP"s strrchr command. They might see the following results in Google:

There"s no need for them to click through to the results. Using a variation of the earlier advice, make sure the "answer" on the page isn"t right next to the first mention of the search term if you want to get people to actually visit your page. These similar examples ("height of mount everest in yards" and "str_replace") don"t spill the beans too early.

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Posted by great scott!

This week"s Whiteboard Friday comes to you courtesy of a few friends from the Twitterverse. We had Lindsay put out a call for WBF ideas via the @SEOmoz Twitter account and, among the suggestions, a few of our followers asked for tips on linking strategies and embedded content, so here we are, thanks to @mattlambert, @khughesrise and @seoaudiore (thanks, too, to everyone else who tweeted suggestions - we"ll try to follow up on many of those in the weeks to come, too).

Creating embeddable content like widgets, badges, or videos can be a fantastic link-building strategy for many reasons. In this video we"ll cover some of the big benefits to embed-based linking, as well as some of the challenges you may face in trying to get your embeddable content out there.

SEOmoz Whiteboard Friday - Embedded Content & Linking from Scott Willoughby on Vimeo.

 

Rand references several embedded content worth looking at, including this set from Twitter, Vimeo"s strategy (which you can see in the video above itself) and Zillow"s real estate widgets.

Oh yeah, since we mentioned Twitter, I was stuck at 299 followers yesterday, so if you"d like to join the "Help Get Scott Over 300" campaign, follow me @great_scott. Thanks!

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Posted by rebecca

The beginning of this month (May 2nd, to be exact) marked my 3 year anniversary as a blogger. My first post on SEOmoz was a paragraph long and consisted of asking our readers if they know of any Spanish-language SEO blogs. It attracted 18 comments. Huzzah! Since then, I"ve published 241 more posts, with this one being #243. I thought I"d reflect back on my three years of blogging and share the good, the bad, the downright ugly, and the lessons I"ve learned along the way.


Phase I: Asking Questions
I wrote 4 posts in May of 2006, and each of them centered on a question posited to the community:

• "Know of any Spanish SEO blogs?"
  
• "Is there such a thing as too much website usability?"
  
• "What do you think of the (then-new) "I"m a Mac/I"m a PC" commercials?
  
• "Is cyberspace a Googlocracy?" 

At this point in my long and storied career at SEOmoz, I had been occupying a desk within the company for 4 short months (3 of which were as an intern), so I still had a lot to learn about SEO, Internet marketing, and, actually, about the Internet in general. I didn"t feel confident enough to blog about something as an "expert" or provide my input/opinion on a topic, so I resorted to asking open-ended questions in order to get feedback from our blog audience and establish a connection with them.

Lesson Learned:
The biggest lesson I learned with my first few posts was that you don"t have to be the expert when you blog, especially when you"ve got a good chunk of readers. It"s important to ask for feedback and reach out to your community for their input. I think they respect you more when you admit that you have limits and appreciate them for their opinions and level of expertise.


Phase II: Editorializing Existing Articles
My blogging evolved into me finding an article or blog post and talking about it (and, of course, ending with a question for our readers). With these types of posts I was able to inject a bit of personal interpretation and my input into them. I still wasn"t touting my knowledge level or expertise, but providing opinions about other people"s blog posts allowed me to step forward a bit and let my voice be heard.

Lesson Learned:
If you can"t think of anything to blog about or still aren"t confident in your "expert" abilities, there"s always an article or some news that you can highlight and add a personal spin to.


Phase III: Establishing a Voice
Once I got a handful of posts under my belt, I started to feel more comfortable sitting at a keyboard, Doogie Howser-style, and I was able to add my personality and voice more freely to my blog posts. I"ve always had a knack for writing, so I really enjoyed (and still do) injecting a little bit of myself into the posts I authored. I think that if someone were to remove the authors from a bunch of different posts and ask "Which one did Rebecca write?", you"d be able to identify mine pretty easily. :)

Lesson Learned:
At this point, even though I was still learning and considered myself to be a beginner SEO, I was comfortable enough with our readers and my coworkers that I could start being myself and letting my posts reflect who I was as a person. I think that"s one of the most important lessons learned when it comes to blogging. The thing that separates the good bloggers from the bad is their voice. What makes you read one blog over another? Sure, a lot of factors come into play, such as the frequency of updates, the quality of information, the level of expertise, etc. But for me, the thing that makes one blogger stand out amongst the throngs of everyone else is his ability to inject his personality into what he"s writing. I"m still no SEO expert, and I don"t pretend to be. Nonetheless, people still enjoy what I"ve got to say because I say it differently than anyone else, and that uniqueness I bring to the table is what defines me and makes me interesting.

Now that I"m at Phase III (profit!!!), I thought I"d share some other blogging odds and ends that I noticed after perusing through old posts.

Recurring Blogging Traits

1. Using punny titles that usually work in a movie, music or pop culture reference

• I Used to Care, But Things Have(n"t) Changed
• Sometimes Sites Don"t Look Like They Should...They Make It...Hurt So Good
• Marketing Sherpa States That SEM Clients Aren"t Multiplying Like Wet Gremlins
• London (and Worthing) Calling
• An American in London
• Overheard in (SES) New York
• Wordze to Yo Mutha

Lesson Learned:
Constructing a fun and eye-catching title is a good way to attract attention to your posts. Since I"m a huge dork, I like working in some sort of pop culture reference--it"s a good way to identify fellow nerds who march to the beat of the same drum as I do. :)

2. Feigning abuse at the hands of Rand

• "...I thought I"d take my boss"s "Post blogs while I"m gone or you"re fired!" threat seriously and attempt to bring something to the blog table."
• "Rand has chained me to my desk and ordered me to summarize the next set of videos released by Matt Cutts."
• "You don"t know what Rand Fishkin is really like. He made it explicitly clear that if I don"t keep summarizing your videos, I won"t live past my birthday."
• "Rand took a trip to both Houndstown and Badgersville to constantly bug me to finish this damn thing..."
• "In order to please the masses, Rand once again chained me to my desk and ordered me to do a recap of SES London in an amusing comic book fashion."
• "My "Don"t Fire Me Rand" Recap of SES New York"
• "...okay, sometimes when I ask him non-work stuff ("Hey, how was your weekend buddy?") he barks "Go write a blog entry!" at me..."

Lesson Learned:
Sometimes it"s good to take a lighthearted, joking tone: it makes the post more fun to read, and if you can find a way to identify with the audience (by, say, pretending the leader of the company you blog for is a sadist), they"ll enjoy your blogging even more.

3. Writing completely useless blog posts that people somehow nonetheless seem to like

• Ten Ways to Take a Break from Tedious SEO Work
• Ten Sad Signs Your Writing is Web-Influenced
• British Vocabulary 101
• 10 Different Types of Clients
• The Best Spam Submission Ever

Lesson Learned:
A little humor goes a long way. Sure, the posts are off-topic and have little to no actual marketing tips, but it"s nice to take a break from the usual blogging schedule and present something fun for your readers. Plus, they seem to like it--the latter two posts I listed are among the most popular ever on SEOmoz, and they"re certainly two of the most popular posts I"ve authored.

4. Using personal interests as an analogy or direct example (with food, movies and training/exercise being my most frequent go-to subjects)

• The Internet = The Ultimate Focus Group
• Why Good Content is Like a Pixar Film
• Punctured Tires and Lessons Learned About Paid Links
• Don"t Create False Expectations, Especially When It Comes to Baked Potatoes
• Movie Websites: A Missed Opportunity Or a Case of the "I Don"t Care"s?
• Content and Marketing Lessons Learned from the Dark Knight
• Sneaky Spam in Local Search

Lesson Learned:
I like using analogies and examples that I know/care about. Analogies and examples strengthen your point and make your post more understandable and relatable for your readers. If you use examples that have a close personal tie to you, you"re more likely to be excited about blogging. Plus, your readers will get to know you and will establish a personal bond, which will bring them back to your blog again and again.

Random Stats:

Most popular blogging categories:

• Roundups (53ish): you jerkwads sure do love your roundups!
  
• Events and Conferences (around 42): I"ve blogged about SES Latino, SES San Jose, SES Chicago, SES London, SEMpdx"s Searchfest, SES New York, SMX Advanced, SES Toronto, SES Travel, Shop.org events, SMX Social Media, SMX West, the eCommerce Summit, and some local Seattle meetups.
  
• Miscellaneous (23): this category houses most of my off-topic/silly/useless posts. :)
• SEOmoz news (15): we"re a growing company, so it"s only fitting that I announce the occasional company-related news to the masses.
  
• Google (16): in comparison, I"ve blogged about Microsoft and Yahoo! two times each. Cue the sad trombone.
• Social Media (13): one of my favorite topics.
  
• Search Community (12): there"s always something interesting to blog about with regards to our industry"s community.
  
• Web Design/Usability (11): I hadn"t really thought about it, but I guess I"m more interested in usability than I thought.

Number of posts about Matt Cutts: 10, 7 of which are video transcription posts, and all of which make fun of him in some capacity.

Number of posts I published but didn"t write: 6 (they were written by our six hiring candidates)

Posts with the most thumbs (since the thumbs system has been implemented):

• The Best Spam Submission Ever (it"s also the 4th most popular post ever on SEOmoz), currently sitting at 96 up, 4 down
• Please Stop Spamming Me for Votes (81 up, 2 down)
• 10 Different Types of Clients (67 up, 0 down)
• Apparently I Work for Google (49 up, 0 down)
• Are You Forcing Your Users to Superfluously Click (41 up, 0 down)

Favorite Posts:

• Apparently I Work for Google. Oftentimes, the best posts I write are the ones that just come to me and that I don"t have to spend any time researching. I wrote this one up one day while I was bored visiting my family in Michigan, and it really pleased me to see how well received (and relatable) it was by our readers.
• How NOT to Request a Link Via Email, Please Stop Spamming Me for Votes, Just When You Think Search Misconceptions Can"t Get Any Worse, Your Users Aren"t Intuitive, Which Is Why Your Forms Need to Be, and Customer Service and Reputation Management the Twitter Way: A Case Study. Sometimes a post falls directly into your lap based on a situation you encounter. The above posts were derived from conversations, a random email, a sign up process, and a customer service mishap. I was able to turn each experience into a lesson that I could share with the community.
• Content and Marketing Lessons Learned from the Dark Knight, 10 Different Types of Clients and Unusual Search Terms from the Month of November. Unlike the previous posts, these three are examples of posts I had ideas for and spent a lot of time on. There"s always a fear and some worry that you"ll pour all this effort into a post (or project) and that it will blow up in your face or fall flat, and I"m always relieved and happy to have the opposite happen. It"s nice seeing your hard work get well received and rewarded.
• Are You Forcing Your Users to Superfluously Click, How Newsworthy Are Your Newsletters, Plan for the Holidays Nice and Early By Analyzing Search Trends, and How a Good Title and Description Can Make or Break Your Social Media Submission. These are the ones I had a lot of fun putting together because I really enjoyed finding and analyzing various examples.

Lessons Learned:

• Try to find value in everyday situations. Think of how you can shape an experience you"ve had into something interesting and useful for your audience.
• Not every post has to be planned out ahead of time--sometimes a great idea can just come to you or you can be inspired by a random occurrence.
• If you put a lot of time and effort into a post and worry it"ll never pay off, don"t worry, oftentimes it will and you"re just being paranoid.
• Use examples in your posts (websites, screenshots, movies, whatever)--they really help!

Least Favorite Posts:

• The lazy posts (What Google Needs to Do with YouTube to Make Me Happy, Wikipedia vs. Britannica in a No-Holds-Barred Debate, Want to Make Up Stupid Words? Then Create a Social Media Site!). I think these posts had good potential, but I was lazy and essentially used them as a means to bitch about something without having much of a valid point to support my gripes.
• The clueless posts (Wikipedia: Now Telling You What"s What While You"re IM"ing, Google Adwords is Giving Me a Headache, Digg Has Shout-Blocked Me). I fired off these posts without doing adequate research and subsequently got my ass handed to me in the comments by people who were quick to point out that either what I was doing wrong or that the feature had been around for quite some time.
• The lame post (How to Get Banned from Digg). Yeah, this post sucks. (Hey, sometimes I can be painfully unfunny too!)

Lessons Learned:

• There"s a fine line between bitching with a point and just plain bitching. You don"t want to come across as a whiner.
• Also, if you"re blogging about a topic, you should do a bit of research beforehand just so you don"t make a fool out of yourself (unless that"s your intent).
• Oh, and don"t try too hard to be witty, clever, smart, etc. It often falls flat and is embarrassingly obvious to your readers. Just be yourself!
  

Polarizing Posts:

• All the Female Bloggers Say Heyyyy!...Hello? Ladies? This post inadvertantly turned into a bit of a gender war. Kim Krause Berg had blogged about the lack of recognition for female tech bloggers, and I said that it"s because there aren"t that many so there are very few to recognize. This post was pretty tame in terms of how much ire it raised, but nonetheless it was my first foray into taking a stance on a topic that had dissenting viewpoints. 
• Hey, I"m Blogging! Pay Attention to Me! This post has the dubious distinction of attracting my first ever thumb down. Apparently some of our readers/bloggers didn"t care to hear me call them attention whores. Oh well. I still think that bloggers (including me) are attention whores. Deal with it. ;P 
• A-List vs. Blue Collar Blogging. This is one of my favorite posts in that it received 17 thumbs up and 13 thumbs down for a net gain of 4. That"s pretty impressive. I still stand by my core message, which is that "A-List" bloggers do exist, and that not every blogger can become one in 90 days. I do feel a bit dumb for getting baited by Jason Calacanis, but then again, he was pretty good at getting attention (be it good or bad) back in the day (he seems to have quieted down more recently--maybe he"s busy trying to de-suck Mahalo).  
• Ron Paul is the Snakes on a Plane of 2008. Never fails--you talk about politics and end up stirring the pot, especially when you compare a popular politician to a B-grade movie about deadly snakes aboard a flight from Hawaii to Los Angeles.
• Generation Google a General Disappointment. This one"s a bit tricky. While I still maintain that the panel could have been much better than it was, looking back I realize that I was too harsh to Danny Sullivan, Rand and his brother, Evan. Belated apologies--I could have gotten my point across without pouring on quite as much Haterade as I did, so I"m sorry. (Hey, better late than never, right?)
• No, Unfortunately Digg Doesn"t Know Who You Are. I think this post got a lot of backlash partially because of the harshness of the original title and because some of the examples I highlighted were taken from actual user accounts, so they felt embarrassed to get called out. Again, I probably could have made my point without being quite so harsh, which is definitely an important takeaway. Nonetheless, I still like my post and stand behind it as an important thing to remember when doing social media marketing.

Lessons Learned:

• Controversy attracts eyeballs, but you have to be prepared to take the good with the bad. If you can dish it out but your skin is too thin to take what gets bounced back at you, you probably shouldn"t take such a harsh stance on things. (Thankfully, for the most part I"ve got a pretty thick skin. That"s what you get when you grow up with two teasing older brothers.)
• Don"t be afraid to stick up for yourself or defend your stance, but also know when to admit you"re wrong. After looking back at some of these posts, I was able to identify moments where I crossed the line and should have checked myself before I riggity wrecked myself.
• This has more to do with a business blog, but try to stay respectful even when disagreeing with someone. I"ve sloooooooowly learned that over the past few years, and now I"m a bit more tempered than a couple years ago. I don"t get as worked up or dragged into ridiculous wars between bloggers/marketers, and as a result it"s made me a better employee, blogger and human being.

Well, that about wraps up my retrospective on my three years of blogging here at SEOmoz. Blogging for this company has pretty much shaped my career and my image into what it is today, and it"s opened countless doors for me professionally. I can definitively say for a fact that blogging can be an invaluable asset if you know how to approach it. I"ve learned a ton about blogging and about myself in the past few years, and I hope the lessons I"ve shared can be of some benefit to you too. In the meantime, here"s to many more years of blogging about movies, marketing, and the wrath of Rand. ;)

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Posted by Danny Dover

I can always pick out a fool when I hear someone claim they fully get the internet, whether it be a social media snake-oil salesman or a Twitter user with too many followers. The fact of the matter is that while it’s possible (and exciting) to understand one sub-sphere of the internet, there are simply too many spheres for one person to really understand all of them. I simply don’t think it is possible.

By the same logic, my understanding of the internet is flawed as well. I have had many times when a light bulb goes off in my head and for a split second the universe suddenly makes sense. While these moments are awesome (in the truest sense of the word “awe some”), they are temporary. Nonetheless, they have helped shaped my view of the internet and, to a certain extent, the world.

The following is a list of the resources that have substantially changed my view of the internet.

Embracing the Wisdom of Crowds

Wikipedia TED Talk - Wikipedia is the bane of every SEO"s existence. It ranks for everything (#3 on my computer) and is difficult to replace. I shared this hatred until I came across Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales" explanation of why Wikipedia works. Frankly, the entire is process is quite beautiful.

Why Paris Hilton Is Famous - Just the mere image of Paris Hilton bothers me. That said, after reading the following article, I respect her unprecedented ability to market herself both online and offline. Although I think the author gives her too much credit, his outlook on her is both refreshing and inspiring.


The Wisdom of Crowds - For most of you I imagine this book is not new. The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki changed how I view people. His research showed me what I should have seen all along. It is silly to think that an individual person would be better or smarter than the combined wisdom of a group. This book made me realize this.


A World Wide Web of Opportunity

A Speech by David Heinemeier Hansson - In 2008, David, of Ruby on Rails and 37Signals fame, gave a speech at Y combinator’s Startup School. In his speech he described what he believes to be the reason why so many internet companies fail. Without spoiling it for you, the link is below.


YouTube Founders Video - Can you imagine the feeling of securing the financial future for yourself and all of your loved ones simply by signing a piece of paper? It is the feeling that entrepreneurs dream of, and Chad Hurley and Steve Chen finally had it after selling YouTube to Google for $1.65 Billion. This video was taken right after this happened. No wonder they are so giddy!



Stop Following the Leaders:

Fortune 450-500 - I recently had an extremely eye opening lunch with a prominent technologist in Seattle. While discussing the role of education in technology, I foolishly brought up the stale examples of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates dropping out of school. Quick to the draw, my lunch mate advised me to stop studying the leading Fortune 500 countries and start studying the Fortune 450 through 500. While the leaders relied on hard work to get to where they are, they also were given tremendous good luck. This is not always the same for the companies lower down on the list.


Fighting Information Overload

Don"t Make Me Think by Steve Krug is undoubtedly the best book ever written on web usability. His clear and well thought out explanations lay out what every web developer should know about doing their job. After reading this book, I literally made it a requirement for anyone who builds websites with me in my personal life.

Remembering My Place in the Internet’s Evolution

The Computer for the 21st Century - Back in February of 1991, Mark Weiser wrote this article in Scientific American. In it, he outlines a vision for ubiquitous computing that we are still working to achieve today. After reading this, I understood my proper place in computing for the first time. The cutting edge that we live on today is merely the foundation for computing tomorrow.


The Last Question - This is my favorite short story of all time. Written in 1956, Isaac Asimov eerily predicts the creation of a tool like Google. It"s chilling, humbling and has a ending that has stuck with me since first reading it several years ago.


The Hacker"s Manifesto - My experience as an internet marketer skews more toward the internet and development side of internet marketing. This article written in 1986 by  +++The Mentor+++ taught me how little the spirit of hackers has changed. It is as relevant today as it was 23 years ago.

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If you have any other resources that you think are worth sharing, feel free to post them in the comments. This post is very much a work in progress. As always, feel free to e-mail me or send me a private message if you have any suggestions on how I can make my posts more useful. If that"s not your style, feel free to contact me on Twitter (DannyDover) Thanks!

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Posted by randfish

A very simple return to the headsmacking series this week (as it"s late here in London and I"ve been up my usual 40+ hours traveling).

We"ve been noticing that a number of websites seeking to block bot access to pages on their domain have been employing robots.txt to do so. While this is certainly a fine practice, the questions we"ve been getting show that there are a few misunderstandings about what blocking Google/Yahoo!/MSN/other search bots with robots.txt does. Here"s a quick breakdown:

• Block with Robots.txt - do not attempt to visit the URL, but feel free to keep it in the index & display in the SERPs (see below if this confuses you)
• Block with Meta NoIndex - feel free to visit, but don"t put the URL in the index or display in the results
• Block by Nofollowing Links - not a smart move, as other followed links can still put them in the index (it"s fine if you don"t want to "waste juice" on the page, but don"t think it will keep bots away or prevent it from appearing in the SERPs)

Here"s a quick example of a page that"s blocked via robots.txt but appears in Google"s index:

(note that this robots.txt is the same across about.com"s other subdomains, too)

You can see that about.com is clearly disallowing the /library/nosearch/ folder. Yet, here"s what happens when we search Google for URLs in that folder:

Notice that Google has 2,760 pages from that "disallowed" directory. They haven"t crawled these URLs, so they appear as mere address strings (no title, description, etc - since Google can"t see the pages" content).

Now think one step further - if you"ve got any number of pages you"re blocking from the search engines" eyes, those URLs can still accumulate links, accumulate juice and other query-independent ranking factors, but they have no way to "pass it along" since their own links out will never be seen. I"ll illustrate the situation:

There"s two real takeaways here:

1. Conserve link juice by using nofollow when linking to a URL that is robots.txt disallowed
2. If you know that disallowed pages have acquired link juice (particularly from external links), consider using meta noindex, follow instead so they can pass their link juice on to places on your site that need it.

Looking forward to seeing folks at SMX London tomorrow (and for Will and my big showdown on Tuesday, too)!

p.s. Andy Beard covered this topic previously in a solid post - SEO Linking Gotchas Even the Pros Make.

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Posted by rebecca

Since I"m a movie buff and an Internet marketing nerd, I often notice Internet marketing and search mentions in various movies, and I always pay attention to the movie URL shown in trailers (my two recent favorites: the URL for Sacha Baron Cohen"s upcoming Bruno film was www.meinspace.com/bruno, but it looks like now it"s redirecting to MySpace.com, and the URL for I Love You, Beth Cooper is www.iloveyoubethcoopermovie.com, making me wonder why they had to append "movie" to such a specific URL). Recently I came across two examples where the movie industry referenced or directly utilized Internet marketing/social media marketing, and it got me wondering if Internet marketing is finally starting to become more mainstream (meaning fewer people will look at you with blank faces as you try to describe what you do for a living).

The first example comes from Steven Soderbergh"s new movie, The Girlfriend Experience. Available in theaters and via Comcast On Demand, the movie is about a high-end escort in NYC and her relationship with her boyfriend and her clients and their stresses about the current economic crisis and financial instability (the movie takes place right before the 2008 Presidential elections). In one scene the main character is having a conversation with a web developer/designer about her website, and one of her questions is "How do I get my site to appear high up in search engines?" His answer is so-so--he mentions that she has to submit her site to a lot of directories and other sites, which is a "well, yes and no" response--but he does sum up the conversation by telling her that she"ll need a lot of links, which was a pleasant surprise (I"m used to hearing a lot of really appalling search misconceptions).

I was pretty geeked to see that Steven Soderbergh kinda-sort of addressed SEO in one of his movies. Internet marketing isn"t really something you see in commercials or movies--I mean, there"s really nobody buying commercial space to advertise their marketing services, and you never watch a movie about the cute hipster Internet marketer who"s trying to woo the unattainable hot girl, only to find out that his nerdy best friend is actually the girl he"s in love with. Could the mention of SEO, albeit brief and a wee bit inaccurate (well, maybe not "inaccurate" so much as "requires more explanation"), be a step in the direction of mainstream notoriety?

My second example comes from the Cannes Film Festival. A movie is making the rounds at Cannes this year and attracting a ton of buzz. Not only is it a zombie movie (which is awesome in its own right), but it was made for a mind blowing $70. The movie, called Colin, is a zombie film that takes place from the zombie"s perspective, and it cost less to make than most DVD box sets. The filmmaker was able to put it together by utilizing Facebook and MySpace to round up movie extras, helpers and all sorts of people who wanted to be involved in the making of a zombie flick. This movie is a ridiculous example of how you can use social media marketing and networking to benefit your brand. Not only was he able to get volunteers for his movie and make his dream a reality, he generated buzz by building brand evangelists and by getting fans involved and having them spread the word.

If people nowadays are able to make a movie and promote it primarily through social networking and social media marketing, shouldn"t that reinforce the benefits to your clients or to your own team of marketers? You could argue that if it"s becoming more mainstream and commonplace to do SMM since it"s "all the rage" right now that it"s going to get too crowded, but I just think that means you have to ensure that your marketing efforts are that much more clever and better than everyone else. It"s certainly what this guy did--tons of people promote their bands and movies and comedy acts and whatnot via MySpace, Twitter, Facebook, etc., but not everyone succeeds. It"s a mixture of having the right product, clever and persistent marketing, and properly utilizing your social networking channels that equates to a great viral campaign.

So what do you guys think? Can you recall any examples from movies, music or television that lend credence to the notion that Internet marketing is becoming more "mainstream," or do we nerdy marketers still have to huddle in a corner to have our geek conversations while the masses go about their lives dishing about Jon and Kate"s imploding marriage and what Tom Hanks" hair looks like in his new Robert Langdon movie?

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Posted by jennita

URL rewrites and 301 redirects... you talk about them, you recommend them, but do you truly understand how they work? Sure, you know that rewriting a URL means that the URL displayed in the browser changes to be more SEO (and user) friendly. And you know that a 301 redirect is a permanent redirect. But let"s dig a little deeper, and explain how they work together.

As a developer, my very first SEO project was the task of rewriting a massive number of URLs and ensuring that the old URL redirected to the new. It was a daunting task at first because I didn"t have a clear understanding of how it all worked together. I was sure I"d have to rewrite pages and pages of code, and spend weeks if not months on the project. But once I figured it all out, the light bulb went on, and it literally took just a couple days to get it right. Yep! Days.

URL Rewrites

Rewriting a URL means changing the way the URL is displayed in the browser. When a user lands on a page with a rewritten URL, the code behind that page doesn"t change. In fact, the server still reads the original URL.

URL Rewrite Process:

1. User lands on new SEO"d URL
2. Using mod_rewrite, ISAPI_Rewrite, etc. new URL points to old URL on the server
3. Server calls the code from the old URL
4. Page is displayed in browser, displaying the new URL

From the server"s perspective, nothing has changed. The code is still the same. For example, if a developer had built a site using URL variables, there"s no need to change any code. Now, there are always cases that could contradict this. But at the basic level, there shouldn"t be a need to change code on the page.

301 Redirect

Once the URL is rewritten, you want to make sure that the old URL 301 redirects to the new. This tells the search engines that any link juice the old URL had should now be given to the new URL. It also makes for a good user experience, rather than showing a 404 error page. The server is told URL A should now be URL B.

301 Redirect Process:

1. User lands on original URL
2. Using code, mode_rewrite, etc. the 301 redirects URL to the new one, literally changing the URL that is displayed in the browser from the old to the new
3. URL Rewrite process begins again
   

Using the rewrite and redirect together brings the solution full circle. I"ve trained many developers on SEO standards and specifically how to implement and understand the workings of the rewrites and redirects. It takes a bit to wrap your head around it, but it"s all really quite simple.

For more detailed information on rewrites and redirects, check out the following sites:

• Our Guide to Applying 301 Redirects with Apache
• Apache mod rewrite
• IIS - ISAPI_Rewrite
• URLRewriter.net - Open Source URL Rewriter for .NET / IIS / ASP.NET
• Creating 301 Redirects in various languages

Personally, I find it fascinating and enjoy helping SEO"s as well as developers "see the light," as I like to call it. It"s that "aha" moment when they realize how simple it all is, and how easy it is to make your site SEO friendly. The best part is that rewriting URLs also helps to improve user experience. I"d love to hear if you have something to add, or how you go about explaining how these functions work together.

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Posted by Dr. Pete

This post was originally in YOUmoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author"s views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc.

I"ve been suppressing the urge to write this post for a while now. It"s not that I don"t love Twitter (I suspect my wife is a few days away from scheduling my intervention); it"s just that I"m saturated by it. It"s not the tweets themselves, but the incessant whining noise made up of every second-rate media personality in the world "discovering" Twitter on a daily basis and every self-declared "social media guru" regurgitating the same How to Twitter post a thousand times a week.

So, why am I still writing this post? I"m writing it because I"ve experienced something with Twitter that I don"t hear many people talking about. The real power of Twitter isn"t in easy mass-marketing, driving a few more links, Diggs, Stumbles, or Sphinns, or even in branding and making a name for yourself. The real power of Twitter is in transforming online connections into real-world relationships. For me, Twitter has become the most powerful tool at my disposal to bridge the professional/personal gap and drive offline relationships.  If you haven"t experienced this, let me share a few tips (and a story or two):

(1) The Mundane Matters

It"s easy to make fun of Twitter for the constant life-streaming, but I think it"s one of Twitter"s greatest strengths and the key to why Twitter makes the boundary between professional and personal so easy to cross. As you notice your professional contacts talking about their kids, being home with the flu, having a bad day, etc., it"s hard not to relate and feel like you know them a bit better.  Of course, that"s a two-way street. If you"re sincere, it"s a lot easier to start conversations with strangers on Twitter than on a platform where a professional obligation is implied (like LinkedIn).

(2) Harmonic Convergence

Twitter is not only a great place for keeping tabs on your local scene, but it"s also great for letting you know when people are in your neighborhood. A while back, I saw a tweet from my favorite itinerant SEO, Pat Sexton, that he was in Chicago for an event. Now, if you don"t know Pat, you have to understand that outside of conferences, he"s a hard man to find (mainly because he lives in a remote hut in Hawaii and only talks to monk seals). When I noticed Pat was in Chicago, I replied back on Twitter, and found out he was just a few blocks away. Two hours later, we were catching up in a local bar. Without Twitter, I would never have known he was just down the street.

(3) Cross the A-List Chasm

Everyone seems a little bit more human on Twitter, and this has a way of leveling the playing field between the "A-List" and the rest of us. Of course, that doesn"t mean you should follow every industry celebrity and virtually foam at the mouth every time they tweet, but there"s nothing wrong with sincerely replying to a big name when you have something relevant to say or re-tweeting them when you think it"s worthwhile. Of course, like any networking activity, it"s easier if the A-Lister is only one or two steps removed from you, relationship-wise. Eventually, you may get a reply or two, and down the road, some real opportunities.

(4) Round Up a Posse

One of my first experiences with bringing Twitter relationships into the real world was also one of the most powerful. Before last year"s SEOmoz advanced training, I sent out a couple of tweets saying that I"d be in town the night before and asking if anyone wanted to grab some dinner. With little or no effort, I managed to round up a group of 6, most of whom I"d never met before, and we accidentally bumped into 3 more folks from the seminar. Not only did I get to meet new people, but this little group became my unofficial conference "posse," rounding up other new people and making the networking experience one of the best I"ve had at an SEO event.

I should point out that I"m not naturally inclined to do this sort of thing. I"m a bit of a wallflower, truth be told, but the personal nature of Twitter and the low risk of sending out a tweet that goes unanswered made a potentially awkward situation easy. I used the same tactic at PubCon last year, and had a similar positive experience, meeting another group of new people that I previously only knew online.

(5) Don"t Be Shortsighted

With time and patience, these online-offline relationships become cyclical. Once you meet someone in person, you return to Twitter knowing them a bit better – they"re more likely to reply, retweet, and generally engage with you. This can be a powerful cycle, turning people you might only see once or twice a year at conferences into people you correspond with on an almost daily basis.You"ll miss out on all of this, though, if you take a short-term view. Instead of obsessing about getting out today"s link, or pushing for a reply or retweet, take the time to get to know people. Real opportunities come from building real relationships, and Twitter is a uniquely powerful touch point in that process.

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Posted by randfish

Dear Startup CEOs, CPOs (Chief Product Officers) & Founders,

I know your time is valuable, so I"ll be brief. If you currently have or are in the process of developing a business/marketing plan that includes the phrase "traffic from search engines," please peruse the following diagram:

The percentages are rough guesses, but they represent the collective wisdom of many experts in modern SEO. You certainly need to get the on-page factors right, but these are easy. Information from alternative signals (like click-through rate, toolbar usage, analytics, etc.) is still relatively insignificant. Rankings, particularly for competitive queries, are largely governed by links. The ability to rank for large amounts of less competitive keywords (long tail queries) with your content (by getting those pages crawled and kept in the main search engine indices) is also reliant on links.

Have a look at just one more visual:

That Pacman size chunk of the pie chart has been broken down into three important sections (again, the percentages are a rough guess). Taken together, these illustrations and the logic behind them should give you a solid foundation for understanding SEO. Get the on-page stuff right - that"s easy. Target the right keywords - again, easy. Earn large numbers of links from diverse, high quality sources with descriptive anchor text - that"s crazy hard.

Great SEO - the kind of SEO that can actually build a business by exposing a new company to thousands of targeted customers every day - isn"t done after the product launches. It"s not even done during the website design & architecture phase. Great SEO happens during product design. I know product is hard - maybe even the hardest part of building a great startup - but you have to add this step if you want to win.

Incentivize large numbers of diverse website operators to link to you. 

Think about it right now - what is it that your product/service/website/company does that"s going to make people link? How are you going to convert a higher percentage of the visitors to your site into productive, value-adding links than your competitors? What emotions do you leverage that inspire a visitor to link to you (not just Tweet about you)?

We work with a lot of startups, and I can count on one hand the number of companies who thought about this during the product design phase. In the future, more companies are going to think about this and execute on it. They"re going to get the top rankings. Those who don"t will have to compete in spite of the fact that their competition has thousands of targeted, interested visitors showing up on their website every day. Be a part of that first group - think SEO when you"re designing your business, not after.

Sincerely,
Rand Fishkin, Startup CEO & SEO Addict

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Posted by Lucy Langdon

Although a lot of a blog"s success comes from the ongoing effort you put into growing and nurturing it, there are a few things you can do to give it the best possible chance from day one. The checklist below varies from very simple actions through to big decisions and longer term strategies.

Blog Design and Build

• Choose the right kind of blogging platform - You can either install something like Wordpress to the back end of a domain you own, or you can go down the road of a free hosted blogging platform. There"s a great roundup of the pro"s and con"s of all the choices on Problogger. It"s very important to think long-term when you make this decision because it can be difficult to move things around in the future. For example, put your blog on a free platform like Blogger and you can"t 301 pages if you ever choose to move.
  
• First impressions are vital - You don"t have the clout to get away with dodgy code or bad spelling; make sure everything is as good as it possibly can be in those first few weeks of your blog.
• About page and welcome page - Rather than using that awkward "first post" to explain who you are and what your blog is about, put a couple of static pages up with some authoritative and friendly information about, well, who you are and what your blog is about. After the post that attracted me, these pages are usually the first place I"ll go on a new blog.
• RSS above the fold - Doesn"t need much explanation. I do not want to have to search for that icon when I land on a blog.
• Offer email subscription - Old-school? Still absolutely worth doing.
• Be clever with your language - As per this excellent post on Copyblogger, think about your users and the kind of language they"ll connect with. If your blog offers free tips or advice, then why not put that as a call-to-action rather than "subscribe" or "sign up".
  
• Social Media buttons - These aren"t right for everyone, but if you"re going after the social media crowd then it"s worth having a think about how those buttons can be best implemented on your blog. There"s actually a fair bit of debate around this in the blogging community...
• Check that on-page SEO best practice is adhered to - You know the rules. If you don"t, learn them!
  
• Check theme across different browsers - I spoke to our developers about this and they reckon that manually testing in each browser is the best plan. If you don"t fancy that, I"ve heard some good things about Browser Shots.
  
• Install analytics package - There are free and paid options. Just make sure you"ve got something (like Google Analytics) up and running from day one.
• Get some feedback - Ask a friend to have a look at your blog before you launch it. It"s really hard to spot the most obvious of mistakes when you"re too involved in something so use a friend to get some perspective. You could also ask for some advice from forums or blogs in your niche. As long as you"re open about what you"re after, people will generally be very helpful. This has the added perk of informing a new group of people about your upcoming blog.
  

Blog Launch

You"ve got everything sorted and you"re champing at the blogging bit. Here are a few things to take care of on launch day.

• Launch with at least 5 quality posts - If you"re link baiting for those first visitors, make sure you have some other content for them to read on the blog. A blog with one fabulous post can seem like a one-hit-wonder. Ideally, you want your visitors to feel like they haven"t even got time to read everything in one sitting; they"ll be forced to bookmark you and return another time.
• Submit to directories - Once you"ve got this first content up, submit your blog up to a few directories. Here are three good places to start:
  
  1. Technorati
  2. BOTW
  3. Blogged
  4. Bloggapedia
  
  If you want to read more about this, take a look at this post on SEJ.
  
• Use Your Contacts - Friends, “friends”, followers, family, contacts... anyone who has ever expressed a passing interest in your life will not object to you telling them about your blog (as long as it has good content on it).
• Use blog URL in email signature - ...make it catchy.
• Get some comments going ASAP - I"m a huge believer in the concept that conversation begets conversation. Get a few comments up on your posts from friends and family (encourage, cajole, threaten, bribe- let your opinionated aunt be opinionated) and watch the party start. Rand has some alternative advice on this (point number 6).
  
• Consider buying some advertising - Bid on a few keyphrases or buy some Stumble Upon traffic. There"s no shame in this. It can be really hard to get your content in front of the right audience, and buying some advertising will really help.
• Is it real news? - If you, or the company or person you"re blogging for, is well-known, there"s a good chance that a blog is news. You can go old-school or new-school with this: either publish a Press Release and get it on the wires, or contact a top blogger or three to let them spread the news for you- or both!

I"ve steered clear of advice on how to promote an existing blog in this post, but it"s worth just touching on how important outreach is from day one. Commenting on others" blogs, offering to guest post (or inviting guest posts on your own blog), participating in forums, responding to any feedback or comments you receive.... all of this is hugely important in establishing your name and brand online and should be included in the first (and all following) stages of your blog launch.

I"m sure you"ll have lots more ideas about how to give your blog the best chance of succeeding from launch day and I"d love to hear about them in the comments.

(Photo via scragz)

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Posted by Nick Gerner

Judging by our analytics and the volume of Q+A about mozRank and PageRank, I"d say a lot of you are applying metrics to your SEO. And I don"t just mean search engine referrals.  Given the economy, it"s great if you can lay out some hard numbers, connect that to results, and make a strong argument for the work that you do. 

I know we"re seeing our SEO business continue to grow, not shrink, even in this harsh economic climate.  I think a lot of that is because we"re able to provide good numbers to back up our strategy recommendations.  But even with the expertise on our SEO team and out in the community, I still see a few common questions about mozRank and PageRank, and what these mean for real-world SEO:

• What"s the scale for mozRank?  And why do I care?
• What does mozRank measure compared to Domain mozRank?
• How does mozRank compare to or differ from PageRank?  Why should I use one or the other?
• What does PageRank really tell me about a page?  How is it limited and what can I do with this knowledge?

These are great questions.  We"ve got some discussion in our Linkscape help center around these, but it"s a little technical and product focused.  And we"d prefer to tell everyone (not just PRO members) something about SEO here. 

If you"d like, you can jump straight to the takeways.  By the way, when I say "PageRank" below I mostly mean Toolbar PageRank, the green fairy dust in your Google Toolbar.

First, on to scales.  Both mozRank and PageRank (both academically and in the real world) have very few pages at the top (mR/PR 10) and many, many pages at the bottom (mR/PR 1).  Because there"s such a big disparity here, both of them have a handy 10 point scale, as illustrated below.


You"ll notice the Y-axis is showing a hypothetical Link Juice metric on a log scale.  So where we have mozRank 4, you"ll see that corresponds to a hypothetical link juice value of 599, and mozRank 5 corresponds to 5,000.  This just reflects the relative effort to get these mozRanks, whether this be links, authoritative endorsements, etc.

Take a mozRank or PageRank 5 page: one point above PageRank 4, one point below PageRank 6: one point in both cases.  But the work you put in to go from 4 to 5 is quite different from the work you do to go from 5 to 6.  For beginners it"s frustrating to hit a particular level of PR or mR and feel like you"ve plateaued.  When this happens, it"s time to sharpen your pencils because you"ve got to break out some new techniques.

FYI, we set mozRank so that each level is ~8 times as much link juice as the prior level.  To show this in another way, here"s the same graph, but we"ve taken out the fancy scaling and just show the gradations between mozRank 5 and 7.


Suddenly you can see the real difference in SEO effort between a mozRank 5.08 and a mozRank of 6.61, and the work left until mozRank 7.  Show this the next time someone gives you a hard time about that link building effort you"re making.  Or better yet, the next time you"re link building, be sure to measure where you are today, and choose the right link building tactics.  What worked to get you to mozRank or PageRank 5 just isn"t going to cut it if you"re going after that elusive 7.

When people say site PageRank, they"re really talking about the link profile of the whole domain: what other sites are linking back?  mozRank and (the original academic form of) PageRank both measure only links between pages.  This ignores any factors about content, anchor text, domain age, authority, or trust.  Domain mozRank and the concept of site PageRank are both interested in only links between sites.  This still ignores factors about content or anchor text or domain age.  While mozRank is scoped at the page level and measures reach by links to that page, Domain mozRank is scoped at the whole domain and measures how broadly the domain is referenced across many different domains.  In this case, many links from a single domain don"t help, but a few links from each of many different domains does help.

But typically one uses PageRank of the homepage to measure this.  PageRank doesn"t do a bad job of this, but it"s not directly measuring this effect.  Inside Linkscape (and exposed on the mozBar), we show Domain mozRank, which does directly reflect this, on the same kind of a scale described above.


Each level of Domain mozRank is about five times the juice of the prior level.  This reflects the fact that there are many more pages than domains.  But you get the same issues trying to jump from DmR 5 to 6 compared to 4 to 5.  Getting more links from the same domains already linking to you isn"t going to help your site-wide link profile.  So if you"re stuck at DmR 5, it"s time to reach a little more broadly, engage in some new communities, and partner with some new sites.

So what about PageRank?  Why do I keep talking about mozRank if Google isn"t using it in their algorithms?  That"s a very valid question.  We are confident, and plenty of expert SEOs agree that Google cares about links.  They care about links from authoritative domains more than links from non-authoritative domains.  And once you"ve gotten those links, the links you give out count for more.  This is exactly the intuition we capture in mozRank and Domain mozRank.  In fact, we"ve done a lot of studying and comparing mozRank and PageRank and we"ve found something really encouraging, and something a bit surprising.

* I"ve included a small amount of noise in PageRank (+/- 0.5) because PageRank is only provided with 10 gradations (e.g., PR 5 or 6 but never 5.34). This causes bunching in graph, which makes interpretation difficult.

This graph visually shows how mozRank compares to PageRank.  The x-axis represents toolbar PageRank* of a page, and the y-axis represents mozRank for the same page.  I"ve included the line y=x, which shows what perfect correlation would look like.  For you stats junkies the Pearson"s correlation coefficient is 0.48, which is good, but not perfect correlation. 

We"re pleased with this correlation.  But by PR 4, mozRank starts to fall below PR, in some cases by at least a point.  Our rule of thumb is that mozRank should be within a point or two of PageRank.  This gets at data to support a belief many of you have had for a long time: Toolbar PageRank is correlated with site-wide authority and trust effects, beyond just page-level links.  This can make things difficult for the metrics driven SEO: how can you measure your current position, and progress against different ranking factors, when the metrics you"ve got combine effects?


The Pearson"s correlation between Domain mozRank and PageRank of the homepage of the domain of 0.71.  This is a much more significant correlation than the page-level correlation between mozRank and PageRank.  This time, we see much more significant clustering around the perfect correlation line y=x.  And this time we see much less of the underestimating we saw with page-level mozRank.  This suggests that Toolbar PageRank is showing several factors, including page-level linking, but also site authority and trust.  And those factors are combined into a single score.  Using PageRank alone can leave plenty of question marks about your strengths and weaknesses.

  For the metrics driven SEO, this implies a few things:

1. A high Toolbar PageRank for a page might not indicate a widely popular page.  In fact, the page might be very lightly linked to, but might instead be reaping the rewards of being on a strong domain (e.g., some Wikipedia pages).
2. Analyze the profile of the whole domain during the initial audit process, and not just specific pages.  A new or unknown page might receive a high PageRank just by being on a strong domain.  PRO members can try out the labs backlinks analyzer and choose "root domain" or "just this page" to see these two profiles.
   
3. Work on site-wide performance, and then focus it. Gain authority for your whole domain, then focus that strength through link sculpting, on-page key word factors, and anchor text.
4. Use fine grained metrics.  Where appropriate, metrics like mozRank and Domain mozRank along with some comparisons to the competition can give an audit some powerful, targeted conclusions about strengths and about what is missing.  We"re certainly doing a lot of this in our own consulting.

The online marketing space is filled with measurements: analytics, conversions, cost-per-click.  A lot of SEO is something of an art requiring high-level expertise.  But there"s plenty of room for measurement here too.  Check out your site profile, check out your strong and weak pages.  Measure the authority of your site.  Prioritize your work based on your known strengths and weaknesses.  And show your stakeholders not just what you"re doing but why, and how that"s changing. 

With the economy in the shape it"s in, the people who can measure their work and validate their assumptions are the people who are going to survive.  And they"re not just going to survive, but they"ll thrive as they pick up the pieces the rest of us leave behind.

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Posted by rebecca

Stories, news, and other notable items from the past week:

• Compete has rolled out a bunch of changes, adding user generated tags, a new interface, dynamic graphs, and more.
• Pete Meyers has hired a new intern, Yoozer, and he"s here to answer your toughest questions about usability.
• Are you a small business and scratching your head about this newfangled Twitter thing? Check out this Twitter guide for small businesses and hop on the 140 character bandwagon.
• Man, Twitter is all over the place lately. Is it bad for journalism? Marc Gunther seems to think so...
• Last Twitter link (for now): Brent Payne is all...well, atwitter (sorry) over the fact that Alyssa Milano responded to his tweets. [insert lame Who"s the Boss joke here] 
• Tony Adam counters Darren Slatten"s theme winning post about reputation management with a post saying online reputation management does matter. I smell a feud!
• 10e20 offers up some basic tips for online and offline social networking. PROTIP: Befriend Chris Winfield. He and his hair are among the most powerful social media marketers in the biz.
  

• Researchers have used a brain interface to post to Twitter (check out a video of the brain computer interface in action). I for one welcome our new tweeting computer overlords.  
• My amigo Greg wrote an informative post on getting to know Mixx, a digg-esque social media site. He includes some good tips on how to use the site and get maximum benefit from it.
• Matt McGee is mad as hell about Google Maps, and he"s not gonna take it anymore!
  

• Danny Sullivan recently wrote a great post about expired domains and whether their links still count. Check it out--hopefully it"ll address your burning questions about buying and redirecting old domains.
• KnowEm.com is a cool new service that allows you to check the availability of a user name across 120 social media sites. 

YOUmoz entries:

• What Are Your Thoughts on Optimizing for Product Variations? Sahota talks about options for ranking for long tail product keyphrases and product variations.
• SEO Checklist in a Hurry - Audit List. Filipe Santos provides us with 5 items to check when doing a site audit.
• Dear Spammers Sending Out Emails to SEOmoz Members. Kenneth Dreyer lays the smackdown on recent spammers blasting SEOmoz members with emails.
• The Google Gods Strike Again... Fizzarotti experiences some issues with how Google is classifying his URLs.
• "Putting Out" to "Score" on Social Media. MTurek talks about privacy issues and concerns with social media and social networking accounts.
• Google Adwords Optimisation and Account Limits. Hannahm23 shows us how to submit more keywords and ad groups to Adwords.
  

Best of YOUmoz:

• A Better Web Development Process Based On the Concept of Link Bait. John McElborough talks about the standard web development process and thinks it should start with content strategy and link building.
• Small Business SEO: Starting with the Right Success Metrics. Rishi continues his small business SEO blogging series by talking about success indicators and metrics.
• Link Building from A to Z. Wiep.net shares 26 great link building tips starting from A to Z.

New additions to the SEOmoz Marketplace:

Featured job postings:

• SEO marketing finance manager for Embarq’s Interactive Services in Wake Forest, NC
• PPC online marketing internship for Orchid Box in London, UK
• Contracted SEO analyst for Swimwear Express in Cleveland, OH
• Contracted channel partner for MaximumHit
• Web marketing specialist for Stone Interactive Group in Ann Arbor, MI
• Web design and development specialist for Metter Advertising in Coopersburg, PA
• SEO specialist for Predator Nutrition in Leeds, UK
  

Featured companies:

United States:

• Rdezine in Baltimore, MD
• Defcon Servers in Connecticut
• KVCHosting in Edmond, OK
• Maine Hosting Solutions in Bath, Maine
• Rise and Shine SEO in San Diego, CA
• My Newsletter Builder in Asheville, NC
• Dean Arrow in Colorado

Canada:

• Measure Marketing Results in Toronto, ON

UK:

• Com. Motion Consulting in Edinburgh, UK
• Orchid Box Limited in London, UK

Europe:

• Pixabit GmbH in Leonberg, Germany

Asia:

• ISE Web Solution in Bangalore, India
• Global Online Solution in Delhi, India
• Maximum Hit in Noida, India
• VietSEO in Hanoi, Vietnam
• Intechno in Beijing, China

Australia:

•   Red Meets Blue Design in Perth, Australia
  

Featured resumes:

Currently looking:

• Rudy Dallal was the webmaster and SEO specialist for the NY Film Academy and is currently looking for SEO work.
• Alessio Nanni is a PHP/MySQL coder with extended knowledge of all CSM and bulletin systems. He"s also proficient in XML and CSS, Python, C, Javascript, Actionscript (Flash) and has general Graphic knowledge.

Happily Employed:

• Justin March works on a range of online marketing projects in Stonehouse near Stroud in Gloucestershire, UK.

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Posted by great scott!

So you"ve got this great content with lots of links pointing to it, but now you have a new version, or there"s an update of the product, or it"s an annual content piece...how do you keep all of those links, make sure users get to the relevant version, and keep the old stuff archived? What to do, what to do?

Never fear, Whiteboard Friday is here to provide answers to all of your expired or cyclical content woes!

SEOmoz Whiteboard Friday - Expired Content from Scott Willoughby on Vimeo.

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Posted by wiep.net

This post was originally in YOUmoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author"s views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc.

Although you can easily find lists with 21, 66, 69, 75, 101 or even 131 link building strategies, numbered (link building) tip lists remain very popular. Not because these articles provide shocking new insights - most of the aforementioned mentioned lists mention pretty much the same tactics - but because they remind people of how work intensive the ongoing process of link building can be, and because they make people think due to their in-depth nature. "How can I use these tactics for our website?" "Which of the listed tactics are relevant for our company?" Or, even better, "What strategies would I have added to this list?"

This list, hopefully, makes you think about your current strategy, and reminds you that you can (and have to) link build your az off continuously.

(Image by *key1)

 

Award websites (or hosting awards)

Although there are thousands of unimportant, irrelevant or simply weird web award contests out there, there are hundreds of great, appealing and well-respected awards being hosted every year as well. I"m not saying that you should aim for an ad:tech Award or a Webby straight away, but there are probably several interesting awards available in your industry as well. If this happens not to be the case, you can also choose to create your own award.

Business partners

There are dozens of legitimate ways of trading links with other websites without having to fear that your website receives some kind of reciprocal link filter or penalty. Asking a select group of your business partners to mention your company somewhere on their website (while doing the same for them) is a perfect example of this. You could either create a page that lists your most important business partners (which also might be of interest to potential new customers), or mention them on multiple different pages across your website.

Creating link pages that carry hundreds of links to slightly relevant "partners" don"t work anymore (ever wondered why most links.php pages have a grey PageRank?), but establishing link partnerships with a small amount of highly relevant websites can definitely be useful.

Customers

There"s nothing better than a happy customer. Happy customers often come back to buy more of your goods, or they might tell their friends about your products or services. If you"re able to identify your happiest customers, you can try to see if these brand evangelists might be willing to link to your website. If you"re in the b2b industry, you can ask for a testimonial or product review, and if you"re selling products to consumers, you can target those customers who have a personal blog or website. While offering a discount, samples, beta invites or something else definitely is an option, it isn"t even always necessary. Like I said, there"s nothing better than a happy customer...

Directories

Submitting your website to directories as a link building strategy has already been beaten with a stick hundreds of times, but it still remains a valid tactic that definitely works. Of course, that"s if you"re doing it the right way.

Submitting your website to a few (which can vary from about 5 to a few dozen) high quality relevant directories? Yes. Auto-submitting your  website to several hundreds of general directories? No. Identify which directories are the most important and relevant ones for your company (which can either be general, niche or local directories), submit your website, and move on.

Events, Charities & Sponsorships

Speaking at, liveblogging from, or maybe even sponsoring an industry event (or charity) can lead to links as well. A large benefit of these links is that, besides being highly relevant and providing traffic, they can create a reputable image of you (or your company), because you show that you know what"s happening and what matters in your industry. Also, events are a regularly returning opportunity, as most events and conferences are not one-time-only.

Forums

Although it may seem like a very easy way to get more links, link building through forums can be very tricky. However, it can also be one of the most valuable in terms of branding and the amount of targeted visitors. There are several ways of building links through forums.

A tactic that"s being used quite often is signature-based link building. When you"re doing this yourself (some "rent" the signature of high profile forum members), it"s a good way to build a brand on the forum you"re participating in, as long as you contribute regularly. It is also a good way to disguise your link profile a little bit for other link marketers, as Yahoo tends to show each forum link individually. Tools like MajesticSEO and Linkscape have devalued this benefit, but it may still be valid in some cases.

A different way to build links through forums (and that"s being used a lot) is link dropping. Some people think that creating an account, starting a topic (or leaving a comment) and dropping a URL won"t reach the attention of the forum moderators. Most of these links, however, are deleted within 5 minutes after the topic has been created, or the reply has been added.

Another way in which you can use forums to attract extra links is by sponsoring a contest. Lots of forums have contests (photo contests, poetry contests, etc) regularly. Donate a prize to the winner of one of these contests, and you might receive a link in return.

Like I said, forums can be very tricky in terms of link building, especially when you"re more or less just dropping your link. This is considered as spam, and can have a bad effect on your brand (or your clients), so only use forums in your link building strategy when you"re able to dedicate enough time to it.

Although forum links have been devalued by search engines in the past (mainly because of abuse by spammers), I do think that links on forums that are being moderated with good care can be pretty valuable. The social control on forums is pretty high, which might be a signal to search engines as well.

Guest Blogging

One of the most efficient ways to build  deep links with the anchor text of your choice is by guest blogging (or guest writing) for other websites. You write an article that will be published on a different website, and in exchange for that contribution, you"re usually allowed to add a link (or a few) to your own website. Because you"re the writer of the article, you choose which anchor text will be used and what URLs will be referred to, so you have full control. This YOUmoz post is an example of guest blogging :)

If you have proven yourself as a good writer or networker, your guest post might be posted on a very well-read blog or website, which not only provides extra link strength, but lots of extra visitors as well.

Hire Help

Outsourcing isn"t an option for everybody, but it"s definitely worth considering. You can either let somebody you trust manage (a part of) your campaign, or you could visit a link building workshop or training. Especially when you’ve been building links to your own site for quite some time, a fresh mindset can bring in some new ideas and point of views.

Although asking an expert for advice definitely is an option, hiring some help doesn"t have to be expensive. Amazon Mechanical Turk, for example, can be awesome for outsourcing easy (and sometimes annoying) tasks. However, it"s important to keep an eye on the quality, but that"s always the case.

Industry Authorities

Every industry has at least a few "must-have" links. These links are links  on the most authoritative websites (either in # of visitors or SE rankings), which, if you"re able to get them, almost certainly will give you a boost in rankings. Whether you"re simply sending out a link request, creating link targeted content, networking your ass off, or guest blogging (see "G"), these industry authorities are well worth spending a few hours of your time on. Take your time to identify these important link targets and to craft a custom strategy to get links from these targets; the value of the links will usually pay back the investment.

Job Websites

When it comes to link building, vacancies are often forgotten. However, especially when your company is somewhat larger, the amount of links that a single job ad can result in can be quite high. Ask your HR officer on which websites your latest vacancy is being shown, and you might be surprised about the numbers.

Although lots of these links will disappear over time (when the vacancy is filled, for example), vacancy pages often accumulate quite some PageRank. Therefore, it"s important not to forget to list your most important products (“this is what we do...”) on your "jobs" page in order to distribute the link strength to these money making pages.

Killer Content

Yes, I know that you get slapped around the ears with "just create good content" a lot, but it"s true. Not just for link baiting, where you try to push your content via sources like social media, but for regular link building as well.

When you"re building links for a highly commercial website with just a few pages, you"re probably having a hard time obtaining good links. Creating informative pages, preferably with some attractive images and/ or video material, and adding these to the website makes the process of persuasion easier, and will increase your link conversion rate drastically.

Linkers of the Past

Ask people who have linked to a press release page, article, tool or any other page on your website in the past to check out your newly added, relevant content. If this page is relevant enough, he or she might link to you again. A very easy and very efficient tactic.

If there are specific websites you"d love to get another link from, that have already linked to you before, target the content specifically at these websites. Also, you can ask the owner or editor of the website you want to obtain a link from to contribute to the content you"re creating, in order to increase the chance of being linked to by this person once again.

Microsites & Other Domains

Companies usually own dozens to hundreds of websites. Especially if you"ve hired a traditional marketing agency in the past (those guys *love* to launch a new microsite every month or so), you probably have a few domains lying around you"re not aware of. If you work at a small company, there will be at least a few, but if you work for a large company, there will probably be a lot.

Link these websites (carefully!) together, make them point to relevant, money making pages on your most important domain, or redirect the most important and/ or relevant ones to your main website. If you"re planning on redirecting them, make sure that the content is as similar and/ or relevant as possible; otherwise the 301 might not transfer all of the link strength.

News

Although most news websites are always looking for new content, it can be pretty hard to get your product, company or website mentioned sometimes. Instead of just relying on the plain old push methods, such as sending out a press release, it can be wise to identify and network with influential journalists from your industry.

On websites like WeFollow.com, TweepGuide, or other sources, you can easily find journalists in your neighborhood or industry. Networking via Twitter is just a start, but most of these journalists have personal blogs as well, which usually are listed in their Twitter bio. These blogs are just another door to their attention.

Another tip for when you"re finding it hard to reach news websites is to send out press releases during the summer, holidays, or other moments when the amount of real news is relatively low. In these periods, you usually have a higher possibility of getting mentioned.

Offline Media

While most people don"t think about offline media (yes, that"s TV, radio and all that other "old" stuff) during a link building campaign, offline sources create tons of links indirectly every day. I"ve seen campaigns that started offline and only mentioned a URL, that resulted in hundreds of links. And most of these campaigns weren"t even optimized, so there"s a lot of potential.

The trick (and most difficult part at the same time) is to create a path where an offline signal triggers someone to go online and visit a URL, and from there on to tell his or her friends by linking to it. This usually works best with linkbaity campaigns, so think about those offline media every once and a while when you"re developing a linkbait campaign.

Places Where You"re Already Being Mentioned

There"s low hanging fruit, and there"s LOW hanging fruit. Search for websites that already mention your business name, URL, or your personal name, but haven’t linked to your website. This works pretty good (not flawless) in Yahoo!. Contact the website owner or editor, and ask if it"s possible to add a link ("it"s more user friendly"), and perhaps even to give it a descriptive anchor text.

Q&A Websites

Websites where people can ask questions, such as Yahoo! Answers, Mahalo, or a more niche site like LinkedIn, are great for branding, content research and link building. Regularly answering questions that are related to your business helps you to build a (personal) brand, just like with forum participation.

While you"re answering these questions, you get a clear image of which questions are being asked a lot. You can try to answer these questions in an FAQ on your own website in order to attract traffic through search engines. You can also direct people on these Q&A websites to your FAQ, so you build extra traffic and links. However, use this with care. I"ve seen quite some people using Q&A websites to build links in a spammy way, which isn"t very good for branding.

Relevant Organizations

The (local) Better Business Bureau, the Chamber of Commerce, or any other industry organization usually adds links to all their members. Don"t forget to add yours. Although some of these links are being nofollowed and others may be buried quite deep into the website, it"s still low hanging fruit waiting to be picked.

Also, some of these organizations also provide industry related content, such as a blog, research or an article database. Try to determine if it"s possible to contribute, and if so provide tips, visuals, or any other content that can be accompanied by a link to your website.

Suppliers

Just like with customers (see "C"), you can also get your suppliers involved in your link building campaign, for example with testimonials. Lots of companies would love to add something like "We"ve been clients of SEOmoz for over 5 years now, and they"ve never let us down. Awesome rankings and excellent service." - John Doe, Company X to their website, so offer to give your top suppliers a positive quote.

When you happen to be working for a big brand, you can also create an "Official Company X Supplier" logo. Especially when your company has a good name, there are lots of companies who"d be more than willing to add such a button to their websites. This also works excellently for resellers and accredited or qualified companies.

Twitter

The wide acceptance of Twitter and the broad selection of Twitter tools have made it into a medium that can be used on so many levels, one of which is for link building.

Like I said before, Twitter can be great to find and network with influential journalists and bloggers (see "N"), but it can also be used during a content brainstorm or for trend research. For example, tools like Twitturly, which keeps track of popular URLs on Twitter, and Twist, which shows trends on Twitter, are very useful.

Besides the other possible uses for Twitter, such as brand monitoring, initiating the launch of a campaign, recruitment or maybe even direct business, you can also use it to simply let all of your followers know that you"ve got news while linking to it.

Universities

It sometimes looks like everybody and their dog are chasing .edu links because of their higher search engine value. While I doubt that an .edu link is more valuable than a link on any other TLD by default, the majority of links coming from an .edu domain are relatively juicy.

There are lots of ways to get links from .edu domains, but you"ll have to keep in mind that relevance still remains a very important factor. So don"t go chasing after any university or college link you can get (the same goes for .gov and .mil links, btw), but try to focus on the most relevant ones instead.

A few examples of how to get .edu links are by speaking at a university or college (for example, about Internet Marketing), through an intern, career or school fairs, offering student discounts, or being interviewed for (or contributing to) the school paper. Just with any other TLD, it"s just common sense.

Video Websites

Just like image websites can help you to build links and drive traffic, video websites can do the same. Regularly upload great, relevant videos to YouTube, Vimeo or any other video website you think is useful in order to build up a subscriber base. Add relevant tags and a link to your website, so you can easily get found on the video website and can lead traffic to yours. These videos don"t have to be explosively amazing or remarkably clever; sometimes surprisingly simple can be enough as well. Tools like TubeMogul can make the process of uploading to multiple video hosting sites somewhat easier and faster.

Widgets

Although building links through widgets can backfire if not done correctly, it can also be very effective when you do it right. I think Rand explains it very well in one of the Whiteboard Friday videos; it all boils down to intent, destination URL and clearness.

The great thing with widgets is that nearly any company can use this strategy, as most industries have at least something that"s widgetizable. However, the biggest mistake I see being made is companies who think, “Hey, let"s make a widget where people can display some of our products they think are cool.” Just think of what kind of widget *you* would display on your website...

X-robots Tag, Robots.txt & 404s

While search engines can find most of the pages on the web, there are also quite some pages that aren"t accessible to search engine bots. A noindex-tag or robots.txt block is quite common.

Determine which of your URLs are restricted for search engines and use Yahoo!"s SiteExplorer to see which links are pointing to these URLs. Either remove the search engine robot block, change "noindex, nofollow" into "noindex, follow", or contact the linking website and ask if it"s possible to adjust the URL they"re referring to. You can do pretty much the same with 404 error pages - Google provides quite some info about this in the Webmaster Console.

Also, in some cases you might be linked to from pages that can"t be crawled by search engines. I received a link once from someone who kept his blog out of every search engine"s index by adding a "noindex, nofollow" x-robots tag to it. When I emailed him about this, he told me that he wasn"t aware of it, removed the "noindex, nofollow" tag, and linked to me once again as a thank you. People make mistakes all the time, so pointing them out can be worthwhile.

Your Own Website

If you"re looking for a quick, cheap, easy and very effective link building tactic, starting at your own website is probably the best choice. You have optimal influence (well, if you"re not being dictated by either a communication or an IT department) when it comes to anchor text, link location, target URL and many other factors.

For example, when your website has already been around for a while, it may have already attracted hundreds or thousands of links over time. Try to determine which of your pages are the most popular ones, and add links to relevant and/ or other important URLs to those pages. Navigation, website structure and proper alt attribution are just a few other examples of link marketing opportunities on your own website.

Ztrategy

Yeah, I know, I kinda cheated on this one, but having a well thought through ztrategy is so important that I couldn"t leave it out. Having a clear view of your surroundings and adjusting your link marketing strategy to this situation is key to being successful.

A big mistake that I see being made quite often is folks who start link building without a plan, or with just very unrealistic goals. Link building without a plan is like riding a bike blindfolded with your hands tied behind your back; you"ll probably survive the first few feet, but you don"t know where you"re going and will probably end on your face eventually. Also, when you"re planning on pushing your relatively new website to top three rankings on highly competitive keywords within a few months, a lack of results will likely lead to losing faith and motivation pretty quickly.

Although the Z usually is the end of a list, it"s definitely not the end of your link building campaign. Link building is a form of (search engine optimized) marketing, and marketing is never “done”.

Now that I"ve listed 26 different tactics that most of you might be able to use for your website, let"s see if it"s possible to create another list from A to Z in the comments. I"m pretty sure that all of the Mozzers are able to come up with another 26 link building tactics :)

Wiep Knol is a link marketer from The Netherlands, who writes about link building regularly on his own link building blog, Wiep.net.

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Posted by rebecca

At the beginning of every month I"ll be highlighting the best content from the previous month. I"ll still be doing the weekly roundups (I owe you guys a big one tomorrow), but here"s a monthly recap of the best blogs, YOUmoz entries, tools and more.

Best Blog Posts in April 2009

1. Fear and Forgiveness. Rand talks about feelings (whoa whoa whoa, feelings) and forgiving people who have rubbed him the wrong way in the past. It"s a post we can all relate to and a nice reminder that maybe we shouldn"t hold onto grudges as tightly as we do. 
2. How Google"s Rankings Algorithm Has Changed Over Time. Rand shares his opinion on how some of the key factors in Google"s ranking algorithm have changed over the past several years.
3. Whiteboard Friday: Domain Trust and Authority. Bookending Rand"s Google rankings algo changes post is this WBF video about various issues that can affect your domain"s trust metrics and its ability to rank well. 
4. How to Rank Well in Google Products Search & a Big List of Places to Get Reviews. Tom Critchlow represents Team Distilled with pride as he shares some great tips on how to optimize for Google Base and provides potential ranking factors.
5. 21 Tips to Earn Links and Tweets to Your Blog Post. It"s just not a Best Of list without, well, a list. Rand shares 21 ways to attract attention to your blog posts.
   

Best YOUmoz Posts in April 2009:

1. SEO Since 1999. James Svoboda goes all VH1 "I Love the Internet" on us and gives a comprehensive history of how search engines, directories, PPC, affiliate program, social media marketing, and more have changed in the last 10 years. 
2. Darren Slatten Sucks - Don"t Ever Hire Him. Darren takes an interesting approach to reputation management and says that he doesn"t need it; rather, he lets his work speak for itself.
3. How a Site Redesign Increased Traffic By 515%. Whitespark shares the results of a major site redesign with us and includes some really compelling before and after web stats.

Tool Updates and Launches in April 2009:

• We gave the Crawl Test tool a bit of a face lift and improved its functionality. It"s also faster and more scalable, so hooray for that! (If you notice anything buggy with it, please contact sitesupport@seomoz.org.)
• Both Linkscape and Blogscape had updates in our continuous effort to provide you monkeys with accurate, fast and useful tools. Linkscape"s index is now the biggest ever, with 44 billion URLs and 475 billion links. We also updated our list of the 500 most important domains on the Internet. 
• We introduced our new juicy link finder, the Link Acquisition Assistant, which is currently beta-ing it up in Labs. This tool returns 121 link acquisition queries based on information you provide about your website, brand and competition.
  
• Oh, and of course, we launched Webfluence at the beginning of the month. ;)

Monthly YOUmoz Contest Winner

Last month I introduced a new feature, our monthly YOUmoz blog theme contest. Each month I"ll announce a blog theme and our members can choose to write a YOUmoz post about that theme. At the end of the month I"ll pick a winning blog post, and the author will receive a $50 Amazon.com gift card.

April"s theme was reputation monitoring and management. We only received two entries (sniffle):

• Darren Slatten Sucks - Don"t Ever Hire Him
• My Own Personal Approach to Online Reputation Management

Kudos to DanaDV for giving it a fightin" chance, but I"m going to have to award the prize to Darren Slatten for writing an entertaining, thought-provoking post that takes a different approach to online reputation management. Darren, you goober, you are our very first YOUmoz contest winner. Congratulations!

YOUmoz Theme for May 2009

This month we"ve added a nifty little banner to the YOUmoz home page that displays the current month"s theme. Now you have no excuse--I want to see more entries this month, damnit!


As you can see from the screenshot, our theme for May 2009 is social media marketing. I figure that since Rand has been blogging about SMM a lot lately, it"s a good opportunity to keep the conversation going. We already have one entry so far, so stop dilly dallying and submit your post today!

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Posted by rishil

This post was originally in YOUmoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author"s views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc.

It’s been a while since I put together a Small Business SEO post. I thought it’s high time I tackled another key issue facing small businesses – deciding whether their SEO activity is progressing or not.  SEO, and indeed SEM, is a unique marketing channel. It is quantifiable, responsive and flexible to an extent which I would argue other channels aren’t. However, that is my personal opinion. And the way in which I rate SEM successes is different, not unique certainly, but definitely different.

The first thing clients say to me when requesting SEO is invariably centered around rankings. “I want to be position so and so, for such and such a keyword.” And I am certain that this is a situation familiar to many of you providing SEO services. However, search isn’t always about ranking.  And rankings aren’t an overnight success story – they take time to achieve. In the meantime there need to be other indicators of success. There are a range of metrics possible to use to act as such indicators, many of which are key to gauging small business SEM success. Ranking high for “xyz” may deliver huge volume of visitors, but not sales. On the other hand, capturing niche rankings for “uvwxyz” and “abcdefg” may deliver less traffic, but actually better sales, not to mention may be easier to achieve in a shorter lead time.  

What I want to do is demonstrate a couple of interim success metrics that I use, that are different, and how I explain them to clients using my current playground, designer watches. Let’s break down some simple metrics that I use as indicators of success (Unique Success Indicators – USIs):

1. Keyword Coverage
2. Keyword Variance
3. Call to Actions

Keyword Variance and Keyword Coverage are slightly interlinked.  In a previous post, Keyword Discovery for Small Businesses, I explored a range of keyword development routes, branching from a series of questions. The first part of the section dealt with expanding to long tail keywords from a series of parent keywords, for example:

Parent: Designer Watches

Long Tails: Designer Watches London, Cheap Designer Watches, Designer watches for Sale, Designer Watches bargains in UK. (Not an exact series, but I hope you get the gist.)

The second part of the post covered expanding the root in relation to other phrases, for example in this case: Gucci Designer Watches, Armani Designer Watches, Gucci Men’s Watch, Men’s Rolex Wrist Watches. What I usually start with is splitting these keywords into a series of “roots,” where, although “Designer Watches” is my top level keyword, I have other equally important keyword combinations, which in the example used would be the different watch brands.  

So what is Variance and what’s the difference to Coverage?  Variance is simply the “variety of root terms,” i.e., what are the most common top level keyword sets that the site attracts traffic for. In this case the Variety would be around the different Brands – Gucci, Armani, etc. Success metric – do I get a sufficient variety of root keywords in my referrer traffic?

Coverage in that case equates to the long tales of these root key phrases. For example, Cheap Gucci Watches UK, Gucci watches for men, Gucci designer watches, etc. Success Metric – do I cover a large proportion of long tail extensions of the roots in my referrer traffic?

 

The Calls to Actions metric is probably one I don’t like being on this list. This because I feel that it’s the SEM’s job to deliver traffic, and the site"s job to guide that traffic in to carrying out an action. However, I still use it as a metric because it IS the SEM’s job to deliver TARGETED traffic. If you deliver an extra 2000 visitors a day who don’t buy, don’t fill in a questionnaire, don’t spend more than a few seconds on the site, don’t make an enquiry, don’t call the business, then you are definitely failing to deliver the right traffic.  There is only so much you can blame on a poor site – and to be honest, if you feel that the site just won’t convert, stand up and say so.

Let’s take the example of my site (designer watches). It’s a poor site. The search functionality is rubbish, there isn’t a contact form, the call to action is pretty blunt, and there isn’t a way to shift and filter between offers. But that’s OK. My site"s current aim is to target purely long tail traffic delivered via Google’s QDF algorithm. So I expect high bounce rates and low click through rates. However, my success metric for the present is Keyword Variance and Coverage. But that doesn’t mean that I should have no sales!

In this roundabout way, I hope I have demonstrated a different way to look at interim metrics. What I haven’t done is to explain how to relate these to a client"s site.

It’s not a simple exercise, unfortunately. However, if you do follow certain processes while working on a client’s site (or even your own), I am assuming you would carry out some sort of an audit. I normally advise on an SEO SWOT analysis. This audit helps in identifying what’s wrong with a site, and what its position is in relation to its competitor and industry.  The ideal scenario would be to split the metric indicator decision into two parts:

1. What needs to be done on the site? (e.g., link building, site cleanup, increased content, etc)
2. What are the client"s metrics for success? (e.g., sales, visibility, ad impressions, brand building, enquiries, etc)

Once you have identified the above, you can then proceed to identify the quick wins against the long term goals. Splitting them into the two categories allows you to put together a range of success metrics that are achievable within your predicted timescales, given that the SEO/M work you carry out works for the site.

In my case above, I have given first priority to Coverage and Variance, which will then move on to rankings in the long run. In order to achieve rankings, I need links and content – so for the metric of High Rankings, I have two identifiable and quantifiable actions.  Which highlights another point – short term metrics vary significantly to long term metrics.

Let me end with examples of other interim metrics I have used:

• Quantity of indexed pages
• Increase in backlinks
• Universal search visibility
• Local search visibility
• Increase in indexing frequency
• Ranking for targeted landing pages
• Cross search engine visibility

I do have to apologise in the circular nature of this post - I felt that it’s strange ground to cover unless I put the whole thing together in a conversational tone in order to explain myself better.

If you would like to know more about Small Business SEM processes that I use, please feel free to read my take on SEO Swot Analysis,  as well as:

• Small Business SEO: Content Strategies
• Small Business Link Building: Part B - Grabbing the Bull By the Horns
• Small Business Link Building: Part A - Analysing Opportunities  
• Building Bricks: Keyword Discovery Process for Small Businesses
• Small Business SEO: It"s About Education and Empowerment

 If you enjoyed my writing, I invite you to follow me on Twitter.  

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Posted by randfish

The FTC (Federal Trade Commission) has some rules about online marketing that may surprise you - they certainly surprised me.

Recently, SEOmoz"s own Sarah Bird was interviewed by Eric Enge on a wide variety of contract and legal topics. As I was proudly browsing through the piece, I was especially curious about what Sarah had to say around marketing on social media networks:

(the FTC) made clear that online advertisers are covered by rules about so called stealth marketing. This basically means that if it"s not obvious that the advertiser is being paid to do this advertisement, there needs to be a disclaimer saying he or she is in fact being financially compensated.

Like Tiger Woods advertising golf balls, we all know he is being paid to do that, so they don"t have to put a little disclaimer up there saying "Tiger Woods received money to do this." However, there are more subtle things, like if you are going through a chat room and you leave a comment on a blog about a product and link to it, it is not necessarily obvious that you have a financial association from the merchant that would require disclosure. It"s considered to be material to the consumer"s decision, because they never really know how much to trust this person and what they are saying about the product.

The consumer"s perception is going to change if they realize that that person is being paid by the company that makes that product. So if you are an affiliate for someone and you write a nice post talking about how great of a product it is, you should disclose somewhere on your site that you make money every time someone buys the product you are talking about. I think that has people really scared.

In the online marketing world right now, there are people who think that that"s really not a fair law. I personally think it maybe makes marketing much more difficult, and I feel like it hampers people"s creativity, but it"s probably a good thing for consumers to know if someone is being paid to talk about a product. So it"s uncomfortable, but it"s probably overall good for e-business. It will increase trust in the marketplace, which I think is always a good thing.

You can read through some of the FTC"s formal guidelines around product and advertising endorsement here, and check out John Bell"s top-notch coverage here as well. But, essentially, when I read Sarah"s reply above, I got scared.

I had a great number of questions about exactly how, where and when these guidelines apply. When we in the SEO space engage in social media marketing, there"s a lot of web activity that does not have explicit endorsements (and could never work if it did). Everything from posting links on Digg to leaving comments on blogs to growing corporate Facebook & Twitter accounts and beyond seems to be potentially at risk.

Luckily, I was able to ask Sarah about many of these issues and get some great replies. Here were my questions and her answers (below each question as relevant):

Does this mean that if a company pays you to do social media, you need to disclose your relationship in every account you create, with every post you make, with any piece of content you submit or any connection (friending) that"s made?

The FTC"s official position is that if you"re being compensated to talk about someone"s product, then you need to disclose it. Unless it"s really obvious from context it"s a paid endorsement (like Tiger Woods).  The bottom line is that it is considered misleading to consumers if you"re endorsing a product, but not disclosing that you"re compensated.

So if your company pays you to do social media marketing, and you"re posting about the product or linking to the product, then you should also be disclosing your relationship. If you"re just blogging and friending people, and it"s not in the context of talking about a product, then you probably don"t have to disclose. Disclosure is really only relevant when you"re actually pushing a product. There is a lot of other stuff that SMM may do that isn"t talking about product--tweeting, friending, some non-product related blogging....

What about microsites where companies publish some viral content, and only later add their name or redirect it?

The FTC rules don"t talk about link buying or linking (without something more).  So I doubt the new guidelines apply to things like building microsites and then re-directing them. So long as you"re not talking about the product, the disclosure stuff doesn"t come in. After all, how can a consumer be confused about whether you"re being paid to endorse a product if you aren"t selling the product in a piece of link bait. If what you"re doing is purely PageRank sculpting through various, relevant link grabs--but you"re not talking about the product--then I don"t think this rule requires you to disclose.

What about link building contracts - does the agency need to disclose to anyone they talk to (directories, resource lists, bloggers, etc.) that they"re being paid to get the links (even if they don"t have to pay the individual publishers)?

I also don"t think the new rules require you to disclose to the webmaster that someone is paying you to ask him for a link. That"s not an interaction that is relevant to the consumer"s perception of the product.

Has the FTC said that link purchases also need disclosure? Everyone knows that sidebar links under a section called "supporters" or "sponsors" is paid, but Google demands use of nofollow - how about the FTC? Do they recognize nofollow as sufficient for saying a link is paid?

The FTC doesn"t specifically address link buying or or link bait in its new regulations. If someone pays you for links, then you should probably say "sponsored link" or something if it"s not obvious from context that the link was purchased. I don"t think the FTC would care about follow and no-follow because consumers have no idea whether a link is followed.  That"s probably just a SE relevancy thing and unrelated to the FTC since they only care about whether a consumer gets the wrong impression.

However, things may get a little wonky when the webmaster gets paid for the link. The webmaster should disclose that he got paid to add the link when there is a risk that it could look like an endorsement of the product.  The webmaster shouldn"t add the link to a "stuff I like" list without also revealing that he got paid to put it there. He shouldn"t write a blog post about how great the product is and link to it without some kind of disclosure.  If he just links to it somewhere on his site, without context and with non-endorsing anchor text, then maybe a disclosure isn"t necessary. It depends on the perception of the consumer.

I learned a lot from this conversation, but I"ll try to distill my takeaways as they relate to SMM:

1. Most Social Media Marketing is Legal Without Disclosure
   Want to create accounts for your client or project at social sites, interact with the community under those accounts or build up popularity/followers? You"re in the clear, and can do so without saying who"s paying you or why you"re engaging in those activities. It only gets hairy if/when you"re leaving comments or content that endorses a product or company that"s paid you to do so. For example, if SEOmoz hired a social media crew to go say nice things about our tools or post a link to them in every forum on the web where SEO was discussed, they"d need to state their relationship with us each time they engaged in that fashion.
2. Link Builders Don"t Have to Disclose Their Relationships
   As Sarah said, since it"s not relevant to the consumer that an agency or consultant is doing link acquisition, this doesn"t fall under something the FTC cares about.
3. Google & the FTC Have Very Different Requirements About Paid Links
   If you buy links and put nofollow on them, that"s NOT good enough for the FTC and you may be breaking the law. Instead, you need to label links that have been purchased in visual ways on the page ("sponsored links," "advertisements," "supporters," etc.) to clearly indicate the financial relationship. Google"s guidelines don"t request this human-visible disclosure, but instead want those links to use rel="nofollow" so they can remove the value those citations pass from their link graph. This dichotomy is certainly frustrating.
4. Linkbait, Viral Content & Microsites Don"t Require Disclosure (most of the time)
   Since viral content is typically free, generally not specifically endorsing a product/service and doesn"t fall under the "paid links" issue, it"s pretty safe to engage in without disclosure, whether on a subdomain, subfolder or microsite.

Big thanks to Sarah for helping out, and I"m sure she"ll make some time for replying to comments & questions as well. I"d also like to take this opportunity to note that for the past year, Sarah"s not only been our legal blogger and chief counsel, but also our COO. She"s fulfilled that role amazingly well and I"m incredibly proud of her. I know this has meant long absences from the blog, but it"s awesome that I don"t have to deal with our upcoming 785 page financial audit, HR issues, etc. Thanks Sarah! :-)

p.s. Note that the FTC governs the United States only, so rules may vary widely in other geographies.

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Posted by randfish

I haven"t promoted an SMX event on SEOmoz in a long time, but the agenda and opportunity in London (May 18 and 19 - just 2 weeks away) is too good to miss. If you have search marketing personnel anywhere in the UK, the expenditure (£890 with a 10% discount for SEOmoz PRO members) will undoubtedly bring a high ROI. I"ll explain why:

1. This is an Advanced Conference
   Go look at the lineup for the two days. The sessions, the speakers and the material are high level. I think Chris Sherman recognized that attendees are increasingly savvy and seeking the edge of knowledge and tactics from the field. He"s prepared a show where I guarantee even someone like myself is going to come away with a decent amount of new information. As we all know, just one right tip can pay for the entire conference.
2. Clients & Networking Abound
   London is going to have a lot of in-house attendance, and a high number of very talented, accomplished, powerful people from the world of search. If you"re seeking to get noticed, get a job, find new prospects or meet some of the industry"s top people, go - if you engage socially, you"ll get value on this front.
3. Ben Jesson from Conversion Rate Experts
   He"s speaking on the Landing Pages & Multivariate Testing panel on day one. Working with CRE has increased our conversion rate by more than 50%. Listen, take careful notes, apply and you"ll make back your conference fee in no time. Ben"s that good - and he shares really top notch stuff at shows like this.
4. Blow Your Mind Link Building Techniques
   I"m speaking on this panel with some exceptionally talented link acquisition folks. Patrick Altoft, Lyndon Antcliff & Pete Wailes know their stuff. My topic is exposing how the websites who"ve earned the most links in the shortest amount of time have done it - I"m going to be working hard to impress.
5. Will Critchlow vs. Rand Fishkin
   Will & I will be putting on boxing gloves and fighting to a knockout at 1:15pm on May 19. OK, maybe not physically fighting, but I am formally challenging Will to a presentation-off. Whoever delivers the worse show (as voted on by the audience) will be forced to buy the other"s wife the present of her choosing (and Will, I"m warning you, Mystery Guest"s taste in shoes will make your wallet run in fear).
6. Give It Up with Dave Naylor
   Again, this single session will more than earn you back your conference fee. If you"ve seen Dave Naylor "Give it Up" in the past, you know what I"m talking about and if you haven"t, you"re in for a hell of a treat. Go watch these videos if you don"t believe me.
7. The City of London Rocks
   The people, the pubs, the networking, the food (yes, London has managed to become a foody haven in the last decade) and the quality of SEO talent is tough to match in any market.
8. SMX & eMetrics Together
   The folks at SMX & their counterparts at eMetrics have banded together to offer a single pass to both events for one price (£1,295). eMetrics alone costs £1,095, so this is a massive discount.
9. The LondonSEO Party
   Few events are as notorious, as well-attended and as valuable from a networking and learning perspective as the infamous London SEO series, put together by Rob Kerry of Ayima. It"s a "can"t-miss" experience.
10. Because @#$%! the Recession
    Lots of economic indicators are suggesting this recession is going to be a short one, and that"s great. But in the world of search, and particularly in SEO, things have been booming. Companies are fleeing from marketing investments that aren"t trackable and can"t prove ROI, and those dollars/pounds are going straight to search. Invest in the knowledge and capability of your organization now, while your competitors are paralyzed, and you can reap the rewards for years to come.

I"m looking forward to seeing everyone at SMX London and I"ll be joined by Si Fishkin (my grandfather), who"ll be making sure speakers bring their A material (or else). See you there!

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Posted by randfish

Tonight, I"m throwing out a hypothesis about social media participation & social media marketing:

The majority of marketers who engage in social media do so NOT because it produces greater ROI (professionally), but because the metrics are more immediately tangible and emotionally rewarding.

Social media engagement, whether it"s building a name for yourself on Twitter, growing your connections on Facebook, increasing the number of followers on Digg or ratcheting up your popularity in a niche service or forum produces some very compelling results. Changing some title tags, tweaking internal links or writing an article on a boring, business-relevant subject may bring more direct financial ROI per hour invested, but the metrics don"t FEEL as emotionally rewarding.

I"ll show, rather than tell.

Let"s say I put in some effort attracting more relevant visitors to my site. I see that a certain phrase is sending good quality traffic via my analytics and decide to pursue a higher ranking for that keyword. I do a bit of external link research, find some good places for a listing, maybe acquire a small handful of external links. I tweak the title tag, the H1 and a bit of the page content and make the call to action more prominent and compelling. I find a few important pages on my site (the top pages tool is badass for this) and place some good internal links. My rankings rise a few positions and I see more traffic the next week.

My conversions go up, and my company makes a few hundred more dollars in signups every week thereafter. I can track my progress through analytics:

Now, to a CFO or a manager concerned with the bottom line, that"s a beautiful thing. To see 59 conversions this week vs. 53 from last week means an improvement of more than 10% for an investment of only a day"s work. Repeat that process and you"ve got something amazing on your hands.

But... To a marketer, from a selfish, emotional, human standpoint, it"s not nearly as gratifying as even the most superficial social media engagement.

Let"s say that instead of spending that day alone in my world of SEO and conversion optimization, I venture out into the realm of social media. I decide that I need to grow my social account"s reach so that when I broadcast messages, they reach a larger audience, when I reach out to my network, I can find more influential contributors, when I paste links, more people click them. From a marketing perspective, these are all good, relevant, valuable things.

But let"s be honest - the thing marketers (and humans as a whole) love about social media is the way the metrics present themselves:

My Facebook feedback loop shows me lots of new friend requests, event invititations, group invitations, status updates from my network and images where people have tagged me.

Twitter shows me what the SEO community is thinking about and how they"re talking about my brand.

StumbleUpon shows statistics about what types of content are bringing visits and positive/negative reviews.

Now, I can come up with logical and entirely factual reasons why reviewing and answering all of these is important. I can legitimately justify why updating my status and adding more people to my friend list, replying to feedback and building up relationships are valuable to branding, marketing and bottom line metrics for the company. In fact, I"ve even got statistics to prove that our site derives value from social media:

There"s Twitter at the bottom of the list, bringing 10K+ visits to our site! That"s huge, right?

Here"s the problem... It"s also the lowest converting traffic of any referral source - less than half that of aggregate Google referrals.

I grant that direct referrals are never the whole story, and that there is real branding, marketing and user acquisition value to the traffic, participation and effort spent in social media. What I worry about is whether these intangibles are worth the expenditure.

In every one of the social media cases, the feedback and the metrics are coming from real people that I can reply to, hear back from and strike up a conversation with. The lonely days of lines & numbers as the only recompense for my marketing efforts are at an end. When I engage in social media marketing, I don"t feel like an SEO geek, toiling against an algorithm and an anonymous search audience. I feel like a social butterfly, blossoming in the world of Twitter & Facebook, the same outlets the media is raving on about all day long (when not obsessed with swine flu, that is).

The trouble isn"t that social media is useless. It"s that a dichotomy exists between the financial & business value of certain marketing efforts and the psychological quality of the associated metrics:

	Bottom-Line ROI	Metrics
Social Media Marketing	Low to Moderate (depending on industry, focus & goals)	Emotionally rewarding, immediate, personal
Classic SEO & Web Marketing	Moderate to High (typically)	Dry, time-consuming to gather, primarily numeric

We"re all human, and few of us are immune from the emotional baggage that comes with that designation. It"s hard to put in 8 hours of classic keyword research, content creation and link building and see results several weeks later through a series of lines and figures when applying those same 8 hours blogging, twittering could earn a couple hundred responses, 30 retweets and 18 new followers. The feedback loop is immediate, direct, personal and fulfilling. It feels good to be recognized, to be listened to, to be engaged - that"s how our minds work and there"s little use fighting it.

I"m just suggesting that we might want to be extra careful about distributing our time and energy in the places it can earn the best ROI. At least... most of the time :-)

p.s. This is just my personal opinion, so I"d love to hear what you think. I recognize that SMM, when it achieves dual goals of traffic & link building is of massive value (as are other activities designed to leverage the social web to bolster high ROI tactics), but I"m more skeptical of the ROI from social networking & driving up social media popularity.

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Posted by Tom_C

While answering Q&A the other day it occurred to me that a lot of questions we see are basically the same question asked over and over again in different formats. In answering these questions we often end up re-using the same responses time and time again so I thought it would be a good idea to create a bit of an FAQ based off some of the most informative questions and answers which we"ve answered over the past couple of years.

This format could easily turn into a series of posts if people are interested but to start with I"m just going to look at questions relating to geo-location, internationalisation and foreign language questions. In my opinion 99% of questions on these topics can be answered by the information below. For the other 1% we"d be delighted to have you stop by Q&A and share your troubles :-)

Note: You do need to be a PRO member to read the answers to the questions I"ve linked to but I"ve pulled out the highlights from each question for you here so that everyone can benefit from the post.

The Basics

Before I delve into the Q&A I"m going to link to some of the best posts on the topic which we nearly always end up linking to when we"re talking about geolocation and international issues:

A post by Duncan on some tricky Local issues
Will is interviewed at SMX by Rand on the basics of ranking internationally
Lucy interviews local SEO experts from around the world to get their take on the usual problems

The Answer To The TLD/Sub-Domain/Sub-Folder Question

This question we see more than any other. People are ALWAYS asking which is better: www.domain.com/uk, www.domain.co.uk, uk.domain.com? The answer is "it depends", which is why we get asked the question all the time. On what does it depend you might ask, well look no further, the answer is covered in these 3 Q&A:

My rule of thumb with multi-location / language sites is as follows:

• Any country where you will have staff in the country, language resource to write the website and / or where it will be enough of your business to justify the investment, I would target with its own cctld (e.g. a website hosted in France, written in French at domain.fr to target France)
• Anywhere that is not an option (for cost / benefit reasons - and this could be all non-English areas), I would create the country as a sub-domain on the .com and write in the local language only within that sub-domain (e.g. domain.com/pt for Portugal, in Portuguese). Test registering these sub-folders as geo-targeted within Webmaster Central. I would probably host this in the UK as you will want your English-language content to be geo-targeted to the UK. Apart from the homepage, put your English-language content in /en or /uk depending on your preference

Things to think about when designing a global multi-lingual SEO strategy

Basically, my feeling is that big brands, whose content naturally earns lots of links and attention, should go for country specific TLDs. Smaller brands, who are much less likely to earn the quantity and quality of links to each separate domain they need to rank well should use one domain with geo-targeted sub-folders.

Subdirectories or CC TLDs?

I would probably avoid hosting a .com targeting North America in the UK as the English-language component could confuse the engines.

Geographic considerations of your web hosting provider

If you have a small business rather than a big one sometimes the answer changes, check out this question specifically for small businesses.

And to finish off this section Jane answers a few specific questions.

International Linkbuilding

Of course, one of the important ranking factors is links from the correct geographical location. So how do you go about linkbuilding internationally?

I think using domain extension specific searches is probably an excellent way to go. For example:

• http://www.google.com/search?q=directory+site%3Aco.uk
• http://www.google.com/search?q=intitle%3Adirectory+site%3Aco.uk
• http://www.google.com/search?q=inurl%3Adirectory+site%3Aco.uk
• http://www.google.com/search?q=resources+site%3Aco.uk

You can add your specific topic/keywords (make sure you think broad) to these types of searches and find excellent places to list your site.

International linkbuilding tips

Geo-location/IP-based Redirection. AKA Cloaking

While questions on this aren"t as common, we see this problem giving a lot of people a hard time (probably because there"s a few pitfalls to avoid!). Unfortunately most of these questions are marked as private so I can"t share them, however the most common sources we link to when talking about this are these, make sure you"ve read them before you think about any conditional redirection:

Rand turns to the dark side
Does white hat cloaking exist?
The world series spidering problem

Miscellaneous Questions of Interest

This is the bracket containing those hard-to-categorise questions which are still useful and worth reading even if the problem doesn"t apply to you directly:

I believe best practice for this is to use the accent in body copy and title tags (I would choose &eacute; as that should work regardless of your character encoding and your users" browser). In the URL, however, I would choose the first example www.domain.com/cinema for the user-focused reason that accents in URLs get encoded when they appear in your browser"s address bar - which makes them illegible to users

How to deal with foreign characters

Adding &gl=uk (for the UK, that is, nz for New Zealand, etc) to the end of a search query will return results as if you were in that country. For example, notice the difference between these two results on Google.com for "athletics": regular result versus Australian result.

Seeing Google as if from another country

Because you"re targeting these language markets, I would go with the native spellings of the languages in your URLs, rather than the English spellings. Neither is likely to make or break the site in terms of international rankings, but this is still the route I would take.

International search language use and spelling

However, from some searching around I"ve seen that almost all english language queries in google.ae are returning english sites. This is mostly .com (due to the dominance of .com domains) but I"ve also seen .co.uk sites and .com.au sites ranking as well. This suggests to me that it would be possible to rank for english language terms in google.ae with any TLD so long as the language is in English.

Geo-targeting a .me extension to the middle east

That"s all folks, hopefully this is useful and if you"re thinking of asking a question on geo-targeting or international issues, why not check out these links first!

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Posted by great scott!

We"re big fans of using "nofollow" for linkjuice sculpting around your site. If you know what you"re doing, you"re careful, and you"re considerate, it"s an incredibly powerful strategy that can have a big payoff. But what if you make a mistake? If you don"t pay attention, or you go about it willy-nilly, site-sculpting with "nofollow" can cause some major problems...and that"s what we"re looking at in this week"s Whiteboard Friday.

SEOmoz Whiteboard Friday - Dangers of Nofollow from Scott Willoughby on Vimeo.

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Posted by randfish

Last week I gave the keynote presentation at SMX Munich, Lessons Learned Building an Index of the WWW. In that presentation, I shared a great deal of data from our web index as well as some SEO tips based on our experience replicating many search engine activities (crawling, indexing, building a link graph, de-duplication, canonicalization, etc.). In this blog post, I"d like to first announce that Linkscape"s new index, with crawl data from late March to early April (& upon which these data points are calculated), is now live - check it out here - and second, to share the charts, graphs and tips from my presentation.

The Linkscape Index

First off, some basic points about Linkscape"s index:

• The crawl is intended to imitate what major search engines crawl and keep in their index. Talking to lots of folks from the engines who do this work, we"ve heard that while tens or hundreds of billions of pages are crawled, there are only "~5-10 billion pages worth keeping in a main index."
• Linkscape is a crawler-built index, meaning it uses a seed set and crawls outward via links to discover new URLs.
• The index currently biases towards pages with external links, meaning we don"t crawl as deeply as the major engines do, but we try to crawl. very broadly (to reach as many well-connected pages and unique domains as possible).
• The crawlers and data sources we currently employ all respect robots.txt.

The Web"s Structure

As we crawl, we see some well-known structural pieces making up the web:

Linkscape, as well as numerous academic sources (and, almost certainly, the major search engines), collect and store data about three types of structural components - pages, subdomains and root domains. Link & content metrics, along with crawl parameters and query-independent ranking factors, are stored about each of these.

Linkscape also sees a view of the web that most IR students will be familiar with:

As others have noted in the past, the web"s link structure tends to look a bit like a bowtie, with a large number of tightly linked, well connected pages in the center and outliers on the borders with few incoming/outbound links. Linkscape does a relatively good job with the center and the linked-to edge (with few/no outbounds), but struggles more on pages with no incoming links (as these are difficult to discover and often not worthwhile keeping in an index).

Index Statistics

We"ve found these data points fascinating and I"m excited to be able to share many of them for the first time. While Linkscape is not as comprehensive as Yahoo!/Google, it"s far closer to a representation than a sample size. Our latest index update currently contains:

• 44,410,893,857 (44 Billion) pages
• 230,211,915 (230 Million) subdomains
• 54,712,427 (54 Million) root domains
• 474,779,069,489 (474 Billion) links

For this index, the following data pieces apply:

* Note that for the link distribution chart, this refers to "external, juice-passing links" which excludes links from the same subdomain to itself as well as links on pages with the meta nofollow or those that employ rel=nofollow.

* Note that for the root domains linking chart, this refers only to pages/sites receiving links from unique root domains. For example, with www.seomoz.org, we"d only receive one "linking root domain" from searchengineland.com, even though that site links to ours on many unique pages. Likewise, with links we receive from About.com and their numerous subdomains - in total, it"s only one counted "unique root domain."

* Not surprisingly, most links on the web are incestuous to some degree, and thus come from internal links (those on the same subdomain as the target), same IP address (where multiple sites from the same owner are hosted), same root domain and the same c-block of IP addresses. If we can see these relationships with Linkscape, it follows that the search engines have an easy time of it as well - and these links are almost certainly not passing the same kind of value that external links from unique root domains, IP-addresses and C-blocks would.

Some interesting data points on the above:

• 2.7% of all links on the web are nofollowed
• 73% of those are internal (so nofollow is actually far more popular as a link sculpting tool than a spam prevention device)
• 3 billion out of our 475 billion links (~0.6%) were found in noscript tags - while the engines recommend against this and talk about it as a spam tactic, we suspect that many of these are, in fact, legitimate uses and probably do get counted (due to their value in content discovery).
• 165,638,731 links (0.034%) aren"t visible on the page (they"re hidden off screen using CSS or other tactics). Again, given the numbers, we wonder whether all of these are spam and whether they"re all discounted by the engines.
• This is our first index supporting the canonical URL tag, and so far we"ve seen just north of 16 million pages employing the parameter. While this is still a drop in the bucket on a global web scale, we"ll be watching closely for how much support it generates over the months to come.

Search Engine & Linkscape Metrics

Like the search engines, we calculate a number of metrics on the pages, subdomains and root domains in our index to help uncover spam and sort by popularity & trustworthiness. The following are distributions of the metrics we currently employ:

* mozRank is our calculation of raw link popularity. Like Google"s PageRank, Yahoo!"s WebRank and Live"s StaticRank, it"s a recursive algorithm that counts links as votes and treats links from more popular pages as more important. We"ve found that while it"s useful for discovering which pages to crawl and index, it"s a poor measure of true importance and has significant noise.

* Domain mozRank is calculated in the same fashion as page-level mozRank, but on the domain-level link graph. Thus, it only takes into account unique links that exist from one root domain to another and is agnostic as to whether a site has 1, 100 or 1,000 links to another. We"ve found this metric exceptionally valuable for identifying the popularity and importance of a root domain - on the subdomain link graph, it"s more susceptible to manipulation and spam.

* mozTrust, which we also calculate on both the domain and page level link graphs, has proven highly effective as a spam identifier (particularly in combination with mozRank - the difference between the two is an excellent predictor of manipulative linking). mozTrust relies on the same intuition as Yahoo!"s TrustRank, running a recursive algorithm that passes juice down from trusted seed URLs/domains.

Measuring Correlation

Possibly the most interesting data I shared from an SEO application standpoint was around our research into the correlation of individual metrics to search engine rankings. Our own Ben Hendrickson has been doing significant data gathering and analysis, trying to answer the question,

How well does any single metric predict higher rankings?

His early results are enlightening:

In this chart, Ben"s showing that no metric is particularly good at predicting rankings by itself, but if you had to use something, the number of root domains linking to a URL and that URL"s mozRank are both just above the 95% confidence interval. Note that such classic SEO metrics as Yahoo! link counts and Alexa.com counts (which are included in many toolbars and appear in many SEO reports) are very nearly worthless.

The results are much better (though still not excellent) when we instead ask what metrics correlate with ranking 10 positions higher (essentially, what"s the difference between page 1 vs. 2, 2 vs. 3, etc). Here, Ben shows that while only a single metric is above the 95% confidence interval (domains linking to a URL), there are several that are 20%+ better than random guessing.

Perhaps the most surprising result of this (for me, at least) was the data showing that Google"s link counts actually do have a correlation with rankings, suggesting that they"re not completely random (even though they might feel that way given their small sample size).

Out of all the metrics, it"s little surprise that # of linking root domains is a favorite (we use it, for example, to sort our Top 500 list). It"s one of the most difficult metrics to manipulate effectively and has high correlation with trust, importance and search engine rankings.

Top Tips for SEOs

Based on the work we do crawling and building an index, and the struggles we"ve encountered (and seen the engines similarly encounter), we"ve crafted a few short tips. While some of these are obvious and well known, they still pay to keep in mind as high-level recommendations we feel confident the search engines would support:

1. Don"t rely on the search engine to canonicalize anything for you.
2. Focus on link acquisition from a diverse number of root domains, not necessarily high PageRank pages, or those with high link counts.
3. Make smart, usable, short URLs. They"re far easier to process and have a much better correlation with useful, unique content an engine would want to keep in its index.
4. If you want to earn lots of links, building a distributed content widget/badge/link that users embed in their sites/pages is an incredibly effective strategy. Just look at how many of the top pages on the web achieved that position employing this strategy.
5. Don"t rely on PageRank or raw link counts as accurate assessments of ranking potential. According to our data, they"re not high signal or high rankings correlation metrics.
6. The social web is rising, as are those employing it effectively (again, check out the top