Posted by Aaron Wheeler

 One of the most helpful aids in doing SEO is knowing what factors actually affect your rankings. It seems obvious on its face, but not everyone prioritizes their SEO work with the knowledge of how changes to a site and link profile actually affect the SERPs. It's important to at least have some heuristics to use in pursuit of higher rankings, and while it's not always easy, it is possible to correlate optimization techniques with positive (or negative) movement in SERPs.

SEOmoz tries to establish these correlations in our bi-annual Search Engine Ranking Factors project by running tests and consulting with professional SEOs; for instance, in 2009, we discovered that keyword-focused anchor text from external links was highly correlated with positive rankings (we're currently working on a new iteration of the report for 2011, so keep your eyes peeled!). As you probably know, and as Rand spends a little time explaining in this week's Whiteboard Friday, correlation is not causation. That being said, correlations are still important and useful information! In today's post, Rand begins a two-part series on how to use correlation data in your SEO and social media research.

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Video Transcription

Howdy, SEOmoz fans. Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Today we've got a great topic, really exciting topic. We're going to be talking about correlation data and how you can use it in SEO and social media analysis.

A lot of you already use correlation data, and many of you have probably seen on our blog and in our early release of data from our Ranking Factors Survey this year that we're going to be presenting a bunch of correlation data. We've done this a number of times over the past few years. It's always very, very interesting to look at. Sometimes it's potentially controversial because some of the data is really interesting and surprising.

In this case, correlation data is something that I know many folks in the SEO field and the social media field who don't have a substantive background in statistics, like me. I mean, let's face it. I think I got a D in my statistics class in college, and I'm pretty sure I skipped the last three classes and didn't even go to the final because I was sure I was going to fail. Then somehow I skated by. But that's beside the point. I dropped out of college anyway, so I didn't need that D.

Correlation, it sounds like a big fancy word, but it's actually really, really simple. It's essentially the degree to which one metric, a predictor, has a correlation, a connection to another. Let me give you a couple of really simple examples just so you can understand this, and then we'll talk about some ways to use it in SEO and social.

Let's imagine, for a second, that you are a contractor. You're doing some content writing and you bill the companies that you write for on an hourly basis. You do ten hours of labor, at $10 an hour, let's say, and you get $100. The hours billed and the dollars received have a very, very good correlation. In fact, they'd have a correlation of 1.0 hopefully. Hopefully, you don't bill some hours and then people don't pay or they pay you more hours than you billed. Maybe those things will happen, but usually it's 1 to 1 correlation. It's 1.0 is the correlation. Remember all correlation numbers, at least statistically speaking, from a math perspective are between 0 and 1 positive correlations, at least. Then we do have negative correlations as well. We're not going to worry about those for a sec.

In the dollars received, hours billed, that's a perfect correlation. You see I billed for 1 hour, I got $10. I bill for 2 hours, I got $20. I bill for 3 hours, so perfect linear, nice 1.0 correlation. You can imagine there are lots of systems, simple systems that function like this. For example, the number of steps that you take and the distance that you travel. Those have sort of a perfect, nice correlation.

Then there's stuff that has a correlation but the correlation might not be as perfectly predictive, and we want to have numbers around what those correlations are. Here's a pretty simple example. This is the number of days that I wear yellow shoes. You can see I'm not wearing them today. But number of days that I wear yellow shoes and the number of days where I give a professional presentation. Oftentimes, these are quite connected. But it turns out there are also days where I wear the yellow shoes and I don't give a presentation, or where I give a presentation but I don't wear the yellow shoes. Those things do happen. It's not a requirement that every time I get up on stage I have to wear yellow shoes, but it happens a lot.

So we can map those. We can say, oh, well, there were five days where Rand wore yellow shoes and all five of those days he gave a presentation. Then a couple of days later, oh, you know what? Rand wore the yellow shoes just around town. He was breaking in a new pair. So there are a couple of more days where he wore them, but only one more day where he gave a presentation. So we get a little chart like this.

What correlation scores can do is they can help give a number like 0.7 to the connection between these two numbers. You can sort of say, huh, well, there's a good correlation between them, but it's not certain that every time Rand wears yellow shoes, he's giving a presentation, or every time he gives a presentation, he wears yellow shoes.

That's exactly what these numbers are designed to predict. Now, in really simple scenarios like this, a correlation score of 0.7, that's relatively high. But we'd actually need quite a few data points to be able to predict something called "standard error." So, standard error tells us the degree to which we're certain that these two things are connected.

If we have a standard error of let's say .25, that might be a pretty high standard error because we only have a few data points. That means that there's potentially a lot of fluctuation. This could be a much lower correlation than we think it is or a much higher one, depending. But if we got thousands of data points, if we had every data point around when I wore yellow shoes, every data point around when I've given a professional presentation, this standard error might drop dramatically to let's say .05. Now, we can be more certain that, oh, yeah, there's clearly a connection there, and with a little bit of fluctuation, we know pretty much what the correlation number is. So we can predict how often when Rand gives a presentation he's going to be wearing yellow shoes based on an average of previous data. That's what this is designed to tell us. That's exactly what correlation can be used for.

Let's talk about some ways to use correlation data in your SEO and your social media campaigns. First off, in a lot of the cases, you don't actually need a huge data set. Let's talk first about ways that you're probably already using correlation data, which is with individual data points. These are things where you gather, you look at search results, or you look at how you perform in social media. You look at how other people are doing. You form correlations in your mind. Like, boy, you know what, every time I see someone write a top ten list about something, that seems to get a lot of links and a lot of retweets and a lot of attention. It seems like top X lists are a really good way to produce content. People really like these top ten lists, or top X lists. Maybe that's a good way to go. That type of data point connection in your own mind is correlation. It's something where you're connecting these things seem to predict success, and so I am going to potentially imitate them and see if they predict success for me.

That's actually a fine thing to do. You could do something, like, hmm, it seems like when I have a tweet with a link that gets higher click-through rate, it also gets more retweets. So if I can figure out the formula to get one of these, chances are I'll do well with both of them. I'm going to work on my click-through rate. I'm going to work on things that predict higher click-through rate. I'm going to get those short punchy titles. I'm going to get a good URL shortener. I'm going to keep the . . . whatever it is that the format of the tweet that you send that gets one of these is, you can generally predict you'll get the other one, maybe in some cases.

This doesn't necessarily apply to everyone. A lot of the time it's just your personal experience, and that's a fine thing to use. Facebook shares, you might notice that in your Facebook account, when you share content that has a picture of a human face. So, it's got a little, oh, look, there's a nice picture of Rand. I appear quite "stick figurey" today. Yes, I draw like a second grader. It's weird that I do Whiteboard Friday. Facebook shares that have a human face as the thumbnail get more clicks. You think to yourself, huh, all right, maybe I need to start using more human faces in the thumbnail of what I put on Facebook, you know, the image that you choose when you share content on there. That might be a fine thing to discover. You could use that from an intuition basis, or you could actually measure it. You could go back through your account and look at all the click-through rates that you've earned, if you're using an URL tracker or shortener like bit.ly. Then you could see is this really the case? Put the numbers into Excel and run the data, see on average how you're performing. It's a pretty simple way to do things.

You might also notice something like an observational notice. Links with keywords in the anchor text provide more of a rankings boost in Google. When you get links, external links, and they contain the keyword you're targeting somewhere in the anchor text, then you get more rankings boost. So, you think to yourself, huh, anchor text. That must be a powerful signal. I'm going to start trying to do that. When I get anchor text on other sites, maybe I'm going to put it in my bio, so when people link to me, they'll use that particular keyword and pointing to the pages that I want.

This observational correlation is something that SEOs and social media marketers and digital marketers of all stripes have used for ages. They've used forever, this observational type of correlation. But there's cool stuff that you can do on a research basis that we call sort of aggregated or average correlations that produces lots of really interesting stuff too. I'll give you some examples of those.

So, over at HubSpot, their social media scientist, Dan Zarrella produces something called the "Science of Retweets," talking about how retweets are spread over the Web and what correlates well with things getting more retweets versus less retweets. He also does one that's great on the science of timing, talking about when is the best time to tweet or produce a blog post.

This correlation type of data is used all over the place, in tons and tons of different fields, definitely in digital marketing. We do some cool stuff here at SEOmoz where we collect hundreds or thousands of data points to be able to show aggregate or average correlation with two different metrics.

So for example, in our recent survey, we collected 10,000 different search results. The reason we collect such a high one remember is because we want that low, low standard error that comes from having a lot of data. So, we collect 10,000 and then we see, oh, how do tweets correlate with higher or lower rankings in Google? How do Facebook shares correlate with higher or lower rankings in Google?

You can see, actually, that some of the interesting things we've noticed from collecting this type of data is that, hmm, keywords in the alt attribute of an image, for example, predict higher average correlation than using the keyword in the H1. So a lot of SEOs tell you, oh, you know, that H1 tag, that's a really important tag. You've got to get the keywords in the H1 tag, got to have H1s on every page.

Looks to us like the correlation with H1s, keywords in the H1 is no better than having the keyword just near, at the very top of the page, which H1s usually predict anyway. So, maybe it's not the H1 that's helping. You don't know. It's correlation data. It's not causation. We don't know for sure that this is what's causing it, but we know that there's a connection numerically between these metrics.

That alt attribute, huh, it looks positive. We never thought, oh, maybe we should recommend that. So, for the last few years, we've been recommending put a good image on the page and make sure your keyword is in there.

You can see we did this with Twitter data. We did a cool study with Twitter data where we looked at a large number of tweets. We said, "What predicts higher click-through rate?" It turned out that shorter tweets produced higher click-through rate. Probably no surprise, right. So instead of using all 140 characters, you only use 60 characters, 80 characters. Looks like more people click on the links in those shorter tweets. That's kind of interesting, kind of cool. Maybe it suggests that when we're writing titles and headlines of things we want people to click, we should make those tweets very short. We looked at putting the link in the tweet at the front of the tweet versus the end of the tweet versus the middle. The middle looks slightly better than the other two.

You can learn all sorts of interesting stuff. This is what's awesome about correlation data. It doesn't necessarily mean it predicts things, but what it does mean is that things that have these features have a higher propensity to do well. So, in some cases, at least for me, I care a lot less about whether there's causation there. I do care, but I care much less about the causation than the raw correlation.

The reason I'm so interested in the correlation is because it says things that have this feature do better or worse. So, whether that's the cause of them or not, I like to imitate the things that do better and not imitate the things that do worse. I don't know whether it's directly causation or whether it's a second order effect or a tertiary effect or just some fragment of an effect. It doesn't matter to me. I want to look like the people who are successful. I want to do what successful people do, and that's what correlation data is so good for.

So, in part two, next week, we're going to talk about some really cool stuff that we found with correlation data and give you some ideas of where we're going in the next phases. Take care everyone.

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Posted by BryanCrow

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.

A weird thing has happened as a result of panda. Something you might have expected Google's Search Quality testers to catch before rolling the update out. Due to the domain-wide nature of the signal, high-quality, original content produced by the websites who were negatively impacted are now being ranked below the exact same content, republished by partners to whom they syndicate. Even more egregious, they are also being outranked by scrapers who effectively steal and republish the same content without permission or credit.

I have seen this briefly mentioned by observers, but I haven't seen this phenomenon transparently documented either in SEO press or in the Panda Google forum. The purpose of this post is to transparently share data from the site WonderHowTo.com (of which I am the CTO) and locate others experiencing a similar phenomenon.

Pre Panda

For three years, we at WonderHowTo organized the sprawling world of HowTo with taxonomical zeal and very human curation. By January, we had grown to more than 10mm monthly uniques. As our community formed, we began to shift our efforts towards the concept of covering timely news in the HowTo space (there is astounding innovation each day among the 427 subcategories we follow).

Our journalistic cred grew, and at the beginning of the year, two fantastic syndication partners Business Insider, and Huffington Post recognized our quality and eagerly published our articles in their sections (primarily Technology). On occasion, we noticed that our articles were outranked by our partners, but over the course of a few days, Google always got it right, recognizing the source as WonderHowTo. For the record, pre-Panda, we cannot recall one instance when a scraper outranked us with our own content in Google. Never. There seemed to be order in the universe.

Post Panda

Our Google traffic fell by 40%. Among our 1 million indexed pages, we experienced plenty of displaced rankings. Before getting into the what, how, & why, one thing has stood out as alarmingly egregious: Original content created by us is no longer able to rise to the top above our partners or even scrapers who republish our content. Ever. Panda branded us the Rosa Parks of content, forcing us to the back of Google's ranking bus, along with all the other sites which fit its profiling.

Crediting the Original Source - Google vs Bing

I took a look at the articles we're promoting on our home page and syndicating to Business Insider and Huffington Post. As I mentioned earlier, our articles also tend to get scraped and republished on dozens of sites within minutes of them being published. Post panda, it turns out Bing is doing a better (though still imperfect) job of ranking the original source (WonderHowTo) above the scrapers & syndication partners. Here are examples from a few recent posts (For simplicity, I searched for each article's exact title):

"How To Remove Your Name and Profile Picture from Facebook's Social Ads"

Original Source is #9 on Google

"Transform Your Android Home Screen into a 3D Environment with the SPB Shell 3D Launcher App"

Original Source is #7 on Google

"How to Add a Dislike Button to Your Facebook Page"

Original Source is #14 on Google

The larger implication is that if Google cannot rank the source first when searching for the exact title, then the source will also lose out on traffic from any additional keyword variations that the very same content ends up receiving on scraper and partner sites.

Deconstructing The Panda Damage

Our process has always revolved around human curation with the goal of weeding out anything low quality, it seemed odd that the hit would be so large. We did a deep analysis on a variety of signals (article word count, title word count, how many links, embedded media, how many comments, how many favorites, bounce rate, etc) to try to determine which individual pieces of content were getting hit the most.

We separated the content that gained the most traffic to compare against the content that had lost the most traffic, comparing signals & looking for trends. The results seemed random. Very short video descriptions would rank quite well, while long, detailed original transcriptions and guides were suffering. Every time we thought we'd found an influencing signal, we'd go on to find enough exceptions to negate it.

It became abundantly clear that Panda does not work by filtering out individual low quality content as was originally implied. It works by punishing entire domain names if an undetermined percentage of the content on that site meets the undefined "low-quality" criteria. Soon after we came to this realization, Google confirmed it in a statement to Search Engine Land, and an interview with WIRED.

This Site-Wide Approach Punishes High Quality Results

With this signal hitting an entire site instead of just its individual low quality content, the results fundamentally oppose the stated goal of search quality and fairness in attribution. The collateral damage results in Google burying the original source of high quality content, promoting those who steal, scrape, and republish above them. Furthermore, it ends up demoting other top quality results simply because of the domain on which the content resides. It's counter-intuitive to think that prejudicially branding every piece of a particular site's content, past, present and future is an effective way to promote top quality results.

Trying To Resolve Your Site-Wide Demotion

Within a week, several search analysis reports started popping up with post-mortem break-downs. Most were fundamentally flawed in that they only looked at the number of ranking places each site would loose without taking search quantity and click through rate into account. The bottom line is that the difference between ranking 1st and ranking 2nd is mammoth. As such if your site ranked #1 for a couple hundred popular queries and you got flagged by panda, the bulk of your traffic loss would be from those #1 positions changing to #2 to #10 positions. Shifts between #4-#8 don't make nearly as much of a difference. But I digress.

A consensus has been forming across the web stating that if you remove duplicate and otherwise low-quality content from your site, or do the work of telling Google not to index it, your classification as low-quality under panda would be lifted. The idea that you can get out from under this cloud started to gain traction as a couple of stand out examples started showing up.

Find Your "Problem Content"

The vast majority of content on WonderHowTo was written by our team of editors, researchers, and curators. It has always been our policy to write original descriptions for the videos our curators approve for our library so as to ensure authenticity, accuracy, and relevance. It is part of the added value we bring to the table when embedding how-to videos from youtube, vimeo, or any of the other 17,000 creators we've curated in our hunt for useful and excellent HowTos (Talented video creators often produce an excellent tutorial with zero regard to title or description, rendering them invisible to search. To these compelling voices, we have sent a steady stream of deserved traffic).

Over the years we have also consummated one-off agreements with a handful of partners who requested that we use their own specific descriptions, word-for-word, when including their content on our site. As was the Pre-Panda norm, Google would always rank the original source 1st, so there was no need for any one-off no-index tags to keep rankings in their correct place.

With the growing consensus that such republishing could be a major signal in getting a domain flagged, it seemed apparent that our biggest problem might be this content from our partners. After auditing our library, we found that about 16% of our content had been republished word for word from one of these partners. We would have to noindex these to take them out of search visibility.

Enact Your Sweeping Changes to Remove Your Problem Content

Once you've identified all your problematic content, it's time to noindex it. Digital Inspiration made a number of similar changes and saw his rankings restored within two weeks. Here are the changes we made to WonderHowTo as of March 25, 2011:

1. Duplicate Content from Syndication Partnerships
We added a robots noindex meta tag to each page where content was republished from one of our partners.

2. Related Video Pages
We realized that the pages we have that show all the related videos to a particular video were allowed to be indexed. So, we added a robots noindex meta tag to each of those pages.

3. Un-embeded Video Pages
When we don't embed how-to videos from around the web that we feel meet our quality guidelines for inclusion on our library, we provide a link for people to watch that video on the source site. As people who land on these pages from a google search may find this page to be an intermediary page, we think these may tripping the signal as well. So, we added a robots noindex meta tag to each of those pages.

4. Tag Pages
According to Digital Inspiration, allowing tag pages with inadequate content to be indexed may also trip this flag, so we added a robots noindex meta tag to all topic pages with fewer than 4 useful videos on them.

5. Page Link Count
I read that too many links on a page may have also been a signal. So, we cut the limit of the number of related topics to show on any given page down by 50%.

Wait for your Changes to Take Effect

Within a week, Google had re-crawled enough of our content to start removing the no-indexed pages from the index. We knew this would result in an additional drop in search traffic, but the hope was to rectify the side effect of Google ranking our high-quality content lower than the scrapers who republish it.

We are hopeful that the changes we've made will remove this site-wide flag, or that Google will tweak the algorithm to only target low quality content as opposed to an entire site. But as of today, (4/19/2011), the problem still exists. Google continues to drive people who search for our content to the republished versions on our partners sites and the sites who scrape us without permission or attribution. Our search traffic has declined (now partially because of our noindexing changes), and our high quality content continues to be outranked by less helpful results.

If you have a site that is experiencing a similar phenomenon, let us know in the comments. This behavior seems contrary to the fundamentals of search quality, and Panda specifically. Without making some noise about it, it may never be corrected.

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Posted by Dr. Pete

Even the best advice is useless if you can’t put it into play. As a consultant who started his professional life as a coder, I always try to consider the effort and cost of implementing any changes I advise. Don’t get me wrong – some difficult changes have to be made, despite the pain. Usually, though, there are a few easy wins that won’t take days of development or thousands of dollars to put into play. I’m going to give you 8 fixes to on-page SEO problems that I see pop up regularly…

“Easy” Isn’t Always Easy

A quick disclaimer – what’s “easy” for one person or on one platform might not be so easy on another. Sitewide changes (TITLE tags, for example) can be tricky, but they’re generally a lot easier than a complete redesign or a switch to a new platform. One area I won’t mention in this list is improving your URLs. Although that can be a powerful tactic, I’m seeing too many people who want to make relatively minor changes to URLs for SEO purposes. Sitewide URL changes are risky and often difficult to do correctly – they aren’t worth it to go from “good” to “slightly better”. The changes I’m proposing here are generally low-risk.

1. Canonicalize Internal Duplicates

While there may not be a duplicate content penalty (with a Capital “P”), there can be serious consequences to letting your indexed pages run wild, especially in a post-Panda world. Google often does a poor job of choosing the right version of a page, and low-authority sites can end up diluting your site's index and pushing out deeper, more important pages (like product pages).

There are three common varieties of internal duplicates, in my experience:

1. Duplicates caused by session variables and tracking parameters
2. Duplicates caused by search sorts and filters
3. Duplicates caused by alternate URL paths to the same page

If search spiders see a new URL for the same content (whether that URL appears static or dynamic), they’ll see a new page. It’s important to canonicalize these pages. When the duplicates really are identical, using the canonical tag or a 301-redirect is often the best bet. In some cases, like search sorts or pagination, the situation can get more complicated.

2. Write Unique TITLE Tags

The TITLE tag is still a powerful ranking factor, and it’s still far too often either abused or neglected. Pages that you want to rank need unique, descriptive, and keyword-targeted TITLE tags, plain and simple. You can easily track duplicate page TITLEs through the SEOmoz PRO Campaign Manager, including historical data:

This data is available from multiple locations, including the Campaign Dashboard and “Crawl Diagnostics” tab. You can also track exact duplicates in Google Webmaster Tools. You can find it under “Diagnostics” > “HTML Suggestions”.

The solution here is simple: write unique TITLE tags. If you have a huge site, there are plenty of ways to populate TITLE tags systematically from data. Writing some decent code is well worth it to fix this problem.

3. Write Unique META Descriptions

While the META Description tag has little or no direct impact on ranking these days, it does have 2 important indirect impacts:

1. It (usually) determines your search snippet and impacts click-through rate (CTR).
2. It’s another uniqueness factor that makes pages look more valuable.

Again, there are plenty of ways to generate META descriptions from data, including just using snippets of product descriptions. Try to make descriptions meaningful and attractive to visitors, not just pseudo-sentences loaded with keywords.

4. Shorten Your TITLE Tags

Long TITLE tags tend to weaken the SEO impact of any given keyword, and can also turn off search visitors (who tend to skim results). The most common culprit I see is when someone adds their home-page TITLE to the end of every other page. Let’s say your home-page TITLE is:

“The Best Bacon Since 1983 | Bob’s Bacon Barn”

Then, for every product page, you have something like this:

“50-pound Mega-sack of Bacon | The Best Bacon Since 1983 | Bob’s Bacon Barn”

It may not look excessive, but you’re diluting the first few (and most important) keywords for the page, and you’re making every page on the site compete with your home-page unnecessarily. It’s fine to use your company name (or a shortened version, like “Bob’s Bacon”) at the end of all of your TITLE tags, but don’t repeat core keywords on a massive scale. I’ve seen this go to extreme, once you factor in long product names, categories, and sub-categories.

5. Re-order Your TITLE Tags

On larger, e-commerce sites, it’s common to list category and sub-category information in TITLE tags. That’s fine up to a point, but I often see a configuration that looks something like this:

“Bob’s Bacon | Bulk Products | Bacon Sacks | 50-pound Mega-sack of Bacon”

Not only does every TITLE tag on the site end up looking very similar, but the most important and unique keywords for the page are pushed to the very back. This is an issue for search usability, too, as research has demonstrated that the first few words in a title or headline are the most critical (possibly as few as the first two). If you’ve got a structure like the one above, flip it around:

“50-pound Mega-sack of Bacon | Bacon Sacks | Bulk Products | Bob’s Bacon”

It’s a relatively easy change, and it’ll put the most important keywords up front, where they belong. It will very likely also increase your search CTR.

6. Add Direct Product Links

On sites with 100s or 1000s of pages, a “flat” architecture isn’t possible or even desirable. So, you naturally end up taking a hierarchical approach where products are 3+ levels deep. I think that’s often fine, if the paths are clear to crawlers and visitors, but it can leave critical pages with very little ranking power. One solution is to pull some of your top sellers to the home-page and link directly – this effectively flattens the architecture and pours more link-juice where it’s needed. Don’t go overboard, but a “Featured Products” or “Top 10 Sellers” list on the home-page can really help boost important deep pages.

7. Re-write Internal Anchor Text

I’m amazed how often I see internal links, even main navigation links, given cryptic, vague, or jargon-loaded labels. If you’re trying to rank your category page for “kid’s clothing”, don’t label the button “Apparel (K-12)” – it’s a bad signal to search engines, and it probably doesn’t make much sense to visitors. Your internal anchor text should reflect your keyword strategy, and your keyword strategy should reflect common usage. Use labels people understand and don’t be afraid to be specific.

8. Remove 10 Low-Value Links

There’s an old adage in copywriting – say what you need to say in as few words as possible, and then, when you’re done, try to say it in half that many words. I think the same goes for internal linking. If most of your inbound links are coming to the home-page, then your site architecture is the single biggest factor in flowing link-juice to deeper pages. It’s natural to want to link to everything, but if you prioritize everything, you effectively prioritize nothing. Find 10 links on your home-page that are either low priority for search or that visitors never click on (a click-mapping tool like Crazy Egg is a great way to test this), and remove them. Focusing your remaining link-juice is an easy way to boost your most important pages.

I’d love to hear any tips you may have for easy wins on-page. I’d also recommend Rand’s post on building a perfectly optimized page. While link-building is critical, fixing on-page issues is often a lot easier and can have an immediate impact, so it’s important not to ignore either front of the SEO battle.

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Posted by randfish

Since last December's admission from Google + Bing's search teams regarding the direct impact of Twitter + Facebook on search rankings, marketers have been asking two questions:

1. What signals are Google + Bing counting?
2. How much influence do these social signals have on the results?

Over the last few weeks, we've been collecting data and running calculations in an attempt to provide more insight into these answers. Today, I'd like to share some results of that process. But, before we begin, there's some important caveats.

The data we're sharing below examines the top 30 ranking results for 10,217 searches performed on Google in late March (after the Panda/Farmer update, using top suggested keywords in each category from Google's AdWords data). It compares the features that higher ranking results have, which lower ranking results do not. Since the standard error numbers are very, very tiny, we can be fairly confident that these correlation values would apply to Google results as a whole (i.e. if we were to run these correlations on 100K, 1 million or 1 billion results, we'd get the same correlations).

However, this does not mean we can be confident that what we're measuring are actually ranking factors having a direct influence. Let's use an analogy about dolphins to help illustrate:

image credit: alfonsator on Flickr

Thus, our first caveat is - correlation is NOT causation - the features we show below may indeed be directly influencing Google's ranking algorithm, but they also may just be artifacts or features that high ranking pages tend to have (though, we do know from their public statements that at least some data from these sources is influencing the results).

It's also true that our analyses will not be nearly as sophisticated as whatever Google + Bing are doing with the data, so while we look at raw numbers from APIs, the search engines may have arrangements enabling them to look far deeper into the signals that make a tweet or share authentic - in particular the "author authority" metric they mention in the linked interview above. Thus, the second caveat is that results presented here are likely overly simplistic. A big takeaway for marketers should, thus, be - even if you're sure that a social metric is highly influential, spamming the heck out of it is probably a dumb way to try manipulating the rankings.

With those out of the way, let's look at some data!

Correlation of Link Metrics vs. Social Signals

How well do metrics like the quantity of shares on Facebook, Tweets on Twitter or Google Buzz shares correlate with higher rankings in the top 30 results in Google's web search results?

In June of 2010 we ran a similar analysis and found the highest correlated metrics to be exact match .com domain names and # of linking root domains to the ranking page. Exact match domains have fallen substantially (in both prominence and correlation) - but we'll save that analysis for another blog post - while link metrics have remained fairly static in their correlation to higher rankings in Google. As of late March, the data is showing an unlikely new leader - shares of a URL on Facebook!

Naturally, this data shocked us. I presented at SMX Elite in Sydney last week on this and, prior to showing the slide, asked the audience, by show of hands, who believed Facebook to be more influential in Google's rankings than Twitter. Not a single person raised their arm. When data's this surprising (and particularly when the rest of the data from the analysis - much of it available here - matches our expectations), we want to look deeper.

Is Facebook Share Data Available for Enough Pages to Be Significant?

My first reaction was to ask Dr. Matt Peters, SEOmoz's in-house data scientist conducting this analysis, if the results were skewed by a few search results where Facebook shares just happened to be present in the top results. His response...?

More data:

Link data was present for nearly every result we examined (99.9%+), which is to be expected, but social data? Of this magnitude? Even for plenty of weird, uninteresting queries? Shocking. If you had asked me to guess, I would have said we'd find Facebook share data on maybe 5-10% of the results - 61% is mind-boggling. It challenges a lot of my assumptions about how far social data really could take web search (e.g. see this video from April of last year in which I proclaim there's no way Facebook search could replace Google search), especially considering the relative newness of Facebook's Open Graph project.

Are Social Correlation Merely the Result of Overlap with Link Signals?

My next guess was that Facebook Shares' correlation was simply a matter of being a good predictor of links. Surely, pages that earn lots of Facebook shares also earn lots of good links. As before, Dr. Peters had some analysis to help answer the question.

In this chart, we examine the correlations of social data, controlling for links (in this case, specifically # of linking c-blocks). And yet, we still see a remarkable positive correlation between Facebook shares and higher rankings. Twitter, on the other hand, drops dramatically, potentially signalling that its influence as direct signal may not be as strong (though we must keep in mind this data is not causal).

Takeaways from this Data

While we can't say for certain whether these numbers mean that Facebook strongly influences Google rankings, I personally have some big learnings and opinions to share:

1. Social Metrics are Well Correlated with Higher Rankings
   To me, correlation alone is interesting because I want my sites/pages to be similar to the pages that rank higher in Google, irrespective of whether those traits are directly measured in the algorithm. Pages that earn tweets + Facebook shares also correlate well with earning links, and send direct traffic on their own - ignoring these services at this point seems foolish.
2. Testing the Direct Impact of Facebook Shares on Google is Imperative
   We've already observed several remarkable results from testing Twitter's impact. Facebook should be next on the list for many search marketers.
3. I Need to Learn More About How to Earn Facebook Shares
   Given the potential importance and the obvious direct impact (traffic from and visibility on Facebook itself), I, and probably many web marketers, need to examine successful strategies and brainstorm new ways to earn sharing activity from Facebook's massive user base.
4. Shares Might Be More Valuable than Likes
   In Facebook's own environment, a "like" of content will show up on your own "Wall" and in "Most Recent" (a new feature as of last week), but it rarely shows in "Top News" where most users scan and click. If that alone isn't reason to encourage sharing v. liking, the data above certainly is (at least to me).
5. Twitter May Be Less Powerful than I Thought
   The correlation data and the presence of tweets in SERPs was less, in comparison to Facebook, than I would have expected. It could be that in cases like those of our experiments, where many influential Twitter users shared a URL in close temporal proximity, Google takes it as a signal, yet for standard search rankings, it's not as powerful. We'll definitely keep testing and watching, but my expectations for tweets correlating with rankings, after controlling for links, were higher, and thus the results, somewhat surprising.

It's up to you how to interpret this data, but whether you believe (or have tested) the causality of Facebook/Twitter or not, all of us in the SEO sphere should be carefully watching the social space and Google's social efforts.

For those interested, here's the full presentation on correlation + opinion data shared at SMX Elite last week:

 

Ranking Factors Data 2011: SMX Elite Sydney View more presentations from Rand Fishkin

 

Looking forward to a vibrant discussion and, hopefully, some testing (and reports back) of Facebook's influence on Google's rankings :-)

p.s. When the full search ranking factors report is released in the weeks to come, we'll also be providing our methodology and a raw dump of data so anyone can reproduce and double-check our results.

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Posted by willcritchlow

You might have seen some of the buzz about the recent #linklove events we ran with SEOmoz in London and New Orleans. These were single-day events focused purely on link building. In a little over a month's time, we are running our first 2-day deep-dive expert conference stateside. I've spoken at a bunch of the MozCon events in Seattle, and we thought it was about time we brought the show to the east coast. Without further ado, I present Pro SEO Boston:

• Where: Boston, MA - Joseph B. Martin Conference Center at Harvard Medical School
• When: 16th / 17th May 2011
• What: advanced SEO, actionable tips and new stuff you've never seen before
• Who: the best speakers we could find, including Rand, Dharmesh, Seth Besmertnik, and many more
• How much: only $799 with the SEOmoz PRO discount (grab a free trial if you aren't a PRO member)
  • [Non-PRO member price: $949]

Tickets are available now - you can:

book here

Yes, that is the appropriate response

We pour our heart and soul into these events and recent feedback suggests we're going in the right direction. 92% of attendees of our recent London #linklove event said they'd attend again! Typical criticism of advanced events is that it's really tough to get the level right - when we ran #linklove in New Orleans, 94% of attendees said the level was "just right" (vs. too advanced or too basic).

Since this is our first event on the East Coast, many potential attendees won't have attended a Distilled / SEOmoz event before. If you need more convincing than I can give, I suggest you read a recap of our last event (#linklove in NOLA) from Tom Harari who said:

“The SES New York conference was being held at the same time as the Distilled seminar and I almost went to SES instead – man, am I glad I didn’t”

Sneak Preview

The first thing you should know is that Rand and I will once again be battling head to head. Previous battles have been quite "big picture" - so this time we're taking it to the trenches to put together two competing SEO plans for specific sites. We'll present them, you'll decide whose is best, there will be only one victor. (Place your bets now - I'm currently ahead 3-1, but I've never won in the US and I believe Rand has been cheating by taking presentation classes...). We'll also be presenting a regular session each:

• Live data analysis: it may well be that in the long run, the only thing that separates search marketers from "traditional" marketers is our obsession with data. I will be presenting a session where I will show you in real time some of the skills you need to become the master of that data - from new sources, APIs and Excel wizardry up to hacking programs together to get you the information you need. I am increasingly of the opinion that every SEO should be comfortable with at least one scripting language / method. If you're not automating, you'll find it harder to be effective.
• Blended and verticals: fewer and fewer searches are returning 10 regular blue links these days. Rand will be showing you how to win in a multi-vertical search world. Some sites live in areas where everything is vertical, others have upside opportunities from (for example) news or video. Whichever applies to you, Rand'll be showing you how to rank.

I'm a little scared of Rand's presentation training

When programming our 2-day events, I focus on the things that I know advanced SEOs want to know; what would I be quizzing these guys about if I saw them in the bar? What does Tom need to learn about? What doesn’t Rand already know?

Out of all this brainstorming came a schedule that looks a little bit like the following:

• Taming the panda: Google didn’t just change an algorithm – they changed the web:
  • How has the world changed with the recent Google updates?
  • How is it going to continue to change?
  • What should you be doing right now to win over the medium term?
  • Possibly the hardest question: if you’ve been negatively impacted, what can you do to recover? How permanent are the impacts likely to be?
  • Laura Lippay has had a unique perspective on the evolving landscape of search over the last few years as she’s moved from working in SEO at a search engine to consulting alongside ex-Googler Vanessa Fox to running her own show. If she can’t help work out the answers to this, no-one can.
• A Geek's Guide To Crafting Code To Lure In Links: how the geek shall inherit the earth:
  • A large proportion of the web’s links go to functionality that people find useful – engineers are the new link builders
  • How can developers create link worthy applications?
  • How do you build link-worthiness into your core product?
  • Is this really a good use of your time? How do you make sure that you get the right kind of business benefit from building popular products?
  • Dharmesh Shah is the only person I want to present this session – who else do you know who has those engineering chops alongside the ability to build businesses worth hundreds of millions of dollars?
• How not to fail at link bait: not everything works – learn from it:
  • How should you coordinate research, writing and design?
  • What tools and sources create the most link-worthy content?
  • What link bait fails and why?
  • Chris Bennett and his company are behind some of the most shared content on the web. It’s inspiring to hear his stories of success, but what about the stuff that went wrong? I’m going to be pushing Chris to share both details of his process (from brainstorm, to data, to wireframes, to finished designs) as well as notable failures along the way.
• Social media: an engineer’s perspective: the new social skills:
  • Whether as a ranking factor or simply as a traffic / business driver, social media is becoming ever more important.
  • How do you architect your site to get liked, shared, clicked?
  • How do you measure social interactions through closed ecosystems?
  • Mat Clayton recently blew me away over coffee with some of the stories he shared about the growth he has driven for mixcloud.com . Is it possible the true social media guru is an engineer?
• Effective link building: still necessary, still hard:
  • Tips and tricks from an effective link builder
  • What really makes a difference?
  • Channelling your “creativity” – everyone has evil ideas; how do you use them for awesome?
  • Justin Briggs has had remarkable success building links for his clients out of the Seattle Distilled office – I want to see his presentation to help carry some of the knowledge back across the pond to London HQ.
• Information Architecture 2.0: if it can’t be crawled, it can’t be found:
  • How can you decentralise IA decisions to cope with rapid publishing and / or UGC?
  • What can smaller sites learn from enterprise?
  • How should you change your decisions as crawling gets ever faster?
  • What should be your top priorities when presented with a brand new site? What about when you are struggling to get change implemented?
  • Marshall Simmonds is behind some of the biggest site architectures on the web and has thought long and hard about the different difficulties facing legacy sites with inflexible CMS constraints and start-ups without the authority to support immense architectures
• Forecasting, presenting and explaining SEO to management: you have to get the budget from somewhere:
  • What's the right balance between detail and story?
  • How do you reconcile the things you need to say to win budget with describing progress month on month?
  • What metrics do management understand that actually correspond to real success?
  • Seth Besmertnik blew me away with his presentation in Seattle last year on taking SEO to the next level in the enterprise. Out of everyone I know, he has done more thinking on "managing managers" into understanding, investing in and rewarding SEO than anyone. Bring your notebooks to this one.
• Keyword culture: whatever else changes, we’re still typing words into boxes:
  • What has changed in the world of keywords while you weren’t watching?
  • What are the best sources of data?
  • What’s the latest thinking on targeting keywords and implementing a keyword strategy?
  • Kate Morris has helped implement keyword cultures with in-house teams at some of the biggest brands in the world. With backing from Distilled’s resident data junkies, she’s going to change the way you think about keywords.
• Moving the needle: if there’s no return, there’s no point:
  • How do you manage your investment across multiple channels?
  • How does the new GA functionality impact multi-channel marketers?
  • What lessons can this teach us for SEO? How should we allocate our time between activities?
  • How do you forecast in a world of uncertain results and outcomes? What does this mean for your planning?
  • If you’re working with big sites, manually tweaking every page might not be possible. What marketing activities have genuinely moved the needle for SEOmoz over the past 12-18 months?
  • Joanna Lord is not only one of the best and most energetic speakers I know, she’s also got a unique insight into cross-channel challenges in a hyper-competitive industry. She’s going to share key formulae and tools they use to manage this process at SEOmoz.
• New technologies: the future has to be useful for something:
  • How can you create crawlable AJAX?
  • What does HTML5 mean for SEO?
  • What do you need to know about PUSH?
  • Rob Ousbey loves the future and he's going to show us a bit of what it looks like. As one of our most experienced SEOs, Rob's combination engineering / management degree sums him up perfectly - technology for business purposes. I can't wait to see what the future holds.

Tom's presentations got better when he started wearing nice shirts

Bonus sessions:

• Live site review / link building – it’s not a normal presentation, but it’s perennially popular. Watch the sparks fly as experts battle to be the first to find issues and opportunities live on stage.
• Getting $hit done – the section of Tom’s presentation at #linklove NOLA on how to cause change and actually get things done was a surprise hit. Causing change is becoming one of the most powerful internal memes at Distilled and Tom’s going to share some of the lessons we’ve learnt and implemented in a short energiser session.
• Give it up – best thing on the internet – we love the energy you get when you put all the speakers on stage at once. In Boston, we’re trying a new tack: aiming to inspire us all towards awesome. What are the ideas and implementations that these great minds have been most impressed by? I personally can’t wait to hear what they all come up with.

Our speakers

A bit more about the people who are coming to share their knowledge - I'm really exciting to be speaking alongside a bunch of old friends as well as some people I've been wanting to meet for a long time. I hope you'll join us to learn from all these people used their skills to create success and awesomeness all around themselves:

• Dharmesh Shah from Hubspot - I am in awe of Dharmesh's ability to pilot an amazing growth story of a company, geek out and write code and have a family life all at the same time. I will definitely be picking his brains for tips. I can't believe that after speaking online so frequently and with both Duncan and Tom having met Dharmesh, that Boston will be our first real life encounter. I, for one, can't wait.
• Seth Besmertnik from Conductor - another great East Coast entrepreneur. I first met Seth in Seattle back in 2007 and he has repeatedly inspired us to set the bar higher. No-one knows more about what steers big companies through the SEO maze than Seth. Whether you're in-house or a consultant, Seth will help you bring the data that will convince management and clients of what you need.
• Marshall Simmonds of Define Media Group - when we made the list of people who could talk authoritatively on the topic of large sites and complex architectures, Marshall's name was right at the top. Our decision was absolutely not influenced by our shared love of whisky. Not even a little bit.
• Laura Lippay of How's Your Pony? (I know, really?) - I first saw Laura speak on her SEO forecasting process. I was blown away by both the effectiveness of her model and (probably more importantly) the explanation of the underlying assumptions in management-friendly terminology. It was immediately clear why she has been successful working with some of the biggest websites in the world. You might also have read her 8 step SEO strategy (if you haven't, you should go read it now, I'll wait....)
• Chris Bennett of 97th Floor - I asked Chris to speak at #linklove in NOLA because I knew just how much of the internet was created by him and his company. If you haven't seen him present, you are missing a serious trick. This time around, we're asking him to reveal even more of the actual process behind the success. Last time he spoke, I immediately started sending notes back to our team. This time, we're going to see even more of the magic.
• Mat Clayton of Mixcloud - right now, you might not have heard of Mat, but I've heard some of what he has to say, and it's quite possible that his is the session I'm looking forward to most. One of a team of 4 University of Cambridge graduates behind Mixcloud, Mat has been more successful than anyone I've come across at baking social sharing and mechanics into the core of his business. He has a self-deprecating way of saying he isn't an SEO and doesn't know much about it. But don't believe his British reserve - he has the data to prove exactly how well his approach works and I think he might just add more value to some websites in the audience than the rest of us put together.

and... of course, from Distilled and SEOmoz:

• Rand Fishkin and me going head to head in a competition to see who can bring a better, more actionable, more powerful strategy for some lucky sites in unloved niches
• My brother, Tom Critchlow, who's been appearing in Whiteboard Fridays and webinars all over the place recently. He's been in-house at SEOmoz for a little bit now and so he'll be combining his agency and client-side lessons into advanced tips
• Others from the Distilled Seattle office: Kate Morris whose ability to combine marketing and technology is second-to-none, Justin Briggs who, in the short time he's been with Distilled has been tearing it up with great blog posts and speaking engagements and Rob Ousbey who has done such a phenomenal job of running our West Coast outpost over the past year.
• The bundle of energy that is Joanna Lord (from SEOmoz) is going to kick your ass if you don't bring it. I'm already feeling pumped.

Who let that guy ask questions?

The reminder information:

• Where: Boston, MA - Joseph B. Martin Conference Center at Harvard Medical School (it's at Harvard Medical School - how could you fail to learn?)
• When: 16th / 17th May 2011
• What: advanced SEO, actionable tips and new stuff you've never seen before
• Who: the best speakers we could find, including Rand, Dharmesh, Seth Besmertnik, and many more
• How much: only $799 with the SEOmoz PRO discount (grab a free trial if you aren't a PRO member)
  • [Non-PRO member price: $949]
• There is also a VIP dinner on the Sunday night before the conference. You'll get 1-1 access to the speakers and a handful of other delegates - this costs $299 / person and is extremely limited - it will sell out quickly so don't hesitate if you'd like to join us

book here

We have negotiated a discounted hotel rate for our delegates at The Holiday Inn Boston Brookline, just a short cab ride from the conference venue. The rate is $189 per night. In order to qualify for the discounted rate please call the reservation department directly on 617-277-1200 and quote 'Distilled Delegates'

If you're really lucky, you'll even get to sing karaoke with the Distilled crew (or maybe that's if you're unlucky):

No caption could do this justice

Pictures from #linklove London. Thanks to foliovision - you can see the full photoset here.

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Posted by Aaron Wheeler

 Sure, you know SEO like you know the back of your hand. You know how to linkbuild, and you know how to do keyword research. Of course you've got a lot of SEO knowledge - you've been watching these Whiteboard Fridays every week, right? =P Well, now it's time to get crackin'! Unfortunately, it feels like you never have enough time to get done all the things you know you should do. Maybe the people in charge aren't willing to do the things you know they need to do to get positive results, or maybe you can't implement all the changes you'd like to in the short time you have because you're too busy building an encyclopaedic report for your client. There's a lot of ways to make SEO not happen for your client's site, but this week, Tom Critchlow from Distilled will show you how to avoid stagnation and keep the SEO ball rolling!

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Video Transcription

Howdy, SEOmoz fans. Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. I'm Tom Critchlow. I'm currently here in Seattle helping SEOmoz with a few various bits and pieces, and today I'm going to be talking about how to make SEO happen.

So, very common in the SEO industry, and actually across all kinds of consulting, I hear a common complaint, which is I know what to do, I know what the SEO technique is, I know maybe I need more links, maybe I need to change something on the site. Figuring out the problem and solution is not the hard part. The hard part is getting stuff done. Today I am going to talk through a few tips about how to actually translate from knowing the answer to actually making the answer a reality. So, let's start straight in.

Number one, no more reports. This is my biggest bugbear with SEO consulting. I see this all the time from other agencies, lone SEOs, in-house SEOs. I see it all the time. Big, lengthy, you know 50 to 100 page reports. I'm really not a big fan.

Here at Distilled we try really hard to keep all of our reports really, really short. That is something that I really try to instigate in everyone that I teach within Distilled, because a long report isn't getting things done. Right? Like, you'll send across a report. It will be 100 pages, and you'll think, yes, this is a great report. You send it through to your client. They're probably not going to read it. Reports don't actually help get stuff done. So, instead of sending a lengthy report, consider the two primary functions in my eyes for what a report does.

There are two things. A report needs to convince somebody to do something, and it needs to tell them how to actually get it done. In my eyes, when you send a report through that is 50 pages or 100 pages, you are very often confusing the two. So, really, to convince somebody to make change happen, you only need one page or maybe you need a phone call or maybe you need a meeting. Let's say it is a whole bunch of on-page changes and you say I'm going to need a huge amount of developer time to get all these changes done. You go to the marketing director or the marketing boss or whoever it is that you report to, and you go, "I need to get this stuff done." And they go, "Why?" So, you need to answer that question. But you don't need 100-page report to answer that question. So, make sure that you convince whoever the stakeholder is, independently of the report, that this change needs to happen, and then as a secondary function, you need to actually make that change happen. But that change is often, like, go work with the developer team or go and have lunch with the guy who runs the developer team or actually go in and do the change yourself on the site.

Whatever it might be that it takes to get it done, focus on that separately from the big report. Sometimes, yes, you do need to spec things out. You need to go in and you need to say, "Well, actually, all these pages need these keywords changing, or the information architecture needs to look like this." There are things that you need to put down in writing, particularly for developers when you need a tight spec, but don't confuse that with what a lot of consultants will do, which is sending through a big report that has both some justification in it and some nitty-gritty technical details. Try to divorce those two things so you have the convincing separately to the doing. Just generally, write less reports. Just make stuff happen.

Secondly, processes. I see this a lot again in reports that people send out and in consulting and SEO recommendations, even in blog posts. I see people saying, well, you should do X. But there is very little explanation as to how a particular company or a particular website will actually go about doing X. For example, guest posting. Let's say that you put in a report, "Guest posting would be a great way of building links for your niche." I have seen this kind of thing in plenty of reports. But that is not actionable. How does the client actually take that recommendation, and how do they turn that into actually doing guest posting?

Well, the key lies in processes. When you're doing consulting, when you're trying to get things done, processes are at the heart of everything a business does. If you want to make something happen that isn't already happening, you need a new process, or if there is an existing process, you might need to modify that process to make it SEO friendly or make it happen in a particular way.

The key to coming up with processes and improving processes is to understand what the existing processes are. So, if you go into a business or you're consulting for a website or maybe even if you are in-house, understand how things work currently. If you don't understand how things are working, how on earth can you go in and recommend changes or say you should be doing this or you should be doing that. If you don't understand how things are working, you're going to fail.

When you are putting forth your recommendation, try not to frame things as, "Go and do guest posting." That's not an actionable thing. Instead, try to frame things as, "Here is a process for guest posting that is tailored for you." That might involve understanding who is going to do it. Do they have the staff? Do they need to hire more staff? Are there existing people who could take on the task within their existing roles? How are they going to do it? Are the people who are going to do it trained? Do they have the skills? Do they have the tools? Is other tracking in place? How much? Should there be five people doing this all day long? Should it be part of one person's job? So, understanding these three things will really help you get closer to getting things done. Okay. Now switch over here now.

Number three, pre-deliver. So, when you are doing consulting or when you are trying to get SEO changes to happen, there's a big tendency I think to, you want to go away. You want to work in a dark room for days or weeks or months, and then you want to come back and you want to go, "Tada!" I've just made this amazing thing or I have just built this big report for you, and here's what needs to happen. The problem is if the person you are presenting it to, they're seeing it fresh for the first time, then it's a surprise to them, and surprises don't equal getting things done. So, instead, consider pre-delivering what you're going to be recommending. So say, "I need some time to figure out exactly what the information architecture looks like, but you can be sure that there are going to be some information architecture improvements or changes." That will give the person that you are reporting to, or the person that you need to convince to make change happen, that will give them the time to prepare. They'll be like, "Okay, great. Well, we've got a new version of the website going live in three months. We'll need the spec from you by the end of this month." Great. So, now you have a time frame. Now you have a framework within which to work.

There is a very natural tendency, I think, with human beings to want to kind of make things absolutely crystal right before you release it, before you let your baby be seen by other people. But actually, in reality, in the business world, you want to pre-deliver. You want to overcommunicate with people and say, "This is what I am thinking of changing. Is that okay? Does that fit with you? Are you able to make that change?" Again, understanding either the client or internal resources. Understanding how much developer time they have will be a great framework for your recommendations.

Number four, communication. So, I have written a quote on here which is that, "Change happens when people like you," which is a fantastic quote that I got from a management consultant who came in and helped do some training for Distilled. It is so true. You think of businesses as these cold, hard, rational entities, and they're just not. Businesses are run by people like you and me. Well, maybe not like me or you. But anyway, businesses are run by people, okay. So, if you want to make change happen, you have to make people like you. So, take people out for lunch. Be nice to them. Socialize with people. Pick up the phone to people. Speak to them. E-mails are a very cold form of communication. Instead, try and build a rapport with people. Again, whether in-house or in agency, just make people like you. Make people understand where you're coming from, understand why you're doing what you're doing. If people don't value or understand why you're doing something, they are far less likely to actually make that change happen.

So, make people like you, and face-to-face meetings are crucial to this. I think, again, whether you are in-house or agency side, face-to-face meetings and beers and lunch, all of that will actually make change happen, because when people meet you face to face, they are so much nicer, they are so much warmer, and you're so much more able to actually convince them that what you are recommending or what you are working on is important to them.

There is a favorite saying within Distilled, which is that communication solves all problems. So, if you are ever stuck with the question of how to make SEO happen, think about communicating with somebody. Whether it is somebody on your team, whether it's your boss, whether it's the client, whoever it is, communicate with somebody, and that's how change will get done. Don't write a 50-page report.

All right. Thanks guys.

Video transcription by SpeechPad.com

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Posted by randfish

Several weeks back, I gave a very unique talk at LUISS University in Rome, Italy at the bequest of the US State Department and the Business Association Italy America (BAIA). The audience was small, but the energy was fantastic. Italy has traditionally been a challenging place to do a tech startup, but a consortium of folks are aiming to change that. My talk was an early part of that effort, and I'm really proud to be involved.

Luckily, the presentation can now reach a much wider group, thanks to the efforts of Robin Good, creator of Master New Media and one of Rome's most well-known bloggers. Below, you'll find all the sections of my talk, broken down by topic, in both video and text format. My deep thanks to Robin for this remarkable work transcribing, filming, editing and even researching all the links I mentioned. Enjoy!
 

 This is the story of SEOmoz, as I have heard it by sitting in the first row of a small but very attentive audience at the LUISS University in Rome, Italy. The storyteller is Rand Fishkin himself, the father and founder of an SEO company which has become synonym of high value tools and services, competence, and a natural inclination to share valuable information before asking something in return.

Photo credit: Rand Fishkin

As Rand himself announced at the beginning of his presentation, this is the first time that the full story of SEOmoz is being told publicly, in front of an audience and the first time that he his sharing some of lesser known stories, anecdotes as well as the data and numbers that have characterized his unique online adventure.

And being this a story full of valuable lessons, I am truly grateful to him for having given me and MasterNewMedia permission to record and publish this story in full without any editing or censorship.

I must also say, that while watching Rand recount the story of how his company became what it is now, I was humbled by Rand's own honesty and transparency in sharing his own failures and mistakes, as much as I did admire him for the perseverance and determination which he has painted all along his value-creation path.

Having recorded Rand's full SEOmoz story presentation from start to end, I have split the material in twelve relatively short video clips (which I have also transcribed in full), which cover everything from the early times before SEOmoz existed to the financing times, and up to today success. In these videos you can also see Rand Fishkin sharing some of the key lessons learned as well as the strategy and tactics he has utilized to drive his company to his fast increasing value.

 

SEOmoz Story Introduction

Duration: 1' 15''

Text Transcription

This is the first time that I am giving this specific presentation.

This is a story that I told many times in bars, restaurants, enotecas, but never on stage in a formal presentation - you are going to be the first to see it, and hopefully it will be valuable.

What I want to do is tell the story about how we started SEOmoz, how it went from being nearly a disaster to a surprising success this year, in fact the last few months have been incredibly exciting for us.

Some of the things we learned along the way, both from an entrepreneurship perspective - starting a company, scaling a startup - as well as in marketing capacity.

I know there are a few of you here that are very interested in search, in SEO, in web marketing... I am going to represent some of the lessons that we have learned from that as well.

I put the presentation up on SlideShare, so if you like it you can download and share it.

 

The Origins of the SEOmoz Company

 
Duration: 5' 20"

Text Transcription

In 1981 - I know, this is a long time ago to start a startup - my mom Gillian founded a local service that helped people make business cards, print identities, pre-internet marketing services.

In 1997 when her clients started needing websites, then I followed the typical path "I want to make some extra money while I am in high school, I am in college. I will make some websites for her clients, learn HTML, learn  CSS" - and I also learned Flash, which is how I still build a lot of my graphics and stuff.

In 2001 - know I am speaking at a university so I should not recommend this - I dropped out of college.

I did not finish, I only had two classes away from graduating, so I paid them almost all the money, but I just did not get a degree.

Two classes away from graduating, I decided that I could not go to school anymore. I just needed to do this startup thing, and of course following the first steps of other great Seattle’s entrepreneurs like Bill Gates who did the same thing.

In 2002, Gillian and I started essentially a small agency that did consulting around website building and built a lot of Flash websites.

It was in 2003 that we had contracted some other consultants locally to help us do SEO, to try get our rankings higher on Google for all our clients.

We were struggling. You got to remember that in 2001 the Internet was an incredibly exciting place and then I dropped out of school and it became a much less exciting place very quickly, because in 2001 the market falls apart around technology and I have already dropped out of school. I dropped out of school in June and it was around September that the market took a crash.

It was looking like maybe it was not the greatest decision but, of course, being obstinate - which I truly am - I stuck with it.

We had these third party services that were failing to do good SEO work for our clients, so I started learning it myself, which is how I picked up web design and all anyway.

We had gone pretty deeply to debt - I will talk about that in more detail a little bit later - but hiring those contractors, buying expensive offices, spending a lot of money on equipment, paying salaries that we could not really afford to pay... unfortunately not for me.

There is a very beautiful woman in a black dress in the third row - that is my wife Geraldine - during this time that I was deeply in debt and I could not pay myself a paycheck, she paid our rent, she worked... I do not know why she stuck with me, but it worked out well, it was a good investment eventually.
In 2004 things are kind of going terribly and I started the SEOmoz blog, because not only was I struggling financially, but I was struggling with SEO.

I realized that I was not great at it, I could not figure it out, it was very challenging.

Google makes it really hard to know and understand how to do SEO well. And that was one of the reasons why I built SEOmoz, as I thought that this practice of search engine optimization, should be easier. It should not be this black pox, it should not be so hard to understand and so, SEOmoz was founded around this idea of transparency and sharing and information.

If you go back and read the blog posts from 2004, you are not going to be impressed. They are not particularly insightful. A lot of them were just silly day-to-day stuff.

Things like: "I found this article here, it says to do this thing. I tried it and it did not work", but eventually it gets more popular, it starts growing, I get better at blogging, I get better at writing and building these resources and in 2005, after we produced some viral content, Newsweek Magazine, which used to be a very popular magazine in the United States - they had subscription of around eight / nine million subscribers weekly who pick up this magazine - they featured us in a big four / five page spread around SEO and that was a sort of a big coming out party.

We suddenly had a lot more media attention, a lot more clients contacting us instead of wanting us doing web design development services, they wanted us to do SEO. That kind of kicked us off and in fact the Newsweek article was the impetuous for me writing something called The Beginner’s Guide to SEO which is still a relatively famous and well-regarded resource.

The weird part is The Beginner’s Guide to SEO, brought us more clients, more traffic, more value than the Newsweek article did. I thought: "Oh, Newsweek wrote an article, I would better write a guide to SEO for all the people who are going to come to the website from reading the magazine and want to learn more."

It turned out the other way around. The guide itself is more popular.

 

How to Raise Venture Capital Money 

Duration: 4' 39"

Text Transcription

In 2006, after doing a little bit better, we finally have our first profitable year.

You might think to yourself: "Boy, it seems from 2001 to 2006 - five years without making one profitable year - that you would have given up. In fact you probably should have given up." This is one of the lessons on entrepreneurship: If you stick with these things and you keep finding a way to live, you will make it - and I think that story is definitely more true for us than many others.

In 2007 we transitioned to software.

What we realized was we had a good consulting business - it was growing and we finally had a profitable year and we suddenly change business model.

We had a consulting business, but it is incredibly hard to scale consulting.

You take clients in, they pay you money, but you need people, well payed human resources to do a good job, to scale up the practice of consulting, and that is really hard particularly in a field like SEO where there are not a lot of talented people and many of the most talented people run their own firms or in-house set successful agencies.

Training people up takes a lot of time away from clients, so you already need a revenue base before you can do that.

We found it tremendously challenging and we built up a really popular community. The SEOmoz blog now is getting between 8000 and 10000 unique visitors a day.

We thought: "Consulting is a terrible way of monetizing, because maybe we take three or four clients a day. What we need to do is to find a revenue-generation system that can scale with the amount of people that are coming out"

Advertising is a natural one.

When you have a popular site, advertising is something nearly everyone invests in at some point. We did try it and we could make some decent money, but advertising only scales if you can scale the content, the visitors and grow essentially the pie of people that are coming to your site.

Our pie was sort of toward serving a very specific population, SEOs, which was not a huge market, it has now become a much bigger market, but it was not a big market.

We built this software service. For anyone of the members it starts at $99 a month, but it started at $39 a month and we still have people that pay that $39 a month rate of our grandfather in early years.

In 2007, after we do this in February, that summer Michelle Golderg from Ignition Partners - the second larger venture capital firm in the Seattle area - calls me, and so does almost simultaneously Kelly Smith from Curious Office.

Curious Office is a small private investment fund, one that you would call today an  angel group, but at the time they were just a private investment firm.

Kelly and Michelle both sort of took me out to lunch a few times, and they said "What are you doing with this SEO thing? Because we think this is going to be a business, is going to be a big market sector. This is going to be an exciting area."

This is one of the things that when I have spoken to people when I was at the Social Media Week in Milan and today here in Rome... Italy really lacks a lot of this specific type of activity, where someone like a Michelle and a Kelly would come to an entrepreneur who is doing something small, but interesting and successful, and say: "This could be really big". I cannot really underestimate the impact, the influence that that had. Having them come to me and say "We think SEO is going to be big. We think that you can take this to a big place."

It is not that they even told me exactly what to do or gave me the ideas. Just them saying: "This could be a $1 billion company" was enough to get me thinking in a different way about where the business could go and what it could and should be.

In November 2007 we took $1.1 million - a million from Ignition, $100000 from Curious Office.

 

How to Manage a Board of Directors 

Duration: 2' 54"

Text Transcription

We did found the board of directors.

When we took this investment, we were very lucky. 2007 was a great time to raise money, which meant that there were founder-friendly terms.

Today, right now, is probably the best time to raise money since 2007.

The last six months or so have been absolutely the best time. You can raise at very good rates, you can get good amounts of money. You can get very good deal terms - and this has not been possible for much of the last three years or so.

It is kind of a different story today.

In 2008 we took the money that Ignition and Curious Office invested and we used it to build out some technology that we could not have otherwise done - we really needed this to do. That technology today is called Linkscape. It is essentially our index of the World Wide Web. It tries to match the index that Google, Bing or Yahoo! used to maintain - something like Baidu or Yandex in Russia or Seznam in the Czech Republic.

We had this cartoon created. My favorite part is... Do you see how the hamster is powering the web crawl? We had his crawler food say: "Not with more VC funds." That was my favorite. I thought that was so clever. Yet, no one even read this comic. They all tried the product, so it worked out. This took us almost exactly a year, because we took the money in November of 2007, we launched Linkscape in October of 2008 and it was in December of 2008 that we returned a profitability. We were sort of lucky in that.

We were able to return to being profitable from a single round of investment. There are a lot of companies, a lot of startups, who take multiple rounds of investment before they can reach profitability.

A company that I like very much that is based in Boston, that does a lot of stuff around software for marketing services, is called HubSpot. They just took another, I think $32 million from Google Ventures, Sequoia, and Salesforce, on top of about $33 million that they had raised previously. They raised $65 million.

They never returned to profitability. As they are growing and growing and about to get profitable, they take another round, so that they can grow faster and faster. Which is not my personal bias, but it definitely is a great way to build a big company very fast - and it is something that venture capitalists do look for in traditional kinds of big VC investments.

It is less the case today, because there is like The Lean Startup movement - Eric Reis and all those guys. A lot of angel money is going to these and they do not need those big returns in the same kinds of ways, so you can raise at a leaner size.

 

Business Marketing Strategies 

Duration: 8' 13"

Text Transcription

One of the interesting things around Linkscape is that, although I designed it for a "me".

I am an SEO expert who has had seven years in the business, been doing this sort of day in, day out and these are all the things I want to see in a tool. This is what I want in software. The frustrating part about that was that there is not a lot "mes" out there. There are not a lot of Rand Fishkin-style SEOs who can use software in that particular fashion.

It was in probably about nine months later that we realized: "OK, we need to rebuild this in a different way."

We launched about a little more than a year later Open Site Explorer, which has gone on to become incredibly popular. It gets a quarter million or so visits a month and a few million requests a week for information. This tool essentially turned into Open Site Explorer over time.

One of the other lessons that I would urge folks who are thinking about startups, is that if you are an expert in your particular field - you have been doing email marketing, energy trading, travel services - and you think: "I am going to build a startup or a software piece that does what I want, that solves my personal problem", that is a really good idea. What is a bad idea is building it only for expert level folks like yourself.

You need to be able to make a market accessible service and that was a big challenge for us. I think it took me a long time.

My VC folks, my board of directors were always encouraging me: "You need to hire a director of product. You need to get someone in who can run the product division, because you are too much in the weeds, too deep in the data to be able to see the big picture." And that worked out. I hired a guy from Microsoft.

Open Site Explorer and pro membership - essentially the service that we offer, the software subscription service, it started at $39. It moves along from essentially what was a collection of 20, 30 tools and resources that anyone can use whenever you need them - which worked well for a specific set of SEO professionals, a subset of our customers - to a single campaign-based web app. That was something that we learned through competitive intelligence.

We saw some competitors in our space building software that was more campaign-based, did everything all in one and seeing the success that those products had and the intuition that we had around... Those products keep people on the service longer than our specific tool set, which in a recurring revenue business is critical to success.

You need to make sure that the people who are subscribing to your service stay with it for weeks, months and years, not just a few weeks or days.

We had about 800 subscribers at the end of 2007 and I believe our membership, which at the time was called premium had gone form $39 to $49 a month. In 2008 at the end of the year we had about 2,500 subscribers. 2009 we got to 4,000. In 2010 I think we ended with just about 7,200 or 7,100 subscribers. This year we are estimating that we are going to double that. And just today I think it is around 10,400 members. It is outpacing this growth - it is possible we will beat that number.

The growth is not like the hockey stick you will see in a lot of presentations from startup guys. What you do not see is the flying up. It's sort of slow steady progress. Five or six years from now if it continues along this growth rate, which is about a 50, 60 percent growth rate depending on the year, it is going to look great, but it is a very step-function process.

It is not the classic Facebook kind of story, where the first two years it is nothing and then it spikes, or Twitter where the first three years people sent 40 million tweets, and then yesterday they sent 40 million tweets. So that process, that scale, is not the kind of business that we have got.

This is today as of a couple days ago, we have got about 10,300 subscribers. Our API, which serves out data from the Linkscape product, has about 20 paying customers and 250 total users. We have 32 employees. We just welcomed a new software engineer.

Our board of directors remains the same, which is relatively rare to see.

Usually when businesses scale, a lot of venture-backed businesses scale, they will bring in an independent outside board member - and we have been looking for someone, but have not found that perfect fit. Since Gillian and I control the board, we can sort of dictate terms.

It's my opinion, my bias, to believe that a board of directors should be run by the entrepreneur. I think most famously... Mark Zuckerberg does that at Facebook, despite not owning 51 percent of the company, he has regulations written into the bylaws of Facebook saying that he will always control the board - which is interesting, but that is what has been done at Google. It is what was done at Microsoft.

A lot of these big companies, I think venture capitalists and investors are coming around to this idea that: "Maybe I do not need to run the company or be able to vote people off, vote the entrepreneur down."

You can see our revenue raised last year. Last year we did about $5.7 million and this number is particularly important for software startup folks.

Your gross margin is going to be extremely important, because it is how people value you.

When we get up a market assessment of SEOmoz's value, they take this number, $5.7 million, and they are going to multiply it by some number that is based on our revenue model and our margin. At this margin and with a subscription revenue business, we are probably worth between four and six times that number. If we were in an advertising-based business and our margins were around 60 percent, which would be pretty good for an ad-based business, that number would probably be two, two and half X. Instead of being worth 20 or 30 million dollars, we would be worth 12 to 15 - and that would be the price that essentially an outside company might come in and offer to buy the company at.

I would not recommend, and I don't think anyone in the startup world would recommend optimizing around margins or towards margin at the beginning of a software-based business. You really want to do that at a later stage, because growth, reinvestment are so important.

Also just to be totally clear, we are talking about gross margin, not net margin. This is essentially just the cost of running the software service. There's no way we would, but if we needed to, we could fire probably 25 of the staff, keep it running with a skeleton crew, just pay the operations in terms of web hosting and that kind of stuff, and that would be essentially what the gross margin is. The cost of structure of running the service, providing the service to customers is 17 percent.

 

Lessons Learned 

Duration: 5' 9"

Text Transcription

Let’s dive into some of the lessons learned here.

The first big one that comes from those five years of sucking at this entrepreneurship process is: Do not give up.

I have not fully verified these numbers, but from memory it is probably pretty close.

This is our debt, personal debt before we even took venture capital: At the height we had almost half a million dollars in personal debt - which is one of the reasons why today I cannot get a credit card in my name. I have a proper card and I have a checking account but I cannot get a credit card. I can't get a bank loan, I will not be able to buy a house, a car, even rent an apartment without my wife co-signing for me.

That sucks, but at the same time, it was that debt, all these mistakes, all this time that helped me learn how to figure out how to run a real business. In hindsight I would not trade it in, but I can definitely tell you that in 2005, 2004 I had to mostly not think about this.

What I thought about was business: How is the company doing? Are our clients happy? How do we get more clients? How do we get more traffic to the website? ...And not "I am in $400.000 debt, I think I should probably declare bankruptcy".

Another thing that can be extremely distracting and problematic for startups is focusing on too much stuff.

There are a million things going on with your business, there are things around employees, founders, customers, the product, the marketing and you can get lost in numbers. You really can.

I have seen startups who do that, who have essentially more debt than they present, that is 50000 numbers and they do not have a focus around which ones matter.

At SEOmoz we have just a few basic metrics and then more advanced stuff that essentially provides detailed into those. Things like: "How many paying subscribers have we got?" and then a more advanced version that will be on: 

1. What is the growth rate and what is the acceleration rate? 
2. Are we speeding up?
3. Are we adding new customers faster than we were three months ago, 4 moths ago, 5 months ago?

That is an indication that our product, our market is doing the right thing.

We look at average revenue per subscriber - a sort of a top line number. If you take all those people who are grandfathers and payed $39 / $49 / $79 a month - I think the average price that people pay today, across all I remember, is around $90 / 95 but there are people who are paying higher prices as well.

Then we look at the distribution of those revenues: How many people are in each group? Are people more likely to state that they are paying more or less? Those kinds of figures.

We look at subscriptions' duration: How long on average a group, a certain number of members who join us in a particular month, are staying with the service? With this data, you get this idea of: "People who joined in January 2010 tend to drop off after nine or ten months, but people who joined after March 2010 or April 2010... Oh, that is when we had the new open settings for our service, that really kept people out of our service."

We look at cross-revenue margin and profit and, of course, the cost to acquire customers, which historically has been incredibly low, mostly because we do organic marketing.

From those figures, we need to track them really well.

We have weekly reporting that our operation staff does - we use a service called Good Charts, our intern sees this and then we make them available to everyone inside the company.

By getting everybody on board with the same numbers, everyone is thinking about: "What am I doing this week, today, this hour, right now that it is going to help these numbers get better?"

That means that every week we send out an email update with all these charts. We send out data about how the company is doing - we show the revenue run rate.

For example, the revenue run rate if we were to continue operating at this week precise revenue would be $6,5 million. You can get a sense of: "OK, I own 0.5% of the company and today the company would be worth xyz if we were to sell..." Anyone in the company can think about: "This is the value I am creating and I see that the company is more valuable than it was last week, last month, last year." That has a great impact on the culture inside the company of working on the right things.

Why Startup Culture and Mission Are Important

Duration: 1' 59"

Text Transcription

Virtually everyone in the startup world will talk to you about how important culture is. I have to say that I was not always a believer until we developed one at SEOMoz.

We have something that we call TAGFEE. It is an acronym. It means: Transparent Authentic Generous Fun Empathetic Exceptional - but what we do specifically is not nearly as important as the fact that we have one, and that is what I would suggest to all of you.

Even if you are a startup with two or three people, make sure that you have a culture of: "What is it that we are obsessed about? What is it that drives us beyond the revenue that the company is providing?"

If you look at Groupon, Facebook, Google, Twitter, Microsoft, any of these, they will have a mission statement, something they are trying to accomplish. Not, "We are trying to make 50 million dollars," or "We are trying to make 100 million dollars." It is more: "We want to solve this big pain in the ass problem."

For us, the big pain in the ass problem is: It is hard to promote yourself on the web, it is hard to be visible on the Internet and we do not think that should be the case. We think it should be easier - maybe not easy - but easier for everyone, for companies, non-profits, government organizations, individual bloggers, anyone to be able to send out their message across the web. SEO definitely helps with that, but so do all of the other parts of inbound marketing. That is the mission that drives us.

I think it makes us much more successful than just: "How do we make the most money today?" Because you will make a lot of decisions along the way of the business that you would not make if you did not have this.

You would say: "This will bring us an extra $500 in revenue today. This will bring us $5,000 more in revenue next month. Let's do it." as opposed to: "That does not fit with the mission."

 

How to Hire Good People

Duration: 1' 41"

Text Transcription

Some of the traits, the big traits, that we seek in the people we hire include that they are really excited about what they are doing.

We now have an interview loop that includes one person - most often me - whose job it is not to find out if the person is a good fit or to find out if they can do the work well...

I will talk to a software engineer; I will not ask him a single coding question, but I will ask him if is he excited about Internet marketing, if is he excited about making this stuff more accessible to people. That really predicts people who are going to do well on the team.

This is something I would urge you to build inside your company. This culture of: "These are the right traits for the people who work here. These are the people who work out and the people who do not."

It's a painful lesson learned.

I can promise you that there is nothing worse as an entrepreneur having to go fire somebody that you hired two or three months ago because you made a mistake. You will do this, because I did this despite hearing this a million times. You will hear yourself saying: "We need to give them more time. We need to train them up better. We need to see if they can maybe come around to these values."

If they do not have those values intact when they join the company, some of that just cannot be learned. There is going to be somewhere better for them anyway.

Like everyone else says, I would urge you to hire slow, be very picky about who you hire, and fire fast.

Get rid of the people who are not working, quickly.

How to Manage Big Challenges

Duration: 1' 39"

Text Transcription

When you have big challenges in startups, just put them into tiny bits - I think this is one of the biggest things that all of the entrepreneurs that are back from tackling really big problems would recommend. They will say like: In the SEO world, I would love to have my own web index that is like Google, but how the hell am I even going to get started? It is impossible! It is going to take so much time, money and resources... I do not even know what it would take to build that." That is definitely how we and every other company were in that space in 2007.

We divided it up into small, manageable challenges.

What was the first thing we had to do? We had to figure out if we can crawl things. We tried to crawl Wikipedia "Look at that: We built a  crawler and it can successfully crawl all the pages on Wikipedia and build an index of them."

"Can I calculate the PageRank? Let's just try to calculate the PageRank only on the Wikipedia index." "Yes, we can do that. Now let's try and scale that up." "Build a little bit bigger... try that again... how we hold all those pages and index... where we put them... what storage system is going to work... Amazon is... EC2 - which is where we do a lot of our hosting... is too expensive to crawl, so we will find another crawler..."

It sounds like an impossible challenge, and in fact it is just a bunch of little challenges that you can do.

Technology entrepreneurs can accomplish remarkable things, particularly when they are told that they can't - another big driver for me.

Marketing Tips for Startups 

Duration: 10' 43"

Text Transcription

On the marketing front, I also wanted to preset some of the cool stuff that we have learned and the cool stuff that we do and we have success building.

One of the biggest things that we have found is that - particularly in the transition from consulting to software - is that selling is incredibly painful.

Building a sales team is super challenging, sales people often do not mesh well with engineers, code folks and even many entrepreneurs. That culture I think is a dangerous thing that we have had to watch out for and essentially we have biased against it entirely.

We have zero people who do sales at SEOmoz.

I had a funny phone call the other day from MTV Network, which runs Comedy Central, MTV, VH1 - I think they have some media presence here in Italy as well - and they wanted to know: "Can you have an account manager call us up and walk us through SEOmoz?"

"We do not have any account managers"

"Maybe do you have a sales office in New York?"

"No, we do not have any sales people"

"How come are we going to find out what your software does?"

"...You can try it. You go online and you click, put your email and you can try it, right there..."

That process for us works really well. I wrote a blog post about this: "Do not sell, make people come to you" and how I did not do that when I tried to raise venture capital the second time.

In 2009 I did try to raise a second round of capital for SEOmoz despite the fact that we were profitable and failed at that spectacularly.

With SEOmoz we found that by educating people, by teaching them how to do SEO, how they could do all the kinds of things that I am talking about today, we could build up a great community.

This is what drives the tens of thousands of people who subscribe to the SEOmoz blog, who  follow us on Twitter, who participate with us on Facebook, who come to the site everyday... February was our first-ever million visit month. It has built up this massive community and certainly we do not have a million subscribers, but that community means that we do not have to sell.

People can come and if we can convince one other ten, one other twenty people that our software is interesting, they are going to buy.

Some forms of content that works for us to build all that educational stuff:

1. The blog - which we update every day.

   Updating a blog every day, particularly when there is only one of you writing - which for the first four years of SEOmoz has been me - is terrible. Geraldine would attest, it was 1am, we were back from some work event, had dinner or something and she would go like: "Come to bed" and I: "No I cannot, I need to write...". Every night.

   I have this personal feeling of guilt if I do not put something good on the blog, so I never felt good phoning it in, I needed to put a lot of effort in it which means tons of nights staying up till 3am...

   It is weird too, because after doing that for a year you think: "OK, now you’re successful". No, even after two, or three, or four you are not, but you keep going. But now the SEOmoz blog is really growing to something.

    
2. We do a lot of "viral" targeted content.

   We do essentially: "Hey, we wish there were one of these for our industry". I was talking to Robin outside about a company called Oyster which started out in New York that does hotel reviews.

   One of the things they always wished is that TripAdvisor and all those other review sites were not the only places to go for information, because they did not really like user reviews. What they wanted was a paid journalists who goes to stay there at the hotel, takes real photos and then really reviews the place.

   That is what they built. They call it Photo Fakeouts, where they show the hotels’ photos side by side with the ones from the real journalist. It is fascinating, it is great content.

3. We wrote that Beginner’s Guide to SEO that we talked about.
    
4. We do industry surveys.
    
5. I do a lot of graphic and illustrations. This is because of my background in Flash, but the things about that stuff that is great is that the people who pick this up, who put that in their presentations, their websites will link back to use and they will share the fact that these came from SEOmoz. The citation, that link passes SEO value, visitors, it means good branding for us, etc.

   If we are the source where everyone goes to essentially talk about SEO, this is a huge win for us.

    
6. We do a weekly video series... what is weird about that is that if you go to a normal blog post on SEOmoz, you look at our analytics, it is usually read by between 8000 and 12000 people. Sometimes many more, 20000 to 3000 people. 

   We have never had a video that has been watched by more than 12000 people, so you might think: "Would not you give up on that content format, since it does not get you as many views and visitors?"

   The fact is that the engagement on a video is phenomenal and the quality of branding, the number of people who know me or SEOmoz because they have read a blog post is smaller in comparison to the number of people who know us because they have seen the video.

   The only way you can feel that is to get out of the "building" and talk to people, go to conferences and events and forums where you can speak to people in person and then you can feel that impact that video has, it is really phenomenal.

   We recently switched our hosting provider to a company called Wistia, if you are doing online video, I think they are phenomenal. They do all the good SEO, the XML video sitemaps stuff for you, it is really good. And there is another really good one based here in Italy that is called ShinyStat.

    
7. We also do a lot of research and data sharing. 

   When we have questions that we wish we knew or we think the rest of the Internet world would like to know, we will spend money, time and resources doing that research and then sharing the result.

   This is sort of weird, it goes against a lot of long-term business practices, because if you spend money on research you should use that as a competitive advantage.

   Our competitive advantage is to share it and be the resource that everyone else uses to refer to that stuff.

   For example we compared how Bing and Google rankings are different - there are different elements that coordinates the ranking on those two engines - and share this publicly on the blog and we had a lot of feedback from people inside Google and Microsoft who commented about this.

   If anyone of you uses services like Compete.com, Quantcast or Alexa to try and figure out how many visits other sites have, competitive data, let me assure you that data is terrible. Absolutely horrible.

   We did a bunch of work on this and we are in the process of redoing this - the preliminary works still looked horrible - Alexa, Compete, Quantcast, Google Trends for Websites, whatever you want: Any of these competitive intelligence sources compared to the actual visitor data is just awful. Worst than a 0.5 correlation, which it would be the minimum acceptable in my view.

   If you are going on Compete and say: "This guy has more traffic than me," that is a random guess. It is not good, but by sharing this information we have lots of people who refer back to it whenever somebody sights Compete score or Quantcast scores or Alexa data and that is great for us, because its shows tat we are thanking about the industry and try to be a step ahead.
    

8. We do a lot of sites presentations. 

   The interesting thing about these is that I will speak to small audiences and then prepare a slideshow and if there are so many people in the room it sucks that only those people will get it, so I will put the presentation online and I will tell people that is online. Those people will tweet it, they will share it, email it to other people, it will get thousands of views on SlideShare.

   Since SlideShare and Scribd, and a few of these other ones, they often take any resource that becomes popular on their site and feature it on the homepage, this means that I will get 10000 people looking at a presentation that I made from a seed of just a few hundred.

   That is a really powerful driver, one of the big reasons that I am a big believer in creating new presentations. Virtually, every time I talk.

 

9. We also give webinars on our website.

   I would not say we have had a good success with them, but we have found them to be a great customer acquisition and customer retention channel for us. That said, the business I was talking about earlier, HubSpot, their primary customer acquisition channel is a webinar.

   They would essentially give a webinar on a topic like social media marketing or the science of tweets and retweets and they will have 5.000 to 10.000 people attend one of those webinars online around the country and then sign up for their services afterwards. They love it.

 

Successful Web Marketing Channels

Duration: 10' 13"

Text Transcription

Some of the channels where we do distribution include:

1. Forums: 8.583 visits - where we get a surprising amount of traffic.

   It is weird because a lot of web forums have this web 1.0 feel like: "That is so yesterday. Facebook, Twitter, Quora, whatever... that is the next generation."

   Forums are fantastic for us.

   If you go to Boardreader.com one of things that I will often do is search for either our name, our brand name, or our competitors brand names and I will find people, forum threads that are talking about those and I will go participate in that conversation, if it makes sense.

   If somebody says: "Yeah I was using SEOmoz, I was using open sites port and I got back this result and I do not understand it." I will leave a response and sometimes they are like: "Oh my God! Did you see the CEO of SEOmoz left their..." I am just a guy, no one should be impressed by that, but they are. They will tweet about it and they will write about it and that forum thread will get a bunch of views and it will be featured, so it is this great virtuous cycle.

   I pulled out most of the forum places that sent us traffic: 8,500 hundred visits set from 117 different forums - and I did this the total simple way. These are just sources that contain the word "forums", so you can tease the sound of your web analytics pretty easily.

2. Blogs: 9.278 visits. 

   We participate in a ton of blogs. We get written up in a lot of blogs and blogs do send us a good amount of traffic, but only slightly more than forums.

   I cheated again, this is probably a terrible metric, but you get the idea that I could go in and in fact I did go in and do a more sophisticated analysis of this and we do get a lot more traffic from blogs.

   The thing about blogs is that we do not just get traffic from the people who write about us in the post itself. We get a lot of traffic from the comments of blog posts.

   Someone for example like the Compete or the Alexa thing someone will say, "Did you see that Path is now more popular than Instagram - which are two photo sharing startups in Silicon Valley - and somebody will say, "Oh, that is BS." Then they will link over to our study showing that those figures are inaccurate and that will send a bunch of traffic to us and awareness.

   Participating in those comments can bring a lot of value for us as well.

    
3. Search obviously sends us a ton of traffic: 1.494.971 visitors.

   The weird thing about search engines, although it does send us a ton of traffic and we do a good job with SEO, we only get... I think it is about 36 percent of our traffic on SEOmoz from SEO, from search engines.

   The rest comes from all these other sources that we participate in. I wrote a blog post about this last night and you can see some comments in that blog post this morning that are angry, almost upset that we are not more SEO only, or that we think that there is this idea that you have to be diverse in your traffic sources.

   It is my belief that search engines want to reward people who get traffic from all these other places too. They do not want to just leave to people, just rank people who have done a really good job deeming their algorithm, they want people who are naturally popular and important and that is what all these other traffic sources help provide. 

4. Twitter: 109.620 visitors.

   Twitter has been a great tried and tale, in fact it is from us the number one traffic driver from social media, more than Facebook by almost 2x. I would be careful about that bias because we usually find it is the other way around with consumer focused companies and Twitter or LinkedIn will be the bigger one if you are business to business-focused startup.

   If you have a business to business product, Twitter and LinkedIn are likely really worth the investment and certainly if you are a consumer, no matter what you are, Facebook is where a good investment is as well. I will show you our Facebook traffic.

   Twitter was talking on TechCrunch on two days ago, how like the last three months they have gotten way more popular and how the earthquake in Japan shot up their popularity, the number of people who joined Twitter service - and our data reflects that.

   The amount of traffic that we have been getting from Twitter over the last few months has been spiking pretty much. It is interesting to see that.
    

5. Facebook: 79.305 visits.

   Our Facebook sends... also has been growing in traffic, but substantially less than Twitter and surprisingly and super weirdly the value of the traffic is substantially lower.

   My sense is that people who are on Facebook will leave it briefly and then they will come back versus Twitter where it is... I go to Twitter and find cool and interesting sites and information and then I will go to them and spend time on them. So, the Facebook traffic value is very temporal.

    
6. Email 

   Email marketing has been phenomenal perhaps. Some of the biggest gains that we have seen in memberships, some of the biggest promotions that we have had have come through email marketing.

   If you are a startup you need to get MailChimp, because the first 2,000 subscribers are absolutely free on the service and MailChimp is surprisingly affordable and has great deliverablility rates and fantastic analytics. I am just a huge fan of recommending them. I like their service a lot. They also have a great looking interface. I wish that.... I am little jealous, I love their interface. It is great.

7. LinkedIn
   

   LinkedIn has not been a place where we have invested a ton of effort and yet we still see a lot of value out of it.

   It drives probably about a little less than the traffic Facebook does, but it tends to be a much higher performing.

   One of the things you can do on LinkedIn is to claim your own company page.

   A lot of people who join Linked In for their own personal site but they do not claim their company page and join that. I urge you to do that, because those pages pass links too and you can share all the content that you put up there.

8. SlideShare - I mentioned that one - it has been a good source for us.
    
9. Scribd is the same story.
    
10. Docstoc
    
    
11. StumbleUpon weirdly sends pretty good traffic these days. 

    A few years ago they had 4,000,000 regular users and today they have got 14,000,000, so they are one of those quiet growth stories.

    There was a piece in Mashable about how StumbleUpon now sends more outbound traffic to other websites than Facebook does, despite having one fortieth of their users or something - 14.000.000 to 500.000.000, 600.000.000.

    StumbleUpon sends pretty decent traffic for us and it is really because we have interesting content in the site that people will stumble to.

12. Hacker News: 30.867 visits. 

    If you are in the entrepreneurship space, you have to read this site - it is a requirement. I think they do it before they will give you the startup stamp on your wrist.

    This is like where Silicon Valley happens - it really does.

    I probably visit three or four times a day no matter where I am, on my phone. It is obsessive, but it is a way to stay connected to what the Valley is doing even if you are not in the Valley.

    I would strongly recommend reading Hacker News everyday and getting linked to Hacker News can be a fantastic way to get in front of investors, other entrepreneurs, other people in startup fields, software engineers - I cannot understand the value of the people who come through here - and it is super spiky, because inside Hacker News you have to be voted up by other users of the site in order to get listed on there.

    SEOmoz every now and then have a big spike of a few thousand visits from Hacker News.

    It is weird, because the first time you get a spike of traffic it will not provide nearly as much value as the second or the third or the fourth time, because those people who have seen you before and so they are branded with you...

    I spoke at something at Los Angeles and a bunch of guys there were like: "Oh! SEOmoz, yeah I..." They don't care anything about SEO or Internet marketing, but they know us because they read Hacker News and so that is a great way to get on people's radar.

13. Quora: 2.151 visits.

    Quora it is another good one for that, because it is so Silicon Valley, tech world-centric and Quora's traffic has been going insane.

    I think we had a board meeting in January and Kelly and Michelle were like:"What did you do over the holidays, over Christmas, other than spend all your time on Quora?" Because that is essentially where everybody who is in technology was spending their time over December.

    I answered a few questions, like a hundred questions on Quora and we get good traffic from it.

    Basically I started answering questions and then... boom. We are getting serious traffic referring from Quora. I would urge you to invest there.

    No matter what you are doing, whether your startup is around, you can answer questions and be perceived as an authority among a lot of these early adopters and market leaders by participating in this site.

 

Conferences and Events 

Duration: 2' 26"

Text Transcription

I wrote a post called Why I Am a Conference Whore.

Mark Suster, who is a very well known venture capitalist blogger in Los Angeles. wrote a post called Be Careful not to Become a Conference Ho.

Essentially urging startups entrepreneurs not to go speak at lots of events. This was in sort of response to a lot startup founders who have been filling lately like "you have to get out of the building".

Do not just build your startup in-house, go talk to your customers, go engage with them, be out and about and participate, so you understand what people want, what they need and how they are using your product and what they like from your competitors.

I wrote a response to that and I did a little chart distribution. You can see my days at the office last year which are about 68%, my days on the road, speaking and in transit.

It seems like I am essentially more days on the road in transit than I am days on the road speaking. Last year I just used my Google Calendar to figure this out, but it is worth it.

The value you get from a one-to-one connection, from talking to other startups, other entrepreneurs and customers of yours in a personal way it just cannot be replicated over email or through a support forum, over the phone.

There is no way to build up a personal relationship that you get, or the value that you get from these in-person connections.

Let's use today. You are a startup guy and you come up to me after this session and you say: "Rand, I would liked your talk. I am planning a trip to Silicon Valley next month. Is there anyone you think I should be visiting with, I know this guy, this guy and this guy..."

If you emailed me, I might reply to that email, but probably I would not have time. If you come up to me after the session, I likely will.

I would probably make an introduction to four or five people for you, tell you where you should go, who you should meet with and what you should do while you are there. That kind of in-person connection is totally different than what happens on the Internet and it can be much more valuable. I would urge you to do that.

 

SEOmoz' Financial Data

Duration: 4' 34"

Text Transcription

All the stuff we have talked about from Hacker News and Quora, SlideShare, email, Facebook, Twitter and search... everyone of these things follows the same process. That process really can be distilled into four simple steps:

1. I find something new that I think is interesting. Some new place where I think there can value in participating and contributing.
    
2. I test it out. I go answer some questions on Quora.
    
3. I measure it through my analytics or through our conversion data.
    
4. Then I repeat the high ROI ones and throw out the low ones.

The same process is simple to apply to anywhere you go and participate on the web or any channel or any content that you want to try. It is why I am such a huge believer in inbound marketing.

Startups can spend tons of money on customer acquisition, on awareness, on brand building through advertising, through paid search, through brand advertising - back in the '90s through television ads, SuperBowl ads - and yet if you are willing to put in the work, like get down on your hands and knees and scrape for this traffic, you can get a lot more of it for free. It takes your time, it takes your energy, but it does not cost you money.

The last thing I am going to do before I go to Q&A is talk some traffic and financial data. This is our traffic from 2011 - for the last year - and it is a little up.

Most of what we have been doing is refining our on-site marketing process, so our traffic has not been going dramatically up, but here you can see the distribution:

1. Search sending about 35% or so (2.757.368 users).
2. Direct sending a ton (2.120.028 users)
3. Our feed for our blog: 80,000 subscribers clicking on links - that has been big for us (601.919 users). 
4. Social in a big and growing chunk (451.176 users) 
5. Unmeasured stuff (1.328.762 users)

What I want to point out is our paid traffic (11.859 users). It is pathetic! It is tiny. You know what the great part about that is? It does not cost very much money to get.

The million the visits that we got in February, or the hopefully 1.1 million that we will get in January. That is kind of what I wanted to share and this is our revenue over the past four years and an estimate of this year's revenue:

1. 2007: Less than $1 million 
2. 2008: $600.000
3. 2009: $1.2 million
4. 2010: $5.7 million
5. 2011: A little bit over $11 million - although it is possible there might be less

We definitely didn't start strong, but we have come to kind of an exciting place.

The reason I love sharing this story is because I wish so much that I had been able to do this. That I had been able to learn and talk to somebody who' would been through this before when I was starting out.

It is a painful process.

You feel lonely and alone even if there is people around you. As an entrepreneur, particularly as the CEO or the person who is responsible, you feel alone in this process - and yet you are not. There are hundreds of us, thousands of us, doing this all over the world.

I know CEOs and entrepreneurs in northeast Canada, north of Québec. I know entrepreneurs in London, in parts of China, in Australia. There is a huge startup scene that is booming in Sao Paulo, in Buenos Aires, here in Rome.

There are people and they would love to help you. If you have questions, I would certainly love to help answer them, around any topic. Around SEO, marketing stuff, entrepreneur stuff, VC kinds of things. I am happy to help out.

Video clips originally recorded by Robin Good for MasterNewMedia. First published on April 8th, 2011 as "Entrepreneurship: The Full Story Of SEOmoz Told By Rand Fishkin".

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Posted by Paddy_Moogan

A question that I get asked quite a bit is something along the lines of "what link building tools do you use?". The honest truth is that I don't use that many on client sites every day. I've certainly paid for and used quite a few over the last few years, but when I first started in SEO, I didn't have the cash to buy tools or subscribe to them. This forced me to do things manually for quite a long time, but it helped me learn how link building really works from the ground up.

I'm still a bit of an old school SEO in some senses. I still believe that anyone learning SEO should not be allowed to use tools straight away and should learn manual processes first. Here are a few things I believe every SEO should do before being allowed anywhere near tools -

• Build a website using only Notepad and an FTP program
• Manually submit your website to paid and free directories
• Write an article which targets a specific keyword
• Write a press release in four paragraphs
• Hand write META data for an entire site based on a keyword list

I could go on...!  But I'm sure you get the idea.

The point is, I believe that its vital to know the manual process so that you learn how these things really work.

In the interests of giving away some actionable tips, I'm going to focus on the link building process and explain how I believe an SEO should start the learning process.

The Tools You can Use

1. An email program
2. A spreadsheet
3. Google

See - I'm not totally mean, you can use some tools!

Below is the step by step process for getting links using only the three tools above. If you follow this process and learn to link build manually, it will help you much more in the long term and force you not to be reliant upon SEO tools. Whilst SEO tools can help you a lot, when it comes to link building, they should only assist your efforts - not do the link building for you.

1. Use Google to Find your Link Targets

I'm not going to talk too much about this, but the key thing here is to learn how to search. Sounds simple, but its something which is often taken for granted. You should start with the basics which I talk about in this post. The key thing here is to start with basic search queries, then learn how to refine those queries to save time and weed out results which you are not interested in. You can do this using some advanced search queries. However before you go off and use those outlined in the SEOmoz guide, try to come up with your own which are tailored to the site you are trying to get links for. 

After working on this for a while, you should feel pretty comfortable with finding link targets manually and quickly filtering out the ones that you are not interested in. All by using your own advanced search queries - don't use any tools for this!  Trust me, it will help you in the long run.

2. Before ANYTHING find contact details and record in your spreadsheet

Find contact details!  So many people spend ages figuring out if the site is a good one and looking for a page where they may get a link from. Then can’t find contact details!  Which means you’re a bit screwed – find contact details first.

At this point you will probably have had a quick look through the site and will have a feeling whether or not this site is relevant to you. If you feel it is, then add it to your spreadsheet. Do NOT use any tools to record these sites yet, there are tools out there that allow you to manage link targets in a CRM type system. However you need to learn manually what data you should be capturing about each link target. Some CRM tools allow you to capture tons of data, but do you really need it all?  Maybe, maybe not. But the key is to decide for yourself what data you need in order to contact the website about getting a link.

Once you have decided what data you want to capture, put it into your spreadsheet and make it easily sortable in columns.

3. Email the link target straight away

It seems to be the norm to collect link targets into a big spreadsheet, then email them all in one go. Sure this can work, but this isn’t the best way to develop link building skills. I’d advise you to send the outreach email straight away whilst the site is fresh in your mind. This also means you have to write an email that isn’t templated and is totally personal to them – this is fine. This will help you develop a sense of how to personalise emails to give yourself as much chance as possible of getting a link.

It is very important to learn how to craft an outreach email from scratch. At this point, do not write a template. It isn't the best way to learn. Make each and every email personal to the link target, this will teach you the value of personalising an email and exactly how you can do so.

4. Track your progress in a spreadsheet

As mentioned above, forget any fancy CRM or tracking systems, you’re still learning the ropes. Do it the basic way and use a spreadsheet. This will teach you to keep things simple and to only collect the data which is truly valuable, it will force you not to collect tons of metrics and details that you don’t really need.

As you email each target, put a note in the spreadsheet so you know whats going on and can sort by who you have already contacted.

5. The response or follow up

If you haven’t had a response after a few days, send a short, friendly follow up to them. If you still don’t get a reply, I’d leave them be. If you have a response, obviously make sure you respond promptly!  If the response you get isn’t positive, still reply to them in a friendly way. Perhaps ask them if its ok to contact them in the future if there is other stuff you have which may be of interest to them.

Keep track of the responses in your spreadsheet. You can mark each response with traffic lights to make it easy to see at a glance what the responses have been like -

• Green - good response, probably going to get a link
• Amber - warm response, will need some more work
• Red - no way am I getting a link!

6. Record links secured

Make a note of the links that you have secured in your spreadsheet. Think about what metrics you should record about each one. Do you need the following?

• URL
• Anchor text
• Page being linked to
• Cache date
• Domain Authority
• PageRank

I'm not saying you need all of these, you should decide for yourself what is important and how you are going to measure the value of a link.

Whats next?

Well once you have mastered the process manually, you'll find that there are many tools that can speed up certain parts of this process. Using these tools is fine, but be aware that I'm yet to come across the perfect link building tool that does all of this to a high level of quality without human intervention. So knowing where you can automate and where you can't, is vitally important.

Doing this process manually will also help you choose your link building tools better as you'll know what attributes really matter to the whole process.

That's it for this post, I hope you found it useful and please feel free to leave any feedback in the comments.

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Posted by Laura Lippay

Music selection to enjoy with this post: The Unforgiven (Metallica)

In October of 2007 I was standing in front of a full house at the Yahoo Sunnyvale headquarters. I was on a mission to try to explain, with very little actual evidence, that SEO is more than just site “optimization”. I could see what was coming down the pipeline loud and clear. SEO isn’t SEO anymore, it’s different. SEO (especially for enterprise-level sites) equals a damn good product.

Here’s a slide from the presentation:

See the point here? It’s the epic frenemy battle of SEOs vs. Search Engines that whittles the SEO techniques down to what eminently points to no other option but to have a great product. What is a great product? It’s a site that people want to go to, return to, share with their networks, email their friends, etc., (aka building natural links and “buzz”). Get it? Great content and natural links and buzz = the new SEO.  But it’s not actually new, it just hasn’t always been adopted very well. 

Until now. Remember what it’s like when an algorithm shift changes the rules of SEO? Of course you do.

Since this timeline I threw out there in 2007, not a lot has changed on the “spammy methods” side of things (and doesn’t that just tickle the “SEO is dead” funny bone). But wait, do you know what popular widely-preached tactics since 2007 are missing since this chart?  C’mon, think Panda/Farmer update. In the current days of black-hats-gone-grey, what’s the spam tactic to be battled at this point?

If you’ve ever bothered to follow the Google Webmaster Guidelines or anything that Matt Cutts has ever said anytime in the last x years, you’ll see that you, my build-content-for-search-engines friends (I still love you, you tried), have had warnings sitting out there as clear as day. Might I show you a select few?

And I quote: “Great content has to be the foundation of any good site, because mediocre content tends not to attract exceptional links by itself. And if you’re trying to get exceptional links on really really crappy content, you’re going to be pushing uphill.”  “You want to have a well-rounded site, and one of the best ways to do that is to have fantastic, interesting, useful content, great resources, great information, and then that naturally attracts the links.  And then search engines want to reflect the fact that the web thinks that you are interesting or important or helpful.”

But I build exactly what people are looking for in search, how can that be bad?

There’s a difference between building content to attract your audiences and building content to attract search engines. But, your audiences are doing the searches in the search engines, right? So what is the difference? Someone asked me recently why ‘content-rich’ Suite101.com was on the Farmer update loser list. Here’s exactly what I sent back to him in an email:

1. Its obviously created for *search traffic*, meaning the company goal isn’t to invest everything into creating something rich and meaningful for their audiences, but instead the primary goal is to create content for search traffic, THEN maybe throw a little investment into the rest of the site experience.  That's a Google no-no.
2. When there's "shallow content", the site likely isn’t the best resource for anyone researching something through search. Do you want your search results for how to cope with your depression to be this article plastered with ads from Shauntee Jackson (mother of two rambunctious toddlers in Ft. Worth, TX) who even says in the article "I'm no expert in depression" or would you rather have a site that not only has experts dedicated to helping you learn about and cope with your depression issues, but also provides hotlines, medical information, community support and resources, maybe even tools for diagnosis or self-treatment options.

Get what I mean?  Suite101, like every client that says their number one company goal is to get search traffic, is doing it wrong.  Their number one goal needs to be providing value to audiences.  Which in turn provides valuable content for search results. And on top of that, it provides a cleaner, less spammy and more useful web overall. Leave it to Google.

Learn from past mistakes

You’ve heard about the “quality content” mantra, right? If you’ve been in SEO for ten minutes you’re preaching it. So where did we all go so wrong? How can an entire innovative, on-the-ball SEO industry have let this go right over our heads? How can the warnings of the Do No Evil Silicon Valley giant have been so blatantly ignored as if nothing would ever come of them?

If you sit back and think about it (and if you’re old enough), you might get an eerie sense of those dotcom bubble burst days when millions of investor dollars were thrown into internet companies with no staff, no experience, no plan, and only existed as an overblown trend-following idea on paper. Some people had some new ideas and made some money online and all of a sudden everyone’s building online businesses, with dreams of (being) sugardaddies dancing in their heads, forgetting a very basic, fundamental core of a good long-term business model – providing actual value to their audiences. Shallow much?

The 2011 spin on quality content

This is the deal. We know that search engines want to provide sites that people (aka audiences) find valuable. We know that they use signals like social mentions and influence, and clickthroughs from search, and potentially dozens of other buzz-measuring indicators that go into determining if a site is something that people are really into or just some shallow content hanging around the web trying to feign legitimacy like Snooki at a Mensa convention. How to be one of those sites that people are into, that seeps of naturally linkable, sharable, emailable, tell all your friends, come hither, and come hither again content is fodder for another article. But as you create any content online ask yourself this question: “Self? How will this be more valuable to my audiences than what my competitors are doing?”  If you are lucky enough to not have any competitors, then just take that part off the sentence.

But I don’t have to tell you that, because if you’re listening…

…Google already told you so.

Stay tuned for my next post on how this update doesn't just change an algorithm, it changes the web.

xo, Laura

Technorati Tagsgoogle, seo, search engine optimization, panda update, farmer update, trends

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Posted by Geoff Kenyon

When Google made their “page speed is now a ranking factor” announcement, it wasn’t a significant new ranking factor, but it is significant because it means Google wants to use usability metrics to help rank pages. Your site speed should be a priority as slow sites decrease customer satisfaction and research has shown that an improvement in site speed can increase conversions.

To better understand how fast the web is (as of February 2011), I collected site speed data from approximately 100 different sites. This data allowed me to create a very close approximation of the equation that Google currently uses to report (in Webmaster Tools) how fast sites are relative to each other:

y = 122.32e-0.31x   In this equation, x is the time it takes your page to load (in seconds) and the result, y is approximately the percent of pages that your page is faster than. If you grab your load time from Google Webmaster Tools, you can use this equation to gauge how fast you are compared to the rest of the web. If you don’t want to bust out your calculator, grab this spreadsheet and use the calculator I set up.This equation is charted in the graph below.

The x axis in this graph shows the page load time (in seconds) and the y axis represents the per cent of sites that the corresponding time is faster than. So if a page loads in 4.3 seconds, it is faster than 31% of other pages on the web.

This data set allowed me to view the following data points: 

• If your site loads in 5 seconds it is faster than approximately 25% of the web
• If your site loads in 2.9 seconds it is faster than approximately 50% of the web
• If your site loads in 1.7 seconds it is faster than approximately 75% of the web
• If your site loads in 0.8 seconds it is faster than approximately 94% of the web

So now that you can test how you stack up to the rest of the web, the next question becomes how do you compare to your competitors. You can check this pretty easily a couple different ways. Web Page Test is a good web interface you can use to check page speed and Show Slow has automated tracking tools that let you continually monitor pages. I really like using Web Page Test as you can set the location to San Jose (fairly close to Mountain View).  How Important is Site Speed? My interpretation of what Google has said At this point, the question becomes how important is load time. While increasing your site speed is really important and should be done for the user’s experience, it can also improve your conversion rate, this section will only look at how page speed affects SEO.   If we look at Google’s official blog post announcing site speed as a factor, we read:   “While site speed is a new signal, it doesn't carry as much weight as the relevance of a page. Currently, fewer than 1% of search queries are affected by the site speed signal”   I think this means that site speed will affect only queries where other ranking signals are very close or when the load time is exceptionally poor. If competing pages have high relevancy scores and close link metrics (which isn’t probable), page speed may come into play. Additionally, I believe that site speed could negatively hurt you if your page takes an excruciatingly painful amount of time to load.   Matt Cutts was nice enough to blog about this topic when he was on vacation and added onto the above statement with: “That means that even fewer search results are affected, since the average search query is returning 10 or so search results on each page.”   Basically, this isn’t going to shake up the top ten; when it is seen, it will probably be seen in keywords ranking much lower than the top ten.  My Unscientific Experiment I decided to do a bit of unscientific research, I took a few of the most popular search terms for 2010 (iPad, chatroulette, free, Justin Bieber) as well as two keywords that get a lot of link love (here, home) and collected the load time for the top 20 results of each keyword. The data ranged from 1.062 to 58.881 seconds.   As you can see in the above chart, there are some REALLY slow sites ranking in the top 20. I wanted to see if these sites just happened to be running slow at the time or if a second measurement would show that the slow sites are really faster. A week after I took the original measurements, I re-timed any page with a time over 15 seconds (which totaled 18 pages). While some sites showed significant variance the majority did not change that much. The average change was an improvement of 1.72 seconds, or 4%. The average site speed for the 120 different results was 9.58 seconds while the standard deviation for this data set was 9.86 seconds.   According to the normalized distribution (as well as simply looking at the data), you are categorically slow if your page takes more than 19.44 seconds to load as only 15.86% of sites in the top 20 results from this sample were slower than this. Using the site speed equation described earlier, if your site takes 19.45 seconds to load, you are only faster than 0.3% of the web.  How to Improve Your Site Speed If you want to improve your SEO, I would suggest building a link instead of focusing on speed (unless your site is currently extremely slow). That said, speed is a metric you should be trying to improve in order to improve the overall user experience. To decrease your load time, there are a few best practices you should follow:

• Minimize HTTP Requests - Your pages will load faster if they have to wait for fewer HTTP requests. This means reducing the number of items that need to be loaded, such as scripts, style sheets, and images.
• Combine all of your CSS into an external file and link to it from the <head> section each page instead of loading it in the HTML of a page. This allows the external page to be cached so that it loads faster. JavaScript should be handled in a similar fashion as CSS.
• Use CSS sprites whenever possible - This combines images used in the background into one image and reduces the number of HTTP requests made.
• Make sure your images are optimized for the web - If you have Photoshop, this can be done by simply clicking “save for web” instead of “save”. By optimizing the formats of the images you are essentially formatting the images in a smarter way so that you end up with a smaller file size. Smashing Magazine has a nice article on optimizing png images.
• Use server side caching - This creates a html page for a URL so that dynamic sites don't have to build a page each time that URL is requested.
• Use Gzip - Gzip will significantly compress the size of the page sent to the browser which then uncompresses the information and displays it for the user. Many sites who use Gzip are able to reduce the file size by upwards of 70%. You can see if sites are using Gzip and how much the page has been compressed by using GID Zip Test.
• Use a Content Delivery Network - Using a CDN allow your users to download information in parallel, helping your site to load faster. CDNs are becoming increasingly affordable with services like Amazon CloudFront.
• Reduce 301 Redirects - Don’t use 301 redirects if possible; definitely don’t stack 301’s on top of each other. 301 redirects force the browser to a new URL and require the browser to wait for the HTTP request to come back.

If you want to do further research on improving your site speed, Google has a good list of helpful articles for optimizing your page speed here that are much more in-depth than the above suggestions. To get suggestions specific to your website, tools like YSLOW and the HTML suggestions in Google Webmaster Tools are great resources.

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Posted by Aaron Wheeler

 A little over a couple weeks ago, Search Engine Land broke the story that Bing uses clickstream data from Google searches as a ranking factor in its results. The article was entitled, "Google: Bing Is Cheating, Copying Our Search Results," and as you can imagine, there was a lot of response from the SEO community. After the flames cooled down and the information in the article was discussed further, SELand wrote up a counter piece, "Bing: Why Google’s Wrong In Its Accusations," entailing a walk-through of what exactly Bing was doing and why it's not "copying" per se but instead mere consideration of a valuable search signal.

This week on Whiteboard Friday, Rand talks to the Director of Bing, Stefan Weitz, and discusses some of the implications of using clickstream data in Bing's search algorithm. As Stefan discusses, Bing is trying to take a more holistic approach to search results calculation and delivery to ensure searchers get the information most relevant to them, which means using a variety of data sources and experimenting with innovative ways to display results to users. He also gives us some insight into the future of Bing Webmaster Tools. There's also a ridiculous map of Manhattan with some fun-looking satellites pointing at it - check it out below!

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Video Transcription Rand:    Howdy, SEOmoz fans. Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we have a very special guest with us, Stefan Weitz, director of Bing.

Stefan:    How are you doing?

Rand:    Stefan, thank you so much for joining us.

Stefan:    Sure.

Rand:    Really appreciate it.

Stefan:    It's on the way home. It's actually better for me this way.

Rand:    So, Stefan has two great distinctions. Number one, you were recently honored best hair at Bing. Is that right?

Stefan:    That was actually true and it was by mistake. One day I woke up and I had long hair and then I was afraid of getting scissors near my head and so I won't cut it now.

Rand:    That's phenomenal. And second, you are tasked with dealing with messy cleanup from incorrect PR that happens on the Internet and in major media sources.

Stefan:    Sometimes PR that I actually create. It's like job security over and over again.

Rand:    That's great. Well, let's see if we can't create some job security for you here today on Whiteboard Friday.

Stefan:    I'm sure we can.

Rand:    So we are going to get into some of the clickstream topics, but the first thing I actually wanted to chat about is something that you and I were talking about before this session. I think it will be of big interest to a lot of webmasters. So Bing obviously is gaining some nice market share, having a significant impact. Clearly Google is thinking you guys are more and more of a threat, which has got to feel a little flattering. It's got to be a nice feeling.

Stefan:    Well, I mean certainly it's good to know that. I mean, no one's really gained share against Google since Google launched. And look, they do a phenomenal job and they have for years and they've served us well for over a decade. So, yeah, it's nice to see us actually, between us and our Yahoo-powered search or the search that we power for Yahoo as well, I mean, you're talking between 26 and 30 percent of queries are now served by a Bing engine, which is great. The engineers love to see their work being used. There's nothing worse as engineers, as we all know, than writing something that never gets used.

Rand:    Oh boy. I can tell you some frustrations we've had on that front. Now, in terms of Bing and Google, one of the things that is really interesting is this New York Times story that came out this past weekend around JCPenney. So a search consultant was using Open Site Explorer, digging through the backlinks . . .

Stefan:    Nice plug.

Rand:    Yeah, it was a nice plug. Oh yeah, I have to plug SEOmoz on Whiteboard Friday. That's very important.

Stefan:    Okay. Make sure we're clear on that.

Rand:    So they're digging through these backlinks and they're finding a lot of what look like manipulative and paid links that apparently an agency that JCPenney had hired to do some search marketing work for them had purchased to help inflate their ranks. And for a year plus, or nine months plus, they'd been ranking number one, number two, number three at Google and fairly well, reasonably well on Bing, for most of this time for a lot of big searches. So one of the big ones we talked about was "dresses" and "bedding" and these kinds of generic terms. So the New York Times writes this article. That afternoon, Google sort of responds and says, "Hey, we're taking some punitive action against them." In the article they talked about this.

Stefan:    A penalty basically, yeah.

Rand:    Now, we did a search right before this Whiteboard started, and we searched for "JCPenney dresses."

Stefan:    That's right.

Rand:    And JCPenney is not in the top three results.

Stefan:    That's where it got weird for me, actually. I mean, look, I get . . . there are certainly, it's well within Google's rights to say, hey, we want to manually penalize a domain for any number of reasons. That happens. We generally don't like to use a lot of manual re-ranking. We like to try it algorithmically if we can because that just seems like it's actually a more scalable fashion. But you're right. What's happening here, I think, is they've kind of gone a little too far down the path of penalization. Because literally as we looked at, "JCPenney dresses," probably the best P1 result would be JCPenney's dress site, I would think. Right?

Rand:    Right.

Stefan:    And now it doesn't appear anywhere on that P1, page 1.

Rand:    And in fact, I think the fourth result is like their mobile page, which is sort of a weird result to have in the web search.

Stefan:    Yeah.

Rand:    And this is happening because of this penalization system. One of the things that is really curious, I think, for a lot of webmasters, how are Bing and Google ever going to beat this problem on a macro scale?

Stefan:    That's an excellent question. So, there's a couple ways. There is the kind of short-term thing we're looking at from the ranker itself. Like, are there particular classes of link farms that we know are of low quality? Can we kind of apply some kind of discount to links that are coming in from what appear to be low-quality link farms? There's stuff we can do there, which we'll do too. We'll all look at these methods to figure out . . .

Rand:    There's a lot of machine learning that goes into that process, to say like here's a big set of what we think are spam links.

Stefan:    Yes.

Rand:    So as a webmaster, you better not look like spam, either the spam that exists today or the spam that's going to exist tomorrow because a classifier is going to catch that.

Stefan:    That's right. And this is a machine, right? And so you could get ostensibly swept up into one of these categories, right? We actually had someone mail us, a couple weeks ago, who had a site that actually looked like it may have been a spam site. It actually wasn't, but it had a lot of characteristics of what we consider them to be and so she was getting a penalty it looked like on her site. And so we said, "Okay, we can't tell you exactly what to fix, obviously, but here's some things you ought to look at." So there are some things that are happening there.

But, I think, if we go a little bit further, there are two things. We, Google, everyone, Yahoo, Bing, we all use human judges to kind of measure relevancy.

Rand:    Right. Google has this big worldwide distributed team of search quality raters, and you guys have a team as well.

Stefan:    Same thing. HRS, yeah, same thing, and so human raters actually look at this. The challenge we have, we were looking over the weekend, all the engineers, we were all in threads over the weekend looking at this problem and we said, gosh, you know the problem is for bedding, the JCPenney result wasn't bad to a human. Maybe it shouldn't have been P1, but P4? I don't know. Actually if you ask a human to say, "Is this a good result?" They go, "Yeah, it's actually pretty good."

Rand:    So this is why you're not going to get spam quality raters who are saying, oh, JCPenney ranks first for bedding, complain and spam report.

Stefan:    Exactly.

Rand:    No. JCPenney seems perfectly reasonable.

Stefan:    That's right. And so if we took it all the way out, we actually realize that you likely would decrease any CG or the kind of cumulative gain that we get as we measure relevance. So if you yank it out, you actually then, people go, "Wait, where did JCPenney go? They sell bedding." And so it's one of those weird things actually to try to correct for when you have a situation like this.

But in the longer term, this really points to the bigger challenge with search, which is stopping thinking of search as just a way to navigate the collection of links across the Web. Essentially, we've been doing the same kind of search now for over a decade, right? It's basically anchor text and page rank and inbound links, and that's how we've kind of decided what page is best for a particular term.

Rand:    And you think that this model of anchor text, page rank, or in Bing's case static rank and diversity of incoming domains, that's going to fade out to something else? Or it's going to be bolstered by other things?

Stefan:    Yeah. I think that'll be around for a long time. So don't worry. You don't have to like go and sell off. Don't call up Rand and say, "I want out." That's all fine. I don't know. I always think of you as . . .

Rand:    That I sell links? Really?

Stefan:    No. You know orange is Bing's color. That's why I took the color.

But there are signals beyond this. That'll be for a long time. But what we're looking at, and the example I was using today with some engineers was, you do a query – not to pimp Bing here – but if you do a query for, say, shoes on Bing, we actually . . . the first answer now, we actually fire off what's called a visual search gallery, which basically is a way to navigate 3,000 pairs of shoes using a more familiar visual metaphor. So you can say, "Okay, I actually want high heels. I want patent leather. I want black."

It's kind of like applying metadata to your query, and it actually rejiggers the results in real time based on what it is you're trying to do. Because in many cases, people do come to engines and they put in one word, they put in two words, very ambiguous. "Shoes" is a horrible query, right? But we get a lot of that. So the question really is do we just take "shoes" and just try to throw back everything we can against that word, which of course is going to be fraught with problems.

Rand:    Right. Shoes.com. Online shoes. Shoe store.

Stefan:    Yeah, exactly. Is that the right thing? Really, is something that ambiguous actually calling out for a more reasonable approach where we say, "What do you mean?" Kind of like if you and I were talking and I would say, "Shoes." And you go, "What? What, like dress shoes? What are you asking? Do you want to buy shoes?" So we have conversations. And today, engines, they kind of fail. They're very autonomic. They're kind of an in and out type transaction. And we think, with things like Visual Search, we're able to actually start to say, "Okay, great. What do you really mean with that query," and try to pivot and help people refine.

Rand:    So Google's got kind of on the left side those related searches or search suggestions. You guys have search suggestions.

Stefan:    I think the left and the top. On the top. We actually do an answer bar at the top. Those are interesting ways of conversation modes, but we're even looking at ways to go a little further than that without getting into Clippy, which I love Clippy, but not everyone loves Clippy. So something like that without being annoying.

Rand:    I always worry that people are going to think Roger, our mozBot, is Clippy-like.

Stefan:    Oh, you know what? Can we borrow him for our . . .

Rand:    You totally can. We have a current asking price. I'll let you know after this Whiteboard Friday.

Stefan:    So there's that. Longer term, we're looking at how we think of the Web really as a representation of the physical world itself. So we understand that, the weird example I was giving you earlier, "Inception" is a movie. You and I understand that "Inception" is a movie. We understand "Inception" as a movie has a certain number of characteristics. Movies have reviews. They have show times. They have previews. They have trailers. They have pictures. They have conversations on Twitter.

Rand:    So are you saying, from a marketer's standpoint, let me imagine that this is the knowledge that I've got about "Inception." It's a movie. Do I then want to say, "Oh, I should make sure that a page about 'Inception' of mine has things like information about who is acting in it and maybe a video of the preview or the trailer and reviews and data like that and that it's in the movie realm rather than just being the page on the Internet with the most inbound links that say 'Inception.'"

Stefan:    Yeah, because honestly, what's going to happen is . . . we just did this, actually, with our last release. We have become much smarter about these objects on the Web. So we do actually know "Inception," and that's a weird example. Think of like, "Casablanca," which actually has multiple editions that have been re-released over the years and there are different release dates.

Rand:    And there's an actual city.

Stefan:    Exactly, right that too. But now we can begin to say, okay, this "Casablanca" on Netflix is the same "Casablanca" you can buy on Amazon or you can rent on iTunes. That's actually a lot harder than you think because the movie domain is not as clear.

Rand:    So this is like an entity association type of algorithm.

Stefan:    Yeah, exactly. And so that's what we're going to see more and more search heading towards, we believe, is that us understanding the Web again literally as a representation of the world and not just a bunch of links and pages and static text. That offers up an entirely new way to think about ranking.

Rand:    I guess that would be my last question on this before we move on to the clickstream stuff is, as a marketer, what should I be thinking about to be a step ahead as this is coming forward? It sounds like there's naturally going to be some brands who are doing these types of things already. I'm a small website. I'm starting out. I review movies. I want to make sure that Bing and Google know that my stuff is good. What should I be thinking about?

Stefan:    Today, all the classification is done in a very machine learned process. Ideally, there are defined microformats you have for a lot of these things. I can see a lot of that coming down the road. Even like Facebook's Open Graph system has a limited amount of RDF.

Rand:    Right. I can say, "This is me. Rel=me."

Stefan:    Or you can say something like, I forget the actual phrasing, but basically you can say, "This page is about a movie," for example. I would be watching very carefully what standards or even what proposed standards begin to evolve to help describe things that you're working on in a more concrete manner. So if you are selling, let's say your business is selling sheet music of 1930s swing songs, as an example. There will be a time in the not too distant future, in most people's opinion actually, not just mine anymore, where you're able to actually mark up this piece of sheet music that I'm selling. There will be kind of an ontology or some kind of taxonomy which lets the marketers say, this is from, I can't think of composers from the 30s, but some composer – composer=foo, decade=foo, year=foo – and actually begin to describe this thing, this object as an object and not as simply a web page, hoping that we crawl and parse it correctly. Because, frankly, crawling and parsing is a very messy, expensive, and inaccurate science.

That's the brave new world. But again, for now, just keep doing great SEO work, but don't buy links.

Rand:    Don't buy links. Let's move into another really interesting story around this clickstream stuff. So a couple weeks ago . . . no, I'm sorry. I guess it was about a month and a half ago. So Google built a little honeypot, right? Essentially they say, we think that . . . well, because Google and Bing are both using these signals of clickstream data, Google says we think we can engineer this clever system to catch Bing by using a nonsense word.

Stefan:    Yes.

Rand:    And essentially what they caught you guys doing is not building a system that was robust enough to recognize, oh, when we have very few signals about some random nonsense word, maybe we should be tossing those out because otherwise we could be manipulated in a way that would make us look bad.

Stefan:    Right. Yeah, let's do it.

Rand:    So let's go with an analogy here. This is a terrible representation of the island of Manhattan, right?

Stefan:    Wow.

Rand:    So here's maybe here's Central Park. Does that sound . . .

Stefan:    That's better. Now I . . .

Rand:    Now you're there. Washington Heights right here.

Stefan:    My mom grew up in Harlem right over there.

Rand:    My sister lived right here for a while. This is kind of fun.

Stefan:    Yeah.

Rand:    So, navigating the island of Manhattan are tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of vehicles.

Stefan:    Yes.

Rand:    Maybe even a million vehicles. I'm not exactly sure. There's like 11 million people in the city. So if I get a Bing navigation system, Bing is going to tell me based on traffic patterns and the weather and the time of day which way I should go in New York City. Hang with me, this analogy works.

Stefan:    It does work, I think.

Rand:    So Bing has this nice satellite that's orbiting up here.

Stefan:    This is hypothetical, by the way. There is no Bing satellite watching traffic.

Rand:    Right. This is a pure analogy.

Stefan:    Everyone is going to be freaking out.

Rand:    So there's a satellite that's sort of watching and saying, "Oh here, look at traffic patterns." And Google's got their nice satellite.

Stefan:    Yeah. They actually do have one though, watching everything you do.

Rand:    That's good to know.

Stefan:    I'm sorry. Was that out loud?

Rand:    Oh boy, you're going to get into big trouble.

Stefan:    There goes that sponsorship.

Rand:    So they're both watching all the traffic patterns and what they see is, oh, you know what? The best traffic pattern at 4:00 p.m. on a Tuesday for a midsize car is to go down the West Side. The East Side is just a mess. Park Avenue, nobody wants to be there, but the West Side, that looks quite good. So they're directing cars this way.

Now, what Google did in this instance, taking this analogy to search is essentially say, "Oh, you know what? It's 2:00 a.m. on Christmas Eve. There's virtually nobody on the road and we're actually going to grab . . . you know what? We're going to make this weird, new three-wheeled blue vehicle that no one has ever seen before and we're going to send them this weird circuitous route. In fact, they're going to have to cross over Central Park and around there." Oh my gosh, just to get down to Wall Street.

And so Bing is monitoring this and they see, all right, well there's one blue car traveling on Christmas Eve at 2:00 a.m. This is the route it takes. And then next Christmas Eve, when a blue car shows up, some Google engineer goes home and gets into his blue car and checks, "Oh look, that's the route that Bing is sending me. They must be . . ." What do they call it?

Stefan:    Copying.

Rand:    Right, cheating off my test.

Stefan:    Yes, copying, cheating.

Rand:    It doesn't seem like an entirely accurate analogy, but it's pretty good. Well, the cheating off the test results seems . . . it seems like the kind of way that things are going. So Google and Bing are both looking at where people are going on the Web, what they're clicking on, when they search for something, what do they get to next, what do they seem to be happy with, did they refine those search queries and do other types of searches, can we learn based on that behavior? Seems like a very smart way to go. And you saw, there was an ex-Google engineer who went on Quora and said, "Oh yeah, when I worked at Google, we did exactly the same thing."

Stefan:    Oh, yeah. That's kind of what I was so perplexed about is that it's not . . . (a) we've said we've been doing this for years. We've actually, since '07, been doing clickstream analysis. It's an opt-in thing. Again, it's anonymous. People opt-in to it.

Rand:    And the Google engineers who checked this, they went home and they installed Internet Explorer with the toolbar and opted in.

Stefan:    And opted in, correct.

Rand:    So that they would show you guys this data.

Stefan:    Exactly. And so what? We made no secret of this at all. This is actually, we think, a very valuable signal to have. Now, that being said, I can tell you, without getting into all the details, it's not a huge signal. It's one of thousands of signals we use to actually calculate PR.

Rand:    I bought thousands of Mechanical Turkers and had them all click your results for SEO, and I didn't move one position. So I'm really upset about that.

Stefan:    Aw, dammit.

Rand:    Because based on what I saw here I thought . . .

Stefan:    You thought you could nail them, right?

Rand:    I thought I could just get it.

Stefan:    So that's the first thing is that we, and Google even themselves uses this data. They are kind of going back and forth if they do or not. But look, we know for deep links, likely they use toolbar plus . . .

Rand:    Right, sure. Yeah. If I click that JCPenney search result, there's these other links that pop up there, and they're usually the same ones that people search for most often and click on most often.

Stefan:    Exactly.

Rand:    That's a good customer experience. You actually want to encourage that.

Stefan:    Oh, totally.

Rand:    They have, I think, they've got a site speed ranking factor as well. How fast is the site? And they'll show you that data in Webmaster Tools and that comes from the toolbar.

Stefan:    That's right.

Rand:    I think they say it comes from the toolbar inside Webmaster.

Stefan:    Oh, well, there you go. I'm not throwing mud at all. I think it's actually a very valuable thing. What was frustrating to me, I think, is just the fact that it was . . . they successfully proved something we've said we've done now for three years, which is great. They've given me a proof.

Rand:    Well, to be fair, you guys probably should have written something that said, hey, if someone builds a honeypot and uses these small signals . . . so they've got a little gotcha.

Stefan:    Absolutely.

Rand:    But I think maybe it was the press who blew it into a pretty big gotcha.

Stefan:    Yeah. At the end, it's really, you're right. And we actually were talking to Harry, who kind of runs all engineering for Bing and he's like, "If anything, they helped us kind of find a bug. Maybe we should be throwing out if we only have one signal." Because really, the reason that 7 of the 100 that actually tried the beta with . . . so we actually didn't fire. They gave 100 terms and 93 we didn't actually do anything.

Rand:    So they had 100 blue cars.

Stefan:    That's right.

Rand:    You only tracked a few of them.

Stefan:    We tracked all of them because they have clickstream, of course, but we just didn't use the clickstream in our ranker. I would have to look at the probe. Something triggered something somewhere and said, "Even though we have this signal from toolbar, something doesn't feel right. We're not going to fire anything at all." So seven of the hundred actually did, and that was, probably where we had . . . maybe the engineers got a little happy at home and they had a couple gin and tonics and started clicking like crazy on the link and that gave us more data than the other terms. Who knows. But the point is that we think it's a valuable thing to use. We think the behaviors of customers on the Web who have said they want to help improve the product through their usage, we think it's the customer's behavior that they're giving to us to use and refine.

Rand:    Well, this would be like in the SEOmoz web app, for example, us saying, "Oh, you know what? When people go from their on page to their ranking report, lots of people are doing that, let's put those tabs right next to each other."

Stefan:    Exactly.

Rand:    Let's do it. It seem pretty natural.

Stefan:    One of the arguments that I had heard from people on the Web was, "You just shouldn't be using it. It's just not your data." And I think that the Web was built on this notion of collective intelligence. And frankly, Google has a lot of search data. We know this, right? So to ignore it just because it comes from a competitor, it seems . . .

Rand:    Well, you're not just doing this on Google, right? You do it on Yahoo.

Stefan:    Oh, yeah. The clickstream, right.

Rand:    If somebody searches SEOmoz's website, you'll see that if I use Internet Explorer.

Stefan:    Yes.

Rand:    So it doesn't matter the specific source. Right?

Stefan:    That was the big brouhaha.

Rand:    So let me ask, from a marketer's perspective. I think a lot of people in search observed this behavior and then said to themselves, "Wait a minute. I can drive blue cars. Can I influence things through the clickstream?" Is that something where you've already seen an uptick in manipulation?

Stefan:    There have been attempts, I'm sure. But the reason this was so successful, if you call 7 out 100 successful, was because they were nonsense words, words that no one would ever use.

Rand:    Literally zero search volume ever.

Stefan:    Precisely. They were made up words. And then Google did a manual re-rank of those in their index. So when you searched for them on Google, this one site would pop up. It was a completely . . . and even that, even with that explicit signal, only 7 out of 100 actually worked. So I would tell you that it probably isn't a good use of your time to be doing a lot of clicking on clickstreams to try to rank higher.

Rand:    Gotcha. All right. Well, good to know. We'll try something else.

Stefan:    Exactly. But what it does say is that if you rank organically high generally . . . do what you generally do to rank high organically, because that is a factor. In other words, if you do rank at P2 on Google or P2 on Bing and people are clicking through, they search for SEOmoz and click on that link. It's just good practice.

Rand:    So you're saying one of the things that SEOs maybe need to be thinking a little bit more about is not just getting that position, but making sure that once you have that position, people want to click on it.

Stefan:    Are you maximizing? That's right. Your caption, your title, all this stuff.

Rand:    Right, that title and that meta description.

Stefan:    Exactly. Make sure . . . you want that click after they search for you if it is the right site for that particular term. So yeah, that was "Copygate" a couple weeks ago.

Rand:    Well, I'm glad we're done with that.

Stefan:    It was fun.

Rand:    Yeah, I'm sure you want to do that all the time.

Stefan:    One hair is grey now because of that.

Rand:    I have more than that. So, third question, and last question, but I think a lot of people are interested. What's some new stuff that's coming out at Bing? Either for searchers or for webmasters, because I know Webmaster Tools has sort of been in a little bit of a stagnant state for a little while.

Stefan:    It's catch-up, I'd say. We just actually brought in Duane Forrester who you guys might know out in the community.

Rand:    Yes, absolutely.

Stefan:    Duane now works on the Bing team, and he is in charge of a lot of stuff. He'll be out there in the forums with you guys a lot more and across the entire ecosystem for Bing. Duane will be our guy out there in the space. We updated the Webmaster Tools, I think it was a couple months ago now. It's all Silverlight-based. There's still some areas I know we need to catch up in.

Rand:    I won't give you too hard a time, but the Silverlight . . .

Stefan:    I know.

Rand:    When you install Silverlight functionality, there are a few things you lose that you have on the HTML side.

Stefan:    Yeah, that's frustrating. But the good news is that we've staffed a team of actually more than we had before. So those guys are cranking on the new functionalities. We know that we have to do a better job there. We know it. No one's hiding like, "No, we're hot. Let's just keep going." We think we do a good job. We can do a lot better.

And then as far as new stuff for consumers is concerned, I think one of the most interesting things that we'll have rolled out this week – since this is Friday, I can talk about it now – is this new thing called tiles. You'll see them on the page. Think of it now as really a user experience enhancement. In essence, what we found was that people are able, when they see basically a page, if you look at the page and you do a query for something like, I don't know, let's just do one. What's that new Natalie Portman film?

Rand:    Oh, that looks terrible. Not "Black Swan."

Stefan:    Not "Black Swan," the other one.

Rand:    Oh, with Ashton Kutcher.

Stefan:    So we'll let's call it "new Natalie Portman film." I don't what it's called, but whatever it's called.

Rand:    That's probably a good search. Since we can't remember, lots of people are querying that.

Stefan:    That's probably true. I can see the billboard in my head, but I can't . . .6

Rand:    I can see the preview. Clearly bad branding.

Stefan:    God, no kidding. What the hell? Anyway, so you do a search for this on Bing and you get all the results here, all of the organic results. And what you're seeing now with the introduction of tiles is a little visual indicator here on the side for a couple of these results that come from what we call authoritative sites. So you might have one from IMDB here, one from Rotten Tomatoes, one from, I don't know, Flixster, etc. We're actually going to be pulling in metadata from those sites. So you have the average 77% fresh rating here. Flixster might have their rating, IMDB can have their rating. But what we're doing now is we 're actually . . . because we know people actually are able to figure out the results they're looking for if you append some kind of visual cue onto the page. So by adding on these visual cues for these kind of authoritative sites or high-quality sites. . .

Rand:    Are they sending data specifically to you, or are you guys pulling that from their page without them even having to do anything?

Stefan:    No. In this case, there's been some agreement with these guys.

Rand:    So it's like when Google was testing some of their rich snippets, what they call recipes and yeah, yeah, yeah.

Stefan:    So that I think . . . we'll see. It's just a test now, but we'll see how it works. Internal flighting have been pretty successful with it, and it really provides a way for people to actually find what they're looking for much faster, because you know the logo for IMDB, you know the logo for Flixster, maybe.

Rand:    And if I think I'm a trusted website, hopefully in a few months I'll be able to submit something to you, give you some data, and you could potentially give me this kind of result.

Stefan:    Yeah. Nothing to announce yet, but you're getting the idea. Exactly. This notion of how do you kind of ingest third party content more successfully and make it more discoverable to people. So that's kind of fun.

And then, of course, a lot of mobile stuff has come out in the past couple months. You'll see more of this going forward. But really focusing on the scenarios as you're on the go. You know, unfortunately, it's not out yet, so I can't talk about it. Just let me think for a second. It's so awesome. You're going to love it. Just wait.

Rand:    Is it on all Nokia devices now?

Stefan:    It should be. We'll do a follow up. Next time, I'll actually bring a machine and we can actually demo stuff.

Rand:    Oh, that sounds awesome. I love it. Well, Stefan, this has been phenomenal stuff. I think people really appreciate you and Duane particularly being out in the community talking to webmasters about this type of stuff. I hope you'll join us maybe in the comments if folks have a couple questions.

Stefan:    Absolutely. Just don't make fun of my hair. That's all I ask.

Rand:    It was windy outside before he got up here.

Stefan:    Sure.

Rand:    Thanks so much for joining us. Thanks, everyone. Take care. We'll see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday.

Video transcription by SpeechPad.com

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Posted by Lindsay

If you're a Search Marketer working at an agency, in-house or are out-of-work entirely, you've probably considered going independent at least once. A bad day at the office can inspire daydreams of earning more money and working from home in your pajamas. There are clear advantages to becoming your own boss but the grass isn't always greener, as they say.

Remember the 2010 SEO Industry Survey? More than 10,000 respondents participated and the result was some fascinating analysis by Will Critchlow and the Anatomy of a Search Marketer infographic was born. I was in love. As I began exploring the anatomy of an Independent Search Marketer the raw data from this earlier survey revealed yet another use.

I'll share a few new findings from the survey that I thought would be most interesting to those thinking of going solo. Also, as someone who's experienced in-house, agency, and now independent search marketing roles perhaps I can have a useful perspective. I'll try my hardest, anyway!

Lets check out the data first. After I shatter your dreams of making more money and attending every search marketing event once you go independent, we'll dive in to what the job of an Independent Search Marketer really looks like. If you are still interested, that is.

As with any survey, there are a number of caveats to take into consideration when looking at the data and conclusions. Take a read of those cautions as described when we first released the survey data over here. All of the data below looks only at US based respondents. There were 846 US Based Agency Search Marketers, 2217 US Based In-House Search Marketers, and and 1176 US Based Independent Consultants.

Interesting Find #1

On average, Independent Consultants earn about the same as Agency Search Marketers and In-House Search Marketers. The average yearly earnings for all three groups was within the $60-$75K range. As you can see in the graph below however, the distribution is very different. I'll let you interpret that bit as you will.

If you're thinking of going independent for the financial advantage, rub the dollar signs from your eyes and think seriously about your business plan and revenue forecast. More money isn't a given, but is of course possible.

Interesting Find #2

Independent Consultants work with a smaller book of clients at one time than Agency Search Marketers.

If you're looking for variety and to work with a larger number of clients at once, an Agency job might be your best bet. If you prefer to dive deep with a handful of clients, an Independent Consultant career path could be the way to go. Personally, I'd call this finding a big plus for the Independent Consultant side.

Interesting Find #3:

Independent Consultants are less likely to attend industry events and conferences than both Agency Search Marketers and In-House Search Marketers.

Uh oh. Come on Independents! If I were to guess, I'd say that Independent Consultants are less likely to attend industry events because the cost comes directly out of their own pockets. I'm interested in your thought on this, too.

What does it take to become an Independent Search Marketer?

Still thinking of taking the leap from employed to self-employed? Lets explore how your duties as an In-House or Agency Search Marketer might change in your new role as Entrepreneur and Lone Ranger.

Expert Skills

Regardless of what search segment you choose to focus on, as an Independent Consultant your clients will expect you to be an expert. They'll be hiring you to make solid recommendations usually beyond the skill set that they have in-house. It is okay to ask for help from your peers (read your consultant/client NDA first!) and seek the opinions of others, but YOU need to make the call on the final recommendation based on your experience, expertise, and the information at hand.

Stay S-M-R-T Skills

In The Simpsons' "Homer Goes to College" episode, Homer gleefully sets his high school diploma aflame, while singing, "I am so smart, I am so smart, S-M-R-T, I mean S-M-A-R-T!" Behind him his living room is going up in flames (quote). Just because you've made it into the realm of independent consulting doesn't mean you can stop going to conferences (see Interesting Find #3). Keep engaging, keep reading, and keep learning if you wish to continue growing your career.

Self-Promotion Skills

Don't like to toot your own horn? That'll cost ya. You need to be able to speak intelligently and convincingly about your subject matter. You need to speak confidently about your experience and skills without taking it too far.

Nun-chuck Skills

Just kidding. You don't need nun-chuck skills to be an Independent Consultant, unless your also trying to get girls. Right Napoleon?

 Closing-the-Deal Skills

Do you have a hard time asking for things? Once you've covered the Expert and Self-Promotion pieces, you might find yourself in a position to sell something. So, what do you do?

As an in-house or agency consultant, you likely haven't had to sell your services... for money. Sure, you sell ideas, projects, and the like. You may even be great at asking for a raise or negotiating for more holiday time. What it comes down to is this. Are you willing to look a prospect in the eye (or at least speak over the phone) and sell a project along with the price tag?

General Business Skills

You might be an SEO prodigy, but that doesn't mean you are a business person. It is possible that the most brilliant SEO on the planet would be most successful and earn the most money if he is allowed to focus on his core strength. Running an independent SEO consulting business requires a lot of tasks that will take you away from the thing you love. Here is a quick list of the non-SEO stuff you’ll need to be prepared to tackle.

• Marketing – I know, you can show up in the SERPs for the terms you are targeting but SEO isn’t the only marketing channel at your disposal to drum up clients. What else do you have in your tool belt? Email, graphic design, advertising, social media, affiliate...? Take stock and make sure you have enough tricks up your sleeve.
• Basic Accounting – Even if you hire an outside accountant to handle your taxes, you’re going to have to keep records and have a clue about balancing a budget, filling out a W-9, invoicing, accounts payable, etc.
  
• Bill Collecting - If a client doesn't pay, it is on you to follow-up and make it happen. Outsourcing this function can be pretty expensive, so be prepared to do it yourself at least in the beginning.
• Strategic Planning – Sorry, this one sounds borrowed from a business 101 text book. The content there wasn't all drivel! Strategic planning is important because you need to be able to plan and think about your business as well as do the work. 
• Old-Fashioned Paper Pushing – You’ll need to register your business and keep it registered, notice and do something about legal matters as they arise, open your mail, deal with banks, order business cards, etc. This is my least favorite part about being independent. Each of these items can seem like a small task, but add them up and you can lose a lot of valuable billable time.

People Skills

You may know your search marketing inside and out. You may have a solution identified to triple a web property's search traffic. Unfortunately none of that will matter if you can't communicate and influence your prospects and clients. Some people are excellent at this from birth. Others have to work at it.

Money or Mommy   If you aren’t lucky enough to have contracts set-to-go the day you transition from employee to independent, you’ll last a lot longer if you have a cushion while you get on your feet. You can be creative here, for sure, because a safety net can take on many forms. Here are a few ideas.

• Save money first ( You're so smart!)
• Move back in with Mom. Food, shelter, bedtime stories, what more do you need? (Think I'm kidding? See: Census Bureau data, Slide 18)  
• Take a loan. This seems like a bad idea, but your finances are your own business. :)
• Lean on your partner. Are you currently living large with two household incomes? I bet you could manage on one for a little while.
• Get your boss to hire you. Some of my best independent consulting clients today are my employers of yesterday. Why not continue to work a bit for your current boss, as an outside consultant? It could make the transition smoother and help everybody meet their goals.

What is the fun in that?

Certainly there are a lot of heavy things to think about before making a go of it on your own. Lets round this post out with the top 5 reasons that being an Independent Consultant is awesome.

1. You can choose your own clients. Not into paper products? Don't pitch the project!
2. You don't have to get dressed in the morning. You should. The point is you don't have to.
3. You'll have a nice short commute from your bedroom to your office.
4. If you have a young family, you can oversee your children's care with in-home childcare.
5. If you do your best work at midnight, have at it. Aside from client calls and general daytime availability you can usually set your own hours.

That does it for tonight. Happy Daydreaming!

P.S. Congratulations Watson! "I, for one, welcome our new computer overlords." - Ken Jennings

Images from Shutterstock

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Posted by jennita

Disclaimer: This post has absolutely nothing to do with SEO or even online marketing. You've been warned. Please keep reading to see the awesomeness that is your new profile. *happy dance* :)

Before I jump into the new profiles and what's so great about them. Let's take a look back, a look at the profiles of yesteryear. Back in the day when the profile functionality was created, Twitter didn't even exist yet (I know... WHAT?! There was a life before Twitter?). The profiles were quite simple really, you could only post one link and design wise there was a ton of whitespace.

Old Profile Layout

It is definitely time for an upgrade! So, let's take a look at some of the changes to the profiles.

Lookin' Good

With this redesign you have the ability to show us a lot more information about yourself! You have all the same functionaity you had before, but with a ton of additions. For example, you no longer have to add your Twitter name to the "additional contact info" section, there's actually a place to add you Twitter name! So let's take a look at a few screenshots with some of the changes.

New Profile Layout

More Links + Social Profiles

Not only do we show your community stats but you can see here we have direct links to your social profiles and the ability to add more links! (although only one will have the nofollow removed after 200 points).

Community Stats + Social & Other Links

More Profile Information

Now you get more bang for your buck and can display more information about yourself. Remember that you can earn up to 20 MozPoints for having a fully complete profile.

Profile Information

Comments and Blog Posts

Yea! This is information you had before, but now it's in a much cleaner, prettier format. Plus you get more options to see the post someone commented on and who wrote it. This will make it much easier to navigate around. Below is a screenshot of Casey Henry's latest comments.

Comments & Blog Posts

Earn MozPoints

Yes, that's right. You can earn MozPoints just for filling out your profile. As you update your profile you'll notice that you points just for filling in simple things like your name, title and bio. Take a look at the screenshot below to see how MozPoints will be added.

MozPoint Changes

Along with the changes to the profile and the upcoming changes to PRO Q&A it made sense to take a look at how MozPoints are calculated, why users would want to gain more and the ways to do that. Take a look at the new MozPoints page for all the details.

Ways to gain points

• YOUmoz - You'll now get 20 points when you get a YOUmoz post published (it used to be 10). Plus if the post makes it to the main blog, you'll get an ADDITIONAL 30 points. Which would give you a total of 50 points just for the post, plus still continue to earn points for every thumbs up and comment received on the post.
• Filling out your profile - More on that above. :)
• Comments - You continue to earn 1 MozPoint for each comment you write and 1 Mozpoint for every thumb up on your comment.
• New PRO Q&A - Right now this is in beta and only 100 users have access, but in the coming months all PRO members will be able to use this forum to ask and answer SEO questions. Free members, you can gain access by reaching over 500 MozPoints. Participating in PRO Q&A is a great way to gain points.

Benefits of having MozPoints

Other than just looking cool, and being at the top of the list, there really are benefits to earning MozPoints. A few of the highlights:

• Earn 200+ MozPoints in one month and you'll be considered for one free month of PRO.
• After 200 Mozpoints your first custom URL in your profile becomes followed. Currently you only need 100 points to get this nofollow, which means there are some members who used to have a followed link and no longer do. I'd encourge you to check out the ways to earn MozPoints above.
• Earn 1,000-1,999 points and you get an SEOmoz T-shirt
• Earn 2,000-4,999 points and you get a MozBot Guru Trophy (more info on this soon)
• Over 5,000 points?? Well we'll find something super-duper awesome for you! 

Go Update Your Profiles

Now, stop reading this, and go update your profiles! I want to see new smiling faces and filled out profiles by the end of the day. Go on now, I don't want to have to tell you twice. ;) (Sorry, the mom in me kicks in every now and then). Oh! There is one cookie issue happening when you go to your new profile for the first time. You may get logged out without knowing. So if you try to update your profile and get an error. Try refreshing, logging back in and trying again. You should only have to do this on the first around.

Happy profile updating!

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Posted by jennita

Let me tell you a tale of an unexpected case study on the value of a tweet on a page's ranking and traffic. This tale will mostly be told using graphics, as the images tell the story better than I can. Let's begin...

Last Monday while I was checking the morning tweets, I noticed a ton of tweets about our Beginner's Guide to SEO. It didn't take long to realize that Smashing Magazine had tweeted about it and the retweets were seriously rolling in. (And yes, they really did spell Beginers wrong ;).

Exhibit A - The Initial Tweet

I quickly emailed the marketing team, with a "Sweet! Smashing Magazine tweeted about the Beginner's Guide, let's watch for the traffic bump." Not long after Rand in his infinite wisdom realized that all of a sudden we were actually ranking on the first page for the term "Beginner's Guide" (without SEOmoz or SEO) and he tweeted.

Exhibit B - Rand's tweet as we realized we were ranking for general keyword

Whoa. Now, previously we weren't tracking that keyword as we hadn't really thought about trying to rank for such a general term (by the way, it is now a keyword we watch in our web app campaign). Most of the traffic to the Beginner's Guide usually comes from keywords like seo guide, seomoz beginners guide, what is seo, beginners guide seo, seo keyword research, etc. which are all directly related to SEO and the guide. 

Rand had searched on "Beginner's Guide" about a month or two earlier and it wasn't anywhere in the SERPs, and we definitely weren't getting any traffic for that term. So we were obviously quite interested to see that now, after hundreds of retweets we were showing up on the first page for that term. HOLY WOWSERS. At that point I wasn't sure how long it was going to stick around so I took a screen shot, thinking "this will make for a great case study."

Exhibit C - The SERP

Sure this was really interesting but the question was "will it last?" or is this just an example of QDF? Over the next week I watched the ranking and traffic every day. The ranking seemed to fluctuate between the first and the second page for "Beginner's Guide" throughout the week. I even tweeted about it one day last week to see where others around the world were seeing our guide rank for the term. The response was overwhelming that most people in the U.S. saw it on the first page still (at various spots) and most international folks saw it on the second page (in the 11th-13th spots).

All pretty interesting but we all know ranking isn't everything right? So let's take a look at happened with our organic traffic for that keyword.

Exhibit D - The Traffic

Sure, the traffic hasn't been huge, which is totally expected since our guide to SEO probably wasn't the user's intent if they searched for "Beginner's Guide." Plus, the fact is, that's not a highly searched term, so getting a ton of traffic for it wouldn't make sense. What IS interesting though is that before the tweet, we had absolutely zero traffic for that keyword and after the tweet, we have traffic. It has obviously died down since the initial tweet but we're still getting traffic each day for it.

Just like our initial test we ran a few months ago, we'll continue to monitor the traffic and ranking for "Beginner's Guide" to see if the tweets only helped in the short term or in the long term as well. Until then, if you have any similar case studies or "random awesome tweets that fall into your lap" as we did, I'd love to hear about the outcome.

Oh, and one last little bit of info. Below is a screenshot of the data about the bit.ly URL that Smashing Magazine used in their tweet. It's pretty dang exciting to see how many clicks it generated!

Some takeaways:

• A high quantity of tweets from "real" users on Twitter has a pretty substantial impact on rankings in the short term (take note sources seeking rankings during high search volume periods - holidays, news events, etc.)
• It appears likely that Google (and Bing) are using the concept they described in the interview on SELand of "Author Authority" to help weight the value of tweets (as we've seen that bot-repeated tweeting in similar quantities doesn't have this affect)
• There seems to be some long-term, nascent value carried by tweets in addition to the short-term effects. If this is consistently observed, expect a lot more SEO activity around engaging and incenting tweeting to key URLs.
• It's still unknown whether and how much the text of a tweet impacts the SERPs in a way similar to anchor text. That will be an excellent next test for us to observe.

Ah... the power of tweets. :-)

Would love to hear your experiences and feedback on tweets influencing rankings in the comments!

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Posted by randfish

Every 3-4 years, there's a big shift or addition to the key metrics Google (and, to a lesser extent MSN/Bing and Yahoo!) uses to order competitive search results.

1996-1999: On-page keyword usage + meta data

1999 - 2002: PageRank + On-page

2002 - 2005: Anchor text + Domain name + PageRank + On-Page

2005 - 2009: Domain authority + Diversity of linking domains + Topic modeling + Anchor text + Domain name + PageRank + On-Page

In 2010 and 2011, we've already seen the entry of social signals from Facebook and Twitter. The recent clickstream stories revealed that both Google and Bing employ clickstream data (Bing has done so publicly for the last 3 years, Google more quietly and probably longer), though this likely is a relatively small data point for both.

It's my belief that the next generation of ranking signals will rely on three (relatively) new groups of metrics.

#1: Brand Signals

One of the reasons Google took so long to penalize JCPenney (it was first spam reported to me in late 2009) is that their human raters and user data likely suggested it was actually quite a good result for searches like "dresses" and "bedding." The brand name meant that people felt good about the listing and Google, up until the bad press, felt no need to take punitive action, if the methodology was manipulative (I'm pretty sure they knew about the manipulation for a long time, but wanted to solve it algorithmically).

For millions of retail, transactional-focused searches, Google's results are, to be honest, easily and often-gamed. We could find hundreds of examples in just a few hours, but the one below serves the purpose pretty well.

I just bought some new yellow pumas (these ones), but the best possible page Google could return (probably this one) is nowhere to be found, and most of the first two pages of results aren't specific enough - a good number don't even offer any yellow Pumas that I could find!

Google wants to solve this, and one very good way is to separate the "brands" that produce happy searchers and customers from the "generics" - sites they've often classified as "thin affiliates" or "poor user experiences." As webmasters and supporters of small-business on the web, we might complain, but as searchers, even we can agree that Puma, Amazon and Zappos would be pretty good results for a query like the above.

So what types of signals might Google employ to determine if a site is a "brand" or not?

These are just a few examples of data types and sources - Google/Bing can look at dozens, possibly hundreds of inputs (including applying machine learning to selected subsets of brand vs. non-brand sites to identify pattern matches that might not be instantly apparent to human algorithm creators).

As you might imagine, many manipulative sites could copy a number of these signals, but the engines can likely have a significant quality impact. The Vince update from 2009 is often pointed-to as a first effort along these lines from Google.

#2: Entity Associations

Search engines have, classically, relied on a relatively universal algorithm - one that rates pages based on the metrics available, without massive swings between verticals. In the past few years, however, savvy searchers and many SEOs have noted a distinct shift to a model where certain types of sites have a greater opportunity to perform for certain queries. The odds aren't necessarily stacked against outsiders, but the engines appear to bias to the types of content providers that are likely to fulfill the users' intent.

For example, when a user performs a search for "lamb shanks," it could make a lot of sense to give an extra boost to sites whose content is focused on recipes and food.

This same logic could apply to "The King's Speech" where the engine might bias to film-focuses sites like RottenTomatoes, IMDB, Flixster or Metacritic.

Bill Slawski has written brilliantly about entities in the past:

Rather than just looking for brands, it’s more likely that Google is trying to understand when a query includes an entity – a specific person, place, or thing, and if it can identify an entity, that identification can influence the search results that you see...

...I’ve written about the topic before, when Google was granted a patent named Query rewriting with entity detection back in May of 2009, which I covered in Boosting Brands, Businesses, and Other Entities: How a Search Engine Might Assume a Query Implies a Site Search.

Google’s recent acquistion of Metaweb is noteworthy for a number of reasons. One of them is that Metaweb has developed an approach to cataloging different names for the same entity, so that for example, when Google sees names on the Web such as Terminator or Governator or Conan the Barbarian or Kindergarten Cop, it can easily associate those mentions with Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Entity associations can be used to help bolster brand signals, classify query types (and types of results), and probably help with triggering vertical/universal results like Places/Maps, Images, Videos, etc.

#3: Human Quality Raters & (Trusted) User Behavior

Last November, I wrote a post on my personal blog called "The Algorithm + the Crowd are Not Enough"

In the last decade, the online world has been ruled by two, twin forces: The Crowd and The Algorithm. The collective “users” of the Internet (The Crowd) create, click, and rate, while mathematical equations add scalability and findability to these overwhelming quantities of data (The Algorithm). Like the moon over the ocean, the pull of these two forces help create the tides of popularity (and obscurity) on the Internet. Information is more accessible, useful, and egalitarian than ever before.

But lately, at least to me, the weaknesses of this crowdsourced + algorithmic system are showing, and the next revolution feels inevitable.

Given that Google's just launched a Chrome web extension to allow users to block sites of their choosing in the SERPs and the many attempts to leverage user data in the search results (remember SideWiki, SearchWiki, Starred Results), it's a good bet that the pure-algorithm bias is slowly seeping away. Bing uses a panel of search quality reviewers, as does Google (though the latter continues to be very secretive about it).

Both are looking at clickstream data (a form of user-based information). Here's a former Google search qualty engineer noting that Google's used the same form of clickstream analysis via their toolbar that they railed against Bing for applying.

All of this strongly suggests that more user and usage information will be gathered and used to help rank results. It's far tougher to access than link data and, particularly hard to game without appearing "unnatural" compared to the normal web traffic patterns. I've talked before about how I don't like the direct signals of clicks on search results, but many ancillary data points could be collected and used, including information about where users have "good" user experiences on the web.

I'm looking forward to your thoughts on the next generation of ranking signals and what Google/Bing might do next to overcome problems like JCPenneyGate, spam perception among technophiles and content farms. It seems hard to imagine that either will simply rest on a system they know can be gamed.

p.s. I'd also add that vertical/universal results and more "instant answers" will continue to rise in importance/visibility in the SERPs for both engines (though these aren't really classic "ranking signals")

p.p.s. If you're PRO and interested in the brand signals in particular (and some suggested brand-building tactics), feel free to join our webinar this Friday.

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Posted by Paddy_Moogan

There are various industries online where traffic and revenue from affiliate programs is a huge part of the overall revenue stream. If you work in one of these industries (gambling for example) then you may have the opportunity of optimising the affiliate program to get more value from an SEO point of view. In this post I'm going to outline some of the techniques you can use along with the advantages and potential risks of both.

I want to very briefly cover why some of these techniques may carry some risk. Google has traditionally sought to not pass value across links that appear to be affiliate based. I searched high and low for some official Google Webmaster Guidelines on affiliate links, all I found was this page which talks more about content rather than links. However I did find the following quote from an interview that Eric Enge did with Matt Cutts:

Eric Enge: If Googlebot sees an affiliate link out there, does it treat that link as an endorsement or an ad?

Matt Cutts: Typically, we want to handle those sorts of links appropriately. A lot of the time, that means that the link is essentially driving people for money, so we usually would not count those as an endorsement.

I think the gist is that the website has only put the link in place because they are getting some financial reward for doing so. ie they get paid a commission if someone uses the link and then buys a product etc. Therefore, Google doesn't like to count them as editorially given links.

There are various arguments that can be had as to whether affiliate links should be counted or not, but thats not the point of this post. All you need to know really is that Google doesn't tend to count affiliate links as editorally given, therefore you need to be careful how you use and optimise them.

Here are some ideas for you to optimise your own affiliate program to try and get some SEO benefit from the links.

1) Use of a Dedicated Landing Page for Big Affiliates

I quite like this technique. The principle is that you look at who your biggest affiliates are in terms of SEO value, as well as traffic. Then you create a dedicated landing page on your domain for that affiliate to use. You can even do this so that they can still link to their own versions of deep pages such as categories or product pages.

For example, if the SEOmoz affiliate program were to do this, a landing page to PRO could look like -

www.seomoz.org/pro/paddy

This URL would look exactly the same as the URL would if it didn't have /paddy on the end. So for the user, they wouldn't notice anything different and would have the same experience.

To stop the problem of having loads of duplicate content pages, you can make use of the rel=canonical tag. So on the URL www.seomoz.org/pro/paddy, I'd implement the rel=canonical which points to www.seomoz.org/pro. If you are unfamilar with rel=canonical then you should read this guide from Lindsay.

By doing this, you are telling Google that the /paddy page is a duplicate on the /pro page. therefore don't index it and pass any links or authority to the /pro page. It should also stop the /paddy page from showing in search results.

As mentioned above, I'd say to do this for your larger affiliates, mainly because it can be a tricky process to get setup. However if you have a good developer who has some time to spend on this, you could potentially roll it out across your entire affiliate network.

2) Make Sure Affiliates Link to the Correct Page

We saw a case recently of a large client in a competitive industry having their own in house affiliate program. However the program had been running for quite some time. In that time the client website had undergone a few changes in terms of URL structure, so some affiliates were linking to old URLs.

 Most of the time this isn't a problem if the appropriate redirects have been put in place. Unfortunately, the client site had been through more than one change of URL structure, and on one of these changes, redirects were not implemented correctly. Here is how some affiliates were linking to the client -

Affiliate links to - www.client.com/category-name/

302 redirect to www.client.com/keyword-category-name/

301 redirect to www.client.com/optimsed-keyword-category-name/

See where the problem lies here? That pesky 302 is stopping link juice from being passed to the new version of the URL. This is a common problem when multiple developers and SEO agencies work on the same site over a period of time. The first set of URL changes meant that a 302 redirect was used instead of a 301. Then when an SEO agency came along to make the URLs optimised for keywords, they use a 301, unaware that previous work had been carried out.

We ran some analysis and found around 600 links going to old client URLs that were not redirecting properly, all of these were from affiliates who were pretty easy to contact and get to fix the problem.

The client was unaware that older affiliates were still linking to the very first version of the URL which went through several redirects, one of which being a 302 that meant that value was not being passed. So our advice was two fold -

1 - Change the 302 redirect to a 301 in order to pass value to the latest version of the page

2 - Contact all affiliates and ask them to update their links to the latest version of the URL. Some affiliates may not want to go to the effort of doing this, however you should point out that linking to a paid that goes via multiple redirects like this, could sometimes strip off their tracking code and not credit them for sales. They'll soon change the links!

3) Help your Affiliates Make Their Content More Valuable (and get links!)

A few weeks ago I wrote a Distilled blog post about getting more SEO value from your YouTube videos. If you take a look at this article, it tells you a way to get clean backlinks by getting people to embed your YouTube videos. If you have videos available to you, it is worthwhile adding clean links and encouraging your affiliates to embed the videos on their website. This has three benefits -

1 - Your affiliates are adding more value to their own sites by having relevant, helpful videos on their site, therefore potentially increasing the click through rate to your site

2 - Embedding these videos will help the overall strength of your YouTube channel

3 - You get a nice additional link to your website

As an added incentive, you could even slightly increase commission for affiliates who embed your videos. This can help to get things kick started.

The end result will hopefully be something like this:

Video by ParryGripp

Ok, I really just wanted an excuse to put a video of a baby monkey going backwards on a pig on the blog :)  But the point is that you can add a nice clean link underneath your video.

4) Add More Value to Widgets and Iframes That Affiliates Use

I worked with a client recently who was looking to get a bit more benefit from their affiliate program. They are in a super competitive industry and had tons of affiliate links, so just a small change to this could result in higher click throughs and more revenue. The long term SEO benefit was also a big factor.

This client had embeddable chunks of content that were pulled in dynamically using an iframe. Links within the iframe couldn't be seen by the search engines, nor could they see the content, so there was no SEO value at all. A solution was to add a HTML wrapper around the iframe which contained a link to the client and the affiliate could also add some content which the search engines would see. Again, there are several benefits to this approach -

1 - You're adding value to the affiliate site by allowing for the option of adding content which the search engines and users can see

2 - You're getting an additional link back to your website

Hopefully this has been useful and given you some food for thought when optimising your own affiliate programs. Any feedback or ideas you have, as always feel free to drop a comment below!

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Posted by Aaron Wheeler

There are a lot of hep cats out there in the offline world, but they can be a bit quiet about sharing what they like with other people. Fortunately, there are huge flocks of rad birds online! Tweeting birds, actually. The kind that like to tweet all day about how many worm-selling websites they have ranking in the SERPs and enjoy retweeting the silly videos their bird friends sing about. It turns out that after a while, those bird friends can be pretty hard to get to join your flock! This week, Jen Lopez, our community manager, talks about how we managed to increase our total bird/Twitter followers by 250% to over 27,000 people.

Oh, and make sure to check out the surprise ending! Valentine's Day is coming up soon, you know...

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Video Transcription Hi, SEOmoz fans. I'm Jen Lopez. I'm a community manager here at SEOmoz. Today I'm going to be talking about how we increased our Twitter followers by over 250% in the past year.

Now, I know the question is going to come up that we're not supposed to care about the actual numbers. It is not about the numbers. It's about the actual influencers and that sort of thing. That is true. It is very true. But you still, in order to get more influencers and in order to get more people retweeting your stuff, you need to get more followers. So, we're looking at the percentage that we increased and not necessarily the exact numbers.

Before I really get started I should tell you that when I first started taking over the Twitter account, my biggest goal was simply to beat Rand in followers. We started and the SEOmoz account had something like 4,000 followers. That was maybe a year and a half year ago. Today we have almost 28,000. That was because I was bound and determined to beat Rand who had a good 15,000 more followers than we did. So let me tell you exactly how we did that.

The first thing is we engaged. I know you're going to say, "Everybody says engage with your followers." But what does that really mean, right? So, at SEOmoz, for us we use Twitter not only as a marketing tactic but as a customer service tactic. It is also a huge part of our community. Twitter for us is a little bit of everything. If somebody sends us a kudos like, "Oh, I just tested out the new web app. Seriously awesome. Thank you, SEOmoz," we respond back and say, "High five!" or "Glad you love it." Sometimes we retweet it, whatever. They get a response. That doesn't happen 100% of the time, but it happens often.

The next thing that we do is if somebody complains, they get an error, they're like, "Your latest post was horrible," whatever the case may be, they also get a response. Sometimes the response is, "Whoa! Sorry you got that error. Can you send us a screenshot?" Or, "Make sure to have your third party cookies on." Whatever the case may be, they get a response. Oftentimes, once they get a response, their tone changes. They change from being mad about something to all of a sudden being like, "Hey, it's cool. You responded. You got me. I'm good."

We also started, if you notice, every one of our blog posts get published on [Twitter]. Oftentimes it will go up in the middle of the night in the US plus in the afternoon. What we're doing is we're trying to make sure we have a huge following from essentially all over the world. We want to make sure that it is not just the West Coasters getting great content. We schedule it so that it goes out. There are definitely ways to schedule your content and schedule tweets so that you don't look like a spammer. You're actually going in and when you are around, you reply to people. You touch base with them. The biggest part of engaging is just making sure that you are talking to people whether it is they love you, they hate you, they have a question, whatever it is; talk to them. People really appreciate it. Simply by doing that, that alone in the first year that we started making these changes to the Twitter account increased our following by about 100%.

What really kicked us into over gear is we made sharing a whole lot easier on the site. I don't know if you remember, but at least 6 months ago, it was really difficult to share any content on our site. If you wanted to share a post, you had to scroll down way at the bottom, there was a "share this" button, I believe. Then you click "share this" and you have like 500 options of what you're to do next. Most users aren't going to do that. They don't want to have to think. I go to a website and I want to share something, I don't want to think about it. I want to click a button that says "Tweet Me" and let it take me off to Twitter. So, that's what we changed. When we redesigned the site, we made Twitter and Facebook very prominent on the site. So not only actually has our Twitter followers increased, but our Facebook fans have about tripled also, just by, again, making it easier for people to share your content.

Again, as I'm talking about this, these are the tactics that we have taken to increase our followers. It may not necessarily work with what you're doing. You may not be in a business where you necessarily want to talk to people who are hating your product or whatever the case may be. But this has worked for us, and it has increased our reach by thousands and thousands. If you look at Klout and you look at where we were before and where we are now, the difference is actually amazing. The next step in this is actually to do a post that shows you some really distinct numbers and that sort of thing that I can show you the difference and what our reach is now as opposed to what it used to be.

Other than making sharing easier, we've also added it to emails. You get an email from the customer service team and we say, "Hey, did you get an awesome experience with customer service? Tweet about it." We send an email about the webinar coming up. We're like, "Don't forget to tell your friends about it." Whatever you do, make it really easy to share. I've received emails from my dentist that say, "Forward this to a friend," or "Share this with your friend on Twitter." Whatever you do, think about all the ways that you market or that you do customer service and figure out how you can add Twitter into that.

The last one is, we involved everyone. Even though we increased our talking from the actual Twitter account, where it is really Roger, so oftentimes, you know, Roger he really loves to get on Twitter and just chat it up with people. Sometimes he woots and whees and beeps a little bit. But it was really important actually to involve everyone. So we have asked everyone that if you see someone that has a question about a tool, someone who is asking about the best guide to SEO and we have that content, or if you just see anything out there where I can't be on there 100%. I can't be online at all times. Even though, if you know me well, you probably know that I'm mostly online all of the time. So, we involved. Rand, if Rand sees a question come through to SEOmoz, he'll respond to it and he'll CC the SEOmoz account so that we know it has been covered. Same with Joanna or SEOmom, they do the same thing. We have also involved our associates like Dr. Pete, the entire distilled staff, so the people that you see posting on the blog and that sort of thing. I've also asked them, if you see questions, whatever it is, talk to people. Remind them, hey, there's this post over here or there's this app over here or don't forget you can send an email to help@seomoz.org and they'll be able to give you more information or help you with your problem.

Then, here we have Mozzers just in general. We have some of our great community members who have also helped us. They've taken it upon themselves to jump into conversations, involve people into the SEOmoz community through Twitter. For us, like I said before, Twitter is not just a marketing tactic to us. It is involving people in the community. It's telling them about community events whether it is a meet-up or a webinar coming up or discounts to a conference, whatever the case may be. We use Twitter for everything talking to our community.

So, these are the main three tactics that we've used over the past about a year and a half to increase our followers. The other thing that we often look at is increasing our reach and taking a look at our influencers, because we want to make sure that not only are we gaining followers but we're gaining followers who are the equivalent to the linkerati. We want the social linkerati. We want these people who like to retweet, who like to send your information out. We want those people to be following us and to be engaged with us. We will often jump into a conversation and be a part of it simply because we know that having that touch point with someone makes them feel more a part of the community. I've done it in person, too. I talk to people in person and mention Twitter, and the next thing you know, I see that they're following us. It is just really important to get out, talk to your people, and engage them.

I would really love to hear what's working for you. What do you do? What is your tactic to gaining followers, finding those influencers, and how do you use Twitter? I hope that you guys will forgive me that perhaps I am not as eloquent as Rand. I really loved doing the Whiteboard Friday today. Aaron who is back there taking the video is laughing at me at the moment. I would just like everyone to know that. Anyway, thank you everyone. I hope you have a great weekend. We'll see you next week for another Whiteboard Friday.

Video transcription by SpeechPad.com

(And Jen, they were laughs of love! I find Jen to be a very enjoyable person.)

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Posted by Dr. Pete

There was once a directory called DMOZ, which shone forth like a beacon of glorious link-light. From all across the realm, downtrodden webmasters would travel to pay homage to the ones called Editors, that those keepers of the Categories might bequeath a link of great PageRank upon them. Woe upon those who did not have the light of the most open directory, as their websites would surely wither and perish.

Sadly, that's not far from the way many people saw DMOZ in the past, and that attitude still persists in 2011. It's easy to understand why – a free yet authoritative directory that even now has a Toolbar PR of 8 is certainly an attractive link target. Unfortunately, when we quest after high authority mega-directories, we sometimes miss that the SEO and traffic value of the link we can actually get (one buried deep in subcategories) is virtually non-existent.

Where Are The Pages?

This post came out of Q&A, where we've had multiple questions about new DMOZ links not showing up in Open Site Explorer. To be honest, the timing and depth of these links means that OSE doesn't always catch them, but in almost every case that I dug into, the DMOZ pages in question weren't being indexed by Google, either.

In many cases, these links end up in one of the Regional categories. Let's look at an example, the DMOZ regional listing for website developers in Denver. The URL is a bit too long to display here, but it's 11 folders deep (10 below the root).

Although Google shows a cached copy, there's nothing in the index. Even the cached copy is over 2-1/2 months old. Unfortunately, no indexation means no link-juice gets passed.

Where Did It Go Wrong?

I'm not here just to pick on DMOZ – I want to illustrate how, as you dive deep into a site (even a very high-authority site), it's easy to lose link-juice fast. Let's pick apart that DMOZ link, level by level. The following table shows whether each level is indexed by Google and OSE, as well as the Toolbar PR and SEOmoz PA scores for the page:

It's easy to see that PR falls rapidly at Level 6, and indexation stops soon after. It's also interesting that, in this case, OSE is actually crawling deeper than Google (I honestly didn't expect that).

I should point out that these listing pages are hardly unloved orphans, in the scheme of DMOZ. The Denver Business_and_Economy page lists 1,017 companies, and even the deepest Web_Design_and_Development level has 35 listings. Keep in mind that these are also web developers, who are probably eager to see their listing count for something.

Can You Save The Love?

There are cases where enterprising SEOs may find it worth their while to get someone else's page indexed. You could build your own links to the deep DMOZ listing page, promote it in social media, etc., nudging the crawlers to take action. In this case, though, you really have to ask if it's worth the trouble. The final resting place of this link is, unfortunately, just that – a link-juice graveyard. You could give it link-juice by linking to it, of course, but that effort is probably better spent on building your own, direct links.

Is There Someone for Me?

There are plenty of fish in the sea, even without DMOZ, right? Let's look at another revered PR8 directory and coveted link source, the Yahoo Directory. Surely, the Yahoo regional listing for web developers in Denver must be loved by Google?

That's right – that subcategory page is not indexed in Google or OSE, and it has no TBPR or PA, even though it contains 27 active (and presumably bought and paid for) listings.

Does this mean big directories are a thing of the past? No, but it does mean that your infatuation may be more shallow than you think. There's a lot more to the value of a link than the TBPR or authority of the domain, and, if you're not careful, you might just find that your love is unrequited.

"Knight in Shining Armor" image licensed from Getty Images (Tony Garcia Photography).

Update (February 10th): Despite my effort to nofollow the link, Google decided to mess with me (thanks for the heads up, Aaron B.) and index that DMOZ page, which now has a 2/10/11 cache date. I'm sure there's a lesson in here somewhere, but I refuse to learn it. It does suggest that even a nofollowed link and a few clickthroughs can kick the crawlers into gear.

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Posted by Oli Gardner

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.

“Get me to page 1 of Google, while emailing our customers a bi-weekly newsletter, engaging influencers on Twitter, maintaining a captive Facebook audience, capturing new leads, and putting out 3 blog posts a week.” Harsh? Yes. Familiar? Definitely.

Everything a Non-Marketer Needs to Take a Business from Zero to Hero Online

What you are about to read might be a little shocking. Why? Because it’s so freakishly long. It contains a 6-month action plan for marketing your business online and if you can read it all in one go you’re a hero or a raging insomniac. I’d recommend bookmarking it to use as an ongoing reference guide.

Let the story and the course begin...

A typical marketing storyline

You’ve just been put in charge of “Internet marketing” at your new sweatshop startup (don’t worry, I live there too - replete with rusty sewing machines and fake Nike stitching patterns). What do you do? Where do you start? There are so many elements to online marketing that it’s hard to know where to begin.

It’s much more than just one job. At the very least it’s 8 distinct disciplines. I know because I try to do them all and I’m stretched to my limit.

With that in mind, I’d like to present you with:

• A 15,000,000 pixel infographic (that’s fifteen million colored squares, which could make it the largest infographic in history). Note how the graphic looks like a giant “i” (which is also the first letter of the word infographic). *Taps self on shoulder for the clever artistic reference.*
• Part 1 is a cogged wheel showing 50 tasks broken down by discipline. If you print it out you can tear off each cog or mark the little check boxes as you complete each task.
• Part 2 is a six month course to teach you how to become an internet marketer whether you’ve done it before or not. Compress the timeline if you’re a workaholic. It also contains a traffic timeline showing the effect certain actions will have on your inbound traffic growth.

It takes a lot of work - although not as much as writing all this - so no whining please. In order to be successful you have to plan for the long haul. Read it, absorb it and put it into practice. Also remember to give a shout out on Twitter (using the hashtag #noobmarketing) as you progress through your marketing marathon (and join the discussion with other noobs).

Landing Pages as Marketing Glue
You’ll notice how landing pages have been positioned in the wheel as what I call the “marketing glue” that holds your activities together. They sit in the middle of many marketing and sales funnels and do a great job of focusing your customers on what they should be doing. You don’t always need them (12/50 tasks here call on them), but when you do they can make a big difference in the your conversion performance. I covered the reasoning and purpose of landing pages in an earlier guest post called “The 12-Step Landing Page Rehab Program” so I won’t delve into that again, instead I’ll just point out where, when and how you should be using them.

The Wheel of Marketing
8 of the core components of an Internet marketing strategy are covered here (there are more, but I have my limits). I’ll give you a brief overview of each and why it’s important. As an alternative to following the 6-month course you could tackle each of these channels as an independent track by following the task lists.

• Social media marketing (SMM)

The new darling of the marketing community still gets grumbles from the old-schoolers. Ignore them for they know not what they say. SMM is a massive topic, so for the noob guide we’ll focus on a few key platforms: Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn. And a few key strategies: developing a style and how to convert your social traffic.

#1 - Claim your brand
#2 - Set up your Twitter account
#3 - Have something to say - define your style
#16 - Build a following on Twitter
#23 - Time your tweets
#30 - Create a conversion oriented Facebook fan page
#31 - Connect your blog to Facebook
#32 - Seed some facebook fans
#39 - Start networking on LinkedIn
#45 - Stay in the conversation: Leave Twitter tabs open for "live" social interaction
#46 - Create a social media contest page with viral features

• Email marketing

Email can be tough and unforgiving compared to other online mediums (once you hit send, your message is committed to the ether, never to be undone - except through the use of the apologetic “I screwed up” follow-up email. Instead of talking about writing emails, I’ll focus your noob experience on cooler concepts like drip campaigns - which can make the difference between an actively engaged audience and a legion of prospects who’ve forgotten what you do.

#4 - Choose an online email provider
#5 - Create a branded email template
#17 - Set up a drip campaign for acquisition, education & retention
#24 - Segment and create lists
#40 - A/B test your emails

• Lead Generation

How do you do email marketing if you have no one to email? That’s where lead gen comes in. We’ll discuss methods for growing your email lists by writing eBook’s, presenting webinars and simply by asking people to follow your blog.

#6 - Set up a Feedburner account to capture & track RSS readers
#7 - Gather emails for a product launch
#25 - Answer questions on LinkedIn & Quora
#33 - Give something away in exchange for customer data

• Organic search marketing

I have to tread carefully here as the SEOmoz community is probably the most engaged and knowledgeable SEO crowd on the planet (yes I’m sucking up). Here I cover some of the techniques that I’ve used to be successful at managing my organic search and building a natural ecosystem that encourages link building success.

#8 - Set up Google Webmaster Tools
#9 - Research and define your core organic search keywords
#18 - Architect your blog for search - choose targeted categories
#19 - Use SEOmoz campaigns to track your search progress
#41 - Link building

• Conversion rate optimization (CRO)

Think of 5 lanes of traffic driving across a bridge. This is your inbound traffic (often paid for) wanting to cross boundaries just to reach you. If your intended destination page isn’t optimized for their specific needs, you may as well knock 2 lanes out of the bridge and let the cars fall into the river. CRO is all about making sure the other side of the bridge leads to optimizeville, where there’s only one thing to do and it's really obvious how to do it.

#26 - A single purpose and CTA for every page
#34 - Rate your pages with the conversion scorecard
#42 - A/B test your landing pages
#43 - Try a 5 second test
#47 - Learn from your users using feedback widgets & live chat
#48 - Segment inbound traffic sources

• Analytics

There’s a reason analytics is represented by grey in the wheel. It’s dull. Until you get it right that is. Analytics contain so much hidden awesomeness, that when you get it hooked up everything else becomes much easier - including getting buy-in from management to do “fancy-pants” things like CRO above.

#10 - Set up a Google Analytics account
#11 - Establish conversion goals and funnels
#12 - Annotate important events in Google Analytics
#20 - Add custom reports to your Google Analytics dashboard
#35 - Discover under-performing areas of your site

• Content marketing

Content isn’t king anymore - it’s more like the emperor. Content is the start, middle and end of your online marketing story and is critical to virtually everything you do. By the end of this course you’ll be writing on your corporate blog, guest blogging, writing eBooks, getting your publishing schedule organized with an editorial calendar and even attempting the mighty infographic.

#13 - Start a corporate blog & give your knowledge away for free
#14 - Submit your content to social hubs
#15 - Bookmark your content on delicious
#21 - Set up an editorial calendar
#22 - Enable social sharing mechanisms
#27 - Write an ebook
#36 - Write guest posts for other blogs
#44 - Write about others to build relationships
#49 - Create an infographic

• Paid search marketing (pay-per-click or PPC)

PPC is the fastest way to get instant traffic to your site. However, it's hard to do well, so we'll wait until month 3 to tackle it. The majority of Google’s AdWords users go bust on their free $100 voucher with nothing but a sour taste in their mouths. I’ll give you some tips on doing it right and a back up plan for letting the experts take over if you can’t figure it out.

#28 - Create a Google AdWords account
#29 - Send traffic to landing pages - not your homepage!
#37 - One landing page per ad group
#38 - Improve message match for a high quality score
#50 - Get some help from a PPC expert

YOUR 6-MONTH MARKETING ACTION PLAN
Ready? Set? Go.......!

Getting started is all about establishing your network base. Registering accounts and defining your style (always a good idea before you start yammering in a tone unbefitting your brand). This might well be the busiest month of the course, but that’s how it should be. Take your excitement and enthusiasm and kick things off as fast as you can. The sooner your infrastructure is in place the sooner you can start marketing your business - and that’s why we’re all here.

 

1. CLAIM YOUR BRAND

To avoid having your brand name taken by someone else (brand squatters with an egg avatar that are only followed by their moms are everywhere), you should set up branded accounts on the important social networks as soon as possible. Visit the following sites to claim yours, and do it today:

• Twitter.com/youryourbrandname
• YouTube.com/yourbrandname
• Flickr.com/yourbrandname (for storing your photos, graphics and infographics - for organic image search value)
• LinkedIn/yourbrandname (as a business hub that's bigger than just you)
• Facebookcom/yourbrandname

NOOB INSIGHT: Facebook is trickier than the rest as you have to complete a few other steps before you can be granted a branded vanity URL. I’ll explain the necessary steps in tasks #30 and #32).

2. SET UP YOUR TWITTER ACCOUNT

Design a branded Twitter background: The new Twitter is considerably wider than it used to be (you'll notice a lot of branded backgrounds are covered up which looks a little silly), so the primary left side branding area of your background needs to be very slim. For screen resolutions of 1280px (fairly commonplace these days) - you are limited to roughly only 108px for the core part of your branded background design and messaging. More details on background designs for the new Twitter.

If you have a little more space (customers with larger screens), you could stretch to about 200px and do something like Shopify has done - notice how they’ve balanced their top green stripe to align tidily with the Twitter app layout.

They also do a great job establishing social proof by showing the logos of big name brands that use their platform.

Set up your profile: Describe your core value proposition in your profile description and add a link to your website in the available slot. You should use a few choice keywords in your bio as this will help people to find you via Twitter search.

Photo or logo for your avatar? If you representing your company on Twitter then how you use your logo for your Twitter avatar will depend on how many people in your company will be public representatives of the account. If it’s just you, you could go with your own photo or try combining a small version of your logo beneath your photo. If you’ll be sharing the role of chief tweeting officer, then it’s best to go with the logo by itself. The typical method for identifying who’s talking is to add your initials to the tweet - for me (Oli Gardner) I’d use ^og.

In the past I used just the logo, but for a more personal touch (as my name has become better known in the landing page industry) I'm trying out the photo/logo mix as shown below.

What do you think of this approach?

NOOB INSIGHT: Nobody trusts accounts that have the default Twitter egg avatars. Change it immediately. It doesn't need to be perfect - just throw your logo or face up there on day 1.

 

3. HAVE SOMETHING TO SAY - DEFINE YOUR STYLE

Ideally you will be creating content via your blog, which gives you the starting point of a conversation, or at the very least, something to talk about and share. There are a three main categories of communication. Your choice of approach will come down to how much of an expert you want to be on a subject, and how busy you want your content stream to be.

• Creators: people who share content they’ve written. Let’s you become known as a thought leader.
• Curators: Curation in the social space has been defined as “curation is the act of synthesizing and interpreting in order to present a complete record of a concept” (Jamie Beckland). To help your curation strategy and become a valuable resource subscribe to lots of relevant content and use a service like feedly.com or Google Reader to consume it - then provide insightful commentary on the content as you share it to help people gauge the value of the links you are sharing.
• Chatterboxes: are people who simply engage in conversation for the majority of their stream. I personally find this a bit old-school Twitter - when it was about what you were eating for breakfast etc. Unless you are a celeb, it's unlikely you can start out this way successfully - but you should still try to incorporate some personal aspects into your Tweets to remain human and interesting.

NOOB INSIGHT: Give your writing room to breath - Leave about 20 characters at the end of your tweets to let people retweet it without having to edit your literary work of short art. (Retweeting often entails inserting RT @yourname into your text which takes up some space).

What's your style?

What kind of style do you enjoy following? What worked for someone you'd like to emulate? You can't fake awesome, but it helps to define your intentions a little before you start pushing your personal and company brand. At the end of the day, it's best to do what comes naturally to you.

"Authenticity rules" as they say.

 

4. CHOOSE AN ONLINE EMAIL PROVIDER

If you’re thinking “Really? I have to open yet another account with another 3rd party?” - then the answer is yes. Why? Because you only have two other options: build an in-house system or use Outlook/Gmail. The first makes you responsible for deliverability rates and CAN-SPAM compliance issues and the other has none of the power or flexibility to maintain lists and is not designed for serious marketing. Trust me, if you’re going do email marketing - go with the pros. It doesn’t have to be difficult or expensive.

If you are just starting out, Mail Chimp is great for modern online businesses and is free until you reach a certain size. It also includes powerful segmentation tools which will help to separate your messaging in the future, once your lists and customer base grows.

If you are a designer (or have a design based audience), you might want to look at Campaign Monitor as they have crafted a service specifically targeted at designers.

I’m only mentioning a couple of providers off the bat because the choice is overwhelming. Consider this list of online ESP’s (email service providers) as evidence of the time you could waste comparison shopping. Side note: if you have some really specific feature requirements, you do want to make sure your chosen provider is equipped as switching providers down the road can be a pain (I’ve done it 3 times already).

 

5. CREATE A BRANDED EMAIL TEMPLATE

Some of the templates that come with email providers are okay, but very plain and simple. If you upgrade to a paid plan you often get more sophisticated templates. These too will suffice for a while. But ultimately, you want to have a branded template.

Take a day and design a palette and brand-related layout for your emails - you don’t have to be perfect - but lay it side by side with your homepage and see how well it relates. Is it enough just to have your logo and the right typeface? Only you can determine that.

Check out the great template samples from Campaign Monitor - perhaps one is close enough to your core brand elements to make some simple tweaking suffice.

 

6. SET UP A FEEDBURNER ACCOUNT TO CAPTURE & TRACK RSS READERS

Feedburner is a tool for managing RSS subscribers. To get started, you’ll need a Google account, then follow these steps:

1. Visit Feedburner.com
2. Add the URL of your blog and it will automatically find the RSS feed (most blog software like Wordpress will have created an RSS feed for your blog)
3. Go to the Publicize->Email Subscriptions section to grab the email form code
4. Click on the small RSS icon at the top-left to get the URL of your new Feedburner RSS feed (which will look something like this: http://feeds.feedburner.com/Unbounce)

Here are some more detailed instructions on setting up your RSS feed with Feedburner (and Wordpress).

Your goal is to get people to subscribe to the RSS feed of your blog, and there are two ways to do this:

• Place an email form (from step 3 above) on your blog (preferably at the end of every blog post) that asks people to subscribe to your blog.

• Put a bright orange RSS icon somewhere obvious on your blog (typically in the right-hand sidebar or at the top of the page) - and place a link on the image to your Feedburner RSS URL.

There are some cool free RSS icons at Iconspedia and more details about RSS concepts can be found in this post about RSS from Smashing Magazine.
 

Show off your subscriber count (when it’s high enough)
You can use your reader count to show social proof, but as you’ll hear me mention at various points in this post, you need to be a little bit patient. Only show how many readers you have when it hits a number that makes you feel proud or impressive. 500-1000 is a good ballpark level. When it reaches this level, you can grab the Feedburner Feedcount widget that doubles as an RSS subscribe link and social proof indicator.
 

7. GATHER EMAILS FOR A PRODUCT LAUNCH

If you are about to launch a new product or service (particularly an online one) you should be gathering leads (typically email addresses) so that you have a base of interested people to market to leading up to your launch and at launch time.

Getting the lead
If you don’t ask, you won’t receive. Create a simple coming soon landing page that asks for an email address so that you can notify people when you launch. Here’s an example:

Tips for an effective coming soon page

• Have a clear and simple statement about what your product offers.
• Offer a free gift in return for the email (such as an ebook that provides some expert advice related to the types of business problem your future customers are looking to solve). You can place a link to the file on your confirmation page - or you can set up an autoresponder via your email service provider.
• Give people some motivation to enter their email. If you’re going to have a beta period, ask people to sign up to be a part of your beta team and state that there are only x spots available. Making it exclusive will appeal to early adopters and beta geeks that like to be at the front of the line. Remember Gmail invites? There’s a new startup called LaunchRock that lets you create a viral “Launching Soon” page in minutes.

8. SET UP WEBMASTER TOOLS

Google Webmaster Tools provides you with detailed reports about your pages' visibility on Google. Such as when you are getting 404 errors (pages not being found), and who is linking to your site (which is good for some of the link building exercises we’ll get to later on). It’s also a good place to verify that your XML sitemap has been submitted correctly and that your pages are being indexed (so people can find them).

Follow these steps to get up and running:

• Step 1: Set up an account (you’ll need a Google account)
• Step 2: Add your site

• Step 3: Verify your site. To do this you will be asked to upload an HTML file to your site or to add a short code snippet to your homepage. Once you’ve done this you’ll get a happy green checkmark when Google sees what you did.
• Step 4: Create an XML sitemap. This tells Google what pages are on your site, so that it can go index them (it won’t index them all - it’s just picky that way). There are a couple of ways to do this depending on the type of site or blog you’re running. If you’re using Wordpress, you should install the Google XML Sitemaps plugin which will generate it automatically for you. Alternatively you can use a different generator to produce one (after you enter your site URL).
• Step 5: Add your sitemap. Once your sitemap exists, you need to tell Webmaster Tools where it lives on your site. This is typically something like http://www.yoursite.com/sitemap.xml.

• Step 6: Get in the habit of checking in once per month to look at stats and spot any errors. It’s also a good QA task to do after you make any changes to your site, in case you broke something in the process.

Watch a simple video introduction to GWT that covers some of these steps and more.

9. RESEARCH AND DEFINE YOUR CORE ORGANIC SEARCH KEYWORDS

This is a massive topic that would usually be taken up by at least one chapter of a book, but as I’m trying to keep it short and give a noob style overview, I’ll simplify it to one of the core purposes behind how and why you’d choose some of your core keywords.

The core organic search keywords (or phrases) are what you want to optimize your pages for so that people searching for those terms will find you. There are two main components at play here: optimizing your pages for these keywords (making the content on the page relevant to the keywords), and getting inbound links to your pages with link anchor text matching (or semantically related to) the keywords - which tells Google that someone else recognizes you as an authority on your subject.

As with all of the SEO tips I provide here, you will find much more detail elsewhere on the SEOmoz blog - and hopefully in the comments below if I get anything wrong :)

To quote Rand:

“Chances are that at launch, you won't even be targeting many of these searches with specific pages, but if you build the list now, you'll have the goal to create these pages and work on ranking for those terms.

As you're doing this, don't just choose the highest traffic keywords possible - go for those that are balanced; moderate to high in volume, highly relevant in terms of what the searcher wants vs. what your page/site offers and relatively low in difficulty.”

And see this post for more tips - Choosing the Right Keyphrases

10. SET UP A GOOGLE ANALYTICS ACCOUNT

Your first analytics task is to set up a free Google Analytics account. There are paid analytics services available, but when you’re getting started, Google Analytics is the best tool to use.

Watch this simple video for help getting your account set up.

11. ESTABLISH CONVERSION GOALS AND FUNNELS

Conversion goals are the actions you want your site visitors to take. Examples of conversion goals are:

• Account signups
• File downloads
• Newsletter or RSS subscriptions

To get started, examine your website and make a list of all of the actions you’d like to track. Then you need to add these goals to your Google Analytics account. If the actions are based on a sequence of steps, you need to set up what’s known as a funnel.

Read this brilliant guide to goals and funnels or watch this video tutorial. If you want to take a look at some more advanced examples of goals that you can track, Web Analytics World wrote a good post on 10 Must Track Goals.

Once you have your goals and funnels set up, you can add them to your dashboard for easy access (discussed later on in #20).

12. ANNOTATE IMPORTANT EVENTS IN GOOGLE ANALYTICS

When you get traffic spikes (from a great blog post, PR event, press coverage etc.) add an annotation note into Google Analytics so you can remember the reason for the surge at any point in the future. Not only is this good for historical tracking, but deeper analysis of the data during these spikes can point to potential opportunities and future direction decisions - if you can recreate events that produce a high degree of success then you can make a business case with analytical backing.

In this example you can see the effect that my last SEOmoz guest post and a mention in a post by Rand shortly afterwards had on our traffic.

How to add an annotation
Adding annotations is easy, either click the small gray drawer handle below the chart to open the notes panel (and click the “+ Create new annotation” link), or you can click directly on a node (blue dot) in the chart and click the link there (as shown in the image above). For further instructions and some good suggestions about the types of events to record - read this post on making notes with Google Analytics.

NOOB INSIGHT: Adding these notes tells a great story of the events in your company’s history. If you make it big, you'll be seen as a hero for recording it all for the giant posterity poster that gets put on the wall just before you get bought out for billions.

 

13. START A CORPORATE BLOG & GIVE YOUR KNOWLEDGE AWAY FOR FREE

Rule #1. To do marketing, you need to have something to market. This is especially true when it comes to content. Creating a corporate blog provides the following benefits:

• It gives you something to talk about and share
• It allows you to transparently share your knowledge and begin the process of establishing you (and by association your company) as a leader in your space
• It keeps your site fresh. This is an important trust factor as it tells people that you’re actively working and “out there”.
• It extends your reach (other people will share your content if it’s good)
• It provides a base for organic search marketing

Read this post to get some inspiration for types of blog post that you can add to your calendar.

Wordpress is the most popular blog platform and you will find a detailed guide to getting started quick at http://onenightsite.com/ (note that some of the content is a bit out of date - but the steps are still relevant).

NOOB INSIGHT: Blog from the start - Don’t wait until you have a launched product to start your blog. Start it on day one and try to write about things your future customers will find beneficial.

14. SUBMIT CONTENT TO SOCIAL HUBS

Getting traffic when you’re starting out is often the biggest challenge new companies face. To get a traffic boost, write a great blog post and submit it to social content sites such as Digg, Reddit, Sphinn, SERPd and Mixx. The community then votes for your post if they like it. If you can get this right it’ll be a source of valuable traffic.

Each site has a different audience and naturally likes different types of content. The best way to learn is to see what types of content are being consistently voted up and try to shape your own ideas to fit the desired format. This could be using the right structure (such as a list post - x ways to blah blah) or including an infographic (discussed below).

NOOB INSIGHT: Don’t submit crap for the sake of it as it won’t get any votes and you risk being booted from the system for flooding it selfishly, and don’t only submit your own content. Try to become a useful and generous member of the community by submitting other great content you find.

15. BOOKMARK YOUR CONTENT ON DELICIOUS

Delicious is a social bookmarking site that lets people keep their bookmarks in a consolidated online location (as opposed to being stored in the web browser on your computer). Bloggers, researchers, PR marketers (and general users) use Delicious as a research tool to uncover great content.

You should get in the habit of submitting all of your content to Delicious and tagging it with relevant keywords so that people searching for content will find you. Social proof plays a role here once again, as the number of times your content has been bookmarked is displayed (giving people a reason to believe it’s quality content once the number climbs). For this reason you’ll want to set up your blog so that others are prompted to bookmark your content (which helps them remember you and bumps up your bookmark count too).

Here’s an example of searching for the tag “landingpages” on Delicious:

Here you see search results broken down by bookmarks I’ve made myself and the highest ranked results from the rest of the community (along with a count showing how many people have done it in total). It also shows what tags have been used to classify your content, which you can use to explore further or just gain some insight into how your readers are describing you.

In month 2 we’re going to make some architectural decisions to focus your organic search efforts, set up reporting for your key business KPI’s, establish a communication path for your new email subscribers and start growing your Twitter network. We’ll also learn how to get your blog readers to share your content for you and get organized with an editorial calendar.

 

16. BUILD A FOLLOWING ON TWITTER

You will gain followers over time by doing the following things:

• Following other people (some will follow you back)
• Tweeting awesome things that your followers retweet (others will see that you rule and want to follow you)
• Tweeting things that people find via search

You can try visiting this link to follow relevant people - http://twitter.com/#!/who_to_follow (note: this might only work when Twitter has built up some knowledge of who you follow, who follows you and what you are saying - so you might need to wait a while before using this).

There are also directories where you can find people by category like twellow.com.
listorious.com has user generated groups of related people (called Twitter lists) that you can follow and be exposed to many people at once.

Use Twitter search to look for interesting conversational topics relevant to you or your business and follow some people that are currently chatting about them. Remember to stop and engage in conversation too - it’s supposed to be social.

NOOB INSIGHT: Don’t believe or listen to people who have “secrets for how to get a massive following on Twitter” it’s all bs.

 

17. SET UP A DRIP CAMPAIGN FOR ACQUISITION, EDUCATION & RETENTION

Not all of your leads (potential customers) are ready to commit when you first meet them. It can often take several interactions before people reach the point where they are comfortable to convert. This could be due to timing, need for extra research, or it could be that cluttered inbox’s or just being busy distracts people from taking the time to read your message.

This means that you want to stay top of mind so that when the time is right, you’ll be the company your leads think of. A great way to do this is to set up what’s called a “drip campaign”. A drip campaign is a series of emails that are designed to guide your prospects closer to your conversion goal. Typically, they are set up to send out emails automatically after someone opts in to receive your content (which is why they are also often called autoresponders).

Examples of how to attract someone to opt in to your drip campaign would be:

1. A checkbox to receive a series of tips when someone signs up for a free account for your online product/service. By providing some useful content you can keep your new signups in your sphere of communication influence and increase the likelihood of them upgrading to your paid plans or purchasing your products.
2. On lead gen landing pages for webinars or ebook giveaways, ask people to opt in for further free content on the form confirmation page

Drip campaigns for retention
A secondary and equally important use of drip campaigns is to offer the same instructional and helpful free content to customers who have already converted. This is where you move into retention mode and your aim is to maintain a lasting relationship with your new customers.

The benefit of getting people to opt in to your campaign is that you can specify up front what the content will be about and how often you’ll be sending it (honesty is key to keeping people on board - don’t send people a ton of emails that they’re not expecting).

Tip: Drip interval timing
For retention based campaigns there are a few ways to decide on the frequency of emails. If you want to keep the frequency a little higher at the start, try something like “[x] Get our top 7 daily tips for xxxxxxx” to ensure you can educate your new customers on the best ways to take advantage of your service and help to keep them coming back and logging in as they start their customer journey.

If you want to be able to encourage future purchases of other products you offer, you might want to ask someone to opt in to “[x] Receive advance notices of new products.”

For acquisition based campaigns, you want to stay top of mind, but not pester people, so try offering a weekly email with interesting content that people will want to read (and hopefully share).

Most email service providers have a drip (autoresponder) feature. Typically, they will be able to provide you with a sign-up form that you can place on your pages. Mail Chimp wrote an interesting article on the subject.

18. ARCHITECT YOUR BLOG FOR SEARCH - CHOOSE TARGETED CATEGORIES

When you set up the blog for your site, keep the key phrases you chose earlier in mind when creating your main blog categories. You will want to create content that’s targeted and focused on these primary categories so that the category pages (where all the posts from that category live) can be developed over time to be important hubs of content on these subjects.

Most category pages are just lame old listings of the 10 more recent posts. What you want to do is add extra static content to this page (to go with the ever changing dynamic list of posts) that makes it feel like a microsite in it’s own right (for the humans) and has lots of juicy keyword rich content for the search engines. Think about adding the following:

• An introductory block of content that serves to cover the basic theory of the subject category
• Links to the best posts from the category (posts get buried over time and you want people to find them consistently)
• Links to related and useful content elsewhere (don’t be afraid to link to other great people/resources), you’ll get more links back to your page if you are open, awesome and helpful

Set up a flat site architecture (based on your main categories)
Building hub category pages is great for IA (Information Architecture), overall user experience, and link building. But you do want to continue to add more horizontally oriented sections (more categories for long tail terms) so that your content spreads out in a flat way rather than a deep way. This is a more advanced topic, but the following blog post is well worth a read when you’re tackling architectural issues: http://seogadget.co.uk/solving-site-architecture-issues/

19. USE SEOMOZ CAMPAIGNS TO TRACK YOUR SEARCH PROGRESS

I’m going to plug what to me is the most awesome of the SEOmoz pro tools - campaigns (campaigns are just one of the many tools you get as a pro member - but the one that tipped me into handing over my credit card). If you’re going to invest any cash into your SEO activities, I’d start with this.

It’s a great way to organize all of your core keywords and keep track of how they are ranking in the search engines in a centralized place. It also crawls your site and spits out reports of what you’re doing wrong (awesome!) and here’s the best part: suggestions for how to fix them (more awesomer!).

If you’ve been here before you probably already know this - but cos of the power of social media and SEO a lot of you will hopefully be arriving here as first time visitors - so go check out the pro tools and the pro tour. There’s a risk free 30-day money back guarantee so not much to lose.

There, that’s my sales pitch over. Oh wait - go check out Unbounce.com too. Come on, I just wrote over 13,000 words here :) 

20. ADD CUSTOM REPORTS TO YOUR GOOGLE ANALYTICS DASHBOARD

Google Analytics is a powerful but complex tool. Most people don’t have time to spend hours digging into their data and typically only require a few key metrics for their reporting needs. The first step here is to figure out what you want to report on - perhaps pick your top 5 KPI’s (Key Performance Metrics), and create a report for each. The important part here is to add the report to your dashboard, this saves the setup and structure of your report “query” so that you can access the data from one overview screen whenever you need to produce a marketing report.

To get you started I’ll walk through an example. Here my goal was to produce a report showing “organic search from Google - excluding branded and paid search”. The reason I want to exclude branded search is that I want to discover how “true” organic visitors are interacting with the site without being influenced by those who had already heard of our brand (Unbounce in this example). I also want to exclude paid search (like AdWords traffic) so that I can report on that separately for a paid search ROI report.

Setting up a custom report

• Log in to your Google Analytics account
• Select Traffic Sources -> Search Engines

• Click on “google” as your choice of search engine (1) - then click “non-paid” to remove paid search traffic (2)

• Filter any keywords that contain branded search (the word Unbounce) and click "Go"

• Add the report to your dashboard. Now you’ll have instant access to this data any time you need it (without having to fiddle with any settings).

 

Now you can get a quick overview of the metrics you consider most important without having to repeat these steps every time.

21. SET UP AN EDITORIAL CALENDAR

One of the keys to a successful content strategy is having an editorial calendar. It can help keep you accountable to deadlines and organize your schedule. You’d be surprised at how few work days you actually have left when you account for everything else you need to do as part of your overall marketing strategy. Think of it like the content equivalent of a “bucket list” (which is a list of things you want to achieve before you die - and can be a great wake up call that you need to get off your ass and start doing things).

As a simple example, perhaps you’d set up your calendar to achieve the following:

• Write one weekly blog post for your corporate blog
• Write one guest post per month (I discuss what guest posts are and why they are a good idea in #36 below)
• Assign half a day each month to thought/research on what you’ll write about the following month
• Spend some time on LinkedIn answering questions
• Define some post types that are easy to produce on a recurring basis (perhaps a monthly roundup of interesting links from your industry vertical)

A brilliant approach to setting up a publish schedule is explained in a post by Russell Sparkman.

22. ENABLE SOCIAL SHARING MECHANISMS

Add simple sharing tools to your content so that people can easily share it. If you use Wordpress (or similar blog software) there are hundreds of great plugins that make it simple for people to submit or vote for your content on the social hub sites (discussed earlier).

Use sharing widgets for Twitter, Facebook and Delicious so that your readers can market on your behalf. These sharing buttons/widgets perform two roles for you.

• They make it easy to share your content
• They show how many people have done so - establishing social proof that helps visitors believe that your post is worth reading (if you have a sufficiently high number). Note, that negative social proof is as damaging as positive social proof is encouraging. If you’ve ever visited a blog that has 0 retweets on every post, you’ve probably had the reaction that it’s not worth your time to read. The best way to solve this problem is to write great content, and if necessary, bug your friends and colleagues to share your content to help get it off the ground.

Facebook Like button
http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/plugins/like

Facebook Like Box
Use this to try to get people to like your Facebook fan page. You can place it in your blog sidebar or use it as a required element of a contest entry to build your following. Tip: don’t use this until you have a few hundred fans to avoid the effects of negative social proof. Be patient.

http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/plugins/like-box/

Twitter Retweet button
http://twitter.com/goodies/tweetbutton

Delicious button
http://www.delicious.com/help/tagometer
(Tip: try the tall layout with graph and tags turned off to get the view shown here)

 Wordpress plugins for social sharing

Sexy Bookmarks provides a simple general set of sharing buttons - a good place to start (set it up to appear at the end of each blog post).

Month 3 introduces the concept of conversion rate optimization starting with focusing every page of your website on a single call to action and creating landing pages for great pay-per-click success. We’ll also start to develop your subject matter expertise by creating your first ebook (which you’ll use for lead capture later on).

23. TIME YOUR TWEETS

Figure out when your target consumers are most active online and schedule your Twitter time accordingly. You can schedule your tweets with a tool like Hootsuite or Timely if you’re not going to be awake or available at that time. Remember though, that Twitter is a social medium, so try not to schedule tweets for times when you’re not around to converse (if the tweet is conversational in nature).

As a starting point, 9am PST is a great time to tweet. Reason being that it coincides with multiple times when people are actively unfocused on work and might be hanging out on Twitter instead. This time encapsulates:

• The start of the work day on the west coast of North America (when people are dithering on their social media accounts while they drink their morning coffee).
• Lunchtime on the east coast (New York) - where many folks are whiling away their lunch hour online.
• The end of the work day in the UK

Dan Zarrella has some excellent insight into the best times to tweet.

24. SEGMENT AND CREATE LISTS

“Buy our peanuts! They’re the best in the world!!!”
Great, unless half of your target audience has a peanut allergy.

Segmentation is all about targeting your customers with communication that's relevant to them. It can be a fairly complex process to get your customers added into your email program based upon different demographic, psychographic and software usage behaviourial patters - and it’s even more difficult to ensure that you move people between lists when their status changes (from being a free customer to a paying customer, someone who has bought 5 items versus 20, or whether they would appreciate a birthday gift consisting of poisonous nuts).

Given the complexity of this subject, you have to start somewhere, so try to draw some distinction between your customers: either by procession through the sales process (new, interested, registered, purchased, etc.) or simply by free vs. paying (online service SaaS model) or male vs. female (for marketing a clothing line).

When you start thinking about a new email campaign, break it down by the different groups you want to target within your list and segment them into different lists or subgroups to make your communications more targeted.

The folks at 3WeeksToLive put together a great video about segmenting your email campaigns. (Note: it mentions my company too, but the part you want to pay attention to is the Mail Chimp email segmentation bit at the end).

25. ANSWER QUESTIONS ON LINKEDIN & QUORA

We'll get into some other ways to leverage LinkedIn later on. But to kick things off I want to talk a bit about using LinkedIn and Quora to draw people to your site. This is different that regular lead gen (where you are collecting emails). In many ways it's a mixture of organic inbound marketing and lead gen. By answering people's questions you can change someone with a question into someone who you have established a dialogue with - this lets you communicate with them in the future (usually through internal messaging systems).

Do this right and you’ll be come an established expert in your field. You want to be seen as someone who regularly answers questions and answers them authoritatively - never just give a meaningless response. Always be original and only answer if you have something valuable to say.

To find some questions to answer, log in to your LinkedIn account and visit this page.

Quora

Quora.com is essentially a Q&A site that lets you engage in conversation by answering questions posed by the community. Set up your profile to define your area of expertise and you can also automatically follow conversations on relevant topics. One of the benefits of Quora is that the content is all public and indexed by Google, making it an important avenue for establishing a nice trickle of organic traffic. This also means that your Google Alerts will pick up any mentions of your brand - alerting you to conversations you should be a part of.

To extend your reach on Quora, connect it to to your professional Twitter and Facebook accounts (shown in the screenshot below) - this will quickly build a following (just like on Twitter) so that people will be notified of your answers, potentially bringing them back to your site as a result (or at the very least keeping them in your sphere of influence and maintaining your position as a thought leader).

26. A SINGLE PURPOSE AND CTA FOR EVERY PAGE

This is a fundamental concept of landing pages - each page should be laser focused on a single objective. It helps your visitors to complete your intended goal, helps you to measure it more easily (only one conversion action) and keeps your optimization activities on track. It stands to reason that if you are introducing multiple products on your page, or if there are 50 links on the page, that some of your visitors will stray from your intended goal and do other things. They might also be unable to find the thing you’re hoping they’ll find.

A landing page that is dedicated to one story/promotion/offer/product, has one goal and one call to action, is going to convert your advertising traffic more effectively that most homepages that are designed with multiple users, goals, and traffic sources in mind.

TRY THIS: Check your landing pages
If you are doing any advertising (banners, PPC, email, social media) - look at where you’re sending this traffic. If it’s your homepage, count the interaction points and links and think about how you could reduce this by using a landing page. If you already have a landing page, read the content out loud. Does it tell a cohesive story about one and only one topic or does it wander.

NOOB INSIGHT: Your customers can't handle moe than one message at a time. Read this post on focused marketing messaging to learn more about simplifying your pages.

27. WRITE AN EBOOK

This is where content marketing, lead gen and email marketing start to make sense. We already establilshed that if you want to start building a list of business leads for email marketing, you need to do lead gen. To do lead gen effectively you need something to give away. Enter the eBook.

An eBook is typically a PDF containing a short piece of expert advice on a given subject that your potential customers would find valuable.

When starting out, it’s a great way to procure some interest, traffic (sharing via social media etc.) and a reputation for knowing your stuff.

An example process for writing content
When we started Unbounce, we had a 2 hour brainstorm session to gather ideas for an eBook entitled “101 Landing Page Optimization Tips”. I split the session into about 14 questions which each became a chapter of the book. After gathering all the post-it notes, I pulled an all-nighter to write the 27-page eBook ready for sharing and lead gathering the next day. It was a really important first step in establishing our reputation in the period prior to product launch. After a year of gathering leads, I decided to open it up without the lead capture and made it a blog post which you can read here: 101 Landing Page Optimization Tips

Make it clear that you want people to share it
Old school marketers were afraid to give anything away for free. This is antiquated thinking - you want people to share your eBook as much as possible to extend your reach. Make it very clear in the PDF that you encourage people to share it with their colleagues (put a note in the footer on every page).
 

UBER NOOB INSIGHT: Forget the lead capture!
Sometimes it’s better not to place any barriers in the way of your content. Sure, not capturing emails for your eBook will prevent you from being able to market to people, but the increase in downloads and exposure you’ll get can be worth it. People appreciate you not asking for anything in return which can improve your chances of positive word of mouth. Mix it up - gather leads sometimes, then try it without. 

28. CREATE A GOOGLE ADWORDS ACCOUNT

This is a boring and somewhat obvious step, but AdWords can be a complicated system to use. To get started, follow Google’s step-by-step guide to get your account up and running.

29. SEND TRAFFIC TO LANDING PAGES - NOT YOUR HOMEPAGE!

This is the number one lesson you need to learn when running a paid search campaign. Sending PPC traffic to your homepage (which 80% of people sadly still do) is like sending an intern to buy a left-handed screwdriver at a hardware store (think about it) - it’s stupid, makes no sense, is a waste of money and your gullible shopper will never find what they are looking for.

Why is your homepage bad? Because it’s designed for more general communication and naturally discusses more than one thing - which means it will fall short of matching up to your ad.

They say a picture is worth a thousand words, so you should check out this infographic which discusses the concept of why landing pages are better than your homepage for PPC.

 

In month 4 we shift focus away from Twitter to develop a presence on Facebook that's designed to convert visitors into fans. We’ll use landing pages to gather new business leads in exchange for your knowledge (including the eBook you wrote in month 3). We’ll use analytics and a scorecard to identify and improve the weakest parts of your website.

We’ll explore free and paid traffic by learning some advanced PPC techniques and starting to write guest posts on sites that can send you targeted customers.

30. CREATE A CONVERSION ORIENTED FACEBOOK FAN PAGE

As mentioned above, you need to have a fan page before you can claim your brand name on Facebook. To get started, create your fan page. The single conversion goal of your fan page is to get people to “Like” you (become a fan). In order to do this you want to do two things:

• Design a landing page to convince people that following you is a good idea and make it very clear how to do it (click that like button above etc.)
• Push non-fans to this landing page when they first arrive

Designing your Facebook landing page
It’s simplest to design a single image that is 520px wide to fit the dimensions of Facebook (you can get much fancier and interactive, but to get started, it’s easier to use an image). Below is an example of the default Unbounce Facebook page - it’s just a simple suggestion to click the Like button along with a few reasons why:

You can see from the Red Bull example below that they are doing the same thing:

Creating the tab for your Facebook landing page
Now that you’ve designed your landing page, you need a new tab in the Facebook navigation to contain it. Read this post to learn how to add a new tab using the FBML box app. Then follow these steps:

• Click “Edit Page” on the left-hand side of your Facebook page (below your profile photo)
• Click “Apps” from the new left-hand menu
• Click “Go to App” beneath the FBML app - in this case it’s called Welcome - FBML because my tab is named Welcome (you choose the name in the next step).

• Choose a name for your tab, and paste some HTML to show the image (note that you’ll have to upload the image you designed above to your server somewhere)

How to send non-fans to your Facebook landing page tab
To increase conversions, you want non-fans to see the lovely new conversion focused landing page you designed in the last step. To do this you need to set up the options so that non-fans are sent to the landing page tab you just created (above) - rather than the main Wall tab.

Click the “Options” link below the navigation as shown below:

Then click “Settings” and change the “Default Landing Tab for Everyone Else” to be the tab you created in the last step. In the example below, I chose “Welcome” for the Unbounce account.

Setting up a vanity URL for your fan page
You’ll also want your page to have a nicely branded URL (what’s called a vanity URL), such as Facebook.com/pepsi. To do this you first need to establish a fan base of at least 25 fans (which we’ll discuss in the “Seed some Facebook fans” section later on. Then visit http://www.facebook.com/username/ to choose your vanity URL.

NOOB INSIGHT: In the realm of conversion centered design it's not rude to point. So be brutal in your intent and SHOW & TELL people what you want them to do on every page that matters.

31. CONNECT YOUR BLOG TO FACEBOOK

A Facebook page with no activity doesn’t send a very good signal to the people you are hoping to engage. You can ensure a consistent stream of social content flowing through your news feed by connecting your blog to your Facebook account. A good way to do this is to use the Networked Blogs Facebook app. Add their app to your Facebook page by clicking the “Add to my page” link (shown in the image) and following the instructions. 

Now whenever you create a new post on your blog, a link to it will automatically appear on your Facebook wall. Aside from making it look busier, it's also an extra way that people will be exposed to your content on a regular basis.

32. SEED SOME FACEBOOK FANS

You should try to get an initial base of fans on your page for a couple of reasons:

1. Establish some social proof (so that it’s not the equivalent of an empty restaurant)
2. As mentioned earlier, you can’t get a vanity URL for your fan page until you have 25 fans (this is their way of preventing brand squatting without any fans or community interaction).

To do this, take advantage of your existing networks: invite your friends, family and anyone you have on your existing personal Facebook account. Get the rest of your company to do the same and you'll hit this threshold really quickly. As soon as you have 25 fans - visit http://www.facebook.com/username/ to set up your vanity URL.

33. GIVE SOMETHING AWAY IN EXCHANGE FOR CUSTOMER DATA

Now it’s time to start using your subject matter expertise to generate some business leads. You can offer up many things in exchange for data including:

• The eBook you wrote earlier on - if you’re following along properly :)
• A webinar registration
• A report such as a comparative study
• A whitepaper

You absolutely must use a landing page for this, to ensure that your visitors are focused and don’t wander off to do something else. If you need some inspiration for how your landing page should look, check out this great example of a lead gen landing page.

It’s very important to remember that any request for data is a barrier to entry, and your success has a direct correlation between the size of the form and the size of the prize. Is it a fair exchange? A/B testing the amount and type of information you are requesting can yield the optimal point of friction that balances quality lead data with a high quantity of leads.

NOOB INSIGHT: Are you ever going to fax someone? Didn't think so. Take all unnecessary form fields away and enjoy higher conversions. 

34. RATE YOUR PAGES WITH THE CONVERSION SCORECARD

If you have a page that you want to improve, spend five minutes answering the 20 questions on the conversion scorecard. When you have your final score you will have the two things you need to start testing and optimizing your pages:

• A baseline score to compare your design against (this is a thumb in the wind type checklist score that you are aiming to make as high as possible before you set your page loose on the public).
• A to-do list of items (all the ones you checked as “no” on the scorecard) to consider when creating a new version of your page.

It can be a fun exercise to have a few different people from your company rate the same page. Any differences in score will give you some good talking points (or an argument).

NOOB INSIGHT: If you are consistently scoring under 8/20 then I think you might need some expert help. Depending on your budget, you could try these fine folks to improve your conversion rates: Bryan Massey, Rich Page, Naomi Niles, Wider Funnel & Conversion Rate Experts.

35. DISCOVER UNDER-PERFORMING AREAS OF YOUR SITE

It’s time to do a quick review of your site to see which areas are working and which aren’t. The most important areas of your site were defined earlier when you set up your conversion goals and sales funnels (#11). Look at the reports for each goal/funnel and watch out for the following:

• High bounce rates on key entry/landing pages
• Poor conversion rates on any of your goals
• Exit points in your sales funnels

Your goal here is simply to use your analytics software to uncover insight into the weakest links and establish some priorities for your optimization efforts.

36. WRITE GUEST POSTS FOR OTHER BLOGS

Writing guest posts is the idea of submitting content to be published on another company’s blog and is one of the best ways to accomplish some important content marketing goals:

• Establish yourself as a thought leader (make a name for yourself) on sites that are frequented by your target market
• Extend your reach
• Get a valuable inbound link
• Increase your inbound traffic

Starting out can be tough as you need to have established yourself as a good writer before people will let you loose on their blogs/sites. For this reason you should focus on your own blog for the a while and ensure you are creating very valuable and high quality content. This is going to be your writing resume that will open doors in the future.

As you become a successful guest poster, it will be easier to gain access to the high profile blogs. If you’re an expert in a field of internet marketing then the YOUmoz blog concept is a great way to try and break into the guest posting arena. Reason being that the community will decide whether or not your content is valuable enough to be promoted to the main SEOmoz blog. This bypasses the often time consuming editorial processes that exist on many sites.

Guest post tip
Two things you absolutely MUST do if you’re going to succeed with guest posts are:

1. Write your very best content (don't just hack together an unremarkable or unoriginal idea)
2. Actively engage with the community in the comments - this is often where your post will really come to life as you’ll be addressing the questions of your readers and it shows that you care enough to stick around “after the show” to engage with people.

Analogously, guest posting is sort of like the collaboration in a music video - where you see “featuring <insert your name>” in the title. You achieve credibility by association which brings brand exposure and recognition to your name. Think of it as a marketing wingman who has a VIP backstage pass to your target audience.

37. ONE LANDING PAGE PER AD GROUP

This is a great tactic for comparing the effectiveness of your different ad messages. Ad Groups contain one or more ads which target a set of keywords. Often with PPC, you will have several ad groups to allow you to separate semantically related collections of phrases. As an example, for the last PPC campaign we ran here at Unbounce, we created ad groups targeted at the following concepts:

• landing pages
• landing page templates
• lead gen
• conversion rate
• a/b testing

If you drive all of your ad groups to the same destination page your chance of a tightly matched message will be greatly reduced and your quality score, cost per click and conversion rate will all suffer as a result. Using a separate landing page for each group allows you to tailor the experience and messaging for each ad group without compromising the others.

38. IMPROVE MESSAGE MATCH FOR A HIGH QUALITY SCORE

Hopefully you have now begun sending each ad group to a separate landing page. The next step is to optimize the message match between the ad and landing page to achieve a higher quality score.

[From Wikipedia] Quality Score is a variable used by Google, Yahoo! (called Quality Index), and MSN that can influence both the rank and cost per click (CPC) of ads.

The simplest way to improve your quality score is to ensure the primary content and headline of your landing page is very closely related to the phrases you are using in your ads.

An exercise in message match and quality score
To illustrate how much impact the content has on your quality score, set up 2 identical ad groups and point them to identical (but unique) landing pages. Then work hard to make the message match strong on one page and really bad on the other. Compare the quality score in your AdWords account to see the difference! 

 

 

In month 5 we switch our social efforts to professional network LinkedIn. We’ll look at ways to make the dull task of link building a little more organic and painless. Big this month is the introduction of A/B testing; we’ll use this to make your emails more effective and bring landing pages in to improve virtually every other aspect of your promotion specific marketing. Finally, we’ll learn how to gain buzz and industry exposure by writing about others.

39. START NETWORKING ON LINKEDIN

LinkedIn is a massive social network based entirely on business professionals. There are several techniques you can use to extend your reach, including:

Join groups on LinkedIn
LinkedIn requires that you have a mutually agreed upon connection with someone before you can message them directly. You can ask your own connections to try to connect you with others if they know them, or you can become a member of the same groups. Once you join a group in LinkedIn you have a direct communication pathway to EVERY member of that group. Now you can network freely. Just remember not to spam people.

Ask questions on LinkedIn
By asking questions, you can gain access to a large network of people, build your network and associate your brand with a certain type of content. Access the Answers section as shown below to begin. You are allowed to ask 10 questions per month on the free account and can target your question at specific job categories.

Start a group on LinkedIn
If you have the time to build your own group - find a niche relevant to your product or service and start a group of interested parties. By managing the group (and keeping it alive with interaction) you can attain some credibility in the space. This is like having a Facebook fan page based entirely inside a business network.

NOOB TIP: Just like an emoty Facebook fan page or an empty restaurant, an inactive group is lame. Check out this two part article on creating and managing a LinkedIn group: part 1 - part 2.

40. A/B TEST YOUR EMAILS

Some email providers allow you to run A/B split tests on your emails. This is a great way to find out the types of trigger and branding your customers respond to. It’s often tempting to aim for exciting subject lines but more than often simple works better (and does a better job of avoiding spam filters). At the end of the day, testing allows you to see what works best.

There are many things you can test in your emails including:

• Subject line text
• Day of week
• Time of day
• The “From” name

Read this excellent article on email a/b testing written by Mail Chimp.

41. LINK BUILDING

Link building is sooooo awesome. Wait a minute, no it’s not. It’s the dullest job anyone involved in SEO can ever do. Sadly it’s also uber important to your success. In a nutshell, you want people to link to your website, ideally with keywords strongly related to the subject matter you are talking about.

One of the biggest reasons content marketing (such as having a great blog) is so important is that you have a higher chance of people linking to your content based on the topic of the post, rather than just your brand name. Ranking #1 for your brand name is critical, but usually quite easily done. It’s the other keywords/phrases that you chose earlier on that you want people to use as the anchor text when linking to you.

For example, the first line below gives my site some love for the term “landing page examples”, whereas the second gives more weight to the brand name.

Check out these awesome landing page examples from Unbounce.
Check out these awesome landing page examples from Unbounce.

So there are two important aspects to a basic approach to link building.

1. Write awesome/inspiring/useful/funny content that people want to link to
2. Figure out who is linking to you and optimize the links

Here’s how to find and optimize the links:

Step 1: Discover inbound links
You can set up Google Alerts on your brand name, website URL, and topics related to your business. This allows you to discover conversations or mentions that are happening around the web. It’s important to jump into these conversations quickly to add your expertise and increase the odds that readers of the content will proceed on to your site. You’ll also benefit from building relationships with the writers of the blogs/content you are interacting with.

You can also discover inbound links by checking Webmaster Tools, but the most reliable place to check is the Yahoo Site Explorer.

Add your site, then click explore and hit -> InLinks. It’s the best way to figure out who’s linking to you, which leads into part 2 where we optimize these links.

Step 2: Optimizing inbound links
Schedule a monthly audit of all the sites that are linking to you. You can do this by trawling through your Google Alerts as per step 1. Then make contact with the author of the link (often someone who wrote a blog post mentioning you) and politely ask them for a favour: to change the anchor text in the link to something that will help your organic search results for your key terms. This is way better and more legit than the lamo old-school link exchange requests that spam artists send to you.

 

42. A/B TEST YOUR LANDING PAGES

If you’ve ever had a boardroom (or family) argument about design direction or page layout (button color, messaging, logo size, use of video, amount of text) then you’re not alone. We’ve all been there and most often it’s the boss who wins the argument.

A/B testing allows you to remove conjecture from these types of decision and is the basis for any conversion rate optimization strategy. It let’s you pit different pages against one another in a contest or experiment to see which performs (converts) the best.

There are many tools available that aim to make this process simple:

• Google Website Optimizer (GWO) - requires that you have some technical chops to set up scripts throughout your pages, but it is free
• Visual Website Optimizer (VWO) - a visual alternative to GWO and also includes some advances features like heatmaps/clickmaps
• Optimizely - similar to VWO it lets you make testing changes in a visual environment
• Unbounce (disclaimer: I’m a co-founder) - dedicated to creating and testing new landing pages specifically, whereas the other solutions listed are targeted more at testing (rather than creating) pages

You know you want to run a test, but what exactly should you test? A little bit earlier (#34) we used the landing page scorecard to help you figure out what you should be changing on your page. Refer back to this when you conceptualize and design an alternative page for testing.

NOOB TIP: If you aren't using standalone landing pages yet and don't really know how to make a landing page that converts well you might want to read HOW TO: Create a landing page design concept in 10 minutes.

43. TRY A 5 SECOND TEST

Another great way to do a gut check on your landing pages is to run a 5-second test. The theory here is that most visitors only spend about that much time on your page before deciding to stay or leave. In other words, you have to get your sales pitch in one ear and hopefully not out the other in a fraction of the typical elevator ride (where an elevator pitch is more like a 30-second spew).

To run the test, find a relevant guinea pig (ideally someone from your target market who hasn’t been exposed to your brand before) and sit them in front of a computer. Flash your page up on screen for 5-10 seconds then take it down again. Ask the user what the page was about. If they didn’t “get” your value proposition or understand what the page is asking you to do, then it needs to be simplified.

Cool tool: FiveSecondTest.com lets you run these tests online in front of their user base.

NOOB TIP: Remove, rinse, repeat
To improve your page, you need to simplify it. Try removing as much text as you can while leaving the purpose intact. Add some whitespace for clarity and ease of visual browsing. Use a clear and succinct header (this the most important thing for this type of test). Then try the test again (with a new set of subjects) and see how many more people “get” the page than before. 

44. WRITE ABOUT OTHERS TO BUILD RELATIONSHIPS

Here’s a simple but effective tip. By writing about others - and giving them a nicely optimized link - you will place yourself on their radar and garner some goodwill in the process. There are four main ways that people will become aware that you wrote about them:

• If you are linking to a blog post of theirs, they will often be notified of the link by their blogging platform (Wordpress etc.)
• If they have Google Alerts set up for their domain or brand name they will see your article
• When you share a link to the post via social media, include their name (@them via Twitter for example) so that they notice
• Email them directly to tell them that you wrote about them

This is a great way to establish relationships with other companies or develop rapport with important online influencers.

A Side benefit of writing about others
If you’re lucky, and are creating positive and interesting content about another company, they will join in the promotional process by sharing it with their network - thereby extending your reach and bringing in new potential customers. Remember to have a call to action at the end of your blog post to maximize this traffic.

In our final month we get to some more advanced marketing techniques. We’ll learn how to be plugged into live conversations about your brand and business segment, how to utilize social contest rules for viral potential and how to get feedback from your customers right at the critical point of conversion. We’ll end things by segmenting every inbound marketing channel for improved measurement and optimization opportunities and learn about the power of infographics as a way to gather links.

 

45. STAY IN THE CONVERSATION: LEAVE TWITTER TABS OPEN FOR “LIVE” SOCIAL INTERACTION

What are the most important keywords that would spark a conversation about your business’s core purpose? These will often be very close to the keywords you choose for your organic search and PPC campaign strategies. Pick a few of these, plus your own brand name and open a new browser tab for each. Then do a search for that term in Twitter and just leave the search results open in that tab.

This allows you to be “always on” and catch the conversation in real-time as it happens. You’ll see that the tab title will be prepended with a count of new messages like this: “(x) Your term” as shown above. As soon as you see a conversation or comment occur, you can jump in and engage with people that are actively talking about you or your area of subject matter expertise.

NOOB TIP: Make it easy - Bookmark your favourite Twitter searches and add them to your browser toolbar for easy access.

46. CREATE A SOCIAL MEDIA CONTEST PAGE WITH VIRAL FEATURES

Contests are a simple way to gain some exposure for your brand. It’s essential to offer up a prize considered valuable by your demographic, whether it’s based on your product or service (a free year for instance) or a “toy” that your customers would like (an iPad etc.)

The viral nature of a contest is in part to do with the value of the prize, but also the manner in which you facilitate and enforce the sharing of your contest page.

A clever way to encourage sharing, is to make it part of the entry process for the contest. Examples include:

• Twitter “Tweet This” Box: Now as part of the contest entry, people can retweet your message and a link back to the contest page - and do it without leaving your contest page, driving more traffic to your contest and greatly extending your reach. This widget requires that you set up a Twitter @Anywhere app.

• Facebook Like Box: This allows you to acquire new fans for your Facebook page. It also helps to build your social proof by showing your fan count and optionally some photos of your fans. You can customize this widget and grab the embeddable code for it from the Facebook share section.

 For an example page, you can see a contest landing page I created last year.

47. LEARN FROM YOUR USERS USING FEEDBACK WIDGETS & LIVE CHAT

There are many ways to input ideas and theory into your optimization efforts: analytics, expert review, experience, and of course a couple of pinches of conjecture for good measure. What’s missing from this list? User feedback.
 

User feedback at the point of conversion
Why aren’t people converting? Why not just askthem? You can embed some simple feedback widgets on your page to do exactly that. There are two main types: survey tools that pop a little question up from the bottom corner of the screen, and live chat which lets you engage in a conversation. Both can provide insight into points of confusion that you hadn't thought of.

Conversion is all about reducing friction and barriers to entry, and every little improvement you make can make the experience better for the next visitor. As shown in the diagram, you can use the feedback to create an alternate version of your page for an A/B test.

NOOB TIP: Talk to your visitors
Add a survey widget (Olark, KISSinsights) or a live chat widget (SnapEngage) to your site or landing page and get some feedback. Then turn it off, build a new page that incorporates the feedback and run an A/B test. 

48. SEGMENT INBOUND TRAFFIC SOURCES

Most marketers use many sources of inbound traffic - especially if you’re super smart and are reading a post like this :) However, if you send your PPC, banner, social media, email and organic search all to the same place it can create the following issues:

• Harder to measure: you need to get pretty fancy with your analytics to understand how each source is performing
• Harder to test: you can’t optimize your page for one channel without affecting the others (which is a killer if your changes boost your email conversion rate but negatively impact your SEO ranking and PPC quality score)

The graphic below shows how using a separate landing page for each source of traffic allows you to tailor the content and message while simplifying testing and measurement. 

The results from a segmented approach to marketing can help you decide which channels don’t work (and should be canned) or how much you should budget for each channel to maintain an appropriate ROI.

 

49. CREATE AN INFOGRAPHIC

Infographics are exactly like they sound, graphics with information on them. Often presented in the form of stats, but really they can be any self contained unit of visual content. An obvious example is the one at the top of this blog post - although they’re not generally as gigantic as that.

Infographics have the benefit of being very popular and very sharable. People also bookmark them for reference, and people like to write about them and collect them into “roundup” posts making them excellent link bait.

Some examples of marketing infographics

• The 10 Best Infographics for Internet Marketing Pros
• 11 Mind-Blowing Mobile Marketing Infographics

How to encourage sharing and gain inbound traffic from your infographics
Follow these simple tips to ensure your infographics attain maximum exposure:

1. Use social sharing buttons (retweet etc.) on the page that holds the infographic
2. When someone clicks your infographic to see it full size, remember to repeat the social sharing buttons.
3. Provide an embed code, so that people know they can take it and use it on your own site (don’t be afraid of this - encourage it). The embed code also makes this very easy. Cut and paste.

Flowtown is great at this.

Designing an infographic
This is the hardest part. They can be very time consuming to do right and they need to communicate a strong and useful/entertaining concept. If you don’t have the design skills you can get a company like Column Five Media to design one for you.

50. GET SOME HELP FROM A PPC EXPERT

Now that you’ve got your feet wet with PPC, you might be a natural and are acquiring customers at an acceptable price. But if you find that the click through rate of your ads isn’t as high as you’d like (everyone would like a higher click through rate right?), then it’s worth considering bringing in some ad experts. Trada is a PPC marketplace where a crowd of experts can help you with your campaigns and the folks at BoostCTR “Guarantee better text ads or your money back!” So you’ve basically got nothing to lose and a lot to gain. Give it a try. 

GRADUATION DAY!!!!!!!!
Woohoo, you made it to the end. Congratulations and thanks for taking 3 hours to read all this! Also, apologies to your boss if it means you are now going to deliver your project late. Of course, if it’s marketing related then you can write it off as research and you’ll be prepared to do bigger and better things next time.

I hope you learned a lot from this course and that you can use it as a resource as you start or continue your journey from online marketing noob to internet marketing expert.

Remember to give a shout out on Twitter (using the hashtag #noobmarketing) and share this with your friends and colleagues. 

A FINAL NOTE - LET'S GET A COMMENT FEST GOING!
I know this was a really long post, but my hope is that it will help people:

1. By teaching them a few tricks, techniques and methods they didn't already know
2. See the daunting task of multi-disciplinary marketing as less scary
3. Gain a couple of advanced insider secrets that only usually come about through experience

If you have ANY questions about any step in the course, have at 'er in the comments and I'll do my best to answer.

Cheers
Oli

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Posted by richardbaxterseo

One of the earliest and arguably most important parts of the SEO process is keyword research. Keyword research helps you answer that all important question, "In what quantities do people use search engines to find the products and services on my website?". Your research process will ultimately govern the method you use to structure your website, inspire your content strategy and kick start your link building campaigns.

So, it's a bit of a shame that some SEO's don’t like doing keyword research. It’s data intensive, requires some heavy lifting with Excel, and, let’s be honest, at times feels a bit like guess work. We're reliant on data to make the right decision, and that decision could have consequences months if not years down the line for your SEO project.

This is a "give it up" post

For several years now, I have used a methodology for our client keyword research that I believe adds deeper, actionable insight in to the decision making process. You see, a list of keywords with search volumes is all well and good, but it’s not particularly actionable, is it? I’m going to show you part of a process that helps to change all of that.

Before we get started, I’ll make the disclaimer now – I believe in this process so much that I built a keyword tool that does all of this work for you. Obviously I’m going to give a nod to that point, but none of what you'll learn in  this post depends on using our tools.

What you need to know first

To follow along, you need to understand a key principle in my methodology. That principle goes a little like this:

To make keyword research more actionable, you need to be able to categorise, group and filter keywords. Deep insight into category based search behaviour can make your research considerably more effective.

That’s it! Now, let’s think about what I just said. For my example, I’m going to use an automotive / cars based analogy, (I love cars, though this concept works for nearly any industry!)

Imagine you’ve got a used cars website, and you want to know if there’s any potential search traffic in location based terms for popular car brands, like “used Audi in Birmingham” or “second hand Mercedes London”. If you wanted to determine the top, most searched for locations for keywords that contain known car manufacturer brands – you might have a problem. If you generate a lot of keyword data, how are you going to be able to group the terms into their corresponding keyword categories?

Here’s a basic example of what I mean:

At first glance, this chart looks like it’s been produced from a single list of keywords. It has in fact been produced with only 2 simple filters in a much larger dataset. “Brand” and “Location”. The data in this chart might help you decide in what order to target your keywords (and their variations) with content, or even justify an entirely new content type for your large scale dynamic website.

What I'm going to show you will teach you a way to generate your data first and sort it all out by categorising it later, and not just by “location”, or “brand”, either. Let’s get started.

Gather your keywords

Firstly, we need to build a keyword list. Let’s start by listing the sources of keywords you can get inspiration from, like Google Analytics, Wordtracker’s keyword suggestion tool, Wordstream’s tool, and my all time personal uber-favourites – Mergewords.com and Ubersuggest. If you’ve got access to PPC data, use that too.

Want some ideas on how to build a rich and varied keyword list full of potential opportunity? Using my example, I want to build a list of car manufacturers (“brand”) by UK City (“location”), and I’d like to compare demand for used vs new (“condition”). To do that, I’ll choose some of my favourite manufacturers, Porsche, BMW, Mercedes and VW.

Grab your list of cities and head over to mergewords.com

Yay! 2,376 new keywords. Now for the search volumes.

Get search volumes

So you have a few thousand keywords to gather search volume for. You’ve got a few options, one of those being an epic copy and paste mission via Google’s keyword tool . Don’t panic, it’s actually not that bad. You’d be surprised just how quickly you can collect a lot of keyword data, even manually, if you get your process right.

By using Chrome , you can build up a sweet downloads folder full of CSV files, 100 keywords at a time. A reasonable copy, paste and download mission can yield a great data set.

Obviously, this stage requires effort. For you savvy SEOs with development skills, you might want to consider writing a script to access the Google Adwords API. Freelancer.com or oDesk are good places to go to get a script written, too. I found a worthy solution in a script I had made by a freelance developer on Freelancer.com, from which I automated the keyword data collection process via Mozenda . Being able to gather data for around 50,000 keywords at a time really enabled me to do some interesting things, like capture 10 related keywords from the suggest API and run all of those through the search volume API, too. Big data for the win.

Create your categories

Ok, time for some Excel heavy lifting. We’re going to start by creating our keyword categories, and then use an Excel array formula to categorise each of the keywords in our data set. For our example, we’re really interested in filtering for keywords that have location, brand and “condition” based keywords.

Do bear in mind this is advanced Excel, and will require some problem solving on your part. Stick with it, it’s very, very cool.

Create a category table with headers for each of your category names and add “markers” in to each category:

Next, in a separate Excel tab, you’re going to need to build up your keyword search volumes table. Create columns for your keywords, search volumes and category names:

Next, the awesome bit. We’re going to use an Excel array formula to identify keywords that belong in a category by matching strings of text between our category markers and the terms contained in the keyword list. Here’s what a categorised list will look like:

And here’s the formula we use to make it happen:

{=IF(SUM(NOT(ISERROR(FIND('Keyword Types'!$A$2:$A$7,$A2)))*1)>0,P$1,"Non-"&LOWER(P$1))}

Where “'Keyword Types'![CELLRANGE]” refers to the category column we’re matching in the category table, “$A2” is our keyword, in this case “audi” and “P$1” is the name of our category column, in this case, “Brand”.

You’ll also notice that there are some curious curly brackets included in the formula. That’s what makes our formula work across an array.

What’s an array formula? “An array formula is a formula that works with an array, or series, of data values rather than a single data value.” – Chip Pearson

We’re using an array formula because we’re attempting to match values across a range of cells. Any one keyword marker string could appear in our keyword, so our formula needs to be capable of checking across a range of values. Array formulas can unlock an entirely new level in Excel, as my good friend Tom Szekeres taught me some time ago. They're just amazing! That. Is. All.

Putting the data together

Follow this step by step process to see if you can get your first categorised list of keywords to work in Excel:

1) Paste the formula into excel and highlight the part of the formula surrounded in red in this screenshot:

 

2) Click your category tab and highlight your category list. Press F4.

3) Press CTRL, Shift and Return and Boom! A categorised list of keywords – in our case any keyword that contains “new”, “used”, and “second hand”.

Why such an advanced approach to add to your keyword research methodology?

When you’re designing a brand new site architecture, or enhancing an existing one, justifying new content groups, changes to dynamic meta templates or defining keyword strategy decisions should always been made on the data. If you have the capability to work with large, expanded data sets, with a scalable categorisation approach, there’s no doubt you can make decisions a lot more confidently. I hope that with a little practice and perseverance, you will agree with me. Some example categories for your industry might include:

- Gender ("Men's", "Women's", "Girl's", "Boy's")
- Occasion ("Christmas", "Valentine's Day", "Easter")
- Location by Cities or States ("New York", "Washington", "New Hampshire")
- Colours ("Red", "Green", "Blue")

You've also got product groups and names, buyer intent (research, review, purchase) and perhaps even groups that directly reflect the position of a category page in your site architecture ("Tier 1", "Tier 2"). Cool huh?

What data should I use?

All of it. Everything you can find. As much as you can get your hands on. That’s the point. You might not want to rely solely on Google search volumes, and, if you can, you should build rankings data and analytics entries into your data set. All I can say is thank the gods for VLOOKUP. That’s another blog post though – if you want me to write it, shout out in the comments.

What should I do next?

Well, the next most sensible suggestion might be to analyse your data using a pivot table. Making pivot tables is a really easy way to quickly deep dive into your data across multiple data points. I wrote a pivot table tutorial (including how to make pretty charts for keyword research), the content of which is designed specifically for keyword researchers.

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