Whiteboard Friday - Architecture for Commerce with Dr. Pete »

Posted by great scott!

Dr. Pete Meyers of UserEffect drops by the studio this week to teach us some incredibly valuable tactics for e-commerce site architecture.

E-commerce folks know that once you get up to thousands (or even millions) of products, it can be difficult to make sure the bulk of your juice goes to your most profitable products, while still getting long-tail traffic for the rest of your inventory. Pete shares some great tricks for large-site architecture that will help you focus your traffic and rankings on your top items, while maintaining visibility for your whole catalog.

SEOmoz Whiteboard Friday - Architecture for Commerce with Dr. Pete from Scott Willoughby on Vimeo.

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How to Spam Blogs and Possibly Get Away With It »

Posted by jennita

Ok, so you’ve all read about The Best Spam Submission Ever which was illustrated ever so eloquently (and if you haven’t read it, please read it now… uhm well ok after you read this - it’s awesomely funny!). As the post mentions, we sift through many YOUmoz entries every day determining which ones to post to the site. Most spam is easily detected; such as the body of the post only consists of 1 or 2 sentences, or the title is obviously nothing related to online marketing (buy gold and silver online!). However every now and then, there is a spark of spam brilliance that makes its way through.

The other day I ran across this entry that had an odd title, but it actually seemed to have real potential. I opened the entry and at first glance, I thought "YAY! I have a good contender." There were multiple paragraphs, headings and even bullet points… this had to be legit, right? Not so much. I found myself reading the entire entry because I was so dumbfounded by the sheer brilliance of the whole thing. If this person had posted to a blog that automatically checks for spam entries, and auto-posts, this one probably would have made it through.

So the idea is quite simple. Take an excerpt of a book (or anything written I suppose), and add keyword rich links throughout! Essentially, make the post look as authentic as possible, without having to spend time writing a blog post. I’ve taken the idea and put together an example for you below. It’s not perfect, but it is damn simple!

<!– Begin Example Spam Post –>

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Her name is Esther; she is a war correspondent who has just returned from Iraq because of the imminent invasion of that country; she is thirty years old, married, without children. He is an unidentified male, between twenty-three and twenty-five years old, with dark, Mongolian features. The two were last seen in a café on the Rue du Faubourg St-Honoré. He was reading: Buy Gold jewelry and diamonds direct.

Just the beginning

The police were told that they had met before, although no one knew how often: Esther had always said that the man — who concealed his true identity behind the name Mikhail — was someone very important, although she had never explained whether he was important for her career as a journalist or for her as a woman.

The police began a formal investigation. Various theories were put forward — kidnapping, blackmail, a kidnapping that had ended in murder — none of which were beyond the bounds of possibility given that, in her search for information, her work brought her into frequent contact with people who had links with terrorist cells. They discovered that, women love gold necklaces and jewelry in the weeks prior to her disappearance, regular sums of money had been withdrawn from her bank account: those in charge of the investigation felt that these could have been payments made for information. She had taken no change of clothes with her, but, oddly enough, her passport was nowhere to be found.

• He is a stranger, very young, with no police record, with no clue as to his identity.
• She is Esther, thirty years old, the winner of two international prizes for journalism, and married.
• My wife.

Next steps

I immediately come under suspicion and am detained because I refuse to say where I was on the day she disappeared. However, a prison officer has just opened the door of my cell, saying that I’m a free man. A man who reads Silver and Gold Jewelry.

And why am I a free man? Because nowadays, everyone knows everything about everyone; you just have to ask and the information is there: where you’ve used your credit card, where you spend your time, whom you’ve slept with. In my case, it was even easier: a woman, another journalist, a friend of my wife, and divorced — which is why she doesn’t mind revealing that she slept with me — came forward as a witness in my favor when she heard that I had been detained. She provided concrete proof that I was with her and with gold necklaces on the day and the night of Esther’s disappearance.

I talk to the chief inspector, who returns my belongings and offers his apologies, adding that my rapid detention was entirely within the law, and that I have no grounds on which to accuse or sue the state. I say that I haven’t the slightest intention of doing either of those things, that I am perfectly aware that we are all under constant suspicion and under twenty-four-hour surveillance, even when we have committed no crime.

"You’re free to go," he says, echoing the words of the prison officer.

Conclusion

I ask: Isn’t it possible that something buy gold direct and diamonds really has happened to my wife? She had said to me once that — understandably given her vast network of contacts in the terrorist underworld — she occasionally got the feeling she was being followed.

• The inspector changes the subject. I insist, but he says nothing.
• I ask if she would be able to travel on her passport, and he says, of course, since she has committed no crime. Why shouldn’t she leave and enter the country freely?
• "So she may no longer be in France?"
• "Do you think she left you because of that woman you’ve been sleeping with?"
• That’s none of your business, I reply.

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<!– End Example Spam Post –>

Creative! Right? But, just think about this… if these spammers took a few minutes to actually think through and write a relevant post, they would have not only received exposure but they would have some SWEET links from SEOmoz as well. Plus, if the post is well-written and is quickly getting popular (thumbs up), you may even get promoted to the main blog… talk about exposure! I encourage you all to submit well thought out, relevant posts to YOUmoz. Submit entries you will be proud of showing to the rest of the community, and make sure the content is unique.

Every day we receive many spam entries for YOUmoz, which slows down the process of publishing the real, legitimate ones. This is a reminder for all our spammers out there: Real people read and publish these posts! You can stop spamming us, because at least for now, we’re smarter than you are. :) With that, I’d love to hear some of your best spam submissions!

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PS. This is my own made up spam example and was not taking from any of the actual spam we’ve received.

I used an excerpt from Paulo Coelho’s "The Zahir" and if you have never read his work, I highly recommend him.

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Top 10 Things the Microsoft/Yahoo! Deal Changes for SEO »

Posted by randfish

The search landscape is changing significantly this morning, and SEOs of all stripes need to pay close attention. I’m going to do my best to summarize the impact of these changes based on what we already know and interpret what’s going to change for the field of search engine optimization and what we, as representatives of our clients and our companies, need to know and do.

Background on the Deal

First off, a few background snippets from several of the sources on this topic - SearchEngineLand’s Live Blogging Coverage; TechCrunch; ReadWriteWeb; and the new MS/Yahoo! website Choice, Value, Innovation.

• The term of the agreement is 10 years
• Microsoft will acquire an exclusive 10 year license to Yahoo!’s core search technologies, and Microsoft will have the ability to integrate Yahoo! search technologies into its existing web search platforms
• Yahoo! will continue to syndicate its existing search affiliate partnerships.
• Microsoft’s Bing will be the exclusive algorithmic search and paid search platform for Yahoo! sites. Yahoo! will continue to use its technology and data in other areas of its business such as enhancing display advertising technology.
• Each company will maintain its own separate display advertising business and sales force.
• Yahoo! will become the exclusive worldwide relationship sales force for both companies’ premium search advertisers. Self-serve advertising for both companies will be fulfilled by Microsoft’s AdCenter platform, and prices for all search ads will continue to be set by AdCenter’s automated auction process.

In case that wasn’t quite clear, the big takeaway is that Bing will now power search on Yahoo! and Yahoo!’s salesforce will sell the premium (non-self service) search advertising for Yahoo!/Bing. Bing also gets access to Yahoo!’s core search technology and can, at its option, leverage that to help create more relevant results.

• Google has 78% of market share of paid search (direct quote on SELand from Microsoft)
• Bartz: Yes there are many Yahoo search employees who will be asked to take jobs at Microsoft. There will also be search employees who we look to help us on the display side. And then unfortunately there will be some redundancy in Yahoo. (Just a quick note; if you work in Yahoo! search, please email me - rand@seomoz.org - we’re hiring on the engineering team!)
• Bartz: Notes that when it comes to paid search, Panama is the provider in most international marketplaces for Microsoft already.

• Danny Sullivan: What happens to other things search like at Yahoo? What powered Yahoo News? What happens to the Yahoo Directory? Is Delicious search? And what happens to Yahoo paid inclusion?
  Bartz: We have full flexibility on what to do within our own sites. Paid inclusion, we’ll decide on that later.

• AdAge reports that ComScore shows Bing will now have a 28% market share when combined with Yahoo! search, though.
• ReadWriteWeb worried about this large list of services from Yahoo! that are under "search services." Yahoo! PR called them to say that "this is a consumer facing list of search-related services, like News Search and Map Search, but most of those are not or are no longer formally part of the Search Department." So, probably at least some of them are safe.

Search Query Demand Market Share

The search landscape right now looks like something between:

Market Share from the thousands of accounts served by their hit counter/referral tracking software
(note: I don’t know why it says 82% on the left and 72% on the right, but 82% appears more accurate when adding up all the other figures)

AND

Based on data from Comscore’s June Release

We’re somewhere between a market where Google dominates 65-82% of all search queries. When it comes to referring queries that point out from the engine’s properties (Google/Yahoo!/Microsoft not searching or linking to their own content), I believe Google’s closer to sending out 80-85% of that traffic.

What’s Changing for SEOs?

Note that some of thse are speculative, while others are direct and actionable. However, until the deal actually goes into effect and is publically accessible (which could take some serious time depending on regulators), my best advice is to be prepared (and take those steps that can ensure maximum benefit once the changes go live). Remember that Yahoo! said full implementation may lag up to 24 months (2 years) behind regulatory approval (which itself could take months), so you’ve got some time.

#1 - SEO for Bing is Worth Your Optimization Effort

Even if the lowest numbers are accurate, 15% of search market share is worth the optimization effort. Bing’s algorithm, while certainly an upgrade from Live.com still has a few noticeable preferences, such as concentration on keyword use in subdomains and root domain names (Google loves exact keyword matches, but Bing really likes any keyword placement in the sub or root). Bing’s core relevancy sometimes suffers from manipulative link patterns more so than Google & Yahoo!, though, they often do a good job surfacing alternative queries and instant answers.

Bing’s results are, by default, "richer" than those of Yahoo! and Google. Although Yahoo! will be controlling the user interface on their end, it’s likely much of that "richness" will make its way into the Bing results inside Yahoo!. Bing also surfaces only the top 5 results for many queries, meaning a higher concentration of clicks on those top results.

Bing’s traffic is, in general, also more likely to convert and click on ads. Whether this is a result of demographics or of how the engine frames information isn’t clear, though we may get more insight on that soon.

We at SEOmoz will certainly be doing more work to provide insight into how Bing ranks results and where it differs substantively from Google. You can go play around with results here or here. I strongly suspect there will be more SEO focus overall on Bing in both R&D and active practice.

#2 - We May Lose Yahoo! Link Data

The largest two providers of link information to SEOs today are Yahoo!’s advanced search queries and Yahoo! Site Explorer. If these go away, which seems likely with Bing, since Microsoft removed the link query operator’s functionality a few years back (and Google torched theirs nearly 5 years ago), we’ll be left with very few sources of link information. Obviously, SEOmoz itself provides Linkscape, but we’ll be likely to offer a slightly deprecated, free version of that tool if/when this happens. Exalead.com still does provide link data, though not as richly as Yahoo!

This change would likely see the rise of more propietary link indices as well as the breaking of a large number of internal and external tools that rely on Yahoo! for their link data. We may not know for sure for some time to come, but it may make have a substantive impact on the link research landscape.

#3 - PPC Consolidation

Right now, many companies and agencies exclusively use Google AdWords. I think both Microsoft and Yahoo! are counting on a lowered complexity and barrier to entry with only two major search engines making a compelling case that one should, at the least, participate in the two leading platforms for search. I suspect more people will buy ads from MSN AdCenter, which is likely to increase ad relevancy, quality and competition. The days of low cost traffic via AdCenter and Yahoo! Search Marketing may be nearing an end (unless market share slips so far that they become largely irrelevant, but that seem unlikely, at least in the short term).

#4 - Bing’s Webmaster Tools Are Important

If you don’t have an account with Bing Webmaster Tools, now is the time. Although not yet as robust as Google’s, Bing WMT is working hard to catch up and even surpass their rivals with features that will prove valuable for webmasters on all platforms. The data you get from Bing WMT will also be important for conducting better organic SEO campaigns on that engine and seeing how Google & Bing may view your site differently.

#5 - Yahoo! & Bing Local Become More Essential

We’re still not 100% sure of the status of local search - according the ReadWriteWeb piece, Yahoo! may consider this a "consumer service" and not part of core search. However, if Bing is serving up local listings in the search results (as they do now), Bing’s local registration is going to become very important for local businesses. Check out Bing Local and their local listing center in the near futuer if this impacts you.

#6 - Bing Will Get more Spam

With greater search share comes greater spam attempts. Google’s still a ways out in front in terms of catching and discounting manipulative practices, but Yahoo! has been a close second for some time. I’d expect that Bing will recruit a number of the staff and algorithmic work Yahoo! search has done on this front, but they should also expect serious spammer attention to be focused their way. The loopholes that Google’s closed will still likely be open on Bing for some time to come and spammers will use the chaos that comes from a merger to exploit these.

#7 - Bing Will Get Lots more Data

Bing’s going to know a lot more about you. Perhaps not as much as Google, but with Yahoo! analytics, Yahoo!’s database of profiles, Yahoo!’s behavioral targeting and their own research, Bing’s going to be a close second. This should, conceptually, help improve core search and may pave the way for greater advances on the personalization front, too.

#8 - Important Yahoo! Properties May Dissappear

As Danny Sullivan and ReadWriteWeb noted, we’re in some danger of losing stalwarts like the Yahoo! Directory, Delicious (which has often been seen as an alternative search play), Yahoo! Maps, SearchMonkey & BOSS (two of the best search apps out there). It’s still speculative, but by watching the activities inside Yahoo! over the next 3-6 months, we’ll probably get a lot more insight about who’s headed to the chopping block.

 #9 - Yahoo! Maintains UI Control for their Search Experience

This means that Yahoo!’s results ordering, layout, sidebars and searcher focus may continue to be unique from Bing, thus requiring that SEOs still pay attention to the differences in the two engines and optimize accordingly. It will be tough to know the extent of Bing’s integration until it launches, but there’s a lot of room for variation, which means complexity for SEOs.

#10 - Yahoo! Will Become a More Powerful Content Competitor

With Yahoo! out of the core search business, many people, myself included, expect them to focus even more on the content side of the business. That means properties inside Yahoo! News & Media Group are going to get more attention and more investment. If you’re competing with Yahoo!’s content now, that battle may get tougher in the future.

 

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I have no doubt that this quick analysis doesn’t cover every important aspect of the deal for SEOs, and definitely appreciate any comments you have that can help to provide further insight. Once again, the SEO field is proving that if you don’t like the weather, wait a minute.

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How Not to Request an SEO Proposal: An Epic Email Fail to 51 Top SEOs »

Posted by great scott!

Not but a few short days ago I had the distinct pleasure of being included on a list of 51 of the world’s top Search Marketers.  Alas, for this great honor I did not receive an award statue or a shiny plaque, not even an ornate certificate.  What I received was an email. A horribly executed email that would result in one of the most amusing email threads I’ve ever read, from some of the smartest minds in our industry.

What I’m about to share is a lesson in one fundamental rule: if you’re going to send an RFP to elite consultants, DO NOT simply CC them all in the same email…you’re about to see what will happen.  Names and URLs have been changed to protect the innocent and the guilty. All of the SEO’s are referred to as SEO1-SEO51, just as we were in the To: field of the email (I was SEO8)…those who feel like it can reveal themselves in the comments.

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UPDATE: This post originally contained an anonymous version of the RFP solicitation mentioned above, as well as the anonymous replies (mostly comical, some harsh) from a handful of the 51 SEOs included in the spam. 

I have opted to remove this content due to privacy concerns. While nobody was mentioned by name and no email addresses were shown in the post, in hindsight I don’t feel comfortable with my decision to re-publish email content without explicit permission from the authors, even if anonymous.  If any of the involved parties were at all offended by the inclusion of their responses, you have my deepest apologies. I’ve met with several of my mozMates and we’ve decided that this will be a general blog policy: with the exception of clear, unsolicited spam, we will not republish any private email communication without express permission from the correspondents involved.

I am leaving the comment thread intact because, as always, people certainly have the right to support, question, agree or disagree with what we write on the blog.  I’m sorry that the comments may seem a bit out of context to new readers due to the removal of the post content.  For those that did read the content while it was up, I would like to mention that the vast majority of the thread was not sent to the person who mailed the RFP, it was just good-natured joking amongst the community. The original sender only received four direct responses in the thread: two harsh, one comical, and one stern but fair.

Also, for readers who have contacted members of SEOmoz via email or Twitter requesting responses to this post, our responses will be posted within the comment thread.

-Scott

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What can be learned from this?  When you’re contacting people you want to work with, whether it’s asking for an RFP, marketing your consulting services, looking to partner, hell, even requesting a link, you need to not only know who you’re talking to, but show some respect.  Few things make people less receptive to you than making them feel like a number; like they have no individual value and that their skills and accomplishments are not appreciated.  Be personable, knowledgeable and respectful and you’ll get a lot further in this industry whether you’re a beginner asking for advice, or a company with a good-sized budget.

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What Makes an SEO »

Posted by randfish

There are lots of standardized definitions of SEO (see define query), but few that exist to define or distill the qualities that make a person a professional SEO. The way I see it, there are three ways a professional can be categorized and assigned - technical, self-constructed and peer validated.

Technical: An SEO is one who practices search engine optimization.

Self-Constructed: I practice search engine optimization as a significant portion of the professional work I undertake and am, therefore, an SEO.

Peer Validated: A community of peers in the SEO field has recognized this individual’s achievement and views them as qualified for the title.

In the SEO world, these are very informal and anyone is technically allowed to call themselves what they like (and though I’ll quibble later in the post with some self-titling, I don’t believe any regulation should exist). However, in many other fields, primarily those with a long-established history (lawyer, doctor, law enforcement, engineer, politician), external requirements are a neccessity.

That said, the SEO community appears to be growing in its formalization. Events, organizations, and external recognition, along with the growing value and importance of the practice seem, to me, to be the driving forces at work. I love this community and always have - it’s inspired me, carried me and given me so much that I can never repay enough, but I’d like to add a brief editorialization. It is my personal opinion that unless an individual has these three qualities, I would not personally peer-validate them as an SEO and would hope to be cast out should I not personally exhibit these:

1. Knowledgable in the Basics of Search Engine Operations (not just SEO, but the fundamentals of how search engines work)
2. Actively Practicing SEO by Influencing Change to Websites & Pages and Measuring the Impact
3. Consistently Formulating & Testing Theories About Metrics/Variables that Influence Search Engine Results

I’ve been a bit frustrated of late by the demeaning of our profession by those who do not take the practice seriously nor apply the craft with the respect it’s due. And, furthermore, I’m conflicted about those who’d suggest that our field or our practice should not embrace the principles above. It seems disingenuous, even intellecutally dishonest, to claim to "optimize" for search engines, and yet be lacking in knowledge, not actively practicing (and measuring!), or refrain from critical thinking, brainstorming, forming hypotheses and testing.

Am I too harsh? Should I be more lenient? Or, do we, as a community, want to apply some standards in peer validating those who claim the title of SEO? If so… Are these the right ones?

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Nudge: Lessons for SEO and Business »

Posted by willcritchlow

I recently read Nudge (Amazon US & Amazon UK), a book that got quite a bit of press coverage here in the UK after inspiring some political decisions on both sides of the floor.

Its core premise is that human decisions are not taken on pure economic terms (though economic factors do play a large part as presented in books such as Freakonomics and The Undercover Economist) (*).

The authors introduce a concept of choice architecture which is defined as differences in the way that decisions are structured or presented that can change the outcomes even while having no (or negligible) impact on the economic preferences of the chooser. The simplest examples of this that stuck in my mind were:

1. research has shown that people choose different amounts of dessert depending on where it is positioned relative to other food in cafeterias. There is no particular rational reason why you would want to eat more dessert depending on where it is positioned (indeed most of us would probably like to think we were immune to such manipulation) but it’s apparently a widespread effect
2. employees apparently save more as a proportion of their salary when paid every other week versus being paid monthly - even when their salary remains the same on an annual basis. The hypothesis presented for this effect is that people still budget monthly even when paid bi-weekly and therefore when they get two months a year with 3 payments they largely put them towards savings. Interestingly, I believe it much more common to be paid every other week in the US than the UK where salary payments are almost universally made monthly as far as I know (and where the tax system is set up to work that way)

Note that in most of these cases we cannot choose not to create a choice architecture. We have to present the choice somehow (assuming we are going to offer dessert in our cafeterias and that we are going to pay our employees!) and therefore we can’t choose not to nudge and we must simply decide how to nudge.

So what has this got to do with SEO?

Well, as I was reading the book, I couldn’t help referring their thoughts to my experiences. These are inevitably about business or SEO and so I thought I would write a post to outline the main themes of the book and highlight where I thought the ideas could be applied to SEO or SEO businesses. Since so many are about human weaknesses (or at least human effects) I have applied some to conversion rate optimisation (which is an important consideration when talking about traffic from search) since the search engines are generally not susceptible to human-based nudges. If you are concerned about manual reviews, I expect there is a lot you could think about to help nudge a human reviewer into giving your site a positive review, but that’s a subject for another day.

Before I get into that, I thought I would introduce one of the provisos the authors mention. They say that they believe in what they call Libertarian Paternalism. As they acknowledge, one or other of those words is pretty much guaranteed to annoy you (which one will depend on your politics!). Their view is that nudges shouldn’t incorporate the removal of any options (the ‘Libertarian’ part) - so if we are nudging someone towards a decision we believe will be good for them (as they argue we should - the ‘Paternalism’ part!) we should still allow them to make ‘poor’ decisions if they wish.

It strikes me that this is a kind of unenforceable guideline and in reality we are simply better prepared by thinking about the effectiveness of a nudge than about whether it is libertarian or paternalist. Does this make me a black-hat nudger?

Without further ado, here are the main themes from the book and my thoughts on their application to SEO and SEO businesses:

More choice = better?

There has been a widespread movement (particularly in the public sector) to believe that more choices are always better than fewer choices. This comes from the economic argument that since any larger set of choices includes all the options you had under a smaller set of choices you can’t possibly be worse off (since you can still choose any of the old options) and so you must be at least as well off (and possibly better off) with more choices.

Nudge argues that this isn’t actually in keeping with human nature and that in fact people can be overwhelmed by choice and either choose to do nothing or choose poorly when presented by many options.

Anchoring

The first of many human frailties presented in the book, anchoring comes from the tendency of the human brain to grasp for patterns. Even when we know full well that a number is random, it can have an effect on our estimates of other numbers. For example, if you ask someone the last three digits of their credit card number and then ask them to estimate some other number that falls in a similar range (such as the year of Attilla the Hun’s attack on Europe), people with higher numbers at the end of their credit card (e.g. 987) guess higher than those with lower numbers (e.g. 123) even though any rational person knows full well that there is no relationship between the two numbers.

Using this information

I imagine that this kind of psychology knowledge could help make linkbait more effective. There are many forms of linkbait that rely on some element of discovery or surprise. By initially anchoring expectations in a different direction, the surprise experienced when the actual answer is revealed can be heightened. Since surprise is a common reason for passing along content ("did you know?"), this increases the linkability. Next time you are writing something a bit surprising as linkbait, try anchoring expectations in a different direction first.

It is a well-known negotiating ploy to get someone thinking about a particularly high number before (pleasantly) surprising them with a number much lower (but still perhaps high). I’ll leave you to construct your own ways of using that information! As you do so, remember another effect which comes from framing. People generally behave differently to one price option being "premium" versus the other compared to the second option being "discount" versus the first. The prices could be exactly the same, but the way they are framed can cause real effects.

One other area where I think it is important to think about this is in time estimation. We are all bad at estimating time I think. Whether talking about development resource or time for effects to be realised, we need to know that the other person’s expectations are affected by anchoring. If you want a generous estimate, get them talking about something that’s going to happen next year before asking how long it will take. If you want an ambitious estimate, talk about what you’re doing this evening. If you want an accurate estimate, um, well, don’t we all?!

Availability

People tend to over-weight things close at hand (whether it be personal experiences over those they have heard about or more recent events over older ones).

Using this information

When trying to get someone to do something (whether it be link to you or buy something from your website) you would do well to get them in the frame of mind of a time they did something similar and it went well. In linkbuilding terms, this might be mentioning another outbound link they have on their site already that is similar to the one you seek. In CRO terms, it might be designing your UI to resemble bigger more popular online stores that everyone has experience of using.

Remember that the weight people put on experiences tends to decrease as you move from experiences they had to experiences their friends had to experiences they just heard about. This is why trials and low-commitment business tactics work well - once people have tried something first-hand, they are far more likely to trust statements made about it than they were before trying it.

Representativeness

An unwieldy name for an unwieldy concept. This is the common error that says that if you have in your mind what a class of things should "look like" then anything that "looks like" that description is likely to be classified by your unconscious mind as being one of those things. The most famous experiment demonstrating this bias is as follows:

"Linda is 31 years old, single, outspoken, and very bright. She majored in philosophy. As a student, she was deeply concerned with issues of discrimination and social justice and also participated in antinuclear demonstrations".

People were presented with that description and then asked to estimate the probability of possible futures for Linda. Included in the list of options were "bank teller" and "bank teller active in the feminist movement". Many people apparently ranked the second as more likely than the first (despite the obvious logic mistake preventing that possibility).

Using this information

I haven’t really thought of any good applications of this bias. I’d be interested to hear yours in the comments. One other common manifestation of the representativeness bias is the inability for many to believe that outcomes of many things are random because they don’t ‘look’ random. This has an impact on the presentation of data in reporting. It is important that you give clients or bosses tools for assessing real trends in numbers like conversions or traffic because otherwise there will be a strong chance that random fluctuations will be seen as real trends - causing painful future issues!

Optimism and confidence

People are generally more optimistic about their own future than they should be. When asked the chances of their business failing and about the chances of "businesses like yours" failing, business owners tend to give drastically different answers (sometimes as much as 0% vs. 30% when asked about the next year).

Using this information

This is more one to avoid common pitfalls over (like the representativeness bias) than one where I have come up with good ‘uses’. Remember that bosses and clients will believe their project / linkbait / website implementation will have a greater chance of success than equivalent projects even with no good reason. Beware!

Gains vs. losses

It is quite well known that most people fear losses far more than they value gains (compulsive gamblers can sometimes be found swapping these two traits).

Using this information

This effect leads to an even more powerful one which is a preference for the status quo (no, not necessarily a preference for Status Quo). It is only one of the reasons why people prefer things to stay the way they are (simple inertia being one other). But it leads to powerful effects - if you can just get someone to take an action that changes the default then it is likely that you will continue to benefit.

In linkbuilding - if you can convince someone to put a link somewhere for a short period of time (perhaps while a topic is particularly relevant or *gasp* with a one-off incentive) then it is very likely that link will remain there for some time. Equally if someone subscribes to an email list or starts a subscription, they will tend to remain on it for longer than they might have guessed they would.

Mental accounting and fungibility

I love the word ‘fungible’. It has nothing to do with mushrooms. It is a property of things (like money) where any one is as good as any other (you have no rational reason to prefer one $20 bill over any other $20 bill). Despite being aware of this, many people don’t treat money as being fungible. They mentally account for things ("the money in that account is for my rent, while the money in my wallet is for dinner") - many people are amazingly reluctant to take money from the wrong account even for very short periods of time.

Using this information

When trying to get people to give you money, you want them to be buying your service from one of their bigger ‘mental pots’ of money. When you’re selling SEO, you are often far better getting a piece of the PR or advertising budget than you are just making an argument that there should be an ‘SEO budget’.

In a similar way, you may have more luck getting a link from a page that doesn’t have advertising on it than one that does (while the two are relatively fungible to you, the seller may think of them differently).

Priming and the measurement effect

Much like the anchoring bias discussed above, people behave differently if you simply ask them in advance what they intend to do. Asking people the day before voting day if they intend to go to the polls tomorrow increases the chances that they actually will.

Using this information

Charities know this effect well - many donation requests are preceded by questions about how much you care about different issues. If you are in a situation where this would work in your favour when linkbuilding, it can be a very effective tactic. Start a relationship with a survey and follow-up with a request (where one of the survey questions asked if they would do the thing you then request). This only works if they feel they "should" do it - use sparingly! I think it is closely related to the herd effect where people want to do what others are doing.

You can use the herd effect through social reinforcement in so many ways. It is why signs of others having liked a story make it more likely to be shared by others. You could consider this the next time you are embedding social bookmarking buttons on a post. At the white end of the scale, make sure you don’t include any that will make you look unpopular. At the darker end of the scale, have a think about what might make you look more popular.

Tendency to balance options

Apparently people tend to balance options put in front of them - if you ask someone the proportion of their savings to put into stocks and the proportion into bonds (simplified example) they will tend to go for a 50:50 split, but if you instead ask the proportion to put into US stocks, UK stocks and bonds, they will tend to go for 1/3 in each. Weird huh?

Using this information

I think this has more applications on the business side of things. When you are discussing budgets, be aware that this is going on. For those who don’t naturally allocate much to SEO, try to present it alongside a big budget item (such as design and development of a new site) rather than as one item among many (design, development, testing, PR, PPC etc.).

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I’ll end with a brief summary of when Nudges work best. They work least well when presented with a decision that we make regularly for small stakes and understand well (and where the reward / cost comes close to the point of decision). It’s hard to Nudge someone to choose a flavour of ice cream they like less over one they like more. Nudges work best in the opposite case - decisions we make rarely for large stakes without understanding them well and where the benefits are not felt for some time after the decision point - this is when we don’t get good / immediate feedback about our decisions (or don’t get a chance to practice) and so we fall back more on our ‘gut feeling’ - which is very "nudgeable". Notice how much this sounds like the typical board / CEO making decisions about SEO spending!

As with so many things, Homer said it best (from p.140 of my copy of Nudge):

Canyonero salesman: Okay, here’s how your lease breaks down. This is your down payment, then here’s your monthly, annnnnnnnnd, there’s your weekly.

Homer: And that’s it, right?

Canyonero salesman: Yup…. oh, then after your final monthly payment there’s the routine CBP, or Crippling Balloon Payment

Homer: But that’s not for a while, right?

Canyonero salesman: Right!

Homer: Sweet!

I hope you’ve found this interesting. I was fascinated by the ways we all trade off non-economic things in our decision-making. I’d be interested in hearing others’ examples in the comments below and also other applications of Nudges in SEO or CRO.

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(*) note that I don’t think anyone is these days claiming the early economic arguments that everything is evaluated in financial cost / benefit trade-off terms. Rather the argument goes that people have their own definitions of ‘utility’ which can change depending on mood, current situation etc. and that they generally act to maximise utility. What Nudge is saying is that you can even go beyond this and find differences in decision-making out of proportion to the utility differences (or even where there is no measurable difference in utility).

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Do Former Search Engine Insiders Make Great SEOs? »

Posted by randfish

You may have noticed recently that there’s a trend of folks who leave search engines crafting their own startups. It made me wonder - how are these individuals doing with the SEO on their own sites? Have they engaged a secret formula that the rest of us don’t know to achieve incredible results? Or are they languishing in poor accessibility and SEO tactics gone awry?

Since many of these individuals are friends and colleagues of mine, I won’t pass judgment (and I certainly won’t be comprehensive in my SEO reviews - got lots on my plate), but I do want to share them with you and get your opinions & feedback.

Eytan Seidman & Oyster.com

Eytan worked for Microsoft’s Live Search and was often the public face of the search quality team at conferences. You can read an interview with him here re: Live’s efforts in the search arena. Clearly, Eytan’s a guy who knows search and should get SEO. His new startup, a project with his brother Ellie, focuses on creating the web’s most high quality, in-depth hotel reviews.

The Good:

• The reviews themselves are some of the highest quality, most in-depth content I’ve seen in the travel world, and possibly on the web as a whole. Gorgeous photos with great descriptive text that really takes in the detail - I’m not sure I’d ever even need that much knowledge about a hotel, but I can imagine it’s a picky honeymooner’s best friend.
• Internal link structure looks solid, and it appears Google’s already grabbed tens of thousands of pages - site:oyster.com
• Titles are great - hotel name + geography | Oyster Hotel Reviews. It gets all the relevant keywords in nicely without looking spammy.
• Good breadcrumb navigation that helps with any potential keyword cannibalization (and is helpful for users)
• Excellent internal linking in content (whenever another hotel/region is referenced, Oyster links to it in context)
• Ranking #80 for "Hotel Reviews" and rising fast :-)
• Smart, descriptive meta descriptions
• Good link profile, primarily from press and blog coverage
• Not afraid to link out to external sites in review (and no nofollows on editorial outbounds, either)
• Great architecture means that the right pages rank first for the desired query. For example, even though there are lots of pages about "Fisher Island" in Miami, the destination guide ranks first (fisher island site:oyster.com).

The Bad:

• Exact match domains are so powerful in the rankings, I’m a bit surprised they went with "Oyster.com." That said, there’s never been a truly big success in technology that had an associative name - Microsoft, Sun, Oracle, Google, Yahoo!, Facebook, Twitter, etc. Maybe YouTube would be the closest to a billion+ exit that actually had a somewhat descriptive name.
• Oddly, the top button links have no anchor text - they’re done with CSS, so there’s nothing between the <a> tags,
  e.g. <a href="/dominican-republic/hotels/" id="headerDominicanRepublic" class="headerButton"></a>
• I’m not 100% sure, but it looks like not all of the gorgeous photos can be indexed based on how they’re displayed/linked-to. Google’s got a couple hundred in their image search index, so perhaps I’m just missing how they’re getting efficiently crawled.

Avichal Garg & PrepMe.com

Avichal worked in search quality and web spam at Google, so he’s got a good idea of what makes sites succeed in the engine. Although not publicly facing, as the CEO and founder of PrepMe, a site that aims to provide online tutoring to kids in high school for test prep and class assistance, he’s going to be much more in the limelight (particularly as PrepMe has getting exciting levels of traction).

The Good:

• They’re already on page 1 of the results for high demand queries like "online sat prep," "online act prep" and  "psat prep courses"
• They’re employing nofollows on unimportant internal links… (not sure if that’s technically good or bad, but I’ll bet Avichal knows what he’s doing)
• They’ve got a great set of long tail content in the PrepMe Answers section - Google appears to be doing lots of indexing of these (155K results) and many of them rank well, too.
• Titles, URLs, internal link structure, etc. is all very clean and simple (and well-optimized)

The Bad:

• A lot of page have the same title tags - prepme answers - for example
• It looks like their sitemap file has a limited number of pages listed
• Not that it’s a huge deal, but both prepme.com and www.prepme.com resolve (though they do use absolute URL links to ensure that deep pages aren’t being linked to on the non-www version)

Jeff Weiner & LinkedIn.com

Jeff started at Yahoo!, where he led acquisitions of search technologies from companies like Inktomi, AltaVista & Fast. After a stint as EVP of Yahoo! Networks, he moved to the VC world before taking the lead role at LinkedIn. Jeff’s a very smart, talented guy and LinkedIn is clearly benefiting. They were one of the first to adopt Google’s rich snippets throughout the site and have fixed a lot of duplicate content/canonicalization issues related to user profiles.

The Good:

• As I mentioned, their use of rich snippets in Google is awesome (note they grey descriptive text in result #7 for "Rand Fishkin"). I think they could do even more there (photos especially), but Google may want to keep that only for their own profiles.
• Strong basics - titles, meta descriptions, page structure and content
• The use of the member’s name throughout the page in headlines, e.g. "Rand Fishkin’s Summary, Rand Fishkin’s Experience, etc." gets plenty of targeted phrase use without being spammy
• They allow direct links out, without nofollows - a very, very wise choice and an incentive to maintain updated links in your profile
• People directory - example "A" - these are terrific navigation systems for engines and they do a really solid job of minimizing all other links on these pages
• Interestingly, like PrepMe, they continue to employ nofollows - I think this is a positive (doesn’t waste crawler bandwidth even if it is "evaporating" juice), although I’d probably recommend link consolidation even more.
• Brilliant use of individual name directories, e.g. John Bennett to help searchers find the right person

The Bad:

• They’re disallowing a lot of stuff in the robots.txt file that might be earning links (like /search*). As we’ve noted in the past, blocking pages rather than simply noindexing them, prevents juice from passing.

There are lots more that I won’t dive into detail on, but could be interesting to review as well.

Barnaby Dorfman & Foodista.com

Barnaby headed up search at Amazon’s A9 (back when they were building their own engine to compete with Google/Yahoo!/etc). He’s now the founder and CEO at the Wikipedia of Food - Foodista.

Patrick Li & Raptr.com

Patrick previously worked on Google’s datacenter infrastructure, then on the launch team, where he audited new products/features before they went live. Raptr’s online games platform is fairly addicting and they’ve got some impressive rankings.

Bret, Jim, Paul, Sanjeev, Ana, Tudor & Gary at Friendfeed.com

A large number of Googlers at this social, real-time startup. Friendfeed clearly wants to capture people search the same way LinkedIn, Twitter & Facebook have, and they’re doing a decent job of it.

Mark Lucovsky & VMWare.com

Former Microsoftee and Googler (where he was an engineering director), Mark’s now with VMWare, who still has a way to go before they’re in the top 100 for "cloud computing" although that’s unlikely to be Mark’s sphere of influence.

Vanessa Fox & JaneandRobot.com

Vanessa was the creator of Google’s Webmaster Tools platform and her new company, focused on making SEO accessible to developers, has held a number of industry events. Obviously she’s kicking butt. :-)

Tim Cadogan & OpenX.com

Tim  was a search executive at Yahoo! before moving on to lead OpenX, an ad-serving platform. There may not be a great need for SEO here, but Tim probably knows some folks who can help if they do want to leverage organic search to drag in more targeted leads.

There are many other examples, but I think this is a decent start. If you’ve got others to share, we’d love to hear about them in the comments.

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Whiteboard Friday - The Future of SEO »

Posted by great scott!

Thanks to a suggestion from @links4legends we’re strapping on our jetpacks for a bit of SEO prognostication this week. Rand offers up his take on what the future will bring for search marketers.

Will classic, content-based SEO still rule the SERPs?  Will the social graph drastically alter how results are personalized? What about query volume and traffic data: will they become major signals in the algorithms?  Will vertical search portals begin to steal users from the big three, or just get gobbled up? Will opinion-based theories die a fiery death at the hands of data-driven testing?

Who knows?! The "answers" to all of this and more await you in this week’s Whiteboard Friday (cue squiggly dissolve and space sounds).

SEOmoz Whiteboard Friday - The Future of SEO from Scott Willoughby on Vimeo.

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This Week in Search »

Posted by Sam Niccolls

The following is a compilation of some of the most newsworthy, as well as the most useful stories in and around the world of search over the last 1-2 weeks.

• LifeStyle Lift’s Fake Reviews: Andrew Shotland wrote a great post about LIfeStyle Lift, a cosmetic surgery company in need of a serious brand facelift themselves after being exposed for ordering employees to write fake reviews. Ethics aside, LifeStyle Lift is a great example of how costly such shady practices can be for a brand when they get caught. Now, even after paying a $300,000 fine, LifeStyle Lift still has their fare share SERP cleanup to do around their brand.

• Checkbook Journalism: Gawker Founder Nick Denton said “We don’t seek to do good. We may inadvertently do good. We may inadvertently commit journalism. That is not the institutional intention.” Whether you agree with Denton’s approach, or the idea of incentivizing writers and news sources with page view compensation, at the very least, Gawker Media’s approach to news is an interesting one.




• Google’s Microsoft Moment:  Just over a week ago, Matt Cutts gave a lengthy response to a great post made by Anil Dash about Google’s culture. And though it remains to be seen whether or not Obama’s antitrust cop, Christine Varney, will pursue antitrust actions against Google, each post offers an interesting perspective on how the present is a critical time for Google to prescribe to their ‘don’t be evil’ mantra.
• Anonymous TechCrunch Post on Search Regulation: With a scathing review of the search industry TechCrunch’s guest author sparked quite a bit of controversy the other week. But regardless of whether or not you are of Michael Gray’s opinion, it is hard to read this post without numerous objections. This is why the author of the anonymous post deserves the uniquely German honor of ‘Deutschebag of the Week.’  Ein herzliches Dankeschön!

• 5 Search Tools you May Not Know About: I enjoyed using the Bing-vs-Google tool when first I discovered it. And now, after reading Matt McGhee’s post in Search Engine Land, I have a handful of other nifty SEO tools to add to my SEOmoz tool set. Not the least interesting of which is SearchMuffin, which shows Google SERPs in any city, regardless of what location you are searching from.
• Perform Better with AdSense: In a detailed blog post that is informative for both newbie and experienced AdSense partners, Smashing Magazine outlines just about everything you would ever need to know about AdSense. This is a particularly great Saturday morning read for anyone looking to increase AdSense revenue to their website or blog.
• Sharing Links: Inside Facebook reported using AddtoAny data that Facebook is the most popular way to share links on the web. According to this data, 24% of all links shared on the web are shared though Facebook. In other words, according to AddtoAny, more links are shared through Facebook than are shared on Twitter and e-mail combined.
• URL Shorteners and Affiliate Programs: Amazon has stopped giving affiliate commissions on visits via Twitter and Facebook, but where should the line in the sand be drawn? In his post, Dave Naylor talks about the subject of affiliate commission on URL shorteners.
• The Dark Side of Entrepreneurship: Jay Goltz of the New York Times addresses the sobering realities of starting a business through the story of an electrical engineer turned CEO in Chicago who loses it all. This story offers an interesting, and timely juxtaposition to yesterday’s news of Amazon’s blockbuster acquisition of Zappos.
• Google Autocannibalism: A ridiculous yet amusing concept that outlines an autocannibalistic model where Google could be made to eat itself. Get money, buy stock. Get money, buy stock. Ahhh… I see, it’s so simple. It’s in the computer.

• Google Mini Appliance: Michael Cottam outlines his frustrations with Google’s webserver in a post that proclaims the appliances are overpriced, short lived, and little more than disposable search engines. And thanks to Michael’s reminder at the end of his post, we now know what to link to.
• Forecasting ROI for SEO: If you like flow charts or you have a management team that cares what kind of return you are getting on your SEO spend, the diagrams in Gab Goldenberg’s post do a great job of outlining how to calculate ROI on your SEO.
• AdWords Demographic Bidding: AdWords is now enabling advertisers to control ad spend based on user demographic data. Several hoops have to be jumped through to implement GA tracking codes, but there is now an AdWords interface that allows for demographic bidding.
• 30 Non Google ways to get traffic to your website: From shopping search engines to Yahoo Answers, SEOptimize illustrates that there are more than a few ways to drive traffic to your website other than traditional SEO.   
• Death of London Startups: Paul Carr’s post in The Guardian talks about how the geek trip Robert Scoble, Craig Newmark, Sarah Lacy and others made trip to London breathed ephemeral life into a dying startup culture. But in dramatic fashion, Carr concludes that the London startup scene is dead. Is this true? Any thoughts on this from our friends across the pond?
• Employers Should Not Give Bonuses: I had strong initial objections to Alfie Cohn’s article. But the New York Times author (ear muffs, Rand, ear muffs.) offers some compelling reasons as to why rewards will likely not lead to higher performance.
• The Psychology of Restaurant Menus: Last month Jeff Sexton of FutureNow wrote a post where he took examples of real world billboards and described how marketers could incorporate effective billboard tactics into online banner ad creation. Liz Kay’s post in the Baltimore Sun about what advertisers and consumers can learn from the manipulation of restaurant menus is a similarly interesting read.

And last, but certainly not least, there were some great entries on YouMoz over the last couple weeks. From MichaelC breaking down dynamic landing pages to Roadies addressing brand management through the example of United Airlines, there was a wide array of interesting posts. Keep ‘em coming this week!!! We are always looking for standout posts to promote to the main blog.

1. Dynamic Landing Pages: Optimizing for Natural Search by MichaelC
   
2. 7 Reasons Why You Should NOT Use Google Analytics by Nicki Hicks
   
3. Choosing Your Brand — Two Case Studies of Different Methods by Raaboo
   
4. SEOmoz: It’s like a Digital Florida by Ciaran
   
5. Dear United, Here’s Your Chance for Awesome Reputation Management by Roadies

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Have an article or blog post that would be great for next week’s post? If so, send me a direct message on Twitter or tweet about it and include @samniccolls in your tweet.

 

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High Impact/Low Effort SEO from a Developer’s Perspective »

Posted by jennita

When was the last time you had a heated discussion with your developer? Or better yet, when was the last time they rolled their eyes at you when you asked them to make some sort of change to the website? My guess is that it probably hasn’t been all that long. Or has it? A higher probability is actually that you work with some wicked smart developers who blow your mind away with their sheer awesomeness!
 
Recently, there was a post over on YOUmoz about the naivete and misconceptions that developers have about SEOs written by cyberpunkdreams. He had gotten into a conversation with a group of developers who thought that SEOs were spammers and were only out to get bad sites at the top of the rankings. The dialogue on this topic is interesting, because at the same time that developers are thinking we’re a bunch of spammers, we, as SEOs also have misconceptions about developers in general.

Sure, there are many developers out there who may not specifically focus on SEO, nor do they have a keen knowledge of everything that goes into ranking well. But they are no dummies. They often are very analytical and can think through problems or come up with excellent solutions to issues. They can create an algorithm that will take 8 different pieces of data from the database and build dynamic title tags with length restrictions, keyword usage, and anything else you want to throw at them. Without our technical counterparts, our jobs would be pretty boring, since half of the tasks we need completed, we can’t do on our own.

With all this said, I decided to run a little test and find out what developers felt were the top 5 changes they could make to a website to provide high SEO impact and value with a low level of effort. I set out on a mission to contact developers through Twitter, Faceboook, email and IM. As I’m writing this I’m wondering now if they wondered what the heck I was asking them this question for. Little did they know they were going to be quoted in this post. :)

Top 5 SEO Changes

This list is derived directly from the responses I received via Twitter, Facebook, IM and email from 13 different developers. With that, here’s a list of ways developers can optimize their site for highest impact, with the lowest amount of effort, from their perspectives.

1. Title Tag
   This was overwhelmingly the top response by most of the developers. Many of them specifically mentioned building dynamic title tags, and not just hand coding each page.
   Reference: Best Practices for Title Tags

2. Canonical URL Tag
   Multiple people mentioned the canonical URL tag which I found very exciting. In the SEO world we all got super giddy when this tag came out, and it’s great to know that it has surfaced as an important feature for developers as well.
   Reference: Canonical URL Tag - The Most Important Advancement in SEO Practices Since Sitemaps

3. Permalinks
   Get your URLs right! I built dynamic URLs for years that were not user friendly at all. There are so many options to rewrite and redirect your URLs, and many CMS’s are getting more and more SEO savvy.
   Reference: Dynamic URLs vs. Static URLs - The Best Practice for SEO is Still Clear

4. Robots.txt
   Although the robots.txt file is there to help a site owner make sure that the right areas are being crawled, if it set up incorrectly it could do more damage than it’s worth. The theme from the developers was to make sure that you don’t have "Disallow: /" or are in some way blocking access to relevant areas of the site.
   Reference: Managing Robot’s Access To Your Website - From janeandrobot.com

5. Image Alt Attribute
   For me, this should actually be moved further up the list. This is a big one, as we’ve been talking about lately that keyword rich (not spammy) image alt attributes correlate with higher rankings. Now before you go and get all huffy, puffy about this one, watch the Whiteboard Friday about Correlation, Causation and SEO.

WOW! Blows your mind right? Nope. Not so much. Developers actually DO live on the same planet with SEOs. In fact this list might very well have come from any one of us. Developers are knowledgeable. Be sure to give them the credit they deserve for knowing the things you don’t. The beauty in the SEO/developer relationship is that they shouldn’t have to know everything you know, and you shouldn’t have to know everything they know. :)

Also worth noting, but didn’t make the top 5 list, were dynamic meta tags, internal linking, valid X(HTML), URL Hierarchy and fixing bad navigation.

A Few Noteworthy Quotes

There were a few responses that I received that I wanted to call out specifically. Whether they were spot-on, a little "out there", or downright kooky, I felt they deserved their own recognition.

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Ken Jones - This is by far my favorite response, and OH SO TRUE!

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Cesar Serna - Cesar is well-known in the SEO industry, so I thought perhaps it would give me some street cred if I posted his well versed quote which I received via IM (see how cool I am!!). :)

"From a developers point of view implementing Canonical Tags is the simplest website update for SEO impact. It’s one line of code and yet it signals to engines what your preferred indexed URL should be instead of leaving it up to search engines to decide algorithmically."

Actually, I completely agree with his response as long as we can prove that the Canonical URL Tag is really working. I’ve seen it work well on some large client sites, but have also heard about people running into various issues with it.

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Ben Hendrickson - Ben really needs no introduction, and all I can say is "yea… what he said"

"At the beginning of Anna Karenina the observation was made that happy households are all alike, but unhappy households are all unhappy in unique ways. The same, I suggest, is true for SEO. Whatever is screwing up the SEO of a site ought to be fixed. But although most sites are doing something wrong, there isn’t any single thing that most sites are doing wrong.

That said, there are things more commonly wrong, although listing them looks a bit like a list of SEO best practices that you are very aware of.

1. URL hierarchy. Frequently URLs will derive from the structure of one’s code or CMS, and this will be different than is optimal for users and search engines. Fixing this is sometimes best done with another layer of abstraction like mod-rewrite.
2. Lack of a one-to-one mapping between urls and pages (e.g. canonicalization issues).
3. Uncrawlable ajax content.
4. Bad site navigation links.
5. Title tags that do not reflect each pages’ content, and so on down the list of usual suspects."

See, this is the caliber of developer we have here at SEOmoz. Booyah!

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Mel Gray - Mel is another of our "wicked smart" SEOmoz developers.

"Two words: "pop ups" People LOVE pop ups.

But seriously… I have a site that was ranking number 2 for a particular internet meme. I put 0 effort into developing it. I just would upload images from time to time. But it still bugged me that I lagged behind this site. I changed the title tag and added a brief meta description with keywords for the meme (no stuffing) and as soon as the SERPs started reflecting the change, I was #1."

See our staff would never give in to 2nd place!

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Jason Swihart - Actually Jason’s original response was "Develop good content." which I pushed him on a bit asking whether that was really a developer’s role. This prompted his final response:

By the way, Jason used to be my boss many eons ago when I was doing mainly ColdFusion development.

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As many mentioned in the YOUmoz conversation, it’s essential for Developers and SEOs to work together. Really. We need each other. Developers usually love to learn, so if there’s something they don’t know or understand, educate them. But remember that educating them may mean to point them in the right direction and let them figure it out on their own. Challenges keep those analytical minds working!

How do you work with your developers? Have you found a certain technique or method for working together productively?  I’d love to hear your take on this list and whether you feel these changes really are the most impactful with the lowest level of effort. How about the developers out there. Do you feel you were aptly represented? What steps do you take to work effectively?

Photo Attribution:

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Company Blogging: Whose Voice Is It? »

Posted by Dr. Pete

We bloggers talk a lot about finding our voice, that mystical quality that is uniquely us and yet somehow resonates with a wider audience. What happens, though, when your blog gets written by a group of authors? How does a company or community blog find its voice and not just devolve into a schizophrenic mess?

I’d like to tell you that there’s some secret recipe, but honestly, I think that the most successful companies recognize that they can’t completely control their creation – they have to let it grow and evolve naturally. Intuitively, they somehow recognize the following three realities of collective blogging:

1. Voices Naturally Emerge

Some people, whether they’re just natural writers, strong personalities, or great at what they do, naturally stand out in a crowd. This makes some companies nervous, and they automatically try to rein in those voices, restricting their authors to rigid rules and standards. Too often they end up destroying whatever quality made those writers worth reading in the first place, exactly the quality that would help them build an audience and be successful. Good companies recognize that strong voices naturally emerge, and they play to that strength.

2. Voices Create A Chorus

Even as strong voices naturally emerge, the best company blogs are still group efforts. Without forcing a structure on them, order somehow appears out of chaos. Like any group, a successful company blog finds a common language and culture, develops in-jokes and popular themes, and starts to feel like a conversation. Companies that try the hardest to force this structure are usually the ones who end up destroying it.

3. Voices Eventually Change

Finally, successful companies recognize that voices change – people grow, take on new roles, and eventually move on. We’ve seen it here at SEOmoz, most recently with Rebecca leaving, but it’s happened before that and will inevitably happen again. When it does, that voice is always missed, both by the readers and the collective – the chorus falters a bit, but sooner or later, a new song picks up where the old one left off. It doesn’t mean that the efforts of past authors are diminished or unappreciated, simply that the collective is strong enough to find its voice again.

Adding My Voice to The Mix

Now that I’ve got you reading, I can admit that this post is really my way of making an announcement while trying to not make it all about me. I’m going to be taking on a new role here at SEOmoz, working with the staff to help support the community and some of the PRO functions (such as Q&A). Consider me your unofficial community organizer.

A Brief Re-introduction

Although some of you know me from the community and YOUmoz, Rand suggested that a brief re-introduction might be in order. It all started in the little town of Fenton, Illinois – Population: 137. Ok, maybe I can skip ahead a few years. When I was 9, I bought my first computer, a TRS-80 Color Computer (if you’re wondering, it was 1979). I immediately learned that coding was in my blood. Back then, I was so hardcore that if I made a mistake while typing in a program, I wiped out all my code and started over. Also, I didn’t know that you could edit just one line. Give me a break; I was 9. In case you were wondering, the 9-or-so year-old me is in that picture above - 3 pints of invisible fairy dust to the first person who can guess which one is me.

I started publishing code at 15 and ultimately decided to major in Computer Science. Due to a great intro class I had in high school, I decided to double-major, and went on to get my B.S. in Computer Science and Psychology. When I graduated in 1992, the internet hadn’t really taken hold and my itch to learn more about the human mind had just barely been scratched, so I decided to do my doctorate in Cognitive Psychology.

Long story short, the internet virtually exploded while I was in grad. school to become a household phenomenon, so I finished my Ph.D. and went to work for a startup in 1997. We went through the usual identity crises, from ISP to ASP to niche developers for the tradeshow industry, and I found myself going from being one developer in an abandoned warehouse to Executive VP of a $2M company and staff of 16.

In 2005, I finally decided that it was time to take the next step, and so I started my own company, User Effect, focusing on website usability. I wanted to get back in the trenches with clients and finally put everything I had learned to use. At the end of 2006, a client convinced me to attend my first SEO conference (SES Chicago). I had dabbled in SEO since the late 90s, but was always turned off by the snake-oil side of it, especially in the early days. What I learned at that first conference really opened my eyes. I started to see how search was an essential part of the user experience – you can’t tell where people are going or help them get there if you don’t understand where they’ve been.

I had the good fortune to see a certain Rand Fishkin speak at that show, and I learned about a community and blog called SEOmoz. In the 3 years since, the Moz community has become not only one of my favorite learning platforms, but a home away from home, and the launching point for dozens of friendships. I’ve gotten a lot out of this community, and now I hope to be able to give just a little bit back.

Letting My Voice Develop

As I start to contribute more directly to the site and become part of the collective voice, I’ll always try to remember that the community is much larger than myself. Of course, that doesn’t mean I’ll stop being me. As a long-time community member, I hope to use my new role to not only advocate for you the reader, but to answer the many lingering questions we all have about the inner workings of the Moz and its employees. Among these burning questions:

• What is Rand’s fascination with yellow shoes and what kind of a name is Fish-kin, anyway? Is he merely fond of aquatic life, or is he descended from an ancient race of merfolk who hold the secrets to the Lost City of Atlantis?
   
• What does Scott do all day, other than pick out music for Whiteboard Friday? Is that a real job?
   
• Who is the real Danny Dover, and where did he get his luxurious moustache? Expect some of these answers in my 7-part miniseries: “The Legend of Stachemaster D”.
   
• Is Jennifer Lopez THAT Jennifer Lopez? She says “no”, but isn’t that what the real J-Lo would say if she were hiding from the paparazzi by working at an SEO firm? Think about it.
   
• Who are Will, Tom, and Duncan, and what exactly have they been Distilling? Are they part of a second British invasion?

Of course, I also hope to learn enough about the rest of the Moz staff to mock them as thoroughly. In all seriousness, though, I’m looking forward to this new opportunity and hope to be able to provide some real value. If anyone has questions or concerns about the community (or about me), please don’t hesitate to contact me, and thanks again for being part of one of my favorite spots on the internet.

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Getting an SEO Copywriting Job »

Posted by Lucy Langdon

The inspiration for this post came when I was chatting with a recently graduated friend of mine who’d been looking for work online. Much like myself when I graduated with that all-purpose English Lit degree, she was looking for copywriting jobs online. Before I started at Distilled I did a bit of freelance writing so I knew exactly where she was coming from. Out of curiosity, I decided to have a poke around craigslist and gumtree- a couple of regular haunts of mine about 18 months ago. The very first thing I noticed was that the vast majority all of the writing jobs mentioned SEO, if not in their title then somewhere in their description. I don’t remember it being like that all.

Obviously, SEO copywriting isn’t as new as 18 months, but it is impressive how the landscape has changed so that now some awareness of writing for SEO (and a lot of the jobs were asking for more than that) is nigh on essential to landing some work.

This post is a fairly simple checklist for copywriters who need to be able to walk the SEO walk. It’s pretty top level but I’ve made sure to link out to essential resources.

I just looked on craigslist and found this handy ad that illustrates exactly what I mean:

1. Web-savvy content writer
What it is: Last time I checked, ’savvy’ was something this dashing young pirate said a lot. However, on closer inspection, I can reveal that web-savvy nirvana can be reached simply by getting acquainted with the Internet. You should probably know who this and this are. Web savvy folk know how to Google.
How to have it: Make sure you know what a blog is and be able to talk about them without sounding stupid, (you can write a blog post, post a post, write posts, even post posts, but you can’t post or write ‘blogs’, unless you actually mean publish to more than one different website). Have your favourite three websites tattooed on the inside of your eyelids. You might also want to write why you like them on the back of your hand- is their usabiilty to die for? Have they fully unleashed the power of social media? Actually, it’d be worthwhile getting to know a social media site or two- Reddit and Digg are the hotspots for what’s hot online. Here’s a Reddit and Digg are the hotspots for what’s hot online. Here’s a handy list if you’re playing catch up.
Buzz word/s: RSS, Technorati, Firefox or Chrome, social media, hot trends

2. Produce and upload
What it is: The produce bit’s ok, but what’s that sneaky upload? This is the point where your writing gets put on the Internet for other people to read. If you’re anything like me, that whole ‘other people reading it’ takes a tiny bit of getting used to. There are a few ways your writing can get uploaded but if it’s more complicated that publishing a blog post I shouldn’t think you’ll be expected to do it without help the first few times.
How to have it: My advice is get your own blog and try uploading a few posts. It’s easy once you get going and is also a great place to showcase anything you’ve written. It’s also a great way to practice some basic html. If you’re really busy/lazy, try just signing up to a social media site and submitting someone else’s content. It’s a different process, but the simple act of publishing something online can be a bit daunting first time round.
Buzz word/s: Wordpress, Blogger, Tumblr, CMS

3. Keyword rich, compelling content
What it is: Ah, keywords. This is how search engines work- keywords (or keyphrases) are very important. This’ll do for a very short definition: keywords are the words or phrases people use in the search engines to find what they’re looking for. A lot of job adverts ask for a basic level of keyword research. Check out this introduction. You also need to learn about actually writing optimized copy.
As a side note, there are quite a few misconceptions about keyword use out there. Back in the day, something called ‘keyword stuffing’ or achieving the right ‘keyword density’ was all the rage. If a potential employer asks you to do that sort of thing, you should have the confidence to tell them that practice won’t help, and writing well-optimized and, most importantly, natural copy will be much better for their site.
How to have it: I think keywords are the beginning and end of SEO. They’re important across so much of what we do. You have to see them as part of the whole; understand where they come from and how to use them before you actually try finding them. There are lots of online tools you can use to find out keywords and estimate their importance to your writing. I started out on SEObook’s keyword tool and now mostly use Google’s Keyword Tool.
Buzz word/s: keyword/keyphrase research, meta tags, optimization, keyword stuffing

4. Website needs viewers
What it is: Viewers, traffic, users, customers, visitors- all pretty much the same thing. These are the people sitting at their computer that arrive on the website in question via any number of ways. More often than not, these viewers will need to be ‘converted’. That can mean anything from signing up to a newsletter to buying a sofa- and your copy will come into play somewhere along the way. Your copy might also need to attract visitors. I’ve written more on that below.
How to have it: As far as this ad goes, you just have to write well. Obey all the usual rules about old school copywriting- don’t babble endlessly with words that only you and your much-missed Professor understand. Don’t try and be funny unless you actually are.
Buzz words/s: traffic, Google Analytics

5. SEO efforts
What it is: SEO is Search Engine Optimization. It’s very similar to SEM (Search Engine Marketing) and on the same page as PPC (Pay Per Click). As for ‘SEO efforts’, I’d take a guess that this is the same as the point above. Websites undertake SEO to bring more visitors to their sites by ranking better in the search engines.
How to have it: Learn the basics of SEO. SEOmoz.org is one of the best places to start.
Buzz word/s: blackhat, whitehat, SEO, SEM, PPC, CRO

6. Web link campaigns
What it is: After copy come links (as a writer, I’m a little biased). The phrasing’s a bit strange in the advert, but they’re almost certainly talking about dedicated linkbuilding, which is really just a part of SEO. There are lots and lots of ways to linkbuild. One method might be to promote the quality content you have been hired to write.
How to have it: Learn about why links are important to the search engines and understand the philosophy behind why people link. The search engines essentially see a link from one website to another as a vote. Understand the difference between a spammy footer link and a quality editorial link and the different value of each of those.
Buzz word/s: anchor text, linkbuilding, spiders, indexing

7. Social networking
What it is: A social network is an online community- they hang out on forums, blogs and social media sites. LOTS of people use them on the Internet, some for fun, some for profit, some for pure unadulterated spamming. A few of these sites have 100,000’s of users and getting your content to appear prominently on their radar can obviously bring a lot of traffic and links to your site.
How to have it: Start by spending time with a few different online communities. You’ll soon notice the one or two you keep returning to. Treat the group like you would an offline community and you’ll soon earn your place amongst the ranks. Be warned: social networks can become a time vacuum that you will never truly recover from. Subscribe to a few blogs that regularly appear in these social networks- Cracked and The Onion are a couple of my favourites.
Buzz word/s: social media sites, Twitter, linkbait

8. Online PR
What it is: It’s kind of the same as offline PR except that it’s more informal. You can use sites to publish and distribute your Press Releases in an SEO friendly way, or you can go directly to webmasters and bloggers to see if they want to cover the story. It’s all in the same bag really.
How to have it: Have a go at submitting a press release- you can do it for free. Wait a few hours and then google a section of the release and see how many results appear. Or, if you’re feeling really brave, try pitching an idea for a post to a blog you enjoy reading. This is called guest-posting or guest-blogging and is a really good way to get coverage of something you want to draw attention to.
Buzz word/s: news wire, PR Web, guest blogging

9. Natural search
What it is: As opposed to unnatural search? Natural search just means visitors that come through searching in the engines and didn’t click on a sponsored listing (aka a PPC ad).
How to have it: As above, learn SEO. It can seem a bit overwhelming to begin with but what you have to remember is that a lot of the stuff that gets discussed day to day to do with search is quite high-level. The basics of copywriting for SEO are fairly easy to master, particularly if you spend a bit of time actually having a go, rather than just reading!
Buzz word/s: Organic traffic, search

10. Create great content that ranks on search
What is it: Content is king. Another tattoo for the back of your eyelids. And, crucially, this is why you’re getting hired to write about your Top 10 Favourite Bond Villains. Content that ranks on search means content that ranks naturally in the search engines.
How to have it: All your new found SEO skills (and related buzzwords) will help, but just being able to write in a clear, concise, engaging and readable manner will do wonders.
Buzz word/s: Content is king, optimized copy

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10 Steps to Advanced Keyword Research »

Posted by randfish

Some keyword research is surface-level, fire and forget type stuff. If you just need to see relative volume levels, then a basic keyword research tool is all you need. If, however, you want to really dive deep and get the full skinny on your keywords, I’d recommend having each of these data points.

#1 - Relative Search Volume from 3 Sources

There are three sources on the web that I’ve found to work best for comparative numbers research. These are:

1. Google Adwords: Keyword Tool - enter any term or phrase and get back data about both the average search volume and the volume from the previous month.
2. MSN AdCenter: Research Keywords Tool - you need to be logged in to use this, but the data is solid and shows actual counts.
3. Wordtracker: Keyword Tool - although the numbers Wordtracker shows are frequently less accurate than the two above, they are reasonably decent for estimating comparative search volume. Unfortunately, due to the declining share of Wordtracker’s data sources (the Infospace owned search engines - Metacrawler, Dogpile, DoGreatGood, etc.), niche and long tail term volume estimates can be way off.

Here’s why I don’t use Yahoo!:

From there, rather than build a spreadsheet just showing raw numbers, I like to work in comparative sizes (the real numbers rarely prove accurate anyway). Thus, rather than having a graph of data like this:

I can have one like this:

Note how, in this view, I’m showing the relative volume percentage of the demand for keyword "SEO" made up by "seo services" and "seo tools." This graph tells me that while Google thinks "seo tools" and "seo services" are tiny fractions of the volume that comes in for the broad term, "SEO," Microsoft & Wordtracker both say these phrases make up a more substantive percentage. Since keyword targeting is really about choosing one keyword over another and much less about trying to estimate exact traffic, the latter system makes much more sense to me.

#2 - Temporal Fluctuations

When are your queries in highest demand? Knowing the answer can help you predict when competition may ramp up and additional SEO efforts are needed as well as provide insight into your market overall (if demand has been dropping steadily over the last few years, you might want to target some different terms, or even shift product focus). Two sources of data are solid on this front:

Google Trends for Keywords

MSN AdCenter Labs: Keyword Forecast Tool

#3 - Top Ranking Domains

In order to get a full understanding of the competitive landscape, it’s essential to know who’s ranking for the terms you’re targeting. A basic query is a great start, but I like to append those with a bit of extra data, as I’ve visualized below:

Those three are my favorite pieces of link data to append, not because they alone are predictive of rankings, but because the range so perfectly illustrates what’s necessary, on both the URL and domain level to be competitive. Nick’s been pushing hard to get this functionality automatically included with the SEOmoz Toolbar, so hopefully we can make that happen in the next few months.

#4 - Fresh Web (News, Blogosphere, Tweetosphere) Activity

The fresh web (aka social media sphere) can help to show how often keywords are appearing in content and conversation in blogs, forums, feeds and more. It’s particularly valuable for identifying emerging trends which may not yet have search volume (but will if the conversational content acceleration continues). There’s a few tools I like on this front:

Facebook Lexicon

There appears to be some correlation between "party tonight" on Friday and "hangover" on Saturday

Twist: See Trends in Twitter

Blogscape

Google News Trends

I’d love to see some of those 19th century SEO tools!

The real value (and reason for spending time in these sectors) is to:

• A) Identify patterns or trends indicating a keyword/product/concept is on the rise/fall
• B) Find content that in the past has attracted large amounts of attention around these keywords (an excellent starting point for viral content development)
• C) Locate portals on the web or in social communities where your topic may be hot, and opportunities for promotion or links exist

They’re not universally valuable for every part of keyword research, and you shouldn’t trust the volumes to predict keyword demand (some things get written about more than they get searched), but a good SEO leaves no opportunity un-investigated.

#5 - Vertical Results (and Vertical Opportunities)

It’s wise to be aware of where and how your keywords can cross over into vertical search results. The best way to do this currently is, unfortunately, manually. You’ll want to:

1. Search for your target terms at the major search engines
2. Identify any vertical results that appears in the top 10-20 listings
3. Employ strategies to reach into the applicable verticals

The most common and highest value are typically:

• Local
• Product
• News
• Images
• Blog
• Video

#6 - Searcher Intent

What are the goals of the individuals searching for your targeted keywords? What phase of the decision process are they in? Answering these questions can give you an excellent idea of the potential ROI from drawing in traffic on a given term/phrase. Many times the highest volume keywords are not bringing in the best traffic.

Some good resources on this front include:

• Segmenting Searcher Intent - from SEOmoz
• Two Part Series on Intent Targeting - from Jon Mendez
  • A) Targeting the Two Intentions of Users
  • B) How Brand, Product & Community Influence Intention
• Understanding User Data to Measure Searcher Intent - from SearchEngineLand
• MSN AdCenter Labs also has their Online Commercial Intention Tool which predicts, based on activity, whether a keyword is commercial or informational in intent

Your goal should be to narrow down the potential tasks a visitor who has just performed the query wants to accomplish. This can dramatically boost your site’s performance when coupled with delivery of those paths upon arrival.

#7 - Potential Relevance

The best way to determine the relevance between a keyword and the content/service/product you offer is to test. Run a PPC campaign or dig into your analytics and choose only those visitors that have come via the search query. Pull out data like browse rate, time spent on site, conversions, etc.

The majority of visits who come into SEOmoz for the keyword "SEO Blog" stick around to read at least a couple of pages

Relevance is highly actionable data because it does such a good job predicting which keywords are going to bring valuable traffic. While branded terms often perform highly (and are typically easy to rank well on), longer tail and more specific queries also have this tendency to be more relevant (and, again, are easier to achieve).

#8 - PPC Advertising Data

Even if you’re not planning on bidding for keywords through paid search campaigns, it’s wise to know what the competition is doing and how much value they’re getting from it (and what they’re willing to pay). A few good resources for this information include:

MSN AdCenter’s Keyword Estimate

I really like what AdCenter does with this spiffy graph - showing the cost and estimated clicks in an easy-to-read graphic. Just remember that MSN is the engine with the fewest advertisers, which often means pricing is less aggressive than on Google or Yahoo!

Google AdWords Traffic Estimator

I’m a bit less fond of Google’s standard take on the data, but their pricing is the gold standard, as AdWords has the highest number of advertisers and the most traffic by far.

SEMRush

A solid tool with a lot of uses, particularly for competitive keyword analysis, SEMRush shows some decent numbers around the average CPC and competition levels for most keywords at the head of the demand curve.

Take the cost-per-click data and competition levels into account when you’re considering things like relevance, potential conversion rates and visitor value. Most companies aren’t dumb - if they’re bidding high dollar values for potential visits, they’re converting those visits into dollars and that means you can both learn from them and find strategies to outperform.

#9 - Top Related Queries

Related queries is an easy metric to understand - you want to know what other terms searchers who used these keywords also employed. It’s a no-brainer to then add these to your list of potential keyword targets. Many good sources for this data exist:

• Google shows related searches in both their AdWords Tool and through web search (you’ll want to click the "show options" link at the top followed by the "related searches" link in the sidebar)
• Bing, Microsoft’s new engine, shows related searches by default in their web search interface
• Yahoo! Search has their "also try" list and clicking "more" will give you an interface just below the search box that finds lots of great, relevant keywords
• The aforementioned SEMRush shows great data on this (though you’ll need to sift through as there can be a lot of junk) if you’re a paying member
• Compete.com’s Search Analytics has good information by query and website, though you’ll need to subscribe to their service to get the full value

Get the related queries, dig into the data about them and target those that have enough volume and relevance to help you get increase valuable traffic from SEO.

#10 - Legal Issues

Last, and probably least in most cases, it’s wise to do some research into the legalities surrounding the keywords you’d like to target. Using trademarked terms and phrases on your site can cause attorney trouble, and no one likes that. The place to start, at least in the United States, is here - USPTO Trademark Electronic Search System.

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Whew… That’s a lot of work for keyword research - now you can see why some firms charge hundreds of dollars per hour for this type of deep dive. Put these recommendations to good use, though, and you’ll have an impressive set of terms to target - and that can be a serious competitive advantage.

I’ve undoubtedly left out a few metrics and, as always, appreciate any ideas or suggestions you’ve got on this topic.

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CAPTCHAs’ Effect on Conversion Rates »

Posted by chenry

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.

Personally I hate SPAM with a passion and I’m sure many of you will agree that you hate it also.  Some time ago, I had a client ask me if there was a way for us to eliminate the SPAM that was generated from his web form.  I went to the usual places to see if I could find the answer and was a little let down with the solution that was presented, CAPTCHA.

I’m personally not a fan of CAPTCHA and have always wondered about the affect they have on conversion rates of web forms.  I decided to put together a case study to clear my head about the use of CAPTCHA and its affect on web form conversion rate.

The case study was done over 50 different websites that I either manage or have access to.  These websites range from less than 1 year old to over 5 years old.  All forms were a collection of common information such as name, address, city, email address and a comment area. 

The study was done over the course of 6 months, half of the website started with CAPTCHA’s on and the other half started with no CAPTCHA’s.  After 3 months the CAPTCHA was switched to the other CAPTCHA setting.  I recorded the amount of successful, failed, and SPAM conversions for each of the 50 web forms. 

A SPAM conversion was recorded when the submission had excessive links or was a solicitation for a service.  A failed conversion was recorded when a user/bot entered an incorrect CAPTCHA or never correctly entered the correct CAPTCHA after multiple tries.  A successful conversion was when the information given in the web form was the required information minus any spammy information.

On to the data!!!!

• 2,134 total conversions were entered while the CAPTCHA was off.
• 91 total SPAM conversions while the CAPTCHA was off.
• 0 total failed conversions while the CAPTCHA was off.

 

• 2,156 total conversions were entered while the CAPTCHA was on.
• 11 total SPAM conversions while the CAPTCHA was on.
• 159 total failed conversions while the CAPTCHA was on.

From the data you can see that with CAPTCHA on, there was an 88% reduction in SPAM but there were 159 failed conversions.  Those failed conversions could be SPAM, but they could also be people who couldn’t figure out the CAPTCHA and finally just gave up.  With CAPTCHA’s on, SPAM and failed conversions accounted for 7.3% of all the conversions for the 3 month period.  With CAPTCHA’s off, SPAM conversions accounted for 4.1% of all the conversions for the 3 month period.  That possibly means when CAPTCHA’s are on, the company could lose out on 3.2% of all their conversions!  

Given the fact that many clients count on conversions to make money, not receiving 3.2% of those conversions could put a dent in sales.  Personally, I would rather sort through a few SPAM conversions instead of losing out on possible income.

My suggestion to clients was to avoid the use of CAPTCHA, due to the possible loss of conversions.  I’m in the process of trying out the old “Honeypot” CAPTCHA technique.  It involves using CSS to hide a form field that is supposed to be left blank.  Every time the form is submitted you check the field and see if it’s blank, if not, mark it as spam but not delete it.

What have been your overall views on the use of CAPTCHA and its affect on web form conversion rates?  I’m interested to see what techniques everyone here uses to prevent or reduce the amount of SPAM on web forms.

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Whiteboard Friday - Market Forces & SEO »

Posted by great scott!

What’s the right search strategy for your niche? That’s the question we’re looking at in this week’s Whiteboard Friday.  Determining which tactics are going to be most effective for your particular situation is critical for search marketers. PPC, SEO, Social, Viral? Sure they all have their advantages, but depending on the marketplace you’re in, some strategies may be much more viable - in both cost and effectiveness - than others.

Not surprisingly, the ease with which you can see good results with a given strategy is inversely proportional to the amount of money and attention being allotted to it. As you’ll see in the video, Rand estimates that PPC becomes an extremely difficult tactic to implement effectively in even modestly competitive markets, while Social Media can reap great rewards with little difficulty in highly-competitive sectors.  Take a look at this data from the recent Forrester US Interactive Marketing Forecast:

As you can see, PPC controls the lion’s share of search dollars, followed in distant second by SEO, with Social bringing up the rear (it’s that itty-bitty one down there in green).  The degree to which you can be effective in these areas depends a good deal on how big of a fish you can be in the portion of that pond dedicated to your corner of the web. 

Does this mean you should ignore any particular tactic? No, it just means you may have to carefully weigh your options, goals, and resources for each campaign to plan your strategy properly. 

All areas of online marketing are growing like crazy: Marketing dollars spent on SEO and PPC are projected to double in the next five years (Social will more than quadruple) and make up an ever-larger chunk of business’ overall marketing spend.  That’s great news for our industry as a whole, but it also means increased competition. Get in the habit of considering your strategy in terms of market segment competition now, and you’ll be better able to handle (or sidestep) competitive trends in the years to come.

SEOmoz Whiteboard Friday - Market Forces & SEO from Scott Willoughby on Vimeo.

If you’d like more info on Forrester research, you may want to check out Shar VanBoskirk’s Blog, she’s their online/search guru and writes some great stuff.

UPDATE: I changed the graphic depicting the breakdown of search marketing spend because Seth Godin was kind enough to email me and suggest a more appropriate (and interesting) way to present the information (Thanks, Seth!). He just wrote a great post on how to make graphs that work, I highly recommend you check it out.

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TechCrunch Upskirt: Why Michael Arrington Blogs about Porn »

Posted by Sam Niccolls

In 1970 porn was a 10 million dollar industry. Today, the porn industry pulls in close to a billion dollars. According to Alexa, four of the hundred most trafficked sites on the web are porn sites. Additionally, Google has a monthly volume of over 100 million porn related searches and that number is only increasing. Needless to say, the saying holds true on the web: sex sells. But the results in the x rated SERPs are not all what you might think. Amidst the porn stars and production companies, you will also find thousands of TechCrunch articles.

In the last year alone, TechCrunch made over 550 blog posts with the word porn in body of the post. In some cases the articles addressed popular, newsworthy stories such as the much talked about iPhone porn app, but in a number of cases the stories were a bit more of a stretch. Newsworthy or not, TechCrunch blogs about porn when they have the opportunity. And though the porn related articles they write typically don’t top the SERPs, they do rank on the first 1-3 pages for a number of high volume porn related queries, including terms such as ‘youporn,’ ‘you porn,’ and ‘iphone porn.’

What does this mean for TechCrunch’s traffic? Well, based on monthly search volume, if you assume industry average SERP click through rates, it’s not unreasonable to estimate that TechCrunch generates over a quarter million visits a month from x rated queries.

TechCrunch also optimizes porn posts for users, not just search engines. Often they do this by including mildly risque above the fold images in blog posts. In addition to having a positive impact on decreasing bounce rates for first time visitors who arrive from porn queries, these thumbnails likely have high click through rates when articles are picked up on Techmeme and other news aggregators. And like other TechCrunch blog post images, these risque images are not hyperlinked, which encourages more clicks on the c column advertisements.

Ad Revenue — What does porn blogging mean for TechCrunch’s bottom line?

1) 1st Time Visitors: Assuming 3 page views per visit, with 286,625 visits, TechCrunch would receive just under 900,000 page views per month. And to take this a step further, assume TechCrunch earns $2.00 per click (which is simply a guestimate for contextual ads on a site serving their own ads), this would mean TechCrunch is making tens of thousands of dollars each month by doing their Ron Jeremy-esque SERP countdown.  

High Estimate:

Low Estimate:

2) Return Visitors (subscribers): If TechCrunch made their money selling crafts, porn traffic would do little to their bottom line. But they don’t. They make their money off ads. And the more page views they have, the more impressions and clicks they get. And nothing drives page views and engagement like return visits from blog subscribers. So unlike other sites that could blog about porn and not acquire any new customers from the traffic, TechCrunch, who caters to a tech geek demographic, is uniquely positioned to profit from PHP privy porn perusers.

In TechCrunch’s defense, they are not alone. Wired also does their their fare share of porn blogging, but these two seem to be outliers compared to other tech news sites. If you look at pages containing ‘porn’ as a percentage of total pages on the site in Google’s index, there is a clear line indicating that TechCrunch and Wired each have a higher percentage of porn related content than other popular tech news sites.

What about you? Are you leaving revenue opportunities on the table? Would your site drive conversions if your posts ranked on high volume, porn related search terms? Perhaps there is tremendous opportunity here for you? Even if there isn’t, at least there is never any shortage of online marketing boobs and SEO anal-ytics tools to blog about.

——

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A Giant Leap Forward for Link Intelligence Tools & Data »

Posted by randfish

In the last 10 months, we’ve taken a number of dramatic steps to improve the link information available to webmasters & SEOs. Today, I’m pleased to announce even more progress in that direction, as well and cover the impressive store of data now accessible.

Sections in this post:

1. Linkscape’s Web Index Over Time
2. Upgrades to Link Data & Metrics
3. Tools to View Link Information
4. The Future of Link Data

Linkscape’s Web Index Over Time

When Linkscape first launched last October, it featured ~30 Billion URLs - impressive, but much smaller than the depth we’ve reached today. Today we’re announcing our July index update (technically launched late last week) with 48.5 Billion URLs, slightly smaller than our last index, but with a greater focus on quality and less spam/junk.

# of Links in Each Index - March-July 2009

# of Pages in Each Index - March-July 2009

# of Root & Sub Domains in Each Index - March-July 2009

Perhaps not surprisingly, though, the more we crawl, the more it becomes evident that much of the web is fairly useless to index or serve.  So while these numbers are to an extent meaningful, most of our work doesn’t change these statistics (and some of it decreases them) yet this work still should be contributing to improving the quality of our index.

July Linkscape Update: Upgrades to Link Data & Metrics</b

July’s index is the first to feature several important upgrades:

#1 - The "Via 301" Link Flag

When requesting link data for a site or page, we’ll now show you important links that are pointing to URLs that 301 redirect to that location. I still recall early feedback from Danny Sullivan, who was very upset that Linkscape didn’t show him many of what he considered the "most important links" to SearchEngineLand.com. As it turned out, a large number of those pointed to www.searchengineland.com (which does 301 redirect), hence the confusion.  For deciding 301 strategy, people sometimes run reports on a 301′ed url to see just the links through it.  This still works.  Now, in addition those links are also shown on reports for the target of the 301.

#2 - MozRank "Evaporation" through NoFollows

The mozRank algorithm now "evaporates" link juice through nofollowed links in much the same fashion that Google messaged their change to PageRank. For those wondering why the SEO world didn’t notice the nofollow change, there’s some fairly compelling information in the correlation data between mozRank & Google’s toolbar PageRank:

Note that due to mozRank’s ability to show greater data refinement (e.g. 5.57 vs. just "5"), a "perfect" correlation would average 0.25. Thus, the MAE (Mean Average Error) is still remarkably close, but clearly changing the nofollow treatment had only a very slight impact.

#3 - Canonical URL Tags Now Indexed

Although this began in our last index, it’s good to note that canonical URL tags are being picked up and indexed.  We count around 35 million of them.  But until it becomes more evident exactly how the different search engines are treating the tags we are holding off anything drastic, like always trusting the tag in our canonicalization code.  This means unless URLs are canonicalized for other reasons, we still produce separate reports for different URL.  But you may see some "canonical tag" links in a few places.

#4 - Large Sites Have More Consistent Link Data

Although we’re still a few updates away from crawling as deeply as we’d like on large sites, this latest index shows considerably more and better data about "important pages" on "important domains." Some of our users noticed that although we often had a number of pages from large sites, they were frequently not the top-level or most linked-to pages - this fix works to address that. Future indices will multiply this capacity considerably.

#5 - Blogscape’s Data Helping Linkscape Stay Fresher

One of the best features of newer Linkscape indices is their inclusion of fresher link data from the blogosphere and "fresh web" (social media sites like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, web forums and others that push data out via feeds). Linkscape is now sucking down link data from Blogscape’s fresh crawl of the web (updated from 10 million+ feeds every 3 hours) and pushing that out in index updates. Linkscape still has the delay between updates, but the link data produced is now considerably better at showing important links from the fresh web.

Tools to View Link Information

This may be a bit overwhelming, but it’s also very, very cool :-) As you probably know, Linkscape data is infiltrating all sorts of tubes on the Internet.  Here’s a smattering:

Quirk’s SearchStatus Bar

The good folks over at Quirk.biz have baked mozRank into their SearchStatus Firefox extension:

SEOmoz’s MozBar

If you haven’t yet installed the MozBar, I highly recommend it. I’m also very, very excited for the upgrade coming out a few weeks from today. In fact, I’m so excited, I’m leaking a spliced up screenshot (because the 800 pixel wide bar won’t fit in this 600 pixel wide post):

As we noted above, knowing the number of linking root domains is critical to SEO link analysis, so we’re packing it into the new release. That "analyze page" button is going to be seriously awesome, too. Sadly, as I mentioned in my previous post about SEO operators, we’ve been asked by Google to remove PageRank from our toolbar, but there are lots of other third-party extensions that can provide it, like the above SearchStatus bar.

The Free Linkscape API

Our free API serves millions of requests every month, spreading link data far and wide. If you have an application, an internal tool, or hate manually importing data (like I do), check out the API and Nick’s post on the subject.

Top Pages on a Domain

One of my very favorite tools on the web for SEO (and Richard Baxter’s too!), Top Pages lets you enter any domain or subdomain and see the pages on it that have received the largest number of links from unique root domains. The signal to noise ratio is fantastic and it’s remarkably useful for both internal analysis (Do I have opportunities I’m not executing on? Where do I have some spare link juice? What pages might perform best for given keywords?) and competitive information (What is my competition doing that’s bringing them links?).

Smashing Magazine has done some serious Linkbait!

Backlink Anchor Text Analysis Tool

When you need to see anchor text distribution across thousands of links in a few seconds, there’s nothing else like the Backlink Anchor Text Analysis tool. Upgraded this Spring to show Linkscape data, it features sub-30-second runtimes and phenomenal comprehensiveness.

Poor Dave… His friends aren’t using good keywords to link to him. Here you go, buddy - UK SEO

If you’d like even more functionality (particularly the ability to choose a subdomain, root domain or individual URL), the labs version of this tool is also quite excellent.

Linkscape Data Visualization Tool

The most recent addition to the Labs family, Nick’s amazing visualizer tool helps show exactly where strengths and weaknesses exist by comparing many of the data points Linkscape calculates on a scale using Ben’s preliminary rank modeling:

Everybody loves a good radar chart

Basic Linkscape Reports

The classic Linkscape reports still provide a great depth of data and metrics, but you need to know where to look (we obviously have some usability work to do). The juiciest stuff is in the "data detail" tab:

Wow… Twitter gets a LOT of links

Advanced Linkscape Reports

For digging deep into the links that point to a page/site and the associated metrics, advanced reports are still the best source of access.

I’ve got more to write about Oyster.com in the near future (and not just because their namesake is delectable)

The Future of Link Data

There’s clearly been a lot of exciting progress made, but it doesn’t hold a candle to what’s possible. Marketers need data - and SEOmoz’s obligation (and mission) is to answer that call. What’s been done to date hasn’t been easy, and what lies ahead is even harder; particularly making many pieces of incredibly complex information simple and actionabel, but if we wanted easy, crawling the web and building query-independent search ranking metrics probably wasn’t the way to go :-)

Some of the biggest things we’re thinking about for the future include:

• Crawling deeper and producing more frequent index updates
• Showing historical link information (this one is especially challenging because of index and web size fluctuations)
• Illustrating more about internal link architectures on a site and providing recommendations for improvement
• Building ranking models that predict actions that will drive up organic rankings
• Visualizing important data about links, pages, keywords and global metrics

Again, I’ll share a brief taste of what’s ahead (remember, these are just concept wireframes):

The future looks bright indeed.

As always, we rely on the feedback of our members and the SEO community to help us improve the information provided. Please leave any requests or questions in the comments or send them over to sitesupport@seomoz.org.

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Finding and Using Niche Blogs »

Posted by Lucy Langdon

When I talk about ‘niche blogs’, I mean blogs that are regularly updated and focus mainly, but not exclusively, on a certain subject area like, for example, crocheting or tea. More often than not, a blog with a specialty will be of a much higher quality than your average ‘rambling and musings of x’ site. However, with a zillion new blogs published per hour, it’s getting increasingly difficult to ferret these quality blogs out, particularly if they’re not in the business of being found. That makes it sound like I’m talking about underground crochet blogs. I’m not. I just mean blogs that aren’t particularly well optimised for the search engines and don’t know an awful lot about things like title tags or keyphrases.

Why do you want to find niche blogs?

There are a few good reasons but the main one is links.

There is almost certainly a blogging community around something that your site offers (granted, you might have to get a bit creative here). Building a relationship with other websites that cover the same topic is a great way to get genuine quality links from a diverse range of domains- all good things in the search engines’ eyes.

A second reason is plain old simple traffic. A good niche blogger will have a dedicated following and will probably be linked up with several other niche bloggers, each with their own respectable readership. Getting an editorial link from this kind of blog should drive well-converting visitors to your site.

Lastly, it’s not beyond the realms of possibility that this niche blogger knows more about their subject area than you do. If you build up a proper relationship, you could gain more than links and traffic, you could also benefit from their expertise.

Why it’s difficult to find them

They’re niche, so while they may be top of their game, they’re not necessarily going to make it any ‘top x’ lists. As mentioned above, there are also a lot of blogs and although the best will usually make themselves known in one way or another, finding and assessing their value to you can still be a frustrating and time-consuming business.

How to find them

Before you even start looking, have a creative think about which ‘niches’ your site fits into. A spot of brainstorming and keyphrase research can help with this. For example, if you have a craft site, don’t just start by looking for ‘craft blogs’- think about going both broader and more specific: sites that talk about design, creativity or children’s/kids’ activities might have a regular spot for craft; focus in on knitting, crocheting, sewing, embroidery, lace, patchwork, applique, quilting…. the list goes on.

Here are a few things you can do once you’ve got this long list of subject areas:

• swing by a few blog directories. Technorati’s a good place to start, but check out this post for a fuller list of directories. Where it all gets a bit rabbit hole-esque is when you get to the niche blog directories. When you’re searching through any of these directories, be aware that they won’t necessarily categorize everything in the same way. All those blogs you found under ‘crafts’ in one directory might be in the ‘arts’ category in another. This is where that list of keyphrases comes in useful.
• it’s also worth sticking those keyphrases into Wordpress tag search. I’m not really sure what ‘most relevant’ means here, but it seems like a sensible enough list!
• once you’ve found a few decent looking niche blogs, take a good look at their blogrolls. If the list isn’t too long, have a hunt through and pull out any decent looking sites. If the list is too long, pull out all the blogrolls, stick them in a spreadsheet and highlight any duplicates.
• Google’s Blog search is pretty good- particularly the ‘Related Blogs’ bit
• do a few creative searches in Google. If you’re after links, try something like "intitle:<subject> guest post". A blog that’s been open to guest posts in the past, is much more likely to be willing to engage again.

I’ve run through each of these tips with my craft example:

• blog directories: you’ll have to change the setting slightly in Technorati, but check out this page for some useful information. There’s a list of really high (Technorati) authority blogs, each closely related to my search term. The related tags box on the right is also useful for expanding that keyphrase list. I also looked through the blogs on BOTW, which has a craft category and a dedicated knitting and crocheting subcategory. It’s not easy to get listed in this particular directory so I’m confident that this list would be worth spending time exploring.
• the Wordpress tag search brings up a long list of knitting blogs. The list is date-ordered and there aren’t any options to change this, so I would advise the strength of this list would be to strike while the iron is hot and contact bloggers while the post they’ve written is still at the forefront of their mind.
• blogrolls: this knitting site (listed in the top ten of the knitting blogs in Technorait) has this useful ‘Blogs I read‘ page, as does this blog, this blog and this blog. You helpful knitters you!
• Google Blog Search results. Have a look at those Related Blogs- a couple aren’t really relevant, but this knitting parlour blog looks pretty engaging.
• Creative search in Google- some great results!

How to chose your target niche blogs

There are lots of ways you could order this list of blogs, but a lot of the choosing just comes through common sense. For example, there’s no point putting a blog with three posts into the list in the first place, or one that hasn’t been updated in 6 months. If you’ve got the mozBar, it’s easy enough to rule out any blogs with no DmR (or, if they’re on a platform, no mR on any pages).

Once you’ve narrowed down your list, you need to find contact details. If this proves difficult, the bloggers probably aren’t down with being contacted like this so it might be best to take them off the list at this point.

What next?

Don’t spam them! These are quality blogs that value the area you work in- caution and respect are wise bedfellows. Here are a few ideas:

• We’ve had great successes asking for reviews of products as long as we lay our cards on the table from email numero uno. If your site sells something inexpensive and reviewable then this might be the route for you.
• Sending some linkbait round a few of your favourite niche blogs is a great way to get that first wave of interest. You can incentivise this by giving one or two blogs a headstart and letting them know about your latest linkbait a little before everyone else.
• As I mentioned briefly above, guest posting is a really good way to get featured on a niche blog, particularly if you have some clout in your industry. Again, offer something that makes the blogger feel valued- an exclusive interview with the CEO of your company or some stats from your analytics.

This post has some great advice for contacting blogs. It’s meant for artists trying to showcase work, but it’s applicable to this endeavour too.

Any other ideas about how to find, evaluate and otherwise make the most of niche blogs would be much appreciated in the comments. Thank you.

(Thanks to Chiszeo for the cute image)

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The Layman’s Personal Branding Platform »

Posted by Danny Dover

 Personal branding is the art of showcasing your experiences, accomplishments and perspectives. Like many of you, I knew the importance of this but had always put building a personal branding website on the back burner because I didn’t think it was very important and because I felt uncomfortable talking about my accomplishments in such an obvious and self-serving fashion. Recently, my view completely changed.

My lackluster views on personal branding changed when I happened to log into my Google Analytics account and saw I was getting 2,500 monthly visits to dannydover.com and had a bounce rate of 85%. (it’s worth noting that that version of the webpage only contained a poorly written rap and video of a chimpanzee riding on a segway) That was far too many missed opportunities.

I got halfway done coding my new website and realized that a lot of people could also benefit from the code I was writing. I changed plans and rewrote the website to run off of a easy to use platform. I didn’t design it to be as customizable as a CMS like Wordpress or Moveable Type. Instead I focused on doing only one thing (personal branding) and doing it well. I went to the website of Dan Schawbel, personal branding expert, took some notes and got started.

The Layman’s Personal Branding Platform is a drag and drop file based platform that helps you build a search engine optimized website targeted at your personal brand. It is an aid for taking control of the search results for your name. While it won’t do the personal branding work for you, it will make building your personal brand easier. Just because you own a tent, doesn’t mean you are camping. With that in mind, I wish you the best and hope you find this as useful as I have.

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The Layman’s Personal Branding Platform offers:

• A free and open source platform for personal branding (Under both the GPL and the MIT license)
• Automatically Search Engine Optimized for your name (on-page)
• Cross Browser Compatible
• XHTML Transitional Valid

The Layman’s Personal Branding Platform does NOT offer:

• The external relevant and authoritative links necessary to rank for competitive names
• Any kind of support from SEOmoz. (That said, it well documented and very straightforward)
• The server hosting or domain name required to make the website live on the internet (Although this is easier than you might think. See below)

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Example Website

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Setup (/Settings/)

Setup is ridiculously easy. If you know how to organize files on your computer, you know how to use this platform.

When you unzip the platform you will find six folders once you navigate to /settings/:

1. index (Which is another name for the Homepage)
2. personal
3. portfolio
4. professional
5. contact
6. plugins

These folders correspond to the five pages on the website (plugins is not a page, it is a folder for plugins ;-p). If you want to change anything on one of these pages you simply go to the appropriate folder. For example, if I wanted to change something on the "portfolio" page, I would open up the portfolio folder.

Once inside the page folders you will see three more folders and three text files:

1. accent-image - This folder holds the accent image displayed on the top left of the page.
2. three-descriptive-words.txt - This test file contains the three descriptive words you would like displayed at the top of the page
3. intro-paragraph.txt - This text file contains the text for the introduction paragraph of the page
4. image-sections - This folder holds images for the "image sections" of the given page. All you need to do is put an image file in this folder and it will automatically be formatted (although not resized) and placed on the page. The file names are used as the Alt Attribute for the image, so be sure to be descriptive
5. text-sections - This folder holds text for the "text sections" of the given page. All you need to do is put plain text files in this folder and they will appear formatted on the given page. Simply name the text file the same as you want for the section and it will automatically be displayed.
6. README.txt - This contains the directions in case you forget :-)

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Installation

Installation is also very easy. Once you are done editing all of the files in the settings folder, you simply have to send the whole website to a server. The process is:

1. Edit all of the files in /settings/ to your liking
2. Move back one folder so you can see all of the PHP page files (index.php, personal.php etc.) and platform folders (settings, css etc). This is the same folder you will see when you initially unzip the platform.
3. Use a method like FTP (confused? Read below) to transfer all of the files and folders to a webserver.

If you don’t have a web hosting or a domain name, don’t worry. It is easier to setup than you think. I recommend siteground.com (Note: I am not affiliated to this provider other than by the fact that I have been a happy customer for 3 years) although you can use any hosting provider that you want. If you choose Siteground, they offer a domain name, unlimited server space, and unlimited bandwidth for $5.95 USD a month. You should look for similar prices. Once you have a domain name and web hosting can drag and drop the platform files onto the server using FTP just like you would if you were dragging files from one folder on your computer to another. You can see a tutorial on using FTP here. Once you do that, you are done! Its all setup and you can sit back and relax.

I am on to you…

Here are a couple questions I want to nip in the bud before they get asked:

What is with the footer link? - I included a footer link pointing at this blog post, my profile and SEOmoz in the footer generated by the platform so that other people could find and benefit from it. If you don’t want to endorse me or my work feel free to remove it.

Danny, is this an elaborate plan to pimp your personal brand? - I can see why you might think this. I used my website as the example not to get views but rather because at the time of writing this post, it was the only website built on the platform. Remember, I wrote this code originally for my website.

Change Log

Version 1.01: July 13th, 2009 10:21AM PST: Fixed a very minor bug that was creating erroneous CSS 404s. Also added licenses. No impact to users.

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If you have any personal branding advice that you think is worth sharing, feel free to post it in the comments. This post and project are very much a work in progress. As always, feel free to e-mail me or send me a private message if you have any suggestions on how I can make my posts more useful. All of my contact information is available on my profile: Danny Thanks!

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Dear United, Here’s Your Chance for Awesome Reputation Management »

Posted by roadies

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.

Dear @UnitedAirlines,

As you are well aware, @DaveCarroll has released a well-produced music video about lousy customer service that he experienced.  The video is thought-out, witty, satarical, and (most of all) it strikes a chord with the average consumer. In the rare case you missed it:

Now you and your C-level executives may have woken up that morning and felt the entire world was against you. Not only do you have a major public relations fiasco that needs to be dealt with, but it is happening in the worse possible economy when consumers are already timid about traveling by air for their summer vacations. This is truly a headache of the worse kind for any traditional PR firm.

But, lucky for you this isn’t a traditional public relations crisis. You actually have an opportunity to turn this single experience into one of the best case studies of online reputation management in internet marketing history. I’ll explain how:

When Dave gave up the fight with your various claims departments, he promised that he’d write music about his experience. In his version of the story, he explains that he’s over being upset and angry about the experience and that he’s actually thankful that you provided the fodder for this once in a lifetime opportunity.

You should be the one thanking him!

There’s some truth to the saying that "There is no such thing as bad PR". But it definitely can sting for a while, leaving behind a sour taste in consumers mouths. Trust that took forever to build will be lost…unless you act quickly. Your name is now being blasted across thousands upon thousands of tweets, facebook updates, myspace posts, blog posts, and other internet media outlets. In addition, your name is also being used in traditional media outlets where Dave has been asked to give interviews and discuss his "experience" and talk about the song. While he’s getting all this exposure, so are you.

Everyone knows the event happened. You can’t hide it or sweep it under the proverbial rug. And now everyone wants to know what you will do about it. How will you respond? Will you ignore this event like other big brands who think they are better than social media? Will your response be limited to a single, half-generic reply to an individual that you are "working on it"? Will you finally replace his guitar and then release a traditional press release about it?

I hope not, because if you do, you have failed.

Your opportunity lies in the ability to use the same creative outlets as Dave and respond to him directly. You’ll also be giving responses to traditional media inquiries and individual customers who have sung along to Dave’s tune. In addition to having an "official response" (though not "official" in the sense of traditional PR) you have the opportunity to leverage this branding opportunity far beyond the reach that you could have before Dave released his video and turn it into a success story. Below are a few ideas that I have that I offer unsolicited as ways to improve customer relations and brand reputation. I am a professional from a very incredulous industry where brands often receive an assault from not only users but also politicians and activisists. Reputation is extremely important in protecting the brands in my industry, and the anecdotes I provide below come from years of experience of "dealing with shit".

How you can turn United Breaks Guitars into your best branding opportunity ever:

1. Acknowledge it happened and that you were wrong.
   By taking this official stance and letting your employees, PR firms, and ad agencies know that is your stance, you are opening the doors to allow mending to begin. This goes beyond a few corporate tweets or a press release. This needs to be a letter to all your employees so they can adopt the same views and show it in their customer relations. It’s true that you abided by your internal policies and this was a series of coincidental bad timing and follow-up, you still need to adopt the internal stance that you wronged a paying customer. Without this first step, nothing else matters.
2. Respond to Dave directly using Dave’s way.
   Write a song, produce a video. This doesn’t need to be as thought out and well produced as Dave’s video, but it should definitely be humorous and light hearted. But it should also say "We’re Sorry!" loud and clear. For example, you could use the lyrics "It broke our hearts when we heard we broke your guitar". Using Youtube, post this video as a Video Response to Dave’s. This video might have an opportunity to go viral too, so get some quick minds on it and get it up ASAP.
3. Send an email to all your consumers on your mailing list.
   It would be best if this was a letter from the CEO. Inform consumers of the video, that you thought it was fun and done very well, and that you are sincerely sorry that you caused Dave so much grief but you are thankful that he was able to have some fun at your expense. Link to this video directly from your newsletter so consumers know what you are talking about, and realize you aren’t trying to hide it. Next acknowledge that you are aware that Dave isn’t the only one who has had misfortune regarding baggage handling. Apologize to all your customers in this email. Then explain that you’re working directly with your contracted ground crews to enforce stricter baggage handling policies.
4. Create a campaign asking every user to create their own YouTube music.
   Use those videos as part of a advertising campaign (online and ofline) to show that United Airlines now offers better baggage service. "No one cares about your stuff like you do, except for us." or something along those lines would make for a great message. The prize: 5 new Taylor Guitars or free airfare for a band (any 4 people).
5. Hire Dave Carroll to produce a commercial.
   Yes, I said that. Hire him. This would go way beyond anthing you could do by paying to replace a relatively unknown band’s music equipment. By hiring him you are giving him, his band, and their creative abilities massive exposure. You are also ultimately owning up to your mistake and making the best of this situation in the most transparent way possible. The commercial doesn’t need to about baggage handling, but it does need to show Dave’s face and be a catchy jingle.
6. The association between United and guitars has been made, so leverage it.
   Do something crazy like offer every member of the studio audience of Ellen a free guitar (cheap $100 Gibson acoustics from Costco) and free tickets for two. If anyone reports a broken guitar upon arrival at their destination, they get a million Mileage plus miles. It doesn’t have to be to this extent of crazye (or maybe you should), but the idea is to get people thinking that you are serious about protecting their luggage, even if it is a guitar.
7. Finally, and this should be a no brainer, feature Dave’s band Sons of Maxwell in your in-flight entertainment.
   Write a cover story for your in-flight magazine, play their entire catalog in your in-flight music, and maybe even do a documentary for your in-flight TV.

These are just a few of the many, many ways you can capitilize on this moment of misfortune, and turn a negative into a positive. I’m sure that the community where this letter is posted will also have additional insight in their commentary to this letter, since I know they are some of the brightest minds on the entire Internet.

Dave’s story isn’t finished. He promised that he would write three songs. Song 1 is produced. Song 2 is written. And with the attention he’s getting, you can bet he’s going to write Song #3 soon. If you and your agencies play your cards right, the third song will be like a happy ending to a story. It will be about how you finally listened and you helped out.  Ultimately, the goal here should be that when Dave writes his third song, the title should be something about "United bought me a brand new guitar!"

I truly hope that the appropriate people find and read these words. This is truly the opportunity of a lifetime for United Airlines to turn a horrible PR disaster into a marketing story of the decade. All you need is to care a little, and hustle a lot!

I’m very excited to see if and how you handle this, regardless if you ever read this letter. I have a passion for how corporate america responds to individual consumers and love to learn the lessons that are publicly available on such a wide scale from these interactions.

Best of luck captilizing on the unfolded events!
Jason Murphy (aka @MurphyJason)

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