Where in the World is SEOmoz? »

Posted by jennita

We’re getting close to the end of the year, which means halloween, holiday parties and spending time with the family… That is unless you’re a mozzer! The fall season has hit us full swing and we’re out and about speaking and attending conferences, providing training and traveling from Sweden to Mexico to Vegas baby! Check out where we’ll be over the next few months and hopefully we’ll see you there! 

SMX East - NYC - October 5-7

New York City in the Fall… it’s the perfect setting for SMX East. The air is getting crisper, the leaves are falling and search marketers from around the globe take this city by storm. Rand will be speaking the first day on the Revisiting PageRank Sculpting & Siloing panel as well on the 3rd day on Dealing with Domain Names, URLs, Parameters & All that Jazz. You can find me speaking on the last day on the panel Diagnosing Technical SEO Issues. Nick and Adam will also be around, so come find us!

Jane and Robot Search Developer Summit – Google offices NYC - October 8

I really love the Jane and Robot Search Developer Summits. Being a techie at heart, these technical SEO conferences are right up my alley. This particular one is going to be exceptionally great, not only for all the talented speakers but that we get to go to the Google offices in NYC. Woot! Also, it’s by invitation only which makes you feel really special (even if it is free). If you’re interested in going you can request an invitation. As for us, Nick will be speaking about "Why it is Hard to Crawl your website (and how to fix it!)," plus I will be leading the Round table discussion for the Microsoft stack. Oh! I’ll also be helping with registration, so if you see me, please say hi… I’m shy ;). 

London & Stockholm

ECMOD London - October 7-9
SMX Stockholm - October 10-13
A4Uexpo London - October 14
Gillian continues her world speaking tour (by this point she’s spoken at 2 conferences in Canada, 1 in Los Angeles and attended the Social Media Summit in San Francisco!) by taking on Europe. At ECMOD, Gillian speaks about The State of Search Marketing: Where We Are, Where We’re Headed & Why It Matters. Then she jumps over to SMX Stockholm where she’ll be speaking on the panel  Landing Page Testing and Optimization as well as the SEO Check Up session. From there she heads back to London for the A4Uexpo. WHEW! And the tour is only halfway over, check out where she’s headed next!

ExactTarget Connections 09 - Indianapolis, IN - October 13-15

If you love email (and who doesn’t?) then you should check out ExactTarget Connections ‘09, one of the biggest email marketing-focused events out there. You’ll not only learn tons of great tactics for improving your email marketing, you’ll get to see a keynote by Malcolm Gladwell, and a concert by They Might Be Giants! Who knew Indianapolis could sound so appealing? Scott will be our lone mozzer attending, so find him and say hello!

SEOmoz/Distilled Pro Training Series - London - October 19-20

The Pro Training in Seattle this year was honestly the best conference I’ve personally ever attended! The speakers were knowledgeable and approachable, the food was great (always a bonus) and the entire event was a hit. I can only imagine that the Pro Training in London is going to be just as great, if not better (I mean, have you seen the venue?!) Rand and Ben will be speaking plus Danny will also be attending, equipped with a tazer to take down Ben if he starts rambling (or so I hear). :)

We have just a few tickets left to this event and it’s about to sell out. If you’re the type to wait around until the last minute, you better get on it before it’s too late. This is a can’t miss event, Sign up now.

SearchMeetups and World Brand Congress

SearchMeetup New Delhi - October 20-22
SearchMeetup Bangalore - October 24-26
SearchMeetup Mumbai - October 30-Nov 1
World Brand Congress Mumbai - November 2-4
This is the next round of Gillian’s worldwind tour as she heads from London to New Delhi to begin her next round of speaking gigs at various SearchMeetups. She ends in Mumbai for a few days before heading south for the winter.

Mexico

Existes/Mexican Govt Internet Standards Session, Mexico City - November 9-10
SMX Mexico, Mexico City - November 11

Viva Mexico! Gillian rounds out her international tour with a few days in Mexico City speaking at Existes and SMX Mexico.

PubCon  - Las Vegas - November 10-13

Hooray! PubCon Vegas! This is one of the most talked about events of year. Speakers submit their pitches during the summer and everyone has their hotel and airfare booked months in advanced. With up to 7 different tracks each day, PubCon covers everything from SEO to Affiliates. I particularly enjoy the Interactive Site Reviews because inevitably someone asks to have their site reviewed, and the poor soul has no idea they’ve purchased links all across the web and the reviewers reveal it.

If you’re looking for the mozzers, you can find us all over the place! Rand will be speaking on the SEO/SEM Tools session on day 2 and on How to Buy Links with Maximum Juice and Minimum Risk on the 3rd day (This was my favorite presentation last year). Gillian ends her tour here at PubCon and will be moderating Real World Winning Tactics for Content Creation on the 3rd day also. Plus Adam, Arden, Scott and I will be around and we’ll have our annual Search Spam party with a whole new deck of cards! (Ooooh I wonder who’s on them!! Could it be YOU?)

We still have 20 tickets left for our PubCon Promo - Buy a year’s subscription to SEOmoz PRO and get a FREE PubCon 2009 Full Access Pass! The ticket prices for PubCon are about to go up, which will make this deal even better. Better hop to it!

SES Chicago - December 7-11

For the last event of the year, Rand heads off to speak at SES Chicago. Are you tired yet? I’m pretty sure we all are!

Sooooo Sleeeeeeepy

We look forward to the busy few months and seeing everyone! Remember to say hello if you see any of us, whether we look tired like Rand does above, or not. :) Ciao!

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Terrible SEO Advice: Focus on Users, Not Engines »

Posted by randfish

If you’ve been around the SEO world a while, you’ve undoubtedly heard the old adage:

Do what’s right for users and engines will reward you with higher rankings

Along with its peer:

SEO tactics that focus on engines, rather than users, are manipulative (black/gray hat) and will eventually be discounted or penalized

In my opinion, both of these statements are utterly false and tragically misleading. In my view, SEO starts with the user (of course), but cannot ignore the incredible importance of search-engine targeted (and specific) tactics. When I first considered the issue, I thought that perhaps, years ago, these opinions were more accurate than they are today. However, after visualizing the issue, I discovered even that isn’t true:

(please note: graphs like this are, as always, just my personal opinion)

The value of tactics from each set has risen/fallen over time, leading me to the conclusion that this was never good advice. And yet, thinking back, I’m almost sure that at some point, at a conference and during interactions with clients, I personally repeated this misnomer. I want to issue an apology for that now and set the record straight - SEO is a task that requires paying close attention to the needs of both users and engines. You can’t be an effective SEO without it.

Just think of all the specific tasks we perform that we’d never do if it weren’t for search engines:

• Title tags: We might still make them, but agonize over keyword usage and positioning, uniqueness and flow? I doubt it.
• Meta tags: Nope. No reason to even bother.
• XML Sitemaps: I’m pretty sure no human has ever visited this file in an attempt to sort out the pages on your site.
• Webmaster Tools Registration: Without engines, there wouldn’t be any.
• Keyword Research: I think this practice would be more like advertising copy - think Mad Men.
• Keyword Targeting: Why worry about keyword placement for anything other than conversion rate optimization?
• URL Canonicalization: No need - visitors are getting the content either way.
• Accessible Link Structures: So long as you’re not worried about the >2% of visitors who can’t see Flash, go ahead and build rich applications to your heart’s content.
• Robots.txt & Meta Robots: No engines, no reason to direct engines.
• Link Building: Unless it’s specifically to draw in relevant traffic, why bother?
• Creating Vertical Search Feeds: That’s going to be time wasted.
• Information Architecture: While there’s good reasons to do some of this for users, a significant portion of the accessibility and link hierarchy arguments are made moot.
• Redirection: Without engines, we can use whatever method is convenient - javascript, meta refresh, 302 - it makes little difference to the user.
• Rel="Nofollow": Internally or externally, it becomes a pointless attribute.

I think the problem with the classic "build for users" advice is that it sounds so compelling and, on a surface level, makes a lot of sense. Maybe this is a good warning not to adhere to any advice just because it seems logical on its face - knowledge and expertise may not make for simple messaging, but, outside of politics, accuracy is far more valuable than fitting into a sound byte.

UPDATE: A lot of folks in the comments are under the impression that I’m recommending against building for users - nothing could be further from the truth. Websites are made for people, and users should absolutely be the focus of your efforts. My argument in this post centers specifically around the practice of search engine optimization and the idea that tactics which are engine-focused (like XML sitemaps, anchor text, link architecture, webmaster tools usage, etc.) can be ignored because they’re not "for the user." The charts and points above are intended to illustrate that if you only focus on "user-targeted SEO" you’re missing a huge chunk of the potential SEO opportunity pie.

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Design Trends: The Single Purpose Homepage »

Posted by randfish

It’s been a long time since I last blogged on design topics, but I think it’s time to break that streak. This post focuses on a design style that’s both retro (it’s been around a long time) and emerging (the popularity, at least to me, feels like it’s on the rise) - the single-purpose homepage.

First, a brief example:

In the above design, Spokeo has just one, singular, all-consuming goal - get your email address so they can show you how their product works. There may be a few secondary links for registered users to login, access to the blog and about pages, and some logos to help improve credibility, but basically, we’re looking at remarkably driven intent behind the design.

Five Reasons I Like the Single-Purpose Homepage:

1. It Gets the Message Across Quickly
   With only a single headline and call to action, visitors quickly parse the critical message you’re attempting to push. In longer, more complex pages, designers and marketers constantly have to worry about the percentage of people who are actually exposed (in any meaningful way) to the intended triggers.
   _
2. It Forces Simplicity in Communication
   This singularity of messaging also means that the language, words and images chosen have to communicate simply or risk failure. Simplicity in web design has proven itself over and over again as a driver of success, and simple messages are the easiest to understand and to transmit virally - a marketer’s dream.
   _
3. It Reveals What Matters (and Obscures What Doesn’t)
   When external forces compel us, we tend to find our greatest strength is all that remains. That principle is in clear effect with these designs, as the unecessary is completely stripped away, leaving only  those items (graphics, font, layout, links and messaging) that serve the singular purpose of the page. If you’ve ever fought over which ten things to put on the homepage, get ready to trade that in for which ten words can express the entirity of your business (not necessarily an enviable trade, but it can be a net positive).
   _
4. It Sorts the Visitor Wheat from the Chaff
   Visitors who reach this page will instantly know whether the product is for them or not. The uninterested are immediately disengaged, leaving only true potential candidates for marketing and targeting. This means every piece of data you can collect and refine about your remaining audience is precious — but it does remove the "noise" that’s often mixed in with an unfocused audience.
   _
5. It Makes it Easy to Optimize the Funnel
   If you’re doing lots of A/B and multivariate testing (and if this doesn’t convince you that you should, abandon all hope), the simplicity of having only a few input boxes, links and headlines is a miracle. Tests run faster, produce more compelling results and give you the focus you need to improve click-through and conversion rates efficiently. Tiny changes in these percents are frequently responsible for millions of dollars of revenue (which is generally a good thing).

Is It Good for SEO?

It depends… If you have the type of site that’s very product focused and single-purpose in nature, this can be an ideal page type. Even if you run a blog, promote articles, or have other types of secondary content, you can always embed links to them in smaller, more background-style fonts and retain crawlability and good information architecture.

The only real trouble may come from the homepage’s loss in ability to send traffic to more viral, less product-specific parts of the site (which will then cost links, which will in turn cost SEO opportunity). If this is a danger, it may be a viable reason not to implement this style of design. You also definitely shouldn’t be using this style if it doesn’t fit with your strategic goals - publishers, blogs, newspapers and most retailers probably don’t want to go this direction (though taking cues from it in deeper, more focused pages is probably very wise).

Eight Examples of Single-Purpose Homepages in Action:

The URL shortening service j.mp (run by Bit.ly) is remarkably focused on helping provide their product with little surrounding clutter. I particularly like the approach of stretching the URL bar so it’s always the dominant focus - and once you use j.mp, you’ll never go to any other service (part of the reason they can focus so heavily on getting the product used in the first 5 seconds of the first visit).

Tumblr’s message "the easiest way to blog" is made credible by the fantastically simple signup process. They’ve also smartly broken the "single purpose" literal interpretation by having a callout in the green box of "21 Reasons Why You’ll Love Tumblr." Just for the record - even though I’m an advocate of this style for the right type of site, I do strongly encourage testing often and early. The beautiful part is how easy pages like this are to test (in comparison to their portal-entry-like peers)

 

Shopify employs simplicity and text-based callouts to highlight its messaging. I like the layout visually, but I wonder if they’ve done extensive testing about the impact of the three text boxes.

If you’ve seen the dozens of popular weather sites around the web, you know how horrifyingly cluttered they can be. UmbrellaToday breaks with tradition and provides possibly the dead-simplest method for getting solid weather reports. I’m a fan of the clever name and branding, too - I love personality in startups :-)

Although Silverback’s homepage is a bit long-form vertically, the message is singular - convey what the app does and why you need it, then get a click on that download link. I’m not sure if they have tested it, but I’d love to see a version that puts the "What does Silverback do?" graphic in the text bubble spoken by the Gorilla. 

Popular travel site Kayak technically has multiple foci, but the strength of the homepage’s conviction that you want to find airline pricing and their ability to stick with it for so many years (and probably through hundreds of rounds of testing) illustrates the single-purpose homepage brilliantly. It’s also in sharp contrast to their competitors in the travel market, who insist on promoting specials, deals, partnerships, news, reviews and a thousand other disparate items that distract from the intended goal of both website and visitor.

When I first visited Resumator, I wasn’t sure it belonged on this list. However, after spending ~9 seconds actually reading the copy on the page, I was impressed. I instantly knew what they did and actually considered sending it over to some folks inside SEOmoz for consideration (since we’re going to be on the hunt for new hires soon). Single message - check. Delivered quickly - check. Focused direction to one action - check. All that, and it looks pretty useful :-)

Gist plugs your email in with the web’s social features to help give context and content around your inbox and contacts. It’s a pretty spiffy piece of software, particularly for those in sales, and the homepage does a good job of conveying the value proposition quickly and simply.

You’ve probably never heard of this tiny, Mountain View, CA company, but apparently, they do pretty well :-)

Your thoughts?

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Online Reputation Tips - My Ad:Tech London 2009 Presentation »

Posted by willcritchlow

I am in the middle of a crazy couple of months of seminars, conferences and other assorted presentations. If you’re interested in seeing any of them, my speaking schedule is online.

Last week I spent Wednesday at ad:tech in London where I spoke about advanced analytics and online reputation management. In my analytics presentation, I was refining ideas for what I’m going to talk about at our own advanced SEO seminar so I’m not putting that one online just yet, but I thought the online reputation stuff would make a good Monday morning post. The audience was mainly brand and advertising people so I didn’t assume too much knowledge of SEO or ORM, but instead ran through why you would want to monitor for your brand, how to determine if something is going to be a problem and some tips and tricks we’ve picked up along the way.

For those of you who haven’t seen me speak, my slides are not always the most self-explanatory things so although I have included them here, I am also going to run through the key themes and tips:

Ad:Tech 2009 Online Reputation - Will Critchlow, Distilled

Who’s talking about your brand?

1. London Fashion Week: I wanted to start with something topical so I used some examples from London Fashion Week (including brands and models) to demonstrate the impact of news events (interestingly, I found no significant correlation between spikes in search volume for the brands or models during fashion week). Out of this came two kinds of worked example, however:
   • The power of news stories and official websites such as londonfashionweek.co.uk - both of which were ranking for big brand names throughout the week
   • A look at an example set of negative search results - for a model who has no official website ranking, has wikipedia at #1 for her name and has a story about a sex tape on the first page
2. How to tell if something’s a problem: although most of this will be obvious to anyone with an SEO background, I presented some ways to tell whether a new story you find while monitoring for your name or brand is likely to end up ranking for your name. The factors I encouraged people to look out for were:
   • Is the keyword in the title / URL
   • Is the keyword in the headline and copy
   • How powerful is the domain (noting that most new stories won’t have gathered many links of their own yet so we have to make assumptions based on the power of the domain)
   • Of course I recommended people install the mozbar to get easy access to all these factors
3. The pyramid of pain: the stories you are looking out for especially hard are the negative ones which include the keyword prominently and which reside on a powerful domain. Not only are people very likely to be reading and sharing the story, but it’s highly likely to end up ranking
4. Tips and tricks: through our work for a variety of clients, we have been lucky(?) enough to have encountered at least our fair share of gotchas. I thought the least I could do was share a few tips:
   • Have a plan in advance of bad stuff happening - mid-crisis is not the time to be wondering whose job it is to check the wheelnuts
   • We have found the most valuable part of our daily / weekly reports to be the forecast - trying to "write tomorrow’s executive summary today"
   • When emailing busy executives with critical reputation information make sure your subject line gives them the first thing they need to know, and by the time they’ve read the first sentence on the preview pane of their iphone they are fully up to speed
   • Know who to speak to out of hours. What happens if you discover something critical during monitoring and you can’t reach your normal contact? Make sure you have a plan. I illustrated this with a true story about some monitoring we were doing for a client (not Tesco) and discovered a credible threat against Tesco employees and property. I had to cold-call them and try to get through to the right person without sounding like a bomb-threat nutter. To their credit, I got a quick call back from the head of security, but whenever it’s your client, you shouldn’t have to take that risk

I hope there’s some tips in there for everyone. If it raises any questions, feel free to drop me a line or leave them in the comments.

My next presentations

There are a few tickets left for the PRO SEO seminar but we are expecting it to sell out this week.

On Wednesday, at 4.30pm UK time (8.30am PST / 11.30am EST) I am hosting a free conference call entitled How to be an Excel Ninja (and how it helps your SEO) where I will be slicing and dicing Linkscape data among other things. If you’d like to join the call or get the recording afterwards, you can sign up here.

Technorati Tags

online reputation, orm, adtech, presentation

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Why Linkbait is a Tactic the Search Engines Will Always Value »

Posted by randfish

There have been more than a few debates and suppositions over the years about the potential value of linkbait/viral content strategies and whether search engines will always reward these practices. Today (actually, it’s late at night here in Oslo), I wanted to tackle this debate and succinctly present reasons why I believe this methodology will remain powerful and effective in the long run.

First - a quick definition of linkbait as an SEO pursuit:

Linkbait/Viral Content: The practice of crafting web content to attract attention and awareness in the form of natural links given by bloggers, news media, researchers, forum posters and other website contributors. This content can include any combination of static or interactive elements, but is almost always targeted at a specific subset of web audience members who have the ability to influence/create links, share content and spread a message virally (see Linkerati).

Second - a peek at some infographics that help explain why this trend is so powerful:

(SOURCE: Forrester Research via the Groundswell Blog)

Just three years ago, those of engaging in linkbait were targeting 30-50% fewer people than today. That doesn’t always mean it’s easier (in fact, it may be harder, particularly on uber-popular viral sites like Digg & Techcrunch), but it does mean the opportunity to influence has risen dramatically.

So why do I feel so strongly that this carries little to no risk of penalization or devaluation?

1. Viral content is at the core of exactly how the engines want to operate. Search engines are, since their inception in the 1990’s, attempting to use the web’s link graph to identify content that people have found fundamentally interesting and worth sharing. Linkbait is exactly this - every link to a piece of viral content is created independently by individuals who think it’s valuable enough to spread.
2. Devaluing "linkbait" carries an incredibly high "slippery slope" risk. Once could easily make the argument that every website is technically designed to be linkbait and thus, every natural link should be "suspect" (if linkbait was to be considered a manipulative tactic). The fundamental concept of product development for the web is actually based on the same principles as viral content - site builders are trying to make sites and information that people find compelling and want to use + share; penalizing this practice seems to contradict the very idea of the web’s link graph.
3. Search engines have always touted that so-called "natural links" those that are independently created, editorially given and meant to serve as an honest recomendation for a URL’s worthiness are the most desirable and positive kinds of links. This is precisely the type of link attracted by linkbait, in precisely this manner. Viral content is launched, promoted and hopefully seen by individuals who may like it enough to share it and link to it. There’s little else on the web that can attract "natural" links.
4. Linkbait is "great content" - the very thing engines and engineers are constantly recommending as the core strategy for good SEO. To go against this principle would be to invalidate more than a decade of advice. When linkbait isn’t "great" it tends not to attract links and the engines’ work is done for them.

Like anything in the SEO world, there are higher and lower risk methods for engaging in this practice. Former SEOmozzer Matt Inman wrote a post highlighting some of the most dangerous implementations of manipulative link attraction, but these are most definitely the exception rather than the rule. A rough risk scale might look something like:

• No Risk - Production of relevant (on-topic with the site’s offerings) viral content with no manipulative link schemes promoted ethically and organically on and off the web.
• Low Risk - Production of relevant viral content with potentially manipulative promotion (paying those with powerful social media accounts to help "push" the content into visibility).
  This is low risk in my opinion because the links are still created and given organically and editorially. Even if you manged to, for example, bribe Digg into promoting your story on the homepage, if that story attracts natural links from bloggers, writers, journalists, website owners, etc. it’s still fulfilled the search engines’ principles of high quality content that naturally derived editorial links.
• Moderate Risk - Production of somewhat "off-topic" linkbait that has only a loose thread tie to the content of the site.
  While I don’t believe the links will be devalued, it’s possible that they won’t provide as much help to the other sections of the site or it’s overall domain authority and ability to push up the rankings universally across the domain.
• High Risk - The combination of off-topic linkbait and manipulative push practices, possibly with other less-than-fully-honest tactics like highly manipulative or irrelevant anchor text pointing to the content’s "sponsor" or "creator" (typically, this is fine to do, but when employing certain types of "off-topic" anchor text, you need to be carfeful).
• Extreme Risk - Creating content that attracts natural adoption of link code that recommends or points to something other than the original piece intended by the link creator. This could happen by crafting micro-sites on a topic, attracting links and redirecting them to off-topic, commercially focused pages/sites; embedding links into a "copy + paste this code" piece that visitors may not realize links to a location they didn’t intend to endorse; etc.

You can probably tell that I’m a big believer in and supporter of viral content. I actually maintain a list of cool viral content projects that I’m impressed by, and I thought to end this piece, I’d share some of those:

• Viral Video Done Right
• 10 Facts Every Westerner Should Know about the Middle East
• A Visual Guide to the Financial Crisis: The Bailout
• Web Development Project Estimator
• Economic Recovery Dashboard
• Infographic of US Swine Flu
• Amazon Acquisitions and Investments Leading up to Zappos
• How Different Groups Spend their Day
• Military Spending Worldwide
• Information is Beautiful
• The Booze Death Calculator
• Tim Series of Reported Occupations in the US (AKA Job Voyager) 
• Online Dating Advice: What to Say in a First Message
• Modern Mugs and Creative Mug Designs

If you have differing opinions about how the search engines might treat viral content/linkbait SEO strategies, I look forward to chatting in the comments :-)

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Examining the Top 150 In-Linked Posts at SEOmoz »

Posted by MikeTek

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.

Though it’s certainly not the most hyped, an SEOmoz tool I took an immediate fascination with is the Top Pages tool (found in SEOmoz Labs - PRO only). What it does is very simple yet powerful: you give it a domain, and it returns a list of the pages at that domain that are linked to by the most root domains (sorted highest to lowest).

I’m a firm believer that the second best way to learn is by example (the first is to try yourself and fail repeatedly - if you can afford it). 

Since it’s no secret that the SEOmoz Daily SEO Blog is one of the most widely-read in the space (with ~50k subscribers) and Rand & Co. are quite successful at building links I thought I’d turn the Top Pages tool back on SEOmoz and examine the most linked-to posts at the blog here.

The aim: to study a prime example of a link-attracting blog in our space and draw some insight from the style, content and topics of posts that have attracted the most links for SEOmoz - insight that we can (hopefully) all use to improve our own content creation methods.

Note: This data represents a snapshot in time - so some of these numbers will have changed by the time you read this (if SEOmoz has updated Linkscape by then). I also experienced some odd results involving 301 redirects - old blog URLs with ID variables which were 301′d to new URLs weren’t showing up properly in Linkscape (the data set that Top Pages is based on). In short, I had to manually add up some of the In-Linking Domain counts. Yes, it was tedious.

The Data

I decided to cap the sample at the top 150 posts. This was mainly to keep the list manageable and focus on the real "home run" successes.

I gathered the following metrics:

• Post Title
• Post URL
• Post Category
• Number of in-linking domains
• Post is a list? (Ex: Top 10 Ways to X…)
• Post contains images/video?
• Post originated at YouMoz?

On to the meat and potatoes…

Does the list post format ("X Ways to…") attract more links?

The value of the list format for posts and how this helps your content go viral is beaten to death - but we still accept that the format works. How well has it worked for SEOmoz?

Of the top 150 posts, 38 of them were presented in the list format. The remaining 112 posts in the Top 150 were not presented in the list format.

While list-oriented posts are commonly considered a powerful way to make your content more shareable (and attract links) the most successful link building posts at SEOmoz were writtein in a non-list format.

However, list posts can still be quite successful in attracting links (see below).

The Top 5 In-Linked List Posts at SEOmoz:

1. 21 Tactics to Increase Blog Traffic (275 In-Linking Domains)
2. 15 CSS Properties You Probably Never Use (but perhaps should) (139 In-Linking Domains)
3. 11 Best Practices for URLs (90 In-Linking Domains)
4. My Personal Opinion - 90% of the Rankings Equation Lies in These 4 Factors (89 In-Linking Domains)
5. 10 Remarkably Effective Strategies for Driving Traffic (88 In-Linking Domains)

The Top 5 In-Linked Non-List Posts at SEOmoz:

1. The Web Developer’s SEO Cheat Sheet (312 In-Linking Domains) Nice one, Danny!
2. Canonical URL Tag - The Most Important Advancement in SEO Practices Since Sitemaps (139 In-Linking Domains)
3. Matt Cutts on Nofollow, Links-Per-Page and the Value of Directories (139 In-Linking Domains)
4. How to Ruin a Web Design - The Design Curve (117 In-Linking Domains)
5. How Google’s Rankings Algorithm Has Changed Over Time (94 In-Linking Domains)

Do images/videos in posts help attract links?

Most bloggers accept that a post with images tends to be more scannable and sharable. Rand has commented in the past about the boost including supporting graphics in posts provides. How has this translated into SEOmoz’s own link profile?

Of the 150 posts in this sample, nearly a 2/3 majority (90) of them contain either images or video content. The remaining 60 posts were text-only. 

SEOmoz has been more successful in attracting links with posts containing images/video than text-only posts. This might sound like common sense to a blogger, but it’s nice to see it backed up with data. The takeaway here: it’s worth taking the time to find or create supporting graphs/illustrations to include in your posts.

What post topics(categories) attract the most links?

The two categories with the most posts in the Top 150 were Link Building and Technical Issues. These two also attracted the most in-linking domains overall:

The real stand-out in terms total number of in-linking domains is the Technical Issues category - followed by Link Building. This is great information when you’re deciding what topic to focus on for your next blog post or article.

It’s also worth noting that the Blogging category, certainly not a focal topic for SEOmoz, was third in attracting the most in-linking domains overall. Think Linkerati - bloggers are a group with the means and motivation to link (and there are loads of bloggers out there). Not a bad segment to aim your next post at. :)

Here are the most in-linked posts from each category (note: I’m not including categories with only one post):

• Analytics: The Beginner’s Checklist for Learning SEO (63 ILDs)
• Blogging: 21 Tactics to Increase Blog Traffic (275 ILDs)
• Business Tactics: SEO Pricing & Costs - What Should You Charge / How Much Should You Pay? (59 ILDs)
• Content Creation: Every Site is Linkbait & Linkerati Worthy (37 ILDs)
• Events and Conferences:  Mike Grehan on Those in the Sandbox (93 ILDs)
• Google: Matt Cutts on Nofollow, Links-Per-Page and the Value of Directories (139 ILDs)
• IR and Patents:  How Google’s Rankings Algorithm Has Changed Over Time  (94 ILDs)
• Keyword Research: The Beginner’s Checklist for Small Business SEO (65 ILDs)
• Link Building: 10 Remarkably Effective Strategies for Driving Traffic (88 ILDs)
• Misc.: A Complete Glossary of Essential SEO Jargon (83 ILDs)
• On-Page Issues: Best Practices for Title Tags (88 ILDs)
• Paid Search Ads: The Disconnect in PPC vs. SEO Spending (57 ILDs)
• Search and Legal Issues: Pulling a Fast One: A Clever Internet Marketer Is Trying to Trademark "SEO" (37 ILDs)
• Search Community: How to Price an SEO Campaign (51 ILDs)
• SEO Tools: A List of Every Website Statistic Publicly Available (62 ILDs)
• SEOmoz News: Ranking Factors Version 2 Released (42 ILDs)
• Social Media: Widgetbait Gone Wild (62 ILDs)
• Spamming and Black Hat: How to Handle a Google Penalty - And, an Example from the Field of Real Estate (78 ILDs)
• Technical Issues: The Web Developer’s SEO Cheat Sheet (312 ILDs)
• Viral Marketing: Anatomy of a Super Digg (53 ILDs)
• Web Design and Usability: How to Ruin a Web Design - The Design Curve (117 ILDs)
• Web Development: 15 CSS Properties You Probably Never Use (but perhaps should) (139 ILDs)
• Websites: Five Reasons Why It’s Better to be Big & Popular than Small & Niche (30 ILDs)
• Whiteboard Friday: Controlling the Flow of PageRank & Link Juice (33 ILDs)

How about YOUmoz posts?

Out of the Top 150 In-Linked posts at the SEOmoz main blog 9 originated at YOUmoz. Let’s hear it for these mozzers:

• A Complete Glossary of Essential SEO Jargon (83 ILDs) - posted by David LaFerney
• Anatomy of a Super Digg (53 ILDs) - posted by DanielTynski
• Do Sitemaps Affect Crawlers? (39 ILDs) - posted by chenry
• 17 Most Common PPC Mistakes Web Marketers Make (33 ILDs) - posted by Igor Mordkovich
• Proof Google is Using Behavioral Data in Rankings (32 ILDs) - posted by WebGeek
• Divide and Conquer: Creating and Managing Your Link Campaign (30 ILDs) - posted by Crash
• 11 Tips for Appearing at Google Definitions (26 ILDs) - posted by Esteban_Panzera
• Diagrams That Can Help You Define the Proper Anchor Text of Internal Links (26 ILDs) - posted by MariaSEO
• SEO Since 1999 (23 ILDs) - posted by James Svoboda

There are undoubtedly other ways to slice these metrics up - as well as metrics I didn’t include in my research. I encourage anyone with the inclination to download the spreadsheet I compiled and chop it to bits. Just one request: keep me out of it, I’m tired of looking at this data. ;)

About Mike Tekula

Mike is a Web Developer and SEO Consultant working and residing in Long Island, NY. He founded Unstuck Digital, an Internet Marketing agency, in 2008 and blogs at UnstuckDigital.com. He also rambles at Twitter.com/MikeTek.

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Whiteboard Friday Interview: The Bing Team »

Posted by great scott!

This week Rand and I had a chance to head over to Microsoft headquarters and sit down with Eric, Rajesh, and Alessandro from Bing, everyone’s favorite new search upstart.  The guys were gracious enough to let us into their lair and share their insights on the search landscape and what we can expect from Bing in the future.  Tune in and watch the video to learn what the Bing team has to say about:

• How Bing’s marketshare growth will impact search.
• What the potential Bing/Yahoo! partnership could mean for the competitive landscape.
• What webmasters need to do to optimize for Bing.
• How Bing’s Webmaster Tools can help you identify links to bad neighborhoods.
• What Bing’s domain and page scores mean and how you can use them.
• How Bing provides link data and whether or not it will still be available in the future.
• Requirements, features, and upcoming developments for Bing’s amazing IIS Toolkit.

Yeah, seriously, these guys really opened up and let us know the inside scoop straight from the hallowed halls of Redmond.  They’re an awesome group and they’re working hard to create a level of transparency, openness, and community rarely seen from the engines. In fact, if you have product ideas, questions, or suggestions, just go to the Bing Forums and jump into the conversation, the Bing team avidly reads and responds to the forum feedback.

p.s. from Rand - Just wanted to update with a few important links from the discussions:

• Bing’s Webmaster Blog
• The IIS SEO Toolkit
• Bing Webmaster Tools
• SEO Whitepaper from Bing
• The Bing Toolbox (includes APIs, Silverlight tools and more)

I’m looking forward to some future discussions around more specifics of SEO best practices with the Bing team - if you’ve got items you’d like me to ask them about, don’t be shy! We’re planning to have a few more meetings in the upcoming months. Oh - and since Eric was modest and didn’t mention it in person - here’s the latest on Bing’s US market share increases.

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Oslo’s SEM Konferansen in Fourteen Photos »

Posted by randfish

It’s day two of SEM Konferansen in Oslo, Norway, and rather than try to share content from the conference (which I’ll attempt to do in a more formal post next week), I thought we’d return to some SEOmoz roots and do a photo mashup combined with my terrible sense of humor. Remember kids, no sleep + traveling to foreign countries = weird posts from Rand.

Sunrise over Oslo; if you look closely, you can see all the trolls turning back to stone (that’s why blog comments in Norway are so high quality during the day).

Naturally, the hotel room looks like a disco, complete with catwalk (yes, seriously, there’s even a separate light switch labeled "catwalk")

The Grand Hotel on the High Street in Oslo. Thanks to recent shifts in the exchange rate, lunch is now the same price as a roundtrip first class ticket to Seattle (seriously, Oslo is the most expensive city I’ve ever visited).

Notice that once the temperature in Olso registers above freezing, locals immediately remove their shirts to avoid overheating.

I’m sure this photo will come in handy for a slide deck in the future. In the meantime, feel free to insert your own caption about relative progress levels of technology

Why aren’t there more photos of Rand & Geraldine from day one? This should answer the question (notice the footlong bags under my eyes)

A fortress near our hotel is in the process of being renovated by the defense department according to a nearby sign. Supposedly this will add +2 to troll defense systems.

Eniro’s CEO, Jesper Karrbrink, appearing far too fashionable for the search industry.

Lisa Myers of Verve Search (formerly Lisa Ditlefsen) presenting (brilliantly) on SEO at the conference. Despite being Norwegian, Lisa presented in English solely for my benefit (I presume).

Jon: The only window in our hotel room is floor to ceiling and looks onto the lobby from the bedroom.
Magne: Oh yeah! I saw you in your boxers this morning while eating breakfast downstairs.
Rand: Have you been working out?
Jon: This is getting creepy.

Adam Lasnik properly covered his heart to sing the national anthem for Norwegian conference-goers (funnily enough, he does this whenever he’s asked a question he’s not allowed to reveal - part of Google’s new, patriotic plan to deal with search ranking secrets)

"The algorithm moves really fast, so you have to have a beard at least this long to keep up" -Rand

"And then if I push this button … Oh crap … Does anyone know what ’selfen-destructert’ means?" - Andrew Goodman

Rand: The more I drink, the more Norwegian I understand.
Jon: Hmm… And yet, the more you drink, the less English you understand.

We now return to our regularly scheduled blog programming. Please forgive this jetlagged lapse.

p.s For more photos, see this set on Flickr. Many thanks to Everywhereist for the camera work.

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Followed Links from Four Unexpected Sources »

Posted by jennita

We receive many questions every day in our Q & A section. Every question is answered by a different mozzer and is handled personally. Often times we will run across a specific question being asked various times. Although the question is usually never exactly the same, the answer is often fairly similar. One question that has been popping up lately is whether it is really worth it, from an SEO standpoint to participate in Social Media.

The way I usually answer is that although most Social Media and networking sites nofollow their outbound links, they often send relevant traffic to your site. And as junseth mentioned in his YOUmoz post, one nofollowed link could very well gain you several followed links!

A couple of the questions have asked about links from specific sites, so some research was done while answering their questions. From this I found a few sites that I wouldn’t have thought to pass link juice… but low and behold they do! Not only did I find that it’s possible to get a followed link from these sites, but I dug a little deeper to show the actual MozRank passed by the link as well.

Panoramio

First, we had a member ask whether the site Panoramio could be useful for SEO. My husband is a photographer and he actually uses Panoramio on his blog. This is a cool site that let’s you take photos and place them on a Google map and you can see places around the world. There is also a WordPress plugin that allows you to add this feature to your blog. My initial inclination was that no, there wasn’t any specific use for Panoramio other than what I mentioned above… the idea that you could get followed links from other users who like your work. But then I realized that profiles on Panoramio have followed links!

Unfortunately you can’t customize the anchor text, but you do get a nice followed link to your site from a PR 7 and DmR 6.78 site. Woot!

Zillow

The next site was actually found while looking for a good example of using charts and images for link bait while poking around Zillow.com. Again I noticed that there were followed links from the profile pages! This would be a really great link for any business associated with the Real Estate industry in any way.

At first I thought the biggest issue with these links was that the anchor text is predefined to "Website" and "Blog." But then I realized that Zillow also allows you to create your own followed links in the "About" section. Mmmhmmm YES THEY DO! Zillow.com also has a PR 7 and a DmR of 6.96. Although this site may not work for everyone, those who can use it could really benefit!

YouTube

Now, I’ve heard time and time again that sites like YouTube and Facebook don’t pass link juice, but I am here to prove them wrong. This question initially came from a question by a member and it had a number of us digging around YouTube trying to figure out why certain links were followed but others weren’t.

I started to notice that there were two distinct looks to the average YouTube channel (I’m talking about your average user, not the ones PAYING for fancy pages with followed links - that’s not a paid link or anything!). My channel (which admittedly has nothing on it) had a nofollowed link to my personal blog. But a couple of my friend’s sites, had a different look & feel and their links were followed!

My friend suggested that perhaps I should edit the link and see if anything changed. As soon as I logged in and went to edit my profile, I got a popup asking me if I’d like to use the new Beta. Hrmmm sure! And VOILA! As soon as I chose the Beta version, my link was now followed! Here’s an example of a profile passing juice:

I still didn’t really believe it though. So I poked around in the code trying to see if they had the beta versions noindexed or hidden via the robots.txt or something like that. Nope, I couldn’t find anything. From here I started to dig around, I wanted to find a site that had received MozRank to their personal site FROM their YouTube channel. I mean heck, with an overall  PR 9 and DmR 9.06 who wouldn’t want a nice juicy link from YouTube?

Hubba hubba! There it is… passing nice juice! Sure the anchor text isn’t the greatest, but the actual PR on the page is a PR 6. Very nice.

Facebook

Now, you’re wondering how to get a link from Facebook since I mentioned it above. Some of you may have already read about this over at HubSpot but you can create followed links on Facebook pages using HTML or FBML (Facebook Markup Language). Check out the Jack & Bobby Facebook page (a show on the WB) as an example.

Before you get too excited I want to make it clear that spamming these sites in any way is a terrible idea. My intention for showing these sites is to prove that if you look hard enough you can make the most out of many sites on the web, these are just 4 examples. The best way to go about building links through these various sites is simple… only make a profile if it makes sense! If having a profile on Zillow or Panoramio doesn’t make sense, don’t do it. If you have a spammy profile, no one will link to you and the page will never get indexed anyway. So please use this information for good… and not evil. :)

I’m sure there are tons of other sites out there that pass link juice but these four really jumped out at me in the past week. I should also mention that we have worked with Zillow and Facebook in the past but I didn’t find this information through our work with them. All of these sites have excellent domain PageRank and MozRank and are probably sites you didn’t imagine getting nice links from! I’d love to hear other examples (come on now folks… don’t be stingy!) and find out if you have any additional info.

 

Jen: edited to fix incorrect use of "alt text" spelling errors and a missing link!

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4 R’s of SEO: Robots, Ranking, Relevance & Results »

Posted by Dr. Pete

Working with small businesses and participating in SEO communities like the one here on SEOmoz, I get to see a lot of SEO mistakes and misconceptions first-hand. These misconceptions are as diverse as the people who practice SEO, but the funny thing is that they almost always fall into one major theme: someone fails to see the forest for the trees. The vast majority of SEO problems come down to narrowly focusing on one area – whether it’s trying to get every page indexed, ranking for one keyword, or obsessing over link quantity, I’d say that 80% of bad SEO boils down to missing the big picture.

So, consider this a back-to-basics post – one that I hope will be educational to newbies and pros alike. Effective SEO requires us to see the big picture, and I’m calling that picture the 4 R’s: Robots, Ranking, Relevance, and Results. For each of the 4 R’s, I’ll provide some tips and tools for how to measure your progress in that area.

As the lotto commercial says: "You can’t win if you don’t play". You’ll never win the SEO game unless your site gets discovered by bots and indexed. How do you get discovered? You can move to L.A. and wait tables, or you can build relevant inbound links, create a crawlable, spider-friendly architecture, and work to get mentions and citations (through social media, for example).

Tips and Tools:

• Test your index with Google’s site: command.
• Check crawlability with tools like Crawl Test and Xenu’s Link Sleuth.
• Register for webmaster tools with Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft.
• Create an effective XML sitemap.
• Understand that indexing isn’t all-or-none.

Of course, ranking is the Holy Grail of SEO – we all want to be #1 on Google. I’ve been tough on rankings over the past year, but it’s not because they aren’t important. Clearly, you have to rank if you want to generate search exposure and traffic. My concern, and the message of this post, is that rankings are just one element of the big picture.

Tips and Tools:

• Sign out of Google and turn off personalization to check rankings.
• Monitor regularly with rank-tracking tools, such as SEOmoz’s Rank Tracker.
• Get long-tail data from Webmaster Tools’ Top search queries report.

Of course, ranking is only effective if it drives relevant traffic, and I mean "relevant" in the very practical, business-minded sense of attracting visitors who are looking for your products and services. Too many clients want to rank for what they think are the most popular keywords, but that often creates two problems: (1) What they think is popular isn’t always popular, and (2) What’s popular may not be relevant or ultimately drive click-throughs.

Tips and Tools

• Estimate traffic volume with Google’s search-based keyword tool.
• Use web analytics to track organic traffic by engine, keywords, etc.
• Set up a limited PPC campaign to test traffic volume and relevance.

Ok, I know "results" is a bit vague, but hey, I needed another R-word. Seriously, I’m talking bottom-line results here - leads, purchases, and anything else that drives your success as a business ("conversions", in the industry vernacular). Traffic is only valuable if it drives measurable results - otherwise, it’s just costing you money.

Tips and Tools

• Set up conversion/goal tracking in your analytics software.
• Track your conversion "funnel" - the steps it takes a visitor to reach your goal.
• Segment, segment, and segment again.

Of course, thousands of blog posts have been written about each of these 4 R’s, and most of us are better at some than others, but if you keep the big picture in mind and don’t fall into the trap of narrowly focusing on just 1 or 2 metrics for success, you’ll go a long way toward effective SEO.

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How to Export Google Analytics Data to Excel via the API »

Posted by Tom_C

Howdy Folks,

Unlike most of the posts that I’ve put out recently which are more strategy based this post is a from-the-trenches-tip which I’ve recently come across that I thought I’d share. I’m going to talk all about using the Google Analytics API but I’ll show you how anyone can do it, you don’t need to be a developer! All you need is a Google Analyics account and Excel….

Introducing….. Excellent Analytics!

Excellent Analytics? Am I just bragging now? No, it’s actually the name of a tool  - check it out here: http://excellentanalytics.com. It’s completely free and also truly excellent!

Excellent Analytics is an Excel plugin that you can download and integrate into most versions of Excel (EDIT - Greg pointed out in the comments that it only works for Excel 2007 - if you’re not compatible with Excel 2007 then check out the alternatives I link to further down). I’ve not done any testing but it certainly installed like a dream on Windows XP with Excel 2007. Once installed you get an extra tab within Excel that looks a bit like this:

So what does it do?

I’m glad you asked. Basically what it does is it provides a GUI (graphical user interface) for querying the Google Analytics API. You’ll need to give it your username and password and then you’ll be presented with a list of Metrics and Dimensions (just like building a custom report in Google Analytics) that you can choose to include or exclude. Excellent Analyics then pulls the data you’ve requested over the date range you’ve given it into the Excel sheet you’re working on. Nifty. But rather than bore you with hypothetical examples and generic screenshots let me walk you through a real-life example that I used it for only a few days ago.

Example - How To Get A Full List of Referring Pages

I was playing around with Google Analytics the other day for a new client and I was trying to pull off a list of their top referring pages. Now, you might think that was easy - after all Google Analytics has a Top Referrers report! Unfortunately, what this report doesn’t do for you is give you a list of referring pages, it just gives you the top referring sources. So the GA report will show me that SEOmoz.org sent more traffic than Twitter.com for example, but it won’t show me whether the homepage of SEOmoz sent more or less traffic than the Twitter homepage. This is the top referrers report in Google Analytics:

And playing around with custom reporting you can get this report of top referral paths:

As you can see though, we have difficulty matching up the referral path with the referral source. Neither report does exactly what I want. Enter on the scene Excellent Analyics. Let me show you how to build this report in Excellent Analyics.

Step 1 - open up a new Excellent Analytics report - tick "referral path" and "source" in Dimensions:

Step two - tick "visits" in Metrics (or anything else you want to report on, bounce rate, page views etc etc):

And then we have the final results (cleaned up a little):

Obviously this is only one very simple application of the tool - once you are querying the Google Analytics API the world is your oyster! If you come up with any more creative application please leave them in the comments.

It’s Limitations

Unfortunately the GA API only lets you return 5000 rows at a time so you can’t export pages and pages of data. That said, there is a filter function (which I didn’t really show above) which let’s you pre-filter the data. Using the filter you shouldn’t need to look at more than 5000 rows (how much data can you really take in anyway!?).

Other Google Analytics API Tools

For most of this post I’ve focused on Excellent Analytics but it’s worth pointing out that there are other tools to help you query the Google Analyics API. The GA blog actually posted a list of such tools which you can check out here in case Excellent Analytics isn’t the tool for you.

Improve Your Excel Skills

By the way, this post coincides nicely with Will’s next free SEO conference call he’s running on How to Be An Excel Ninja - Excel tips and tricks specifically designed for the kind of excel work you need as an SEO. Go over and sign up here :-)

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Whiteboard Friday - The Value of In-Person Networking for SEOs »

Posted by great scott!

Yeah, yeah, you’re a 21st Century digital boy (or girl). You’ve got 900 Facebook friends, 1,200 twitter followers, and power accounts at digg, reddit, and StumbleUpon, but does anyone actually know you?  This week Rand talks about the importance of in-person networking to people in the online marketing world.

No matter how prolific you are online there is immeasurable value to getting out there and meeting your peers in-person. Whether your status is rockstar or n00b, a little face time with like-minded folks can build important bonds that far surpass what can be accomplished online. The level of connection and amount of trust that can be built even over a couple of drinks with a new friend at a seminar can lead to great things for your business, your brand, and your level of satisfaction with your career in the field.

Over the years I’ve had the chance to meet lots of amazing people in the search space, and there are many I honestly consider my friends. I look forward to seeing them at events, feel welcome to email them with questions, get a kick out of their jokes on twitter, and when business opportunities come through the door that aren’t a good fit for SEOmoz, these are the people I send them to.  The connections you make can be more than fun, they can be extremely lucrative. That said, coming from a background in the film industry, don’t make every new relationship about how it can benefit you…nobody wants to feel like they’re being used, or filed away for a favor. Enjoy the comraderie of the folks in this field, learn from them, laugh with them, and you’ll find yourself surrounded by a bunch of good, smart people who will be more than willing to help you out when they can.

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After watching this Whiteboard Friday you’re probably dying to get to a conference and meet people, so I want to quickly remind you of two awesome opportunities we still have available:

1. Get a FREE PubCon Gold Pass with 1-year of SEOmoz PRO:  If you haven’t heard about this offer yet, or you’ve been procrastinating, time’s running out. We’ve only got a couple dozen free PubCon Las Vegas passes left (up to $1299 value) and when they’re gone, that’s it.  PubCon is, in my opinion, probably the best of the major conferences for in-person networking. Aside from all of the great content, there’s just something about Vegas and the laid-back attitude of the show that brings people together and makes it easy to form new connections.  This offer is a killer opportunity to save a ton of money, get full-access to PubCon, and get a whole year of PRO for one great price.
2. SEOmoz PRO Training Series: London: Our sold-out Training Series in Seattle last month was absolutely awesome and we expect London to be no less amazing. At only $599 for PRO Members, it’s a great deal for two full days of super-actionable, advanced-level content and we’ve got about 20 seats remaining.  On the networking front, SEOmoz seminars are smaller and more intimate than the big conferences, so they can be a great opportunity for people who may be a little shy in huge crowds or want a little more direct interaction with speakers.

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This Week in Search for 9/17/09 »

Posted by Sam Niccolls

 

In a week that saw a State Representative heckle an American President and a rapper steal the stage from a 19 year old girl, it was difficult to differentiate the U.S. Congress from British Parliament or the red carpet from a wrestling ring. And though Joe Wilson and Kanye West may have each disoriented millions, the confusion caused by their outbursts pales in comparison to the confusion many small business owners have over how to rank on Google Local.

From lawyers to restaurant owners, few understand how local search is fundamentally different from organic search. So given the number of recent questions I have received about Google Local, I thought I would share a short list of local search resources to help propel your listing into the 10-pack and keep you from complaining like Kanye.

 6 Google Local Resources to Keep you Quieter than Kanye:

• New Google Parameter Handling:
  Google Webmaster Tools now lets webmasters pick up to 15 parameters for Google to ignore when crawling and indexing a site. In her Search Engine Land post, Vanessa Fox discusses the pros and cons of the new feature and talks about other methods of eliminating duplicate content.

• Adobe Acquires Omniture for $1.8 Billion:
  The story made headlines, but web analytics expert Eric Peterson’s in depth and objective look at the deal was among the most insightful.

• Intuit Acquires Mint for $170 Million:
  CEO Aaron Payzer gets minted and Intuit gains access to the Mountain View based startups’ wealth of personal finance data. In related news, Mint alerts informed Intuit senior management that they have exceeded their acquisition budget for week.

• Search Engine Designs Over the Years:
  You’ve used Way Back Machine, but in his recent post Jacob Gube does some Marty McFly-esque time travels of his own and shows the evolution of search engine designs over the years.  

• Email, Interactive, & Search Strong Amidst Downturn: As media budgets continue to shift, the move toward digital is becoming increasingly pronounced. According to eMarketer’s survey, search is one of only three media channels to see more marketers increase rather than decrease spend in 2009.

• How the Engines Determine Ownership of Redirects:
  Building from a patent application by Yahoo, Bill Slawski takes a look at overlap measurements and other factors the engines consider to determine ownership of redirected domains.

• WordPress: Using RSS and Scrapers to Get Links:
  In a post focusing on WordPress SEO, Michael Gray talks about the RSS footer plugin and why having your feed scraped isn’t such a bad thing.

• Low Fidelity Prototyping:
  Having graduated from college at the age of fourteen, Andrew Chen is the closest thing Web Analytics has to Doogie Howser. In his most recent post, the Silicon Valley prodigy outlines the advantages of creating quick and dirty design prototypes.

• Calls to Action: Does size matter?:
  In a post about button size, Linda Bustos proposes some ways to optimize checkout buttons and shares a handful of useful testing resources for Google Website Optimizer, which includes help guides and a nifty WordPress Plugin.

• Ways SEO Supports Strategic Marketing:
  In a post that adds SEO to a host of traditional marketing acronyms, Living Online provides several marketing strategy takeaways that are applicable well beyond their home base of Perth, Australia.

• Seth Godin: Flipping Abundance and Scarcity:
  Free can be fatal on top of a successful business model, but successful companies find ways to flip the model. In his short post, Godin talks about how abundance can create scarcity and underscores the importance of understanding free in an increasingly digital world.

• Avinash Kaushik Announces 2nd Book Release:
  If you liked Web Analytics an Hour a Day, Avinash’s new book, Web Analytics 2.0 is on pre release and is slated to come out in mid-October. And for those looking to do more good than just decreasing bounce rates, all book proceeds will be donated to charity.

• New Google Website Optimizer Experiment Notes:
  Though the feature is far from revolutionary, the new functionality is relatively useful for those using Google Website Optimizer..

• I Can Have Cheese Burger:
  The un-newsworthy, flash-based, yet oddly viral site from the Wisconsin Milk Marketing Board is worth mentioning for no reason whatsoever. That said, it is a site about cheese burgers and it does offer a mouthwatering alternative to stupid cat pictures.

YOUmoz is keeping its great stride and there were a number of great posts this week. These were the top post of the week!

1. SEO - Only Half the Battle by rorycarlyle
2. A Small Business Perspective of SEO by Data Entry Services
3. SEO Ranking Factors - Pros vs. Joes by Netvantage
4. SEO and Copywriting Can Be a Real Workout by jf3ig

From Jen: Thanks for all the great submissions, keep them rolling in! We’re trying to post two YOUmoz entries per day. It can take up to a week or two for your post to go live, if you have questions, feel free to contact me.

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Our Stance on Paid Links & Link Ads »

Posted by randfish

Tonight I’m tackling a contentious, thorny issue and that’s always a tough task. Thus, I’ll ask, up front, for a bit of leeway in how my words are parsed and interpreted. I’m happy to make clarifications on specifics in the comments.

Lately, we’ve been getting a lot of questions (through Q+A as well as from clients and the SEO community) about the practice of buying links. A good number of folks have pointed out that, years ago, I endorsed several text/paid link brokers - companies that aggregate link ad inventory and sell it to those seeking to boost their rankings. This practice does violate Google’s Quality Guidelines as well as other engines’ desires, as do most of the direct forms of paying money to get a link that will assist with organic search rankings (I say "most" because the Yahoo! Directory and a few others like it may be exempt).

I’ve listed some of our general thoughts about paid links:

• Buying/selling links is an inherently high risk activity
• Certain smart methodologies may temporarily reduce that risk, but never to zero (at least, in my opinion)
• The size, credibility and importance of your organization strongly impacts how you might be penalized by the engines (large companies and popular websites are far less likely to receive harsh penalties or bans in the same way smaller orgs might)
• To perform SEO is to decide that the environment and rules created by the search engines is, for better or worse, your ecosystem
• Choosing to manipulate that ecosystem in ways that violate the engines’ rules or intent is not necessarily immoral or unethical but it is potentially damaging to your business (if you rely on search engine traffic)

I want to set the record straight publicly about where I (and SEOmoz) stand vis a vis recommending link buying and link selling as SEO practices.

1. We no longer recommend paid links, link ads, link buying or selling to any of our active clients
2. We do this because we believe that the risk to reward ratio is too high and not because of ethical, moral or legal reasons
3. Our stance has also changed because we feel that paid links no longer offer long-term, high yield value for SEO campaigns, and that other methodologies that require similar effort and finances are almost always more accretive and less risky

This doesn’t mean that I want to take back the things I’ve said in the past about individual link sellers or those SEOs who endorse paid links or link brokers. If your business has risk tolerance for buying or selling links and you go into it with your eyes wide open, I have no problem with that. The businesses and individuals we’ve recommended in the past value their customers, provide a high level of service and are smart operators. Many of them also offer "white hat" link building and SEO services which we’d still recommend today (some have even left the link ads business entirely).

If you’re buying or selling links today, my general feeling is that there are other, more valuable, less dangerous tactics that will add long term value to your SEO. There may be cases where, particularly for large companies, link buying is a low-enough risk activity to make some sense, but as a rule, and as part of SEOmoz’s commitment to our core values of transparency, generosity, quality and empathy, paid links aren’t going to be part of our toolbox going forward.

p.s. I’d love to hear in the comments how those of you who run consulting businesses or offer SEO consulting services deal with this issue in messaging to your clients.

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Crawling & Indexing - It’s Not as Simple as Just In or Out »

Posted by randfish

Short post tonight as I’m just back from a short trip with Mystery Guest to celebrate our one year anniversary (which was awesome, BTW) and need to get caught up on lots of email.

Let’s start with a quick quiz - which of the following statements is true?

• A) My pages are in my XML sitemaps file, so they must be getting crawled
• B) My pages have been crawled, so they must be in the index
• C) My pages are in the index, so they must be able to show for queries
• D) None of the above

If you guessed A, B or C, congratulations, you’re part of a large contingent of folks doing SEO who are (rightfully!) a little confused about how the engines might be doing this. I’ve created a quick graphic to help out:

The takeaways here aren’t tremendous, but they can be valuable to help explain to SEO outsiders why pages may not be drawing traffic even though metrics like appearing in your XML sitemaps, showing in Google Blogsearch queries or appearing to be crawled in Google Webmaster Tools suggest they should. If you want to determine if a page (or set of pages) are actually included in the engines’ main indices, there’s only two definitive ways to know:

1. Perform queries that show the page appearing in the results (without having to use the &filter=0 in the URL string)
2. Check your traffic logs to see if queries are actively sending the page traffic

This is why I love the metric of # of pages that received at least one visit from search engine X each month. If that number is trending in a positive direction, you can at least rest assured the engine is indexing (and holding onto) your pages.

Comments are strongly encouraged on this topic (particular since I didn’t get to cover it in great detail). Thanks!

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SEO Guide: International Versions of Websites »

Posted by Danny Dover

This is the second post in a series of SEO guides aimed at answering frequently asked SEO questions. (The first one explained How To Properly Move Domains.) If you have an idea for another guide, please let me know in the comments below.

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Update: A very heartfelt thank you to everyone who left comments giving me suggestions and pointing out my errors in the original version of this post. It is great to have a network of people who go out of their way and take the time to offer me constructive criticism. It is very much appreciated and helps me make my work better so other people can get the most out of it. Specifically, I want to thank RedCardinal, robbothan, salomonitc, PowerfulSEOTools and Robert Chapman.

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This structure of URLs is one element of a big problem called internationalization. The internet evolved (or was intelligently designed for those not down with the Darwin ;-p) in a way that made TLDs (Top Level Domains like .com, .info, or .org) almost completely useless for determining the intent of a website. (The exception to this is regulated TLDs like .gov, .edu and some country specific TLDs) In theory, a .com is supposed to only be used by companies and .org by nonprofit organizations. Obviously, this does not happen. Combine this with the current trend to misuse country specific TLDs (ccTLDs) for shorter domains names (Hint: Bit.ly has nothing to do with Libya) and you can easily see why the semantic value of TLDs has became a relatively poor metric for categorizing websites.

So what are you supposed to do as an SEO who wants to build a search engine friendly website with international versions of content? Prepare to summon your inner SEO scientist. You are going to need to pick between three very different options depending on your circumstance.

Task: Weigh the following options and decide which is best for your organization.

Subdomain - uk.example.com/

Great option for websites where strong international push is expected from within the company.

Pros:

• Maintains some of the metrics (domain trust, domain popularity) of the root domain.
• Users will easily understand that this is the country specific version of a site they are familiar with.
• Each subdomain can be hosted on a server with a corresponding country IP address

Cons:

• While you maintain some of the value of the root domain metrics, you do lose a significant amount.
• Higher risk of mislinking. Many linkers will link to the "www" of the site out of habit.

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ccTLD - www.example.co.uk/

Great option for websites that have a strong attachment to country of origin and are vastly different from their foreign counterparts.

Pros:

• Very obvious and intuitive to the user.
• Good chance of getting correct links.
• Provides the ability for each domain to be hosted on a country specific IP address. This can be essential for ranking in country specific search engines.

Cons:

• Completely different domain than its foreign friends, amigos and amis. This means they do not share any of the benefits of inbound links.

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Subfolder - www.example.com/uk/ or www.example.com/en-gb/
(See meta content below for explanation en-gb)

Great option for an already well established website that is looking to expand into new international markets.

Pros:

• All links to any version of the site help boost the domain. It’s a rising tide raises all boats situation.
• Less prone to linking mistakes as this format follows the standard website convention www.example.com.

Cons:

• In my experience, this option has not performed as well in country specific search engines.
• Potentially confusing for users looking for a ccTLD (ex. .co.uk) version of the site.
• Not able to have different country sites hosted from different country specific servers with proper IP addresses.

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Other Considerations:

Google Webmaster Tools:

Google provides a service for making the problem of internationalization a little less nasty. If you sign up for and verify your website with Google Webmaster Tools, you have the option of geotargeting your website. See below:

The IP address of your server makes a big difference in country specific search engines. If you have a small to medium sized site, make it a priority to get a server hosted in the same country as your primary audience.

Meta Content:

Declaring a meta content attribute helps make it easier for engines to understand which language is being targeted. This also makes it easy to make it clear which version of a language is being targeted. For example, the UK version of English is shown below.:

<meta http-equiv="content-language" content="en-gb">

You can find the entire list of language codes at Microsoft’s Developer Center.

Links from Websites Hosted in Targeted Country:

There is an ongoing debate in SEO about whether or not this helps. While I have seen evidence that this is helpful for local search (think cities rather than countries) I have not seen any convincing evidence for this helping in international search. That said, I still do recommend it as a low level priority tactic. Additional relevant links is always a good idea.

What If I Am Lazy and Don’t Want To Think Through All of The Options?

First, consider a new career (perhaps a politician?) and then go with the following configuration:

• Use the subfolder option ( Ex. www.exmaple.com/en-us/my-page/ )
• Verify each country specific homepage with Google Webmaster Tools
• Assign each country specific homepage to the correct country
• Automatically redirect users based on IP while defaulting to one version (For many sites this will be English but this is not universal)
• Include links to alternative language versions of the site on the top of every page (Many sites use images of flags to do this)
• Set the meta content attribute for all appropriate pages

This is not the best option for all situations, but it will suffice for most. (How bout them apples?)

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More Resources:

Geolocation & International SEO Frequently Asked Questions

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

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A Link Building Rule to Cut Out and Keep »

Posted by RobOusbey

A few friends have asked me recently about how they can get their personal or business websites ranking higher in Google. I’ve tended to explain SEO - and link building in particular - quite differently to how I’d talk about it to Internet Marketing pros such as yourself.

In particular, there’s one piece of advice that I’ve given so much recently, that I thought it’s worth mentioning here. I hope that even experienced link builders will see value in considering this (and to be honest, they may get even more out of it.) It’s not intended to be rigidly stuck to, but I think that its greatest use is in how it can be applied to any link building tactic or framework, so much so that I think it’s worth putting on a faux brass plaque:

"The most valuable links you can get, are those which your competitors will never be able to have."

It might be something to do with your content, your business or your internal resources, that gives you opportunities that competing sites don’t have. You can use this rule to assess any link opportunity to see if your site has a unique edge (or if your competitors could get the link too) but if you can actually identify some of those unique factors of your site, then you can use these to proactively discover new opportunities.

If it’s not already explicit (and because you deserve more than a 215 word post) we’ll take a look at how it applies to various link building tactics, and then look at how it can be used to find new opportunities.

Linkbuilding Tactics, Assessed

Directories:

Directory submissions have been discussed on SEOMoz before (see posts from 2007, 2008, 2009). With this rule in mind, you say "is this free-for-all directory, in which people who’ve paid the money are almost always listed worth being in?" and the answer is probably not. Then you come across something like Ethical Duck which lists websites which they consider "in some way are of a positive value to humans, the environment, the planet." If you’ve made an ethical commitment that sets you apart from your competitors, then getting a link in this directory would be something you can do, but that your competitors can’t. Likewise, any quality directory that editorially discriminates on your niche/location/other factors may be equally worthwhile.

Create content specifically to attract links:

Whether it’s out-and-out ‘Linkbait’ or just some great content, you can attract links from sites in a particular niche with the right content. Will this help you target sites that your competitors can’t get links from? Well, that depends on the other competitors in your industry, propensity of niche sites to link, etc, as well as making sure that you pick the rights aspect of your business to market in this way. However. the overwhelming influencer is likely to be whether you are capable of creating great content. If you have the time/resource/motivation to do this - and do it better than your competitors - then you’ll be able to count this tactic amongst your most valuable.

Article Sites:

You know the score with this practice: a site creates tens or hundreds of articles (including a keyword rich link back, naturally) and then gets the published across large and small article sites. Could your competitors do this as well? You betcha. If you’re able to create some quality content and distribute it to sites that wouldn’t typically publish articles like this, then you are using article marketing the right way. (Thanks Patrick.)

Buy exact match domains

Can you or your competitor do this better? It basically just comes down to who has a better budget and moves faster - therefore it doesn’t really say much about which site is more relevant to a particular keyphrase. This probably explains why the more established search engines don’t pay quite as much attention to it, as say, the less advanced ones.

These are just examples, and you can go through any linkbuilding technique to see how it measures up on this score.

Linkbuilding Opportunities, Discovered

I’d suggest beginning by writing a list of everything that sets you apart from some or all of your competitors (both the online and offline ones, if appropriate) - but these only need to be differences, with no predjudice as to whether these things make you better or worse. If you have dedicated marketing staff, they may even have put time into creating lists like this already. Grab them, and anyone else who’s interested to help you build this list - you never know where the interesting ideas may come from.

This section has examples of differences you might have to other websites / companies, and examples of how you can use them to help get links based on this rule.

You are a respected source of information/expertise/etc in the industry, but users of these resources rarely convert into customers:

Get your valuable resource online, and use it get links to your site. Make sure that the pages with this information on pass link juice to the appropriate money pages.

You don’t make the products that you sell:

If your competitors are manufacturer-retailers, they’ll benefit from vertical integration, double margins, etc. However, if you buy your products from a number of sources, then you should look at getting those of them with websites to link to you. If they’re proud that you distribute thier product, then you shouldn’t have much trouble getting them to link. You may also consider offering them a genuine testamonial, some end-user feedback, etc that they’ll be keen to publish, along with a link to you.

You have much higher margins than your competitors:

High profit margin products (and services likewise) might be tougher to sell, but they will carry a considerably higher perceived value than the actual marginal cost to you of producing each unit. Go ahead and use this to your advantage by running a competition. If you’re a music label, you could give away $1,000 worth of CDs, but it would only cost you a tiny fraction of that. If you run an online subscription service, there’s typically very little cost to adding one new user, so give away some subscriptions. Executed well and seeded to the right places, a competition can gather a valuable number of links. (I was recently involved in a competition where the prize value equated to about 50cents for each unique linking site. Pretty good value.)

You have some really cheap products:

The Ferrari Store has a varied selection of products - as well as inlet valves from the Michael Schumacher’s car in the 2000 F1 series (400 Euro) and a ‘Ferrari Limited Edition’ Segway (8,500 Euro) they have keyrings and pins from about 10 - 20 Euro. If they’re requesting links from bloggers and site owners, then giving them one of these cheaper item along with the request could significantly increase their chance of a response. (Note to Ferrari: I can be contacted through the Distilled website. K Thanx.)

You have great sales staff:

You’ve got staff who can sell ice to Eskimos? Take them out for lunch, and teach them about SEO and linkbuilding. Great salespeople tend to have the cajones required to call people up out of the blue and get the response they want (in this case - links.)

You have lots of staff (e.g.: in a call center) who are not fully occupied:

There’s no doubt that you have (at least occasionally) come up against tasks that could be valuable, but you can’t spend time on. ("I wish I could email the webmaster of every rambling society in the UK" or "I wish I knew the top 100 Dugg pages in my niche" etc.) If you have a staff who have alternating periods of activity (eg: call center staff where morning are quiet and afternons busy, or booking agents where summer is busy and autumn is quiet) then teach them the value of some of this work. Don’t forget to properly thank them for the work done, and to later show them how it has benefited the business.

Your site or products have won awards:

As hard as we try for them, awards rarely convert directly into new business. However, if you make sure that you get all the links possible out of then at least your SEO team will benefit from the accolade. Begin with the site of the awards themselves, and work from there. (Do you notice anything missing from this Sony Radio Academy Awards page? Clue: it’s an anagram of ‘KILNS’)

You have a PR team who are great at getting you in the offline press:

You didn’t choose your PR Team because they are great at getting you into newspapers, you chose them because they are great at getting you talked about. Even if they don’t know the first thing about the web, they might relish the challenge of getting you into some large online-outlets. Once they’ve got the PR done, you can always follow up to make sure the links are properly in place, etc.

Actions & Epilogue

I’d suggest taking a quick look at your current link building practices now, and see how they measure up on this scale. I’m not suggesting that you should drop anything in particular, but it may be enlightening to think about which links you’ve built that couldn’t be emulated by a competitor.

After that, go for the brainstorm mentioned above to see what makes you different, and then think about how that could help you build more links.

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Google Quietly Pushing More Links + Data in Snippets »

Posted by randfish

The last 3 months have heralded a bevy of new tests and features from Google’s search results, and it’s worth taking a review of the most frequent of these and examining what it potentially holds for optimization of the future.

The new results types include:

Growth of Rich Text Snippets

Perhaps the most obvious and well-covered, rich text snippets enable certain sites to provide Google with extra "structured" information about their pages and receive data callouts in several formats inside Google’s results.

BTW - Notice how Hulu’s rich snippets aren’t quite as "rich" as YouTube’s? I’m not entirely sure why that is, as Hulu does feature star review numbers just like YouTube.

Internal Anchor Links

Google’s been recognizing use of the hash tag (#) in URLs and has taken a new approach of showing these embedded anchor links right in the SERPs as separate callouts.

This last Gmail result is among the more recent changes Google’s shown with the "jump to" feature embedded inside the snippet (rather than below it).

Page-Specific Sitelinks

Domains have, for a long time, been able to achieve "sitelink" status, whereby important subpages are listed below the main URL, taking up a significant portion of a SERPs’ real estate. Now, Google is offering a similar, though slightly less spacious, piece of real estate to sub-pages on individual internal pages.

Embedded Vertical Results

Several forms of this feature have received mainstream coverage, but the use of embedding vertical data and links, typically with the "+" link, has grown in recent months to encompass data of all kinds.

Multi-Page Article Results

One of the least reported (at least in my brief survey of blog posts) effects, this rich snippet format can have a dramatic effect on the vertical space devoted to a listing. It shows for certain types of forum threads & articles where multiple pages are (in Google’s eyes) relevant to the search query.

 

What Does this Portend for SEO?

• Smart, valuable internal anchors may be a good way to get more visibility in the SERPs
• Attaching vertical data or vertical connections to URLs can earn more visibility (but Google may also take those clicks away as they lead back to other Google properties such as Maps, Finance, etc.)
• Earning authority to individual internal pages may be a valuable tactic to receive greater eyeball activity in the results (even if your page’s don’t rank #1)
• Multiple authors and pages on blog/forum style content can attract greater SERPs real estate

I’d love to hear other new kinds of SERPs you’ve been seeing and the impact you perceive on the practices of SEO and content creation.

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Internet Marketing Certification Course Discount »

Posted by Sam Niccolls

“Those that know, do. Those that understand, teach.” You’ve heard the saying, but for few industries does it ring more true than online marketing. Experts in SEO, PPC, Social Media and web analytics take on clients or use their knowledge to create software, but rarely are they found in the classroom.

So even though we typically do not promote offers from other companies on the SEOmoz Blog, we thought the Internet Marketing Certification Courses Market Motive is offering were worth a mention. Starting on Monday September 14th Market Motive will have online courses with 90-days of lessons taught by an impressive array of industry experts.

• SEO Certification Course
• Social Media Certification Course
• Web Analytics Certification Course
• PPC Certification Course

At $3,500 the courses are not inexpensive, but students get a lot from the interactive classes, including video tutorials, live phone conferences, online testing, and faculty reviews. The folks at Marketing Motive also agreed to give a $500 discount for SEOmoz readers. Just use the SEOmoz coupon code when you sign up — CERT30SEOMZ.

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Whiteboard Friday - Ignore the Long Tail at Your Own Peril! »

Posted by great scott!

You do all kinds of keyword research trying to find the highest-volume terms around your niche. You work and work to move one place at a time up the rankings for those competitive terms, and you still don’t see the traffic increase you’re hoping for. Why?

You’re ignoring the long tail! All of those strange and unique searches people do when looking for your specific products or content! While each of these terms may only have 1-10 searches per month, add them all together and they could represent up to 75% of your search traffic. Watch this video and learn why the long tail deserves your attention and can make a huge impact in your traffic.

SEOmoz Whiteboard Friday - Ignore the Tail at Your Peril! from Scott Willoughby on Vimeo.

p.s. from Rand: Props to Kristen Acker of Zillow for the "Fat Head" and "Chunky Middle" naming conventions - thanks Kristen!

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