Whiteboard Friday - Future-Proofing Your SEO »

Posted by great scott!

When individuals or companies are new to SEO they often wonder if SEO is a one-time thing, or if it’s an ongoing process.  In order to stay on top of your game, you need to keep an eye on your rankings over time and adjust accordingly; but there is a lot of core SEO strategy that doesn’t change much and paying attention to these fundamentals (along with a little upkeep) can go a long way toward future-proofing your SEO strategy.

In this week’s Whiteboard Friday, Rand goes over the key components of three major areas of any SEO strategy–Technical, Content, and Marketing–to show you where and how you can plan your efforts so they won’t be obsolete next month or next year.  Whether you’re just setting out to optimize your site, or you’re already working with an SEO strategy, this video will help you find places to tie-up loose ends and avoid potential frustration down the road.

PS - In the video Rand uses Hitwise as an example of a company that uses unique content effectively, referencing this post about Twitter traffic by Bill "Hold Me Closer Tiny" Tancer.

Do you like this post? Yes No

This Week in Search for 10/28/09 »

Posted by Sam Niccolls

• Eric Schmidt - What the Internet Will Look Like in 5 Years:
  Google’s CEO takes a look into the future and talks about some of the ways the internet will change, such as Chinese language sites outnumbering English language sites, an increase in the number of digital natives in the tech workforce, and the difficulties search engines have around ranking real-time search.

• eCommerce - What the Telco Industry Tells us About Product Selection:
  From button treatments to product matrices, there are likely a number of telco industry learnings highlighted on the Get Elastic Blog that can be applied to your eCommerce site.

• Retailers Going Too Far Tracking Web Habits:
  I’m probably the only person on earth who puts items into his shopping cart and intentionally abandons sites in order to get product discount e-mails a week or two later, but the USA TODAY discusses two issues that are hot button topics for more normal consumers: Cookie usage and behavioral targeting.

• Grammatically Incorrect Keywords:
  In her Search Engine Journal Post, Susanna Speier talks about how even though grammatically incorrect keywords aren’t going to win you any spelling bees, they might be the ones that’ll make you the most honey, er-um money.

• Andrew Chen - Building Lifestyle vs. VC-Backable Companies:
  In an interesting post pulling from his VC experiences, Andrew Chen discusses the fundamental differences between building a self-sustaining company and one that’s VC-backable.

• SEO by the Sea on the Importance of Listening:
  In a step away from his usual technical and analytical posts Bill Slawski takes a thoughtful and reflective look at how his life experiences have validated the importance of listening. Also, Slawski’s post about How a Search Engine might distinguish between bots and humans is not to be missed.

• Amazon vs. Walmart - The Battle of the Books:
  Target is a distant third in the online book sales race, but Compete provides some interesting, in-depth analysis on the toe-to-toe battle this month between Amazon and Walmart. 

• Halloween E-mails:
  Campaign Monitor’s Halloween E-mail Roundup shows some creative, brand specific examples of Halloween e-mails that’ll give you some last minute idea fodder for this year or things to think about for next year.     

• Update on Google Rich Snippets:
  Google has been working on better using structured data and expanding rich snippets for a while, but this week’s post on the GWC blog calls attention to improved documentation and tips around their rich snippet testing tool.

• WSJ - Why E-mail No Longer Rules:
  You may have caught the Wall Street Journal post earlier this month, but if you didn’t, it’s worth a read. The negative backlash across the e-mail industry continues several weeks later.

• Integrating E-mail with Other Marketing:
  A well executed e-mail is no different from a fine wine… it’s good on it’s own, but it’s better when given the right pairing. In a useful post centered around e-mail marketing, Joel Book addresses how the most successful e-mail initiatives integrate with other marketing efforts.

• Google Analytics Qualification Test:
  GA has had a more heavyweight certification for agencies for some time, but now available to individual marketers is a test that gives web analytics users personal certifications.

• Networks, Publishers, & the Evolution of Search & Display Ads:
  Jonathan Mendez talks about emerging trends in the ad world and makes some predictions as to how the landscape will change for both networks and publishers.

• Creating a Multi-Cultural Website:
  If you’ve ever tried to market a product internationally, Forrester’s post about the importance of market research when creating a multi-cultural website might strike a nerve. 

• Google Website Optimizer API Released:
  GWO rolled out a new API, which, depending on your CMS provider, can allow you to create and launch tests without touching any of your website’s code. Pretty useful stuff. Although a major limitation is that the API currently only integrates with two CMS providers.

• Google Analytics - Be Careful When Rearranging Goals:
  With GA’s release the other week came a myriad of fantastic features, including customized alerts and expanded goals. But as James Svoboda points out, if you want to preserve your goal history, you might want to think twice before rearranging your goals.

• Seth Godin - Some People Are Better Than Others:
  The short post about customer types earns a spot in this weeks roundup for one reason: The use of the word sneezers, which Godin uses to refer to the customers and brand evangelizers who are best at spreading your company’s word.

• 5 Social Media Lessons for Paid Search Landing Pages:
  Scott Brinker takes a fairly basic, but worthwhile look at some things to consider when optimizing your PPC landing pages. 

• Google Now Treating 410 Status Codes as More Permanent Than 404s:
  Historically Google has treated the two status codes the same, but now, as stated by Google’s John Mu, 410 status codes will be treated as more permanent.

• Bing It On:
  Google is still going strong, but Bing’s share of the search market continues to grow.

• How SEO and Sex Are the Same:
  In a post with gratuitous use of the word ’sex,’  Joel Leydon’s parody highlighting the similarities between sex and SEO is an entertaining read. Both sex and SEO are basic needs, they’re both organic, and yes, as Leydon points out, you can also pay for each, too.

Top YOUmoz entries:

1. Case Study: How Building a Site for Users Improved Rankings by csaliba
   

2. Web Analytics and Segmentation for Better Conversion by philou2803

Do you like this post? Yes No

Third-Party Affiliate Programs: Roll Your Own Instead »

Posted by MichaelC

One of the best ways to build inbound links is to create an affiliate program.  It’s also a great way to drive real customer traffic from related sites.

But…don’t just sign up for one of the big third-party affiliate programs–you’ll get the customers, but you’ll be throwing away a terrific opportunity to get great inbound links. Today, I’m going to try to talk you into writing your own affiliate program from scratch.

Companies like Commission Junction and Google’s own AdSense will do the implementation for you (and take a piece of the pie), but the real reason NOT to use one of these services is that the links to your site are going to be redirected through THEIR site, so that they can track the clicks, sales, etc.  What this means, of course, is that when a crawler looks at your affiliate’s page, it’s going to see a link to the third-party affiliate site, NOT your site.

But surely there’s off-the-shelf software already written that you can just install on your servers and configure, right?  (You’re not being lazy, you’re being EFFICIENT… right…).

True.  There are is a ton of it out there.  But the stuff that really works well is going to be popular, and if it’s popular, and tons of sites start using it, Google is going to eventually be able to spot some pattern in the linking or tracking identifier in the URL etc. and throw it into the "paid links" black hole.  And whether a particular package does/does not skate under the radar with Google today doesn’t really matter–why spend your time integrating something that Google’s paid link assassins are likely to target in the near future?

Besides, it’s NOT that hard. Let’s run through a quick outline of what you’re going to need to do to roll your own affiliate program to get link juice where you want it.

Do you like this post? Yes No

7 Tips for Surviving PubCon »

Posted by Dr. Pete

Conferences can be amazing opportunities for education and networking, but to get the most out of them, you have to make it to the end. If your average SEO conference is an endurance event, then PubCon is the Iron Man – 3 full days of sessions, sponsored parties, being dragged around Vegas by crazy people, topped off by a full afternoon of even more drinking (just in case you somehow managed to forget where the “pub” in PubCon came from).  This year marks my 3rd PubCon, so I thought I’d offer some tips for getting the most out of your experience without ending up looking like this guy.

1. Plan Your Sessions

Even before you leave for a conference, take some time to plan. Time flies onsite, and by Day 3, you’ll barely remember your name, let alone what the difference is between "Track A1 - Social Media" and "Track A2 - Media in Society". The Murphy’s Law of conferences is that the 4 sessions you most want to see will all be in the same time slot. If a session just isn’t cutting it for you, don’t be afraid to get up and go somewhere else, unless you were foolish enough to sit in the front row.

Pro Tip: If you do change sessions, please open and close doors quietly. It would be a shame if you were beaten to death with a laptop at your first conference.

2. Round Up A Posse

What’s the difference between you and an A-list SEO celebrity? Celebrities are constantly surrounded by their posses. You can gain instant celebrity by pre-building your entourage – get on Twitter and arrange to meet some folks for dinner the night before the conference starts. Then, follow those people around, each taking turns being the center of attention. People will automatically assume that you must be famous.

3. Stay Hydrated

Like any endurance event, you have to remember to stay hydrated. If you see a free bottle of water, grab it, even if you’re not thirsty. The vending machines at the Las Vegas Convention Center do take credit cards, which may seem convenient, but you’ll feel differently when you get home and your wife asks you why there are 7 pages of $3 charges on your Visa bill.

Pro Tip: The IRS does not consider $600 worth of Pepsi to be a legitimate write-off.

4. Bring A Sweater

Running a large event is grueling work, so it’s no surprise that many conference organizers grew up in the Himalayas. Being near-Yetis, these otherwise helpful organizers labor under the assumption that everyone is comfortable at a balmy 50° Fahrenheit. By Day 2 of any conference, no matter how manly you think you are, you’ll be begging to borrow the nearest hot-pink cardigan. Do yourself a fashion favor and bring your own sweater or dress in layers.

5. Buy a Power Adapter

Laptops outnumber outlets by a ratio of 99:1 at any SEO conference, and even though you love your iPhone, let’s face it – it has the battery life of a crack-addicted drumming monkey. If you bring a portable power adapter, you’ll not only be able to share outlets, but you’ll be a hero to anyone who comes along with a dying battery.

Pro Tip: Save your last remaining plug for a celebrity – you never know when Matt Cutts may need to plug in his Android phone.

6. Know The Controversies

SEOs love controversy, so try to have a few in your pocket for when you need a conversation-starter. Start with something easy and work your way up. Here are a few to get you going, from least to most controversial:

• "What do you think of the new nofollow rules?"
• "I think Flash is just as SEO-friendly as HTML."
• "Did you hear that Rand Fishkin eats puppies?"

Of course, you never know what side of a controversy any given person will be on – when in doubt, use these handy, pre-packaged phrases to keep the conversation going:

• "Dude, that sucks"
• "Seriously, I know"
• "You should totally ask [insert expert] about that"

7. Know When to Nap

No amount of Red Bull can keep you awake for 4 days straight, and sooner or later you may need to sneak a cat nap. There are some comfy chairs in Vegas, but there’s also a lot of competition, and napping on slot machine stools gets expensive fast. If you find yourself falling asleep during a session, just bury your head face-first into your iPhone or Blackberry. People will naturally assume that you’re fanatically Twittering.

8. Bonus Tip!

That’s right – 8 tips for the price of 7, because that’s just the way I roll. Pay attention, because this one is important. Whoever wrote the motto "What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas" clearly doesn’t work in our industry and has never heard of this thing called the internet.  Of course, from a marketing standpoint, "What happens in Vegas will probably be photographed on a cell phone, Tweeted, Re-tweeted, posted on Facebook, and tagged for the entire world to see" doesn’t really have much of a ring to it.

Don’t Forget to Say "Hi"

This isn’t really a tip, but if you’re a Moz community member, don’t be shy about introducing yourself. SEOmoz is also going to be hosting a special event you won’t want to miss (more details coming very soon). Hope to see you there!

(Las Vegas sign photo licensed from iStockPhoto.com)

Do you like this post? Yes No

Getting the Best From On-Site Search on your Website »

Posted by RobOusbey

Improving on-site search functionality can benefit a site by contributing to a better user experience, and by reducing the barriers for users to reach their destination pages.

There are a variety of tools that you can use if your site does not already have a search functionality; I won’t second guess which search application will best suit your site.

There have already been posts on various blogs about best practices for implementing site search (such as: label the button ‘Search’ and not ‘Go’, search case-insensitively by default, always recommend refinements to searches which generate no results, etc. Stoney deGeyter covered a lot of the important usability aspects last year.) In this post, I’d like to suggest some different techniques you can implement to get more benefit from your site search.

It is worth considering that, as with web-search, the type of queries made through on-site search can be grouped into categories of ‘intent’:

• Navigational: The immediate intent is to reach a particular page that the user has in mind, either since they visited it in the past or because they assume that such a page exists.
• Informational: The intent is to acquire some information assumed to be present on the site. No further interaction is predicted, except reading the contents.
• Transactional: The intent is to perform some web-mediated activity. The interaction constitutes the transaction defining these queries, and they are the most difficult to evaluate.

(Adapted from the concise descriptions supplied by InfoVis.)

With these in mind, we’ll start by looking at collecting data to help you in this project.

Review Search Analytics

Not a tip, but the place to start is by collecting some data about the way users search on your site. Your analytics package should include a feature to monitor the use and effect of your on-site search. Google Analytics hides this under Content -> Site Search. Follow the site search instructions to expose your search query parameters to Google, and you’ll be able to view a dashboard - such as that shown below from Mixcloud - showing metrics such as the percentage of visitors making refinements to their initial search, the average time spent on the site after searching and the percentage of searchers who left the site after seeing the search results.

If that wasn’t enough, you can see the volume of each search made, those stats broken down by keyword:

Use Search Behaviour to Guide Site Structure

A simple review of this information can often give actionable items. In the example above, a lot of searches are for specific genres of music. This suggests that the users may prefer to find content based on a style they like, and the site architecture or navigation could be adapted to suit this behaviour. For example: a simple change could be to add a ‘Genres’ menu / tagcloud / etc - and populate it with the most searched-for terms.

User experience could be further improved by helping users get straight to the pages which receive the most navigational search queries - in this example by giving a front-page feature link to the mixes by Erol Alkan

Use Search Behaviour to Guide Site Content

A massive opportunity for many larger sites is to look at the search terms that receive high volume, but result in a high percentage of people leaving the site. In these cases, your users are telling you precisely the type of content or products (for e-commerce sites) they’d like you to provide! You can, and should, action this right away.

Using Constrained Search

Since search can be considered as a navigational tool that helps users to find the page they need in a more effective way than browsing through long category lists, sites which have a fairly strict site architecture can reflect this in their on-site search. Instead of having a ‘free search’ text box, they can have a number of fields which ‘constrain’ users to search in a way that matches the structure of the site.

For example, TrustedPlaces have a ’search feature’ which asks users to enter a place type and a postcode.

This type of search form ensures that users are entering enough search information to ensure a quality result on the first search. If the results are disappointing (by being too broad, for example) then they will have to refine their search, or may simply leave the site.

Hijacking Search Queries

In many searches with navigational intent, users will benefit from being taken directly to a content page, rather than a results page. For example, a search on SEOmoz.org for ‘ranking factors’ could be improved by taking a user directly to the Ranking Factors page, rather than the search results page for that query.

The main SEO benefit of taking users to a content or browse page, instead of a search page, is that it encourages users to link to your well crafted page for ‘widgets’ rather than just the ‘widgets’ search results page - which is less likely to rank in Google and less likely to convert.

It wouldn’t take long to do a review every week / month of the top hundred searched-for terms, identify navigational searches, and map these to the intended target page.

Have a unique URL for each search result

If your search results URL isn’t unique to the search query submitted (e.g.: because you have used a POST form directly to the results page) means you could be missing out on the opportunity for lots of search traffic. Google typically avoids returning search results pages in it’s own reults, but in many cases, the ’search results’ are atypical and could be a relevant page to return.

For example, I find My IP Neighbors a very useful site. If their search page redirected to a URL that looked like www.myipneighbors.com/check/www.seomoz.org then they could well compete in the long tail of web searches for domain names.

PPC Landing Pages

One of my favourite pieces of social-research show that users searching for singular terms (e.g.: toaster) are further along the buying process, and should be sent to a product page, where as plural searches (e.g.: toasters) indicate that the user is looking for comparisons and responds best to being offered a range of options.

For people managing paid search campaigns, this means that site-search results pages are a quick way to generate a comparison landing page - and these pages typically have low bounce rate as users tend to visit at least one or two returned results.

The ‘toasters’ search demonstrates a lot of PPC campaigns using this quick and valuable technique, including sites such as MoneySupermarket and Lakeland Plastics. By contrast, Asda are using this technique to send ‘washing machines’ traffic to a page that reads "We’re sorry but there are no results for your search" - please don’t waste your PPC budget like this!

Using web search keywords

I think this is a brilliant idea for anyone who can apply it to their site. If the visitor has come from a web search engine, then you can pre-fill the search box with their search term. A very basic example of this on Youtube is shown below.

One of my favourite implementations of this was on Flickr. If you went from web search to an image page, the site-search box would be pre-filled, and a pop-up message over it indicated how many more images could be found for that search term.

For example, it would say "Search Flickr for 809 other images matching ‘mexican wrestler mask’". This aims to keep people on the site for longer (and from not going back to web- or image-search) but for some reason, I’ve not seen this feature on Flickr for a while.

There’s only so much that can be said in 1,300 words - if you have any particular questions about on-site search, feel free to drop them in the comments, and please do share any particularly creative uses and examples of site search that you’ve seen online.

Do you like this post? Yes No

The New Era of Inbound Marketing »

Posted by randfish

Selling is hard work. It sucks time and energy from both seller and buyer. Both engage begrudgingly in the act to fulfill a need. If you’ve been reading SEOmoz for a while, you can probably feel my personal allergy to "sales" as a process and to "selling," even when that’s what I’m supposed to do. It causes discomfort to be on the pushing or receiving side of sales and over the last two decades, we, as a generation have been drifting further and further away from it. Door-to-door salesmen are nearly gone. The effectiveness of brand advertising, direct mail, trade show marketing and cold calling sales have all diminished rapidly in favor of a new set of channels we all use to buy - nearly all of which center around the web.

Just look at what marketers themselves have to say about where they’ll be spending their dollars over the next few years:

The trend is quite clear - this new bundle of marketing channels that consumers pursue themselves (social media, blogs, SEO, email marketing, etc.) is the future. Traditional marketing tactics may not die, but they’re not going to be where businesses invest nor where ROI is going to see dramatic rises. We’re living at the beginning of the new era (and if you’ve been reading SEOmoz, you’re likely part of the revolution).

I recently read through and provided some feedback for a book on precisely this topic - Inbound Marketing by Brian Halligan & Dharmesh Shah:

Although the book’s contents are likely to be relatively basic for most of us who engage heavily in the SEO and social media worlds, it’s precisely the volume you need to give your CEO, VP, director, client, partner who hasn’t yet grasped why these channels are so much more valuable than their traditional marketing predecessors.

Here’s an excerpt: 

Megaphone vs. Hub
If your website is like most others, it is a one‐to‐many broadcast tool – think megaphone. The web was originally built to be a collaboration platform by Tim Berners‐Lee in the 1980’s. It has taken a couple of decades to get there, but the web is now truly collaborative. If you look at the top ranked websites on the web, they are not broadcasting to their users with a megaphone, they are creating communities where like‐minded people can connect with each other. We need to rethink our websites to take full advantage of the collaborative power of the web – think hub.

If your website is like most others, people visit it once, click around and never return because they heard your sales message and moved on. What we want to do is change the mode of your website from a one way sales message to a collaborative, living, breathing hub on the internet for your marketplace.

It’s Not What You Say – It’s What Others Say About You
If your company is like most others, you put all your web energy on your site. In fact 75% of your focus should be on what is happening off your website about your brand, about your industry, about your competitors, creating communities off your site for people to connect with you and your products, and ultimately driving people back on your site.

One of the reasons I like this book so much is because it distills the somewhat complex, hard-to-explain phenomenon of consumers moving away from a "being sold to" culture to a "finding things for themselves using the web" ecosystem. Grab a few copies, put them on your shelf and hand them out to those you need to convert. Like one of my favorite web volumes of all time, Don’t Make Me Think, Inbound Marketing leverages cartoons, illustrations, simple writing and a direct actions to drive understanding and readability.

p.s. A quick note - Inbound Marketing is from the guys who run Hubspot (which is a company I very much admire), so there’s some directional recommendation to use their tools, including the grader.com properties. The section on SEO itself isn’t hugely robust, but it’s a solid overview (I did my best to provide feedback when reviewing to help make it more accurate) and this book isn’t meant to be a tome of all human knowledge on these subjects.

Do you like this post? Yes No

Whiteboard Friday - Tips, Tricks & Tactics Preview: Seth Besmertnik on Winning SEO Budget »

Posted by great scott!

Rand’s in Jolly Ol’ England this week, so I decided to share a preview from our upcoming DVD Training Series, "Tips, Tricks & Tactics: Volume 1," coming out in November.

We filmed this series during our recent seminar in Seattle and the response was amazing. One of the most popular sessions was Conductor CEO, Seth Besmertnik’s, presentation on "How to Win SEO Budget and Influence Your CMO." In this week’s Whiteboard Friday you’ll get a sneak peek at part of Seth’s presentation (one of 17 presentations on the DVD series) where he’ll show you how to quantify the actual business value of SEO in a way that will get serious attention from executives and clients alike. Watch as Seth explains his surefire way to strike fear in the hearts of your C-suite, maintain motivation in pursuing an SEO strategy, and generate reports like a mad-man.

Keep in mind, this is just seven minutes of his 30-minute session, so it’s really just a small taste of what Seth has to teach.

SEOmoz Whiteboard Friday - Tips, Tricks & Tactics Preview: Seth Besmertnik on Winning SEO Budget

Quick Note: A couple of the slides shown in the presentation look a little washed-out. That’s a result of the video compression for streaming; they’re perfectly clear in the uncompressed DVD video.

Do you like this post? Yes No

This Week in Search: Triple Roundup for 10/1/09 to 10/21/09 »

Posted by Sam Niccolls

• Bing’s Twitter Search & Google’s Defensive PR:
  On the heels of Bing’s Twitter Search announcement, Google’s PR team put their Annie Oakley shades on and announced some upcoming social media moves of their own.

• Google Analytics’ New Features:
  There are some fantastic features in GA’s latest release including customized alerts, threshold goals (i.e. for time on site and pages per visit), advanced table filtering, mobile traffic reporting, more robust user defined variables, and unique visitor segmentation, just to name a few.

• Why SEO Matters:
  Derek Powazek’s blog posts aside, About Online Matters’ thoughtful reflection provides some great reminders about the value and importance SEO.

• Business Week Best Under 25:
  If you’re inspired when you see those 13 year old figure skaters win Olympic gold, Business Week’s list of top 25 young entrepreneurs will have you looping and lutzing in no time.

• Please Remove Your Site From Google:
  This e-mail from a hopelessly confused webmaster to a competitor is worth its weight in gold.

• SEOmoz News - Lindsay Perkin Wassell Announces Departure:
  In her post last week, SEOmoz’s consulting lead reminds us that not all duplicate content is bad. And though we feel bad for the non-canonical twin, we couldn’t be happier for Lindsay and her husband. Many congrats, Lindsay!

• Wolfram Alpha Launches $50 iPhone App:
  In a month where a search engine launches a $50 iPhone app and Adobe rolls out a free Photoshop app, doubts could be raised. But to the best of our knowledge, the world is still round and pigs are still unable to fly.

• Conde Nast to Close Gourmet Magazine:
  At the beginning of the month, Conde Nast made their not so savory announcement that they’re closing Gourmet and two other magazines.

• New Q & A: Bing Continues to Improve for Webmasters:
  Bing made a solid addition to their webmaster suite with the addition of a new Q & A section.

• The Evolution of Zuckerberg & Facebook:
  VentureBeat’s under the hood look at the evolution of Zuckerberg provides an interesting news feed on Facebook’s company history and culture.

• Germany’ Best SEO Resources 
  We love that Germans love SEO here at SEOmoz. If you’re a German SEO, or you spreken a little Deutsch, you can cast your votes for Germany’s best on SEO United’s site. (Note: If you do not speak German, referring traffic source is a great way to pick your vote for "Best SEO Blog.")

• People Are Less Happy on Mondays:
  Facebook status updates confirm the brilliance of Bill Lumbergh; We’re all prone to catching cases of the Monday’s… mmm-kay, great.

• Google Patents Trust Rank:
  Bill Slawski talks about how the trust rank in Google’s recent patent is different from the trust rank described in Yahoo’s 2004 paper and he shares some possible reasons for the patent. In related news, the Google Webmaster Tools patent on crawl rate filed by Vanessa Fox and several others in 2006 was also accepted this month.

• Using Google Analytics  to Find Links to Your Non-www:
  Luna Metrics has a wealth of useful blog posts on web analytics. And though limited to link data on your own site, Jim Gianoglio’s method for finding links to your non-www URLs is a creative, SEO-related use of Google Analytics.

• Video - Aaron Patzer Talks About Mint:
  The presentation given my Mint’s CEO about the company’s history is an entertaining watch for startup entrepreneurs and tech junkies alike.

• Back in the eCommerce Day:
  Get Elastic’s Linda Bustos share’s a wayback machine style look at 9 old school eCommerce website designs.

• Surprising Web Analytics Usage Data:
  The Google commissioned Forrester study uncovers some statistics you might not have guess about enterprise usage of free analytics tools, as well as how ineffectively most people use their web analytics tools.

• Video - Matt Cutts Gets His Herr Did:
  Members of Matt Cutts’ team shave his head as the camera rolls.

• 20 Conversion Rate Optimization Resources:
  Wordstream’s compilation of conversion rate optimization focused blogs, books, and podcasts is worth a look through. It has several resources you might be familiar with, as well as a handful that are probably new.

• First Link Checker Tool:
  Based on the idea that Google only considers anchor text for the first link on a page to be relevant, BusinessOnLine launched an early version of a tool that identifies multiple links on a page with the same destination.

• 10 Worst Money Making Business Ideas:
  Neil Patel’s list of bad business ideas is both humorous and reprehensible. So yes, his Homer Simpson graphic is more than appropriate for the post.

• Using Google’s Chart API for Map-based Linkbait:
  I’m a big fan of Epicurious’ Seasonal Ingredient Map, as well as Travel Pod’s Traveler IQ Challenge, but Google code offers some pretty slick ways to implement customized maps for linkbait on your site.

Highlighted by two great posts from Casey Henry, each of which were promoted to the SEOmoz Blog, there have been a bevy of bookmark-worthy reads this October on YOUmoz.

Top YOUmoz entries:

1. *What Makes a Linkworthy Blog Post by chenry 
   

2. *Track Your Mozpoints by chenry
   

3. Google Universal Results in Brazil by Fabio Ricotta

4. Using WordPress Automated Keyword Insertion for the Long Tail by MOGmartin

5. An Attempt to Understand Local Ranking Factors by riseandshineseo

6. White-Hat Linkbuilding by deckers

7. Planning Your Internal Linking Structure by zoicaremus

8. Domain Authority: Is it a ranking factor? by BenRush

9. True or False: Organic Traffic Converts Better than PPC Traffic? by drummerboy9000

10. Determining Keyword Value by eslobrown

* Indicates blog post was promoted to the SEOmoz Blog

• SEOs Are Spammers, Evil Doers and Opportunists:
  And yes, you should read the exchange between blogger Derek Powazek and Search Engine Land’s Danny Sullivan. If you missed it, the back-and-forth went a little something like this… Powazek made a post disparaging SEO, which sparked a reaction across the industry. Danny Sullivan responded to Powazek’s post. Then, Powazek responded to Danny’s response and Danny followed up again in response to Powazek’s response. There were also a myriad of tweets and blog posts, but that’s the basic gist of the blogger-mama-drama that was.  

Do you like this post? Yes No

Explaining (Some of) Google’s Algorithm with Pretty Charts & Math Stuff »

Posted by randfish

(NOTE: This post is written by Ben Hendrickson and Rand Fishkin as a follow up to Ben’s presentation at the Distilled/SEOmoz training seminar in London this week)

Our web index, Linkscape, updated again recently, and in addition to provide the traditional stats, we thought we’d share some of the cutting edge research work we do here. Below, you’ll find a post which requires extremely close and careful reading. Correlation data doesn’t have all the answers, but it’s certainly very interesting. Likewise, the ranking models data provides a great deal of insight, but it would be dangerous to simply look at the charts without reading the post carefully. There’s a number of caveats and information - raw lines can mislead by themselves, so please be diligent!

[UPDATE Oct 26, 2009: There used to be a mistake.  Below there is a line showing showing correlation between unique domains linking and SERP order.  That line was previously incorrect.  Instead of being the number of unique domains linking to the target page, it was the number of unique domains linking anywhere on the domain of the target page.  The corrected line shows unique domains linking to be much more important, so I also added this line to the combined über score vs individual features chart.  My apologies for the error.  -Ben]

First, some stats on the latest Linkscape index:

• Release date: Oct. 6th, 2009 (exactly 1 year after our initial launch)
• Root Domains: 57,422,144 (57 million)
• Subdomains: 215,675,235 (215 million)
• URLs: 40,596,773,936 (40.5 billion)
• Links: 456,939,586,207 (456 billion; if we also include pages that 301, that number climbs to 461 billion)
• Link Attributes:
  • No-follow link, internal:  6,965,314,198 (1.51% of total)
  • No-follow links, external: 2,765,319,261 (0.60% of total)
  • No-follow links, total: 9,730,633,459 (2.11% of total)
  • 301′ing URLs: 384,092,425 (0.08% of total)
  • 302′ing URLs: 2,721,705,173 (0.59% of total)
  • URLs employing ‘rel=canonical’: 52,148,989 (0.01% of total)
• Average Correlation between mozRank + Google PageRank
  • Mean absolute error: 0.54
• Average Correlation between Domain mozRank (DmR) and Homepage PageRank
  • Mean absolute error: 0.37

Now let’s get into some of the research around correlation data and talk about how we can use the features Linkscape provides to produce some interesting data. These first charts use raw correlation - just the relationship between the ranking positions and the individual feature. As noted above, please read the descriptions of each carefully before drawing conclusions and remember that correlation IS NOT causation. These charts are not meant to say that if you do these things, you will instantly get better rankings - they merely show what features apply to pages/sites ranking in the top positions.

Understanding the Charts:

• Mean Index By Value:  These are used for the y-axises of many charts.  Instead of averaging the raw values, we average it’s relative index in the SERP if ordered by this value.  So if there are 3 SERPs, and the page in the first position has the 4th most links, the 2nd has the 1st most links, and the 3rd has the 10th most links, the mean index by # of links for the first position would be (4+1+10)/3 = 5.
• Mean Count Numbers - these numbers appear on the y-axis of the first chart, showing averages of link counts.
• Position:  This is used for the x-axises of many charts.  For these charts, this is specific to the organic position in Google.com, excluding any vertical or non-traditional search results (local, video, news, images, etc.)
• Error Bars: The bars that bound the trend lines in our charts can show the confidence of two different things.  On some charts, they show the 95% of confidence of where the mean will be if we had infinite analogous data.  These error bars show how confident we are in the line, and frequently have the word "stderr" in the title.  On other charts, they are our confidence of what any given SERP will look like.  These error bars are much wider, as we are much more certain of what the average of many SERPs will be than we are what any given SERP will look like.  Charts with these error bars are frequently labeled with "stddev" in the title.

The data below is based on a collection of 10,000 search results for a variety of queries (biased towards generic and commercial rather than branded/informational queries) and 250,000 results.  Some results were excluded for errors during crawling or returning non-html responses. Results are taken from Google.com in the US from October of 2009.

Are Links Well Correlated with Rankings?

Common SEO wisdom holds that the raw number of links that points to a result is a good predictor of ranking position. However, many SEOs have noticed that Yahoo! Site Explorer’s link numbers (and even Google’s numbers inside services like Webmaster Tools) can include a dramatic number of links that may not matter (nofollowed links, internal links, etc.) and exclude things (like 301 redirects) that matter quite a bit. Using the Linkscape data set, we can remove these noisy links and use only the number of external, followed links (and 301s) to run in our correlation analysis.

This first chart certainly suggests that correlation exists, but the spikiness is a bit frustrating. Through deeper analysis, we found that this is largely due to results that have ranking pages with massive (or very tiny)  quantities of links. Thus, it made sense to produce this next chart:

Here, we can see what would happen if we force-rank the results by number of links. This means we’ve taken each set of results and assigned a number (1, 2, 3, etc.) that corresponds to the quantity of links they have in comparison to the other pages ranking for that result (e.g. the page with the most links is assigned "1," the second-most links gets "2," etc). The smoothness of the line suggests it is fairly accurate, but we can be precise about our accuracy.  The error bars below show the 95th percentile confidence interval for estimates of the mean.

We’re looking good. The correlation is quite strong, suggesting that yes, the number of external, followed links is important and the standard error is low, so we can feel confident that the correlation is real. Clearly, though, comparing with the perfect fit line, links are not the whole picture. Having the most links out of your peers in the results is likely a very good goal, but it can’t be the only goal.

The last piece here is to examine the standard deviation. This can tell us how much an individual page might vary from the averages.

This chart tells us that variation for any individual set of results can be quite large, so getting more links isn’t always going to be a clear win. It’s notable that in this chart, standard deviation here is shown for the 95th percentile confidence, which is actually 1.97 standard deviations away from the mean. On the whole, # of external, followed links is clearly important and well correlated, but we’re going to need to get more advanced in our models and broader in our thinking to get actionable information at a granular level.

Can Any Single Metric Predict the Rankings?

Boy, that sure would be nice… We’ve looked in the past at the quality of metrics like PageRank, Yahoo! Site Explorer’s Link Counts, Alexa Rank, etc. The short answer is that they’re barely better than random guessing. Google’s PageRank score was (around February of 2009) approximately 16% better than random guessing for predicting ranking page (N+10 aka ranking page 1 vs. page 2) and less than 5% better than random guessing for predicting ranking position (N+1 aka ranking position 1 vs position 2). The chart below shows correlations for a number of popular SEO metrics:

Since then, Nick, Ben and Chas have all been hard at work on improving the value and quality of Linkscape’s index as well as the usefulness and signaling provided by the metrics. This next chart shows how we’re progressing:

The correlations above map in the 35-50% better than random guessing range (though it’s not a 1-to-1 comparison with the numbers above - watch for that in a future post) for the first result.  Looking at this graph suggests that external mozRank (which represents the quantity of link juice to a page from external links) and external followed links correspond well to current rankings is interesting and certainly lends an additional data point for link builders. This correlation line might, for example, suggest that in the "average" rankings scenario, earning links from high mozRank/PageRank pages with few links on them (so the links pass more juice) as well as higher raw quantities of external, followed links are both very important.  But even more, this chart supports the idea that earning links from unique domains is paramount. 

[UPDATE (Oct 26, 2009): Previously there was a paragraph speculating why the above result for the importance of unique linking domains was so much lower than we previously calculated.  As noted at the top of this post, this was because I used the wrong datapoint for unique domains linking.  Correcting this made the discrepancy with earlier results disappear.  The chart above is now correct.  -Ben]

The frustrating part about this data is that it’s not telling us the entire story, nor is it directly actionable for an individual search query. As you can see below, the standard deviation numbers show that for any given search, the range varies somewhat dramatically.

When we see this effect, just as we did above, takeaway for an SEO doing work on a client project and attempting to achieve a particular ranking position is unclear. Employing these metrics as KPIs and ways of valuing potential links is probably useful, and building competitive analysis tracking with these data points is likely to be considerably better than using more classic third-party metrics, but it doesn’t say "do this to rank better," and that’s the "holy grail" we’re chasing.

How Do "On-Page" Factors Correlate with Rankings?

This post has dealt very little with on-page factors and their correlation to rankings. We’ll look at that next.

Google recently announced that they ignore the meta keywords tag. This data, showing a line that’s very spiky and error bars showing stderr (standard error) all within the horizontal at "13" certainly supports that assertion. Employing the query term/phrase in the meta keywords is one of the least correlated signals we’ve examined.

Title tags that employ the query term, on the other hand, appear to have a real correlation with rankings. They’re certainly not perfectly correlated, but on average, this chart tells us that Google has a clear preference (though not massively strong - note the smaller range in the y-axis) for pages that employ the query term in the title tag.

We’ve examined H1/H2/Hx tags in the past and come to the conclusion that they have little impact on rankings. This graph certainly suggests that’s still the case. Employing the query in other on-page areas such as the body (anything between the <body> tags) and out anchors (employing the keyword in the <a> tag whether internal or external) have significantly greater correlation with rankings, while H1-H4 tag keyword use appears almost horizontal on the graph (suggesting no benefit is derived from its use). It’s not as bad as the random effect we observed with meta keywords (the lines all start a tiny bit below 13 and end a tiny bit above), but the positive correlation is low and the horizontal is mostly inside the error bars.

This graph is the clearest illustration yet of why it’s so important to build systems more advanced than simple, direct correlation. According to this chart, employing the query term in the path or filename of the URL is actually slightly negatively correlated with ranking highly, while the subdomain appears largely useless and the root domain has strong correlation. Granted, all of these (except the root domain) are on a very narrow band of the x-axis, but SEO experience tells us that using keywords in the name of a page is a very good thing, for both search rankings and click-through rate. Whenever we see data like this, a number of hypotheses arise. The one we like best internally right now is that the URL path/filename data may be skewed by the root domain keyword usage. Essentially, when a root domain name already employs the keyword term, the engines may see those who also employ it in the path/filename as potentially keyword stuffing (a form of spam). It may also be that raw correlation sees a large number of less-well URL-optimized pages performing well due to other factors (links, domain authority, etc.). It’s also true that most sites that employ the keyword in the path/filename don’t use it in the root domain as well, so the negative of the one may be mixed-in with the positive of the other.

Whatever the reason, this is a perfect example of why raw correlation is flawed and why a greater depth of analysis - and much more sophisticated models - are critical to getting more value out of the data.

Can We Build a Ranking Model that Gives more Actionable Takeaways?

To get to a true representation of the potential value of any given SEO action, we need a model that imitates Google’s. This is no easy undertaking - Google employs a supposed 200 ranking factors, so while we’ve got lots of data points (on-page and link factors, plus lots of derivatives/combinations of these) the complexity is still a dramatic hurdle.

The "uber" score (red line in the graph above) is built by taking all of these features we have about webpages, domains and links from both on-page analysis and Linkscape data. We (well, technically, Ben) run them through a machine learning model that maps to the search results and produces a result that’s considerably better correlated with rankings than any single metric. You can already see that in the top 10 search results, the slope of the line is looking really good - an indication that our metrics and analysis function better for predicting success in those areas (which, luckily, are the same positions SEOs care most about).

These machine learning ranking models let us take a much more sophisticated look at the value of employing a keyword in any particular on-page feature. Instead of going off simple correlation, we can actually ask, based on our best fit model, "what’s the impact of using the keyword here?" Let’s use the example we struggled with above showing negative correlation for keywords in path/filename: 

As you can see, this model suggests that, once again, subdomains are largely useless places to put keywords, but the root domain is a very good place to employ it. Path and filename are slightly positive, which also fits with our expectations. It’s also important to note that on this chart some lines dip below 0 on the "mean derivative of uber" y-axis in the 20-25 ranking position range. This suggests that for those results, the keyword use may actually be hurting them. Looking into some sample results, we can see that a number of the URLs in that 20-25 range seem to be trying too hard. They’re using the keyword multiple times in the domain/path/filename and fit with what many SEOs call "spammy-looking." It could certainly be a weakness in our model’s accuracy, but we think it’s also likely that a lot of pages would actually benefit from being a bit less aggressive with their URL keyword stuffing.

In this next chart, we can see the standard deviation error bars. You can see that we’re more confident that in the top results, employing keywords in these URL features won’t hurt and is likely to help, while in the latter portion of the results, we’ve got a bit less confidence about the negative effects.

Let’s turn our attention to those pesky H(x) tags again, and see if the ranking model has more to say about their impact/value.

We’re still getting mostly similar results. It appears that H1-H4 tags are not great places to use keywords.  As with the URL features, they seem to help a tiny bit (even less than URL features, actually), then have a very tiny negative - flat effect in the latter SERPs. Even with the error bars, this is fairly convincing evidence that H(x) tags just don’t provide much value. A best practice might still suggest their use, but there are probably far more valuable places to use your keywords.

Our link measurements also get more sophisticated (and tell a more nuanced story) when we use the ranking models. You can see above that improving mozRank in the top results appears important, while raw # of links may be less valuable. However, when we look further back in the results, you see the negative dip, suggesting that some pages may be over-using mozRank and external links (quite possibly from less reputable/spammy sources). This graph doesn’t have a ton of actionable data (as controlling the amount of mozRank or even the number of external links you get is probably not wise), but it does fit fairly nicely to a lot of the things we know about SEO - good links help, bad links might hurt.

The last graph shows some of the more interesting on-page features from our dataset. The big one here is the consistent suggestion to use images with good alt text that employ your keyword term/phrase. That green line is one of our highest correlations for on-page keyword usage. Putting keywords in bold, in body text (anywhere) and even in out anchors (remember, these are any anchors, not necessarily external links) has the same type of positive impact at top SERPs and slight negative in the 20-25 range that we’ve seen previously. This shouldn’t surprise us at all is we suspect that spammers/keyword-stuffers are playing more heavily in those result numbers.

Conclusions & Take-Aways:

I know this is a lot of data to parse, but it’s also pretty important to understand if you’re in the SEO space and want to bring more data credibility and analysis to your projects. We suspect that SEOmoz isn’t the only firm working on this (though we may be the only one willing to publicly share the data for now), and you can bring a lot of credibility to a client project or in-house effort with these data points showing the importance and predicted value of the changes you recommend as an SEO. There are plenty of people who malign our industry as being based on hunches and intuition rather than strong data. With these analyses, we’re getting closer to closing that gap. We don’t want to suggest that this data is perfect (the error bars and accuracy analyses show that’s obviously not the case), but it’s certainly a great extra piece to add to the equation.

Things the data suggests that we feel good about:

• Links are important, but naive link data can mislead. It seems wise to get more sophisticated with link analysis.
• No single metric can predict rankings (at least, not yet)
• H1s (and H2s-H4s) probably aren’t very important places to use your keywords
• Alt attributes of images are probably pretty important places to use your keywords
• Keyword stuffing may be holding you back (particularly if you’re outside the top 15 results and overusing it)
• Likewise, overdoing it with (not-so-great) links might be hurting you

We’re definitely looking forward to comments and questions, but Ben & I are in the UK and may not be back online for a while (Ben’s plane leaves in a few hours for the US and British Airways doesn’t yet have wifi in-flight).

p.s. A shoutout to Tim Grice from SEOWizz, who put together this correlation analysis a few weeks back.

Do you like this post? Yes No

Conference Recap: ExactTarget Connections ‘09 »

Posted by great scott!

We don’t talk about email marketing on the blog much, but any of you working in the internet marketing space (and that’s likely all of you) probably know that it’s still one of the most effective marketing channels out there. 

We’ve been fortunate enough over the years to partner with ExactTarget for our email marketing services and as they’ve grown and improved their offerings they constantly make me feel terrible.  Don’t get me wrong, they’re awesome, in fact they’re too awesome. The stuff their system is capable of and the one-to-one, closed-loop strategies they evangelize are amazing and I feel terrible that I haven’t been able to implement every concept they’ve thrown my way.  Nonetheless, I’m a huge fan, so mozPal, all-around great guy, and ExactTarget VP of Marketing, Jeff Rohrs, invited me to attend Connections ‘09, ET’s annual user conference in their hometown of Indianapolis last week.

Don’t run away just yet. While Connections is theoretically designed as a user conference, I went in specifically with the outlook of a platform-agnostic email marketer in order to evaluate the content and value of the conference for you, dear reader.  Yes, there was a fair amount of ExactTarget rah-rah, but bottom line: if you’re interested in email marketing, there were great lessons to be learned (and awesome parties to attend) regardless of whether you actually use ET or not. Since interesting and actionable takeaways are what we all want to get out of conferences, let me take you through a rundown of the sessions I attended, as well as some of the things that garnered large, scribbled asterisks or frantic underlines in my notes (yeah, I’m an analog kid, I take notes with a pen and paper, do I lose my membership in the club?).

DAY 1

The first day was all about keynote presentations. I have to take a second to call out the production values of this seminar. The main ballroom where all of the keynotes were held was incredible. Giant screens everywhere, slick lighting and signage, multiple cameras to re-broadcast the speakers onto screens, lighted backdrops, the whole nine. I’ve been to a good handful of conferences from the tiny to the huge, and this was by far the slickest, most smoothly run, and most impressively produced I’ve ever seen (apparently coordinated by Seattle-area event firm HB Stubbs). All other search industry shows (SEOmoz included) should strive to meet the quality and attention to detail ET puts into Connections…seriously.

The main stage at Connections ‘09

Scott Dorsey, CEO & Scott McCorkle, COO ExactTarget

The ET C-suite kicked things off with a pleasant, though painfully scripted, welcome message. There were some cool feature announcements, but as I said, this is a platform agnostic event review, so I’ll spare you the details. Scott Dorsey did drop some interesting statistics that I thought were quite impressive though:

• ET clients send 2 billion emails every month.
• They create 1 billion new contacts and records every day.
• ET currently manages 100 Terabytes of data for their customers (that’s 10x the Library of Congress)
• A study they conducted with Forrester showed that only 15% of consumers want all of their marketing communication through email.
• The same study also showed that, in general, consumers prefer email 300% over other delivery methods.

Malcolm Gladwell

Talk about bringing out the big guns right away, the second speech of the entire event was sociologist and best-selling author Malcolm Gladwell, best know for his books The Tipping Point, Blink, and Outliers (Umm, did I mention everyone in attendance was given an autographed, hard-bound copy of Outliers in their swag bag? Slightly cooler than a t-shirt.).

Gladwell spoke about his findings in his latest book, Outliers, which studied the backgrounds of successful individuals, looking for patterns that determine success.  He used the band Fleetwood Mac as his example for this presentation.  Most people (myself included) think of Fleetwood Mac as a band that emerged out of nowhere in the 70’s with their eponymous "debut" album, which they soon followed with Rumors, one of the most influential and best-selling albums of all time (OF ALL TIME!).  Well, turns out we’re all wrong. Fleetwood Mac started in 1967 and released 15 largely ignored albums under a kaleidoscope of various lineups before finding success in 1975 with Fleetwood Mac.

Turns out, in Gladwell’s studies, this pattern is almost without exception. People considered successful experts in their field almost always exhibit 10,000 hours or more of study, practice, and dedication to their craft or skill-set before they reach success.

Great, Scott, but where’s that valuable takeaway you promised? 

In our world of the internet it can be all too easy to hold ourselves to impossible standards of overnight, instant success. What Gladwell’s study shows is that we greatly underestimate the amount of time and effort that goes into success. There’s little that’s truly arbitrary or mysterious about success; it has a logic, a pattern, and a consistent architecture: it requires effort, hard work, and time. We put too much emphasis on "talent" and "luck" when, in reality, they’re minor contributors.  Expecting yourself to stumble upon that figurative lottery ticket is a lot of pressure to put on yourself and brings with it huge potential for disappointment. Isn’t it more comforting to know that your success can be designed? Relax, even the Beatles spent their first several years playing as a cover band in a strip club in Hamburg, Germany…great things can come from humble beginnings, just give yourself a chance to put in the effort.

Kelly Mooney, CEO Resource Interactive

Author and CEO of Resource Interactive, Kelly Mooney, followed Gladwell with a presentation on her concept of the "O.P.E.N. Imperitive," her model for creating an open brand that engages with users on the social web. It’s a very cool model to work from and one that I think can really help any company working to develop a social strategy. Her new book on the concept, The Open Brand, is probably worth a look. 

Kelly’s model creates a spectrum of online consumers (which she prefers to call iCitizens) ranging across two axes of producers to consumers, and those seeking anonymity to those seeking notoriety. How you approach, interact with, engage, and harness those customers changes depending on where they fall on the grid.

Some interesting points from her keynote:

• The passive web experience is dead, the new chief online behaviors are Creating, Influencing, and Sharing.
• The web is projected to influence 50% of offline sales by 2012.
• The new purchase funnel is non-linear, multi-channel, and digital first. Inital touchpoints can be upwards of 90, purchase options are vast, and there’s a post-transaction consumer participation element.
• People spend 3.5 billion minutes on Facebook every day.
• There are over 18 million Twitter users in the US.
• 77% of shoppers use online research resources.
• Hulu streams have grown 6x year-over-year to 373 million.

At the end of the first day, a fleet (yes, fleet) of charter buses shuttled everyone to the beautiful Indianapolis Museum of Art for an elegant night of networking, food, and drink (they had a Scotch bar, for crying-out-loud, this is what I mean by attention to detail). 

Day 2

The second day of the conference was full of breakout sessions divided between five different tracks.

"How to Develop an Effective 1-to-1 Marketing Strategy" - Strategy Track

Billed as a "how to" session on developing and implementing a segmented, targeted email marketing strategy, I was very excited about this session. Chris Murray from ExactTarget led off with a nicely bulleted framework for evaluating your company’s current plan and setting goals for moving forward into a more advanced strategy.  Chris definitely stressed the importance of making time for strategy before you start executing. I felt his approach was both practical and general enough that is can serve as a great jumping-off point for anybody looking to develop their marketing strategy for any vector, whether email or otherwise. Here’s how he broke things down:

Start with a basic, three question Strategy Development Framework

• Where are you now?
• Where do you want to go?
• How will you get there?

Step 1: Where are you now? Assessment. Analysis, and Auditing

• Evaluate list health (size, age, accuracy, engagement)
• Review past email performance metrics (open rate, click through, etc.)
• Review Deliverability metrics (important to know where you stand with major ISPs)
• Look at your existing customer data, insights, and segmentation. If you don’t know much about your customers, you need to ask them, consider creating and incentivizing surveys.
• Perform competitive analysis. Look at what others are doing well and see how you can emulate or improve on it.
• Evaluate your available resources (budget, creative, technological, etc.)

Step 2: Where do you want to go? Setting Goals

• Determine what you want to achieve through your campaign(s):
  • Brand Awareness
  • Lead Generation
  • Customer Retention/Activation
  • Revenue Growth
• When setting your goals in any/all of these areas, be S.M.A.R.T. (be sure your goals are Specific, Measurable, Actionable, Realistic, and Timely).

Step 3: How will you get there? Devising your Strategy

• Solidify segments and targets
• Decide which vehicle is best for each target (email, SMS, voice, etc.)
• Decide how best to attract targets (this helps drive touchpoints: in-store, on-site, via phone, etc.)
• Get their attention (evaluate and test creative, content, subject lines, etc.)

Look End-to-End: It’s critical to consider all of your marketing in terms of a 360-degree view of the customer lifecycle and devise your strategy with an overall, full-cycle approach in mind. For instance, you may want to consider where each piece of your strategy fits in terms of:

• Opt-In
• Welcome Approach
• Touch Points
• Preference Gathering
• Activation/Purchase
• Opt-Out/Down
• Re-Engagement

After Chris presented his excellent strategy framework, Dela Quist of Alchemy Worx took to the mic for a presentation he called "Fear & Self-Loathing in Email Marketing."  While Dela’s presentation didn’t quite fit the "how to" billing of the session, it was incredibly interesting and provided lots of great takeaways. His primary message was that email marketers often get beat-up and made to feel guilty because they’re all looked at as spammers (even though most aren’t) and the key performance metrics of open rate and click-through rate for individual mail campaigns are grossly misleading in terms of measuring effectiveness.  Dela can be a somewhat controversial guy, but I found him to be an engaging presenter and much of what he said really made me rethink how I want to formulate and evaluate elements of my email planning and strategy:

On how email is perceived:

• Email marketing is the only channel consumers can turn off at will.
• On average, consumers sign up to receive email from 12 brands. With weekly contact, that’s only 48 emails per month, which no reasonable person can consider "overload".
• If you bought every single commercial in the Super Bowl, you’d be seen as rich, cool, and clever; but if you send two emails a month, you’re somehow a spammer and an idiot?!?

On how marketers can improve the way they think about email:

• The only pattern in email marketing is that most people don’t open most emails.
• Numbers always go down over time when we look at opens and clicks. Looking at campaigns instead of people is a bad metric.
• Use Cumulative Unique Open Rate: What % of users opened at least one email over the last X months. This is a metric you can work to improve over time and it provides a better indicator of program performance.
• It’s important to look at new subscribers and old subscribers differently.
• Do NOT try to emulate Amazon if you don’t have thousands of products to serially convert with.
• Think of email as a brand mechanism, not just a direct response channel (-This really opened my eyes)
  • There’s an opportunity for nudge effect even w/ unopened email. People are highly engaged when doing email triage.
  • Studies show that after sending an email, search volume usually goes up, and more unopened people end up converting passively than those that convert directly through the email.
  • Users who open and click an email a week or two after it’s sent convert much higher than those that open and click right away.
  • Email is subtle and sophisticated, so stop using it like a sledgehammer.

"Designed by Success" - Content Track

This design panel, featuring Tim Sinkola from ET, Bill McCloskey from Email Data Source, Mike Corack from Mighty Interactive, and Chad White from Smith-Harmon, looked at groups of emails from different brands and evaluated them for design and content.  It was really interesting to look at welcome messages, newsletters, transactional mails, and more from major brands and get a chance to compare and contrast them with the input of some top-notch design pros.  I’ll quickly walk you through each category of email that was examined and give you the valuable take-aways for each:

Welcome Emails:

• These have the largest open rate, so spend time on them! Include good links, good offers, and brand yourself.
• Include a member ID, username, or password…something that will make people save the email to improve future deliverability.
• Strong calls-to-action (including social CTAs) can be very effective in welcome messages.
• Don’t emulate your website nav in emails: they’re two different animals. Keep email nav to <5 links.

Newsletters:

• Avoid huge hero images, they’re usually blocked. Be sure to include a non-image CTA.
• Only 11% of subscribers scroll below the fold, so move offers and CTAs up the page.
• Think of images as supporting elements and make sure email renders well with and without images.
• Link people back to your site, they’re going to convert on the site, not in your email.
• Social forward and interactivity can be hugely effective.

Product-based Emails:

• Social sharing links (preferably top-right) can be fantastic.
• Explain the value of your CTA and justification for social sharing.
• Use personalization selectively, there’s falloff if you go overboard.

Offer Emails:

• Use what you know about customers to craft relevant offers for them.
• Including a barcode in an email offer can improve conversion attribution for brick-and-mortar businesses.
• Promote sales offers with text, aspirational branding with images.

Transactional Messages:

• Maintain a consistent look and feel across all transactional emails.
• Include cross-sell opportunities if/when appropriate for the customer.
• When including promotional materials, limit it to no more than 20% of the email content, and make sure transactional info is top-left for prominence.

"Research Survey Says" - Content Track

There are tons of market research studies out there, and it can be really difficult to divine the important bits of info from all of them. This session attempted to focus attention to some of the most relevant data related to email marketing from several recent studies to answer the questions: Is email dying? What are the real and perceived threats? Panelists Morgan Stewart from ET, Julie Katz from Forrester, Rebecca Lieb from eConsultancy, and Stefan Tornquist from Marketing Sherpa offered these insights:

• Marketers love the idea of mobile and social, but they’re not hurting email.
• Among consumers, email does have slowing growth, but also the lowest falloff among social, text, and IM.
• Teens may not perceive themselves as using email, but most have email accounts and they use them actively once they get to college-age.
• Email and SEO rank highest among marketers for happiness with ROI (well above PPC, Social, Mobile, and Display).
• Email is so easy and cheap, that it can be used ineffectively and still get results - and that’s a problem. 
• 72% of marketers say they could be using email better!
• 42% of marketers don’t know their ROI from Email.
• The top two reasons (by far) customers unsubscribe: 1) Emails aren’t relevant to them. 2) Received too many emails from sender.
• Consumers overwhelmingly demonstrate that they now demand greater control of email frequency, content, and easy unsubscribe/preference controls.

That concluded sessions for Day 2 (there was one more in the middle of the day, but I had some other work to attend to). The day finished with an armada of chartered buses taking everyone to the Murat Theater for a hysterical comedy performance by Second City, followed by a They Might Be Giants concert! Again, the extravagance, detail, and execution of this event put even the biggest parties I’ve seen Google or Microsoft throw to shame.

They Might Be Giants play Connections ‘09

DAY 3

The final day of the conference started off early for me as I joined five other folks bright-and-early for a small business discussion panel with several reps from ExactTarget.  It was refreshing to hear how similar the problems were that we all faced, despite our businesses being very different. The ExactTarget reps were extremely receptive to our input and seemed to take even our most minor gripes very seriously.  It was a fantastic opportunity for giving and gathering customer feedback, one I definitely hope to emulate at events we put on in the future.

"Extreme Makeover: Email Design Competition"

There were two major events scheduled for the closing hours of the event. First was the "Extreme Makeover: Email Design Competition" which pitted teams from ExactTarget, Mighty Interactive, and Smith-Harmon against each other to redesign emails for Pier 1 Imports, AAA, and Marketing Experiments.  The redesigned emails were then tested against each other (and the original design) and evaluated based on several metrics appropriate for the campaign. The audience was also invited to vote via text for their favorite in each competition.

Unfortunately, I don’t have images of the competing emails to show you, so my notes wouldn’t make much sense.  It was very cool, however, to see the different approaches these teams took to each email, and hear their reasoning behind it. 

Mighty Interactive won the competition for the Pier 1 Imports email (ExactTarget was the audience pick). They stuck closest to the feel of the original Pier 1 design (which actually outperformed all of the re-designs!), which seems to indicate that Pier 1 customers are pretty set in their ways and reluctant to see content presented in a drastically different style.

ExactTarget won the competition for the AAA email (ET was also the audience pick) with an unorthodox, side-scrolling email. I was shocked considering the average age of AAA customers. I thought for sure the unusual navigation would cause confusion and poor results. Clearly I was wrong since they outperformed the control design by 26%!

Smith-Harmon won the competition for the Marketing Experiments email (S-H was also the audience pick) with their clean, colorful newsletter design. Their design outperformed the control by 26% in click-through rate, and reduced unsubscribes by 15.9%. Very solid performance by a cool little company from right here in Seattle.

Marlee Matlin

The conference closed with a final keynote by Academy Award-winning actress, producer, and author, Marlee Matlin, who also happens to deaf.  Marlee, with the help of her interpreter, Jack, delivered a powerful and emotional speech about overcoming challenges, following your dreams, and designing your own success story.  Alas, there aren’t a lot of actionable business takeaways I can provide from her presentation, but I can tell you that her message of courage and strength is relevant to any business-person out there, especially the entrepreneurial spirits that populate the online marketing world.

Overall, I found Connections ‘09 to be an extremely impressive blend of useful, actionable information; thought-provoking and inspiring speakers; and superb networking events, all presented with world-class style and polish. As a first-time attendee, I was thoroughly, thoroughly impressed. Anyone who works with email marketing - even if you don’t use ExactTarget - should absolutely look into attending next year. I’ll almost certainly be there, and hopefully I’ll have the chance to drag some more Mozzers along with me.

Do you like this post? Yes No

What Makes a Link Worthy Post - Part 1 »

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.

I was recently inspired by a post by MikeTek, Examining the Top 150 In-Linked Posts at SEOmoz.  While the information was very informative, it was taken from a limited sample of the over 3,800 post on SEOmoz.  Along with the small sample size, the data was not proportional to other categories and posts.  Mike encouraged anyone with a little automation skills to look into all the data on SEOmoz and really look into what makes a post link worthy. 

For this post we will be looking only at In Linking Domains (ILDs) which is a great way to determine if a post is popular throughout the net.  For example if you have a site like dummy-domain.com that links to your post 1,000 times throughout its site, it would count as 1 ILD.  A great viral post will have a large number of ILDs along with a large number of links.

LET’S START WITH THE DATA

Much like Mike’s data, there were some categories that collected more links than others.  In fact there were five categories that have the most domains linking to them, Link Building (1,448 domains), Google (1,419 domains), Technical Issues (1,243 domains), Miscellaneous (1,215 domains), and Whiteboard Friday (1,044 domains).  See the graph below for the top 30 of the SEOmoz categories.

The data in the chart above can be a little misleading because some of those categories have many more posts than others do.  To make all the data proportional, I took the total number of linking domains and divided it by the number of posts.  The chart changes considerably when the data becomes normalized.  From the chart below you can see that the top 3 categories are Webdev (19), Technical Issues (14), and On-Page Issues (10).

From the charts above it’s easy to say that “Link Building” is a very popular blog topic but it doesn’t always draw in the links like other topic can.  Part of that could be because of the difference in options on link building techniques.  Topics like “Technical Issues” and “On-Page Issues” the types of content that most people will agree on and possibly want to share with others in the business.

To take the study a little further, I stored all the post’s title’s and created a title word cloud for the top 10% of the 3,800.  This hopefully will give you an idea of what topics could have the possibility of being link worthy in your future post.  I was going to try and come up with a “Super” title based on the words in the cloud but couldn’t come up with anything catchy.  Maybe one of you Mozzers can come up with something amazing from the cloud.

Like Mike did in his previous post, let’s take a look at the content in the posts: images, list, and videos.  In the chart below you will see that having a just a list in a post compared to just text, doubles the average number of linking domains.  Have a video compared to just text will almost triple the average number of linking domains.  A post that has an image and a list will also triple the average number of linking domains to the post.

I’m sure many of you are like me and do a quick scan of the post before actually reading it.  By adding images, videos, and lists, it makes it easy to get a quick synopsis on what the post is about, encouraging people to go back and do a full read along with a possible link.  Adding Images and Lists are easy to do and could result in a post that is more link worthy.

I also recorded the length of the post to see if it had an effect on the average number of linking domains.  The length recorded was only that of the post and not the comments or other areas of the page to keep the data accurate.  I’ve read that most blog post should be kept to 500 words or less.  That information seems to be incorrect if you are going to post on SEOmoz and want it to be link worthy.  The chart below shows that posts with 1800 or more words have a much higher average of linking domains.

BIGGEST TAKEAWAYS

I feel the real take away from this post is in the last two graphics summarized below:

• Content is most important thing to a posts but posts with extra visual content attract extra links.
• By adding simple visual content, like lists and images, can increase the number of ILDs by good percent.
• Posts with videos included will attract almost 3 times more ILDs than a plain text post.
• Posts with all three media types (videos, images, and lists) will attract almost 6 times more ILDs than a plain text post.
• Contrary to common beliefs, large posts seem to attract more links than posts with 900 words or less.
• Posts with between 1800 and 3000 words will attract more than 15 times more ILDs than a post with less than 600 words.

The first part of this study was only with SEOmoz data and in the next part of this study I have decided to take on a huge project and taking a look at some of the top SEO/Internet Marketing blogs on the web.  With a larger sample size we may be able to find out if the information found during this study will hold true in other areas.  Stay tuned!

Do you like this post? Yes No

Headsmacking Tip #15: Rank for Brand Promo Code Searches »

Posted by Tom_C

Here’s a directly actionable tip that any large brand should probably start doing right now. In fact most people should already have started doing it. Hopefully after reading this post they will. Take a look at these two searches:

Promo Codes (US keyphrase:)

Voucher Codes (UK keyphrase)

Out of all those brand searches across both the UK and the US not a single brand ranks number 1 for their own brand keyphrase.

Yes, I was shocked too. In fact, not many of them rank on the first page of results for that query.

What to do about it?

Sure, you might be wondering how you rank for that phrase - after all you don’t want to give away free codes do you? Well why not? Create a page that offers your users a chance to get a promo/voucher code in some way. The most obvious I can think of is to offer a promo code if you sign up to an email newsletter, but if that’s too easy perhaps offering a promo code to every 5th email newsletter signup…. Or offer a promo code to anyone who fills out a feedback form…… Or offer a promo code to anyone who links to you ok I’ve gone too far!

You get the idea, if you have any sort of codes then give your users a way of getting them and make a page that can rank for that juicy branded search term. Here’s a perfect example of the kind of page I’m talking about:

Except of course they neglected to do any SEO for the page, like including the phrase "Argos voucher codes" in the title tag so it only ranks 10th…… Still, better than nothing.

Anyway, there you go, short but sweet. In fact this post is so short that you could probably fit the whole post in a tweet. Like this: click here to tweet this post in 140 characters!

Anyone who’s had success using this tactic I’d love to hear from you in the comments.

Do you like this post? Yes No

Free as in beer »

Posted by willcritchlow

As many of you are now aware, the "across the bloody pond" edition of the Pro SEO training that we are hosting in London with the SEOmoz crew is now sold out. What you may not know is that we (Distilled and SEOmoz) are sponsoring a LondonSEO event on Tuesday evening after the end of the seminar. Here’s the official write-up from Jane.

What does this mean for you? Well, it means that whether you are coming to the seminar or not, if you can get to London you can head for the Crown & Sceptre pub on the corner of Great Titchfield Street and Foley Street on Tuesday evening for free beer, scintillating SEO chat and a chance to hang out with all the cool kids of the London SEO scene (yes, I’ll be there as well).

We are paying for the beer, so if you can get into central London, you really don’t have an excuse.

This post is really just a short informational one. Here’s the lowdown:

• when Tuesday 20th October, from 6pm
• where Crown & Sceptre pub on the corner of Great Titchfield Street and Foley Street
• how much? FREE! (free entry and free beer)

I hope to see many of you there. If you can make it, do introduce yourself. Most of the Distilled guys will be there, as will (I believe) Rand, Ben and Danny from SEOmoz.

Short and sweet. I think that’ll do for a Friday evening post. Have a good weekend all!

Technorati Tags

londonseo, pub, london, seo

Do you like this post? Yes No

Whiteboard Friday - Getting Indented Listings »

Posted by great scott!

Wondering how to win rank and influence users? Well, if you have multiple pages from one domain ranking in the same SERP, a little bit of optimization may help you get a coveted indented listing.  You know, one of those cool situations where two or more of your pages show up right on top of each other in the engines. While this is a bit of an advanced tactic, it can be extremely powerful for driving traffic.  Watch this week’s video to learn how to optimize and target for indented listings.

SEOmoz Whiteboard Friday - Getting Indented Listings from Scott Willoughby on Vimeo.

Do you like this post? Yes No

Rethinking Duplicate Content »

Posted by Lindsay

This post is about three pretty interesting things in my book: opportunities at SEOmoz, a new kind of duplicate content, and me. Despite the clever title, this post is not about SEO. You’ve been warned, OK?

That’s OK. Who are you, anyway?

I know, I know - I haven’t been very active on the blog, nor have I been oot ‘n aboot on the conference circuit much this year (Did I mention I’m Canadian?). But I have been busy! Back in January, I relocated from Denver to Seattle and joined SEOmoz for the coolest job ever as the SEO Consulting Manager.

Oh, what a year!

We have been honored to work on some of the web’s most exciting projects this year. From Fortune 500s to peppy start-ups, non-profits, and a few in between, our clients and each of their unique situations have been as challenging as they have been rewarding. All that excitement has kept me busy behind the scenes, working the SEO hands-on and rallying some of the industry’s best, brightest, and busiest to help our consulting clients succeed in the SERPs.

Big deal. What else you got?

Hold your horses. I’ve been busy in more ways than one, let me tell you! One night back in April, my new husband and I were settling in for another rainy night in the Pacific Northwest when … [“Lindsay, this is a family blog!” - Rand]. Oh, sorry boss. Let’s look at this from Googlebot’s perspective …

That’s right, Googlebot! All except the bad neighborhood thing, but I’ll let you take that up with Matt. My husband Eric and I are expecting twins on December 27th! I bet our friends have some questions. Let’s see if we can cover a few of them now.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q. Were you planning to have twins?

A. Yes. Of course this was planned. [looks around nervously] … But, seriously - do I look like I’m from the future? Boy/Girl twins are so awesome, wouldn’t more people be doing it if it could be planned? My hubby and I, along with our families, can’t believe our good fortune … but no, twins weren’t planned.

Q. Can I have your job?

A. Yes! [I mean it this time.] Rand is on the lookout for someone to fill my role. You should definitely ping him!

Q. Are your twins identical?
A. One is a boy. One is a girl. If they are identical … oh dear.

Q. While I’m doing your job, what will you be doing?
A. I’m told that caring for an infant is a lot of work. No matter how many ways I look at this in Excel, when I multiply the work it takes to care for one infant by two … sleep, eating, and personal hygiene disappear from the spreadsheet. Any Excel wizards out there that can help me with this? I’ll also be hanging around Q&A, a service we offer our SEOmoz PRO members, to keep my offspring clothed and my skills sharp. 

First, I’d like to thank the Academy.

Rand, Sarah, and Gillian - Each of you bring kindness, compassion, and generosity to work everyday and somehow never run out. What a team! I love you all so much, I’m inviting you into the delivery room. [*crickets chirp*]. Um, this is awkward … How about a phone call from the hospital?

Jen - Keep it up! (This woman knows her stuff. You should totally take her to lunch.)

I’d also like to thank the whole crew over at SEOmoz for their warm welcome, great sense of humor, occasional lunch room snacks, and the best going away party / baby shower / fried chicken feast a girl could ask for.

Wrap it up, lady.

Except for the fact that I have already relocated to Florida, I’m not going anywhere yet. Pregnancy permitting, I will be working full-time until the end of November, doing what I always do on the consulting side of the business. I might even post again on the blog! ["We've heard that before!" - angry crowd].

In summary;

• Duplicate content isn’t always a bad thing
• Don’t forget to apply for my job
• Boy/girl twins can’t be identical, for obvious reasons
• I heart SEOmoz
• I twitter (@lindzie) more than I blog

Do you like this post? Yes No

Tangled Web: The Most Linked to Pages on the Internet »

Posted by Sam Niccolls

To identify the most linked to pages on some of the world’s most popular sites, we used SEOmoz’s Linkscape powered Top Pages Tool and compiled a list of the most linked to pages on the web.

The results, broken out by website and by category, are not all what you might expect. From Google to GaGa the internet’s most linked to pages offer a look at your favorite domains that will leave you both scratching your head and laughing.   

en.wikipedia.org

5 Things You Didn’t Know About Wikipedia:

1. Twitter is more linked to than global warming.
2. Search Engine Optimization is almost 2x more linked to than Barack Obama.
3. Series of tubes is more linked to than computer.
4. Google is more linked to than world wide web 
5. Sarah Palin is more linked to than Charles Darwin, Abraham Lincoln, or North America.

www.youtube.com

Most Linked to Videos:

1. Susan Boyle Performs on Britain’s Got Talent
2. Rick Astley - Rick Roll
3. Judson Laipply - Evolution of Dance
4. Work at Home Infomercial (in Polish)
5. Web 2.0 The Machine is Us/ing Us
6. Free Hugs Campaign
7. OK Go on Treadmills
8. Michael Jackson - Thriller
9. Rick Astley - Rick Roll (Sadly, this is not a typo. It really is on the list twice…)
10. Battle at Kruger Between Lions, Buffaloes, & Crocodiles

www.dictionary.com

Most Linked to Words:

1. Bandwidth
2. Nothing
3. T1
4. Religion
5. Schadenfreude

Interesting:

1. Pedophile is more linked to than friend.
2. Anime is more linked to than America.
3. Football (American)  more linked to than love.

www.craigslist.org

Most Linked to Items for Sale:

1. Vagina Couch
2. Manly Bike
3. Space Ship
4. Catbus
5. Nazi Dolls

Most Linked to Editorials:

1. Hey Crackhead
2. Why Geeks and Nerds Are Worth It
3. Star Wars Guide to US Presidential Candidates
4. Vasectomy
5. Advice to Young Men From an Old Man

www.facebook.com

Most Linked to Groups:

1. The Great Nationwide Kiss-in
2. Fair Copyright for Canada
3. A G-A-Y Foamparty
4. "Hey Facebook, Breastfeeding is Not Obscene! (Official petition to Facebook)"
5. Nouveau Riche Nationwide Community

www.myspace.com

Most Linked to Bands:

1. Justice (Christian Club)
2. Fleetfoxes
3. Lily Allen
4. MGMT
5. Animal Collective

twitter.com

Most Linked to Companies:

1. Comcast
2. eGuideTravel
3. Mashable
4. Zappos
5. AdSense

Most Linked to Celebrities:

1. Ashton Kutcher
2. Lady GaGa
3. Lance Armstrong
4. Oprah
5. Stephen Fry

www.imdb.com

Most Linked to Actors:

1. Heath Ledger
2. Johnny Depp
3. Christian Bale
4. Angelina Jolie
5. Alison Maclnnis (The Pink Power Ranger)

Most Linked to Movies:

1. The Dark Knight
2. The Matrix
3. 300
4. Slumdog Millionaire
5. Star Trek

www.hulu.com

Most Linked to TV Shows:

1. Arrested Development
2. Firefly
3. It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia
4. The Office
5. 30 Rock

www.perezhilton.com

Most Linked to Celebrity Categories (tags):

1. Heidi Montag    
2. Michael Jackson      
3. Britney Spears   
4. Lady Gaga    
5. Lindsay Lohan (Warning: You cannot unsee this page.)

www.icanhascheezburger.com

Most Linked to Cat Pictures:

1. I Can Has cheezburger 3
2. I Has a Bucket
3. In Depth Analysis by David Mcraney
4. Oldest Lolcat Ever Found 
5. Lol Kitteh as a Second Language

www.cracked.com

Most Linked to Articles:

1. Figures
2. Zombies
3. Bugs
4. Most Badass Bible Verses
5. Most Terrifying Foods in the World

www.collegehumor.com

Most Linked to Videos:

1. We Didn’t Start the Flamewar
2. Font Conference
3. The Matrix Runs on Windows
4. 24 Unaired 1995 Pilot
5. Minesweeper the Movie

www.allrecipes.com

Most Linked to Recipes:

1. Sausage, Apple, & Cranberry Stuffing   
2. Creole Cornbread Stuffing   
3. Brownie Mix in a Jar   
4. Ham & Cheese Picnic Bread   
5. Candy Coated Chocolates

www.webmd.com

Most Linked to Health Ailments:

1. Cankor Sores 
2. Dental Crowns 
3. Tooth Grinding
4. Wisdom Tooth Extraction
5. Pain Management

www.foxnews.com

Most Linked to Stories:

1. Hundreds of WMDs Found in Iraq
2. Cost of Freedom Recap (Dec 2004) 
3. America’s Debt Rises
4. Transcript / Video of Bush and Kerry Debate
5. US Consumer Credit Card Debt May Crash the Economy

www.whitehouse.gov

Most Linked to U.S. Presidents:

1. Barack Obama
2. George W. Bush
3. Abraham Lincoln
4. George Washington
5. Thomas Jefferson

Most Linked to U.S. First Ladies

1. Hillary Clinton  
2. Eleanor Roosevelt  
3. Abigail Adams   
4. Jacqueline Kennedy
5. Michelle Obama

Contributors: This post was a collaborative effort with help from both Scott Willoughby and Danny Dover.

Do you like this post? Yes No

Winning the SEO Battle at Every Step of the Purchase Path »

Posted by randfish

The search engine optimization process can sometimes be mistaken for a singular, sprint-to-the-finish project, when in fact, it’s more like a marathon. Searchers rarely ever convert on the first click and thus, SEO campaigns that merely target a few popular keywords and call the task finished may be fooling themselves. I made this handy chart to help illustrate the issue:

In my example, the hotel could miss out on dramatic opportunities for optimizing the path of discovery, investigation, brand research and conversion rate optimization by simply targeting "dubrovnik hotels" and ignoring the rest of the process. A comprehensive Internet marketer is going to approach this problem the same way a user approaches the process - by delivering value in every step of the chain.

I like to think of the SEO campaign process in a format like this:

1. Generic Research: It’s very possible that, particularly for smaller brands and sites, you don’t have the ability to compete for these lofy, high-level, hyper-competitive keywords. However, there’s no reason you can’t be listed among the references on the ever-present Wikipedia page on the subject, mentioned in a review or blog post, covered by a press publication/article or included in a directory/list of resources. If nothing else, you might consider buying ad space from the pages that rank atop the results - especially in today’s market, buying CPM ads can be even cheaper than paying the engines through PPC.
2. Niche Research: This is often the first opportunity you’ll have to rank, but only if you don’t ignore the indirectly relevant (though sometimes less obvious) keywords in the discovery process. Put yourself in a customer’s shoes (or, better yet, talk to lots of customers and hear how they’ve done this), find the achievable keywords one step above your direct acquisition channel and get to work on some great content that can earn a spot in the top 5-10 listings.
3. Brand Discovery: This is the classic, SEO-as-a-tactic process. Research the most relevant, highly-converting phrases, analyze the competitive landscape and find ways to build the content and earn the links necessary to rank.
4. Brand Investigation: The battle isn’t won until the visitor converts. Make sure that when obvious queries about your product/brand/company’s value arise, you’re aware of the results and pro-actively influencing the content. Sometimes it’s enough to simply provide excellent service and take note of the few criticisms that arise. In other cases, you may need to conduct SEO reputation management campaigns to help surface the good and push down the bad.
5. Brand Navigation: Although this should be the easiest query to win, it presents opportunities for further optimization. Controlling and carefullly choosing Sitelinks under your listing, watching the results in the top 5 carefully and even investing in paid search on branded terms (research has shown that combining paid + organic listings boosts the CTR & conversion rate of both - source needed if anyone in the comments can find that)
6. Purchase: Queries like "discount code" "coupon code" "special offers" etc. are common, particularly for anyone selling directly over the web. It’s up to you to decide how and if you want to distribute these for your savvier and more cost-conscious purchasers, but in campaigns I’ve observed, it appears to more than make up for the "savings" with improved conversions.
7. Evaluation: Surfacing all of the content a visitor may be interested in about your product is wise and it can be very smart to do keyword research in the long tail around terms that follow your brand or product (so you can be sure to show up as the default resource before competitors or review sites, whose accuracy and motivation may be questionable).

I don’t want to overly-complicate the SEO process, but if you’re ignoring important steps in your customers’ search path, you could be missing huge opportunities.

Do you like this post? Yes No

Video Check-In: ExactTarget Connections ‘09 - Day 1 »

Posted by great scott!

Day 1 of the ExactTarget Connections ‘09 Email Marketing Conference just wrapped and it was pretty darn awesome, including keynotes from Malcolm Gladwell and Kelly Mooney. I’ve decided to try something new and check in via video to give a quick recap of the day.  As I mention in the video, I’ll write up a detailed blog post recapping the whole event but, inspired by some of today’s content, wanted to try and offer a little more of a real-time, participatory experience.

If these little video check-ins prove to be popular, maybe I can convince the rest of the Mozzers to do the same from other conferences and events.

Video Check-In: ExactTarget Connections ‘09 Day 1 from Scott Willoughby on Vimeo.

Do you like this post? Yes No

Headsmacking Tip #14: Offer Testimonials, Get Links »

Posted by randfish

What motivates a link? Sometimes it’s referencing data/research/news or given because you’ve produced something interesting and valuable. Sometimes it’s because another site has licensed or adopted content/widgets/badges from you. But, in most cases where an editorial link is given, I find that the underlying motivation is because that link provides some benefit to the linking site. This brings us to the fourteenth tip in our headsmacking series and possibly the tactic that will provide you with the lowest hanging link building fruit yet.

Let’s start with a look at the sidebar of MindValleyLabs’ Blog:

Not too shabby, right? The link comes from their homepage and every blog post they publish and points back to our homepage, sending over plenty of nice link juice as well as some decent traffic (from those interested in learning who SEOmoz is and why we like MindValley so much).

Now let’s look at Matt McGee’s Speaking Presentations Testimonials page:

Again, this link is great for search engines (there’s only a handful of other external links on the page), it’s relevant and it provides traffic as well as search engine benefit.

The next step isn’t too hard to figure out: Go give testimonials!

I’d wager that most of you have between 2-5 dozen contacts who would love to get something positive written from you about them that they can publish on their site. It’s not hard to get started; simply make a list and start sending emails. I’ve provided a brief template you can use below:

Hey Thomas,

Long time no see! I hope all is well with TomsBlog.com and wanted to reach out to offer my help. I’ve been really impressed with the work you do - your posts are inspiring and educational time after time. I’d be more than happy to provide a testimonial you could publish on the site if you’d like - just let me know and I’ll send something over. It would be my pleasure to share the benefits I’ve received with the rest of your visitors :-)

Best wishes,
Rand Fishkin, CEO & Co-Founder, SEOmoz

Testimonial links have a number of qualities that make them absolute gems in the link acquisition world:

• You can often customize the link location and anchor text (so long as it’s relevant and sensible) - just ask when you send over the testimonial (or, better yet, send over the exact HTML code that will embed the right link so all the receiver has to do is copy + paste)
• Testimonials are frequently sitewide, but even when they’re not, they tend to reside on popular, important pages (even homepages sometimes - an otherwise impossible place to get a link)
• They’re 100% editorially given and meant as a true reflection of the relationship you’ve built - that’s precisely the kind of link the search engines want to count
• They provide strong benefits to both parties in the deal; everyone’s a winner
• They’re not nearly as awkward or bizarre as a standard link request and the probability for acceptance is very high

Start a list and get cracking - you have nothing to lose but your link poverty :-)

p.s. As with all link building tactics, if you go overboard (abusing this tactic to excess on in a manipulative fashion), the search engines may not take it well. This is a great way to leverage existing relationships and contacts to help bring in links, but if you’re plotting how to use this to earn hundreds or thousands of links, you’re likely treading on dangerous ground (unless you’re a reporter for a major publication, in which case every business you mention is likely to be linking back to your articles about them).

Do you like this post? Yes No

Blogger Clinic: Increasing Posts-Read-per-Visit »

Posted by RobOusbey

Hi there - I’m a blogger. Could help me? I read that massive post about ‘lessons learned from three years of blogging‘ and I’ve been brimming with ideas ever since. However, I’d like to attract more views to each of my posts.

OK, I can help you with that, by using one equation and five quick techniques to get you thinking. Here’s the equation:

Number of Posts Read = Number of Visits * Number of Posts Read on Each Visit

Rather than just trying to get more people to your site, we should spend some time talking about the final part of that equation - the number of posts read by each visitor.

So you’re going to help me increase page views?

Not quite. There’s a whole bunch of techniques to increase page views without increasing the number of your posts which are read. As an example: you can publish each articles over a number of pages, and make people click ‘next’ buttons - each single read of a post now generates three page views. Great for a spike in CPM advertising revenue, bad for a long-term play of not irritating you visitors.

OK, I get it. So where do I start?

One technique to consider is that of linking to related posts or content.

Ah! But I already do that - there’s a Wordpress plugin I have …

The links in the sidebar or at the end of the article appeal to users who have finished reading and ask ‘what do I do next?’ These might encourage some people to read another post, but users might just wander off through any other link. Whilst they are reading, you have the visitor’s undivided attention - so offer them a few ‘next step’ sign-posts during the article.

For example: You could open the post with a reference to another post, and use a compelling title which encourages them to open it in another tab, and ’save for later’.

Wait - is that what you did at the top of this post?

Indeedy. I’d also suggest doing something similar near the end of the post, so that you can suggest to the reader a ‘next step’ before they finish reading. Don’t let their attention wander - if they’ve read to the end then they are likely to be happy to read other pages that you recommend. And don’t scroll down to the bottom just to check if I’ve done it here - the answer is yes.

Right, I’ll intelligently include a few ‘related posts’ in the text. What’s next?

A basic idea that is often overlooked is variety. Shake up your style of posting and try some different formats that aren’t just text. SEOMoz has done this quite well recently, with regular videos, downloadable PDF resources, list posts, slide shows, etc.

This allows visitors to read more of your posts without succumbing to the strain / snow-blindness of page after page of similarly formatted posts.

Is that why you published this post in a Q&A format?

It wasn’t intentional - I actually pinched the idea from a mathematics post about the P versus NP problem.

Right. Keep my blog varied to keep visitors interested. Do you have any recommendations about style?

Yes, two actually, and I hope you won’t feel like you are ’selling out’ to follow them. The first is to stay upbeat - reading a blog with posts that are consistently negative or miserable is tiring. It’s like talking to that guy who always sees the worst and moans about everything - you can’t wait to get away.

If your posts make the reader smile a little, then they’ll be more likely to linger in the ‘happy place’ you have created for them.

The other style point?

I believe that visitors will spend longer on a site if their intelligence is taken for granted, and they are made to feel clever. Avoid long explanations of basic concepts and let your visitors do their own research on any topics you mention which they aren’t familiar with. Similarly, there’s no need to oversimplify the reading level of your text.

Fortunately, we’re lucky that the SEOMoz blog is read by knowledgeable, professional types who are more than capable of reading about advanced concepts and know how to do their own independent research if necessary.

Aw shucks, thanks!

OK, one final idea about structuring your blog: remember that the snippets you display on category pages etc will influence people’s decision on whether to visit a page. However, as these snippets target current users, they may have a different focus to a snippet you would use offsite - say in an RSS feed, on a social book marking site, etc.

For example, you may choose to use this text when persuading people to visit the site:
      "A popular piece of traditional SEO advice is ripped apart by Rand Fishkin of SEOMoz. Of course we should just focus on the user - right? Find out why that might be wrong, and then join the debate!"

but on the site we should use:
      "You’ve undoubtedly heard the old industry adage: ‘Do what’s right for users and engines will reward you with higher rankings.’ This is tragically misleading, and this post covers specific tactics you must consider, beyond the purely user-focused aspects."

(By the way: if you’ve not yet had the opportunity, I do recommend reading Rand’s post about this topic and checking out the healthy debate it generated.)

Is this the bit where you hand over to the readers and ask for their suggestions in the comments?

Absolutely. Every post I’ve written for SEOMoz has been followed by some great additions, I’m keen to see what you come up with today.

Do you like this post? Yes No