Managing SEO Campaigns in Declining Industries »

Posted by RobOusbey

This is a graph of organic traffic for a theoretical site - they might be in an industry such as print advertising, construction equipment or VHS rental. The decline in traffic is pronounced and serious.

A critical distinction when looking at a graph like this is whether the site’s performance is increasingly worse than the competitors, or whether the whole industry is in decline. In this post I want to recommend some metrics that can be tracked to benchmark your site against competitors (independent of market behaviour) and to check the health of the industry. I’ll then make suggestions for finding opportunities to slow or reverse the trend of dropping traffic.

For the benefit of the time-poor, the post ends with a three point checklist / summary.

Competitors and Benchmarking

There are a couple of different metrics you can use track, which will demonstrate the more direct outputs of your SEO work, and expose your performance amongst competitors.

This chart tracks the Site Authority of the target domain (and some competitors) through time.

To date, trying to chart Linkscape metrics has been a bit misleading: the rapid increase in the reach of Linkscape and modifications of the tool’s algorithms have meant that month-by-month reporting of a site’s Authority wasn’t always a fair comparison. However, Nick tells me that the team are currently putting effort into tackling the challenge of tracking this data. Though you’ll have more confidence in drawing a trend chart such as this one soon, I’d still recommend collecting numbers right now to get a snapshot of where your site is amongst the competition.

Obviously, this assessment of site strength is query independent; differences in site architecture, on-page term targeting and the anchor text of external links will have a significant effect on each site’s performance and number of keywords.

In many ways, the next graph address this. The line for the target site is an ‘average ranking position’ - I’d recommend creating this by taking around twenty non-branded, representative keyphrases (eg: ten which you’re specifically targeting and ten which send a significant amount of traffic) and finding the mean of the site’s ranking for each phrase.

The competitor lines should be calculated by finding the mean ranking position of that site, for each of these keywords where the site ranks in the top 20. (We do this so that the mean isn’t artificially dragged down by keyphrases which the site isn’t trying to compete for, and where it ranks very poorly.)

Even a single month’s data points on these two graphs will provide a snapshot of your site’s position amongst the industry’s other players. Tracking the data each month will demonstrate how your standing has changed, and can directly show the impact of your SEO work - both on-site and off-site.

Industry Assessment

If you have been collecting ranking data in the past, then it can be useful to identify a term for which you’ve had a relatively static ranking over the last year or so. If your traffic from this term has declined over the same period then this provides a useful example of how market behaviour outside of your control is having an effect on the business.

If you don’t have historic ranking data, but suspect that your industry is in decline, you should compare search volume trends to organic traffic sent by some specific terms. In the example below, the site sees a decline in traffic for the single keyphrase ‘football tickets‘ but comparing this to the search volume for the term shows that the site’s performance has actually improved - they are increasing their share of that traffic.

If the industry really is declining and search volumes for all the typically valuable phrases are unlikely to return, then there can be a serious consideration about even continuing to operate in the market. If your core business was VHS rental, consider offering Blu-Ray; if you rank well for house and holiday insurance but are suffering from the decline in these markets then consider adding pet insurance  - a steady / growing market. (Check out this Google Insights data for UK insurance markets.)

Of course, these are extreme examples - and if you’re in these particular industries then you shouldn’t need a blog post to make these suggestions - but they remind us that there are some markets where a time comes to look for business from elsewhere.

Actions

As we did in the graph above, you must begin by looking at the organic traffic trend for keyphrases individually. A lot of information is lost when data is aggregated (such as in total organic traffic.) Go back and look at your highest volume keyphrases from a year or two ago, and compare these to your current highest volume keyphrases, by charting the monthly volume of traffic they sent over that period. It may quickly become clear that whilst your keyword portfolio has been dragged down by some dogs, there are some stars (or problem children) that are contributing a great deal to the overall traffic.

If you last did keyword research 12 or 18 months ago, user behaviour may have changed significantly - even for people looking for exactly the same product. Whilst the metrics mentioned above may bring you to the gloomy conclusion that search volume in your industry is substantially down, it’s possible to overlook the fact that there’s simply been a change in searcher behaviour.

Examples of such changes that have happened in different geographic regions:

• searchers are using more direct queries (’cinema‘ & ‘film tickets‘ are steady or down, ‘film times‘ is way up)
• searchers are moving from long tail to head terms (’internet marketing‘ & ‘website promotion‘ are declining but ‘SEO‘ and ‘SEM‘ are up)
• searchers are moving from head to long tail terms (’currency exchange‘ is down but specific terms such as ‘dollars to pounds‘ are up)

The message here: don’t miss out on opportunities to compete on the emerging keyword groups.

I promised you a checklist.

Please take away these three points:

1. If your organic traffic is down, either for particular keywords or as a whole, be clear whether this is because your site is under-performing, or because the search volume for a keyword / in an industry is descending.
2. Benchmark yourself against competitors by regularly recording the Authority and/or rankings position for relevant keyphrases of your site and theirs
3. Revisit your keyword research - a year is a long time on the internet, particularly given the current state of flux that so many industries are experiencing.

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Whiteboard Friday - 5 Things You’re Not Doing (But Should Be) »

Posted by great scott!

This week, we’ve got a couple of newcomers to Whiteboard Studios! Our very own Jen Lopez and Danny Dover (whom you should know well thanks to Jen’s Meet the Mozzers post) are pinch-hitting for our globe-trotting CEO. Let’s all give them a big welcome.

We did a PRO Site Review Webinar last week and noticed a few SEO issues that are all-too-common. So, in this week’s Whiteboard Friday, Jen and Danny will walk you through five common areas where people often make mistakes, and explain quick fixes that can help you improve, including bot blocking, courting the Linkerati, identifying problems using Top Pages, analyzing conversion rate, and addressing canonicalization.

Here are the charts Danny referenced in the video:

     
                                                                                       Courtesy of WebsiteOptimization.com

Also, if you’d like to learn more about tracking first-touch attribution in your analytics, Whiteboard Friday alumnus, Will Critchlow, wrote about it here.

Addition: Rand wrote a more in-depth post about the use of robots.txt vs. meta noindex, follow here, which can help shed some light on the subject.

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Meet the Mozzers! »

Posted by jennita

Over the past few months, we’ve announced a number of exciting changes here at the mozPlex. Some of those include becoming focused on our software, new SEO tools and a cultural change with our TAGFEE Tenets. With that, we’re committed to being transparent and authentic and feel we’ve done a great job keeping the SEOmoz community up to date on many of these changes.

However, one area we’ve been slacking is in ensuring that our community knows who we are, as a team. There are many mozzers who mainly work behind the scenes building tools, or providing excellent customer service to our members. Along with our shift from consulting, we’ve had a few organizational changes and people’s roles have changed. Additionally we have a number of moz Associates that help contribute to the blog and provide expertise in Q & A.

We’d like to take this opportunity to introduce you to our team, and ask you to get to know us a little better. There are a few new mozzers that may even surprise you! This is an exciting time for us and the community and we’re excited to introduce ourselves. Each mozzer was asked to provide their title, social media accounts, top moz moment (tools created, blog posts written, etc.), then I asked them to answer a few fun questions. So without further ado, I’d like you to meet the mozzers.

Development Team

Every team plays an important role to the success of SEOmoz and our tools, but the development team is key. Without this group we wouldn’t have the suite of amazing tools that we have to offer our members today. Browse through the developers and see who has worked on your favorite tool, and learn more about the people behind the scenes.

Ben Hendrickson Sr Software Engineer @bhendrickson  moz Moment "From the day I started building the Linkscape prototype to the day we launched the first version was about 10 months. I think that project went well."  I am proud to answer questions like this in a confusing and self-referential way.	Chas Williams Software Developer  moz Moment "I work mostly on Linkscape these days. I wrote the code for anchor text distributions and the new views for OSE, so the OSE launch was a proud moment for me :)" My favorite Youtube video.	David Joslin Systems Engineer David on LinkedIn  moz Moment "Since starting in August I have worked to improve our uptime significantly through monitoring, tuning, and application fixes. " On Saturday morning I hang out with my kids until my wife gets her beauty sleep and then I try to get a mountain bike ride in before working in the yard and other chores.
Jeff Pollard Lead Web Developer @nFluxx Jeff on LinkedIn moz Moment "I make sure your website experience is a wonderful one! :)" On Saturday morning I like to catch up on sleep.	Kate Matsudaira VP Engineering @katemats  moz Moment "Helping bring SEO tools and technology to the next level" Why is the sky blue? Because of Avogadro’s number - the number of molecules in a mole determine the wavelength of light reflected (I learned this in my physical chemistry class when we had to derive Avogadro’s number if the sky was yellow — as a result I will never forget this bit of trivia).	Ken Woodruff Senior Architect Ken will have to remain a mystery for another day because he did not get me his bio information in time. To be continued…
Nick Gerner Senior Engineer @gerner Nick on LinkedIn   Nick on Facebook  NickGerner.com  moz Moment Nick Leads SEOmoz API development and is currently working on solutions for historical Linkscape data tracking. On Saturday morning I go for a run, then chase my cats Garrison and Ira until my wife Susan wakes up.	Phil Smith Developer @philhsmith  moz Moment "Working on sooper-top secret project" The funniest job I ever had was… In high-school during the summer I would be the guy-in-a-foam-costume mascot for the local mall I worked at. Think giant purple dinosaur (but not barney.)	Roger Mozbot Needs No Title @roger_mozbot  moz Moment Standing on a crate in order to be as tall as Googlebot. Raised by a protein-rich, startup-obsessed race of robot aliens. Can’t stand paying per click.

Marketing Team

Now that we are focused on our SEO tools, the consulting and marketing teams have been combined. There have been a number of changes in roles and we’re now more focused than ever on getting our products launched, participating and leading our amazing community, and creating excellent content for our readers. Take a peak at our new Marketing team!

Danny Dover SEO Specialist @DannyDover Danny on LinkedIn  moz Moment Danny is at least half full of SEO know-how Rock, Paper or Scissors? Paper. On Saturday morning I…Kick ass and take names. Want to be on the list?	Jen Sable Lopez Community Director @jennita Jen on LinkedIn  moz Moment Having worked remotely for 9 months, I LOVE being in the office. The funniest job I ever had was… in college one summer I tasted beef. It paid well, but was really disgusting!
Joanna Lord Director of Customer Acquisition & Engagement @joannalord Joanna on LinkedIn  moz Moment "My focus is on introducing new audiences to our awesome resources and SEO tools. " My favorite Youtube video is… The Sunscreen Song On Saturday morning I… wake up, make coffee, check analytics, and then go explore my new home–Seattle.	Scott Willoughby Director-Conversion & Retention Marketing @great_scott Scott on LinkedIn  moz Moment Whiteboard Fridays Rock, Paper or Scissors? Rock! \m/ On Saturday morning I… wish cartoons were still as cool as they used to be.

Product Team

The product team leads the path to ensuring that the products being built meet the needs of our customers and they manage the projects from inception through deployment. Essentially they make sure we’re all doing our jobs. :)

Adam Feldstein Director of Product Management  moz Moment Current Focus: 1) Ship a new version of the mozBar. 2) Something much bigger (that I can’t talk about yet) Funniest jobs: I once played a rock/punk gig at a high school party. Ended up being extra fun when the lead guitarist locked his keys in the van with the engine running (fortunately I think we had already gotten the gear out).

Ben Huff Product Manager Ben on LinkedIn  moz Moment "I focus on herding cats. Recently that included getting Open Site Explorer out the door, safe and sound. I’m currently working on doing the same for the new Keyword Difficulty tool." The sky is blue because blue light waves are the shortest visible waves coming from the sun, and scatter off of molecules in the air the easiest.

Matt Heilman Art Director  moz Moment "I make SEOmoz look good"

Operations Team

Who keeps the company working like a well oiled machine? That’s the Operations team of course! They jump in and help with any aspect of the company as needed and are often our customers first point of contact. Without their magic touch the office would be running around like chickens with their heads cut off. Thanks for keeping us from running into each other!

Arden Turnbull Customer Service Manager / Office Coordinator  moz Moment Arden keeps our customers happy!

Christine V. Director of Operations  moz Moment I do my best to increase the staff’s level of happiness and productiveness, much like Tattoo on Fantasy Island. If SEOmoz was a Lifetime movie, I would be played by William Hung.

Sarah Bird Chief Operations Officer @SarahBird  Sarah on LinkedIn   moz Moment I own legal, financial, HR, and generally help make everything run smoothly. I also champion the Marketing Department and the SEOmoz API. I love my job. :) On Saturday morning I… Sleep in and then go for a long run around Lake Union.

moz Associates

This is an amazing group of experts from across the search marketing industry. We’re priveledged to have this group contributing to the blog, helping with Q & A and providing insight for new products. It sorta feels like we’re showing off… because we totally are! 

Cindy Krum CEO & founder of Rank-Mobile - Denver, CO @Suzzicks Cindy on LinkedIn   Cindy on Facebook  moz Moment Cindy is a mobile marketing evangelist. She’ll be providing help in Q & A on mobile topics. Why is the sky blue? Because that is the way Google wants it? (We’re not sure if it will stay blue though - its still in beta and hasn’t officially launched.)	Duncan Morris Founder and CEO, Distilled - London, UK @duncanmorris  moz Moment Given that I always drone on about information architecture I guess I should really point to this post though at the time it came out this was my most interesting post. On a Saturday morning I travel around the south of England to the coldest and wettest playing fields in existence to play field hockey for Wimbledon Hockey Club. Of course in the UK we just call this hockey, but that would give you all the false impression that I’m rock hard and can ice skate.	Jane Copland SEO Consultant, Ayima Search Marketing - London, England Jane on LinkedIn Jane’s Personal Social Media Profile  moz Moment "I’ve written a couple of successful blog posts for SEOmoz (I worked as a full-time employee at SEOmoz from 2006 until 2009). My favourites are: Don’t End URLs in .0, What Rand and Jane Write When They’re Drunk, the follow-up and  A True Story. It’s about hookers." The funniest job I ever had was… I used to work for Rand ;)
Kate Morris Kate Morris, Search Engine Marketing Consultant - Austin, TX @katemorris Kate on LinkedIn  moz Moment "My favorite blog post on YouMoz was Paid Search: Detaching From an Agency, which is what got me speaking on my first panel at SMX East 2008." I’m proud to be an … Army Brat. My favorite Youtube video is … Louis CK - Everything is Amazing, and Nobody’s Happy	Lindsay Wassell Q & A - Tampa Bay, FL @lindzie  moz Moment This post: Rethinking Duplicate Content On Saturday morning I… am awake before dawn caring for my newborn twins! I’m proud to be a… SEO	Michael Cottam Principal, Michael Cottam SEO Consulting - Portland, OR, Canada @Michael512 Michael on LinkedIn  Michael on Facebook   moz Moment I like this one, and it seemed to generate a pile o’ comments: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/its-a-feeding-frenzy-for-keywordrich-domains I’m proud to be a member of the downtown Portland Rotary Club and on the Ambassador Board of the Children’s Cancer Association.
Peter Meyers President, User Effect - Chicago, IL @dr_pete  moz Moment The post: SEO Cheat Sheet: Anatomy of a URL My most popular post on my own blog (by a longshot) is 25 Point Website Usability Checklist.  The funniest job I ever had was… Stuffing photo envelopes with a pot dealer and Christian survivalist. Why is the sky blue? … because The Flying Spaghetti Monster made it that way.	Richard Baxter Director / Founder SEOgadget.co.uk - London, UK @richardbaxter  moz Moment Hmm. I like writing about tools you guys do - Like this and this and pretty charts on ranking factors using Linkscape data like this.  And I really like talking about Microformats. My favorite Youtube video is… Eric Clapton Shreds - is pure awesome and always puts a smile on my face. One day match this level of guitar genius…	Rob Ousbey Search Marketing Consultant, Distilled - Seattle, WA (soon to be) @RobOusbey  moz Moment People seem to like my how-to and link building posts.  On Saturday morning I: often wake up to the smell of bacon The funniest job I ever had was: watching petrol drip down an inclined hot plate to measure the amount of residue. I won an award for it. Hotplate Rob they called me. Ahh, good times, good times.
Sam Crocker SEO Consultant, Distilled - London, for now! @crockstarltd Personal Fashions & Trends Blog  moz Moment I’m pretty new to the moz crew but I was pretty pleased with manning up to take on a "doozy" for my first Q & A and think I found a good solution to the problem I’m proud to be a… n Uh-merican, where at least I know I’m free! The funniest job I ever had was… working at McDonalds when I was 14 years old. My mom said "you can work for me for free 6 hours a day or you can get a job" we all know that Macky D’s is one of the few places that will hire 14 year olds and the rest is history.	Tom Critchlow Head of Search Marketing, Distilled - London Baby. @tomcritchlow  moz Moment My most loved SEOmoz post was this one, mainly because of it’s sensationalist headline… Headlines ftw. My proudest SEOmoz contribution was speaking at both the Seattle and London pro seminars in 2009 and getting some really positive feedback and comments. Rock, paper scissors? After years of playing poker I can now comfortably crush Will at rock paper scissors despite him claiming it’s a game of chance. I will gladly play any game of any sort for money.	Will Critchlow Co-Founder of Distilled, UK & US - London, UK. Though anywhere rainy appears to do. @willcritchlow Will on LinkedIn  moz Moment Taking credit for lots of things done by our team, I’m probably most proud of the London PRO seminar in October last year. My personal favourite post, mainly for the title (just google "space monstering") is this one. Rock, Paper or Scissors? I always lose this to Tom. Rock.

Boss Team

Last, but definitely not least we have our co-founders Rand and Gillian. They may very well be the most well known of the bunch, but I bet you didn’t know Rand used to be a black market Pokemon dealer! Without these two, we wouldn’t be the team we are today.

Gillian Muessig President/Co-Founder @seomom Gillian on LinkedIn  moz Moment "I’m the corporate evangelist and international voice for SEOmoz. My role is to connect the the SEOmoz community with the SEOmoz team and to spread the SEOmoz brand to new audiences and markets." I’m proud to be a… Mozzer. Nothing feels quite so good as seeing the fruition of a life’s work. I couldn’t have asked for more.

Rand Fishkin CEO @randfish Rand on LinkedIn  moz Moment The Beginner’s Guide On Saturday morning I … am hopefully sleeping in (though perhaps a more accurate answer would be that I’m at an airport). I am proud to be a … husband. (Geraldine: Awwww!)

Thanks for taking the time to get to know us!

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SEO Chrome Extension - Comprehensive View of Page and Domain Data »

Posted by neopunisher

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.

After Nick announced the free Linkscape API, I decided to write a SEO extension for chrome. I wanted to focus on all aspects of SEO and not just linking (like some other extensions) as well as a fast clean UI. I organized data from the page and external signals into 5 categories: External Page Data, Page Elements, Social Media, Page Terms, Server / Domain Info, and Suggestions as well as enhancing some common SEO related sites like Google Webmaster Tools, Yahoo Site Explorer and Google Analytics 

Install the SEO SIte Tools extention and see for yourself… it’s only one click and you won’t be disappointed.

External Page Data shows domain metrics link links and rank

• Linking to page and domain from Yahoo
• Page Authority, Domain Authority and links from SEOmoz
• Alexa popularity (with graph) links
• Google index date and PageRank along with domain trends
• Dmoz listing and compete.com data

 Social Media pulls shares and bookmarks from a number of places

• Page Diggs and Domain Diggs
• Recent tweets about the page along with total number of tweets
• Facebook shares, likes and comments
• Reddit points
• Delicious bookmarks

 Page Terms displays relevant page elements to SEO

• Meta Robots
• Meta Description
• Anchor tags and follow attribute)
• Header tags (H1-H5)
• Bold/Strong
• I/Em
• Meta Keywords

Server / Domain Info checks the domain’s IP and country and displays it on a map along with registrar information and WhoIs info 

Suggestions gives helpful on-page SEO suggestions about title tag, links on page, meta description, meta keywords (hey it can’t hurt) 

Page Terms (still a work in progress) performs term extraction and lets you do keyword research with Google’s keyword research tool 

It also has ability to enhance Google Webmaster Tools with links anchor text, if they are followed links and mozRank (or PageRank) of linking pages 

Adds Social media reactions to Google Analytics page details with Facebook shares, likes and comments as well as Delicious bookmarks and Diggs 

It also adds the link and anchor text info to Yahoo Site Explorer with mozRank (or PageRank) 

It is still being developed so I would love any feedback you could give me on it…

Some future plans are:

• Keyword search volume in Webmaster Tools
• Indexed pages in Google, Yahoo and Bing
• Improved keyword research tools
• More site suggestion information
• StumbleUpon share data 

Get the SEO Site Tools Extention Now

Get in touch with me on twitter I’m @cartercole and follow me for updates of new releases (but if you install the plug-in it will automatically update) [highly recommended] :)

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How to Get the Most Out of Your SEO »

Posted by willcritchlow

The good news is that tomorrow (Wednesday 24th Feb), at 8.30am PST (11.30am EST / 4.30pm GMT), I am going to be joined on the next Distilled conference call by Richard Baxter as we discuss "how to get the most from your SEO". The even better news is that it is totally free (as long as you register in time).

If you would like to join us on the call, simply register on the Distilled site and you will be sent instructions to join the conference (which will be handled by gotomeeting / gotowebinar).

Previous calls have been more technical and have been essentially presentations that I have delivered with a slide-deck. I did one on SEOmoz tools and one on how to be an Excel ninja - both videos are available on the Distilled site.

This one is going to be a little different. Rich should need little introduction. With a strong background in in-house travel SEO followed by founding his agency, SEOgadget, he is not only a true guru of keyword research and large site architecture, but also has experience on both sides of the client / agency relationship. He also spoke at the London PRO training seminar last October (thanks to foliovision for the photo):

Rich and I plan to let you into a relaxed chat. We might pull up the occasional website or slide but fundamentally, it’ll be a little like sitting in on a live whiteboard Friday (on a Wednesday, without a whiteboard, or Rand!).

The conversation is likely to be pretty free-flowing - in many ways it will lead on from my WBF conversation with Rand about choosing an SEO consultant - but I can’t guarantee exactly what we will talk about! We are intending to cover:

• the best tasks to keep in-house vs. outsource
• combining SEO effectively with PPC, PR and marketing
• integrating SEO into other processes (e.g. development, business development)
• how to get the most from your agency
• how to keep an eye on your agency and avoid bans and penalties
• how to be a great SEO client and get even more out of your agency

We hope to have you there. We will be taking questions - both on Twitter (hashtag: #optimalSEO) and via the chat interface in gotowebinar, but if you have anything you’d specifically like us to cover, feel free to use the comments below to chime in.

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SEO for Startups: Top 7 Lessons + A Trip to YCombinator »

Posted by randfish

Last week, while in London, I received an email from Paul Graham, whom I’ve long admired, possibly even idolized a bit. He asked if I was available to come speak at a YCombinator SEO event in Mountain View. Tonight, I presented at that evented and thought I’d share my experiences, recommendations and yes, my presentation. Not everything that was discussed is public, in fact, much of it is "classified" at YC’s request. However, there’s so much good material that it would be criminal not to share.

First up, my presentation from the YCombinator SEO for Startups event (naturally, hosted on YC company and prior SEOmoz consulting client, Scribd):

SEO for Startups: YCombinator February 2010

Next, since it’s hard to do any slide deck justice with just the slides, a list of top advice and recommendations, not just from the slide deck, but from many years of interactions, consulting and Q+A help for startups:

1. SEO as a Strategy, not a Tactic
   Yelp uses SEO as a strategy. When their community finds something new in the neighborhood, content is created. They are limited in scale only by the physical world’s local businesses. Plus, it’s only natural that local businesses with good rankings will want to share those via a badge and a link; it’s only natural that their top contributors will want to share the reviews they’ve given. SEO is a strategy - it’s part of what makes them the business they are. If you’re just thinking in terms of keywords in the title and submitting to some directories, you’re going to get lapped by someone who understands how to make content, links, sharing & search demand an integral part of how users interact with their website.
2. Start SEO in the Concept Phase, Not After the Site is Built
   It’s hard to do, particularly when you spend your first two years as a founder thinking SEO is a cross between black magic and BS, but SEO works best when it’s architected alongside a businesses marketing plan. I’ve mentioned in the past that I think VCs and angel investors should be asking about SEO in the first meeting - startups should be three steps ahead of that.
3. Build Accessibility First & Foremost
   I come back time and time again to the SEO Pyramid. It all starts with unique content that engines can find and users find valuable. I’m now the proud owner of a Y Combinator t-shirt bearing the tagline "Make Something People Want." All I’m asking is that you also make something Google (and Bing) can find, too. And, in concert with this advice, check out Perfecting Keyword Targeting & On-Page Optimization to help solve that puzzle.
4. SEO is NOT a One Time Event
   Fire and forget works with smartbombs (or maybe not - scroll to section 5), but it doesn’t work with SEO. This is a constantly evolving field, and not so much because Google’s algorithm is changing all the time, but more so because 300 (or 30,000) competitors are constantly trying to produce better content and market it more effectively while the engines are constantly experimenting with new kinds of results and information. No product is good enough to survive without marketing - even Google itself just ran a Super Bowl ad. SEO is marketing, and as such demands the same attention. Ignore it, and you will fall by the wayside.
5. Analytics are a Religion
   An ad salesman comes to you and tells you that 20% of your exact target market is reading a particular magazine. By putting in a full-page ad every month for the next year, you can ensure that they’ll all know your name and many will buy from you. But wait… How many saw it? How many took the desired action? How many heard about it from a friend or read a loaner copy on a flight? You’ll never know. With SEO, it’s the complete opposite - every action has a trackable reaction. If you ignore the data, use last-touch attribution or neglect to build serious models that track the value of your campaigns, you may as well blow the money on a giant billboard on the 101. Who knows? Maybe the right investor will drive by and decide to invest… Just don’t count on it.
6. Clever Tricks Aren’t that Clever (or New)
   I promise that no hairbrained scheme to manipulate the search rankings by registering thousands of sites or scraping the web for open places to link or contacting 6,000 "friends" for a link exchange are either A) new or B) going to work. Apply your creativity in white hat ways and make sure it passes the Google web spam litmus test. And no, that doesn’t just mean it passes Google’s Quality Guidelines, it means you would happily show it to any engineer on the webspam team content in the knowledge that they’d actually WANT it to help your site rank better.
7. Don’t Let Search Dominate Your Traffic Sources
   If Google sends 90% of your traffic, your business has real danger associated with it. Why aren’t people coming directly to your site, being passed links in email, getting Tweets and Facebook mentions that send traffic? Why is no one blogging about you, writing about you in the press, commenting in forums with links to your content? These "natural" signs tell a story of a real business providing real value. The 90-95% Google trafficked site says something strange is going on, and Google themselves are likely to figure that out sooner or later.

And last, but not least, I’d like to recognize some of the brilliant people and companies represented. It was humbling to receive such kind praise and attentitive ears from companies like:

• Apartment Rentals Site - AirBnB (whose founders were kind enough to give me a ride back to my hotel at SFO!)
• Dead Simple Publishing Site - Posterous (I learned the official way to pronounce it - "pastarus")
• Concerts & Tour Dates Startup - Songkick
• Time Management Software Provider - RescueTime ( a local Seattle startup, and host of the Feb. 25 event)
• Gift Card Exchange Marketplace - Cardpool
• Real Time Search Startup - Scoopler
• Live Video & Chat Hub - Justin.tv

Tragically, the following brief set of photos from the event were taken on my new Android camera phone (yes, I’m such a Hacker News/Paul Graham geek that I had to pull it out):

YCombinator Founders Eating Dinner (noticeably absent in the photo was the single female founder - but they do have one!)

Luckily, there was plenty of Coke to help keep me hydrated (and caffeinated) during the event

The rush for pizza (apparently, The Flash is one of the founders they funded!)

Paul and Rand in the Anybots lab - thanks again, Paul; it was a fantastic experience

There were more than 40 companies in attendance, so there’s no way to name them all here, but the above represent some of the most active on the SEO panel and during the lengthy, but phenomenal Q+A. Later this week, SEOmoz’s own Danny Dover will be attending the Y Combinator meetup in Seattle, and he’d love to say hi and chat with folks there, and hopefully help to bring a good name to SEO.

p.s. At the end of the presentation, Paul noted that the startups owed me a debt for sharing information about SEO. I disagree, but who am I to pass up such a wonderful opportunity. My only request to the attendees was that, if they should see SEO being badmouthed on Hacker News to kindly step in and help others realize the power and legitimacy of this marketing channel.

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Applying Atul Gawande’s Checklist Manifesto to SEO »

Posted by Tom_C

This post was inspired by Rand. If I’m honest, I’m not sure how many of my posts aren’t inspired by Rand… Specifically however it was this tweet which set the wheels in motion (if ever so slowly):

The link that Rand twittered was this one to the Financial Times. It’s a story about checklists. Yeah, *yawn* right? Well not quite - you see these checklists, used by all kinds of people from pilots to doctors, have

The book’s main point is simple: no matter how expert you may be, well-designed check lists can improve outcomes - freakonomics

been shown to increase safety, save lives and make millions. Atul Gawande is a surgeon and has worked hard to get checklists implemented in the medical profession to help save lives. He’s written a book about these checklists called The Checklist Manifesto (Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk). If you want to read more about these fascinating checklists and their incredible power I suggest you check out the FT link above or click here to read this New Yorker article written by Atul Gawande himself. Also, be sure to check out a sample from one of the medical checklists.

That said, this is the internet age - why should we be forced to read anything at all when we can instead get all the knowledge we need through a short and catch video clip? Well, here’s the short and catchy video clip of John Stewart’s interview with Atul Gawande on The Daily Show (sorry, only available to US viewers I’m afraid - c’mon guys get your act together. I can watch the show in the UK, why can’t I watch clips online from the UK?):

As you have probably guessed by now, I was inspired by all of this to apply some of this checklist theory to our SEO projects. The main idea being that while we all know what to do - sometimes we forget to do some of the basics and by having a simple checklist at hand we can make sure we don’t miss anything out. There are obviously lots of different areas of SEO that this would apply to (and other areas - I think it’d work great for PPC) but I’ve chosen to focus on new projects. Below is a checklist that I am in the process of implementing at Distilled for any new SEO project which comes on board. I anticipate that it’s still useful for in-house folks too when launching a new site or project. I welcome your feedback and thoughts on this work in progress!

SEO Project Kickoff Checklist

Is billing set up? - This is useful to ensure that not only is the client in the system and set up for billing but that the project has actually transitioned from sales to operations. It’s also essential to check here that the SEO team knows how much the client is paying.

Is the project in the project management system? - This is a no-brainer (like all the things on the list!) but useful to ensure that you can keep track of the project. In addition it’s important to ensure client contact details are stored there.

Introduce all team members - Ensure anyone within the company who’s working with this client has sat down and knows what everyone else is doing. This is especially important if the client is paying for multiple services such as PPC, Web Development, SEO etc.

Do you know which URL you’re working on? - Often you’ll start work for a company but that business may own many different sections and URLs. Which one are you working on?

What is a conversion? - Whether goal tracking is set up or not in analytics it’s crucial to understand what a conversion is and how much that conversion is worth to the business.

Do you have access to analytics & webmaster central? - SEO without data is like the winter olympics without snow. Ensure you have access to the data from the very start.

Check for irregularities - validating analytics data can be a complete piece of work sometimes, that’s not what I mean here. What I mean here is just a quick sense-check that the site ranks for it’s own name, that analytics data vaguely ties up with rankings, PPC traffic isn’t appearing in analytics as organic etc.

Benchmark current data - The three data points I think it’s useful to benchmark (that you can’t go back and check later) are: 1) Link metrics (my favourite are DA and PA) - it’s useful to store a copy of linkscape somewhere too, 2) A count of indexed pages (yes, I know this is sometimes wildly inaccurate but it’s still worth noting down), 3) A snapshot of rankings for the top 20 keyphrases (full rank tracking/analysis can be set up later in the project).

Has a kickoff meeting with the client been scheduled? - And does the client know who their contact is within the SEO team.

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Bringing SEO to Small Business in Scotland »

Posted by randfish

Last week I spent a day with small business owners in Glasgow (pronounced glaz-go), Scotland teaching the basics of online marketing and SEO. It was a remarkable experience to be faced with such a different crowd than what I’m used to. As a comparison, the week prior, I’d been in Mountain View presenting to the Silicon Valley Search Engine Roundtable, comprised of heads of SEO and marketing directors from Fortune 500 companies - all very savvy operators.

The program, Online Xcellence, was sponsored by the Scottish government and organized by Brian Mathers, one of the most extraordinarily passionate people I’ve met in the search marketing world.

Rand, Brian Mathers & Mystery Guest (err… Everywhereist these days)

Brian’s inspired determination has brought online marketing to hundreds of businesses in Scotland. It was, in fact, wholly remarkable to witness the friendships and camaraderie he’d built by showing off the power of usable websites, analytics and search marketing. Even more impressive was the financial and business success he’d brought to the companies he helped, many of whom were in attendance for the Online Xcellence event.

Brian wasn’t the only wonderful host we met in Glasgow. His colleagues, Adrian Bereziuk and Yusuf Chauhdry helped to make us feel at home. In fact, one of SEOmoz’s contributors, Mintyman (aka Darren Savery, who runs the Semiconductor Directory and authored this excellent post last year) not only attended the event, but picked us up from the airport and took us out to dinner! Scotland’s legendary hospitality & outgoing friendliness were easy to find wherever we went - from shopkeepers to train passengers to taxi drivers and hotel staff.

Since the audience reading this blog likely doesn’t need a refresher course in the basics of online marketing and SEO, I though that instead, I’d share some of the biggest takeaways from my experience in talking to Scottish businesses on SEO & marketing topics.

#1 - Prioritization of Marketing Tactics Drives Small Businesses Crazy

Small business owners know that there massive opportunities from web marketing, but the options and recommendations are overwhelming. PPC, SEO, social media, analytics, design, usability, email marketing - the list goes on and around every corner there’s a case study of a business that’s done remarkable things with each of these.  Sometimes it’s hard to just get past the basics of "what should my website look like?" and "what information should I put on the site?"

I’d written a more advanced post on the topic of choosing the right Internet marketing channel, but this is a true struggle and one I don’t have an answer for. Maybe someone will come out with a remarkable resource that can help on this topic - it’s certainly needed.

#2 - The Myth of Great Content Pervades

For those practicing SEO, the flawed concept that "great content" will naturally attract links and rankings is a big problem. "Make great content" isn’t bad advice, it’s just not the whole picture. The site that does a great job converting visitors and providing solid information about their product will, most likely, lose out to a site with subpar material for customers that does a great job building material that appeals to the linkers of the web and marketing directly to them. Just like everything else in life, search engine rankings aren’t fair and sites don’t get what they deserve. The web rewards savvy operators who understand the psychology that drives attention, interest and links.

I wrote about this just last December - Great Content Equals Great Rankings, Right? Wrong.

#3 - Local Listings are Still a Mystery (and sometimes a thorn in a small business’ side)

I consistently point folks to David Mihm’s excellent resource on the local search ranking factors when faced with these questions, but sometimes the problems go deeper than just listings and ranking. Many business owners have third-parties that set up their local listings on Google (website developers, SEOs, etc). When it comes time to update the listings, reclaiming ownership of those accounts or correcting errors can be a nightmare, and in some cases, Google has no system to handle the situation.

The one piece of advice I can give that’s straightforward and consistently effective is to research the sources Google pulls from in the local listings (usually by examining competitors’ sources) and get listed in these. The name, address, phone number and website address (along with other details) of the business need to match exactly every time - contintuity among the listings seems to be a big ranking factor.

#4 - Multiple Sites are a Weak Link Building Strategy

I think it’s only natural that when many of us first get into SEO and find out about PageRank and the power of links, we instantly generate the brilliant idea to build dozens or hundreds of sites that all link to our main site in an attempt to bolster these metrics. It’s probably for the best that these tactics are largely useless. An island that wants to get foot traffic from the mainland can’t just build a few dozen islands around it and put bridges up between them all.

A useful resource on this topic is the post Root Domains, Subdomains vs. Subfolders and the Microsite Debate, which covers not only the weakness of the microsites as link popularity enhancers but also when microsites can be valuable. After all, we just launched one of our own with Open Site Explorer.

#5 - Last Click Attribution is Killing Analytics

None of the businesses I spoke to employed anything but last click analytics, which can tragically mask the value of all sorts of marketing channels and investments. Yes, Twitter and Facebook traffic don’t tend to convert well, but who knows if those channels are filling your conversion funnel at the top and resulting in sales 3-5 visits later (when the customer searches for your brand name in Google, thus obscuring the true path of discovery). With cookies and lifecycle attribution, you can properly distribute your success to the right channels. Even just enabling first touch tracking in Google Analytics will make you much more sophisticated and accurate.

Personally, though, I think this is something Google (and the other analytics vendors) need to build into their products by default. We shouldn’t be hacking up code and customizing to get this data. It should be right there in a tab called "conversion attribution" where you can see the channels that originally sent visitors who converted and get 2nd, 3rd, 4th visit sources prior to conversion, too.

I also couldn’t pass up the opportunity to share the wonderful experience I had traveling in Glasgow, and to Stirling by train on the weekend.

  The Kelvingrove Art Gallery on an impossibly sunny, early February afternoon

 
Stirling Castle, site of dozens of historical battles between the English & Scots

 
Our tourguide in Stirling castle, featuring matching Tartan pants and tie, along with a phenomenal Scottish brogue

The view from Stirling castle South to the Wallace Monument

The William Wallace monument in Stirling (built in the 1800s to commemorate Wallace’s patriotism)
FYI - Hollywood’s take on Wallace was not entirely accurate (surprise, surprise)

That’s right, we climbed all 300 narrow, windy stairs to reach the top

Possibly Scotland’s most magical treat - whisky in porridge for breakfast; a tradition I’m taking with me wherever I go.

We had a fantastic time in Scotland, and I was honored to participate in the Online Xcellence program. I hope Brian has continued success recruiting online marketing experts for the program; it’s a truly worthwhile and enlightening experience.

p.s. I’m heading to Edinburgh this summer to catch part of the Fringe Festival and possibly catch up with my new Scottish friends again. Tomorrow, though, I’m off to California for OMS, Miva Merchant, a Y Combinator SEO Summit and then SMX West. Hopefully I can get over my cold before we depart.

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Whiteboard Friday - The Renewed Value of Branding »

Posted by great scott!

This week we take a look at how shifts in the engines over the last year have made it more important than ever to really pay attention to brand-based marketing.

A year or so ago, the engines started giving more weight to established brands, but things have become more interesting: With enhanced attention to personalized search, click patterns, and brand preferences emerging through individual search history, having an identifiable brand is a huge asset.  Throw in the new aspect of social search–wherein the influences and preferences of your social network are used to influence inform your decisions, and creating an identifiable brand becomes even more powerful.

Watch this week’s video to learn even more about how branding can help you accomplish big things…

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Peer Review: SEO Best Practices for HTTP Status Codes »

Posted by Danny Dover

The proposed SEO best practice for this week deals with explaining what HTTP Status Codes are and why certain ones are important to SEOs. These 3 digit numbers cause all kinds of problems for search engines and SEOs that are related to indexing and redirection. While the resource page linked to below is not as directly actionable as the soon to be released page on redirection, it still serves as a good broad overview of the topic. As SEOs, we would love to hear your feedback on the following areas:

• Are there any tools that you think are essential for beginner SEOs to know about for finding status code errors?
• Are there any important status codes this page leaves out?
• Is there anything specific you would like to see on the redirection page?

Please let us know if there is something we should add, remove or modify to make this page more helpful for beginners.

HTTP Status Codes

Remember, this page is just a work in progress. We would love to hear your thoughts and suggestions on how to improve it. Please feel free to leave your comments below.

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First Touch Tracking in Google Analytics »

Posted by willcritchlow

It’s time for a quick mid-week geek-out - I wanted to collect together a bunch of resources I have written on first touch tracking in Google Analytics including (for the first time that I’m aware of), the technical implementation details:

• Following a Whiteboard Friday recorded when I was in Seattle a month ago or so
• I hurriedly wrote a post explaining general principles of how to get past last touch attribution in Google Analytics
• which it turned out was (quite reasonably) not enough for some of our readers (and I really wasn’t happy with the level of detail)
• so I have done my best to go above and beyond with detailed instructions on How to do First Touch Tracking in Google Analytics
• while digging around in GA and JavaScript to put this all together (a combination I probably shouldn’t have been doing) I discovered an interesting difficulty if you are going to migrate from the now-deprecated _setVar to _setCustomVar and wrote a post about it over on Search Engine Land.

If you’re the kind of person that unwraps your birthday presents early, you can skip to the punchline, grab the code you need to get first touch tracking working from Google code (don’t forget to read the instructions!). Here’s the meat from my detailed post:

Include following code anywhere above the Google Analytics code script in your page code:

<script type="text/javascript"
src="http://attributiontrackingga.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/distilled.FirstTouch.js">
</script>

Move your GA code above any Website Optimizer code or anything from Google that might write a visitor (__utma) cookie and look for:

var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-XXXXXXX-X");

pageTracker._trackPageview();

In between those two lines, you want to put the following line:

distilledFirstTouch(pageTracker);

Oh, and don’t forget all of this is provided as is, with no warranty. I hope it will help you out, but only you are responsible for changes you make to your website and tracking code. Be extremely careful with live profiles and remember that you will need to do something different if you already use custom variables.

That’s all for now folks. Enjoy your analytics, don’t forget to drop comments with improvements, tips, tricks, abuse for writing such a short post etc. and if you need a primer on Excel to make the most of your new-found data, you can check out the recording of my conference call on how to be an Excel ninja (sign up for future calls here).

To distract you from this spectacularly short post, here are some really big things found on the internet this week:

Check out the depth of the ocean:

As well as the size of the earth:

I also recommend watching this one.

Technorati Tags

analytics, ga, firsttouch, google, javascript, code

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Is Google Getting Too Personal? »

Posted by Dr. Pete

Late last year, Google announced that they would be rolling out personalized search even for visitors who weren’t logged into a Google account. There’s been a lot of talk in the SEO community about how this affects the already dubious future of rankings, but it seems to boil down to one simple fear: does my client (or boss) see the same rankings that I do? I decided to put this to the test – take one client’s real-world keywords and see how much rankings changed depending on how I measured them.

Experiment I – 4 Keywords, 5 Methods

In Experiment I, I took 4 of my client’s most sought after keyphrases (from a popular 1-word query to a long-tail 4-word query) and measured rankings for a week using 5 different methods:

1. Default – Standard, logged-in query
2. PWS=0 – Adding the &pws=0 query parameter
3. Logged out – Standard query, but logged out of Google
4. Rank Tracker – Data from SEOmoz’s Rank Tracker tool
5. GWT – Data from Google Webmaster Tools

Google Webmaster Tools data was only measured once, after the fact, using the "Last 7 Days" option. All queries were limited to web search on Google.com (US). The mean ranking for each keyword by method appears below:

Practically speaking, rankings for this particular set of keywords didn’t vary much across methods. Keyword 1 tends to bounce between the #1 and #2 spot, which the Logged out ranking showed, and there was some disagreement about Keyword 3, but the differences were mild at best. All methods correlated strongly with the default search (r = 0.97 to r = 1.00).

Experiment II – 20 Keywords, 6 Methods

Of course, this was one set of data and only 4 keywords/phrases, so I figured I should up the ante. I pulled the Top 20 search queries (by impressions) from Google Webmaster Tools and did a second round of one-day measurements. I also added a 6th method, "Caribou". No, it’s not a secret codename – I took the laptop to Caribou Coffee to pull a new IP and tried a logged out search from there. Experiment II’s numbers turned out a bit more interesting:

This one takes a bit of explaining. Graphing 20 keywords x 6 methods is ugly at best, so Figure II shows the number of times each method’s ranking varied from default across 5 levels, from ±0 (same ranking) to ±4 spots. The PWS=0 and Logged out groups showed the least variation from default searches, with the Rank Tracker, GWT, and Caribou groups showing more variation (especially at ranking differences of 1-2 spots). Correlations ranged from a perfect 1.00 for the PWS=0 group down to r = 0.71 for Caribou and r = 0.69 for Rank Tracker.

What Does This Mean, Exactly?

I’m glad you asked. Of course, this doesn’t mean that the Rank Tracker and Caribou measures are unreliable. On the contrary, both correlated strongly (r = 0.90) with Google Webmaster Tools (GWT) rankings. What it does suggest is that, given enough keywords, rankings do vary a fair amount depending on how you measure them. There are a couple of general conclusions I think we can draw:

1. PWS=0 Is Unreliable
I’d welcome more data on the subject, but it looks like the "pws=0" parameter does little or nothing for many queries. If you’re using the de-personalization parameter and taking the result at face value, I’d strongly suggest you reconsider. It does appear that turning off personalization may affect some geo-targeted personalization, but the query parameter doesn’t make Google completely ignore your search history.

2. "Logged out" Probably Isn’t
Google’s announcement last year as much as admitted this – if you think being logged out will de-personalize your searches, think again. The open question is: just how much different is it? This data suggests that being logged out has very little impact on rankings, assuming that you’re on the same machine with the same IP. Move to a new machine/IP, and the difference is much more substantial.

3. Second Opinions Are Gold
There really is no gold standard. The rankings in Google Webmaster Tools are the closest we can get to being inside Fort Knox, but these numbers are completely opaque and many SEOs have reported occasional rankings that differ wildly from observed searches. If you rely on rankings as a primary metric, get a second opinion, preferably either a fully logged-out ranking on a browser/IP with no history, or by using a 3rd-party tool like SEOmoz’s Rank Tracker.

4. Skepticism Is Healthy
It always makes sense to check your facts, and search rankings are no different. Rankings vary – you can occasionally type the same query twice in a row and see two different results. Smart SEOs have already diversified, considering metrics like search traffic and conversions. On the other hand, even across these test cases, rankings don’t vary a huge amount. So, don’t panic, but as always, the key is not to put too much trust in any single number.

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The Freshest Linkscape Data Ever »

Posted by Nick Gerner

Since the launch of Open Site Explorer and our API update, Chas, Ben and I have invested a lot of time and energy into improving the freshness and completeness of Linkscape’s data.  I’m pleased to announce that we’ve updated the Linkcape index with crawl data that’s between two and five weeks old—the freshest it’s ever been.  We’ve also changed how we select pages, in order to get deeper coverage on important domains and waste less time on prolific but unimportant domains. 

You may recall Rand’s recent post about prioritizing the best pages to crawl, and mine about churn in the web. We’ve applied some of the principles from these posts to our own crawling and indexing. Rand discussed how crawlers might discover good content on a domain by selecting well-linked-to entry points:

In the past, we’ve selected pages to crawl based purely on mozRank.  That turned out to favor some unsavory elements (you know who you are :P).  Now, we look at each domain and determine how authoritative it is.  From there we select pages using the principle illustrated above:  Highly linked-to pages—the homepage, category pages, important pieces of deep content—link to other important pages we should crawl.  From intuition and experience we believe this gives the right behavior to crawl like a search engine would.

In a past post, I discussed the importance of fresh data.  After all, if 25% of pages on the web disappear after one month, data collected two or more months ago just isn’t actionable.

From now on, we’re focusing on that first bar in the graph above. By the time our data approaches that second bar (meaning most of it is out of date), we should have an index update for you.  If and when we show you historical data, we’ll mark it as such.

What this means for you is that all our tools powered by Linkscape will provide fresher, more relevant data, and we’ll have better coverage than ever.  This includes things like:

• Open Site Explorer
• Competitive Link Finder
• Linkscape Visualization

As well as products and tools developed outside SEOmoz using either the free or paid API:

• Buzzstream
• Quirk’s Search Status Toolbar
• Carter Cole’s Toolbar for Chrome

There are plenty more.  In fact, you could build one too!

Because I know how much everyone likes numbers, here are some stats from our latest index:

• URLs: 43,813,674,337
• Subdomains: 251,428,688
• Root Domains: 69,881,887
• Links: 9,204,328,536,611

Our last index update was on January 17th.  You might recall some bigger numbers in the last update.  Because of the changes to our crawl selection, our latest index should exclude a lot of duplicate content, spam pages, link farms, and spider traps while keeping high quality content.

Our next update is scheduled for March 11. But we’ll update the index before then if the data is ready early :)

As always, keep the feedback coming.  With our own toolset relying on this data, and dozens of partners using our API to develop their own applications, it’s critical that we hear what you guys think.

NOTE: we’re still updating the top 500 list at the moment.  We’ll tweet when that’s ready.

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What We Believe and Why: SEOmoz’s TAGFEE Tenets »

Posted by randfish

Warning: This post isn’t about SEO or online marketing. The focus is on our growth as a startup and our adoption of company values and how we represent those internally and externally. Since transparency remains one of our guiding principles, we felt it only appropriate to share our work in this area - hopefully you can take something away that will provide value in your startup, entrepreneurial endeavors or career path.

At SEOmoz, like many companies, we have a collection of internal documents related to our goals with the business and the ideals we strive towards. A couple years ago, I wrote a post about some of our efforts in that direction, but last year, we authored a document called "The TAGFEE Tenets" that represents more about what we want to be.

Today, I want to share that document with you.

SEOmoz’s Guiding Principles

This document represents the rules we have created and ideals we strive towards for all the work we produce as a company. We embrace these as the embodiment of who we are, why we exist and what we endeavor to achieve in every arena - from software to website content to actions in the workplace and on the road as representatives of SEOmoz.

The TAGFEE Code

Despite the immense challenges that we have faced and continue to face, we refuse to indulge in negativity or pessimism. We are an organization that believes in empowering people to be their best." - Talal Abu-Ghazaleh

The TAGFEE code reflects the core values of SEOmoz. It defines not only SEOmoz’s strategic differentiation in the highly competitive field of SEO, but also helps to set the standard of quality for all work and content produced. We acknowledge that we are entirely responsible for SEOmoz’s reputation, and that the level of success we achieve, the reputation we cultivate, and the contributions we make to the SEO industry are a direct reflection not only of the company, but of ourselves. In short, we are SEOmoz, and by adhering to these standards, we guarantee both we and our work will be Transparent and Authentic, Generous, Fun, Empathetic, and Exceptional.

Transparent and Authentic

• We share the inner-workings of our company - both the good and bad - openly with our community.
• We take responsibility for our mistakes and will do what we can to rectify them.
• We will represent ourselves and our intentions honestly to our co-workers and our clients.
• We will be ourselves, even if that means being occasionally silly, a little less than perfect, and (at times) more than a little dorky.

Why we believe in it

We at SEOmoz have differentiated ourselves from others in our sphere through our transparency, and open, honest dialogue - sharing behind-the-scenes information about the company and our products (even when that information is not entirely positive), and providing our opinions on trends and happenings in the industry, even if they differ from everyone else’s views.

We don’t need to share this information - we do so because we want to, as we believe it improves our company in several ways:

• It strengthens our community, giving our readers and subscribers a voice and sense of ownership in the company (equating with brand loyalty).
• It holds us accountable to our customers, as they are able to weigh in on many of the company’s decisions.
• It keeps us honest and true to ourselves - you can’t hide when your company is an open book.
• It is consistent with our goal of sharing knowledge not only about the field of SEO, but about the experience of running and owning a start-up. To quote Rand, "We want our community to participate in the adventure that is SEOmoz."
• It keeps us honest and realistic about our limitations, our intentions, and our products. We openly recognize our strengths and areas that need improvement, and share this knowledge with our community. An overly-congratulatory, jargon-laden, car-salesman approach would neither be true to our brand or ourselves.

• Rand’s blog posts about the SEOmoz story. 
• Divulging the entirety of SEOmoz’s finances in 2006 (a proclamation that we have repeated yearly, despite some limitations after having taken VC).
• Maintaining an open dialogue on the SEOmoz blog, even when comments are negative or critical.
• Disclosing our opinions and directions around contentious subjects (e.g. paid links).

Exceptions

Our openness has earned us a loyal following. Withholding information sometimes creates negative backlash. Nevertheless, there are circumstances under which we will not reveal information:

• When it would be materially harmful to the company. Rand refrained from sharing specifics about which partners he met with at VC firms, and does not reveal certain aspects of financial metrics.
• When it would be damaging to our competitiveness. We withheld information about Linkscape until launch because we felt that revealing this might be detrimental to the project’s goals.
• When revealing such information would be irrelevant or would risk violating our value of Empathy. We refrain from revealing any private or potentially sensitive information about employees, investors, colleagues, or other members of the SEO community.
• When the board specifically requests that we not release any information about certain internal goings-on at the company.

Generous

Criteria

Am I being as helpful as I can? Am I giving back to the community?

Tenets

• We will over-deliver whenever we can, providing our clients and subscribers with more than their money’s worth.
• We will provide compliments, referrals, and testimonials (that we truly believe in), and will not take compensation for them.
• We believe that generosity is its own reward, but also helps to make us profitable, as we receive referrals, sign-ups, positive testimonials, and accolades from the community.

Why we believe in it.

SEOmoz was created as (and remains to this day) a .org domain. The initial goal was to create a blog in which Rand could share with others what he learned about SEO - with no intention of monetizing it. Interestingly enough, this proved surprisingly successful. By focusing on providing a great deal of content and tools to our readers at no cost, we create brand-loyalty and awareness, and trust in our products. This, in turn, leads to profitability, as more and more readers, drawn in by what we offer for free, are compelled to sign up for premium membership.

This model has also worked incredibly well for the SEOmoz PRO training seminars, which are priced lower than others of its kind. Though it provides the company with comparatively low profit margins, it opens attendees up to the SEOmoz brand and has repeatedly led to positive press and coverage.

Our commitment to being generous extends beyond simply sharing information. We also strive to be generous with our time and finances in order to build stronger relationships with colleagues and staff. We take visiting SEOs out to lunch or dinner, invite them to tour the office, provide referrals (for which we refuse compensation), and host meet-ups and tweet-ups. SEOmoz employees are offered competitive salaries, stock options, and substantial vacation time.

Examples

• Providing an SEOmoz member with accommodations to a conference, when he could not otherwise afford them.
• Giving away free consulting work to organizations like the UN & Seattle Children’s Hospital.
• Danny Sullivan offering Rand his first conference pass to SES New York for free.
• Helping other startups with SEO, introductions to VCs, positive press coverage on the blog and sharing our experiences & lessons.
• Providing free PRO memberships to SEOs doing charity work and for projects to raise money like IM Charity parties.

Fun

Criteria

Are we celebrating our strengths? Are we having fun yet?

Tenets

• We will pursue projects that we find exciting and interesting. When faced with a task that we don’t find particularly enjoyable, we will strive to make it a positive experience or steer clear.
• We are dedicated to creating and maintaining a relaxed and friendly work environment.
• We will celebrate one another and our achievements.
• We will bring fun to our clients and subscribers in unique ways.

Why we believe in it

Because work is only work if you make it so. We want to bring fun and enjoyment to the workplace. If we’re enjoying ourselves, we figure we’ll be more productive, more resistant to stress, and better all-around at doing our jobs. Consequently, we celebrate creative, independent thinking, and our own unique strengths. Some of our best products and our biggest successes arose from mozzers pursuing their own whims and doing what they do best:

• Linkscape Visualization and Comparison Tool, the Competitive Link Finder (Nick & Ben building cool tools on top of Linkscape data).
• Whiteboard Friday (Scott Willoughby’s impromptu idea).
• Danny Dover’s popular checklist blog posts.

In addition to bringing fun to the workplace, we also are dedicated to bringing it to our subscribers and clients. Our blog posts, tools, and seminars are not only useful, but enjoyable. We hope our incorporation of whimsical graphics, fun anecdotes, t-shirts, stickers, and Roger mozbot will bring smiles and a bit of levity to the average work day.

Examples

• SEOmoz’s casual dress code, flexible hours, and open office layout.
• Company events and celebrations such as the 2,000 subscribers party and Danny’s Champagne Wednesdays.
• Team lunches, birthdays, and snacks (thanks, Christine and Arden).
• Conference comics, Werewolf Card decks, ridiculous Rand-as-Santa videos, our Facebook photos & videos, etc.

Empathetic

Criteria

Am I being respectful of the thoughts and feelings of others? Can I proudly stand behind my work and my statements?

Tenets

• We treat others the way we wish to be treated - with respect for their thoughts, feelings, and opinions.
• We will strive to maintain the highest level of professionalism, never resorting to personal attacks or name-calling.
• We will not participate in or be distracted by gossip, negativity or insults.

Why we believe in it

We respect the desires and feelings of everyone with whom we work. This includes not only employees, but colleagues, community members, clients, investors, and even direct competitors and detractors. We respect their personal lives and consider them separate from their professional lives (and therefore not a topic of discussion). Before producing any product, blog post, or even an email, we must ask ourselves if it is as considerate of the feelings of others as we personally hope to be.

By doing so, we feel we will help bring an air of professionalism and focus to our industry, and not be distracted by petty conflicts, disagreements, or gossip. While many sites in our industry fall into that trap, we hope to establish SEOmoz as a drama-free oasis. While we personally like reading "snarky’ writing, we reject it as a voice or tone for our professional environment. We want to be humorous and fun, but always in a positive, uplifting way. We believe that this approach to community is one we can all feel good about contributing to every day.

Issues of Contention

Even during disputes or disagreements, we will strive to make our point without dismissing or debasing anyone else’s ideas. We will give and accept constructive criticism with the understanding that it will help make us, and our company, even better.

In the case of a disagreement or debate regarding an SEO issue, we will focus on using "I" statements to make our claims: "I believe x." "I think the best approach is y."

We will not address personal attacks made against the character of SEOmoz employees or members on other sites (and will remove them from our site if/when they appear), as we feel this is the strongest and best way to stifle such discourse. Obviously, we will refrain from making personal attacks, direct or implied, against anyone, be they critic or competitor.

Topics

Acceptable topics: In addition to anything directly related to the search and advertising industry, we can comment on positive changes in the personal lives of SEOs (congratulating SEOs on wedding days, engagements, births, etc.), new hirings at major companies, tips and tricks for improving rankings, white-hat tactics. We will report on unsubstantiated or rumored news or reports relevant to the industry, but we will be sure to frame them appropriately ("We heard that Yahoo might be considering x.")

Off-limit topics: divorce, firings, affairs, sexual relations, accusations, slander, insults (even if it pertains to a job or project that was poorly executed, it can be expressed in a better way), personal attacks, gossip, outing spam, critiques of general social groups or demographics, unethical or illegal SEO tactics.

Note: SEOmoz has created a more in-depth, often updated document for internal reference. It includes a list of topics that should either not be mentioned on the blog at all, or mentioned with high-sensitivity (that is, pending review from Sarah/Rand). Examples include the deal terms of our venture financing, members & topics from the search marketing community that have a high proclivity for negative content, patent pending technology related to our products, legal issues, etc.

Examples

Behavior that meets the Empathetic criterion:

• Supporting others in their time of need. Remembering that we are all people first, and professionals second.
• Refraining from posting about firings of specific individuals, even when they pertain to the industry. Layoffs could be mentioned, as long as it is relevant to the industry, newsworthy, and done with empathy and tact (though specific individuals should not be targeted or pointed out).
• Offering refunds when a customer is dissatisfied.
• Responding to all customer services inquiries and tweets in a timely manner, with courtesy and competency.

• During a panel on link-bait, an SEO mentioned (in jest) that writing about the personal sex life of a woman in the industry would gain a you a lot of traffic. While the individuals in question were friends and it was done in an attempt at humor, we would consider this off-limits.  
• Using any sort of shock-tactics or inflammatory language (including misleading content), to gain more traffic or links.
• Using insulting or degrading language (either towards readers or fellow SEOs) under the guise of being instructive.
• Writing a "snarky" blog post that degrades, humiliates, insults or demeans others in any way.
• We should no longer write blog posts like this attack on Robert Scoble (we might critique his content, but would not do it in such a personal way). We should also try to re-cast future posts like this rant against startup marketing advice to be more focused on the positive and less harshly critical.

Exceptional

Criteria

Is it the best it can be? Is it uniquely better than anything else out there?

Tenets

• We will utilize all of our skills to create high-quality, well-designed software, code, tools, and products. We will consistently strive to do so on-time and on-budget.
• We will endeavor to be leaders in our industry, providing unique, unparalleled information, products, and customer service to our clients and customers.
• We will never sacrifice quality for profitability.
• We will make SEOmoz synonymous with SEO.
• We will make ourselves known through speaking engagements, webinars, videos, and interviews, all the while delivering the same level of quality and excellence we strive towards.

Why We Believe It

SEO is a new and growing industry - an excellent platform on which we can prove ourselves to be best in the field. Apple made MP3 players accessible and usable for everyone - not just geeks and gadget-lovers. Julia Child translated French cooking for the average home cook. We believe we can do the same for SEO. Through high-quality, unique content, tools, and products, we can make SEO tangible, understandable, and accessible to all.

We won’t provide our subscribers and readers with tools or information that is inaccurate or "needs work." Nor will we create sub-par products simply for the sake of doing so, or for making a profit. Whatever we create, we aim for it to be better than any other resource or tool of its kind. Our work will be worthy of us.

Examples

• Linkscape & Open Site Explorer 
• Whiteboard Fridays
• PRO Training Seminars
• The SEOmoz blog
• Our Amazing Staff!

How Do We Use this Document?

• It’s one of the first items we send to potential employees we’re considering hiring, to help them get a feel for who we are and what we want to be.
• We give it to everyone who blogs or answers Q+A as an associate for SEOmoz (e.g. Dr. Pete, Michael Cottam, the Distilled crew, etc.) to help guide them in comment moderation and provide best practices for the content we produce (both publicly on the blog or privately in answer to Q+A).
• We shared it with potential investors after initial meetings turned into interest to help provide a sense of the character SEOmoz strives towards.
• We use it every day in meetings and decisions about product, content, strategy, hiring and more.
• We apply it to every new hire, asking ourselves whether they can be stalwart supporters of these tenets.

If you’ve ever met with me to talk about startups and entrepreneurship, you’ve doubtlessly heard me ramble on about the importance of "culture." SEOmoz has had a lot of success in the past 3 years, and it’s my belief that our biggest risk isn’t competition or macro-economic factors or even technological challenges (though all of these certainly require effort). I worry about most culture going "sideways." If  our best and brightest start leaving SEOmoz because they no longer believe we stand behind our principles or if the executive team, and most importantly, I, don’t embody TAGFEE, we have risk. Conversely, if we can summon the will and the drive to work hard, both at execution of our tasks and adherence to these criteria, we have a great shot at building something amazing.

As always, we warmly welcome your thoughts and contributions on both TAGFEE and the concept of startups embracing values overall.

p.s. We also invite everyone in the SEOmoz community to judge us against the TAGFEE tenets and let us know if you see us stray or feel that some action we take isn’t "TAGFEE" (it’s an adjective we use a lot internally). You’ve helped so much to make us who we are today, and we are humbled and honored by the contributions everyone in the SEO field has made to helping us build the culture and community here. We hope you’ll continue to help, both in cheering us on and in steering us back to the right path when we stray.

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Running Giveaway Competitions for Links and SEO »

Posted by RobOusbey

There are very few tactics which can guarantee success in linkbuilding. Executed correctly, giving something away is one that gets close to fulfilling that promise.

This post covers competitions and giveaways; I’ll share techniques and tactics you can use, and will include links to some interesting competitions seen online recently, and some that we’ve run for clients.

Running giveaways online typically offers a few different opportunities; of most immediate use to SEOs is that competitions can attract links from authoritative sites and a variety of domains. They can also be great for data collection - it’s fine to ask the entrants for their email address and whether they’d be happy for you to send them emails again in the future.

Furthermore, there’s a potential for increasing brand awareness amongst people who’ve not heard of you before.

Running a Giveaway

In the simplest competition users visit the website to fill out their details, possibly answer a simple question, and then a winner is picked out of the hat.

Competition Prizes

If you have high margin products, these can make attractive prizes without harming your bottom line too much (e.g.: giving away tickets for your theatre doesn’t cost anything if the show isn’t sold out.) You should also consider ‘money can’t buy’ prizes: a trip to watch a rugby match is cool, but spending the day working for a national team and getting a signed jersey is priceless.

Look out for partnerships: when Distilled recently ran a whisky giveaway (to create buzz around the brand prior to the launch of our US office) we were sent messages by Jura whisky and Master of Malt (neither of whom we knew beforehand) offering some quite exceptional additional prizes.

There’s potential to improve any competition by approaching suitable partners first, to offer some co-publicity and links. (I once emailed some contacts to ask for contributions to a competition, and ended up with £300 worth of books, £120 of CDs and DVDs, £50 of gift vouchers, two magazine subscriptions, a £120 digital camera, a wild animal adoption, a bottle of port and a towel that folded up into a beachbag.)

Of course, the flip side of this is that you could simply look out for people in industries related to you that are running competitions, and offer an additional prize for their promotion, in return for links, etc. You can use Google to find such opportunities: search for terms like ‘win’ and ‘competition’ alongside phrases used in relevant niches (eg: ‘win album’ for music prizes) and then filter down to results from the last week / month. For example: this Google search.

Get Listed

The ‘comping‘ community is a great place to seed your competitions to begin. Certainly in the UK, a listing on a few active sites will often send the first 2 - 5,000 entrants - and I’m sure it’s not just us limeys that love a freebie. Search around for sites to submit your competition to, but regional sites you could consider include:

• Loquax.co.uk (UK)
• ThePrizeFinder.com (UK)
• Compaholics (UK)
• CompetitionWinner.com.au (AU)

Each site may have specific restrictions, and can have a delay between a few days and few weeks before submissions are published, so submit your competition as early as possible.

Seeding

Send competition details directly to twitter users & bloggers who you either know well, or think would be interested in covering it. Remember that people can be less inclined to share a competition if it’s good enough (to give themselves better chances of winning.) There are various creative solutions to this issue, but you can just keep it simple and appeal to the blogger’s love of sharing cool stuff with their readers.

Furthermore, look for opportunities to find partners who have email lists. Let’s take two companies with email marketing lists: BigHotel (a large, fictional hotel chain) whoc is running a competition, and GreenTour (a successful, fictional eco-tourism site) which is launching a new feature. They have similar audiences, but there’s no overlap between their products; BigHotel can mention the feature launch in their next newsletter and EcoTour can promote the competition to their subscribers. This just required finding a partner and making a gentleman’s agreement; as Bonytoad is fond of saying: "Win-Win, For Teh Win."

Use Your Affiliates

Make sure that your affiliates can add their tracking codes to the entry URL, and they’ll help to spread awareness of the competition pretty quickly and to places you might not be able to reach to otherwise.

Create a video primer

The Irish rugby competition mentioned above was launched with a 60 second video promoting the prize.

Videos are particularly shareable: embed codes can be copied from the Youtube page, and lots of social sites (including Tumblr, Facebook, Reddit) allow for easy importing of videos. Given that people might be watching the video anywhere, make sure to prominently display the URL for the entry page in the video, either on-screen or using video annotations.

Get Press

Lots of magazines and newspapers are happy to mention competitions and link to them from their websites. Find publications that target the geographic area or niche targetted by the competition. Pick up the phone and give them a call - ask to speak to someone who deals with promotions, or in the editorial department. A few minutes later you might have a decent link and some coverage that will be read by a very targeted group of people.

Maintain Momentum

When people have entered, it’s a waste to just show them a ‘thanks for entering’ message. Use this opportunity to give a call to action - typically to share the competition with other people. Consider having a secondary prize that encourages people to share the competition. For example:

Upsell the Competition

Have a successful competition, and want to take advantage of this get more entries? Take the email addresses of everyone who entered so far, and send them a message during the week before the competition finishes.

I’ve not done this, but I think it could work really well to add an extra 10% to your number of entries. To be honest, I’m considering not mentioning it here, and saving it for myself for a while, but I want to see what CTR & results anyone who tries it gets. Let me know if you have a chance.

Other Competition Structures

Outside of the basic ‘name-out-of-a-hat’ competitions, there’s potential for all sorts of interesting competition structures.

Competitions to Encourage Engagement

Ooh.com run a competition with two $100 prizes each week. The winners are picked from the new ‘OOHs’ which have been uploaded, and encourages people to not only add their content, but to make sure it is as ‘rich’ as possible.

Sites with user generated content (such as a forum, social networking or social media site) could use similar techniques to reward particular contributions.

Twitter Competitions

A competition where the only entry requirement is to tweet a message including a link to a site / account / hashtag has very low barriers to entry for Twitter users. Once up and running, such competitions excel at keeping momentum - the more people hear about the competition, the more people enter - and help to improve brand awareness for companies and products.

The tactic’s been used by a variety of organisations; the most famous execution was probably the competitions run by Moonfruit. This did well, but the concept already feels a little bit passé - plus you have to have an awesome product and spring for $10,000 of prizes to have the same impact that Moonfruit enjoyed.

Consider modifying this viral ’self-fullfilling prophecy’ competition for other formats or networks; Umbro had people upload photos on Facebook - the Facebook ‘News Feed’ then showed entrants’ friends that they’d submitted an entry. If you’re looking to find similar success for your sites, Google Buzz is still new & cool… I’m just saying…

Procedural Points

A couple of miscellaneous points about operating a competition:

Conversion Rate Optimisation

If you’ve attracted people to the competition entry page, you should hope to see a very good conversion rate to completed entries. Try using some CRO techniques on the entry page, to maximise the number of entries received and the amount of useful data collected.

Avoid Cheats

Log the IP address along with each entry - you can then investigate any IP addresses which submit a lot of entries to identify people who are trying to cheat the system.

OK; I hope that this has been useful, or at least inspired you to go through the back of the cupboards, and see if you have anything interesting to give away. Using tactics like this can be an iterative process - it doesn’t need to go exactly right first time, and people will never get bored if you run a few competitions to improve your process. Good luck!

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Whiteboard Friday - How Search is Changing »

Posted by great scott!

This week Rand discusses recent changes that seem to signal the coming of another big shift in how the engines determine results. With the incorporation of social networks into results, increased personalized search, and even Google Buzz, the social graph is clearly becoming a more and more important factor for the engines. What will these changes mean for online marketers and how can you take advantage of them? Watch this week’s Whiteboard Friday and find out…

And here, for your browsing pleasure, are some of the resources Rand mentioned in the video…

• Video intro to Google Buzz:

• Royal Pingdom says Twitter now processing more than one billion tweets per month.

• The New York Times analyzes the sharing of articles online.
• Mashable reports Facebook passes 400 million users.
• Search Engine Land looks at Google’s social search features.

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A Step by Step 15 Minute SEO Audit (A Sample from SEO Secrets) »

Posted by Danny Dover

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Chapter 4: Finding SEO Problems

Sections:

• 15 Minute SEO Audit
• 10 Minute Brand Reputation Audit (Not included in this blog post)
• Identifying Search Engine Penalties (Not included in this blog post)

15 Minute SEO Audit

The basics of SEO problem identification can be done in about 15 minutes. When completing this audit I recommend you take notes based on the action items listed in each section. This will help you later when you do a deeper dive of the website. This audit is not comprehensive (See Chapter 9 for a full annotated site audit), but it will help you quickly identify major problems so you can convince your clients that your services are worthwhile and that you should be given a chance to dig deeper. The smart ones reading this section may notice that it builds upon the ideas expressed in Chapter 2. The dumb ones reading this, will think it is Harry Potter. The latter might enjoy it more but the former will end up with better SEO skills.

Prepare Your Browser

Before you start your audit you need to set your browser to act more like the search engine crawlers. This will help you to identify simple crawling errors. In order to do this, you will need to do the following:

Disable cookies in your browser

Switch your user-agent to Googlebot

How Do I Do This and Why Is It Important?

When the search engines crawl the Internet they generally do so with a user-agent string that identifies them (Google is googlebot and Bing is msnbot) and in a way where they don’t accept cookies.

To see how to change your user-agent go to Chapter 3 (Picking the Right SEO Tools) and see user-agent switcher. Setting your user-agent to Googlebot increases your chance of seeing exactly what Google is seeing. It also helps with identifying cloaking issues (Cloaking is the practice of showing one thing to search engines and a different thing to users. This is what sarcastic Googlers call penaltybait. ) In order to do this well, a second pass of the site with your normal user-agent is required to identify difference. That said, this is not the primary goal for this quick run through of the given website.

In addition to doing this you should also disable cookies within your browser. By disabling them, you will be able to uncover crawling issues that relate to preferences you make on the page. One primary example of this is intro pages. Many websites will have you choose your primary language before you can enter their main site. (This is known as an intro page.) If you have cookies enabled and you have previously chosen your preference, the website will not show you this page again. Unfortunately, this will not happen for search engines.

This language tactic is extremely detrimental from a SEO perspective because it means that every link to the primary URL of the website will be diluted because it will need to pass through the intro page. (Remember, the search engines always see that page as they can’t select a language) This is a big problem, because as we noted in Chapter 1, the primary URL (i.e. www.example.com/) is usually the most linked to page on a site.

Homepage

Next, go to the primary URL of the site and pay particular attention to your first impression of the page. Try to be as true to your opinion as possible and don’t over think it. You should be coming from the perspective of the casual browser (This will be made easier because at this point you probably haven’t been paid any money and its a lot easier to be casual when are not locked down with the client) Follow this by doing a quick check of the very basic SEO metrics. In order to complete this step, you will need to do the following:

Notice your first impression and the resulting feeling and trustworthiness you feel about the page

Read the title tag and figure out how it could be improved

See if the URL changed (As in you were redirected from www.example.com/ to www.example.com/lame-keyword-in-URL-trick.html)

Check to see if the URL is canonical

How Do I Do This and Why Is It Important?

The first action item on this list helps you align yourself with potential website users. It is the basis for your entire audit and serves as a foundation for you to build on. You can look at numbers all day, but if you fail to see the website like the user, you will fail as an SEO.

The next step is to read the title tag and identify how it can be improved. This is helpful because changing title tags is both easy (A big exception to this is if your client uses a difficult Content Management System.) and has a relatively large direct impact on rankings.

Next you need to direct your attention to the URL. First of all, make sure there were not redirects that happened. This is important because adding redirects dilutes the amount of link juice that actually makes it to the links on the page.

The last action item is to run a quick check on canonical URLs. The complete list of URL formats to check for is in Chapter 2 (Relearning How You See the Web). Like checking the title tag, this is easy to check and provides a high work/benefit ratio.

Global Navigation

After checking the basics on the homepage, you should direct your attention to the global navigation. This acts as the main canal system for link juice. Specifically, you are going to want to do the following:

Temporarily disable Javascript and reload the page

Make sure the navigation system works and that all links are HTML links

Take note of all of the sections that are linked to

Re-enable Javascript

How Do I Do This and Why Is It Important?

As we discussed in Chapter 2 (Relearning How You See the Web), site architecture is critical for search friendly websites. The global navigation is fundamental to this. Imagine that the website you are viewing is ancient Rome right after the legendary viaduct and canal systems were built. These waterways are exactly like the global navigation that flows link juice around a website. Imagine the impact that a major clog can have on both systems. This is your time to find these clogs.

Your first action item in the section is to disable Javascript. This is helpful because it forces you to see your website from the perspective of a very basic user. It is also a similar perspective to the search engines.

After disabling Javascript, reload the page and see if the global navigation still works. Many times it won’t and it will uncover one of the major reasons the given client is having indexing issues.

Next view source and see if all of the navigational links are true HTML links. Ideally, they should be because they are the only kind that can pass their full link value.

Your next step is to take note of which sections are linked to. Ideally, all of the major sections will be linked in the global navigation. The problem is, you won’t know what all of the major sections are until you are further along in the audit. For now just take note and keep a mental checklist as you browse the website.

Lastly, re-enable Javascript. While this will not be accurate with the search engine perspective, it will make sure that AJAX and Javascript based navigation works for you. Remember, on this quick audit, you are not trying to identify every single issue with the site, instead you are just trying to find the big issues.

Category Pages/Subcategory Pages (If applicable)

After finishing with the homepage and the global navigation, you need to start diving deeper into the website. In the waterway analogy, category and subcategory pages are the forks in the canals. You can make sure they are optimized by doing the following:

Make sure there is enough content on these pages to be useful as a search result alone.

Find and note extraneous links on the page (there shouldn’t be more than 150 links)

Take notes on how to improve the anchor text used for the subcategories/content pages

How Do I Do This and Why Is It Important?

As I mentioned, these pages are the main pathways for the link juice of a website. They help make it so if one page (most often the homepage) gets a lot of links, that the rest of the pages on the website can also get some of the benefit. The first action point requires you to make a judgment call on whether or not the page would be useful as a search result. This goes with my philosophy that every page on a website should be a least a little bit link worthy. (It should pay its own rent, so to speak) Since each page has the inherent ability to collect links, webmasters should put at least a minimal amount of effort into making every page link worthy. There is no problem with someone entering a site (from a search engine result or other third party site) on a category or subcategory page. In fact, it may save them a click. In order to complete this step, identify if this page alone would be useful for someone with a relevant query. Think to yourself:

1. Is there helpful content on the page to provide context?
2. Is there a design element breaking up the monotony of a large list of links?

Take notes on the answers to both of these questions.

The next action item is to identify extraneous links on the page. Remember, from Chapter 2 we discussed that the amount of link value a given link can pass is dependent on the amount of links on the page. To maximize the benefit of these pages, it is important to remove any extraneous links. Going back to our waterway analogy, this type of links are the equivalent “canals to nowhere”. (Built by the Roman ancestors of former Alaskan Senator Ted Stevens)

To complete the last action item of this section, you will need to take notes on how to better optimize the anchor text of the links on this page. Ideally, they should be as specific as possible. This helps the search engines and users identify what the target pages are about.

Content Pages

Now that you have analyzed the homepage and the navigational pages, it is time to audit the meat of the website, the content pages. In order to do this, you will need to complete the following:

Check and note the format of the Title Tags

Check and note the format of the Meta Description

Check and note the format of the URL

Check to see if the content is indexable

Check and note the format of the alt text

Read the content as if you were the one searching for it

How Do I Do This and Why Is It Important?

The first action item is to check the title tags of the given page. This is important because it is both helpful for rankings and it makes up the anchor text used in search engine result. You don’t get link value from these links but they do act as incentives for people to visit your site.

Similarly to the first action item, the second item has to do with a metric that is directly useful for search engines rather than people (they are only indirectly useful for people once they are displayed by search engines.) Check the meta description by viewing source or using the mozBar and make sure it is compelling and contains the relevant keywords at least twice. This inclusion of keywords is useful not for rankings but because matches get bolded in search results.

The next action item is to check the URL for best practice optimization. Just like Danny Devito, URLs should be short, relevant and easy to remember.

The next step is to make sure the content is indexable. To ensure that it, make sure the text is not contained in an image, flash or within a frame. To make sure it is indexed, copy an entire sentence from the content block and search for it within quotes in a search engine. If it shows up, it is indexable.

If there are any images on the page (as there probably should be for users sake) you should make sure that the images have relevant alt text. After running testing on this at SEOmoz, my co-workers and I found that relevant anchor text was highly correlated to high rankings.

Lastly and possibly most importantly, you should take the time to read the content on the page. Read it from the perspective of a user who just got to it from a search engine result. This is important because the content on the page is main purpose for the page existing. As an SEO, it can be easy to become content-blind when doing quick audits. Remember, the content is the primary reason this user came to the page. If it is not helpful, vistors will leave.

Links

Now that you have an idea of how the website is organized it is time to see what the rest of the world thinks about it. To do this, you will need to do the following:

View the amount of total links and the amount of root domains linking to the given domain

View the anchor text distribution of inbound links

How Do I Do This and Why Is It Important?

As you read in Chapter 1 (Understanding Search Engine Optimization), links are incredibly important in the search engine algorithms. Thus, you cannot get a complete view of a website without analyzing its links.

This first action item requires you to get two different metrics about the inbound links to the given domain. Separately, these metrics can be very misleading due to internal links. Together, they provide a fuller picture that makes accounting for internal links possible and thus more accurate. At the time of writing, the best tool to get this data is through SEOmoz’s Open Site Explorer.

The second action item requires you to analyze the relevancy side of links. This is important because it is a large part of search engine algorithms. This was discussed in Chapter 1 (Understanding Search Engine Optimization) and proves as true now as it did when you read it earlier. To get this data, I recommend using Google’s Webmaster Central.

Search Engine Inclusion

Now that you have gathered all the data you can about how the given website exists on the internet, it is time to see what the search engines have done with this information. Choose your favorite search engine (you might need to Google it) and do the following:

Search for the given domain to make sure it isn’t penalized

See roughly how many pages are indexed of the given website

Search three of the most competitive keywords that relate to the given domain

Choose a random content page and search the engines for duplicate content

How Do I Do This and Why Is It Important?

As an SEO, all of your work is completely useless if the search engines don’t react to it. To a less degree this is true for webmasters as well. The above action items will help you identify how the given website is reacted to by the search engines.

The first action item is simple to do but can have dire affects. Simply go to a search engine and search for the exact URL of the homepage of your domain. Assuming it is not brand new, it should appear as the first result. If it doesn’t and it is an established site, it means it has major issues and was probably thrown out of the search engine indices. If this is the case, you need to identify this clearly and as early as possible.

The second action item is also very easy to do. Go to any of the major search engines and use the site command (as defined in Chapter 3) to find roughly all of the pages of a domain that are indexed in the engine. For example, this may look like site:www.example.com. This is important because the difference between the number that gets returned and the number of pages that actually exist on a site says a lot about how healthy a domain is in a search engine. If there are more pages in the index than exist on the page, there is a duplicate content problem. If there are more pages on the actual site than there are in the search engine index, then there is an indexation problem. Either are bad and should be added to your notes.

The next action item is a quick exercise to see how well the given website is optimized. To get an idea of this, simply search for 3 of the most competitive terms that you think the given website would reasonably rank for. You can speed this process up by using one of the third party rank trackers that are available. (Refer back to Chapter 3)

The final action item is to do a quick search for duplicate content. This can be accomplished by going to a random indexed content page on the given website and search for either the title tag (in quotes) or the first sentence of the content page (also in quotes). If there is more than one result from the given domain, then it has duplicate content problems. This is bad because it is forcing the website to compete against itself for rankings. In doing so, it forces the search engine to decide which page is more valuable. This decision making process is something that is best avoided because it is difficult to predict the outcome.

.table_center{
text-align: center;
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United States

United Kingdom

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Google Analytics Tracking Code Basics and Time Saving Plugins »

Posted by Sam Niccolls

The analytics ninja is not dead, but with Avinash talking more about SEO analytics and SEOs like Rand talking more about web analytics, 2010 has brought with it increased cross-pollination between analytics experts and SEOs.

This blog post is for the analytics driven, SEO savvy, search samurai looking to implement tracking code best practices and take advantage of some useful Google Analytics plugins.

The focus of this post is on Google Analytics, but many of the concepts are also applicable more generally, no matter what web analytics platform you’re using.

Tracking Code Basics

Asynchronous Tracking Code - Even before the asynchronous tracking code was rolled out, I was a believer in putting the GA tracking code in the header, rather than before the closing body tag, which is where Google recommends placing the tracking code. With the announcement of asynchronous tracking code, which loads in conjunction with the page as opposed to sequentially, however, you can now have your cake and eat it too. You can get the benefit of your data not being compromised by slow page load times and also keep from getting push back from the developer that implements your tracking codes.

<script type="text/javascript">

  var _gaq = _gaq || [];  _gaq.push(['_setAccount', 'UA-XXXXX-X']);  _gaq.push(['_trackPageview']);

  (function() {    var ga = document.createElement('script');    ga.src = ('https:' == document.location.protocol ? 'https://ssl' :         'http://www') + '.google-analytics.com/ga.js';    ga.setAttribute('async', 'true');    document.documentElement.firstChild.appendChild(ga);  })();

</script>

Expanding Goal Limitations - Without setting up goals, your GA account is a glorified hit counter. So it’s imperative that you set up goal or eCommerce tracking (if not both). When setting up your GA goals in your analytics settings, you can either use the expanded goals, which allow you to track up to 20 different URLs or engagement metrics per profile. It’s important to realize, however, that you can also set your goals up so you can track hundreds or even thousands of goals. All you have to do is set up a logical hierarchy where the root of your goal URLs trigger your goal events. For us at SEOmoz, this might mean we have a tool run goal event triggered with /goal/tool-run - yet we also have the added granularity down to the individual tool level should we ever want to see which tools are being run the most or to segment traffic based on visitors who ran a particular tool.

eCommerce Tracking - Justin Cutroni did a great job with his series of blog posts that walk through how eCommerce tracking works, installing & setting up eCommerce tracking, explaining why everyone should use eCommerce tracking, & tracking lead gen forms. In addition to eCommerce tracking, not to be forgotten is using SetVar or a custom variable to segment repeat or premium buyers. For example, say your site gets 5 sales from keyword #1 and 5 sales from keyword #2. If sales for keyword #1 are each $800 and sales from keyword #2 are $10 each, you’re going to want to segment that traffic and make on-page optimizations by looking at the on-site behavior of your premium buyers who converted on keyword #1, rather than from keyword #2.  

Custom Variables for Registered & Non-Registered - One of the most powerful aspects of GA is the ability to set custom variable. Custom variables can be set at any of three levels (visitor, session, & page). The Google Analytics help documentation is particularly great, but EpikOne also has a worthwhile description on how custom variables work. The most powerful of these is the visitor level custom variable which allows you to cookie a visitor across multiple sessions. At SEOmoz, we use this to track three different member types: free members, PRO members, & canceled members. We also use custom variables to cookie at the session level.

 
Campaign Tagging & SetAllowAnchor - From widgets to newsletters to signature links in personal e-mails, campaign links should be tagged using the GA URL builder, which gives you tracking parameters that includes multiple, including required _utm values for source, medium, & campaign. In action this looks something like this:

http://www.seomoz.org/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=march-6-2010

When tagging your campaigns be aware that by default GA will only recognize tracking parameters if the string is kicked off by a question mark, which from an SEO standpoint can lead to diffusion of link juice and duplicate content issues. To avoid these issues, we you can kick off campaign parameters with the hash tag and modify your GA tracking code using the SetAllowAnchor attribute, so GA recognizes the hash tag as way to kick off a campaign tracking URLs. To do this, add — pageTracker._setAllowAnchor(true); — to your main GA tracking code between the var pageTracker and pageTracker attributes. Or, for additional documentation, read LunaMetrics’ blog post on using SetAllowAnchor, but the code should look something like this:

<script type="text/javascript">
  try {
    var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-0000000-1");
    pageTracker._setAllowAnchor(true);
    pageTracker._trackPageview();
  } catch(err) {}

Tagging Email - One of the most important areas you can apply campaign tagging is e-mail. And though you can get fancy and create a filter that combines email sources you should not have to do this because your campaigns should be tagged to begin with. So definitely follow what the experts say about tagging email campaigns, but I am a huge fan of bucketing your reports by segment and grouping based on conversion goal. For example, at SEOmoz we’re rolling out a number of e-mails ranging from a customer lifecycle welcome series to newsletters to follow up emails after PRO members cancel. Rather than doing one off tracking, our GA tracking is set up in a way that we can aggregate by visitor type. This allows management to quickly look at the all up numbers and see how e-mail is driving each goal area of the business: activation, retention, and re-activation.

And if you use a logical naming convention with your email tagging, such as the one shown below, your marketing team will be able to splice and dice using regular expressions to get a much more granular view of performance for each email format, type, or version:

• Email Format:  Which types of emails are doing best (i.e. newsletters, promotional emails, system notifications, etc.)
• Performance by Email Type: Shows the breakdown of which email types have the greatest volume and/or the lowest click through rates. And thus, where you should place your testing and optimization energy. (i.e. emails sent 1 week after sign up, promos sent in December, etc.)
• Version Number: Allows you to test subject lines and e-mail variants to see which versions are driving the most conversions, engagement, or retention. (i.e. subject line #1, subject line #2, etc.)

Vanity URLs - If you’re running an offline campaign, such as a magazine ad, a business card run or a billboard creative, you’re not going to want to use the long URL builder parameter. As WebShare’s Corey Koberg shows in the below graphic, long URL parameters don’t work for offline. So you’ll likely be much better off measuring offline efforts with a short, easy to remember vanity URL, which, in order to keep your metrics from being skewed as a result of page load times, you’ll want to implement using a 301 redirect, rather than using meta refresh.

Google Analytics Plugins

Though not on the list of must haves for the search samurai, I’m a sucker for a great browser plugin. And as ROI Revolution blogged about, there are a handful of browser plugins for GA that you might find are worth installing. Three plugins I use with varying degrees of regularity are:

Does a Page Have GA?
If you’re checking a lot of pages on your site to see if they have tracking code installed or if you want quick, at a glance reference as to whether or not a page on another site has GA tracking code, Twistermc’s GA? Firefox plugin is a great way to see if GA is installed without having to view the source code. The way it works it works is simple. If a page has GA installed, the bar chart that appears in the lower right hand corner of your browser is illuminated. If the page does not have GA installed, the bar chart is not illuminated.

Which Referring Sites & Keywords Have Changed?
Similar in concept to a custom alerts, the Better GA plugin by Juice Analytics provides a useful way to drill into your referring sites or referring keyword reports and see which sites or keywords have fluctuated the most over the last few days or week.

Better Google Analytics:
Perhaps the most robust GA plugin of all is VKIs studios’ greasemonkey script based plugin, which offers a number of bells an whistles, including page level social media data from sites like Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, and Delicious (see below),as well as added functionality such as a direct entry field to access your top content report from any other report, direct links to export to Google Docs, and a half dozen or so others.  

For more comprehensive information on Google Analytics, I encourage you to read through Google Analytics’ help documentation or tapping into some of the great web analytics resources available such as Google Analytics’ Official Blog, Webshare’s Blog (their Google Analytics 101 posts are particularly good,) LunaMetrics, EpikOne, & Avinash’s Occam’s Razor - each of which are full of Analytics tips from top-notch experts.

Also, special thanks to David Booth at WebShare for his help with SEOmoz’s implementation of Google Analytics and also for sharing several of the insights included in this post. For more info on GA and GWO, WebShare’s Google sponsored Seminars for Success, which I attended last year, and which the SEOmoz marketing team will be attending here in Seattle on May 12-14th, are among the most educational and best valued around.

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SEOmoz Coming To a City Near You (Kinda) »

Posted by jennita

The holidays are long over, 2010 is well underway, we’ve already launched a new product, made a big announcement… and it’s barely February! While our amazing development and product teams are busily building new tools as I type (and I’m not even kidding, those guys work a lot), some of us are hitting the road.  For the next couple months, the SEOmoz team will be galavanting across the globe attending, speaking and even keynoting (yea.. is that a word?) at multiple Search Marketing Conferences. Essentially, in the next 45 days there’s an opportunity to see one of us at a city near you… or somewhat near you… or at least in the same country… or possibly the same continent. Anyway,  you get the picture.

Following is a detailed list of where you can find us over the next couple months. Being a part of such an amazing community means the world to us, so please if you’re attending any of these events, stop by and say hello. We’d really love to meet you. (Unless of course you’re a stalker, then make sure to look for either Sam Niccolls or Danny Dover… They’d LOVE to meet you.) Without further ado, here’s the list!

OnlineXcellence - Glasgow - February 12

Kicking off this international tour, Rand will be presenting to business owners and CEOS during a day of SEO training at OnlineXcellence.

Let me tell you something…

SES London - February 15-19

This is the first of many trips to London this year for the mozzers.  SES London is known for having great content, and this year one of my favorite speakers, Avinash Kaushik is giving one of the keynotes. Rand will be attending and speaking at the following sessions:

• PPC or SEO? The Ultimate Search Marketing Battle
• Social Media Best Practices for Marketers Inside the Brand

OMS San Diego - February 22-25

At OMS San Diego, Rand is organizing a panel of Search Marketing leaders who will be discussing advanced tactics at the SEO 2.0 Leadership Forum. Rand will also be speaking on the panel, "PR, Social Media and Search".

Miva Merchant - San Diego - February 24-26

The mozzers will be camping out in San Diego for a few days! For the Miva Merchant conference, Gillian is speaking on three sessions while Rand is keynoting about SEO on the second day.

SMX West - Santa Clara - March 2-4

This will be my first SMX West and you’ll find me volunteering in the In House Track on day 3. Rand is speaking on the Link Building Fundamentals panel, which looks pretty awesome. I’ll have the flip video camera, so be sure to hunt me down, maybe you’ll make it onto a Whiteboard Friday.

Use the code "smx10seomoz" to get a 10% discount at SMX West!

Gillian Speaking in India Last Year

SphinnConn - Jerusalem - March 4-7

SphinnConn Jerusalem is the first of it’s kind. It sold out quickly and is sure to be an amazing event. Gillian will be speaking at the SEO Fundamentals panel and the Link Building Clinic.

MVIXcon Dubai & Cairo - March 8-11

Gillian is looking forward to addressing a Women in Business group at MVIXcon in Dubai and to a meeting with members of the Royal Family during her visit.

SearchFest 2010 Portland - March 9

Just a skip, hop and a jump from us, we’ll be heading to SearchFest 2010 which has an amazing lineup of speakers. Rand will be speaking on SEO Tools panel and covering both SEOmoz tools as well as others.

Get $30 off Searchfest by using the coupon code "MOZ-SEMPDXSF1020"

InfusionCon - Scottsdale - March 10-12

Scott will be presenting on SEO to this group of small to medium e-businesses at InfusionCon. Also, we’re always interested in learning more about how to most effectively reach new customers, optimize our payment systems, and get better at customer service. :) Sarah will also be attending!

MountainWest RubyConf - Salt Lake City - March 11-12

The  MountainWest RubyConf is an excellent Ruby conference, which is our preferred dev language at SEOmoz. It will be a good opportunity to meet others doing cool things with the language and to get to know the community more personally.

SXSW Interactive - Austin - March 12-16

Danny Dover will be at SXSW Interactive joining and talking with the literally 10,000s of other attendees. The technology conference is aimed at all things interactive (Websites, Video Games, Movies). It will be a good opportunity to meet website creators who operate outside the sphere of the SEO industry. (Yes they exist, yes they are in Texas)

IMC Calgary - March 16-17

As part of Gillian’s world wide tour 2010, she’ll be speaking at IMC Calgary on the The Power Triumvirate of 2010: The Convergence of Social-Mobile-Local.

Use the code "imc-speaker" to save 15% on any IMC event in 2010!

SES New York - March 22-26

SES New York is jam-packed with training workshops, sessions and brilliant keynote speakers. Really, who wouldn’t want to spend some time in New York City in March? Rand is speaking on a panel plus Adam and Kate will be attending as well. This might be Kate’s first Search Marketing Conference, so go easy on her folks. :)

Get 50% off SES NY with the purchase of 1 Year of SEOmoz Pro. Go Pro Now and Save on SES NY!

IMC Stockholm - March 22-25

Gillian will be keynoting at IMC Stockholm, a broad group of entrepreneurs, affiliates, and search marketers.

Use the code "imc-speaker" to save 15% on any IMC event in 2010!

SMX Munich - March 23-24

Our own rockstar developer Ben, will be speaking at SMX Munich on both a ranking factors panel, as well as a spam issues panel. (Wow, I didn’t even know Ben spoke German!)

The Freemium Summit - The Business of Free - San Francisco - March 26

The Freemium Summit was recommended by Dharmesh Shah as a good conference for folks who have free offerings as an important part of their business plan. Sarah will be attending and it’s a great opportunity to learn and network with other entrepreneurs.

The craziest part is… once all these are over, we have another round starting in April. :) We hope you’re planning on attending some of these events and look forward to meeting you, or speaking with you again. Stay on top of our activities by following us on Twitter, or being our fan on Facebook. Happy Conferencing!

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30 SEO Bookmarklets to Save You Time »

Posted by randfish

We all work hard at the SEO process - analyzing sites, gathering data, researching potential problems and identifying the solutions. Today’s post is on how to work smarter and faster using bookmarklets for SEO. No matter your browser, these plug-and-play links will let you get your job done faster and easier, and look like a pro in front of bosses and clients.

The list isn’t completely comprehensive, but it covers 95%+ of the SEO data points I retrieve on a monthly basis and a few extras I don’t personally use that may be valuable to others. It also has a section at the end on how to make your own bookmarklets for any site, tool or service you use. To employ, just click and drag the bookmarklet links from this blog post into your sidebar or bookmarks folder and rename to whatever you’d like. I’ve divided the post up into sections so you can quickly grab the items you care about.

SEO Bookmarklets Sections:

• Site Indexation Queries
• Backlink Data Queries
• Specialized Search Queries
• Domain & Traffic Data Queries
• Social Media Data Queries
• How to Construct Your Own Bookmarklets

 
Just follow the instructions from this highly "meta" image :-)

Site Indexation Queries

• #1 - Google site:rootdomain.com
  • Bookmarklet - GG Indexed Pages
• #2 - Yahoo! Site Explorer listing of pages on the root domain 
  • Bookmarklet - Y!SE Indexed Pages
• #3 - Bing site:rootdomain.com
  • Bookmarklet - Bing Indexed Pages

Backlink Data Queries

• #4 - Open Site Explorer (OSE) list of links to current URL
  • Bookmarklet - OSE Links to URL
• #5 - OSE list of links to entire domain
  • Bookmarklet - OSE Links to Domain
• #6 - OSE list of linking domains to current URL
  • Bookmarklet - OSE Linking Domains to URL
• #7 - OSE linking domains to entire domain
  • Bookmarklet - OSE Linking Domains to Root
• #8 - OSE anchor text distribution for current URL
  • Bookmarklet - OSE URL Anchor Text
• #9 - OSE anchor text distribution for entire domain
  • Bookmarklet - OSE Domain Anchor Text
• #10 - Yahoo! Site Explorer (Y!SE) links to current URL
  • Bookmarklet - Y!SE Links to URL
• #11 - Y!SE links to entire domain
  • Bookmarklet - Y!SE Links to Domain
• #12 - Google Blogsearch links to current URL
  • Bookmarklet - GG Bloglinks to URL
• #13 - Bing linkfromdomain for entire domain
  • Bookmarklet - Bing LinkfromDomain
• #14 - Historical PageRank for current URL
  • Bookmarklet - PR History

 Specialized Search Queries

• #15 - Google: Remove personalization
  • Bookmarklet - GG -Personalized
• #16 - Google: Include duplicate results
  • Bookmarklet - GG +Dups
• #17 - Google: Show results from last 24 hours only
  • Bookmarklet - GG 24 Hours
• #18 - Google: Show results from last 7 days only
  • Bookmarklet - GG 7 Days
• #19 - Google: Show US results (useful when performing queries from overseas)
  • Bookmarklet - GG US SERPs
• #20 - Google "Text-Only" Cache of current URL
  • Bookmarklet - GG Text Cache

Domain & Traffic Data Queries

• #21 - Domaintools lookup on current domain
  • Bookmarklet - Domaintoools Lookup
• #22 - Compete.com traffic data on current domain
  • Bookmarklet - Compete Traffic
• #23 - Quantcast traffic data on current domain
  • Bookmarklet - Quantcast Traffic
• #24 - Alexa traffic data on current domain
  • Bookmarklet - Alexa Data
• #25 - Wayback Machine archives for curent URL
  • Bookmarklet - URL Wayback Archive
• #26 - Google Trends for Websites on the current domain 
  • Bookmarklet - GG Trends Data

Social Media Data Queries

• #27 - Backtweets Info on current URL
  • Bookmarklet - Backtweets for URL
• #28 - Tweetmeme Info on entire domain
  • Bookmarklet - Tweetmeme for Domain
• #29 - PostRank Info on entire domain
  • Bookmarklet - PostRank for Domain
• #30 - StumbleUpon Info on current URL
  • Bookmarklet - StumbleUpon URL Data

How to Construct Your Own Bookmarklets

Here’s a sample code snippet for the bookmarklet above that shows links from OpenSiteExplorer.org:

javascript:location.href='http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/'+location.host+'/a!links'

To reproduce the effect with a bookmarklet that calls data from any site, you’ll need to

1. Find a web-based tool that stores the webpage it’s calling data for in the URL. For example, Google Trends for Websites uses a format like "http://trends.google.com/websites?q=site:seomoz.org"
2. Include the initial piece - javascript:location.href=’ at the start of the bookmarklet link
3. Follow that code snippet with the desired webpage that contains data. For example, if I wanted to get Google Trends for Websites, I’d use http://trends.google.com/websites?q=site%3A - note that for special characters in the URL like the colon : you’ll need to use the hex character codes (a good list is here)
4. Next you’ll need to call the current URL. The most common way to do this is with window.location.href or location.host which pulls the URL string from the address bar.
5. You may need to strip out portions of the URL to get just the sub or root domain. In my example with Google Trends, I’d use document.domain.replace(’www.’,”) rather than the full URL string from #4 above. This removes the www from a domain name if it exists and extracts only the domain portion instead of the complete URL.
6. To combine the javascript code snippet, you’ll need to use proper syntax - following phrases with +, wrapping in single quotes and ending with a semicolon ;
7. The finished code snippet looks like this -  javascript:location.href=’http://trends.google.com/websites?q=site%3A’+document.domain.replace(’www.’,”);
8. You can use a wide variety of Javascript commands to build all sorts of bookmarklets, not just those that call URLs or append data. However, you’ll need a more advanced tutorial to show you that process - sorry!

Now you’re ready to start building your own bookmarklets. We’d love to have you share any of your favorites (or any new concoctions) in the comments below. If you’ve got great ones, I’ll even try to add them into the post tomorrow and, naturally, pass on the credit :-)

p.s. One I’d love to see is a bookmarklet that gives a pop-up of the current website’s IP address and, for extra bonus, takes you to a Bing IP: search query to show other sites hosted on that address.

Update:

Ask, and ye shall receive! Thanks to crdunst for putting together these two bookmarklets to show the IP address and take you to the Bing IP Search!

1. DomainToIP.com Lookup
2. Bing IP Lookup

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