Dear Internet, Meet Facebook Status Optimizer (Boom, Mind Explodes) »

Posted by Danny Dover

Update: Happy April Fools day everyone! :-D Thanks to all of those who played along and everyone who participated (willingly or not ;-p). Hopefully this made you or a friend smile as much as everyone here at the office. Until next year, Cheers!

 At SEOmoz, we have always striven to be at the forefront of understanding digital search. As web search has become an increasingly solved problem, some of our researchers have begun to switch their focus from Google to Facebook. Facebook is unique in that it is able to data mine social patterns between real life friends. This is increasingly critical data because as our lives become more busy, automation of simple tasks like social networking become more necessary.

Based on these trends, I am proud to announce our brand new tool, Facebook Status Optimizer.

Facebook Status Optimizer (FSO) automatically posts status updates on your behalf that are algorithmically written to ensure your status updates beat the competition and appear at the top of your friend’s newsfeed. SEO was largely about making money, so we are happy that Facebook Status Optimizer’s focus is aligned with what really matters in life - being popular online.

Key Benefits:

Automate talking with your friends with data from your actual behavior!

Computer learning algorithms learn from your friends’ popular status updates

Your friend’s popular status update:

Your automatically generated message:

Your friend’s popular status update:

Your automatically generated message:

Your friend’s popular status update:

Your automatically generated message:

FSO posts statuses that are algorithmically determined to get you more attention!

Share helpful product reviews with those that you care about!

Start using Facebook Status Optimizer today!

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KPI’s and Monthly Objective Metrics for People Who Do SEO »

Posted by richardbaxterseo

Today’s post is inspired by a brilliant question that came up recently in Q&A. The question was based on targets and objective setting for SEO’s and it went something like this:

"What metrics should an SEO’s monthly objectives be based on?"

Having spent a good portion of my SEO career managing SEO teams in-house, this question really reminded me how interesting the topic of organisational SEO can be, and how underserved it is on all but a few SEO industry blogs. In this in-house SEO focused post, let’s take a look at general KPIs for people and teams who do SEO.

Search Engine Visibility (Rankings)

While the value of measuring individual search engine rankings is a topic under frequent debate in our community, achieving consistently high rankings for target keywords is ultimately the reason we’re all doing SEO. In competitive markets, particularly, there will be key phrases that SEO teams will be expected to show progress towards gaining rankings for. Making search engine visibility a targeted metric provides a way for the SEO team to focus on the overall performance of the site in question. There are, however, two problems to solve with search engine visibility as a metric, the measurement of rankings and choice of keywords to be monitored.

In my previous in-house role we developed a keyword selection methodology based on data from Hitwise UK, our own analytics platform and the Google Keyword Tool. As travel SEO’s, we knew that demand would change seasonally for certain destinations and their corresponding keywords. Using a little historical knowledge of our industry and plenty of data, we would always have a clear idea of seasonal demand for the top 200 industry terms.

Measuring rankings on a daily basis allowed us to calculate a percentage based visibility score. What was really fascinating about the whole process was that because the keyword selection methodology remained consistent over a long period of time, we were able to compare visibility scores in year on year increments. As the activities of the SEO team continued to succeed, overall visibility increased from around 60% to 85% over a few years.

If you’re interested in developing a similar methodology, you could consider using Advanced Web Ranking to capture rankings data and calculate the visibility score. The beauty of having a search engine visibility score as a KPI is that the metric acts as a key driver for all SEO based activity. Ultimately, as an SEO Manager you have to evaluate how all of your actions contribute to improved visibility, and therefore traffic.

Search Engine Traffic

Many companies in competitive niches will make use of models to predict traffic levels for the coming year. If you’re lucky, a business analyst will take care of the production of the model itself, leaning on your SEO expertise to help predict how forthcoming trends and planned initiatives may impact overall traffic levels on the site. Your role, as an SEO Manager or in-house SEO is to achieve those traffic levels through maintaining and growing search engine visibility, deploying technical SEO enhancements to grow all important traffic in the long tail and of course, building links!

Link Building

There’s no doubt that link building is critical to search engine visibility and traffic levels on your site, so it might make sense to create volume targets for a link builder. Unfortunately, deciding exactly how many links a link builder can build is a complex and frequently restrictive process because output depends on the person, the market and the method of link acquisition chosen.

In my last in-house role, I found that creating small, seasonal link building projects for my team based on a few key phrases per person worked extremely well. Giving your link builders the creative freedom to design their own strategies based on their own projects and the resources available to them can yield far more valuable results in the long term. The KPI, therefore, may be measured on our new friend search engine visibility on the terms selected by the link building project.

Conversion

Getting the opportunity to have an input on your site’s conversion rate is a wonderful opportunity to learn a new skill, or improve an existing one! A word of caution, though – only sign up for KPI’s that you can control or heavily influence. In the case of conversion you’ll need a lot of business wide buy in and commitment to conversion rate optimisation projects. If you don’t have the tools or support for that, conversion might not be a great primary KPI to be assigned.

Personal Development Goals

As a search engine optimisation practitioner, you’ll have spent a fair amount of time learning your trade and perfecting your skills. When you’re managing an SEO team, don’t forget that it’s a good thing to assign some personal development time for each of your staff. I used to set a target of one presentation a quarter on a subject of choice (SEO related, of course). I still think the personal development targets are the best KPI’s of all. If you’re learning, you’re having fun.

Of course, every organisation is slightly different and you may have different KPI’s to the ones above. Tell us about them in the comments below!

This is a post by Richard Baxter, Founder and SEO Consultant at SEOgadget.co.uk - a niche UK SEO Agency specialising in helping people and organisations succeed in search. Follow him on Twitter and Google Buzz.

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Determining Whether a Page/Site Passes Link Juice (and How Much) »

Posted by randfish

We’ve been hearing some requests lately for some really advanced, expert-level content, and this post is here to deliver. I’ve built up a short list of topics that deal with more cutting edge SEO, and if there’s interest in this series, I’ll try to make it a regular part of the blog. These tactics aren’t black or gray hat (we’re not advocates of that kind of thing), but they’re very specific in use and tend to be at the opposite end of the "low-hanging fruit" basket.

The first in the series touches on a common SEO problem - determing if a link has value and how much. This tactic isn’t low effort, so it should only be employed when the link or link source is particularly critical.

Testing Whether a Page/Site Passes Link Juice (and How Much)

Scenario: You’ve found some potentially valuable, but possibly suspect link sources. These could include things like a seemingly high quality directory that requires payment or a site you’re worried may have aroused Google’s ire for one reason or another. The need for a credible answer applies anytime you’re unsure whether a link is counting in Google’s rankings and need to know.

Tactic: Find a page that’s already in Google’s index and a somewhat random combination of words/phrases from that page’s title and body for which it ranks in position #3-10. For example, with the query - http://www.google.com/search?q=new+york+presentation+morning+entitled+link, my blog post from last week on Link Magnets ranks #3. The query itself is not particularly competitive and the pages outranking it don’t have the exact text in the title or domain name (a critical part of the process).

If I now place a link with the exact anchor text from another page (like the blog post you’re reading now), e.g. new york presentation morning entitled link, I should be able to see, once this post is indexed by Google’s spider, whether it passes link juice. The result will be positive if the page moves up 2-4 positions in ranking and I can be fairly assured that the link is indeed "Google-friendly." With that knowledge secure, I can change the anchor text and/or repoint the link to the desired location. I don’t simply use the anchor text I want initially because with competitive queries, a single link may not make enough difference for the ranking impact to be visible and I don’t want to waste my time/money/energy.

(Metrics displayed in the SERPs via mozbar)

Special Requirements: To make the testing work, you’ll need to be able to repoint the link, change the anchor text or 301 redirect the linked-to page (though the last of these is the least desirable, since 301s lose some link juice in the process and good anchor text is so valuable for ranking in Google). Also, here at SEOmoz, we don’t recommend buying links, so while this tactic could be applied to that process, remember that manipulative links may later be devalued, wasting all that time and effort you spent acquiring them.

Results: With this technique, you can not only get a yes/no answer to questions about whether the link passes ranking value, but a rough sense for how much (depending on the position change - this can be a good reason to use pages that rank in the #7-10 range). Do take care to record the ranking positions of all the pages in the results and leave the test running for 1-2 weeks (longer if there’s very fresh results ranking for the query). If you don’t, other factors may conflate to hide the true results.

I’m looking foward to your feedback about this technique - and let us know if you’re interested in seeing more of this advanced/edge-case content on the blog, too. Below, I’ve listed the topics I could tackle in future "Advanced" level posts.

• Hosting Pages on Third-Party Sites
• oDesk/Mechanical Turk for Content Development (and Link Research)
• Email Marketing for Search Personalization
• Modifying Product/Business Naming Conventions
• Spiking Search Volume and Capitalizing on QDF
• Protecting Inter-Network Links & Domain Acquisitions from Devaluation

p.s. If you do like this kind of thing, I’d also suggest:

1. Register for SMX Advanced: Seattle or SMX Advanced: London - both are quite good and SEOmoz will be sending speakers to both. You can use the code SEOmoz@SMX for a 10% discount to either event.
2. Check out the SEOmoz Expert Training Series DVD, which just launched last week. The video alone will get you pretty excited :-)
3. PRO members should check out our libraries of tips, video content and webinars.

I’m in Tampa, then Miami this week, but will finally return to Seattle for some much needed time in the office next Monday. Until then, blogging, commenting & email may be a bit slow from me.

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Where In the World is SEOmoz - April-May 2010 »

Posted by jennita

Whew! The Spring conference season is in full swing, and the mozzers are coming soon to a city near you. You’ll find us anywhere from Charlotte, NC to Munich to Singapore in the next couple months. The coolest part is that we’re attending and speaking at some conferences for the very first time. It feels good to get out and stretch a bit! Plus, the developer in us will be attending conferences like Chirp and CCGrid 2010 which will both enhance our geek factor!

As always, if you’re attending any of these events, please say hello! We may never get to know you if you don’t wave, nudge, or kick us. Ok, you really shouldn’t kick Joanna, she’d probably pull a ninja move on you. Included in the list below are both SEOmoz employees as well as associates. Come… take a peek and join us!

SMX Toronto - April 8-9

You definitely don’t want to miss SMX Toronto! Not only will Gillian be moderating several panels, but she is also organizing a Search Spam Party (of PubCon notoriety). RSVP now!

Joanna at PubCon 2009

PubCon South - Dallas - April 13-14
20% discount tickets. Get ‘em while they’re hot: rc-2080720

We have quite the crew heading to PubCon South this year. As always, PubCon has tons of great sessions and speakers to knock your socks off. We’re excited to be speaking and attending this excellent conference with gusto.

Check out where to find Gillian, Joanna and Kate Morris:

Chirp - San Francisco - April 14-15

Twitter is having a first ever developer conference, called Chirp. Nick will learn about their new ad platform (hopefully) and what they’re doing with their API. This is super interesting to us for both our tools and our API businesses. Sounds like an awesomely, geekified conference! Be sure to say hello to Nick if you’re there.

Danny at SEOmoz training in London

SMX Sydney - April 22-23

We’re all quite excited about SMX Sydney this year (ok we are every year… but still). This year Danny will be helping run the Developer Day (filling in for Vanessa Fox) as well as speaking about using rich applications and search. Gillian will also be speaking at this power-packed event on post-click optimization.

Pacific Conference - Singapore - April 27-28

"This will be my first time at Pacific Conferences. I’ll be running a power-packed two day workshop that covers everything from the basics of search marketing to integration of social media into marketing plans and tracking ROI from the multitude of search marketing opportunities available to us. I’ll be sharing the stage with Dennis Yu, CEO BlitzLocal, who will be covering PPC, Facebook advertising, social media marketing, and more. In truth, I expect this will be one of the most valuable conferences in the region this year. If you’re in the area, don’t miss this one!"
- Gillian

You can still get a 20% discount on your ticket by mentioning this blog post when you register.

SEMPO event planned, too. Stay tuned for tweets with specifics on a SEMPO event to coincide with Pacific Conference Singapore.

Tom at SEOmoz training in London

SAScon - Manchester, UK - April 28th

Two of our esteemed associates, Tom Critchlow and Richard Baxter will be speaking at SAScon. Reading over the session topics and seeing the list of speakers, makes me jealous I won’t be attending!

Pacific Conference - Hong Kong - April 29-30

"If you miss the Singapore Training event, you can catch us in Hong Kong the same week! Dennis and I will provide the same presentation. Again, if you go to only conference in the region this year, come to Pacific Conference. This will be one amazing show."
- Gillian

Search & Social Spring Summit - Tampa - May 3-4

The Search & Social Spring Summit is pretty much the place to be in May! Really… Florida in May just sounds like perfection! Plus with topics like "Outsourcing Secrets: Cut Costs & Spend More Time on the Beach" and "In-House SEO : Tactics for Managing Multiple Sites & Headaches" it will definitely be hot! Lindsay and I will be attending and blogging from the event. [Plus I get to meet the Wassell babies YAY!]

Conversion Conference West 2010 - San Jose, CA - May 4-5

International Search Summit - Innovations - London - May 13-14

A4U Expo Munich - May 18-19

"I was so surprised by the depth and breadth of the speakers and presentations at A4U Expo London, I’m really looking forward to being a part of this conference in Munich. Focused on affiliate marketers’ needs, this conference covers everything from SEM to SEO, analytics, and on page optimization. Our friends at Distilled will be there and Ben Jesson who helped us with our own conversion rates will sharing secrets. I’ll be speaking on the convergence of Local-Mobile-Social marketing and how to grab this tiger by the tail."
- Gillian

Rand giving an interview in London

eMetrics & SMX London - May 17-18

Both eMetrics and SMX London are happening at the same time, in the Grand Connaught Rooms, Covent Garden. You can get a combo pass for both conferences, then you don’t have to decide between the two! Sounds like the best of both worlds to me. :)

CCGrid 2010 - Melbourne - May 17-20

Chas will be attending the 10th IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Cluster, Cloud and Grid Computing. It’s a great opportunity to be exposed to new ideas/methods in high performance distributed computing. (That’s geek talk for kick butt!)

Search Exchange - Charlotte, NC -  May 17 - 19

Search Exchange will consist of keynotes and panel discussions on search engine optimization, social media marketing, pay per click advertising, and web analytics.

"I am so excited for Search Exchange, its the first conference of its kind down in Charlotte. It’s tackling the trifecta of marketing channels–organic, paid and social. Not to mention the lineup is top-notch with industry all stars like Chris Winfield, Rae Hoffman, and Chris Brogan."
- Joanna

International Marketing Conference Copenhagen - May 19-20

Gillian will be speaking on New Social Media Oppportunities.

We look forward to seeing you on the road! Oh, and just for fun I thought I’d throw in a wordle image based on this post. Enjoy! ;)

Joanna’s photo courtesy of Andy Beal

Danny and Tom’s photos courtesy of foliovision.com.

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Diagnosing Google Crawl Allowance Using Webmaster Tools & Excel »

Posted by Tom_C

There’s been some talk recently in the SEO industry about ‘crawl allowance’ - it’s not a new concept but Matt Cutts recently talked about it openly with Eric Enge at StoneTemple (and you can see Rand’s illustrated guide too). One big question however is how do you understand how Google is crawling your site? While there are a variety of different ways of measuring this (log files is one obvious solution) the process I’m outlining in this post can be done with no technical knowledge - all you need is:

• A verified Google webmaster central account
• Google Analytics
• Excel

If you want to go down the log-file route then these two posts from Ian Lurie on how to read log files & analysing log files for SEO might be useful. It’s worth pointing out however that just because Googlebot crawled a page it doesn’t necessarily mean that it was actually indexed. This might seem weird but if you’ve ever looked in log files you’ll see that sometimes Googlebot will crawl an insane number of pages but it often takes more than one visit to actually take a copy of the page and store it in it’s cache. That’s why I think the below method is actually quite accurate, by using a combination of URLs receiving at least 1 visit from Google and pages with internal links as reported by webmaster central. Still, taking your log file data and adding it into the below process as a 3rd data set would make things better (more data = good!).

Anyway, enough theory, here’s a non technical step by step process to help you understand which pages Google is crawling on your site and compare that to which pages are actually getting traffic.

Step 1 - Download the internal links

Go to webmaster central and navigate to the "internal links" section:

Then, once you’re on the internal links page click "download this table":

This will give you the table of pages which Google sees internal links to. Note - for the rest of this post I’m going to be treating this data as an estimate of Google’s crawl. See a brief discussion about this at the top of the post. I feel it’s more accurate than using a site: search in Google. It does have some pitfalls however since what this report is actually telling you is the number of pages with links to them, not the pages which Google has crawled. Still, it’s not a bad measure of Google’s index and only really becomes inaccurate when there are a lot of nofollowed internal links or pages blocked by robots.txt (which you link to).

Step 2 - Grab your landing pages from Google Analytics

This step should be familiar to all of you who have Google Analytics - go into your organic Google traffic report from the last 30 days, display the landing pages and download the data.

Note that you need to add "&limit=50000" into the URL before you hit "export as CSV" to ensure you get the as much data a possible. If you have more than 50000 landing pages then I suggest you either try a shorter date range or a more advanced method (see my reference to log files above).

Step 3 - Put both sets of data in excel

Now you need to put both of these sets of data into excel - I find it helpful to put all of the data into the same sheet in Excel but it’s not actually necessary. You’ll have something like this with link data for your URLs from webmaster central on the left and the visits data from Google Analytics on the right:

Step 4 - Vlookup ftw

Gogo gadget vlookup! The vlookup function was made for data sets like this and easily lets you look up the values in one data set against another data set. I advise running a vlookup twice for each data set so we get something like this:

Note - that there may be some missing data in here depending on how fresh the content is on your site (this is possibly enough room for a whole separate post on this topic) so you should then find and replace ‘#N/A’ with 0.

Step 5 - Categorise your urls

Now, for the purposes of this post we’re not interested in a URL by URL approach, we’re instead looking at a high level analysis of what’s going on so we want to categorise our URLs. Now, the more detail you can go into at this step the better your final data output will be. So go ahead and write a rule in excel to assign a category to your URLs. This could be anything from just following a folder structure or it could be more complex based on query string etc. It really depends on how your site structure works as to the best way of doing it so I can’t write this rule for you unfortunately. Still, once this is done you should see something like this:

If you’re struggling to build an excel rule for your pages and your site follows a standard site.com/category/sub-category/product URL template then a really simple categorisation would be to just count the number of ‘/’s in the URL. It won’t tell you which category the URL belongs to but it will at least give you a basic categorisation of which level the page sits at. I really do think it’s worth the effort to a) learn excel and b) categorise your URLs well. The better data you can add at this stage the better your results will be.

Step 6 - Pivot table Excel Ninja goodness

Now, we need the magic of pivot tables to come to our rescue and tell us the aggregated information about our categories. I suggest that you pivot both sets of data separately to get the data from both sources. Your pivot should look something like this for both sets of data:

It’s important to note here that what we’re interested in is the COUNT of the links from webmaster central (i.e. the number of pages indexed) rather than the SUM (which is the default). Doing this for both sets of data will give you something like the following two pivots:

And:

Step 7 - Combine the two pivots

Now what we want to do is take the count of links from the first pivot (from webmaster central) and the sum of the visits from the second pivot (from Google Analytics), to produce something like this:

Generating the 4 columns on the right is really easy by just looking at the percentages and ratios of the first 3 columns.

Conclusions

25% of the crawl allowance accounts for only 2% of the overall organic traffic

So, what should jump out at us from this site here is that the ’search’ pages and ‘other’ pages are being quite aggressively crawled with 25% of the overall site crawl between them yet they only account for 2% of the overall search traffic. Now in this particular example this might seem like quite a basic thing to highlight - afterall a good SEO will be able to spot search pages being crawled by doing a site review but being able to back this up with data makes for good management-friendly reports and will also help analyse the scope of the problem. What this report also highlights is that if your site is maxing out it’s crawl allowance then reclaiming that 25% of your crawl allowance from search pages may lead to an increase in the number of pages crawled from your category pages which are the pages which pull in good search traffic.

Update: Patrick from Branded3 has just written a post on this very topic - Patrick’s approach using separate XML sitemaps for different site sections is well worth a read and complements what I’ve written about here very nicely.

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Linkscape Index Update and a Peek Behind the Curtains »

Posted by Nick Gerner

Last week we updated the Linkscape index, and we’ve been doing it again this week.  As I’ve pointed out in the past, up-to-date data is critical.  So we’re pushing everyone around here just about as hard as we can to provide that to you.  This time we’ve got updated information on over 43 billion urls, 275 million sub-domains, 77 million root domains, and 445 billion links.  For those keeping track, the next update should be around April 15.

I’ve got three important points in this post.  So for your click-y enjoyment:

• Fresh index size over time
• Linkscape processing pipeline
• What happened to the last update

Fresh Index Size Over Time

If you’ve been keeping track, you may have noticed a drop in pages and links in our index in the last two or three months.  You’ll notice that I call these graphs "Fresh Index Size", by which I mean that these numbers by and large reflect only what we verified in the prior month.  So what happened to those links?

Note: "March - 2" is the most recent update (since we had two updates this month!)

At the end of January, in response to user feedback, we changed our methodology around what we update and include.  One of the things we hear a lot is, "awesome index, but where’s my site?"  Or perhaps, "great links, but I know this site links to me, where is it?" Internally we also discovered a number of sites that generate technically distinct content, but with no extra value for our index.  One of my favorite examples of such a site is tnid.org.  So we cut pages like those, and made an extra effort to include sites which previously had been excluded.  And the results are good:

I’m actually really excited about this because our numbers are now very much in line with Netcraft’s survey of active sites.  But more importantly, I hope you are pleased too.

Linkscape Processing Pipeline

I’ve been spending time with Kate, our new VP of Engineering, bringing her up to speed about our technology.  In addition to announcing the updated data, I also wanted to share some of our discussions.  Below is a diagram of our monthly (well, 3-5 week) pipeline.

You can think of the open web as having essentially an endless supply of URLs to crawl, representing many petabytes of content. From that we select a much smaller set of pages to get updated content for on a monthly basis.  In large part, this is due to politeness considerations: there’s about 2.6 million seconds in a month, and most sites won’t tolerate fetching one page a second by a bot.  So we only can get updated content for so many pages in a month.

From the updated content we get, we discover a very large amount of new content, representing a petabyte or more of new data. From this we merge non-canonical forms, and remove duplicates, as well as synthesize some powerful metrics like Page Authority, Domain Authority, mozRank, etc.

Once we’ve got that data prepared, we drop our old (by then out of date) data, and push the updated information to our API.  On about a monthly basis we turn over about 50 billion urls, representing hundreds of terabytes of information.

What Happened To Last Week’s Update

In the spirit of TAGFEE, I feel like I need to take some responsibility for last week’s late update, and explain what happened.

One of the big goals we’ve got is to give fresh data.  One way we can do that is to shorten the amount of time between getting raw content and processing it.  That corresponds to the "Newly Discovered Content" section of the chart above.  For the last update we doubled the size of our infrastructure.  In addition to doubling the number of computers we have running around analyzing and synthesizing data, it actually increased the coordination between those computers.  If everyone has to talk to everyone else, and you double the number of people, you actually quadruple the number of relationships. This caused lots of problems we had to deal with at various times.

Another nasty side-effect of all of this was this made machine failures even more common than we experienced before.  If you know anything about Amazon Web Services and Elastic Computer Cloud then you know that those instances go down a lot :)  So we needed an extra four days to get the data out.

Fortunately we’ve taken this as an opportunity to improve our infrastructure, fault tolerance and lots of other good tech start-up buzz words.  Which is one of the reasons we’re able to get this update out so quickly after the previous one.

As always, we really appreciate feedback, so keep it coming!

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Whiteboard Friday - Click-Through-Rate and Usage Data in SEO »

Posted by great scott!

If a lot of people click on my listing in the search results, I’ll rank better, right?

Wrong.

This week’s Whiteboard Friday explores the common myth that the engines use click-through as a ranking signal for organic results.  Unlike paid traffic–in which the engines are incentivized to promote the most click-worthy results–click through is simply far too gameable to use reliably in organic search.  Watch the video for a more complete explanation of why it’s not worth your time to go madly click the crap out of your own results.

Can’t get enough SEO in video format?  Check out our brand new Advanced SEO Training Series: Tips, Tricks & Tactics 2. It’s a killer 8-disc set and you can save a ton with special release pricing available until April 3rd.

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When Conversion Rate Isn’t Enough »

Posted by Dr. Pete

The history of web analytics has read a bit like the quest for the Holy Grail. We’ve gone through a list of candidates searching for the one true metric: Hits, Page Views, Visitors, Unique Visitors… stopping at each one to admire its purity and virtue while denouncing the heresy of whatever metric it replaced (usually, one whose purity and virtue we were just praising the week before).

While drinking from the wrong Grail in analytics won’t melt your face like the bad guy in Indiana Jones 3, you may wish for some face-melting when you have to tell your boss how much money your bad conclusions just cost the company. This post will help you get control of your unhealthy obsession with Conversion Rate and avoid the most costly traps.

Conversion Rate Crash Course

Let’s start with some basics, both for the newcomers and because the industry doesn’t always agree on how to define terms:

There are many variations on conversion rate, and "Action" can mean just about anything – a click, a form submission, an RSS subscription, an actual sale – but let’s keep it simple for now. So, let’s say that for February your site received 10,000 visitors, and 450 of them took action:

Pretty simple, right? Don’t get me wrong – conversion rate is powerful, and it captures an important bottom-line measurement. Problem is, it’s just one number (well, ultimately, two numbers). So, what’s missing? To answer that question, I’d like you to consider three scenarios…

Scenario 1 – Sacrificing Traffic

This is a situation that comes up frequently in PPC management – cutting traffic to raise your conversion rate. Here are a few examples to illustrate the point:

All three of these cases have 5% CR, so they’re all the same, right? Of course not - all else being equal, anyone in their right mind would pick (C). Where people get into trouble is when they over-optimize for CR at the expense of traffic.

For example, let’s say you have a classic PPC scenario: (A) a campaign targeting branded keywords with low traffic and high CR, and (B) a campaign targeting product keywords with high traffic and low CR. Your client starts complaining about low CR, so what do you do? You cut spending in Campaign (B). CR goes up, but the unfortunate side effect is that traffic goes down and overall Actions (read that "sales") go down with it.

SOLUTION:
Pay attention to both conversion rate and overall leads or visitors. Once you collapse down to CR, you’ve lost the top and bottom numbers and are left with just a ratio. If you’re a PPC manager, set an acceptable Cost-Per-Action (CPA). Traffic within your CPA limit may be worth going after, even if CR isn’t ideal – traffic that costs more than your acceptable CPA may have to be sacrificed. Don’t just start chopping visitors to see CR go up.

Scenario 2 – Dropping Prices

Want the secret to increasing conversion? Cut your prices in half. What’s that? You say you’ll make a lot less money that way? Yes, you probably will. Of course, you’d never do anything that radical, but many people create sales, price pressures, and information architectures that drive people to the cheapest product. This can boost CR but cost you money.

Let’s look at an example – say you get 1,000 visitors per day, and experiment with pushing a cheaper product ($29) over a more expensive product ($99) to boost CR:

Looking at the CR, it’s great news: you doubled conversion. Unfortunately, your revenue also dropped 40%. There may be times when you’re willing to make this trade-off to draw in new customers, but make sure you have all of the information you need to make that business decision.

SOLUTION:
If you make a change that could drive visitors to lower-priced items, make sure you track not only CR but also changes in the average purchase amount. If you’re running an A/B testing scenario, consider tracking the mean or median purchase for both groups (use the median if your products span a wide price-range).

Scenario 3 – Losing Loyalty

An aggressive push to drive short-term conversion, including the pricing scenario above, could also lead to a drop in long-term revenue and customer loyalty.  If you offer a sweetheart deal that pulls in new customers, it’s possible that they’ll take advantage of that deal and disappear forever. Today’s Conversion Rate gain, if it’s driven by bargain hunters or impulse buyers, could be next month’s Conversion disaster.

That’s not to say that sales and short-term incentives are never a good idea. Driving traffic in the front door is essential to building long-term relationships. The core point is that, whenever you take an action that may change the quality of your customers (and not just the quantity), you need to look at the big picture.

SOLUTION:
These metrics are a bit beyond the scope of this post, but there are a number of Key Performance Indicators built around repeat buying and the lifetime value of a customer.  Whenever you pursue a short-term strategy, don’t just measure CR, measure whether those new buyers are one-hit wonders or have real staying power.

It’s Still Pretty Good

I don’t want to sound like I’m bashing Conversion Rate. I use it every day and have driven real, bottom-line improvements for clients based on CR metrics. We just have to remember to never get so enamored with one metric that we neglect the big picture. Every web metric that has ever existed or ever will exist is missing some critical piece of information for some set of situations and has the potential to lead us astray. Think about your objectives, think about the possible outcomes, and most of all, think about all of the analytics tools you need to see that big picture.

Special Offer – SEOmoz has just released our new Advanced SEO Training DVD series, "Tips, Tricks and Tactics 2". Buy it before April 3rd to Save $150 and get Free shipping!

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Creating an Online Video Strategy »

Posted by katemats

Hi SEOmoz community! 

Let me take a moment to introduce myself since this is my first post on the blog.  My name is Kate Matsudaira (Kate Mats for short), and I started here in November as VP Engineering for the fabulous technology team here at SEOmoz.  Before that I worked for an online video platform called Delve Networks - where I learned a lot about online video, how people are using it, and perhaps more relevant to this audience, how to make it work for your business.  All this experience working with lots of customers to get their video online has given me a lot of insight into the many different ways to use video, monetize video, and optimize it to deliver the highest ROI.  In this post I am going to lay out a few tips and tricks for getting started with a video content strategy.

Lots of us keep hearing about how video is such a compelling medium and a great way to engage your customers.  Not long ago Rand presented a Whiteboard Friday Video where he covers some of the basics around video SEO, like the trade offs between using a third party site, or hosting the video yourself.  In the following post, I hope to add a little more to that topic and talk about some additional strategies that combine these ideas - starting with a 3 step process to help you get started with creating a video strategy for your website

Step 1: Getting Video on Your Website

So you have decided you want to add video to your site - let’s talk about some potential strategies to make the most of your efforts.

There are two options central options for getting video on your site - you can choose a 3rd party or you can host the video yourself. 

Generally hosting video yourself is not recommended unless you have lots of technical resources at your disposal (there are lots of moving parts to a video hosting project including: hosting the files, serving up video and the resulting bandwidth costs, selecting and customizing a player, collecting metrics and analytics, etc) - it used to be that this was the best option, but that is no longer the case.  For most people choosing a 3rd party video platform is a better solution because they will offer better bandwidth costs, provide you lots of tools to manage your video and help create a compelling user experience. 

For this article I am going to assume you are choosing a third party platform and not building everything yourself (although if you were, some of the advice may still be relevant for your project).

Once you’ve chosen a platform (there are lots of options like YouTube, Delve Networks, Ooyala, Brightcove, Fliqz, and more - evaluating each of these could warrant a whole post in and of itself!) you have to think about your video strategy - do you just want video on your site, or do you want videos hosted off-site as well?

Step 2: Defining your strategy - should you host it or post it?

Once you’ve evaluated some options and feel like you know how to get video on your site, the next step is to decide should you just host the video on your site, post it to the video sharing sites, or both*.

* Note: I wouldn’t suggest posting the same video (in the same way) since you really want users to link to your website, not YouTube, for the same content, or you would want your site to show up in the SERPS instead of the video sharing site’s version of your content. But this is not a one size fits all recommendation and there may be cases where this is appropriate; such as when you pay to produce a high quality piece of content and want it on your web site, but want to take advantage of the traffic from a video sharing site - more on this below.

Everyone knows that sites like YouTube, MetaCafe, and DailyMotion get a lot of traffic, and that posting to these video sharing sites can be a great way to get exposure and expand your reach.

There are some clear advantages of these big video sharing sites including: 

• Easy to upload video
• No bandwidth costs
• Lots of traffic
• Easy to share (embed, email to friends, rss feeds, etc)

But there are also some disadvantages:

• Videos are watched on their site, not yours!
• Harder to monetize - if you are pursuing a video ad strategy to monetize your content this harder to do on big video sharing sites
• No link juice if people embed/share your video
• Limited analytics to understand user engagement, video bounce rate, etc
• Tend to be lower quality
• Ads appear on your content
• Limited length/duration

These sites can provide a powerful marketing channel to your site, brand and content. However, if your ultimate goal is conversions you need to have clear plan on how to get traffic and viewership on that track (and that for most of us, means back on your website).  This means that you need to think carefully about a strategy that makes sense. 

Here is a good list of questions that might help you pick a strategy that works for you.

• Do you want increased brand awareness?
• Are you planning to put ads on your content or charge a premium or pay per view model for your video?
• How are you going to get users to come to your site using your video?
• Are you concerned about bandwidth costs?
• Do you just want something simple, or is having a full fledged platform important to your business goals?
• Is your content long, or is high definitely/quality really important to you?
• Can you create entertaining or useful videos that would gain traction and views on a video sharing site?
• Or is your content very product specific and best used to help your current traffic convert?

Of course you don’t have to pick one or the other, you can use a hybrid strategy. Some ideas I’ve seen work well in practice include:

Put mini videos on YouTube, and the longer length content on your site.
This will act like a teaser and encourage users to come to the site for the rest of the content.

Here is an example of a Yoga web site trying to sell their DVDs - in this case they are trying to build up their YouTube brand (see the call to action encouraging users to subscribe), but are also trying to drive traffic to their site by enticing you with the first part of a DVD series.  =

YouTube compresses video to a lower quality, so you can offer an high definition or higher quality version on your site. 
This is particularly compelling for entertainment based content, or any content that would be thoroughly more enjoyable in full screen mode.

In this example, 4KidsTV offers a cartoon series that offers the lower quality versions on YouTube, but direct people to their site to watch the higher resolution content as seen below.

Offer relevant materials (articles, white papers, quizzes, etc) on your site that compliment the content in the video. 
Indicating this in the video description will encourage users to visit your site for additional information.

In this YouTube video, there are instructions on how to style your hair a particular way using Foxy Hair Extensions.  This user has several of these videos that are very useful and instructional, but they also encourage viewers to purchase the product in the video they are selling.

Put the same video on both YouTube and your site. 
Typically you would do this if you wanted to leverage the YouTube distribution channel, but you wanted something else that YouTube didn’t offer - for example some other video providers offer customizable players, substantial analytics, subtitles, etc - or perhaps you have limited resources and want to put the video both places. This strategy allows you to still take advantage of the audience on a big sharing site, but also gives you the ability to showcase the video content to your users as well.

If you are going to use the same video on both YouTube and your site - it is duplicate content in some sense (which in SEO is generally bad), but you can skirt "duplicate content" for video by having a different title/description when you post to YouTube vs. your own site.  And this approach could potentially get dual benefits (findability of content on YouTube + visibility on your site and ability to serve advertising/content/have video sitemaps/etc). 

If you do go this approach I recommend you think about your users - make sure your web site adds additional value in supplemental, relevant content or a superior experience.  And also make sure that the video you are using is designed to help your strategy - if you want more brand recommendation make sure your video showcases your brand in the content, if you want to drive your users to take an action make sure that call to action is clear in the video, etc. 

One thing you might want to stay away from is having the the exact same video on your homepage (or the landing page you are steering people to via your video). In general it wouldn’t be a great feeling for a user who watched the video, to go looking for more information and see the exact same video they just watched - you need to give them something different and relevant.  For best results, drive people to a specific landing page or microsite (with a very short and easy to remember url) via your video that is tailored to the actions and conversions you want them to take (and this also allows you to track the traffic coming to that page since users have to type in links and can’t click on them in the video).

Finally, it is also important to pick the right content for this strategy.  This means creating content that drives your objectives. For example, choose a video that will showcase your brand - that way if it is embedded elsewhere it will carry your branding along to those sites.  Having your url or landing page url actually in the video content will show viewers where to go to get more information or similar content.  Give them call to actions - tell them what they get if they go to your site - tease them with more content, make it clear what you want them to do.
 

Step 3: You have a plan, now optimize it!

There are several pieces to optimizing your video marketing - since several of these are likely worth of a whole post, in the interest of brevity I have broken it down into two areas: the video itself, and the metadata for the video (either on your site or the video sharing site).

For the video: 

• Showcase your brand in the video.
  Edit your videos to showcase your brand in the introduction (pre-roll), or in an overlay like a sub-title (these are easy to add with most video editing software), or in a backdrop in the content (think about interviewing people in front of a big canvas with your brand on it - like celeb pictures at movie reviews).  These can be very effective since your branding will travel with the video.  Videos sharing sites make it very easy to share (now, there is a compelling statement!) and could end up embedded or ripped on lots of other sites, or in search results, etc. Thus, adding your branding to the video file itself ensures that your company information, brand, or website URL travel along with your content.
• Use descriptive filenames.
  When you create a video some cameras will name files things like a234rt.mp4, this isn’t terribly useful to search engines.  So just like using descriptive names for your images, renaming your videos to something more meaningful (i.e. dog-walking.mp4) will help with video SEO efforts.
• Add a call to action at the end of the video.
  Make it clear to users what to do next — give them your website address, send them to a link to learn more, direct them to similar videos on your site.  This is your great chance to steer them where you want them to go.  Make it clear to the user what they get if they go to your site.
• Make your audio clear!
  A recent NPR story noted that YouTube engineers are creating automated video transcripts to aid in video search. Having clear, understandable audio will help get more accurate transcripts (which not only improves searchability but also accessibility for hearing-impaired users).  This is also great for regular users, too, since sometimes it is hard to hear when you have poor quality audio, multiple sources talking at the same time, or music playing during someone’s dialogue.
• Think about the duration of your content.
  Some video sharing sites, like YouTube, limit content to 10 minutes, but generally breaking up your video into small digestible chunks will make it both better for the user (they don’t have to watch 10 minutes on a topic they don’t care about to get to the 3 minute segmented they are truly interested in viewing) and give you more unique and (hopefully) compelling content.  Plus if you are using a 3rd party solution this can help minimize bandwidth costs.
• Add text titles, textual graphics, and other text in your videos.
  Much like OCR technology Google is employing new technology to help understand video, so if you put captions and other textual elements into your videos that can help both users and search engines (think about these elements like headings used in news broadcasts)
• Create interesting content.
  In general this should go without saying; but I figured I should state it clearly since I have had someone say "I don’t understand why people aren’t watching my [very boring and dry] commercial on product X"

And the metadata:

• Fill out all of the information fields.
  If there are fields to be completed like title and description, make sure you fill them out (and use your keywords where appropriate).  Use the same approach you’d employ when optimizing your web pages for SEO; video search is very similar to classic web search.  Don’t leave any information blank since this is how the video sharing sites expose your content to their audience.   
• Use descriptive and catchy titles.
  This helps users know what your video is about and can assist with viral efforts.  Using keywords in your title, description and tags will make it easier for users to find and discover your content - and they can help you rank higher for those keywords.  But like most things in SEO, don’t go overboard - pick a few relevant keywords/tags to focus on that will have the most relevance to users viewing that video. (For example, if you made a video on how to cook pancakes, but you are trying to drive traffic to your kitchen supplies e-commerce site - keywords like pancakes, cooking, etc are probably better choices than "griddle" because they are far more relevant to the user)
• Take the time to setup a profile, channel, etc.
  Like Twitter and Facebook, taking the time to fill out your profile and make it meaningful will help users understand your brand and can help you gain more traffic share on the video sharing sites.  Many of the video sharing sites make use of channels, so having a channel with organized content gives your account credibility - generally like other community based websites being part of the community will improve your visibility and spending time on these sharing communities should fit into your overall video strategy.
• Choose a good thumbnail.
  It is the first thing users see and plays an important role on whether they click or not.  Make sure you try to pick a thumbnail that is compelling and relevant.  You could probably write a whole post on picking compelling thumbnails, but at a basic level, use common sense and try to answer the question "what photo best encapsulates the content of my video?"
• Put meaningful content around the video.
  If you put the video on your site, having great indexable and meaningful content around the video will help search engines understand the context of the video and related content.  This is also great for your users.  For example, if you have a video on making pancakes, content about pancakes, the history of pancakes, or recipes would all be great surrounding content.  For interviews, a summary or other relevant articles would be helpful for the user.  And in some cases, transcripts of the video make *excellent* accompanying content.
• Create a transcript.
  Some video sharing sites allow you to submit transcripts, there are also some players that allow you to share this with users.  This can help a lot with content since transcripts can be understood and indexed by search engines.  And if accessibility is a concern for you, creating transcripts is likely hugely beneficial to your customers in the first place.
• Submit a video sitemap to Google.
  This is the easiest way to increase your chances of your video showing up in Google search results. You can find more information on that at Google Webmaster Support. [Special tip for those of you reading this in detail: if you want to drive users to your site and only have the thumbnail show up in search results make sure and set the parameter allow_embed="no" ]
• Take advantage of mRSS and HTML 5.
  There are lots of great attributes you can specify for the video including things like tags, that make it easier for the search engines to understand and index your content.  And with mRSS you can submit the feed to Google, so as soon as you publish new video it will be pushed to them - just like RSS and your blog! 

Once you get it on the page, and you spend some time optimizing your content for maximum usability and impact - make sure you have setup some sort of way to measure you success.  You should certainly pay attention to views (even better if you can get more detailed video engagement metrics), but many platforms offer even more detailed metrics to help you measure and track the effectiveness of your strategy.

That should be a good first set of things to do to get started with a video strategy.  And of course, this is just the beginning there are lots of options and many creative ways to leverage this compelling medium to aid your goals.

If you liked this information or found it useful or have thoughts on video related topics you would like to learn more about, I would love to hear your feedback so please post it in the comments!

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The Advanced SEO Training Series: Tips, Tricks & Tactics 2 is Here! »

Posted by great scott!

The SEOmoz Advanced SEO Training Series is back with our latest installment, Tips, Tricks & Tactics 2!  Picking up where Volume 1 (now in it’s second printing) left off, Volume 2 is bigger, badder and loaded with 8 discs worth of training material to advance your SEO skills.

Intended for those seeking to learn high-level, scalable, enterprise SEO tactics and strategies to push their knowledge to the next level, this brand new series offers 14 all-new advanced presentations plus updated editions of two of the most popular modules from Volume 1.  Filmed live in London, UK before an international audience representing over a dozen countries, this series will teach you priceless SEO strategies that you can apply whether your audience is hyper-local or spans the globe.

Until Saturday, April 3rd, you can get Tips, Tricks & Tactics 2 for just $449 (that’s $150 off the regular price of $599) and we’ll include FREE Worldwide Shipping.  That’s less than 1/3 of what most industry conferences cost, and you can share this among your entire team (no travel expenses either).

Want to save even more?  SEOmoz PRO Members only pay $299 ($449 regularly). Do the math and you’ll see that this is a great opportunity to get the brand new Advanced SEO Training Series: Tips, Tricks & Tact, try SEOmoz PRO and save a ton of money at the same time.  Still want more? Keep reading to the bottom of the post for an extremely limited offer that’ll save you over $400…

If you’re ready to learn a ton of immediately actionable, advanced strategies you can start using right away, then Tips, Tricks & Tactics 2 is one of the best training investments you can make this year.

Video quality not representative of actual DVD content

Special Bonus Offer (while supplies last)…

Ultimate Advanced SEO Bundle: Tips, Tricks & Tactics Volumes 1+2 - Only $549 ($399 PRO)

For an extremely limited time, if you order Tips, Tricks & Tactics 2, you can get Volume 1 for only $100 more (regularly $499)!  We’ve only printed a couple hundred DVD copies of of this six-disc, 17 module series (the original printing sold out within weeks) specifically for this bundle.

Together, Tips, Tricks & Tactics Volumes 1+2 provide over 20 hours of top-notch, advanced strategies. This unrivaled education in SEO is an absolute must have for organizations, agencies, or individuals anxious to rapidly advance their search marketing know-how.

Get the
Ultimate Advanced SEO Bundle
, an $1,095 value, for only $549 (or $399 for PRO Members)!  Remember, this offer is limited to quantities on-hand and will go quickly…also, this special pricing and free shipping is only available until Saturday, April 3rd, so order fast.

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Link Magnets: A New Paradigm in Link Acquisition »

Posted by randfish

This morning I gave a presentation at SES New York on a session entitled "How to Become a Link Magnet." Below, I’ve copied the presentation into this post and hope to create some context around it.

In my opinion, the "link magnet" concept, however it’s phrased, is one of the most powerful and important to understand for companies who want a true strategic advantage from their link graph profile. For a long time, SEOs have recommended the creation of "linkbait" content or "high quality content" in order to naturally attract links from the web’s link-able population (those who have places to publish on the web that could include a linking or sharing activity - Facebook, Twitter, blogs, media publications, hobby websites, etc.).

Magnetism is link acquisition is the idea that rather than simply producing and hoping people like it enough to link, you build a true incentive for them to do so. Incentives can range across the psychological spectrum (but shouldn’t venture into the financial). You might, for example, build a resource that ranks the top 50 tourist destinations in New Orleans, contact each of them to tell them they’ve won, and provide them with a great-looking badge to help show off their new accolade. Their websites now all have an incentive to link to your article, as they can take pride in the award (and possibly be rewarded with more visitors who’ll want to take a trip).

In the presentation below, I walk through this in a more visual way and show some examples:

How to be a Link Magnet: SES NY 2010

The examples from the embedded deck include:

• Vimeo - the online video sharing site has a great looking player and each time it’s embedded, they earn 3 links back to their site by default. Linkers are rewarded by having the attractive player, easy functionality and solid uptime Vimeo provides. This is a classic widget-reward strategy that sites like Scribd (see the presentation above for example), Docstoc, Slideshare and many others employ.
• OKCupid’s Blog - one of the few pieces of content that I’d describe as both "linkbait" and a "link magnet." The content is so unique, so appealing to a wide swath of humanity (who among us isn’t interested in the science of attraction?) and so well documented as to be rewarding to those who share. When I personally tweeted about some content from them a few months back, I saw great responses on Twitter, more retweets and more followers. That’s how publishers want to position content - as a way to earn a reward if/when you share it.
• Techmeme’s Leaderboard - when Techmeme added this feature, they had links from dozens of the listed sites within hours. Today, nearly all of those who appear, have linked to the page at one time or another, and some even do so on every page of their blog. It’s a way for those listed to show that they’re a "serious" source and a well-regarded one.
• SimplyHired - The job site uses a research content embed strategy that more folks need to be adopting. By performing any combination of searches around salaries or popularity, you can retrieve a graph showing the trendline and numbers. Embedding the graph widget on your site creates a link back to SimplyHired and bolsters your credibility whenever you’re trying to make a point about a job/industry’s value or historical performance.

I’ve talked previously about this type of link acquisition strategy being built into the product process, but I hope this presentation has been valuable in showing off even more about what can be accomplished and why it’s so critical.

Looking forward to your comments and questions as always (and to my three other sessions here at SES: NY)!

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Using Bespoke Products & Services To Build Links »

Posted by Tom_C

I was at a recent client meeting for a new project and we were brainstorming ideas. After considering all kinds of wacky schemes, plots, techniques and tactics we came up with what is, in essence, a very simple linkbuilding technique. In the interests of openess I wanted to share it with you, I’m just nice like that. :-)

This idea works best when you are working in an industry where the value of the items that you are selling is high, and the object is somewhat unusual, distinctive or customised. Examples of businesses which might fit this category:

• Antiques dealers
• Bespoke interior decorators
• Painters
• Bespoke aquarium builders
• Photographers
• Landscape gardners

If your site is within one of these niches then the basic premise is as follows:

"When your clients have purchased something from you which is unusual or distinctive they are often happy to link back to you. This is especially true for high-value items."

A Real Life Example

Disclaimer: Distilled built and designed the Aquarium Architecture website but we are not involved in their SEO. The below is an illustrative example. Also, I love aquariums so it’s a win-win :-)

Those of you who are paying attention will notice that I carefully slipped "bespoke aquarium builders" into the list above. The reason being that Aquarium Architecture are just such a company - they design and build bespoke high-value, custom-install aquariums. To give you a flavour of what I’m talking about:

Pretty aren’t they?

Anyway - while you’re all drooling over the nice pretty fish I’m going to talk about how they can get links out of the work they do. The website doesn’t have prices on but you can imagine the kind of money you need to get one of these aquariums. So the buying process is often a long and involved affair where clients will want to ensure every little detail is correct. Because of the intimate relationship which Aquarium Architecture have with their clients it should simple to build into their process at some point, asking for a link to their site. Obviously, this isn’t going to be applicable for all clients (the above image was taken from an installation in a professional footballer’s house, and he doesn’t even have his own website) but they do a reasonable amount of business with Pubs, Hotels and the like. These businesses DO have websites and would provide valuable links.

Remember To Add Value

When building a link building campaign however you should always remember that you’ll get more links if you can add value to the linker. Therefore I don’t suggest that Aquarium Architecture simply ask for a link. Instead, I’d recommend that as part of the process a case study is built on the site for each new client which shows off photos of the aquarium along with making-of shots and/or design sketches. They’ve already done this to a limited extent as you can see here:

So now, not only do Aquarium Architecture have a direct and intimate relationship with their clients but they also have now built some content on their site which the client has a motivation to link back to. If you were building this process for an antiques website instead of an aquariums website you might want to include the history of the particular antique item on the case study page. These kinds of case study pages can be really high value and are a natural place for the client to link to. Not to mention the fact that you’re building out website content all the time to help long-tail rankings and you’re constantly adding testimonials which will help conversion rates. Win-win-win!

Or, Alternatively, Why Not Make Some News?

Of course, manually building links is hard work, even when you have a process like above. Therefore you might also want to consider taking some of the more unusual/remarkable/impressive contracts and craft a news story out of it. Again, the Aquarium Architecture guys did this well (again, nothing that Distilled was involved with):

The above story appeared in the Daily Express in the UK and is a fine example of the kind of linkbait that you can create when you have products of such a unique and high-value nature. Unfortunately in the above example Aquarium Architecture didn’t get a link out of the story but there are plenty of ways you can go about getting links from this kind of thing.

Key Takeaways

So I completely understand that not all clients or websites will be able to do this kind of thing but hopefully even if you can’t follow this exact process you can gain some insights into how you might build a process into your existing business practices to help your company build links.

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Whiteboard Friday - Faceted Navigation »

Posted by great scott!

So last week Eric Enge interviewed everybody’s favorite Spam Cop, Matt Cutts (not to be confused with everybody’s favorite Axe Cop), about all sorts of juicy Googleyness. You can read the whole enchilada over at Stone Temple, or view an illustrated version Rand put together (I recommend you do both, it’s really good material).

The interview shed a lot of light but also inspired some confusion and questions, especially about how much of a site Big G will or won’t crawl.  If you’ve got a big site, say an e-commerce site with lots of flexible navigation and categorization, this could be a big problem for you. Fear not!  This week’s Whiteboard Friday will show you a clean, simple way to allow for both great usability for your visitors and compact, straightforward crawlability for the engines.

You might also want to check out this older, but relevant post on diagrams for understanding crawl priority.

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Announcing the New SEOmoz Toolbar - Plus 5 New Features »

Posted by adamf

First, let me make a quick introduction. Normally, I spend my time focused on new products at SEOmoz, working with a great team of people that design and build our new tools and features. Today I am excited to use my first blog post to announce our new SEO toolbar for Firefox, and tell you about some of the powerful features we have added.

As a quick reminder, all of these new features are free, and will be available to anyone who downloads the Firefox SEO Toolbar!  However, we still reserve advanced link data for PRO members.

So, on to the features. To add a little color to my descriptions, I’ve also asked some SEO experts you may recognize to preview the toolbar and talk about how they use the new features.

1. New SERP Overlay

This new Search Engine Results Page overlay was designed to offer the most relevant link data without getting in the way. You can now use our toolbar to see which search results are getting the most links, and click Explore to run a full analysis in Open Site Explorer. To turn on this overlay, click the settings button on the toolbar, and select SERP Overlay.

"I get the best ‘feel’ for abstract metrics by seeing them in familiar places. I find it easiest to understand the new metrics by seeing them on search results I’m familiar with; as an added bonus, this is one of the most helpful analyses you can do when looking at a new SERP for the first time." –Will Critchlow

2. Page Authority and Domain Authority

Page Authority and Domain Authority have taken their place as the primary metrics in the toolbar. These two predictive metrics will give you the best indication of how authoritative pages and domains are. If you miss having mozRank and mozTrust available at a glance, don’t despair!  You can add these back into the toolbar by selecting them from the settings menu.

3. Surf Like a Search Engine

We have added new settings that allow you to hide images, turn off JavaScript, and even set your user agent. This will help you see pages like the search engines do, and identify potential bad page behaviors. And just to help out, we’ve added a handy little overlay to keep you aware of when any of these features are set. Just click the link in the overlay and all of your settings will return to normal.

"The new user agent switching means I’ve removed another plug-in from Firefox. I love my SEO plugins but I also think there’s such a thing as having too many. Go for simplicity is what I always say. Special love goes out to disable JavaScript, too – I actually caught a nice bit of hidden link spam with this last week! Disable images is a sure fire way to check out the image alt attributes on a web page too. Nice." –Richard Baxter

"I don’t want to take credit for an awesome feature. OK. I want to take credit for an awesome feature. After constantly forgetting I was surfing as googlebot and getting chucked out of Google calendar etc I asked for this feature and it’s just as awesome as I hoped it would be. " 

4. New Data in the Analyze Page Overlay

Our analyze page overlay has also been enhanced with a number of new, useful data points, including

• Page Download Time – this becomes more important with Google’s announcement that speed matters.
• Text to Code Ratio – Is there more code on your page than content? Don’t make the search engines sift through too much code to find the relevant content.
• HTTP status codes – Find out the status code of the current page, and learn which redirects were involved in getting you there.

"The overlay is still the most valuable thing for me. I must use it 5+ times every day to get quick info about how many links are on a page, whether it’s using rel="canonical" or whether the keywords are properly included in the right page elements. I hate using ‘view source’ and searching through code; overlay FTW!" –Rand Fishkin

"The http status codes feature is my favourite new addition to the tool. There’s not more reloading and hunting through LiveHTTPHeaders reports - this lets me very easily see the redirect route taken in getting to the current page." –Rob Ousbey

5. Quick Access to Tools from SEOmoz and Third Parties

The tools dropdown has been expanded to include fast access to the latest SEOmoz tools as well as a wealth of other helpful resources, including traffic data, Twitter tools, and domain info.
 

I hope you enjoy the new toolbar. Please give it a try, and be sure to send feedback so we can keep making it better. You can easily send feedback by clicking on the light bulb icon on the toolbar.

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An Illustrated Guide to Matt Cutts’ Comments on Crawling & Indexation »

Posted by randfish

Late last week, Eric Enge of Stone Temple (and a co-author of mine on The Art of SEO) published a fascinating interview with Google’s head of Webspam, Matt Cutts. I think the whole of the SEO community can agree that Matt taking time for these types of interviews is phenomenal and I can only hope he does more of them in the future. Understanding more about Google’s positions, their technology and their goals will benefit website creators and marketers dramatically.

The interview itself is certainly worth a read, but as one mozzer noted to me during the email string on the subject "I’m embarassed to say I couldn’t make it all the way through." Fair enough; and that’s why I’m presenting Matt’s primary points in graphical, cartoon format. I’ve also included some adlibbing, interpretation and fun into these. Only the bits surrounded by quotes were actually taken directly from Matt’s words, so please do keep in mind that this is my opinion of what Matt means (along with the occassional editorial).

#1 - There is No Hard Indexation Cap; But Indexation Has Limits

#2 - Duplicate Content Might Hurt Your Indexation

#3 - Lots of Qualifiers on Whether Affiliate Links Count

#4 - 301 Redirects Pass Some, But Not All of a Page’s Link Juice

#5 - Low Quality, Non-Unique Pages Might Drop Your Indexation

#6 - Faceted Navigation and PageRank Sculpting are Thorny Issues

Personally, I liked how much Eric pushed Matt with scenarios that would require some advanced methods of showing faceted navigation to users but not search engines. However, I also understand that Matt needs to take a position that’s right for 95% of site owners 95% of the time or risk creating a new "PR sculpting" issue.

One other item that really stood out and got me excited was this response:

Matt Cutts: (with regard to links in ads) Our stance has not changed on that, and in fact we might put out a call for people to report more about link spam in the coming months. We have some new tools and technology coming online with ways to tackle that. We might put out a call for some feedback on different types of link spam sometime down the road.

That sounds really good - a huge frustration for the SEO world has been the fact that so many SEOs perceive their competitors to be outranking them with black/gray hat linking techniques and feel they must engage as well is order to stay competitive. Shutting this down or making SEOs feel that Google is taking consistent action when obvious manipulation is reported would go a long way to quelling this thorny problem.

My last recommendation is that you check out Eric’s 29 Tidbits from my Interview with Matt Cutts; a post that summarizes a lot of the critical information and takeaways quite neatly.

To end, I thought I’d add the four questions I wish Eric would have asked Matt (maybe next time!):

1. With Google’s new recognition of internal anchor links and listings of those URLs in the search results, is it still safe to link to internal anchors on pages and trust that the link juice will flow to the page as a whole, or are content blocks inside individual pages now being treated as unique entities?
2. With the handling of nofollow changing and Google crawling/executing Javascript, what’s the best way to link to a document on the web so human visitors can access it but search engines cannot WITHOUT wasting link juice/PageRank (robots.txt, for example, couldn’t do this) or cloaking?
3. Does Google now (or will you in the future) consider the sharing/linking activities happening on Twitter, Facebook, etc. to have any impact on the overall link graph of the web (assuming we’re talking only about those links that don’t make their way onto standard web documents)?
4. When people ask the question, "why is my competitor ranking so well with low quality/manipulative links?" you often reply that they should be careful in presuming that Google hasn’t already discounted the value of spammy links and the competitor is actually ranking on the basis of quality link sources. This creates an environment where marketers are constantly trying to discern which links pass value and which don’t - could you give advice for relatively savvy, experienced SEOs to help them make those determinations so they can pursue the right links and stop paying spammers for the wrong ones?

If you’ve got thoughts to share, questions outstanding from the interview or my amateur drawings or things you wish Eric had asked Matt, feel free to post them below.

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Using Anchor Links to Make Google Ignore The First Link »

Posted by Errioxa

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.

In the past, I have tried several different ways to skip the first link that Google takes into account for a given URL (nofollowed links, links with 301 redirections, etc). However, all these attempts had little success (301 works but it’s very suspect). Recently, I ran a test to see how Google handled the anchor links (links to different sections within the same page, eg: <a rel="nofollow" href="http://example.com/index.php#anything)">example.com/index</a> and was surprised by the results I found. In the setup I tested, Google completely ignored the first standard link and instead credited the second anchor link.

The Test

For my test, I included several links on a page (Page A),

• the first link is a simple link. (<a href="http://example.com/category/product.php">text</a>)
• the second and third link are anchor links. (<a href="http://example.com/category/product.php#anchor-example">other text</a>)

Or in graphic form: 

Results for Test 1

If you search for the first linked text we can see that we don’t get the results of the destination page (Page B) . This link is not an ‘anchor link’, this link is a link to a ’simple URL’ (that´s how I named it) but it is ignored.

SERP for first link: simple link (no # mark)

Instead, Google takes the next two anchor links (this and this) and shows the page they point to in the results. Although the apparent ignoring of the first link is odd, the way the link is displayed is even weirder. As you can see the URL that shows in the SERPs (See red box in image above) does not take to the anchor link, but to the simple link.

SERP for second link: anchor link (#)

SERP for third link: anchor link (#) 

Results for Test 2

SERP for first link: simple link

SERP for second link: anchor link (#)

I ran two more tests to see if the test could be reproduced. Both of the other tests had the same results!

Conclusion

It is interesting to see the impact that link order has on rankings. Keep this in mind going forward and I hope you find this as interesting as I did.

Note from Jen: Errioxa had an updated version in the queue that I missed that explains this all a bit better. I have updated this post with the new version. 3/16/10

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I Want To Be Like Rhea Drysdale »

Posted by Sarah Bird, Esquire

May It Please the Mozzers,

I haven’t written on the blog in months, but I simply couldn’t let today pass by without acknowledging the courage and perserverance shown by Rhea Drysdale in her pursuit of justice. She’s my hero and I want to be just like her–A woman of action and humble fortitude.

Rhea announced victory against Jason Gambert in a trademark dispute lasting more than two years. She fought to prevent "SEO" from becoming trademarked for one mysterious man’s private use. She fought on behalf of all of us who work in the SEO industry. Like many of you, I feel sad and ashamed I couldn’t do more to support Rhea–but we’ve had other legal trouble to sort out at SEOmoz that consumes our limited legal resources. :( 

Lawsuits are expensive, stressful, and very time consuming. There is nothing glamorous or certain about them. Even when you’re in the right, you have to keep worrying about whether justice will prevail, and whether you’ll be broke or demoralized before it finally does.

I’m feeling really jazzed and happy today because Rhea has bolstered my belief in people, the SEO industry, and the justice system. As Joanna Lord said earlier, "Its a good industry-day folks, good industry day :)"  It just feels warm-and-fuzzy to work in a community of people like Rhea who sacrifice a lot without hope of any financial gain. And of people like Aaron Wall, Michael VanDeMar, Barry Schwartz and many others who’ve publically supported and recognized Rhea for her efforts both today and in the past.

I just wanted everyone out there in blogland to know that we have a big crush on Rhea and a big crush on the SEO industry. It’s so great to see everyone coming together to support Rhea and recognize what she’s done for all of us.

You can show your support by helping Rhea recoup some of her legal fees. She’s updating her blog with the best way to donate to her (without inadvertently giving her some tax grief!) on the OutSpokenMedia blog.

Group Hug!

Sarah Bird

Chief Operations officer and Erstwhile Legal Blogger

SEOmoz, Inc.

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Double Your Fun with Double the SEOmoz API »

Posted by Nick Gerner

I know, I promised a Linkscape update by last week.  And I missed it.  But there’s an update today!  Do you forgive me?  No?  Not enough?  Well how about doubling the volume of data available in our free API?  You might have gotten a totally awesome email last week announcing that the free SEOmoz API is now serving up to 1,000 links.  This email was so awesome I just had to share it (nice work Scott!)

• Up to 1,000 links to a page, subdomain or root domain (sorted by Page Authority of the linking page)
• Anchor text for those 1,000
• Aggregate anchor text counts across all links in our index
• HTTP status code
• nofollow indicators
• Plenty of metrics for data junkies

We’ve got a community submissions page on our wiki, and we love to share neat apps.  So if you build something on our API, send it our way and we’ll make sure the community hears about it.

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Data Visualization Techniques »

Posted by willcritchlow

Rob and Duncan are currently in Seattle, with this week full of interviews of SEO consultants for our US office. Since the announcement in February, we have been working flat out with a bunch of new clients and dealing endlessly with the US immigration service. With people on the ground, I guess we’re now officially participating in the American dream, so to celebrate I’m going to spell Visualization with a z throughout this post. I can’t guarantee full American spelling for everything I’m afraid - muscle memory is a powerful thing.

Anyone who has heard me speak will know about my love of data. Heck, I’ve even given talks on Excel ninjas. However, this post isn’t so much about the data (and that’s the last mention of Excel, I promise). This post is about the visualization.

I expect that everyone in SEO has spent at least some time recently thinking about data visualization techniques. They are great ways for content and data sites to get links and branding benefit and are also loads of fun. Tom’s resource for information visualization and infographics is a great place to start if you don’t really know what I’m talking about.

Last week, I was approached by the FT to pull together some data for them about the use of the web (and social media in particular) across the UK’s political parties as we approach the election. As I started thinking about how I wanted to shape this, I realised that I wanted to produce a visualization for the web as well and that the process I was using might be interesting to you guys. Hence, my top tips for data visualizations with bits and pieces of real world examples:

7 Data Visualization Secrets

1. Gather data (intelligently)

Over the weekend, I had a bit of a think about what kind of data I wanted to be able to visualize. Thinking about Twitter, for example, I wanted to know things like the most influential (and least influential) Twitterers in each party, who was doing things really well and who was making a pig’s ear of it, who could I compare unfavourably to some comedy joke accounts and how did the best of them compare to the Prime Minister’s wife’s pretty impressive performance.

In order to answer any of these questions, I needed data, and lots of it. Obviously, had I been working on this on a weekday, I’d have looked around for the newest recruit in the Distilled office and asked for the data on my desk by the end of the day. Without that option at the weekend, I fired up Mozenda to grab Twittering MPS, their grader ranks, retweetranks, and tweetranks along with follower counts, number of tweets and profile information. It took me about half an hour to gather all this information!

Tip #1: use tools like Mozenda to mash up your own data with multiple sources of public data to get unique insights.

If you haven’t played with Mozenda yet, I highly recommend it - with a simple user interface for creating robust crawlers, it’s a superb tool for any SEO.

2. Delegate additional research

There are some things that even the best scraping engine in the world can’t gather for you. For example, I wanted to cross-reference the data I’d gathered against the cabinet and shadow cabinet. Only a human can do this reliably. For this, I recommend using a virtual assistant service for cheap data gathering (I use timesvr - in the US, you could use mechanical turk for this kind of thing).

I discovered an awesome service the other day - Smartsheet integrates with Google Apps and has an integration with Mechanical Turk that enables you to easily populate tabular spreadsheet data using cheap human resource. Unbelievably useful and powerful.

3. Use great design

I’m not a designer. My design sense is about as well-tuned as my singing. I think this makes me appreciate the importance and value of design even more. Since I’m not the expert here, I’m just going to tell you what works for me when getting other people to make things look pretty:

• Wireframes are your friend: although I hate paper for almost everything, I used to always sketch ideas on paper. Recently I have been a late convert to the power of drawing wireframes on the computer. I am, however, definitely sold. Choose your weapon of choice - I’m currently liking MockingBird but have also seen cool stuff from (Balsamiq, gliffy, Pencil (a Firefox plugin - thanks Simon Lilly) and Mockflow)..
• Pay attention to the users of your data: carefully consider the width, colour scheme and any associated links in the embed code to make the most of embedding opportunities
• Get professionals involved early: don’t lock your limited-design-skills-self in a darkened room only to emerge with something that even a pro couldn’t make look pretty. When you’re at the wireframe / outline stage, show what you have to a designer and get feedback before kicking off the final data collection and design phases
• Brief as well as possible:  provide a few examples of the style you are looking for and visual elements you particularly like. Include comments about anything you don’t like in the examples you provide. Try not to be that guy who says I just don’t like it - can’t quite put my finger on why…

The example wireframe that follows is for entertainment only. Any relationship to real infographics real or imagined is coincidental:

If you are including graph-based data, choose your charts carefully (tip: pie charts are often bad). I found this neat flow-chart for choosing what style of graph to use the other day - from Advanced Presentations by Design by Andrew Abela:

4. Consider interactivity for widgets

Any time you are working with data online, you have opportunities to provide your users with interactivity. Sometimes, static infographics are plenty enough to get links and sometimes you will get significantly more if you are providing a widget that allows people to offer their visitors interesting functionality.

You don’t always have to build this yourself. We recently started working with Tableau Software whose business intelligence software has a kick-ass free, public version that is really cool for just dropping in data and creating widgets for embedding. Here’s a subset of the UK politicians on Twitter data:

Sheet 1

5. Quirky is at least as important as correct

You all read the internet. You know the power of random facts, cute animals, in-jokes and comedy references. It’s generally not enough to present just the raw facts - interesting comparisons and strong imagery improve the shareability of any piece. We are all wired to remember (and therefore to repeat) comparisons better than plain numbers.

I’m still working on which elements of my infographic might make for quirky comparisons. For example, did you know that an Oscar is the same height as an adult pygmy marmoset monkey? From a client’s recent Oscars infographic:

Source: LocateTV

6. Know who your targets are

Finishing on a couple of strong SEO points, if your goals are improved rankings, you are doing this primarily for links (and if you are doing it for branding purposes, the sharing is critical). So you need to know who your targets are and find a way to reach them. If your target market happens to overlap with Reddit, StumbleUpon etc. then they are obviously going to be great, but don’t forget to drop people in your niche a line as well.

Bonus tip: don’t forget the infographic fans.

7. Provide the embed code (with a link)

You want to provide the embed code for two reasons:

1. to make it easy for non-tech-savvy bloggers to share your content
2. to make sure (as far as possible) that you get a link out of it

If you can style and include the link in a relevant way (especially if it links to more data or more information) you increase the chance that the people embedding your content will embed the link along with it. If you want to go even further, you could provide your graphic under a Creative Commons Attribution license.

Please keep the comments for discussions of techniques and ideas, not for politics. Any political comments included above are for amusement only and may or may not reflect the political views of the author, or anyone else.

Technorati Tags

data, visualization, graphics, infographics

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Whiteboard Friday - When Optimizing, DON’T Test Everything »

Posted by great scott!

Test, test, test! That’s the mantra these days. Conversion Rate Optimization is the buzzword on everybody’s lips (and tweets). So why are we telling you NOT to test?  Well, we’re not, we’re just saying to be smart about it.

People often get a testing platform ready to roll and then start obsessing over just how intricate they can get with multi-variate tests…it’s a walk before you crawl scenario. Start with the big picture: A/B tests of major page layouts, even MVTs on major design changes. Those things can yield MAJOR uplifts in conversions and they’re the things you need to focus on before you worry about what color font you use in your H1 tag and the 0.0001% lift you get from it.

We’re not saying small changes and new recipes from complex MVTs can’t yield meaningful results, we’re just saying to start with the big picture and work on the details later.

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