Whiteboard Friday - Facebook’s Open Graph WON’T Replace Google »

Posted by great scott!

Earlier this week Facebook announced its ‘Open Graph’ at F8. There was all sorts of hubbub (much of it the bye-product of well-orchestrated buzz) about Facebook finally making strides to kill Google’s dominance of the web.  So should you hangup your white hat, your black hat, your grey hat, and trade it all in for a blue hat?  Much as we love Facebook, the answer, dear reader, is no: SEO is not dead. 

Watch this week’s video to hear Rand’s take on how Facebook’s ‘Open Graph’ will impact web marketing and all the ways it won’t.  There are all sorts of opportunities that will likely emerge out of this new technology, so you should pay attention. So go ahead and keep an eye out for a nice fitting blue hat in the near future, but don’t plan to throw away your white hat anytime soon.

The sticker we received

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Competitive Intelligence: Purpose & Process »

Posted by JoannaLord

When it comes to marketing your brand online there is just so much to do. We spend our days researching, creating, implementing, and then measuring the success of our efforts. There are dozens of channels to participate in, and obviously thousands of ways to go about marketing your brand, but however you slice it—online marketing comes down to introducing new audiences to your brand, keeping your current brand users happy, and evolving the brand/company itself.

Unfortunately I think the first two steps often overshadow that third step to the process—evolving the brand/company itself, probably because to grow as a company you really need to take a pause and evaluate where you are currently standing. As marketers, the idea of pausing is equated with losing momentum which scares the hell out of us all. This industry moves too quickly, and pausing to reflect on where your brand is compared to your competitors seems like time poorly spent.

I am here to argue just the opposite. A few weeks ago I gave a presentation at PubCon South on “Competitive Intelligence on the Social Web,” and I wanted to extract a few of my key arguments and offer them up the SEOmoz audience both as thought provokers and for feedback. In my opinion competitive intelligence is one of those marketing steps we all say we did, but few of us rarely do. It’s true. Most of us are big fat liars when it comes to “doing competitive intelligence.”

For example, competitive intelligence IS NOT:

• Sitting in a room and ranting about your competitor’s latest marketing move
• Grabbing lunch with your Product Manager and creating a roadmap based on what your competitors have that you don’t.
• Putting together a grid of you and your competitor’s website’s traffic stats, never to be looked at again.
• Googling your competitor’s brand name to see what latest things are noted in the SERP’s

Sorry friends that is not competitive intelligence.

However, competitive intelligence IS:

• Understanding what direction your competitor’s are headed & how that might intersect or parallel your own
• Knowing what products you are pushing out and how they match up or differ from your competitor’s
• Mapping out a list of key differentials and attributes for your biggest competitors and yourself
• Researching & monitoring a variety of platforms to better understand your competitors

Okay now that we all have a better sense of what it is, let’s talk about how to do it.  Instead of throwing a 20-slide PowerPoint at you I thought I would dilute it down to a few key steps toward understanding your competitive landscape, and perhaps more importantly I want to tie those into how you can use this information for company gains.

The Grid of Awesomeness:
Okay maybe that name is a bit of an exaggeration, but either way, the first key step toward understanding your competitors is getting them all down on paper and forcing yourself to research key attributes. I have included below an example grid that you can use to get you started.

You might ask yourself—how do I know which competitors to include? This can differ depending on the size of your company and the scope of your industry but a great place to start is the “3-1-1 rule”. I usually suggest you pick 3 brands that are often grouped with yours, either in roundup articles, or in conversation. Those are your primary competitors. Then choose one “dreamer,” which would be the brand in your vertical you hope to be one day. Lastly, I suggest including one “newbie” in your competitive analysis, this is assuming that isn’t you of course. By picking a newbie in your industry you can often gain perspective into where your industry is moving, and key marketing channels to consider since they tend to operate pretty lean.

After you have chosen your competitors I suggest filling out the following for them: name, size, products, features, price points, affiliate program description (do they have one? What are the key attributes?), playing grounds (what channels, platforms, communities are they dominating?), advocates/influencers (who is lobbying for them?), notes. Don’t forget to fill this out for your company as well!

Example Grid:

Product Growth & Benchmarking:
This is perhaps the most time consuming element to competitive intelligence when it is done well. There needs to be someone in charge of competitive intelligence maintenance. This person should subscribe to your competitor’s blog so you are hearing about product launches as they happen, and all company announcements in real time. You can also gain a lot of insight from reading the comments to those posts.

In addition to this you should set up Google Alerts for your competitor’s brand plus the words “launches” and “announces.” We all know that Google Alerts are limited and somewhat unreliable, but you should have a daily digest set to notify you of any big moves your competitor’s are making. You never know which could be a real momentum changer.

The last step to this is really to keep a pulse on the traffic growth to their sites by checking Alexa or Compete monthly. While it may seem a strain on your time and resources it’s beneficial for you to know what momentum trajectory your competitor’s are on.

Monitoring Mentions:
This is what most people think competitive intelligence is. While it’s not the only piece to the competitive intelligence puzzle, it certainly is an important one. There are so many tools available to us (most free) that help us keep an eye on what our competitors do…it’s actually a bit creepy how many tools and sites are out there to help us be shady. I personally support this shadiness.

Some examples would include sites like: Whostalkin, SocialMention, Backtype, etc. All of these allow you to search a competitor’s brand or products and find out the latest things said about them. These social web aggregators search a number of channels like images, videos, blogs, new feeds, etc. They are great for understanding how a product launch might have gone for a competitor or how any other announcement was received.

Other ways to spy on your competitor’s in the social web—create private twitter lists and monitor their brand and employee’s feeds, sign up for competitor’s newsletters, etc. The key is know where they are pushing out the most crucial information and then making sure you have someone dabbling in that space.

Hiring Espionage:
Now that you have a sense of where your competitor’s currently stand and what they are doing right now, it’s time to spy on them and try to figure out their next moves. Hiring espionage is a great way to do this. You can gain a great sense of where your competitors are moving by looking at who they are investing in from an employee perspective.

A great way to do this is to keep an eye on their company job listings, and occasionally throw their brand into a job meta-engine. The best possible place to spy on hiring moves is by going to LinkedIn and finding their company profile page. There is a section down at the bottom that shows recent hires. You can defer tons of information from this section—are they hiring a bunch of sales people? Top-level engineers? Whatever team they are stacking up is probably the team they are focusing on.

The Takeaway:
The important thing to remember is that competitive intelligence isn’t something you do once and never revisit again. It also isn’t something that you can base on intuition or informal conversations with coworkers. Competitive intelligence is a key process that can be used to inform instrumental decisions you make. The better you understand your competitors the clearer perspective you have on your industry and audience as a whole. Competitive intelligence enables you to better speak on your strengths, brainstorm ideas for quick gains, and make more data-driven decisions all around.

Plus you get to pretend you are a spy which is just all sorts of fun (please note trench coat and night vision goggles are optional).
 

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30 SEO Problems & the Tools to Solve Them (Part 2 of 2) »

Posted by randfish

Last November, I authored a popular post on SEOmoz detailing 15 SEO Problems and the Tools to Solve Them. It focused on a number of free tools and SEOmoz PRO tools. Today, I’m finishing up that project with a stab at another set of thorny issues that continually confound SEOs and how some new (and old) tools can come to the rescue.

Some of these are obvious and well known; others are obscure and brand new. All of them solve problems - and that’s why tools should exist in the first place. Below, you’ll find 20+ tools that answer serious issues in smart, powerful ways.

#1 - Generating XML Sitemap Files

The Problem: XML Sitemap files can be challenging to build, particularly as sites scale over a few hundred or few thousand URLs. SEOs need tools to build these, as they can substantively add to a site’s indexation and potential to earn search traffic. 

Tools to Solve It: GSiteCrawler, Google Sitemap Generator

GSiteCrawler: Downloadable software to create XML Sitemaps

Download a few files from Google Code and Install on Your Webserver

Looks like Google Webmaster Tools, doesn’t it? :-)

Both GSiteCrawler & Google Sitemap Generator require a bit of technical know-how, but even non-programmers (like me) can stumble their way through and build efficient and effective XML Sitemaps.

#2 - Tracking the Virality of Blog/Feed Content

The Problem: Even experienced bloggers have trouble predicting which posts will "go wide" and which will fall flat. To improve your track record, you need historical data to help show you where and how your posts are performing in the wild world of social media. What’s needed is a cloud based tracking tool that can sync up with the Twitters, Facebooks, Diggs, Reddits, Stumbleupons & Delicious’ of the web to provide these metrics in an easy-to-use, historical view.

Tools to Solve It: PostRank Analytics

PostRank’s nightly emails keep me wracking my brains for better blog post ideas

PostRank sends me nightly reports on how the SEOmoz blog performs across the web - numbers from Digg, Delicious, Twitter, Facebook and more. By using this, I can get a rough sense of how posts perform in the social media marketplace and, over time, hopefully train me to author more interesting content.

Addition: Melanie from Postrank added a discount code in the comments for SEOmoz users! Use the coupon code "SEOmoz" in order to get three free months instead of just one.

#3 - Comparing the Relative Traffic Levels of Multiple Sites

The Problem: We all want to know not only how we’re doing with web traffic, but how it compares to the competition. Free services like Compete.com and Alexa have well-documented accuracy problems and paid services like Hitwise, Comscore & Nielsen cost an arm and a leg (and even then, don’t perform particularly well with sites in the sub-million visits/month range).

Tools to Solve It: Quantcast, Google Trends for Websites

If a site has been "Quantified," no other competitive traffic tool on the web will be as accurate

Since both sites are "Quantified," I can be sure the data quality is excellent

I’ve complained previously about the inaccuracies of Alexa (as have many others). It’s really for entertainment purposes only. Compete.com is better, but still suffers from lots of inaccuracy, data gaps, directionally wrong estimates and a general feeling of unreliability in the marketplace. Quantcast, on the other hand, is excellent for comparing sites that have entered their "Quantified" program. This involves putting Quantcast’s tracking code onto each page of the site; you’re basically peeking into their analytics.

Sadly, Quantcast isn’t on every site (and their guesstimates appear no better than Compete when they don’t have direct data). Fortunately, one organization has stepped up with a surprisingly good alternative - Google.

Google Trends for Websites allows you to plug in domains and see traffic levels. Much like AdWords Keyword Tool, the numbers themselves seem to run high, but the comparison often looks much better. Google Trends has become the only traffic estimator I trust - still only as far as I could throw a Google Mini, but better than nothing.

#4 - Seeing Pages the Way Search Engine Do

The Problem: Every engineering & development team builds web pages in unique ways. This is great for making the Internet an innovative place, but it can make for nightmares when optimizing for search engines. As professional SEOs, we need to be able to see pages, whether in development environments or live on the web the same way the engines do.

Tools to Solve It: SEO-Browser, Google Cached Snapshot, New Mozbar

_
A longtime favorite site of mine, SEO Browser lets you surf like an engine

_
Poor Google; that’s all they see when they crawl our pretty site

SEO-Browser is a great way to get a quick sense of what the engines can see as they crawl your site’s pages and links. The world of engines may seem a bit drab, but it can also save your hide in the event that you’ve put out code or pages that engines can’t properly parse.

_
I wonder if Googlebot ever gets tired of blue, purple and gray…

Google’s own cached snapshot of a page (available via a search query, as a bookmarklet, or in the mozbar’s dropdown) is the ultimate research tool to know what the engine "sees." The only trouble is that it works in the past only (and only on pages that allow caching). To get a preview, SEO Browser or our friend below can be useful.

The mozbar lets you dress up like Google whenever the occasion is right

One of Will Critchlow’s feature requests in the new mozbar was the ability to switch user agents, turn off JavaScript and images and, in essence, become the bot in your browser. Luckily, he also forced us to place a gray overlay in the right-hand corner that alerts you to the settings you’ve changed and gives you an easy, one-click "return to normal." Browsing like a bot = solved!

#5 - Identifying Crawl Errors

The Problem: Discovering problems on a site like 302 redirects (that should be 301s), pages that are blocked by robots.txt (here’s why that’s a bad idea), missing title tags, duplicate/similar content, 40x and 50x errors, etc. is a task no human can efficiently perform. We need the help of robots - automated crawlers who can dig through a site, find the issues and notify us.

Tools to Solve It: GSiteCrawler, Xenu, GGWMT

Mmmm… Parallel Threads

She canna hold on much longer cap’n!

We’ve already covered GSiteCrawler in this post, but for those unaware, it can be a great diagnostic tool as well as a Sitemap builder. Xenu is much the same, though somewhat more intuitive for this purpose. Tom’s written very elegantly about it in the past, so I won’t rehash much, other than to say - it shows errors & potential issues Google Webmaster Tools doesn’t, and that can be a lifesaver.

Doh! I think we messed up some stuff when KW Difficulty relaunched :(

Google Webmaster Tools is extremely popular, well known and well used. And yet… lots of us still have crawl errors we haven’t addressed (just look at the 500+ problems on SEOmoz.org in the screenshot above). Exporting to Excel, sorting, and sending to engineering with fixes for each type of issue can save a lot of heartache and earn back a lot of lost traffic and link juice.

#6 - Determine if Links to Your Site Have Been Lost

The Problem: Sites don’t always do a great job maintaining their pages and links (according to our data, 75% of the web disappears in 6 months). Many times, these vanishing pages and links are of great interest to SEOs, who want to know whether their link acquisition and campaigning efforts are being maintained. But how do you confirm if the links to your site that were built last month are still around today?

Tools to Solve It: Virante’s Link Atrophy Diagnosis

Does that mean Stuntdubl & SEOmoz are "going steady?"

This tool comes courtesy of the great team over at Virante, and it’s a pretty terrific application of an SEO need and Linkscape data through the SEOmoz API. The tool will check the links reported from Linkscape/Open Site Explorer and determine which, if any, have been lost. Many times it’s just links off the front page of blogs or news sites as archives fall to the back, but sometimes it can help you ID a link partner or source that’s no longer pointing your way in order to facilitate a quick, painless reclamation. The best part is there’s no registration or installation required - it’s entirely plug and play.

Addition: Russ from Virante added a discount code in the comments for SEOmoz users! Use the coupon code "seomoz30" in order to get more results from these tools.

#7 - Find 404 Errors on a Site (without GG WM Tools) and Create 301s

The Problem: Google’s Webmaster Tools are great for spotting 404s, but the data can be, at times, unwieldy (as when thousands of pages are 404ing, but only a few of them really matter) and it’s only available if you can get access to the Webmaster Tools account (which can stymie plenty of SEOs in the marketing department or from external consultancies). We need a tool to help spot those important, highly linked-to 404s and turn them into 301s. 

Tools to Solve It: Virante’s PageRank Recovery Tool

3.99 mozRank for ~0.00 effort

The thinking behind this tool is brilliant, because it solves a problem from end to end. By not only grabbing well-linked-to pages that 404, but actually writing the code to create an .htaccess file with 301s to your choice of pages, the tool is a "no-brainer" solution.

#8 - See New Links that are Sending Traffic (and Old Ones that Have Stopped)

The Problem: Most analytics tools have an export function that, combined with some clever Excel, could help you puzzle out the sites/pages that have started to send you traffic (and those that once were but have stopped). It’s a pain - manual labor, easy to screw up and not a particularly excellent use of your precious time.

Tools to Solve It: Enquisite

I love the ability to look across the past few months and see the trend of new pages and new domains sending links, as well as identifying links that have stopped sending traffic. Some of those may be ripe for reclamation, others might just need a nudge to mention or link over in their next piece/post. This report is also a great way to judge how link building campaigns are performing on the less-SEO focused pivot, sending direct traffic.

#9 - Research Trending/Temporal Popularity of Keywords

The Problem: Keyword demand fluctuates over time, sometimes with little warning. Knowing how search volume is impacted by trending and geography is critical to SEOs targeting fields with these demand fluxes.

Tools to Solve It: Google Insights, Trendistic

Hmmm…. Maybe we should launch Open Webmaster Tools next?

We need to make it out to India & Brazil more often, too!

Google Insights is great for seeing keyword trending, related terms and countries of popularity (though the last of these we’ve found to be somewhat suspect at times). However, sometimes you’re really interested in what’s about to become popular. For that, turning to trend sites can be a big help.

Although it doesn’t yet have a "suggest" feature to help identify terms & phrases that may soon become popular searches, it does help establish the "tipping point" at which a buzzword in Twitter may become a trend in web search. As we’ve discussed in the WhiteBoard Friday on Twitter as an SEO Research Tool, finding the spot at which search volume begins spiking can present big opportunities for fresh content.

#10 - Analyze Domain Ownership & Hosting Data

The Problem: When researching domains to buy, considering partnerships or conducting competitive analysis, data about a site’s hosting and ownership can be essential steps in the process.

Tools to Solve It: Domaintools

We should make sure to re-register this domain…

Long the gold standard in the domainer’s toolbox, DomainTools (once called whois.sc) provides in-depth research about a domain’s owners, their server and, sometimes most interestingly, the other domains owned by that entity. BTW - they’re spot on; SEOmoz owns about 80 other domains besides our own (though we only really use this one and OpenSiteExplorer right now).

#11 - Investigate a Site/Page’s History

The Problem: What happened on this page last month or last year? When conducting web research about links, traffic and content, we all need the ability to go "back in time" and see what had previously existed on our sites/pages (or those of competitors/link sources/etc). Did traffic referrals drop? Have search rankings changed dramatically? Did a previously available piece of content fall off the web? The question really is - how do we answer these questions?

Tools to Solve It: Wayback Machine

Before 2005, we were on a different domain!

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If you remember this version of the site, you’re officially "old school"

Yeah, yeah, you’ve probably heard of the Wayback Machine, powered by Alexa’s archive of the Internet and endlessly entertaining to web researchers and pranksters alike. What might surprise you is how valuable it can be as an SEO diagnostic tool, particularly when you’re performing an investigation into a site that doesn’t keep good records of its activity. Reversing a penalty, a rankings drop, an oddity in traffic, etc. can consume massive amounts of time if you don’t know where to look and how. Add Wayback to the CSI weapons cache - it will come in handy.

#12 - Determine Semantically Connected Terms/Phrases

The Problem: Chances are, the search engines are doing some form of semantic analysis (looking at the words and phrases on a page around a topic to determine its potential relevance to the query). Thus, employing these "connected" keywords on your pages is a best practice for good SEO (and probably quite helpful to users in many cases as well). The big question is - which words & phrases are related (in the search engines’ eyes) to the ones I’m targeting?

Tools to Solve It: Google Wonder Wheel

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Nothing about "Yellow Shoes?"

We don’t know for certain that this is a technique that provides massive benefit, but we’re optimistic that tests are going to show it has some value. If you’d like to participate in the experiment, take related phrases from the Wonder Wheel and employ on your pages. Please do report back with details :-)

#13 - Analyze a Page’s Optimization of Images

The Problem: When image search and image accessibility/optimization is critical to your business/client, you need tools to help analyze a page’s consistency and adherence to best practices in handling image dimensions, alt attributes, etc.

Tools to Solve It: Image Analyzer from Juicy Studio

 
Doh! We need to add some dimensions onto our images.

It’s not the prettiest tool in the world, but it does get the job done. The image analyzer will give any page a thorough evaluation, showing missing alt tags, image dimensions (which can help with page rendering speed) and informing you of the names/alts in a thorough list. If you have image galleries you’re aiming at image search optimization, this is a great diagnostic system.

#14 - Instant Usability Testing

The Problem: Fast feedback on a new landing page, product page, tool design or web page (of any kind) can be essential to smoothing over rough launches. But tools aren’t enough - we need actual human beings (and not the biased ones in our friend groups or company) giving fast, functional feedback. That’s a challenge.

Tools to Solve It: Five Second Test, Feedback Army

It can’t be that easy, can it?

Wow… It totally is! Here I am helping give feedback to a local geek squad.

Users are easier to come by than we think

Both FeedbackArmy & FiveSecondTest offer the remarkable ability to get instant feedback from real users on any page, function or tool you want to test at a fraction of the price normal usability testing requires. What I love is that because it’s so easy, it makes that first, critical step of reaching out to users a low barrier to entry. Over time, I hope systems like these help make the web as a whole a more friendly, easy-to-use experience. Now there’s not excuse!

#15 - Measure Tweet Activity to a URL Across Multiple URL Shortener Platforms

The Problem: You’ve got your bit.ly, your j.mp, your tinyurl, your ow.ly and dozens more URL shorteners. Between this plethora of options and standard HTML links pasted into tweets, keeping up with all the places your URL is being shared can be a big challenge.

Tools to Solve It: Backtweets

Tweeting links in the middle of the night is fun!

Bit.ly can track bit.ly and many other services offer their own tracking systems, but only Backtweets is aggregating all of the sources and making it easy to see what people are saying about your pages no matter how they encode it. Now if only we could get this to integrate with PostRank and Search.Twitter.com and Trendistic and make the interface super-gorgeous and have it integrate with Google Analytics… and… and…

#16 - BONUS: Determining Keyword Competition Levels

Bonus! I mentioned last week in a comment that I’d make a post about the new Keyword Difficulty Tool. Since this post is all about tools anyway, I figured I’d toss it in and save you the trouble of clicking an extra link in your feedreader.

The Problem: Figuring out which keywords have more/less demand than which others is easy (and Google does a great job of it most of the time).

Tools to Solve It: New Keyword Difficulty Tool

The real problem was that our previous keyword difficulty tool attempted to use 2nd order effects and non-direct metrics to estimate the competitiveness level of a particular keyword term/phrase. While it’s true that more popular/searched-for keywords TEND to be more competitive, this is certainly not always the case (and in fact, SEOs probably care a lot more about when a keyword has high traffic and relatively weak sites/pages in the SERPs more than anything else). The new tool attempts to fix this by relying on Page Authority (correlation data here) and using a weighted average of the top ranking sites and pages.

Running five keywords at a time is way better than one
(we’re working to add more - promise)

The best bet here looks like "best running shoes" - relatively lower difficulty, but still high volume

Oh yeah, looking at the top positions, a few dozen good links and some on-page and we’re there

Reversing the rankings is never easy, but parsing through KW Difficulty reports certainly makes it less time-consuming. Watch out for the scores, though - a 65% is pretty darn tough, and even a 40% is no walk in the park. At last, I feel really good about this tool; it was suffering for a good 18 months, and it’s nice to have it back in my primary repertoire with such solid functionality.

I’m sure there are plenty of remarkable tools I’ve missed and there are likely questions about these problems, too. Feel free to address both in the comments!

p.s. This was written very late at night and I need to be up and on a plane at precisely butt-o’clock tomorrow morning, so editing will have to slide until Jen wakes up and gives this a good once-over. Sorry about any errors in the meantime :-)

Note from Jen: I finally woke up and made a few minor edits. :) I also added a discount code from Virante "seomoz30" AND a discount code from PostRank "SEOmoz". Tools Rule!

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The Definitive How-To Guide For Conversion Rate Optimization »

Posted by stephen

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.

Let’s start by asking one of the most important questions in conversion rate optimization (CRO):

A good question.

In this article, you’ll get:

• A clear and defined process for CRO
• Checklists to print and check off as you go

I’ll share the same processes that I use to consistently boost my clients’ conversion rates – sometimes even doubling or tripling them. (I specialize in industries like finance, gaming, travel and weightloss, where even a 5% increase in conversion rate can generate millions of dollars.)

This is the article I wish I could have read when starting out.

Conversion Rate Optimization - setting the record straight

If you only remember one thing from this article, make sure this is it.

Conversion rate optimization is…

• Finding out why visitors aren’t converting
• Fixing it
• That’s it.

It sounds obvious, but a lot of people forget it – and they leave a ton of money on the table as a result.

Conversion rate optimization isn’t…

• Split-testing the colour of your buttons (unless you really want to)
• Following best-practice and guesswork
• Based on misleading metrics

Let’s look at the first point:

Don’t split-test the colour of your buttons (unless you really want to)
The more people talk about CRO, the more you hear bizarre recommendations on the colour of your buttons and headlines, the alignment of form labels, and so on.

This is one real-life example:

"Making your headline red will increase your conversion rate 30%."

Let’s rephrase the statement, using the definition of CRO above:

"I think that visitors aren’t converting because our headline is black rather than red."

Putting it like this, it starts to sound less plausible.

Just because Youreapoorloser.com has a red headline, doesn’t mean you should.

We need to start by finding out why visitors aren’t converting – then fix it.

The trouble is that statements like “green buttons convert better than red ones” and “short forms are better than long forms” are appealing, and quickly become considered “best practice”…

Don’t follow best-practice and guesswork
It sounds counterintuitive to say "don’t follow best practice" (especially in an article actually giving advice). To put it another way, don’t assume that just because it worked for someone else means it’ll work for you.

It’s natural that we’ll look for silver bullets – in fact, it’s good to look for ways to get bigger wins quicker – but this kind of testing doesn’t fit with a successful conversion rate optimization strategy.

Conversion rates are hugely personal to your website – what works on someone else’s website will only work on yours if you have similar objections. You’ve got to find out what’s wrong with your site – not what worked on someone else’s.

Don’t worry about misleading metrics
Focus on the money. So don’t worry too much about microconversions or other metrics. (The only reason people boast about increasing their "add to basket" conversion rate is often because they didn’t increase their overall conversion rate.)

Focus on the money and the conversion rate that’s directly linked to revenue.

Why CRO matters

Ok, let’s start with the easy one:

1. Make more money

But wait… there’s more! When you increase your conversion rate, it also means you can…

2. Increase advertising spend

After all, when your conversion rate increases, then PPC, affiliate marketing and other advertising will suddenly become much more profitable. And when you do that, you can…

3. Increase market share

The more you increase your conversion rate, the more traffic you can buy, the more customers you get, the more repeat business you get… You’ll rapidly increase your market share. And it all starts with your conversion rate.

Conversion Rate Optimization – step-by-step

Make sure you download a copy of the checklists here:

That’s a real button. Click it!

Stage one: research and analysis

Become the customer
This is a massively important step – and one that most people skip. Don’t be that person.

Buy the product or service. And when you’re buying it, take screenshots and/or use Camtasia or similar to record yourself buying it. (It’s incredible how many people haven’t bought a product or service from their own site.)

Increasing sales starts with understanding what you’re selling, so when you’ve bought the product or service, use it as a customer would. Test it, take it apart and put it back together – even demonstrate it to others as a salesperson would.

Set up funnels in Google Analytics
Most companies haven’t even set up goals and funnels in Google Analytics (and if they have, they stopped working properly months ago). When they’re set up right, they’ll quickly show you where you’re losing traffic and where the biggest opportunities are.

If you need help setting this up, take a look at this excellent article on Google Analytics goals and funnels.

Use other analytics packages
Other analytics packages are great at showing you what’s happening on your website.

Crazy Egg will generate heatmaps of your website, showing you which areas are getting the most clicks. Yes, Google Analytics does heatmaps too – but not like Crazy Egg. They’ll even show you clicks on inactive elements – the things people are clicking on that aren’t actually links. Often this will reveal areas the visitors want more information on. It can be a great source of quick wins.

 
Crazy Egg – Look for clicks on inactive elements, as they can be a great source of quick wins.

ClickTale is several tools wrapped into one. It’ll give you heatmaps showing how far down your pages visitors are scrolling (perfect for your long spammy weightloss page). It can even record videos of your visitors’ sessions (which will help you get in the habit of looking at your site through someone else’s eyes). And finally, it has brilliant form analytics – you’ll see exactly which questions in your form are causing visitors to abandon the page.

ClickTale gives you access to a huge amount of data – including how far down the page visitors will scroll.

Do five usability tests
With several cheap usability testing companies available, there’s no excuse not to be doing it anymore. It’s one of the most profitable activities you can do. With sites like UserTesting.com (US and UK) and whatusersdo.com (UK), you’ll pay around $40 for a 15-minute usability test. At the end, you’ll get the video of their session, plus the voiceover as they navigate your site.

With sites like UserTesting.com and whatusersdo.com offering quick and cheap usability tests…

…there are no excuses not to do any.

Remember, don’t make your brief too prescriptive. You want the tester to use the site as they would if they weren’t doing a test – don’t make them follow orders. (You can even set them the same task on a competitor’s site to see what the competition is doing right/wrong.)

Survey your customers
By this stage, we should be building a good list of reasons why visitors aren’t converting – whether they’re usability issues (can’t buy) or objections (won’t buy).

We’ll gather more data on this with surveys. It doesn’t really matter how you survey your customers – so long as you do it.

You can create a survey with SurveyMonkey and email it to your customers and non-customers (but make sure to use free-text answers rather than multiple choice – we want the customers to tell us in their own words, not to pick the closest reason from a list). Or use a tool like Kampyle to gather feedback directly on your site. Or just pick up the phone and speak to them.

Talk to sales staff
Your website is the online equivalent of your best salesperson. So… find that salesperson and ask them to sell the product or service to you. (If you’ve got a Flip camcorder, use that to film it.) Find out what questions and objections the customers ask and – more importantly – find out what the answers are.

Flip camcorders – Keep one of these handy when speaking with sales and support staff.

Stage two: solutions

Create a list of all the objections + issues
Ticked everything off in stage one? Good. If not, make sure you complete it soon (seriously – if you don’t, you’re leaving money on the table.)

When you’ve got all the data, start a spreadsheet with a list of all the usability issues (can’t buy) on one tab, and the objections (won’t buy) on another. Highlight the ones that come up most often, or that you think can have a big impact.

Brainstorm ways to overcome them
Next, brainstorm ways to solve the usability issues and objections. Put the possible solutions into the second columns of your spreadsheet.

Look for hidden opportunities
Remember, it’s important to be creative with the solutions. Here are a couple of examples:

If you’ve got a low conversion rate on a form, do you even need the form in the first place? Take a look at posterous.com – a great example of removing the sign-up process altogether.

Posterous.com – “Look Ma – no sign-up!”

If you have to keep your sign-up process, but people are abandoning it, how do you fix it? Lovefilm.com are great at conversion. If you abandon their sign-up form, on your next visit, they’ll redirect you back to where you left off – even if you type in their homepage URL. (Abandon their sign-up form and you’ll see how.)

Lovefilm.com – “Haven’t I been here before…?”

It’s creativity like this which will boost your conversion rate. If you do the same as everyone else, your conversion rate will be the same too.

Prioritise the actions (aim for quick results and maximum improvement)
So now we’ve got the objections, the issues and the possible solutions. Next we need to tackle them in the right order. There’s an opportunity cost, so we want to start – not with the quick wins – but the quick and big wins.

Go through the list with your developers. Mark the ones that can be developed and tested quickly and easily. If they match up with the ones you highlighted above (that can have a big impact), you’ll know where to start.

Stage three: development and testing

Develop the variations and take screenshots
Now the fun part. Start developing the variations. Don’t be tempted to test too many things in each variation – you won’t know what’s increasing the conversion rate and what’s lowering it. Be scientific in your testing and you’ll get bigger wins quicker.

When the variations have been developed, make sure you take screenshots of them. We need to keep records of everything we’re testing. It’s easy to get 20 tests into a campaign and forget what you tested at the start. Be like Travis Bickle: “One of these days I’m gonna get organezized”.

Today is that day.

Set up Crazy Egg on variations
Don’t forget your analytics when you’re testing. Crazy Egg is a staple in my testing diet. If the Crazy Egg code is in your footer, it’ll be on the new variations automatically (as long as it’s an A/B test, not a multivariate test). Just set up a test at CrazyEgg.com and you’ll get a heatmap for the new page. Compare the two and you’ll have a clearer insight why one page is converting higher than another.

Test using Google Website Optimizer or other testing software
Google Website Optimizer is fairly powerful, fairly easy-to-use and – best of all – completely free. No excuses.

Google Website Optimizer – the price is right.

Now let me qualify those statements. It’s fairly powerful out-of-the-box, but you may want to hack it to do things like testing multiple goals. It’s fairly easy to use – especially if you’ve got a good developer – but there are alternatives that are easier.

For a detailed guide to testing software, take a look at whichmvt.com.

Stage four: review and expand

Log the results and screenshots
When the test has finished, log the results and store them with your screenshots of the variations. As we repeat this process, we’ll build up a folder of what works and what doesn’t. This is crucial.

Analyse the results (big losses are just as important as big wins)
Big wins are awesome. Big losses can be interesting too – just flip it around. So rather than saying, “Page B lowered the conversion rate by x%”, you should say, “Something about Page A effectively increased the conversion rate by y% over Page B.”

Then all we need to do is find what that something is. Take a look at your Crazy Egg screenshots and review your list of objections and usability issues.

If you got a win, can it be developed further?
The first question after getting a win is, “How can we develop this?” So if you added a testimonial to your landing page, what would happen if you added five more? Take the winning element to extremes and see how big a win you can get.

If you got a win, can it be applied to other parts of the funnel?
The second question is, “How can we apply this elsewhere?” Take the principle that increased the conversion rate – adding trust, emphasising a particular benefit, introducing a guarantee – and work out how you can apply it to other parts of the funnel.

These two questions together can magnify increases to the conversion rate several times over. 

Stage five: repeat

As you can see, the process works in a cycle. The insight you get after completing a test will feed into the top – giving you ideas for other tests to try.

This is Conversion Factory’s approach to conversion rate optimization.

After a few rounds of testing, repeat all or part of stage one (research and analysis). Do the usability testers still struggle with the same things? Are potential customers still uncertain about the benefits of your product? Either way, you’ll get fresh ideas for CRO.

Follow this process and you’ll quickly – and reliably – increase your conversion rate.

What now?

Thanks for making it through to the end. If you haven’t already downloaded the worksheets, you can get them now.

If you want to get more articles on conversion rate optimization, sign up to the mailing list on conversionfactory.com and we’ll keep you updated.

Thanks!

Stephen.

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Client Based Keyword Research: How to Grow Plants Up a Wall »

Posted by RobOusbey

There are a variety of tools and techniques recommended for SEO keyword research, from the free to the expensive, from the well-known to those that are almost kept a secret. However, there’s one source of keyword ideas which is often overlooked: the customers (and potential customers) served on a daily basis.

Let’s get sidetracked for a moment: I’ve lost track of the number of people at agencies who have been asked the question "If you’re so good at SEO, why don’t you rank for ‘SEO in New York’?" (Or wherever the agency is based.)

The answers vary, but one important thing is almost always the same: when you look at the off-line inquiries, people rarely phone up an SEO agency and say "Hello, I’d like you to perform some SEO for me, to cover a variety of tasks including keyphrase research, on site recommendations and link building" - the phone call is more likely to begin with "Hi there, er, I have a website where I sell my widgets, but I want to sell more, and I think I need to promote the site better online. Someone said there might be stuff you could do to help me?".

To mine this rich source of keywords, you want to teach your front-line staff to spot the ‘keyphrases’ that are embedded within the first three or four statements the enquirer makes, such as ‘sell more online‘ or ‘promote my website‘.

Your new, killer Keyword Research Tool

Get Your Hands Dirty

Of course, you don’t need to be a fashionable new industry like search marketing to make this work for you.

Let’s say you work for an auto garage. One of the most popular services you offer is tire balancing - it noticeably helps improve a vehicle’s driving experience, but it’s not too expensive (though it has good margins). The page on your website is well targeted towards ‘tire balancing’ and ranks fairly well in your area, but doesn’t receive many visits or have a great conversion rate.

You head down to the garage and ask the mechanic how many tire balancings he’s done recently.

"We’ve had three in just this morning", replies the helpful greasemonkey.

"And they all came here because they know we do tire balancing?" you ask, naively.

"Aw, no - all three just said their steering wheel was vibrating when they were on the freeway, so it had to be the balance was off," he replies.

You’ve heard what you needed to, and without another word you race back to the office, and update the page. The new title reads "Steering wheel vibrating? We’ll fix it in 1 hour with tire balancing" and the rest of the page is updated too. You not only start to receive more traffic, but it converts better as well.

Showing staff - whether they are receptionists, shop assistants, hard working mechanics or professionals - the value of spotting these keywords will help you gather a rich source of new targetable ideas, and it’s one that your competitors won’t be able to get to.

Keyphrase research? Oooh, that’s gonna cost ya….

Next stop: New Keyphrases

You can also go one-step-removed to get keyword ideas.

National Express are a UK-wide coach service (a little like the Greyhounds in the US) that get you from A to B more slowly and much more cheaply than taking the train. Their site targets terms such as ‘coach trip from Bath to Newcastle’ etc.

However, if I were them, I’d be calling the travel agents who have made bookings on behalf of customers, to find out what people asked for, when the booking ended up with a coach trip being the right answer. It’s possible that phrases such as ‘overnight journey to Newcastle’ or ‘cheap way to get up North’ will have actually come up in conversation, and the agents have then recommended a coach trip.

These phrases should then definitely be considered for targeting on the site.

Loitering with Intent to Research

One final example, from a conversation overheard in a garden center, between a customer (played by a middle aged female, looking lost) and the sales assistant (an underpaid college kid, looking increasingly confused):

• Customer: Hi, where could I find a mopsy?
• Assistant: I .. I’m sorry ma’am?
• Customer: You know, the thing I can screw to a wall to grow plants up?
• Assistant: Do you mean a trellis?
• Customer: Ah yes! I knew it was the name of one of my daughter’s rabbits.

If I worked for an online garden supplies website, I’d have immediately made a note to write a blog post about ‘How to Grow Plants up a Wall.’ I also think I’d have spent the rest of the afternoon hanging around to listen to what else people were asking for by description or by describing their problem, rather than searching for an item by name.

Whatever your niche, see if there’s a place you can hang out to get the opportunity for this kind of real world keyword research.

It’s Search Marketing

It’s been said many times that a significant part of sales and/or marketing is to solve each customer’s problem. This is just another way of getting you close to that goal, and bring you new business at the same time.

CC Photo Attribution:

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Whiteboard Friday - Oh $#!%, I Got a Penalty »

Posted by great scott!

Anyone who’s been in internet marketing long knows the feeling: you go to check your rankings one day and something’s different. Your pulse quickens, a cold sweat spreads across your brow, your eyes widen…they’re gone. Your precious rankings are gone! Where did they go? What happened?

Penalties. They can bring the strongest of us to tears. But sometimes we can be too quick to blame a penalty on sudden changes in our rankings.  There are lots of things that can cause fluctuations (even major ones) in the SERPs and it’s importnat to know how to figure out why you’ve dropped.  This week, we’ll look at how to identify whether or not you’ve been penalized, as well as what to do if you have been smacked down by our Google-y overlords.

Check out this week’s Whiteboard Friday and next time you’re struck with a moment of SERP Shock, you’ll know how to handle it in a cool and strategic manner.

If you want more information on penalties, here’s a slide deck Rand presented at a recent conference….

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Take the 2010 SEO Industry Survey; Your Peers Need You! »

Posted by randfish

I’m very excited to announce that we have just put the finishing touches on our second, biennial SEO Industry Survey!  We ran our first industry survey in 2008, and learned and shared a lot about the SEO community. This survey follows up on a lot of questions we asked last time, but includes a greater focus on other areas of organic search marketing as well.

With this survey we hope to find out and share with the world:

• Who are the people in the SEO community?
• How do they learn about SEO and sharpen their skills?
• How are companies embracing search marketing?
• Which tools and tactics do people in the industry use to support their SEO and social media efforts?

The survey only takes about 10 minutes, and we will again share the results once we’ve had time to work through the data.

Prizes!

As an added incentive, we are offering some cool prizes for people who completethe survey, including one 32G iPad!  We are also giving away 3 Flip Mino HD Cameras and 10 people will win thier pick of brand new SEOmoz gear. [Obligitory legal disclaimer: Void where prohibited. See our official rules for all the details.] We will announce the winners of the sweepstakes by June 4th. Follow us on Twitter to stay up-to-date.

A Look Back

It will be interesting to see what has changed in the search marketing industry in the past two years. In fact, let’s take a look at a few examples from the survey taken in 2008!

Way back in 2008, people thought that Yahoo! was more likely to challenge Google than Microsoft. Nice guess, but, obviously we know now that’s not accurate. Ask, Baidu, and Wikia all battled for third place in people’s opinion.

Check out this data about the use of nofollow. Since SMX Advanced last year when Matt Cutt’s told us that nofollow no longer worked the way we thought for PageRank sculpting, I wonder if these numbers have changed?

Share the Survey!

The survey ends May 21, 2010 (about a month) so tell your friends in the industry about it. The more people that take the survey, the more interesting and valid the results we can share.

Tweet it Share it on Facebook

Partners

Many thanks to our friends who are helping to promote the survey over the next month. It’s important to get a broad audience from across the industry. Be sure to check them out:

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The Science of Ranking Correlations: How Does PageRank Perform? »

Posted by randfish

I’ve been an SEO for a long while - nearly 8 years. In all that time, I still haven’t been able to wean myself off the intoxicating drug dealt out by the Google toolbar - that "little green fairy dust" called PageRank. Intellectually, I know it’s flawed in a multitude of ways, but so many people in our field (and in the broader webmaster/marketing community) still talk about "PR 4 websites" and how "I have a PR6 but he’s still outranking me." I find myself thinking about it, using it in conversations and yes, even considering it as a metric for rankings.

There’s so many reasons why PageRank shouldn’t be a primary metric for SEO:

• Infrequently updated - Google updates the PR scores in the toolbar 2-4X each year on an unpredictable and unpublished schedule. The PageRank score you see today could be dramatically different than the PageRank Google’s using in ranking/crawling calculations.
• 1 of 200+ ranking signals - Google’s representatives have continually repeated that PageRank is just one of "more than two hundred" signals the engine applies to the rankings equation.
• Applies to pages, not sites - The PR score is based on individual URLs, not domains. Technically, there’s no such thing as a "PR 5" website, just a website with a homepage URL that has displays "5" in the toolbar.
• Imprecise - PageRank is a logarithmic score when fitted to a 0-10 value in the toolbar. We’ve estimated the log base around 8-10, meaning that a PR5 URL has 8-10X more PageRank than a PR4. Yet, there’s no granularity between values. One PR4 page might have 5 times more PageRank than another PR4 page, but the Google score won’t tell you until the log base threshold has crossed the next value marker.
• Intentionally Inaccurate - Google has been using toolbar PageRank to visually penalize pages and sites for buying/selling links for many years, but they readily admit they use this filter intermitently so as not to tip off spammers. Thus, we’re never sure when looking at PageRank whether a page/site has or hasn’t had its PageRank reduced and whether that does or doesn’t impact rankings (or the value passed by the non-manipulative links).

But perhaps none of these are as compelling as the data put together by our in-house correlation, machine-learning & ranking model expert, Ben Hendrickson. Over the past few months, we’ve gotten an increasing influx of questions about PageRank with relation to our tools, mozbar and through Q+A, so Ben’s gone ahead and done some hardcore correlation analyses to help answer our most pressing question about the toolbar PageRank score - does it matter, and if so, how much?

How Well Does PageRank Correlate to Rankings?

The short answer is - not very well, but not badly enough to suggest that Google’s statement above is entirely inaccurate. Let’s have the data do the talking:

Using Spearman correlation, we can see that for page one results ordering (the correlation we measured for all of these charts), Google’s toolbar PageRank is around 0.18. A perfect correlation would be 1.00 and a completely useless/random correlation would be 0.00. In other words, PageRank has a positive correlation, but it’s not particularly predictive.

Interestingly, PageRank is even more useless on Yahoo!’s results ordering and Google.co.uk results (UK SEOs take note!) but nearly as good for Bing.com as the Google results in the US.

The next time your boss or client asks you about increasing their PageRank; show them this chart. It’s the best evidence we at SEOmoz have to back up the statement "PageRank doesn’t matter much." The metrics website owners and marketers should care about is traffic, conversions and the lifetime value of the visits sent by search engines. PageRank (and similar metrics) don’t help with these at all. SEOs, however, appreciate any proxies or metrics they can get their hands on that will help to better explain the rankings. We’ll use the rest of the post to tackle that issue.

Is PageRank the Best Metric of its Kind?

Another interesting question we need to ask is whether other, similar metrics that model themselves on PageRank’s data (and Google’s link graph of the web) are potentially worth using. The chart below speaks directly to this question:

In this chart, we’re looking exclusively at correlation with Google.com’s rankings (in the US). PageRank and SEOmoz’s own mozRank are extremely close, but, perhaps surprisingly, mozTrust (which uses a PageRank-like algorithm biased to trusted seed sources) and external mozRank (which counts only the mozRank to a URL coming from external links) both have higher correlations.

This suggests that, as Google’s representatives have often said, "what others say about you is more important than what you say about yourself." Looking at the quantity of external link juice flowing to a page may be a better metric than just that page’s total link juice (including values from both internal and external links).

Are Other Commonly Available Metrics Better Correlated?

When we saw that some PageRank-like metrics might be more usable (or at least very competitive substitutes) for this purpose, we naturally asked "what about non-PageRank metrics?" This next chart provides some answers:

The data here is especially interesting. Yahoo!’s link count is a good deal better than Google’s PageRank in correlating with Google’s own search results!

Perhaps not surprisingly, Page Authority, a metric that Ben builds with rank modeling, has the highest correlation with Google.com’s rankings. It’s about 51% "better" correlated than PageRank - a big step up, but still nowhere near telling the whole story. While this data may seem to make SEOmoz’s metrics look quite good, in fact, our raw link counts are slightly worse than Yahoo!’s, suggesting that we still need to improve Linkscape’s crawling and indexing. 

Can We Value Websites/Domains with PageRank (or Other Metrics)?

Another big question we need to answer is around the concept of "homepage PageRank" being a measure of a site’s ability to perform in Google’s rankings. Correlation data can answer this quite competently:

The correlations here are, not surprisingly, considerably worse. Estimating a page’s ranking based on page-specific metrics is hard enough, but to do so using only data we have about the domain that page is hosted on is extremely challenging. Still, we can see that some different metrics than those we used previously can offer some insight. Google’s homepage PageRank certainly isn’t great, but it’s also not much worse than the best metric we’ve got - Domain Authority.

It’s also extremely curious that Compete.com’s traffic rank outperforms PageRank and that Yahoo!’s count of links to a domain underperforms, particularly considering its impressive show in the page-specific metrics. We did also attempt to pull Alexa data, but found the speed and consistency to be so poor that we couldn’t get it all prior to publication.

The story with domain-level metrics that I’d love to tell you is "use Domain Authority," but being TAGFEE, I have to say that today, no single metric is, IMO, good enough. We’ll be hard at work improving these over the weeks and months to come, but we’d also love to see other efforts to help solve this puzzle. Valuing a domain’s ability to rank pages in Google may be challenging, but it’s a very worthwhile goal.

Where/How to Access These Metrics

We used a variety of metrics in our correlation analyses above, and we certainly invite you to use any that are of interest in your own work:

• Google’s PageRank Score
  • via the Google Toolbar
  • Also available, though potentially against Google’s TOS, through the PageRank Checksum (please perform your own searches)
• Yahoo!’s Link Counts
  • via Yahoo! Site Explorer
  • via the Y!SE API
• Compete.com Rank
  • via Compete.com’s free tool on their website
  • via the Compete.com API
• Alexa Rank
  • via Alexa.com
  • via Alexa Data Services API
• SEOmoz Metrics
  • via the SEOmoz API (free up to 1 million calls / month)
  • via Open Site Explorer
  • via the Mozbar
  • via Linkscape

Information about the Dataset Used for this Analysis

We suspected that folks would have questions about how the data was gathered, the source of the keyword/ranking information and several other pieces. Ben kindly answered many of these below:

How many keyword rankings did we collect?

Over 4,000 search results for Google.com and over 2,000 for the other engines (Google.co.uk, Bing.com, Yahoo.com).

What is our accuracy level with this data?

The standard error ranged between 0.00528743 and 0.00559586 for the Google.com correlations.

Standard error gives some idea of how much our answer is likely to change if we looked at a lot more queries than we did.  If we had been able to look at an infinite number of queries similar to those we tested (ignoring that doing so would be impossible), the answer we would get would be 68% likely to be within one standard error of the answer we measured here, and 99.73% chance to be within three.

What source provided the the keywords/rankings we used?

From Google AdWords‘ suggested keywords for different categories. If one ads together all keywords for all of the top categories with all of the subcategories one level down, one gets a bit over 11,000 unique keywords.  From this list, we randomly sampled keywords.

Why did we use Spearman rather than Pearson correlation?

Pearson’s correlation is only good at measuring linear correlation, and many of the values we are looking at are not.  If something is well exponentially correlated (like link counts generally are), we don’t want to score them unfairly lower.  

[Update April 22nd 6pm: I should give sferguson credit for suggesting using Spearman's to us]

How did we handle "ties" in the results (when, for example, PageRank wasn’t granular enough)?

We follow exactly the methodology that is suggested for Spearman’s in textbooks, which is treating all tied values as having ranked indices equal to the average of the indices of the tying values.  This might give an unexpected advantage to less granular metrics (like toolbar PageRank) because they can hedge and vote "tied" on close calls whereas more granular metrics do not.  On this data it seems this is not affecting the results much, as the results appear similar to other ways of handling ties that do not have this effect.

The Big Picture in Just a Few Words

Google’s PageRank is, indeed, slightly correlated with their rankings (as well as with the rankings of other major search engines). However, other page-level metrics are dramatically better, including link counts from Yahoo! and Page Authority.

Homepage PR of a website is much less correlated with the ranking performance of pages on that site, but not entirely useless. Domain Authority is a slightly better metric for this purpose, as is the Compete.com Traffic Rank of the domain. None of these, however, are convincing enough to be highly useful today (in our opinion). The best they can do is serve as a proxy until (hopefully) better metrics arrive.

Looking forward to your comments and questions as always!

Oh, and if you found this post valuable, Tweets are appreciated :-)

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Categorized Keyword Research: Step 2 of the 8-Step SEO Research Strategy »

Posted by laura

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.

Step 2 isn’t groundbreaking stuff, but it’s approached in a slightly different manner in order to use and abuse further in our strategy document.  It’s your regular keyword research broken out into categories for segmentation and prioritization, and we’ll use that for prioritizing and determining gaps and opportunities in Step 3 and for competitive research in Step 4.

Before we jump into keyword research, let’s not forget the audience targeting we did in Step 1.  Now that we have a good idea of the specific needs and pain points of our target audience(s), we’re ready to dive into some specifically targeted keyword research.  But don’t worry if you don’t have personas built out or a good idea of target audiences and their needs, you can still start with this step and categorize based on the products, services or topics you want to dig into.  Defining personas and their needs helps us laser target our audience when we do keyword research, but all is not lost if you don’t have that data – step 2 will still be an ok place to start.

CREATE A TEMPLATE

First lets create an Excel template that will hold all of our keyword lists.  We’ll be categorizing keywords so the easiest thing to do is to categorize them now, rather than pouring through hundreds or thousands of keywords in excel sheets trying to separate them out and categorize them later (I’ve tried both methods and believe me, the latter can suck the life out of you).  I usually open up a clean Excel sheet and start creating tabs for categories of keywords I think are relevant (go as deep or as high level as you want), and leave one tab in the front for all of your keywords combined.  We’ll leave that tab empty for now.

Keyword categories can be based off of our persona types and their needs, or you can categorize keywords based on topics based on how your site might be sectioned, or if you’re really inquisitive like me, you might do persona groups with keyword subsections for each.  

If you’re covering several topics per persona, or if you have an especially large site and you’re covering several topics with subtopics, you can create a different worksheet for each main topic/persona that has several subtopics within it.  That will be easier to decipher than one worksheet with 40 tabs that represent topics and subtopics.

Don’t be afraid to make keyword tabs for as many topics as you want – you don’t have to use the data if you think the search volume is too low.

For example, if I’m working on my seniors’ health site, my categories might look like this:

• General seniors & elderly terms
• Senior & elderly health
• Diseases and conditions
• Weight loss, diet and fitness
• Assisted living
• Drugs
• Aging
• Doctors
• Self-diagnosis
• Information for Caregivers

In my target audience research findings I saw that Florida, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia were the states with the highest proportions of people 65 and older in 2000: 17.6 percent, 15.6 percent, and 15.3 percent, respectively, and I thought I might want to provide local information for my visitors (ideally I’d also look up the highest numbers of seniors by state in addition to percentages).  So I might also add some special interest keyword sections with some local terms. And although I made it up, (because I haven’t actually done any in-depth research) I think seniors might be interested in prescription drug plans, so I’m going to create a special interest keyword section for that too, to do some exploration:

• Local senior health
• Prescription drug plans 

The more exploratory you are, the more work you might have to do, but the more insight you’ll get back as well, so feel free to make as many categories as you want, and ditch some once you’ve done the keyword research if you don’t feel they’re relevant or no one is searching for the topics. The purpose of this keyword research is to determine and discover the topics relevant to what you can provide, determine the best keywords to target and incorporate, and eventually to prioritize content and topics based on relevance and search volume.

You could also use keyword tools that allow you to create and store keyword lists like Keyword Discovery or WordTracker, but for this example I’m going to use the free Google AdWords Keyword Tool. 

Now that I have categorized my keyword sections in my Excel sheet, it’s time to fill them in with data. 

EXPAND KEYWORDS & GRAB VOLUME DATA

Now that you have keyword categories setup in your Excel sheet, you can do some research and expansion. While you’re expanding your keyword list you’ll also be collecting search volume data.  

In the end, you’ll want this data:

• Keyword
• Search Volume

In the next article (Step 3) we’ll be comparing your site’s referrals from Google to the Google Search volume for each keyword (with a calculation to allow for clickthrough rates) so we’ll be adding referral (and potentially conversion) columns to our Excel sheet. This is why I prefer using the Google AdWords Keyword Tool, since it gives us estimated monthly Google Search volume. And it’s free. 

We’ll also only be looking at Google data for this example, primarily because Yahoo and Bing currently don’t release search volume data.  To be more thorough, you could estimate other search engine search volume (based on each search engine’s market share), but as I mentioned, for this example we’ll just stick with Google.

Here’s how to collect your categorized keyword data:

1. Go to the Google AdWords keyword tool
2. Type in a word or phrase from your first keyword category. Type in a few words or phrases if you want, but don’t overdo it in one query.  You’ll get back a limited set of results, so you’re better off getting more terms based on one or two keywords than the same amount of results based on 10 or 15 keywords.
3. Choose Exact from the Match Type dropdown

When I do keyword research, I usually start with high level general words, which lets me see what is popular around that topic, and what other related terms I might want to add to my lists, possibly even as another category if there is enough volume.

For example, if I start my senior healthcare site keyword research with the terms seniors and elderly, I can see how popular searches are with each of those terms in them, but I can also see that the related search results show me that Alzheimer’s and nursing homes are high volume related topics that I want to be sure I have keyword categories built out for in my worksheet (and eventually possibly content on my site).

If I had an existing senior healthcare site, this might give me insight into content opportunities that I’m currently not targeting. For example, if I didn’t have any content on my site for nursing homes, I might want to consider either adding content and/or partnering with advertisers or content providers to cover that topic.

I also mentioned I thought my visitors might be interested in prescription drug plans.  When I do research for those terms, I can see that searches around Medicare topics are much more popular. I’ll add these terms into my worksheet.

4. If your results look mostly good, scroll to the bottom of your results and export your results into a csv file for Excel
5. Open up your CSV file and move column widths so you can see the keywords
6. Do some manual filtering by removing keywords that aren’t relevant (remove the entire row). You may also want to remove any competitor brand terms, unless you’re trying to attain/convert traffic for them.
7. Are you interested in global search volume or local?  Whichever you’re interested in, make sure you have matching referral data later (for existing sites only). We’ll be comparing referral data per keyword to search volume in the next step (optional, but good stuff to know), so if you’re interested in global data, make sure you have global referral data.  Whichever column you’re not interested in, delete it.  You can also delete the Advertiser Competition column unless you want to use it for further analysis, but we won’t be using it for these examples.  You should now have two columns: Keyword and either Global or Local Search Volume.
8. Copy your keywords and your search volume data and paste them into your keyword category tab in your Excel worksheet*. 

9. Repeat this process for all keyword categories in your worksheet.
10. It’s a good idea to note somewhere in your worksheet what time period the data is you’re pulling.  Google AdWords keyword tool shows data in a monthly chunk, so note the month in your worksheet so you don’t forget when you’re comparing your own site referral data later.

*Alternatively, you can save each keyword list export as its own file rather than copying and pasting it into a master Excel sheet.  Keep in mind that you may do several keyword list searches and exports for one topic though.

You can get even more creative in your keyword research by also looking into what your competitors are targeting.  Use the Website Content tab on the Google Keyword Research tool, or other tools like Keyword Discovery to discover terms that are semantically relevant to your competitors’ websites.  This might provide more insight into terms you can or should target for your own site. We’ll delve into much more competitive research in further steps.

Everyone has their own method of doing keyword research, so do what works best for you.  All that matters is that you end up with categorizations that you care about, and some search volume data that we’ll use later in our strategy. This part of the strategy should end up giving you a really good idea of what’s popular and what types of terms and topics you might want to target.

We’ll look at how to prioritize and how find potential Gaps and Opportunities (for existing sites) in the next article: Step 3.

Do you have any similar (or completely different) methods for collecting and categorizing keywords? Please share!

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Link Profiling with Open Site Explorer »

Posted by Dr. Pete

We all know that links are good for SEO and good links are even better, but what does a “good” link profile really look like? It’s easy for even an average website to have hundreds of back-links, and sorting through them to get a sense of the overall quality is often more art than science. It’s also easy to get caught up in the outliers. Will 1 great link or 1 spammy link tip the balance? Probably not, but it’s easy to get distracted by those exceptions when you’re filtering through hundreds or thousands of links.

Here on SEOmoz, we’ve tried to distill (and by "we" I mean a bunch of other people who are smarter than me) the idea of link profile quality into metrics like Domain Authority and Page Authority. These are incredibly useful concepts, but now we’re on the opposite extreme – just one number to represent something very complex. The problem is, we really don’t have much in between, a way to understand the quality of our link profile at a glance.

Link Profiling: The Experiment

This blog post really began when I wondered whether it would be possible to take our existing Moz metrics and chart what a link profile looks like. I went through a number of variations (subjecting Ben and Nick to harrowing emails loaded with dozens of graphs), until I finally landed on a process using Open Site Explorer. I’m going to outline that process, give a few examples, and then provide you a link to an Excel spreadsheet to download, so that you can play around with the idea yourself.

The basic process looks something like this:

1. Enter a site into Open Site Explorer (OSE)
2. Select “Show [Followed + 301]”
3. Select “from [External Pages Only]”
4. Select “to [All Pages on the Root Domain]”
5. Export results to CSV/Excel
6. Calculate the max Page Authority (PA) for each domain
7. Sort max PA into buckets: 1-10, 11-20, etc.
8. Graph the buckets

The result is a distribution of all of your linking domains by the highest-authority pages in those domains. This sounds a lot more complicated than it really is, so let’s see it in action.

Profile 1: High Quality

Let’s start with what a high quality domain might look like – I’ll make it easy and pick on SEOmoz. Using the process above, here’s one way you might graph the SEOmoz link profile. Since Open Site Explorer exports a maximum of 10,000 links, I’ve restricted this profile to just the home-page:

You may be surprised to realize that, even for a high-authority site, most of the Page Authority is still on the lower-half of the spectrum. The simple reality is that even on a strong site, most of the actual pages that link to it are much weaker than their parent domains. Most of the back-linked Moz pages land in the second bucket, with a gradual drop-off as PA increases.

Profile 2: Medium Quality

Now, let’s compare that with a solid but less authoritative site, my own blog. I’ve got solid back-links from some pretty good sources, but nothing like the Moz does. Here’s what my PA profile looks like (this is also the data used in the spreadsheet below):

Here, you see that most of my back-linking pages are sitting in the 0-10 bucket, a clear sign of my inferiority (sniff, sniff), but the curve still levels off gradually and I’ve got some solid representation up the PA chain.

Profile 3: Low Quality

Finally, let’s pick on a site that came to us in Q&A with some trouble (we’ll keep it anonymous, of course). This isn’t a site that was heinously blackhat, just one that suffered from enough low-quality links that we suspected a problem:

Look closely, and you’ll see a pronounced 0-10 bucket followed by a rapid drop-off, with little or no high-quality pages to take up the slack. It may seem like a subtle distinction at first, but look in the PA range of 20-70, and you’ll see the difference.

The Excel Spreadsheet

You can download the spreadsheet (1.9 MB) and try it for yourself. Just export your own data from Open Site Explorer (as described above) and paste it into the first worksheet ("OSE Data"). The second sheet ("Domains") will automatically strip out the subdomains, and the third sheet ("Max PA") is a pivot table that calculates the maximum Page Authority for each subdomain and then collapses that into the 10 buckets. 

One trick: You’ll need to refresh the Pivot Table (how to do this varies a bit with your version of Excel). The other pages and the final graph should refresh themselves automatically. I haven’t tested this on a Mac, so feel free to comment with helpful corrections.

This technique is a work in progress, and more of a way to explore your link profile than a hard analytical tactic at this point. If you try this out and find something interesting, please let us know in the comments. We’re always looking for useful ways to enhance the data visualizations on the SEOmoz tools.

Update - DA Profiles

A few people asked in the comments about what the Domain Authority (DA) profiles looked like. Since the SEOmoz team re-normalized some of the DA data last week, these curves are very similar in shape, but I’m including them below (I’ve matched them on height of the top bar):

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Futuristic Ways of Creating Automated Link Building Tools »

Posted by willcritchlow

Rand recently asked you all for feedback about improving the blog. The two areas that you asked us to write about more were linkbuilding and tools. In a shameless populist move, I thought I’d write a post about tools for automating (bits of) linkbuilding.

Recently, I keep coming across ways that we are actually living in the future. I don’t mean the jet-pack-wearing-holidaying-in-space-hover-car future, more the holy cow, you can actually run select * from internet where… kind of future.

Yes, I know it’s not as cool.

I believe that technical skills are important in SEO. There are plenty of non-technical roles in SEO agencies or teams (especially on the creative side of things) but if you have ambitions to lead teams, set strategy and run SEO projects, you kinda need to understand how the internet works under the covers. For me, that means knowing how to build stuff - even though I’m not a developer and should never be let near production code, I like to understand the concepts and principles. To keep on top of things, this means occasionally getting my hands dirty and building stuff. It’s fun. I can highly recommend it.

In order to bring you something useful and actionable, I decided to pick something simple that my team wanted, something to help with linkbuilding, but also something I could put together relatively quickly. I chose to build a prototype tool for monitoring the web for mentions of a website that don’t link to that website. Hopefully it’s pretty clear how this could be helpful - but just to give one example - if you are running a PR campaign, you may well get coverage that doesn’t link to you, but if you just drop the journalist a line straight after publishing, they can often get a link included. For those of you who think better in pictures, here is a diagram of what I mean, with my limited drawing skillz:

I recently wrote about some moderately technical tools (e.g. Mozenda, Smartsheet) in my post on data visualization techniques. The tools I’m going to cover today are even more technical and advanced - but they are also infinitely more flexible. I don’t want to scare you into thinking this is something you can’t do yourself though. I learnt all the techniques and tools below and finished my mini-project from scratch in 2 hours. In fact, it’ll take me longer to write the post than it did to do everything in it. If I can do it, so can you.

At 1pm UK time on Thursday 15th April, I tweeted this:

Why those particular tools? Well:

• xpath allows you to navigate and select elements and attributes from an XML document (including HTML). This gives you a really simple way of pulling information out of HTML pages
  • How this helps my mini-project: I get a straight-forward way of pulling all links out of a page in order to check whether the page in question links to you
• YQL (Yahoo! Query Language) is the select * from internet where … magic I referred to earlier. It provides an API that you can use to grab pages, RSS feeds and a whole load of other cool stuff
  • How this helps my mini-project: with one line of code, I can grab RSS feeds of mentions (for my proof-of-concept, I used a Google Alerts RSS feed) as well as grabbing the pages referenced in order to run xpath on them (did I mention that YQL supports xpath?)
• Google App Engine allows you to deploy web applications without worrying about most of the usual environment, server and configuration issues. It is also a way of dropping buzzwords into your conversation by deploying your newly scalable application to the cloud. FTW
  • How this helps my mini-project: I didn’t want to assume any prerequisites like having servers at your disposal, but I also didn’t have time to set anything up from scratch. App Engine is free for small-scale use, and I went from not having an account to deploying my code in under 2 hours
• Python is one of the two programming languages supported by Google App Engine. The other being Java. I know a tiny bit of Java from years ago, whereas I didn’t even know Python gives indentation semantic meaning before I started my project
  • How this helps my mini-project: I needed some kind of programming language to enable me to build loops, display the output etc. and I needed to pick one that I (a) didn’t already know and (b) could be used with App Engine

Getting Going

Before I start, let me warn you to read the disclaimer at the end of this post: I build a prototype / proof of concept here and you should definitely not rely on my code. Use at your own risk!

My ’specification’ for the project was:

• Grab mentions from a Google Alerts RSS feed (I chose to hardcode ‘SEOmoz‘ [RSS link] into my proof-of-concept)
• For each mention, see if there is a link to any page on http://www.seomoz.org
• Output a list of mentions that don’t link

Pretty simple, right?

With the clock ticking, I started by downloading the install files for App Engine and Python while reading up on YQL.

The Python download was taking a while, so I spent the first half hour building the YQL queries I needed on the console.

To grab the Google Alerts, I used:

select * from feed where url=’http://www.google.com/alerts/feeds/02091889458087148316/10137124638087203861′

and for each page in that list, I could grab the list of links using:

select * from html where url=’<target URL>‘ and xpath="//a[starts-with(@href,'http://www.seomoz.org')]"

The xpath there probably needs a bit of explaining - I built it using a combination of the basic xpath documentation linked above and the ever-awesome stackoverflow. You can consider it in three sections:

1. //a means select all ‘a’ (anchor) elements (i.e. links)
2. //a[@href] means select all href attributes of all links
3. //a[starts-with(@href,'http://www.seomoz.org')] means select all href attributes of all links that start with http://www.seomoz.org

By the time I’d cracked that, my downloads had finished and I set about getting my environment ready using the App Engine quick start guide.

I also had a lucky break at about this point. I discovered that there is a YQL library for Python. Holy awesome batman! I figured it was going to be pretty easy to build something in Python to query the YQL API, but I didn’t realise it was going to be as easy as yql.Public().execute(query). Sweet!

It took me a while to work out how to import third party libraries into my App Engine environment (turns out you just grab the source code and include the folder in your application’s root folder). My time was running out by this point. I was about halfway through my two hours and I hadn’t yet written a single line of code.

Uh oh.

Writing Python Code

I’m not the right person to teach you how to write Python code. Especially because about 10 minutes before the end of my challenge, I realised I didn’t know how to create an if statement. My approach to learning Python is not to be recommended; but there are loads of great tutorials out there. I really wish I could step through and explain my code line-by-line, but honestly? I’d probably just expose my horrific lack of knowledge.

[Want a link from SEOmoz? Understand Python? Write up an explanation for beginners, drop me a line and I'll link to it here. For bonus points, you could show how to improve my code ]. In the meantime, working through the code has to be (as my university lecturers used to say) left as an exercise for the interested reader. Update: Peter Coles has kindly taken the time to go through my code (improving and) explaining things - if you’re interested, I suggest you read his explanation of my Python code. Thanks Peter!

All you really need to know is that in 33 lines of code (at the time of writing), I built my basic prototype. You can see the resulting code over at Google code.

The Outcome

With time running out, I clicked ‘deploy’ and…..

mentionmonitor

…. huh. That was easy.

OK, so I get time-outs / server errors from time to time and it’s really only a proof-of concept at the moment (see below) but I still think it justified my tweet exactly two hours after the previous one:

Huge Caveats

My prototype is essentially just a proof-of-concept. Among loads of other things, note that it doesn’t have:

• Any error-handling
• Much testing
• Any documentation (including comments)

And that it does have:

• Hardcoded variables
• Massive limitations even given the hardcoding (only grabbing 10 results, for example)
• No way of automating it or doing anything other than running it manually (though App Engine does provide simple ways of extending into this)

In its current form, it’s not really useful for anything, but hopefully it will become interesting soon. If you want to build anything off it (or the ideas contained in it), I’d love to hear about it (but please bear in mind that it really is the definition of non-production-ready code, so if you do use it, you do so entirely at your own risk!).

I still think that it has been a useful learning exercise for me and I hope it presents you with some food for thought (unfortunately not real food like Rand’s recent post).

Please share your ideas

I’d love to hear your thoughts for similar small tools that help us all do our jobs better. I’d also love to see someone take this and turn it into a more fully-functional tool (if you do that, let me know and you’ll likely get a link from here!).

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Whiteboard Friday - Leveraging Syndicated Content Effectively »

Posted by great scott!

You see an amazing story somewhere in the vastness of  the web and you think to yourself: "Man, that would be perfect for my readers! It’d get great traffic and my customers/advertisers would love it!"

Now, how do you syndicate that content on your site (fairly and legally) without running into the traditional problems of duplicate content, link-back requirements, etc…all things that can really hamper the likelihood of SEO traffic for the content?  Watch this week’s Whiteboard Friday to learn some great strategies for getting maximum impact out of content you license (and watch this older one if you have content you want to license out). There are lots of options and it’s important you know your options if you want to achieve your goals.

PS - The folks over at Market Motive put out some great online marketing training courses and have kindly offered SEOmoz readers a discount for the next Master Certification which starts Monday April 19.

The courses are 100% online and include 90-days of  lessons with some top people including Avinash Kaushik, Todd Malicoat, Bryan Eisenberg and more.  SEOmoz readers can use corporate access code "CERT30SEOMZ" to save $500 off the Master Certification course.

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SEOs and Developers: 5 Ways to Build The Relationship »

Posted by jennita

Who is the one person (or group of people) that you can’t live without? Your developer. [Don't tell that to your spouse though.. eh?] As an SEO your life revolves around making changes to your site/application and getting all the pieces to fall into place. If you live in a perfect world, you have the ability to change all your on-page optimization including URL, Title tag, meta description, set up redirects, etc. But how many of us live in this fantasy la la land where everything is perfect? I’m going to go out on a limb here and say not very many of us.

We need our developers. As tough as it may seem some days (the feeling is more than likely mutual), it will make your life just a little easier if you can find a way to work with your development team. Whether that means just one person, or a team of 20 people, getting along with them will allow both of you to do a better job. (As a consultant you may not be able to get the same availability to talk to the client’s developers but if you give your client these tips on how to work well with the dev staff, they’ll thank you for it.)

So what are some things you can do to build a better relationship with your dev team? Here are 5 tips, in no particular order.

1. Show Them the Data

Remember the first time you showed your boss that traffic increased by 500% and the revenue for the month went up 200% just by removing those silly frames on the site? Well show that information to your development team as well! When a developer sees that a change that took a total of 2 hours including the push to production, brought in such an increase in revenue, he/she is going to see the value in their work. When you feel like the work you’re doing, actually makes an impact on the company, your boss, your salary… you’re more willing to help make additional changes in the future.

With a little digging, you’re sure to find something on your own site where you can show the developers exactly how much of an impact their work has had on the company’s success. Heck, throw them a party for reaching that monthly traffic goal that your sales team has been working towards but that your dev team knows nothing about. Data, data, data, that’s where it’s at!

2. Have Them Do it Themselves

I really love this one. Ask your development team to “SEO” their own websites. Most developers (or really anyone these days) will have some sort of website. Whether it’s a personal blog, they manage their aunt Betty’s jewelry store or they have their own business on the side, they usually have something.

As a developer when I was asked to make URL rewrite changes and create landing pages, etc. It bothered me that I felt like these changes were for nothing, just some marketing fluff that wasn’t really going to help much. But then I took my husband’s website and started to implement some of the same changes. I also did my own research and started learning SEO on my own (which is the way many developers work) and voila I drank the Kool-Aid quickly. As soon as my husband’s site started ranking really well for different terms, I wanted to learn more at work. I knew that the changes I made on this small site were fairly easy and I was targeting local and very long tail searches.

Show them the tools in your SEOmoz PRO account (or buy them their own!) and the other tools under your belt and let them learn on their own, with their own sites. Once they understand the basics (or the more advanced depending on their skill levels) and do their own research, you’ll find that it’s easier to 1) talk to them about SEO in general and 2)  get them to make the necessary changes to the site.

3. Let Them Teach You

Sure, you’ve read all the blogs, you’ve done all the research, you’ve been to the conferences and you’ve seen it work on many websites. But you’re not the one changing the code (in most cases). When you go directly to a developer and ask her to set up seventy five 301 redirects because of xyz reason and you give them the code to do it… they’re going to laugh at you (I know I did… sorry Lindsay). Don’t tell a developer HOW to do something.

Help them understand WHY it needs to happen and ask them to figure it out. Remember they’re the expert when it comes to the technical side. Obviously there are many SEOs out there who are also very technical, and this puts you in a great position! You can use that to your advantage, but I’d still recommend letting the person in charge of making the actual development changes, figure the majority of it out on their own. If they seem to be running into roadblocks, point them in the right direction.

Let them teach you about the issues with your current platform, why certain SEO “best practices” simply can’t be done. Let them come up with relevant alternatives and figure out how to solve the problem without doing it the “normal” way. Your developer is wicked smart, let him show you just how well he can find a solution!

4. Find an Advocate

All you need is one. One person on the development team who has the ability to sway others as well. This doesn’t mean that you want someone who can persuade people into doing something that doesn’t make sense. But you want someone on your side, who understands SEO as well as the infrastructure of your website and the development team.

If you see one developer who seems to be somewhat interested in SEO, try to send them to a conference, preferably one with developer specific sessions. SMX often has a “Developer Day” or “Technical SEO Track” these are super valuable for your technical staff. (I went to SMX Advanced Developer Day a couple years ago and now I work for SEOmoz! Word.)

Sometimes pulling yourself out of the limelight of always being the one telling them what to do, and letting an "expert" (in quotes, because you’re more than likely also an expert but they might not see that) explain the world of SEO to them, will help them to see the light.

However you can get that person on board, do it. Once you have an in, they can be your advocate. Believe me on this one, I was that developer!

5. If All Else Fails…

Buy them beer! Or coffee, or Jack Daniels, or pizza or whatever the heck it is that they like. Make friends, be nice, and go give your developers a hug. Tell them J.Lo sent you. Unless of course that is just too creepy and you could get sued for sexual harassment, in that case, stick with the beer. :)

Every organization has a different set of obstacles and each one should be treated distinctly. I’d love to hear how you’ve worked with your developer or technical team to work on SEO solutions together. What worked for you and what didn’t?

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Cooking Up Great SEO: An Analogy in Photos »

Posted by randfish

I’ve long opined to friends and co-workers that two of my personal passions, cooking & SEO, are deeply related in some mystical, cosmic way. Cooking is familiar to everyone. There’s a process for each recipe, a uniqueness to each dish and both an art and a science to coaxing perfection out of raw ingredients to make them better than the sum of their parts. So too it is with SEO.

SEO, however, is incredibly difficult to understand and to explain. It’s a thorn in the side of nearly everyone I talk to in our industry that they can’t easily explain the concept and process of their work outside the web marketing and development communities. That’s why I’m creating this post. If someone in your personal or professional life simply doesn’t understand SEO, send them here. Hopefully, the silly pictures of me cooking up some pasta on a sunny Sunday can help to inspire that missing connection.

Sunday night’s dinner tasted even better than it looked…

And for the SEOs reading this post who already know this process intimately, perhaps you can find some nuggets of information, or at least work up an appetite.

The Planning Process: Structuring and Improvising on a Recipe (or SEO Strategy)

Phenomenal dishes require two things - the right ingredients (which we’ll discuss below) and the right strategy to prepare them together. Too much heat for too long and your food will burn. Too little salt and it won’t carry any flavor.

SEO is remarkably similar; the wrong architecture can make it impossible for search engines to find your pages (see Site Architecture Issues to Avoid - as true today as in 2006 when it was written!). A bad implementation of duplicate content (whereby the same works appear on many pages - see the Illustrated Guide) can make the engines go crazy trying to figure out which page to rank in the results.

Careful planning, combined with precise implementation is the only way to ensure good results - in both cooking and SEO.

For my recipe, I knew that our guest for the evening, SEOmoz’s COO & Blawger-in-chief, Sarah, loved braised lamb. And, perhaps not surprisingly since I’m married to an Italian, I love pasta. These, I thought, were two great tastes that go great together. I looked up some recipes and found a few terrific ones… But my plans changed when I got to the market.

Choosing the Right Ingredients

Great chefs don’t plan a menu around a fixed menu, they visit and talk with their suppliers to understand what’s fresh, what’s good and what’s great.

Likewise, no SEO worth their salt simply produces a website and a set of content without first discovering what their customers want. Google helps to make this easy with tools like Google Insights for Search, which allows us to see how many people are actually searching for, say…

Braised lamb’s popularity wanes substantially in the summer each year

When a good SEO sees that some searches are more popular than others, he targets those keywords instead. When a good chef sees great food, he leaps at the same opportunity.

Goat shoulder straight from the farmer who raised them! How could I resist?

That’s the great thing about bringing an open mind to the kitchen (or to the SEO process) - sometimes the tastiest things are the ones you never considered.

This process certainly doesn’t stop at Goat meat (or at keyword demand). SEOs need to choose the right content management system, the right nvaigation structure and even the right marketing channel(s). I needed to choose the right wine:

Chianti, Nebbiolo, Barolo, Montepluciano, how can I choose?!

After a midday shopping extravaganza, I had my basic components and was ready to proceed:

Left to right: Goat shoulder, eggs, Sangiovese, semolina flour, carrots, celery, pancetta, onion, garlic, thyme, rosemary, sage, crushed tomatoes, tomato paste, flat-leaf parsley

Like the SEO who researches a market and discovers that opportunity lies in keywords and content he’d not previously considered, I was now faced with the prospect of cooking a meat I’d never prepared before.

Applying a Sound Technical Process

Talented chefs don’t necessarily need the best ingredients or even the best equipment. They can make do in any environment. SEOs need to be equally flexible. We’d all love to be in professional kitchens with the freshest ingredients sourced from sublime locales, but we’re often making do with someone else’s 5-year-old implementation of second-rate SEO advice and a website design that was barely clinging to relevance in 1999.

Great processes in cooking, in SEO and in business across the board can help transform even the mediocre into something palatable.

In SEO, technique is of paramount importance. If you can’t properly analyze a site’s accessibility and identify the errors and opportunities, you’ll always be working with one hand tied behind your back. Successful keyword targeting & on-page optimization are well documented practices and yet many SEOs fail to overcome this relatively moderate, achievable burden. Employing tactics like XML sitemaps, canonical URL tags, proper pagination systems, smart 301 redirects & rewrite rules are akin to adding ingredients to the pot in the right order, with the right heat in the correct proportions. You can mess up a few of these a little bit, but a big breakdown in any area makes for an inedible experience.

I don’t claim to be a great chef by any means. In fact, much as with SEO, I’ve learned through trial and failure, through watching others do it right, by eating great meals prepared by great foodie friends and asking them their secrets and, most of all, through practice. My wife can attest to the hundreds of failures I’ve had over the years, just as my experience at SEOmoz has shown plenty of failures (e.g. up until today, we forgot to put any content on the new Keyword Difficulty Tool page for logged-out users, aka Googlebot - doh!).

But there are tactics and strategies that are tried and true as well as a sixth sense that both chefs and SEOs come to with time and practice. For example, in the top-right photo above, you can see how the onion has been pre-sliced such that horizontal slices now create a mirepoix-ready dice (I hated cutting onions until I learned that technique). In the center-right photo, you’ll see a well made of flour with eggs neatly nestled inside, ready to be spun into a great pasta dough (try doing it on a mound of flour, but prepare for an eggy floor).

In SEO, the same principles hold true.

I no longer use ridiculously outdated metrics like keyword density in an attempt to add relevancy to a page. The days of building links through low quality directories are long since past. Even smart strategies like linkbaiting need updating to stay relevant and valuable (just as Julia Childs’ recipes are still good, but can feel a bit dated). Applying smart tactics around microsites and domain authority, keyword cannibalization and multiple keyword targeting can mean the difference between a dish fit to be king of Google’s rankings and one that suffers on the pauper’s page 10 of results.

The Difference Between Good & Great

Sometimes, getting the basics right is good enough. For a dinner with friends, applying the tactics I know in the kitchen with some unique ingredients and a bit of elbow grease worked out just fine. But there’s a huge gap between the meal I made and what great chefs are turning out in the world’s great kitchens. This video is one of my absolute favorites to help illustrate the issue:

The NFL hires some of the fastest runners in the world to compete at the professional level. The difference between the player in the video (Jacoby Ford) and an average guy (Rich Eisen) is stunning to watch. The same holds true in cooking. My goat ragu with homemade orecchiette might impress my wife and Sarah (hopefully), but it won’t hold a candle to what New York’s Mario Batali or Seattle’s Tom Douglas could put together.

Likewise, the SEO world’s best and brightest can achieve results so astounding and impressive that they can scale businesses overnight. We may be a web-addicted, geeky, quirky bunch, but the range of talent varies just as far as in any other pursuit. A phenomenal SEO can build a true competitive advantage with their skills & knowledge by leveraging the best tools and data out there along with an unrelenting dedication to excellence.

An Analogy Taken Too Far

There’s no doubt I’ve stretched this metaphor to the point of breaking, but hopefully it’s been fun and valuable. I’ll say just this one last thing on the subject:

To be truly great at any endeavor, individuals need to strive for perfection. Even the world’s fastest athletes need to work on that sloppy toe scrape at the start of a race. The mindset and the discipline to learn all that we can about a subject and apply it in the smartest, best ways is what separates good from great in cooking, athletics, academics, programming and yes, SEO. Our field has "optimization" right in the acronym - it describes a profession built around to achieve perfection in spite of massive barriers - a set of unknowable algorithms, a constant moving target, financial & economic incentives for our competitors to outgun us not just the day of the race but every hour of each day.

If you’re just learning about SEO, welcome to our tiny corner. We can be a scrappy, insular bunch at times, but we’ve got tons of heart and an incredible passion for this oft-neglected marketing discipline that’s we can’t wait to share.

If you’ve been doing this for years, I hope you’ll stick around and share your tips on how to better dice an onion and achieve maximum carmelization on the goat. After all, a great meal is best shared with friends and family - and that’s exactly what we’re trying to build here at SEOmoz.

Goat meat falling off the bone, fresh pasta that’s still al dente - what more can a man ask in life?

Apparently, nothing.

For those who are interested, you can see the full documentation (183 pictures from market to table) below:

p.s. A special and huge thanks to my lovely wife, Geraldine (who asks that in return, could we maybe link to her blog and help her SEO?) for the photography, and to SEOmoz’s Sarah Bird (who joined us for dinner and helped make the pasta) for indulging me in such a geeky weekend activity.

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Cooking Up Great SEO: An Analogy in Photos »

Posted by randfish

I’ve long opined to friends and co-workers that two of my personal passions, cooking & SEO, are deeply related in some mystical, cosmic way. Cooking is familiar to everyone. There’s a process for each recipe, a uniqueness to each dish and both an art and a science to coaxing perfection out of raw ingredients to make them better than the sum of their parts. So too it is with SEO.

SEO, however, is incredibly difficult to understand and to explain. It’s a thorn in the side of nearly everyone I talk to in our industry that they can’t easily explain the concept and process of their work outside the web marketing and development communities. That’s why I’m creating this post. If someone in your personal or professional life simply doesn’t understand SEO, send them here. Hopefully, the silly pictures of me cooking up some pasta on a sunny Sunday can help to inspire that missing connection.

Sunday night’s dinner tasted even better than it looked…

And for the SEOs reading this post who already know this process intimately, perhaps you can find some nuggets of information, or at least work up an appetite.

The Planning Process: Structuring and Improvising on a Recipe (or SEO Strategy)

Phenomenal dishes require two things - the right ingredients (which we’ll discuss below) and the right strategy to prepare them together. Too much heat for too long and your food will burn. Too little salt and it won’t carry any flavor.

SEO is remarkably similar; the wrong architecture can make it impossible for search engines to find your pages (see Site Architecture Issues to Avoid - as true today as in 2006 when it was written!). A bad implementation of duplicate content (whereby the same works appear on many pages - see the Illustrated Guide) can make the engines go crazy trying to figure out which page to rank in the results.

Careful planning, combined with precise implementation is the only way to ensure good results - in both cooking and SEO.

For my recipe, I knew that our guest for the evening, SEOmoz’s COO & Blawger-in-chief, Sarah, loved braised lamb. And, perhaps not surprisingly since I’m married to an Italian, I love pasta. These, I thought, were two great tastes that go great together. I looked up some recipes and found a few terrific ones… But my plans changed when I got to the market.

Choosing the Right Ingredients

Great chefs don’t plan a menu around a fixed menu, they visit and talk with their suppliers to understand what’s fresh, what’s good and what’s great.

Likewise, no SEO worth their salt simply produces a website and a set of content without first discovering what their customers want. Google helps to make this easy with tools like Google Insights for Search, which allows us to see how many people are actually searching for, say…

Braised lamb’s popularity wanes substantially in the summer each year

When a good SEO sees that some searches are more popular than others, he targets those keywords instead. When a good chef sees great food, he leaps at the same opportunity.

Goat shoulder straight from the farmer who raised them! How could I resist?

That’s the great thing about bringing an open mind to the kitchen (or to the SEO process) - sometimes the tastiest things are the ones you never considered.

This process certainly doesn’t stop at Goat meat (or at keyword demand). SEOs need to choose the right content management system, the right navigation structure and even the right marketing channel(s). I needed to choose the right wine:

Chianti, Nebbiolo, Barolo, Montepluciano, how can I choose?!

After a midday shopping extravaganza, I had my basic components and was ready to proceed:

Left to right: Goat shoulder, eggs, Sangiovese, semolina flour, carrots, celery, pancetta, onion, garlic, thyme, rosemary, sage, crushed tomatoes, tomato paste, flat-leaf parsley

Like the SEO who researches a market and discovers that opportunity lies in keywords and content he’d not previously considered, I was now faced with the prospect of cooking a meat I’d never prepared before.

Applying a Sound Technical Process

Talented chefs don’t necessarily need the best ingredients or even the best equipment. They can make do in any environment. SEOs need to be equally flexible. We’d all love to be in professional kitchens with the freshest ingredients sourced from sublime locales, but we’re often making do with someone else’s 5-year-old implementation of second-rate SEO advice and a website design that was barely clinging to relevance in 1999.

Great processes in cooking, in SEO and in business across the board can help transform even the mediocre into something palatable.

In SEO, technique is of paramount importance. If you can’t properly analyze a site’s accessibility and identify the errors and opportunities, you’ll always be working with one hand tied behind your back. Successful keyword targeting & on-page optimization are well documented practices and yet many SEOs fail to overcome this relatively moderate, achievable burden. Employing tactics like XML sitemaps, canonical URL tags, proper pagination systems, smart 301 redirects & rewrite rules are akin to adding ingredients to the pot in the right order, with the right heat in the correct proportions. You can mess up a few of these a little bit, but a big breakdown in any area makes for an inedible experience.

I don’t claim to be a great chef by any means. In fact, much as with SEO, I’ve learned through trial and failure, through watching others do it right, by eating great meals prepared by great foodie friends and asking them their secrets and, most of all, through practice. My wife can attest to the hundreds of failures I’ve had over the years, just as my experience at SEOmoz has shown plenty of failures (e.g. up until today, we forgot to put any content on the new Keyword Difficulty Tool page for logged-out users, aka Googlebot - doh!).

But there are tactics and strategies that are tried and true as well as a sixth sense that both chefs and SEOs come to with time and practice. For example, in the top-right photo above, you can see how the onion has been pre-sliced such that horizontal slices now create a mirepoix-ready dice (I hated cutting onions until I learned that technique). In the center-right photo, you’ll see a well made of flour with eggs neatly nestled inside, ready to be spun into a great pasta dough (try doing it on a mound of flour, but prepare for an eggy floor).

In SEO, the same principles hold true.

I no longer use ridiculously outdated metrics like keyword density in an attempt to add relevancy to a page. The days of building links through low quality directories are long since past. Even smart strategies like linkbaiting need updating to stay relevant and valuable (just as Julia Childs’ recipes are still good, but can feel a bit dated). Applying smart tactics around microsites and domain authority, keyword cannibalization and multiple keyword targeting can mean the difference between a dish fit to be king of Google’s rankings and one that suffers on the pauper’s page 10 of results.

The Difference Between Good & Great

Sometimes, getting the basics right is good enough. For a dinner with friends, applying the tactics I know in the kitchen with some unique ingredients and a bit of elbow grease worked out just fine. But there’s a huge gap between the meal I made and what great chefs are turning out in the world’s great kitchens. This video is one of my absolute favorites to help illustrate the issue:

The NFL hires some of the fastest runners in the world to compete at the professional level. The difference between the player in the video (Jacoby Ford) and an average guy (Rich Eisen) is stunning to watch. The same holds true in cooking. My goat ragu with homemade orecchiette might impress my wife and Sarah (hopefully), but it won’t hold a candle to what New York’s Mario Batali or Seattle’s Tom Douglas could put together.

Likewise, the SEO world’s best and brightest can achieve results so astounding and impressive that they can scale businesses overnight. We may be a web-addicted, geeky, quirky bunch, but the range of talent varies just as far as in any other pursuit. A phenomenal SEO can build a true competitive advantage with their skills & knowledge by leveraging the best tools and data out there along with an unrelenting dedication to excellence.

An Analogy Taken Too Far

There’s no doubt I’ve stretched this metaphor to the point of breaking, but hopefully it’s been fun and valuable. I’ll say just this one last thing on the subject:

To be truly great at any endeavor, individuals need to strive for perfection. Even the world’s fastest athletes need to work on that sloppy toe scrape at the start of a race. The mindset and the discipline to learn all that we can about a subject and apply it in the smartest, best ways is what separates good from great in cooking, athletics, academics, programming and yes, SEO. Our field has "optimization" right in the acronym - it describes a profession built around to achieve perfection in spite of massive barriers - a set of unknowable algorithms, a constant moving target, financial & economic incentives for our competitors to outgun us not just the day of the race but every hour of each day.

If you’re just learning about SEO, welcome to our tiny corner. We can be a scrappy, insular bunch at times, but we’ve got tons of heart and an incredible passion for this oft-neglected marketing discipline that’s we can’t wait to share.

If you’ve been doing this for years, I hope you’ll stick around and share your tips on how to better dice an onion and achieve maximum carmelization on the goat. After all, a great meal is best shared with friends and family - and that’s exactly what we’re trying to build here at SEOmoz.

Goat meat falling off the bone, fresh pasta that’s still al dente - what more can a man ask in life?

Apparently, nothing.

For those who are interested, you can see the full documentation (183 pictures from market to table) below:

p.s. A special and huge thanks to my lovely wife, Geraldine (who asks that in return, could we maybe link to her blog and help her SEO?) for the photography, and to SEOmoz’s Sarah Bird (who joined us for dinner and helped make the pasta) for indulging me in such a geeky weekend activity.

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Linkscape Update, New Stats and an API Dashboard »

Posted by Nick Gerner

Update: Why did my Domain Authority change?

In this index update we re-calibrated our Domain Authority metric to better reflect the relationships between all domains on the Internet. This means that many websites’ Domain Authority (DA) changed.

Not to worry! If your domain authority went down, so did all of the other domains that had similar link profiles before the index update. (Don’t think about it like something bad happened to your site, think about it like we changed how we view the entire Internet) You can read more about why we did this in the section below.

The good news is, we have an index update for you!  And it’s a couple of days sooner than previously announced.  The bad news is, things were, as you might have noticed, a little rocky this morning.  We had more traffic to the API than ever before, and, through the magic of being a scrappy startup, we all jumped into action.  Fortunately, through the magic of Amazon Web Services, we’ve quickly increased our infrastructure and are serving better than ever.  I do apologize for any issues this might have caused.

I’ve got a few things to say in this post, so you can skip forward if you like:

• Page Authority and Domain Authority Change
• New API Dashboard
• Stats on Nofollow vs Rel=Canonical
• Index Update Stats

We’ve gotten a lot of feedback about Page Authority and Domain Authority.  We’re excited about these metrics and are using them to power a lot of what we do: sorting links, crawl selection, keyword difficulty.  But lately, it seemed as if things were getting a little… clumpy.  We were packing our numbers too closely together to give a real sense of the spread in authority over the web.  I’ll defer to Ben and Rand, who are working on this a lot, but just to give you a taste:

As you can see, we’ve pulled apart a lot of great sites.  This spread, for example SEOmoz with a PA of 80 and Amazon.com with a PA of 89, better reflects different authorities.

This will have effects across tools, including Keyword Difficulty.  So take a minute to check those out and make sure that what we’re showing you matches your intuition.

It’s actually very fitting that we should have more traffic than ever before, because we’ve been hard at work on better serving one of our biggest API consumers: You!  Today we’re launching our SEOmoz API Dashboard. 

This dashboard will be the place to go to manage your SEOmoz API account.  Right now we’re including all of your API usage.  This gives you visibility into your API consumption, critical if you’re on the paid plan.  And if you’re on the free plan this gives you some idea of the usage of your tools.  As we improve what we offer both in the API and to support application development, you’ll see more and more here.

Last week I had a great chat with Eric Enge at Stone Temple Consulting.  We talked a little bit about the usage of nofollow and rel=canonical over the last year (a big year for both!), but I didn’t have anything concrete to share at the time.  I dug into it and it’s pretty interesting:

As you can see, rel=canonical is really taking off.  Since we started keeping really good stats on its usage in our data, it’s grown in usage by about 50%, in just six months!  We see rel=canonical being used more than either internal or external nofollows.  And internal nofollows have fallen off quite a bit about eight months ago, but are reasonably stable since then.

My hypothesis (without supporting data at the moment), is that two mindsets are winning:

• use rel=canonical right away
• if rel=nofollow is working leave it

I’ll leave it to the expert SEOs to debate this (in the comments, please!), but that could well be sound advice.

Here are some charts and graphs of the data we’ve updated since last month.

We’re staying on course with our current update rate for pages.  We’ve got updated information for about 43 billion pages.

And we have a corresponding update for links to and from those pages.

We’ve got two focuses for our data updates:

• Get those domains which we used to think about as niche
• Get deep on those domains that are highly authoritative

This is actually a big initiative we’ve been working on this year.  And we’re already seeing great improvements to our data quality.

 I hope you enjoy the data.  As always, feedback is much appreciated!

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8 Secrets of Success Within SEO »

Posted by chenry

How does a person become successful in the world of SEO? I wish I could tell you all the secrets but if I knew them, I would be sitting on a beach in Tahiti, sipping mai tais, instead of writing this post. About a year ago I ran across a video of Richard St. John giving a quick 3 minute presentation at TED about the 8 secrets of success and started to wonder if those same 8 secrets where true within the SEO industry. Take 3 minutes, watch the video and think about how you can implement his secrets into your SEO work and then read my take on his secrets related to SEO.

1.) Passion

2.) Work

3.) Good

4.) Ideas

Successful SEOs are always coming up with new ideas! Richards gave some great tips on how to come up with ideas, they included: listen, observe, be curious, ask questions, problem solve, and make connections.  All of those things can be done in communities like the one here at SEOmoz, get out there and start making those connections and asking questions.  Making comments on blog posts is a great way to start making connections or even creating your own YOUmoz post with techniques you use.

5.) Focus

6.) Push

7.) Serve

Serve your clients something of value and not just empty promises like some of the shady emails your clients receive. Happy clients will lead to great referrals and increase your bottom line. Along with serving them great results in the SERPs, provide them with some useful knowledge to help them understand why SEO is important to continue to do and not just a onetime thing.  Increases you clients knowledge about the SEO process will reduce questions and concerns in the long run.

8.) Persist

What do you think helps people become successfully in the SEO industry? What are the secrets to your success in this industry and what can a newbie do to get started on the right foot?  We would like to hear what you think makes people successful in this industry and what you consider when calling a person successful in SEO.

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Negotiating Partnerships For Scale-able Linkbuilding »

Posted by Tom_C

I’m no business guru. I’ve never run or owned a business. But from what I’ve overheard from smart people who do run businesses, developing a Unique Selling Proposition (USP) is crucial to succeeding. It’s the essence of being remarkable which is what Seth Godin talks about a lot. It’s one of the first questions that I ask clients when they come on board - "What’s your USP? Tell me why you’re better than your competitors".

Listening to clients tell you why they’re better than the competition is a little like getting a client to sell their product to you for CRO (as the Conversion Rate Experts talk about in their SEOmoz case study). The answer to this question will often surprise you and start you thinking of all kinds of juicy ways that you can go about gaining links.

So this is one way of getting link building techniques. But once you have this information about a businesses USP there are other ways to leverage it. And that’s what I want to talk about in this post.

Negotiating Partnerships For Links

Ok, so the stage is set - you’ve figured out what it is that makes your company (or website) better or different from your competitors. You’ve figured out your USP. Now, you need to package that USP up and exchange it for links. Let’s take a really basic example; a successful blogger like Glenn Allsopp. He figured out that one of his USPs was writing kick-ass pieces of content. So he decided to do some guest posting (please read his awesome guide to guest posting). When you boil it down, all a guest post is at the end of the day is a little mini-partnership between two bloggers.

Let’s look at a slightly bigger picture example. Let’s say you’re running a website with data on local pubs and bars. Let’s call this website BeerMoz.com. Now they look hard at the competition and figure out that more or less everyone has the same data, but their USP is in packaging up the data in nice Web 2.0 ways while their competitors are stuck in Web 1.0 swamps. One of the consequences is that BeerMoz has some kick-ass widgets. These widgets let you see the top rated pubs and bars in your area. Awesome linkbuilding-sauce. However, they don’t just stop there, here’s the clever part - Beermoz take their widgets and create partnerships with other local data providers.

What does this partnership look like? Well it looks a little like regular users embedding a widget only it’s done on a much larger scale. Take a camping website (say TentMoz.com) who has local data on campsites, they’re interested in jazzing up their campsite pages by displaying the best pubs to drink in nearby. This data is provided by BeerMoz and there’s a link back to BeerMoz via their widget.

This one partnership nets BeerMoz hundreds if not thousands of links. Admittedly it’s only from one domain so the value of those links tails off but they’re still great links to have - ideally to inner pages too (if the widget is set up correctly to point at individual pubs).

While it’s not going to bring any classical SEO benefit, consider Twitter’s partnerships with Google and Bing. These are exactly the kinds of deals that (done with anyone not a search engine) nets you some really strong links.

How To Find The Partnerships

Once you’ve come up with the concept, finding a website to partner with can often take just a little extra creative thinking. Often a good place to explore are those people who compete with you in the rankings but are not direct business competitors. For example, look at the people who rank for "SEO Tools" - you’ve got a mixture of sites actually offering their own SEO Tools but also blogs writing about SEO tools.

The hard part, however, is often getting to talk to the right people at the company once you’ve identified them. This is where having some business development experience comes in very handy. This stage of getting to talk to the right people, saying the right things and bargaining like a pro is something that business development people are very good at and I strongly recommend that you consider giving a little bit of SEO training to one of these people rather than trying to teach these skills to an SEO.

If you’re struggling however, consider reading a sales book to get some ideas of how best to speak to the right people and say the things they want to hear. Also - consider using LinkedIn as a resource to find contacts or get introductions at a company that you’re aiming for. Leveraging your personal network for an introduction can be the most effective way of getting a warm lead in these situations - twitter has saved my bacon more than once. Mmmm bacon.

Closing The Deal

Once you’re into the detail of negotiating the partnership there’s a few tips and things to bear in mind. Firstly, remember that you likely have more assets than the one you’re offering. For example, consider throwing into the negotiations some free exposure in your email newsletter or some twitter love for some of their content. Try and figure out what it is that drives their online presence and offer them something that helps it.

Here’s a story that my Dad loves to tell - many years ago (likely pre-internet!) he had a small dingy (like a small boat if dingy doesn’t translate to the US folks) and was trying to sell it. He advertised in the local paper for a few months at a really reasonable price but got zero responses. It appeared people just weren’t interested. Frustrated he decided to advertise again, but this time with a price tag several times what he was advertising it at before. Instantly he had several enquiries and sold it almost over night.

What we can learn about this story is that often attaching a price tag to something makes it’s perceived value go up. If you think about it, there’s no real reason for this to be true but nevertheless it’s how us simple predictable humans work. So why not open these negotiations by trying to SELL them your USP? If your USP is genuinely valuable then there’s no reason that you can’t sell it to them. Couch it in terms of licensing, or syndication of data. As discussions progress you can gradually start to talk about removing the price tag if they’ll only link to you in return for giving them this data. Boom! They see what you’re offering as valuable, they think they’re getting a steal and you get your links. (BTW - I wonder if this is technically buying links? I’m sure Google would never penalise you for it but it’s an interesting hypothetical example…)

Reciprocal Linking Isn’t Dead

If you’re struggling to really stand out from the crowd or don’t have a USP to talk of then firstly you have bigger problems than not enough links!! But secondly, consider reciprocal linking. Yes, yes I know I’ll probably get shouted at in the comments but reciprocal linking done between trusted sites on a manual level from pages without large numbers of external links is a GOOD THING. There, I said it. So consider negotiating some reciprocal links from strong sites. A few things to bear in mind:

• You want to carefully consider what you’re offering and to who you offer it. There’s only so many of these that you want to put in place so make sure they’re high quality.
• Don’t link to their pages which link to yours. Try and spread it around a little.
• Try not to create site-wide links. These are generally a bad idea. A smaller number of strong links will trump sitewide links every time.

 What experiences have you had using partnerships for link building? I’d love to hear from you in the comments.

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Grabbing Your Traffic by the Long Tail and Other Reasons to Take a Deeper Look at Your Analytics »

Posted by gillian

We all know that there’s gold in the long tail. We know that there are huge numbers of searches, many of them completely unique, in the long tail. Avinash Kaushik affirmed recently at SMX Toronto, that the long tail provides an average of seven times the data of short tail metrics. Excuse me? Seven times? We are definitely not focusing enough attention on the long tail.

The problem is that the long tail is hard to track and analyze. For example, on a sample website, 35 keywords yield 5,000k uniques. The balance of 26,000 keywords yield an additional 35,000 uniques. Thirty-five thousand uniques is worth focusing on, but 26,000 keywords isn’t manageable.

Here are a few solutions to help you cut this beast down to a manageable, profitable size.

1. Reduce long tail overkill by working with a combination of YOUR BRAND + KEYWORD. For the example site, on the same sample website, segmenting out key phrase sets that included the brand name plus a keyword yielded 340 super actionable, interest-and-probably-purchase-intent-driven, highly valuable keywords. Now, that’s manageable.
    
2. Tag Clouds:Use tag clouds to see how your site is performing against your prime keywords.
   Try this: Check out this tag cloud based on search data for Blackberry from Compete. it’s abysmal. Your site should do a lot better.
   
   Tag Cloud 1: Shows all their data
   

   Tag Cloud 2: Removes the word "blackberry" and shows the rest of the traffic (which is a tiny fraction of it all)
   
   

3. Keyword Trees: Try Juice Analytics’ Concentrate Long-Tail Search Analytics. Plug in your brand and see the intricate relationships between your name and your prized keywords. You may find content development opportunities and gain a much better understanding of what your customers really want from you. Which brings us to…

Segmentation Analysis

Ask yourself this: How can I finish this sentence? "email me if…"
Then use it on your site to increase conversion rates even a few percent.

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Whiteboard Friday - Link Building with Nudges »

Posted by great scott!

Is it better to practically force your users to make the desired conversion action, or is it better to give them a choice? How about a choice between two desired conversion actions?  How about giving them choice, but making the more preferred one easier as well as anchoring it in social proof that makes it still more compelling?  It’s a powerful way to increase conversion rates and funnel users on your sites, and it’s a concept covered in the book Nudge, by Richard Thaler & Cass Sunstein.

Will Critchlow covered Nudge in detail on the blog last year, but we’ve recently seen some interesting examples of how you can use this theory effectively in your on-page and social marketing efforts. Watch this week’s Whiteboard Friday to learn more about how you can implement these tactics yourself.

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