Wrong Page Ranking in the Results? 6 Common Causes & 5 Solutions »

Posted by randfish

Sometimes, the page you’re trying to rank - the one that visitors will find relevant and useful to their query - isn’t the page the engines have chosen to place first. When this happens, it can be a frustrating experience trying to determine what course of action to take. In this blog post, I’ll walk through some of the root causes of this problem, as well as five potential solutions.

When the wrong page from your site appears prominently in the search results, it can spark a maddening conflict of emotion - yes, it’s great to be ranking well and capturing that traffic, but it sucks to be delivering a sub-optimal experience to searchers who visit, then leave unfulfilled. The first step should be identifying what’s causing this issue and to do that, you’ll need a process.

Below, I’ve listed some of the most common reasons we’ve seen for search engines to rank a less relevant page above a more relevant one.

1. Internal Anchor Text
   The most common issue we see when digging into these problems is the case of internal anchor text optimization gone awry. Many sites will have the keyword they’re targeting on the intended page linking to another URL (or several) on the site in a way that can mislead search engines. If you want to be sure that the URL yoursite.com/frogs ranks for the keyword "frogs," make sure that anchor text that says "frogs" points to that page. See this post on keyword cannibalization for more on this specific problem.
   _
2. External Link Bias
   The next most common issue we observe is the case of external links preferring a different page than you, the site owner or marketer, might. This often happens when an older page on your site has discussed a topic, but you’ve more recently produced an updated, more useful version. Unfortunately, links on the web tend to still reference the old URL. The anchor text of these links, the context they’re in and the reference to the old page may make it tough for a new page to overcome the prior’s rankings.
   _
3. Link Authority & Importance Metrics
   There are times when a page’s raw link metrics - high PageRank, large numbers of links and linking root domains - will simply overpower other relevance signals and cause it to rank well despite barely targeting (and sometimes barely mentioning) a keyword phrase. In these situations, it’s less about the sources of links, the anchor text or the relevance and more a case of powerful pages winning out through brute force. On Google, this happens less than it once did (at least in our experience), but can still occur in odd cases.
   _
4. On-Page Optimization
   In some cases, a webmaster/marketer may not realize that the on-page optimization of a URL for a particular keyword term/phrase is extremely similar to another. To differentiate and help ensure the right page ranks, it’s often wise to de-emphasize the target keyword on the undesirable page and target it more effectively (without venturing into keyword stuffing or spam) on the desired page. This post on keyword targeting can likely be of assistance.
   _
5. Improper Redirects
   We’ve seen the odd case where an old redirect has pointed a page that heavily targeted a keyword term/phrase (or had earned powerful links around that target) to the wrong URL. These can be very difficult to identify because the content of the 301′ing page no longer exists and it’s hard to know (unless you have the history) why the current page might be ranking despite no effort. If you’ve been through the other scenarios, it’s worth looking to see if 301 redirects from other URLs point to the page in question and running a re-pointing test to see if they could be causing the issue.
   _
6. Topic Modeling / Content Relevance Issues
   This is the toughest to identify and to explain, but that won’t stop us from trying :-) Essentially, you can think of the search engines doing a number of things to determine the degree of relevancy of a page to a keyword. Determining topic areas and identifying related terms/phrases and concepts is almost certainly among these (we actually hope to have some proof of Google’s use of LDA, in particular, in the next few months to share on the blog). Seeing as this is likely the case, the engine may perceive that the page you’re trying to rank isn’t particularly "on-topic" for the target keyword while another page that appears less "targeted" from a purely SEO/keyphrase usage standpoint is more relevant.

Once you’ve gone through this list and determined which issues might be affecting your results, you’ll need to take action to address the problem. If it’s an on-page or content issue, it’s typically pretty easy to fix. However, if you run into external linking imbalances, you may need more dramatic action to solve the mistmatch and get the right page ranking.

Next, we’ll tackle some specific, somewhat advanced, tactics to help get the right page on top:

1. The 301 Redirect (or Rel Canonical) & Rebuild
   In stubborn cases or those where a newer page is replacing an old page, it may be wise to simply 301 redirect the new page to the old page (or the other way around) and choose the best-converting/performing content for the page that stays. I generally like the strategy of maintaining the older, ranking URL and redirecting the newer one simply because the metrics for that old page may be very powerful and a 301 does cause some loss of link juice (according to the folks at Google). However, if the URL string itself isn’t appropriate, it can make sense to instead 301 to the new page instead.

   Be aware that if you’re planning to use rel=canonical rather than a 301 (which is perfectly acceptable), you should first ensure that the content is exactly the same on both pages. Trying to maintain two different version of a page with one canonicalizing to another isn’t specifically against the engines’ guidelines, but it’s also not entirely white hat (and it may not work, since the engines do some checking to determine content matches before counting rel=canonical sometimes).
   _

2. The Content Rewrite
   If you need to maintain the old page and have a suspicion that content focus, topic modeling or on-page optimization may be to blame, a strategy of re-authoring the page from scratch and focusing on both relevance and user experience may be a wise path. It’s relatively easy to test and while it will suck away time from other projects, it may be helpful to give the page more focused, relevant, useful and conversion-inducing material.
   _
3. The Link Juice Funnel
   If you’re fairly certain that raw link metrics like PageRank or link quantities are to blame for the issue, you might want to try funnelling some additional internal links to the target page (and possibly away from the currently ranking page). You can use a tool like Open Site Explorer to identify the most important/well-linked-to pages on your site and modify/add links to them to help channel juice into the target page and boost its rankings/prominence.
   _
4. The Content Swap
   If you strongly suspect that the content of the pages rather than the link profiles may be responsible and want to test, this is the strategy to use. Just swap the on-page and meta data (titles, meta description, etc) between the two pages and see how/if it impacts rankings for the keyword. Just be prepared to potentially lose traffic during the test period (this nearly always happens, but sometimes is worth it to confirm your hypothesis). If the less-well-ranked page rises with the new content while the better-ranked page falls, you’re likely onto something.
   _
5. The Kill ‘Em with External Links
   If you can muster a brute force, external link growth strategy, either through widgets/badges, content licensing, a viral campaign to get attention to your page or just a group of friends with websites who want to help you out, go for it. We’ve often seen this precise strategy lift one page over another and while it can be a lot of work, it’s also pretty effective.

While this set of recommendations may not always fix the issue, it can almost always help identify the root cause(s) and give you a framework in which to proceed. If you’ve got other suggestions, I look forward to hearing about them in the comments!

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Keyword Research Tools - Build Your Own Adventure »

Posted by Sam Crocker

Hi there Mozzers! My name is Sam Crocker and I work for Distilled. This is my first post here at SEOmoz and I am looking forward to your feedback!

Background

My mother used to scold me for misusing my toys, playing with my food and for having a bit too much energy. She was well within her rights, as I was a bit of a handful, but at the moment one particular phrase really sticks out in my mind

“Is that what that was made for Sam? Use it the right way, please.”

Whether I was riding down the stairs in a sleeping bag, having sword fights with paper towel tubes with my sister, or using my skateboard as a street luge- I’ve always been big on using things for purposes other than their intended design. It should be no surprise that I do the same with some of the fancy and powerful tools upon which we have become quite dependent in the SEO world. Much like when I was little, it seems like by using things the “wrong way” there’s scope to have a bit more fun and to discover some new and different ways of accomplishing the same goals.

Me As a Little Guy. Snow Scraper = Renegade Fighting Stick?

I spoke about my most recent adventures in using things the wrong way at SMX Advanced London. I don’t think too many people who came to the keyphrase research session expecting to hear about how a scraper like Mozenda could be used to save all sorts of time and effort and generate new keyphrase ideas. You may want to have a quick read through that before watching the screencast.*

It’s also important to point out that Mozenda is best used as a discovery tool in the instance I provide here. If this method were a perfect solution to keyword research you could very easily build a tool that does it better. The beauty of Mozenda, however, is that it can be just about any tool you want. If you need to generate brand new content around a subject area you know nothing about, you can use it to explore tags on delicious or another social media platform.

Given a great deal of interest in this technique that I received from attendees at the presentation and in the twittersphere I decided it was worth providing a full walkthrough to cover some of the nuances I wasn’t able to cover in a 12 minute presentation and to share with the folks who weren’t able to attend the conference.

 *It’s worth noting that for the sake of consistency I used the same Google Suggest tool in the video as I used for my initial research and discussed at SMX London. Since then Rob Milard built his own keyphrase expander tool based on this work and it is considerably more versatile than the original tool (you can search Google.com or Google.co.uk and export the file as a CSV). The output of this version isn’t in XML and provides the “search volume” data missing from the first tool. So congratulations and a BIG thank you to Rob from me and the search community in general!

Next Steps

The above screencast is an introduction of a technique we have been experimenting with to broaden the keyphrases targeted on a site (particularly, it can be used to increase the number of longtail keyphrases and provide insights into terminology you may not be targeting in your current list of keyphrases). This can be particularly useful if you work for an agency dealing with clients from a number of different sectors. For the sake of demonstration I have only input 7 terms into the Google Suggest tool in an effort to pull out a workable dataset for the screencast and for my presentation but Mozenda is a pretty powerful tool, so there’s really nothing stopping you from using more keyphrases. As a matter of courtesy, however, I would suggest setting up some delays when running any large scraping task to prevent overwhelming servers or hogging bandwidth. For more information on this, please have a read through Rich Baxter’s latest piece on indexation.

One of the questions I was asked (by a number of people) was “what next?” As in: “what on earth am I going to do with these extra 10,000 keyphrases?” And although this presentation was intended as a proof of concept, I don’t want anyone to think we are trying to keep anything secret here so here are a few ideas about what you might consider doing next.

Option 1: Ask For Help!

For the people who find themselves thinking “I’m not really sure what to do with this data” I would suggest enlisting the help of a numbers guy or gal (Excel Wizards or other nerdy warriors). Odds are if you find looking at this sort of data daunting, you’re going to need their help making sense of the numbers later anyways.

Option 2: Outsource

The second option, for those of who know exactly what you want to do with this data, but don’t have the time to go through it all, I strongly suggest enlisting the help of cheap labour. Either find yourself an intern or make use of Amazon’s Mechanical Turks to find someone who can accomplish just what you need. The nice thing about services like this is that it’s a 24/7 workforce and you can get a feel for how helpful someone will be fairly quickly and painlessly.

Option 3: Jump Right In

Finally, the third option for those of you with some Excel skillz and a bit of time. There will definitely still be some manual work to be done and some weeding through for terms that are not at all relevant, the suggestions where you usually say aloud “no, Google I did NOT mean…” will clearly need to go.

The best use of this data will be the general themes or "common words" that you can quite easily sort through or filter for using Excel and that you may have been to oblivious to prior to starting.

 Feel Free to Sing Along if You Know The Words! (image via: Kottke)

Step 1: Remove all duplicates. In this example there were no duplicates created though I can only assume that with 10,000 keyphrases run through the tool there will be some duplicate output.

Step 2: Remove URL suggestions. I know we like to think otherwise, but if the user was searching for “gleeepisodes.net” they probably aren’t interested in TV listings from your site. It would also be a fairly cheeky move to try to optimise a page about someone else’s website.

Step 3: Remember your target audience. If you only operate in the UK “Glee schedule Canada” and “Glee schedule Fox” can probably be eliminated as well. Now would be a good time to eliminate any truly irrelevant entries as well (e.g. “Gleevec” – although some of your viewers may have leukemia this probably is not what most visitors to your site are looking for).

Step 4: With the remaining terms and phrases run them through the usual sense checking routines. This is a good time to check global/local search volume for these terms and look at some of the competitiveness metrics as well. Search volume will probably be quite high for most of these terms (at least enough for Google to think someone might be looking for them regularly), though competitiveness probably will be too, so choose wisely.

Identifying the patterns at this stage will be essential to the value of the research you are conducting. You can try to filter for common phrases or suggestions at this stage and if, as in this example you realise "rumors" is a relevant term you’ve not targeted anywhere on the site, it is high time you consider adding content targeting this area for all of the television shows on the site.

Last Step: Come up with a sensible strategy to attack all this new content. Look at these terms as jumping off points for new content, new blog posts, and new ways of talking about this and other related products/services/subjects on the site.

Conclusions

A lot can be learned through this sort of exercise. In addition to finding some new high volume search terms, it may help you identify trends in search for which you have not been competing and have implications across the whole site rather than on one page. For example, maybe you didn’t think about “spoilers” or “rumors.” For a site dedicated to television programmes this sort of terminology will likely be valuable for a number of other shows as well!

The moral of the story? If you build it they will come.

Sometimes it is worth developing your own tool to make use of existing technology. Whilst I still feel Mozenda is the right tool for the job for handling larger datasets, the tool Rob built is a perfect example of both how a little creativity and building on other’s ideas can lead to benefit for everyone. Rob’s tool effectively rendered my Mozenda workaround unnecessary for most small to medium sites, and that’s awesome.

Image via: Motivated Photos

A final word of warning: I’m not suggesting that you replace all other keyphrase research with this idea. This technique is best utilised either during creation of a site about an area you know very little about (it’s rare, but it happens), or when you’ve run out of ideas and tried some of the more conventional approaches. It’s all about thinking outside of the box and trying new things to save you time. Onpage optimisation, linkbuilding and more traditional keyphrase research needs to be done but sometimes the best results come from trying something a bit experimental and using things for purposes other than that which they were designed.

If you have any questions, comments or concerns feel free to shame me publicly either in the below section or on Twitter.

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May 2010 Linkscape Update (and Whiteboard Explanations of How We Do It) »

Posted by randfish

As some of you likely noticed, Linkscape’s index updated today with fresh data crawled over the past 30 days. Rather than simply provide the usual index update statistics, we thought it would be fun to do some whiteboard diagrams of how we make a Linkscape update happen here at the mozplex. We also felt guilty because our camera ate tonight’s WB Friday (but Scott’s working hard to get it up for tomorrow morning).

Linkscape, like most of the major web indices, starts with a seed set of trusted sites from which we crawl outwards to build our index. Over time, we’ve developed more sophisticated methods around crawl selection, but we’re quite similar to Google, in that we crawl the web primarily in decending order of (in our case) mozRank importance.

For those keeping track, this index’s raw data includes:

• 41,404,250,804 unique URLs/pages
• 86,691,236 unique root domains

After crawling, we need build indices on which we can process data, metrics and sort orders for our API to access.

When we started building Linkscape in late 2007, early 2008, we quickly realized that the quantity of data would overwhelm nearly every commercial database on the market. Something massive like Oracle may be able to handle the volume, but at an exorbitant price that a startup like SEOmoz couldn’t bear. Thus, we created some unique, internal systems around flat file storage that enable us to hold data, process it and serve it without the financial and engineering burdens of a full database application.

Our next step, once the index is in place, is to calculate our key metrics as well as tabulate the standard sort orders for the API

Algorithms like PageRank (and mozRank) are iterative and require a tremendous amount of processing power to compute. We’re able to do this in the cloud, scaling up our need for number-crunching, mozRank-calculating goodness for about a week out of every month, but we’re pretty convinced that in Google’s early days, this was likely a big barrier (and may even have been a big part of the reason the "GoogleDance" only happened once every 30 days).

After processing, we’re ready to push our data out into the SEOmoz API, where it can power our tools and those of our many partners, friends and community members.

The API currently serves more than 2 million requests for data each day (and an average request pulls ~10 metrics/pieces of data about a web page or site). That’s a lot, but our goal is to more than triple that quantity by 2011, at which point we’ll be closer to the request numbers going into a service like Yahoo! Site Explorer.

The SEOmoz API currently powers some very cool stuff:

• Open Site Explorer - my personal favorite way to get link information
• The mozBar - the SERPs overlay, analyze page feature and the link metrics displayed directly in the bar all come from the API
• Classic Linkscape - we’re on our way to transitioning all of the features and functionality in Linkscape over to OSE, but in the meantime, PRO members can get access to many more granular metrics through these reports
• Dozens of External Applications - things like Carter Cole’s Google Chrome toolbar, several tools from Virante’s suite, Website Grader and lots more (we have an application gallery coming soon)

Each month, we repeat this process, learning big and small lessons along the way. We’ve gotten tremendously more consistent, redundant and error/problem free in 2010 so far, and our next big goal is to dramatically increase the depth of our crawl into those dark crevices of the web as well as ramping up the value and accuracy of our metrics.

We look forward to your feedback around this latest index update and any of the tools powered by Linkscape. Have a great Memorial Day Weekend!

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All Links are Not Created Equal: 10 Illustrations on Search Engines’ Valuation of Links »

Posted by randfish

In 1997, Google’s founders created an algorithmic method to determine importance and popularity based on several key principles:

• Links on the web can be interpreted as votes that are cast by the source for the target
• All votes are, initially, considered equal
• Over the course of executing the algorithm on a link graph, pages which receive more votes become more important
• More important pages cast more important votes
• The votes a page can cast are a function of that page’s importance, divided by the number of votes/links it casts

That algorithm, of course, was PageRank, and it changed the course of web search, providing tremendous value to Google’s early efforts around quality and relevancy in results. As knowledge of PageRank spread, those with a vested interest in influencing the search rankings (SEOs) found ways to leverage this information for their websites and pages.

But, Google didn’t stand still or rest on their laurels in the field of link analysis. They innovated, leveraging signals like anchor text, trust, hubs & authorities, topic modeling and even human activity to influence the weight a link might carry. Yet, unfortunately, many in the SEO field are still unaware of these changes and how they impact external marketing and link acquisition best practices.

In this post, I’m going to walk through ten principles of link valuation that can be observed, tested and, in some cases, have been been patented. I’d like to extend special thanks to Bill Slawski from SEO By the Sea, whose recent posts on Google’s Reasonable Surfer Model and What Makes a Good Seed Site for Search Engine Web Crawls? were catalysts (and sources) for this post.

As you read through the following 10 issues, please note that these are not hard and fast rules. They are, from our perspective, accurate based on our experiences, testing and observation, but as with all things in SEO, this is opinion. We invite and strongly encourage readers to test these themselves. Nothing is better for learning SEO than going out and experimenting in the wild.

#1 - Links Higher Up in HTML Code Cast More Powerful Votes

Whenever we (or many other SEOs we’ve talked to) conduct tests of page or link features in (hopefully) controlled environments on the web, we/they find that links higher up in the HTML code of a page seem to pass more ranking ability/value than those lower down. This certainly fits with the recently granted Google patent application - Ranking Documents Based on User Behavior and/or Feature Data, which suggested a number of items that may considered in the way that link metrics are passed.

Those who’ve leveraged testing environments also often struggle against the power of the "higher link wins" phenomenon, and it can take a surprising amount of on-page optimization to overcome the power the higher link carries.

#2 - External Links are More Influential than Internal Links

There’s little surprise here, but if you recall, the original PageRank concept makes no mention of external vs. internal links counting differently. It’s quite likely that other, more recently created metrics (post-1997) do reward external links over internal links. You can see this in the correlation data from our post a few weeks back noting that external mozRank (the "PageRank" sent from external pages) had a much higher correlation with rankings than standard mozRank (PageRank):

I don’t think it’s a stretch to imagine Google separately calculating/parsing out external PageRank vs. Internal PageRank and potentially using them in different ways for page valuation in the rankings.

#3 - Links from Unique Domains Matters More than Links from Previously Linking Sites

Speaking of correlation data, no single, simple metric is better correlated with rankings in Google’s results than the number of unique domains containing an external link to a given page. This strongly suggests that a diversity component is at play in the ranking systems and that it’s better to have 50 links from 50 different domains than to have 500 more links from a site that already links to you. Curiously again, the original PageRank algorithm makes no provision for this, which could be one reason sitewide links from domains with many high-PageRank pages worked so well in those early years after Google’s launch.

#4 - Links from Sites Closer to a Trusted Seed Set Pass More Value

We’ve talked previously about TrustRank on SEOmoz and have generally reference the Yahoo! research paper - Combating Webspam with TrustRank. However, Google’s certainly done plenty on this front as well (as Bill covers here) and this patent application on selecting trusted seed sites certainly speaks to the ongoing need and value of this methodology. Linkscape’s own mozTrust score functions in precisely this way, using a PageRank-like algorithm that’s biased to only flow link juice from trusted seed sites rather than equally from across the web.

#5 - Links from "Inside" Unique Content Pass More Value than Those from Footers/Sidebar/Navigation

Papers like Microsoft’s VIPS (Vision Based Page Segmentation), Google’s Document Ranking Based on Semantic Distance, and the recent Reasonable Surfer stuff all suggest that valuing links from content more highly than those in sidebars or footers can have net positive impacts on avoiding spam and manipulation. As webmasters and SEOs, we can certainly attest to the fact that a lot of paid links exist in these sections of sites and that getting non-natural links from inside content is much more difficult.

#6 - Keywords in HTML Text Pass More Value than those in Alt Attributes of Linked Images

This one isn’t covered in any papers or patents (to my knowledge), but our testing has shown (and testing from others supports) that anchor text carried through HTML is somehow more potent or valued than that from alt attributes in image links. That’s not to say we should run out and ditch image links, badges or the alt attributes they carry. It’s just good to be aware that Google seems to have this bias (perhaps it will be temporary).

#7 - Links from More Important, Popular, Trusted Sites Pass More Value (even from less important pages)

We’ve likely all experienced the sinking feeling of seeing a competitor with fewer and what appear to be links from less powerful pages outranking us. This may be somewhat explained by the value of a domain to pass along value via a link that may not be fully reflected in page-level metrics. It can also help search engines to combat spam and provide more trusted results in general. If links from sites that rarely link to junk pass significanly more than those whose link practices and impact on the web overall may be questionable, they can much better control quality.

NOTE: Having trouble digging up the papers/patents on this one; I’ll try to revisit and find them tomorrow.

#8 - Links Contained Within NoScript Tags Pass Lower (and Possibly No) Value

Over the years, this phenomenon has been reported and contradicted numerous times. Our testing certainly suggested that noscript links don’t pass value, but that may not be true in every case. It is why we included the ability to filter noscript in Linkscape, but the quantity of links overall on the web inside this tag is quite small.

#9 - A Burst of New Links May Enable a Document to Overcome "Stronger" Competition Temporarily (or in Perpetuity)

Apart from even Google’s QDF (Query Deserves Freshness) algorithm, which may value more recently created and linked-to content in certain "trending" searches, it appears that the engine also uses temporal signals around linking to both evaluate spam/manipulation and reward pages that earn a large number of references in a short period of time. Google’s patent on Information Retrieval Based on Historical Data first suggested the use of temporal data, but the model has likely seen revision and refinement since that time.

#10 - Pages that Link to WebSpam May Devalue the Other Links they Host

I was fascinated to see Richard Baxter’s own experiments on this in his post - Google Page Level Penalty for Comment Spam. Since then, I’ve been keeping an eye on some popular, valuable blog posts that have received similarly overwhelming spam and, low and behold, the pattern seems verifiable. Webmasters would be wise to keep up to date on their spam removal to avoid arousing potential ranking penalties from Google (and the possible loss of link value).

But what about classic "PageRank" - the score of which we get a tiny inkling from the Google toolbar’s green pixels? I’d actually surmise that while many (possibly all) of the features about links discussed above make their way into the ranking process, PR has stayed relatively unchanged from its classic concept. My reasoning? SEOmoz’s own mozRank, which correlates remarkably well  with toolbar PR (off on avg. by 0.42 w/ 0.25 being "perfect" due to the 2 extra significant digits we display) and is calculated with very similar intuition to that of the original PageRank paper. If I had to guess (and I really am guessing), I’d say that Google’s maintained classic PR because they find the simple heuristic useful for some tasks (likely including crawling/indexation priority), and have adopted many more metrics to fit into the algorithmic pie.

As always, we’re looking forward to your feedback and hope that some of you will take up the challenge to test these on your own sites or inside test environments and report back with your findings.

p.s. I finished this post at nearly 3am (and have a board meeting tomorrow), so please excuse the odd typo or missed link. Hopefully Jen will take a red pen to this in the morning!

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All Links are Not Created Equal: 10 Illustrations on Search Engines’ Valuation of Links »

Posted by randfish

In 1997, Google’s founders created an algorithmic method to determine importance and popularity based on several key principles:

• Links on the web can be interpreted as votes that are cast by the source for the target
• All votes are, initially, considered equal
• Over the course of executing the algorithm on a link graph, pages which receive more votes become more important
• More important pages cast more important votes
• The votes a page can cast are a function of that page’s importance, divided by the number of votes/links it casts

That algorithm, of course, was PageRank, and it changed the course of web search, providing tremendous value to Google’s early efforts around quality and relevancy in results. As knowledge of PageRank spread, those with a vested interest in influencing the search rankings (SEOs) found ways to leverage this information for their websites and pages.

But, Google didn’t stand still or rest on their laurels in the field of link analysis. They innovated, leveraging signals like anchor text, trust, hubs & authorities, topic modeling and even human activity to influence the weight a link might carry. Yet, unfortunately, many in the SEO field are still unaware of these changes and how they impact external marketing and link acquisition best practices.

In this post, I’m going to walk through ten principles of link valuation that can be observed, tested and, in some cases, have been patented. I’d like to extend special thanks to Bill Slawski from SEO By the Sea, whose recent posts on Google’s Reasonable Surfer Model and What Makes a Good Seed Site for Search Engine Web Crawls? were catalysts (and sources) for this post.

As you read through the following 10 issues, please note that these are not hard and fast rules. They are, from our perspective, accurate based on our experiences, testing and observation, but as with all things in SEO, this is opinion. We invite and strongly encourage readers to test these themselves. Nothing is better for learning SEO than going out and experimenting in the wild.

#1 - Links Higher Up in HTML Code Cast More Powerful Votes

Whenever we (or many other SEOs we’ve talked to) conduct tests of page or link features in (hopefully) controlled environments on the web, we/they find that links higher up in the HTML code of a page seem to pass more ranking ability/value than those lower down. This certainly fits with the recently granted Google patent application - Ranking Documents Based on User Behavior and/or Feature Data, which suggested a number of items that may considered in the way that link metrics are passed.

Those who’ve leveraged testing environments also often struggle against the power of the "higher link wins" phenomenon, and it can take a surprising amount of on-page optimization to overcome the power the higher link carries.

#2 - External Links are More Influential than Internal Links

There’s little surprise here, but if you recall, the original PageRank concept makes no mention of external vs. internal links counting differently. It’s quite likely that other, more recently created metrics (post-1997) do reward external links over internal links. You can see this in the correlation data from our post a few weeks back noting that external mozRank (the "PageRank" sent from external pages) had a much higher correlation with rankings than standard mozRank (PageRank):

I don’t think it’s a stretch to imagine Google separately calculating/parsing out external PageRank vs. Internal PageRank and potentially using them in different ways for page valuation in the rankings.

#3 - Links from Unique Domains Matters More than Links from Previously Linking Sites

Speaking of correlation data, no single, simple metric is better correlated with rankings in Google’s results than the number of unique domains containing an external link to a given page. This strongly suggests that a diversity component is at play in the ranking systems and that it’s better to have 50 links from 50 different domains than to have 500 more links from a site that already links to you. Curiously again, the original PageRank algorithm makes no provision for this, which could be one reason sitewide links from domains with many high-PageRank pages worked so well in those early years after Google’s launch.

#4 - Links from Sites Closer to a Trusted Seed Set Pass More Value

We’ve talked previously about TrustRank on SEOmoz and have generally reference the Yahoo! research paper - Combating Webspam with TrustRank. However, Google’s certainly done plenty on this front as well (as Bill covers here) and this patent application on selecting trusted seed sites certainly speaks to the ongoing need and value of this methodology. Linkscape’s own mozTrust score functions in precisely this way, using a PageRank-like algorithm that’s biased to only flow link juice from trusted seed sites rather than equally from across the web.

#5 - Links from "Inside" Unique Content Pass More Value than Those from Footers/Sidebar/Navigation

Papers like Microsoft’s VIPS (Vision Based Page Segmentation), Google’s Document Ranking Based on Semantic Distance, and the recent Reasonable Surfer stuff all suggest that valuing links from content more highly than those in sidebars or footers can have net positive impacts on avoiding spam and manipulation. As webmasters and SEOs, we can certainly attest to the fact that a lot of paid links exist in these sections of sites and that getting non-natural links from inside content is much more difficult.

#6 - Keywords in HTML Text Pass More Value than those in Alt Attributes of Linked Images

This one isn’t covered in any papers or patents (to my knowledge), but our testing has shown (and testing from others supports) that anchor text carried through HTML is somehow more potent or valued than that from alt attributes in image links. That’s not to say we should run out and ditch image links, badges or the alt attributes they carry. It’s just good to be aware that Google seems to have this bias (perhaps it will be temporary).

#7 - Links from More Important, Popular, Trusted Sites Pass More Value (even from less important pages)

We’ve likely all experienced the sinking feeling of seeing a competitor with fewer and what appear to be links from less powerful pages outranking us. This may be somewhat explained by the value of a domain to pass along value via a link that may not be fully reflected in page-level metrics. It can also help search engines to combat spam and provide more trusted results in general. If links from sites that rarely link to junk pass significantly more than those whose link practices and impact on the web overall may be questionable, they can much better control quality.

NOTE: Having trouble digging up the papers/patents on this one; I’ll try to revisit and find them tomorrow.

#8 - Links Contained Within NoScript Tags Pass Lower (and Possibly No) Value

Over the years, this phenomenon has been reported and contradicted numerous times. Our testing certainly suggested that noscript links don’t pass value, but that may not be true in every case. It is why we included the ability to filter noscript in Linkscape, but the quantity of links overall on the web inside this tag is quite small.

#9 - A Burst of New Links May Enable a Document to Overcome "Stronger" Competition Temporarily (or in Perpetuity)

Apart from even Google’s QDF (Query Deserves Freshness) algorithm, which may value more recently created and linked-to content in certain "trending" searches, it appears that the engine also uses temporal signals around linking to both evaluate spam/manipulation and reward pages that earn a large number of references in a short period of time. Google’s patent on Information Retrieval Based on Historical Data first suggested the use of temporal data, but the model has likely seen revision and refinement since that time.

#10 - Pages that Link to WebSpam May Devalue the Other Links they Host

I was fascinated to see Richard Baxter’s own experiments on this in his post - Google Page Level Penalty for Comment Spam. Since then, I’ve been keeping an eye on some popular, valuable blog posts that have received similarly overwhelming spam and, low and behold, the pattern seems verifiable. Webmasters would be wise to keep up to date on their spam removal to avoid arousing potential ranking penalties from Google (and the possible loss of link value).

But what about classic "PageRank" - the score of which we get a tiny inkling from the Google toolbar’s green pixels? I’d actually surmise that while many (possibly all) of the features about links discussed above make their way into the ranking process, PR has stayed relatively unchanged from its classic concept. My reasoning? SEOmoz’s own mozRank, which correlates remarkably well  with toolbar PR (off on avg. by 0.42 w/ 0.25 being "perfect" due to the 2 extra significant digits we display) and is calculated with very similar intuition to that of the original PageRank paper. If I had to guess (and I really am guessing), I’d say that Google’s maintained classic PR because they find the simple heuristic useful for some tasks (likely including crawling/indexation priority), and have adopted many more metrics to fit into the algorithmic pie.

As always, we’re looking forward to your feedback and hope that some of you will take up the challenge to test these on your own sites or inside test environments and report back with your findings.

p.s. I finished this post at nearly 3am (and have a board meeting tomorrow), so please excuse the odd typo or missed link. Hopefully Jen will take a red pen to this in the morning!

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The SEOmoz Office Gets a New Do »

Posted by jennita

Disclaimer: You will not learn any SEO, CRO, SMO or Analytics in this post. You may however feel the urge to watch the Wizard of Oz and eat crepes.

As you may have heard, SEOmoz has moved offices (woo hoo!). So we thought it would be nice to take you on a tour of our new digs. We’re quite proud that we outgrew the old space and needed a bigger place. Please follow along as I take you on a tour of the new office.

We are just a block from Pike Place Market, and within walking distance of Bell Harbor which is where SMX Advanced is held. We have the entire top floor! But let’s look at the good stuff… the inside.

First, as you first step out of the elevator you may think, "Wow, this really is a cool space." But then…

You look down at your feet and exclaim, "Wow! I feel the need to breakdance!" [busts a move]

Next, as you make your way through the Operations department (who used to sit in a back, very dark corner) you too will be in complete shock at the sunny, openness of the space. Just like this guy:

Holy big, bright awesome room batman! Yes we even have a meeting room called the Batcave [see below]. (Ok, the bat cave is a bright, sunny, room that does not resemble a bat cave in any way. But that’s ok, cuz we have a bat cave. damnit.)

Oh wait. What’s this?! Crepes, yes my friends. On "opening day" at the new moz office we had a crepe guy! "I’ll have one with nutella, strawberries and bananas please."

But seriously, we really have a lot of work to do. See, we’re working! Well at least Ben Huff is (the dude on the left). :)

Nevermind. Oh look we also had fruit (and mimosas ehem), we’re not complete pigs you know. Remember Phil [dude on the left]? Last time you saw him he was wearing his PJs. #justsayin

Have I mentioned that Rand has an office… with a door… that he can close! This probably isn’t overly exciting for most people but for the developers who used to sit right outside his office (aka his desk) and listened to every phone call, webinar and Whiteboard Friday… let me tell ya, they’re cheering today.

Plus we have 5 meeting rooms now. We used to have one. Again… now there are F I V E. I was late to a meeting earlier because I couldn’t find Thunderdome. I thought it was in Spider Skull Island, but apparently those are different. heh. Boys named our meeting rooms if you hadn’t guessed that already.

Rand in sheer shock:

Plus really, who could resist having this right outside the window:

The only downside to getting a new office is that now we all have this silly dress code.

Wonder Twins… Activate!

If you’re going to be in town for SMX Advanced, we’ll have a few office tours set up. The dates/times will be announced soon, and we’d love to show you around in person!

Thanks to my husband, Rudy Lopez who provided the amazing photos (all except the obvious snapshots).

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Overcome the Google Analytics Learning Curve in 20 Minutes »

Posted by Danny Dover

 As recently as a month ago I was a victim of a state of mind I call Analytics Dismissal Disorder. This mindset is common after hearing about the importance of analytics, installing the tracking code and then getting overwhelmed by all of the graphs and scary numbers. When I suffered from analytics dismissal disorder (which my doctors called A.D.D. for short), I knew Google Analytics was important but avoided the extra effort necessary to learn how to get the most out of the software. This post explains what I needed to learn to get over this.

After learning the basics of Google Analytics, you can learn interesting facts like what search terms people use to find your website. In this case, web searchers are more interested in fat people falling than they are in me.

Here is the problem with Google Analytics:

It is obviously potentially useful but who has the time to study how to use a product. I don’t even read the text-less IKEA manuals so why would I read documentation for software. Sounds boring.

This all changed when SEOmoz offered to pay for me to go to WebShare’s Google Analytics Seminar (Wait, you are paying me to leave the office? Mission Accomplished). This 16 hour class walked me through Google Analytics and pushed me through the massive learning curve.

This post distills what I learned in those 16 hours of employer-paid-learning into something you can understand and act on in 20 minutes. Nerd High Five! (*Pushes up glasses*)

Overcome the Google Analytics Learning Curve in 20 Minutes:

An actionable guide to learning what you need to know about Google Analytics.

First Things First:

What are Accounts and Profiles and how are they different?

When you first log in to Google Analytics you need to navigate to your desired data set. This is much more confusing than it ought to be.

Accounts are like folders on a computer. They can contain a lot of different files (profiles) and serve mostly just for organization. An example of an account might be Work Websites or Personal Websites. (Be forewarned, this is not intuitive on setup. Don’t make the mistake I did and name an account after a website. That naming convention is more appropriate for a profile).

Profiles, on the other hand, are like files on a computer. They can’t contain additional profiles or accounts. They represent one view of a website (although not necessarily the only view). An example of a profile might be api.seomoz.org or SEOmoz minus Office IP addresses. You can limit a profile to whatever view of a website you want by using filters.

What are Filters and Segments and how are they different?

This is also more complicated than it ought to be. (grrr)

Filters are attached to website profiles (i.e. "SEOmoz minus office IP addresses") and are permanent. If a profile includes traffic data from all IP addresses except SEOmoz’s office computers, there is absolutely no way to reinclude this excluded data in the given profile at a later time. Filters are irreversible and kinda mean (thus the anal in Google Analytics). You can set them up on the profiles page. (See Below)

Segments are similar to filters except they are profile agnostic and their effects are temporary. In addition, they can be compared against each other. The example segments below shows all visitors (blue line), new visitors (orange line), and returning visitors (green line) and their distribution on the top content of the given website.

What are "raw" profiles and why use them? (Ctrl+Z won’t save you here) 

Google Analytics is different from other Google products in that it doesn’t provide a way to undo certain types of data processing (i.e. filters). In order to give you freedom to explore (and potentially ruin) your profiles, it is important that you create an unfiltered (raw) profile of your website that you can use in case something goes wrong with one of your other profiles. In SEOmoz’s case, this profile is literally called "Do Not Touch! Backup Profile". This is the backup profile we will use to get historical data when Joanna Lord screws up our other profiles. (Danny!)

What if I don’t trust a specific metric?

Tough beans! The key to getting the most out of Google Analytics is to trust it. This is very similar to how we measure time. We all know that our bedroom clock is probably not exactly synced with our office clock but we trust each time-peice as close enough. You need to make the same leap of faith for Google Analytics. The metrics might not be 100% accurate all of the time, but like a clock, at least they are consistent. This makes Google Analytics metrics good enough. (And quite frankly it is as accurate as all of its competitors)

Navigating Google Analytics:

Google Analytics Navigation

Dashboard (Mostly Useless High-level Metrics)

As you would expect, the dashboard shows you the high-level status of your website. The problem is that these metrics tend not to drastically change very often so if you keep looking at your dashboard, you won’t like see any big changes. ZzzzzzzzZZZzzzzz.

Real analytics pros don’t let friends rely on the default dashboard stats.

Intelligence (Automated e-mail alerts) - Check Monthly

Intelligence is Google’s confusing name for automatic alerts. Did traffic to your homepage jump 1000% over last week? Are visits from New Zealand down 80% from yesterday? Intelligence alerts will, with your permission, e-mail you if anything unexpected happens on your website.

Visitors (The type of people that come to your site) - Check Monthly

As the name implies, this section reveals information about your visitors. Want to know what percentage of your users have Flash enabled or how many people viewed your website on an iPad? This section will tell you. (Long live Steve Jobs!)

Traffic Sources (Where people are coming from to reach your site) - Check Weekly

This section shows you different reports on the sources that drove you traffic.

Content (Metrics on your pages) - Check Weekly

Whereas, Traffic Sources shows you information about other people’s pages as they relate to yours, the Content section only shows you information about what happens on your pages.

Goals (Metrics on whether or not people are doing what you want them to do) - Check Daily

Goals are predefined actions on your website that you want others to perform. It is important to note that you must configure these manually. Google can’t auto detect these. This section shows metrics on how people completed these goals or where they dropped off if they didn’t complete them.

Report Interface:

The bread and butter of Google Analytics are the reports. These are the frameworks for learning about how people interact with your website.

Graph:

The graphs/reports in Google Analytics have 6 important options. The first three are detailed below:

• Export. This is pretty self explanatory. You can export to PDF, XML, CSV, CSV for Excel or if you are too good for commas you can export to TSV.
• E-mail. This is one of Google Analytics more useful features. This tab allows you to schedule reoccurring e-mails or one time reports for your co-workers. As an added bonus, if you set up these auto-reports, the recipeients don’t even need to log into Google Analytics to access this data.
• Units (in this case Pageviews). This is a report dependent unit that you can change based on the context.

• Advanced Segments. This is an extremely powerful feature that allows you to slice and dice your data to your likings.
• Date Range (in this case, Apr 24 2010 - May 24 2010).
• Graph By. This feature allows you to choose the scope of the graph in relation to time intervals. For some reports you can even break down data to the hour.

Data:

Data is your tool to see specifics and and make quantifiable decisions.

• Views. This feature actually affects the graphs and the data. It dictates the type of graph or the format or the data.
• ?. This is your source for help on any given metric.
• Secondary Dimension (in this case, None). This allows you to splice the data table by specific data dimensions (cities, sources, etc…)

Which Reports To Track and When:

I recommend using this as a starting point and tailoring it to your needs as you learn more about the unique needs for your website.

Daily

Goals -> Total Conversions

Content -> Top Content (at the page level)

Traffic Sources -> All Traffic Sources

Traffic Sources -> Campaigns - (Optional)

Weekly (or bi-weekly if you have a content intensive website)

Goals -> Funnel Visualization

Goals -> Goal Abandoned Funnels

Content -> Site Search

Traffic Sources -> Direct Traffic

Traffic Sources -> Referring Sites

Traffic Sources -> Keywords

Monthly

Visitors -> Overview

Intelligence -> Overview

Content -> Content Drilldown (at the folder level)

Content -> Top Landing Pages

Content -> Top Exit Pages

Traffic Sources -> Adwords - (Optional)

Which Reports to Ignore:

Visitors -> Benchmarking

From installation validation tools, it’s estimated that as many as 70% of Google Analytics installs are either incomplete or incorrect. This means that the data that these benchmarks rely on, is very likely inaccurate.

Visitors -> Map Overlay

While this feature is one of the most popular features of Google Analytics, it is also one of the least useful. The data these maps present is not normalized so areas with high populations tend to always dominate the screen. They are not completely useless as they show trends but they are not something that can be relied on heavily either. Use your best judgement when viewing this report.

Content -> Site Overlay

This feature seems like a good idea but is not able to be implemented in a way that makes it accurate. Put simply, in order for this tool to work, Google Analytics would need to have more information about the location of a link on a page and a mechanism for tracking which instance of a link gets clicked. Clicktale and Crazy Egg are nice alternatives.

Conclusion:

Tracking the metrics above is only the first step. Imagine Google Analytics as a magical yard stick (For you sissies on the metric system, a yard stick is like a meter stick but better). It is essential for measuring the success or failure of a given online strategy but it is not an online strategy alone. It is best used as a supplement to the your current activities and should be treated as such.

I am surely going to get some flak from some Analytics gurus who know more than me. (You want to go Kaushik?) Remember, this guide is intended to help people get over the GA learning curve, not to be a comprehensive guide. If you are looking for the latter, check out the hundreds of blog posts at the Google Analytics Blog.

One last thing, if you’re interested in taking the Seminars for Success classes, here’s the upcoming schedule.

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

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Spying on (and Learning from) Your Competitors: Step 5 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.

Let me start by asking you this.  What makes your site:

1. Different?
2. Remarkable?

In competitive landscapes these are very important – no – absolutely necessary questions to ask yourself.  Now that we’ve gone through defining target audiences, doing categorized keyword research, finding Gaps & Opportunities and defining who the competition is, we’re going to take one more important step before dumping this all into a big juicy pile of strategy. We’re going to sniff out the competition and see what makes them different and remarkable, and we’re going to use those creative noggins to work on topping them. Are you feeling confident?

We’re going beyond comparing title tags here; We’re looking at product features that would make people want to visit your site instead of your competitors, and not just visit once, but visit repeatedly, sign up, link to, email their friends, share on Facebook and Twitter, etc.  We’re looking at what makes your competitors sticky, what makes them linkbait, what makes them lovable.  Because SEO today isn’t just great meta tags, it’s a great product.

We’re going to slice and dice the competitors in a couple of different ways, and like most of what we’ve covered so far, you should feel free to do any kind of research or use any tools that work for you – you don’t need to do exactly what is shown here. I highly encourage getting creative and breaking out your own competitor template and/or build on top of these examples,

TEMPLATIZING COMPETITIVE RESEARCH

If you’ve read the previous steps in this SEO Strategy series you know I’m an Excel junkie and you probably know what I’m about to say next, don’t you?  That’s right! We’re going to open up Excel and make tabs!

This time we’re making a competitive research template that you can use for any of your SEO competitive research projects.   The tabs we’ll create for this example will be:

• Features
• Sentiment
• On-Page
• Inlinks
• Traffic

I know I don’t need to say it again (but I will) – this is just an example. You can do whatever you feel is right here.  The idea is to get a good big-picture look at what our competitors are doing, not just in their title tags and inlinks, but what features, tools and social visibility do they have? What is it that’s making them rank so well, and what is it that’s making people like them, want to share their content, want to link to them, etc.   We’re not just counting inlinks and looking at the anchor text.  We’re comparing product offerings. We’re looking for what makes a site naturally popular.

It’s important to realize that SEO is so much more than inlinks and tag optimization. There have been plenty of sites that have gained top rankings and high visibility before they ever accomplished SEO basics.  If you’ve got a hot product, links and traffic will come more naturally. And if that’s what our competitors are doing, then we want to peek into their properties and see how we can do even better, or at least do great at the parts they’re slacking on (finding or refining our niche).

We’ll create one of these Competitive Template worksheets for each category we’re comparing (from the categories you defined in Step 2 and/or the Gaps and Opportunities you want to target from Step 3).  This way we’re looking at our competitors in each niche, rather than just for the site as a whole, since they oftentimes are very different.

GET IN THE MINDSET

Here’s here we ask ourselves, “Self? Based on what I’m learning by looking at my competitors’ offerings, what specific things should be built into this product in order for it to have a good chance at outranking them?”  Remember in high school when you wanted to be cool like the popular girl so you studied how she acted, what she said, who she hung out with, what she wore, etc?  It’s sort of like that except you don’t want to be like her, you want to be even AWESOMER.  You want to be the one who has the coolest clothes, the most interesting friends, and the best parties in town that everybody wants to go to and cant stop talking about. 

So I encourage you to be as specific and thorough as possible in your research, but also be realistic.   If you just can’t afford to be that cool for example, then can you be the coolest kid in town for a specific group of people (aka can you be the best and most relevant site for a specific niche or subgroup/subtopic)?  Think creatively and always keep in mind who you’re targeting and what you can bring to the table. 

Now that my cliché high school movie clique speech is out of the way, I’ll  share some examples of research you can do, but feel free to compare whatever features you feel are important.

REMEMBER YOUR TARGET MARKET AND THEIR GOALS

If you’ve done some persona research or defined target markets in Step 1, keep that in your mind for this Step.  Remember that you’re looking at these site features and content from your target market’s perspective, and you’ll want to check that whatever goals they are trying to reach are available on your site and the competitors’ sites, and how easy those goals are to find and to achieve. 

For example, let’s say I have a music site, and I defined a persona in Step 1 that I named Rock ‘n’ Roll Randy. Rock ‘n’ Roll Randy is a Rolling Stone reader and music aficionado who likes to impress his friends with his endless wealth of music industry knowledge.  Rock ‘n’ Roll Randy likes to stay on top of the latest Rock ‘n’ Roll news, so he’s looking for the best site online to get breaking rock ‘n’ roll news and fresh perspectives in his RSS feed and maybe could be swayed into a newsletter.

I would have created a music news keyword category just for Rock ‘n’ Roll Randy in Step 2.  I found out who my competitors are for music news keywords in Step 4.  Now, when I dig into these competitor’s sites, I can poke around and look at everything they’ve got going on, but I also want to pay special attention to the task(s) at hand for Rock ‘n’ Roll Randy.  Does my site and/or my competitors’ sites offer what he’s looking for? Is it easy to find? Are steps to conversion simple and user-friendly? How does my conversion process compare to my competitors? What product is Rock ‘n’ Roll Randy more likely to subscribe to, come back to, share with his Rock ‘n’ Roll friends, etc?

Putting this lens on allows you to catch things you might not have noticed by just comparing inlinks and tags. If you’re intrigued by this process, check out my favorite industry book to hit the shelves recently - Vanessa Fox’s Marketing in the Age of Google. It goes into this kind of stuff in more detail – you’ll love it.

Now let’s get into some spywork, shall we?

TAB 1: FEATURE & CONTENT COMPARISON

I’ll usually compare at least these three types of things in my feature & content comparisons:

• Content & Landing Pages
• Resources, Widgets, Tools
• Social Presence & promotion

I’ll create a matrix with my site and 1-5 of my top competitor sites (that we defined in Step 4) in the rows, and the aspects I’m comparing in the columns.   So it might look something like this:

The stuff I compare is different every time I do one of these.  Think about what you want to compare that would be important to visitors and/or your targets, and put that in there.  I’ll usually end up adding things as I go along.  For example if I find out that one of my competitors provides a calculator tool and I hadn’t thought about that, I’ll add it to the feature comparisons.

Once you’ve done this, step back and take a good look at what sets these sites apart.  Ask yourself some of these questions:

• What features/content do my competitors have that I don’t?
• Does this content serve a need my target markets are looking to fulfill?
• Could/should I provide those features/this content? Could I make them even (more comprehensive, easier to use, more valuable to my visitors, provide it faster, easier, cheaper, etc)?
• How active are they in social networks where my target markets might be?
• How are they promoting their content through social sharing functions on their sites?
• Do they have proper targeted landing pages for the terms I care about?
• Are there calls-to-action on the landing pages? How apparent are they?
• Are there features of the site (tools, calendars, calculators, communities, etc) that might encourage repeat visits to the site?

I could go on, but the idea is to get a good feel for what’s going on in this competitive space, and start to form some recommendations based on this comparison that you’ll put in your Recommendations section of your Strategy document.  Take notes on this and start to form your recommendations now.  You can iron them out and make them sound good later, but you don’t want to forget, so make sure to get these thoughts while their still fresh in your head.

TAB 2: SENTIMENT (LIKES/ DISLIKES):

This one can be a crap shoot, but if you can get any insights out of it – excellent.

First, if you happen to have any good social monitoring tools that are half decent at determining sentiment (I’m a huge fan of NetBase for larger shops) use these to determine what people like about your competitors products and features, and what they don’t like about yours (if applicable).  Also check out what they wish someone provided, or what they want or need or are looking for that they haven’t been able to find online. 

If you don’t have a social listening tool or you’re just not getting good info from it, use the tool we all know and love: Search!  Search for any variation of things like:

• “like” + [your brand name]
• “love” + [a feature you provide]
• “I wish” + [a feature you provide]
• “sucks” + [an author or blogger on your site or your competitor sites]
• “hate” + [your competitors’ brand names or features]

What you find may or may not be useful, and remember, we’re not just looking for SEO-related stuff here – we’re not looking for whether people love or hate our SEO – we’re looking for what people love or hate or how they feel about your product and your competitor products.  We want to know why they like the popular girl more than the other girls.  Or more specifically, we want to know why they visit, revisit, link to, share, email, bookmark, or talk about that product.

If whatever you find is relevant and insightful, make a note of it.  The insights you gain from here will go into your Recommendations in the next step.

TAB 3: SEO ON-PAGE COMPARISON

On-page comparisons can be automated, and there are a few good tools that provide usable data.  But of course the best on-page comparisons come with a touch of SEO know-how to not only show where there might be a flag, but of course determine 1) if the flag is actually a concern, 2) the level of concern/priority for each flag, and 3) the actions to take to fix it.

Here are a couple of on-Page SEO Comparison Tools that you can use any combination of to compare yourself against competitors:

• SEOmoz Crawl Test
• SearchCLU
• Website Grader
• Covario

Of course there are lots more out there – feel free to share your favorite with us in the comments. But remember, automated tools are not SEO consultants.  They can only do so much. Use this as a base to compare some of the on-page features, and add your own analysis to what’s working or not working for you vs. your competitors for these on-page factors.

Make notes of the things you consider flags - not all of it has to be noted or used in your recommendations.  In fact, I usually only note a few things here that stand out.  For everything else, I point to regular canned SEO best practices from the Recommendations section of the Strategy document.  This isn’t a best practices document; this is a custom analysis with specific insights and recommendations (which is why you’re worth so much).  ;) 

TAB 4: INLINK COMPARISON

I’ll keep this one light and simple – you guys know how to do link research by now. You can use some of the inlink tools to compare the number of external links to the site and even the anchor text used in those links in this tab.  If you do, be sure to graph the results. 

What I’ll often do with inlinks too, is create a grid to see if I can determine who’s possibly link-shacking with who.  Take your top x sites, including your own, and put each site in a cell across a couple of columns of your Excel tab.  Put the same sites in rows in the cell tab that you’ll cross-check with the columns. 

Then do this search in Yahoo Search:

Site:site1.com linkdomain:site2.com

This will return any pages from site 1 that are linking to site 2 (and indexed in Yahoo). For example, here are the pages on Wikipedia.org that link to seomoz.org: 

http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=site%3Awikipedia.org+linkdomain%3Aseomoz.org 

Do this for each site (both directions).  Keep in mind some of these links might have nofollows on them (use the SEOmoz toolbar to easily see nofollows).  Sometimes you’ll see some sites with heavy cross-linking.  This might mean a partnership, network, or paid links.  Whether or not any of this cross-linking info is useful is questionable, but I like to see it if I have time to do the work. 

Use this tab for any link comparisons you feel are important to explore.  Because I’m skimping on this section a little, I expect you guys to share your competitive inlink practices in the comments.  If you gain any good insights from what you find in your competitive inlink research in this tab, make a note of it for your Recommendations that we’ll build out in the next step in this series.

TAB 5: TRAFFIC COMPARISON

We know who our competitors are in search results.  I also like to look at overall traffic to get an idea of who’s killing it beyond just Search.  If your competitors are getting a lot of traffic in general, they’re doing something right.  Also what are their traffic trends?

Here are some tools you can use to look at traffic and traffic trends:

• Compete
• Alexa
• AttentionMeter
• comScore
• Nielsen
• HitWise

This is another one of those things that I like to look at, but usually isn’t extremely actionable for SEO.  I like to know the trends and the overall popularity of my competitors.  I might gain some insight from looking at these, like if any competitors are losing ground or gaining fast (many times this could be due to search traffic since search often drives a large percentage of traffic to many sites).

TAB 6+: YOURS

What else do you want to compare?  Add as many tabs as you like.  This isn’t necessarily something you have to give to your client (although you could add it on as an appendix), this is a space for you to use to explore the competitive landscape.  Add what you feel you want to dig into, and take notes on what you find that is useful for your recommendations along the way.  We’ll be creating that part of the Strategy document next.

WHAT YOU NEED IN THE END

You need specifics. You need competitive insights that go beyond title tag comparisons.  You need to know everything about the popular girls.  The most important tab for me in this whole process is usually the features & content comparison.  This is the stuff that speaks to why a site is popular (as long as I’m comparing the right things) and it’s the stuff that can affect some of the other tabs like inlinks and traffic.  I use the insights I gain on this tab almost every time.  I may not find any really good insights in the rest of the research, but I almost always find some juicy nuggets in the feature & content comparisons.

You should now have a really good idea of what you’re up against, where your site stands competitively, and what you might need to consider in terms of providing a unique, remarkable offering to your target markets.  Combine that with Gaps & Opportunities we found in Step 3, and categories and keywords of interest you found in Step 2, and you should have a nice set of notes that you can use to form some solid, specific recommendations in the next step.

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5 Ways Being An SEO Helps You With Online Dating »

Posted by Tom_C

Howdy mozzers. Since a lot of people in the search space are geeks, it naturally follows that there are plenty of single SEO guys and gals. Therefore this post is for you! Actually, it’s more of a collection of random SEO tips and tricks I’ve picked up recently that I decided to hang together by applying the tips to online dating at the same time!

Disclaimer: I’m going to reference OKCupid throughout this post. They are not a client, I have no alliegnece with them but they’re like the Google of online dating. Their blog is an A+ example of how to write engaging content which gets links. I reference it all the time when talking to clients.

5 Ways Being an SEO Makes You Better At Online Dating

1) Add Trust

This is something I learned from doing Conversion Rate Optimisation. Getting users to convert almost always isn’t about changing the colour of buttons or the position of images. It’s about getting the right message across to your users. You want to find out what makes them tick and then give them what they want. This can sometimes be as simple as changing the text of a header on a page.

Top Dating Tip: Mention things like "good at cooking", "sporty" - people respond well to these kinds of hints that you’re an awesome person.

Top SEO Tip: Make sure the language and message used on your site fits your users. I wrote a post on using natural language for CRO which contains a nice little case study you might want to check out.

2) Be Efficient

Effective SEOs are efficient people (and efficient people are also effective SEOs I imagine?). Rand wrote a fantastic post on using outsourcing to get things done which highlights the different tasks that you might be able to outsource and Will wrote a fantastic post on automating tasks (with a followup cheatsheet full of APIs). Anytime you find yourself doing the same task over and over again you should really stop and think about how you can do it more effectively. Can you outsource? Can you automate?

Top Dating Tip: Write an "opening message" - full of humour and intelligence and wit (outsource this if you find it hard) which you can use to woo potential suitors. Online dating is a long slow process (at least for guys) and you’ll need to message lots and lots of people in order to get dates (at least if you’re as ugly as I am) so take the pain out of this process by automating the opening email. Of course, with all good email marketing you need to make it look like it’s not automated. Include references to specifics from their profile and get their name right!

Top SEO Tip: Automate automate automate. Did you see recently that you can now run scripts from within Google Products? Kind of like Google Apps only stupidly easy to use. It lets you send emails, access calendars and even create Google sites. The programming language is kind of like Visual Basic but includes powerful tools like sending emails and fetching web pages. I’ll leave it up to you to imagine the possibilities here!

3) Research

Research is integral to strong SEO. You need to research rankings, links, site owners, potential link opportunities and a whole host of other things. The internet lends itself to researching and gathering data and sometimes you need to employ some of the SEO tricks you’ve learned to use Google effectively or to track down an errant webmaster. There was a scary email conversation between distilled and SEOmoz staff following a Q&A where we discussed how to find the individual behind a social media profile. The amount of data you can gather from a simple digg profile is terrifying. Within a few minutes we had his real name, family members, wife’s name, address and phone number. So next time you think you’re posting something "anonomously" think again!

Top Dating Tip: Users will often use the same photo to sign up to loads of different sites. So use a service like TinEye to do a reverse image search on potential suitor’s profile photos. What people write on social media profiles and what they write on their personal blog are two very different things!

Top SEO Tip: Following the image theme, I recently picked up a really neat trick you can use to find people who are hotlinking your images. Simply use the imagesearch: command in Google Images like this: imagesite:seomoz.org -site:seomoz.org (make sure you’re searching google image search!)

I’d like to think that you’d use this list of sites as a list of places to get links from rather than a list of sites to goatse but each to their own… (hat tip for this imagesite search query goes to Andre who I met at A4uexpo in Munich).

4) Stay Fresh

The idea that having "fresh content" would help you rank was one of the myths Rand recently addressed and I certainly don’t think it carries much weight. That said, for fresh queries, fresh data is essential. Rand recently talked about how twitters of a URL may help them rank for QDF-style queries. Certainly QDF is one area of SEO that a lot of people overlook.

Top Dating Tip: Having a fresh profile helps get dates. If your join date is 2 years ago or your last login date was over a month ago then chances are you’re not interested. So make sure that you keep things up to date. I also think that some of the ranking algorithms at sites like OKCupid favour fresh profiles over stale ones.

Top SEO Tip: Think about which queries are triggering QDF algorithms in your industry. Are they worth chasing? Is your site set up to publish content fast? Is your content team set up to publish content fast?! Some SEOs I’ve talked to recently still didn’t even know there was such a thing as QDF so if you’re in this space make the most of it and think about twitters of your URL like Rand says. Here’s a good beginners QDF video (oldie but goodie)

5) Test Test Test

Testing is crucial to online success. Whether it’s testing process changes, or multivariate testing using Google Website Optimizer it’s important to keep testing things. Karl from Conversion Rate Experts gave a fantastic presentation in Munich at A4uexpo where he really demonstrated why testing radical changes is much better than changing little changes. Unfortunately I can’t link to his slides but I’m assured he has a post in the works so keep your eyes peeled for that soon.

Top Dating Tip: Test which profile picture will get you most dates by using the My Best Face feature. It lets you see which profile image works better for you and gives you lovely graphical breakdowns of the data to show you which demographic your image works best for. It’s like CRO for online dating!

Top SEO Tip: Try segmenting your website optimiser tests. Will wrote a post on how to segment your tests which you should check out.

I hope you enjoyed this - look out for my next installment entitled "5 ways being an SEO doesn’t  help you get dates online" which will mainly feature images of SEOs looking geeky and having poor social skills.

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How to Measure & Improve SEO: eMetrics London 2010 Presentation »

Posted by randfish

Last week, I gave a 45-minute presentation at eMetrics London on a variety of analytics for SEO topics. The presentation slide deck is embedded below:

Metrics for SEO by Rand Fishkin (eMetrics London 2010)

The presentation went into more depth in person, but topics included:

Some basics:

• Measuring traffic against macro query growth
• Measuring against search market share
• Measuring against temporal trends
• Keyword selection based on traffic quantity, quality and difficulty of ranking
• Choosing keyword messaging to optimize conversion rate
• Tracking CTRs on search results
• Identifying crawl errors using a variety of tools
• Tracking rankings - when, where and why it’s useful 

A handful of intermediate level tactics:

• Getting beyond "last-click" attribution
• Evaluating indexation for SEO
• Tracking vertical search results using filters

And some more advanced items:

• Evaluating metrics for predicting search results ordering and valuing links/content
• Applying metrics to improve your SEO
• Valuing social media together with search
• Discussing the relative impacts (both primary and second-order effects) that social has on rankings

Happy weekend everyone!

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Whiteboard Friday - Sitewide, Reciprocal, and Directory Links »

Posted by great scott!

Link building sucks.  You know it, I know it, everyone knows it. It can be slow, tedious, and exhausting. It’s also one of the most crucial aspects of complete search engine optimization.  So what do you do when faced with the intimidating challenge of building links? Once upon a time, you could’ve just submitted your site to a few hundred cheap directories (or a few thousand like so many of the $99 "SEO" shops offer), arrange for a few dozen reciprocal links from sites with decent PageRank, and maybe even negotiate a nice, keyword-targeted footer link from a reasonably popular blog. Bing-bang-boom, you’ve got several hundred good links with super-optimized anchor text…hellooooo rankings!

Those of you who’ve been playing this game for a while are probably thinking, "ahh, 2004, those were the days!" Everyone else is either looking at the screen incredulously or laughing hysterically, "this stuff doesn’t work at all anymore!" Oh really? Doesn’t it?  Sitewide, Reciprocal, and Directory links often have a bad rap because in the last several years they’ve largely become synonymous with cheap, spammy, dishonest, and largely useless scam SEO offers. But here’s the catch: if you’re careful, reasonable, and practical, these oft-maligned practices can still be effective.  Don’t go screaming black hat on me, watch this week’s video to learn the how, when, and why of what can make these black sheep of the link building world viable tactics.

As discussed in the video there are times when these strategies can be legitimate.  Rand covered these in a lot of detail in our recent PRO Webinar on Advanced Competitive Link Building, so if you’re a PRO Member, be sure to watch the recording. For now, let’s look at some situations where these strategies can still work.

Sitewide Links  The early oughties (aka 2000’s) were the like Studio 54 for sitewide links: shady links were snorting coke off of hookers in the dark recesses of footer navigation across the web. Then Google raided the joint looking for manipulative link patterns like the IRS looking for cooked books–the jig was up for footer and sidebar sitewide nav links.  To this day you can occasioanlly stumble across a rogue footer containing a few links out to ridiculously unrelated content (one local theater here in Seattle has links out to branded baby care products), but by-and-large this practice is no longer used…except for when it is.  Does Disney link to other sites in its content network? Does Lulu link to their SEOmoz and PC magazine awards? Does SEOmoz link to service partners like Distilled and Exact Target? Yes, they/we do and we do so in sitewide footers. These are legitimate and natural relationships. There’s nothing strange or fishy here. In fact, if any of these links were paid, they’d be better off on one or two strong pages rather than on a sitewide navigational element. Basically, you should consider these bad if/when they seem unnatural and/or they’re done alongside other shady stuff.

Reciprocal Links  First things first: within niche industries, natural reciprocal links are compeletely natural. In fact they’re often difficult to avoid. Think about the SEO space; SEOmoz, SEOBook, Search Engine Land, Search Engine Journal, and all the others…we’re constantly linking to each other, but do we ever call up Aaron or Loren or Matt and say, "hey, I’ll link to your page if you link back to mine with this exact anchor text"? No, that’d be ridiculous. ‘Reciprocal’ becomes a four-letter word when it becomes clear that your site has an unusually high proportion of 1-to-1 links (you and other sites link to each other only once), often with suspiciously consistent anchor text. Those are the phenomena that start to look shady and draw attention.

Directory Links Here’s the litmus test for a directory: Do they care who you are? Good directories endeavour to actually create a high-value resource by excercising editorial control and restricting listings to sites and businesses that will be of value to their users. Bad directories endeavour to maximize the number of people willing to pay them money to be listed next to Der International Haus of Spamcakes because, hey, it’s a PR3 link! It’s really that simple. Directory links of the good variety can be really solid link sources (they’re often niche or local), but the bad kind (of which you can probably find 20,000 for $99) ain’t gonna do a damn bit of good for you.

When it comes down to it, you simply need to use good judgement with your link efforts. Is this a link someone would not be surprised to find on this site and in this location? Is the link from a site you could or would legitimately link to in a blog post? Would your site or page be a good resource for someone visiting a particularly directory? What about the rest of the content and links, do they seem legitimate?  A little honest evaluation and some common sense is really all you need to avoid engaging in bad linking practices.

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4 Ways to Improve Your SEO Site Audit »

Posted by Lindsay

The preparation of an SEO Site Audit is something that every SEO, whether in-house, agency-side, or independent consultant, has done. They range from a brief assessment of an hour or two followed by a quick email  to a mammoth document of more than 50 pages that can take a month or more to complete. A junior SEO might charge a few hundred dollars for a quick assessment and a well known consultancy can charge in the neighborhood of $40K for a report on the more complete end of the scale. For a process that gets that much time and money allocated it’s way, I’m amazed at the lack of chatter on industry blogs. I suppose what elements we review and how we go about the process are among the things that SEOs hold close to their chest.

In true SEOmoz spirit, I’m cracking open the black box and sharing what I’ve learned along the way. This is the first post of many that you will see from me over the coming months on the topic of optimizing your SEO reviews. Today, I’ll cover a few of the most significant elements that I’ve come up with over the years to include in all large SEO reviews.

1. SEO Scorecard

I’m starting with the single most important element of the SEO Audits I create. The idea was hammered out with the guidance of an executive at my old in-house gig. Woody wanted something to bring to the VCs that would summarize our SEO health across multiple web properties in a clean and concise summary. I told him SEO was too complicated for that, but he pushed me and together we came up with the SEO Scorecard.

The scorecard works on a five point rating scale and assesses the website’s key pages in columns against a hearty list of categorized SEO factors in rows. Don’t go overboard when selecting your key pages. I’ve never had to go over five even on the largest of websites. Once you dig in to a website you will usually find that 90% of the content is represented by a handful of templates. The SEO Scorecard is built and populated in Excel, then pulled into your audit document in screen shots.

I always feature the SEO Scorecard near the beginning of the document. It is an excellent way to anchor the rest of the report and gives you something to reference as you describe enhancements. I’m including a screen shot of the first bit of my current SEO Scorecard so you can visualize what I’m talking about.

2. Internal Linking

I’m not talking about the SEO factor here; I’m referring to how link within your SEO Audit Word document. If your reports are anything like the ones I’ve worked on, they end up huge in terms of length and file size. This is especially true if you are good at including screen shots and other graphic elements. Help your readers navigate the document with a click-able table of contents and plenty of embedded links between related sections and topics. Your readers will get more out of the document and will be able to navigate it in a way that makes the most sense to their learning style. This internal linking process might add an hour to the final editing process, but your clients will thank you. Believe me.

Here is a screen shot from the Most Pressing & Valuable Changes section of an audit.

3. Action Items

One of these days, I’ll share the outline that I use in creating an SEO Review document. For now, you can imagine a series of headings and subheadings along with a whole lot of text and a sprinkling of screen shots. For the average Joe, an SEO Review is a brute of a document to read. The concepts are foreign and as they read they’re mind is spinning with ideas of how they will implement the grand ideas you’ve presented. Don’t burden your readers with the additional task of creating a to-do list as they read. After you’ve elaborated on the details of an issue and how it should be resolved, include a list of action items. These are meant as a brief summary, so keep them short and concise!

Here is a sample of action items that followed the Local Search section of a recent report I created.

4. Repetition

As much as you like to think that your clients will read your entire review document over and over with bated breath, they won’t. More likely, your clients will skim the document looking for the most important issues and action items.

At SEOmoz, we not only covered key issues in the SEO Scorecard and in written detail within a dedicated section. We covered the most important components in one form or another a total of SIX times; Overview, Table of Contents, Scorecard, Most Pressing & Valuable Changes section, the topic section (most complete), the Action Items, and the document’s Closing Summary. I’m not suggesting that you copy and paste your entire assessment six times, but what I am suggesting is that you mention key enhancements often and place internal links to the complete assessment within the document’s dedicated section.

• Tell ‘em what your gunna tell ‘em (Overview).
• Tell ‘em some details about the most important things your gunna tell ‘em (Most Pressing & Valuable Changes). 
• Tell ‘em where to find the info (Table of Contents, Internal Links).
• Tell ‘em just how bad it is on a scale of 1-5 (SEO Scorecard).
• Tell ‘em (the topic section).
• Tell ‘em what you told ‘em (Closing Summary).

I’ve been writing audits for a long time and will say that it has become one of my favorite tasks as an SEO. It wasn’t always that way. In the beginning it takes countless hours to get your groove and find your efficiencies. I hope that I’ve shared a few ideas here today that will improve your experience writing SEO Audits moving forward.

Keep your eyes out for more posts on the topic of SEO audits over the coming months. I plan to publish something every two weeks until I run out of interesting things to say. Topic suggestions are welcome.

Action Items

1. Create your own SEO Scorecard and use it to anchor your SEO Site Audit documents.
2. Link profusely within your audit document to ease navigation for your clients.
3. Summarize each section of your audits with a list of clean and concise action items.
4. Repeat yourself, A LOT.

Happy Auditing!

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Google Analytics Event Tracking to Monitor Calls to Action »

Posted by chenry

Analytics is one of those things that hasn’t always been at the top of my priority list until recently. Google Analytics has many features I’ve never used before because I haven’t had the time to sit down and really investigate what they can do for me and my clients. A few months ago, in one of my late night GA adventures, I found a section on event tracking, a small love soon formed.

The Setup

• category (required)
  The name you supply for the group of objects you want to track.
•  action (required)
  A string that is uniquely paired with each category, and commonly used to define the type of user interaction for the web object.
• label (optional)
  An optional string to provide additional dimensions to the event data.

Example: seomoz.org 

 

Other Uses for Event Tracking 

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5 Simple Google Analytics Tips You Should Be Using »

Posted by jennita

Last week, a few of us from SEOmoz attended WebShare’s Seminar for Success for Google Analytics and Google Website Optimizer training. All of us who attended have a decent grasp on GA but really wanted to get some advanced information and gain a better understanding of GA’s potential. Plus, actually getting trained on something is always helpful, even if you feel you know it well!

During the first day, which was an introduction to Google Analytics and user training, I quickly realized that there were a number of tips and tactics that I had NO IDEA about previously. I felt a little silly that I didn’t know that some of these things even existed in GA and got to thinking… if I didn’t know you could use these great tactics, maybe others don’t either.

Following are the tips that I’ll be using in Google Analytics from here on out. You may already be using some of these, but hopefully you’ll find a helpful nugget of information in here.

1. Date Range Made Easy

This actually made me the giddiest of all the features. It’s so simple, yet also so subtle that I had never noticed it before! When you use the date range drop down selection, you can select a month or a week easily by simply clicking on the week or month. WHAT?! I know, that’s what I said.

Month Selection

Week Selection

2. Overview Comparison Reports

This is another one, that I feel a bit silly I didn’t know previously! But if you do a comparison with the past month (or whatever date range you choose), it will show you all the data in the overview. My favorite part is that it will calculate the difference for you and give you a quick overview of the comparison. Pretty dang cool! Plus if you take that information and export it to PDF it’s super easy to send it on to anyone or set up a scheduled email (see below).

3. Regular Expressions FTW

Coming from the dev world, I’ve used regular expressions in the past for many things. I was really excited to learn more about using regular expressions when performing searches, setting up filters, and all other things. Here are a list of the regular expressions you can use. Don’t laugh if you’ve been using these for years, some of us are excited over here!

Wildcards

• . = match any single character
• * = match – or more of previous
• + = match 1 or more previous
• ? = match 0 or 1 of previous
• | = logical OR

Anchors

• ^ must occur at the beginning - ^/order\.php = everything that starts with /order.php
• $ must occur at end

Grouping

• () create match on an item – grand(ma|pa) – (.*) = match any chars
• [] create match on one ofe list of items

Escaping

• \ escapes any special character - OK I actually giggled out loud in the training because the trainer, David Booth, said "When in doubt, escape it out” [see! hehehehe]

This regular expression allowed me to search for all guides within the /article section of the site

4. Show More Rows

If you have a large site, I’m sure you’ve come across the issue of trying to export all your data but you can only download 500 rows at a time! That can be super annoying if you’re trying to pull data when you have 10,000+ rows you need to get into one spreadsheet. This little trick can save you hours of time
Just add this to the end of the URL: “&limit=”. Then when you export it to CSV (this is the only option it works with), you’ll get the full number you’ve added in the limit. The view on the page will still only show 500 (or whatever it’s set to) but the actual download will have everything you need. There are limitations with the number of rows you can get in Excel but it’s more of a problem with Excel 2005 and earlier.

1. Normally you can only select 500 rows at a time.
   
    
2. But add "&limit=#" in the URL
   
    
3. Then Select Export to CSV
   
4. And voila! You have all your data
   

A few notes about this feature that came from the comments: 1. You have to use the &limit feature before the # in the URL for it to work and 2. The max you can get using this is 50,000 (Tom Critchlow recommends looking at Excellent Analytics, an excel plugin to get more).

5. Schedule a Report to be Emailed

I’ve actually seen this used previously and was on the receiving end of these reports, but honestly hadn’t thought about how we could use them on SEOmoz until now. These are extremely useful for reports you send often (daily/weekly/monthly) and/or reports you send to users who don’t have access to GA. Also use the “add to existing” feature so you can send multiple reports to one person rather than 2 separate emails.

Another nice feature is that the date range you set up is sticky, so if the report was set up to show the last 30 days, the next email sent out automatically will also pull the last 30 days. Mhmmm woot!

I personally plan on testing this out starting in June with YOUmoz posts. So if you get a YOUmoz post published in June, watch for a follow up email from me with your post analytics. :)

Bonus Tips!

 Here are a couple additional tips I couldn’t leave out. They’re not specific to GA, but work nicely with it!

Search based keyword tool – http://www.google.com/sktool

Rand has talked about this in the past and I’ve used it as well, but I didn’t totally understand the potential! The part I didn’t realize was that if you log in, you’ll get customized suggestions based on your site and your Adwords account. I’ve gone in and used the tool previously but didn’t realize that by being logged in, and having all your accounts hooked together, that you’d actually see data based on your account. This is probably a bit “duh” on my end, but still in case you didn’t know… well now you do. :)

Google URL builder!

Setting up a campaign is much easier than I realized! There’s actually a simple tool that helps you easily create the campaign URLs. Just fill out this form, and it pops out the URL for you to use in your campaign. Pretty nifty!
 

There you have it! Some cool tips I learned in the Seminar for Success. We learned quite a bit and Danny is going to have another post probably next week with some more advanced tactics. If you’re interested in taking these classes as well, here’s the upcoming schedule.

I’d love to hear about any other tips or tricks like these that you use. If you’re looking for more advanced GA tactics, tomorrow Casey Henry will be posting about using Event Tracking to monitor Calls to Action.

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Debating the Value (and Meaning) of "Great Content" for SEO »

Posted by randfish

The SEO industry, like many others, has private forums, chat threads and groups of connected individuals whose interactions happen largely behind closed doors. Today, I’d like to pull back a curtain and share a debate that occurred between a number of CEOs in the search marketing industry over the last few days that I think you’ll find both fascinating, and hopefully, valuable, too.

The topic is the concept that content quality is highly correlated or predictive of high rankings in the search engines. This isn’t a cut-and-dry debate, but a more nuanced and, yes, subjective look at content quality from a wide range of perspectives.

First, I’ll introduce our players (these are just the folks who agreed to have their contributions published), after which we can dive into the discussion:

	Stephan Spencer is VP of SEO Strategies at Covario, co-author of The Art of SEO, founder of Netconcepts (recently acquired by Covario), and inventor of the GravityStream SEO proxy technology (now rebranded as Covario’s Organic Search Optimizer).
	Gord Hotchkiss is the President and CEO of Enquiro, author of the BuyerSphere Project and a leading expert and research on online and search user behavior.
	Thad Kahlow is the CEO of BusinessOnLine, one of the nation’s leading online marketing agencies, successfully launching hundreds of solutions for clients including American Red Cross, Caterpillar, Sony, NEC, Sybase, and Hasbro, to name a few.
	Eric Enge is the President of Stone Temple Consulting, a 16 person SEO and PPC consulting firm with offices in Boston and Northern California. Eric is co-author of The Art of SEO from O’Reilly.
	Chris Baggott co-founded ExactTarget and authored the popular book: Email Marketing By The Numbers.  He is currently co-founder/CEO of Compendium an Enterprise Social Content Publishing software and writes about Best Practices for Blogging on his own blog.
	Richard Zwicky the Founder and President of Eightfold Logic (formerly known as Enquisite), a predictive insights and search and social analytics platform used by enterprises and agencies around the world. A serial entrepreneur, Richard is the author of multiple patents and has been involved in online marketing since the late 1990’s.
	Lawrence Coburn is the CEO and co-founder of DoubleDutch - the first white label geolocation platform.  He is also an Editor at The Next Web’s geolocation blog, and a mentor at io ventures - a San Francisco based startup incubator.
	Will Critchlow is a co-founder of Distilled, a London & Seattle based SEO consultancy. He speaks regularly at industry conferences on analytics, data-driven optimization and data visualization.
	Rand Fishkin is… the author of this post :-)

Thad Kahlow (in reference to these three posts):

Great Content ≠ Great Rankings
We disagree.   Great content is so important to ranking well.  It may not be the only factor, that content has to be found, be newsworthy and incorporate keywords that will drive traffic but the basic principle that content is a huge factor to generate competitive rankings.

Rand Fishkin:

Great content ≠ Great Rankings
I’ll fight tooth and nail on this one. Great content is a really good thing to do for many reasons, but I’d doubt it correlates to great rankings any better than PageRank does (or doesn’t).

Eric Enge:

Speaking of fighting tooth and nail, you have now earned my $0.02 (:>). Great content may not equate to great rankings by itself, but if we look at the integrated whole of a web marketing strategy, where link building and social media promotion are the driving components of success, great content is a MUST.  I think it would be a disservice to put anything out there that suggests otherwise.  Accordingly, I would suggest:

"In the absence of a marketing strategy to leverage it, great content will not necessarily drive great rankings, but if you are looking to create a major web property (for your market space) then great content is a requirement.  It’s impact on the promotion of your web site is fundamental.  Obtaining links and getting positive feedback from social media communities is far easier with great content."

Stephan Spencer:

Great content doesn’t automatically mean great rankings. In other words, it is not a foregone conclusion that great content will necessarily rank just because of its quality. The content may deserve to be ranked, but if no one knows about it, or if the site architecture is so atrocious that it repels the spiders, then it won’t rank. It’s as important to actively promote that great content as to have created it. I’m simply making an argument against that tired old phrase “Build it and they will come.” Don’t let my comments dissuade you from creating high quality content though! Indeed, it’s a likely prerequisite for SEO success, especially when the keywords being targeted are highly competitive.

Chris Baggott:

So if Eric is $0.02…..I’m $0.001  :-)

I’d like to chime in on the content question. Isn’t this an issue of competition?

I wrote a post talking about one of Rand’s slides at Web 2.0 showing 4 word phrases being the highest converting. We took a look at our own client base and found exactly the same correlation. The client I use in the example has decent domain authority but not much else other than content and categories specifically relevant to the longer tail terms they are targeting. When we talk about SEO don’t we need to differentiate the fat head tactics from the long tail tactics?

Rand you made a great case for the long tail and conversion in your deck. Vanessa Fox in her new book makes the statement that 56% of all searches return no ads. As the world starts to appreciate that the tail is only going to get longer it seems like content is going to be getting more an more important. Am I crazy making the assumption that the lower the query competition the bigger the role of content relevance, recency and frequency plays in driving high converting traffic?

Rand Fishkin:

Agreed - for the long tail, domain authority + enough juice to get lots of pages indexed + the mere mention of the phrase combo = you’re often ranking top 5

Eric - agree with you as well, it certainly makes many things easier, but so many people in our industry (and outside of it) think and promote the idea that "great content" (which, IMO, has been repeated so often it’s nearly lost meaning) will get you rankings. Great marketing will get you rankings, often regardless or in spite of content quality.

Lawrence Coburn:

I agree wholeheartedly.  To do well in the tail, you need deep (though not necessarily high quality) content.  To match 4-5-6 word queries at scale, you need to have a lot of content to draw from.

On a related note, the May Day update changed something around exactly these sorts of queries, and for us, not for the better.  I’m curious as to where the traffic that was going to us, and other big, broad, content sites, is now going.

Rand Fishkin:

Yeah - we also took about a 10% hit in the tail of search traffic from Google to seomoz.org and that was weird. Previous updates have always only helped us do better or stayed the same. Digging into traffic data, it appears to be fewer pages receiving any traffic, which tells me it’s most likely an indexation issue - Google getting pickier about what it keeps in the index.

Thad Kahlow:

Re: great content = great rankings.

I agree, and don’t think many could disagree, that creating great content, upon itself will deliver great rankings.  But when we look at this issue from a much broader context (30k ft), Google’s mission is to provide the most relevant experience (not just SERPs). Better content provides a better experience.

So I digress because I believe this topic addresses a systemic ailment within search (may piss off a few ole school’s with this one)… but we as SEOs spend significantly too much time obsessing (me included)  over algorithmic loop holes, updates, dances, undulations…to the point of reaching diminished returns.  And I humbly (as much as I can be) suggest that if we as SEOs spent more time with our clients focusing on the end users needs when launching a search campaign and built unique, relevant content, and less focus on the extreme nuisances on the algo (yes, you need an extremely sound SEO best practices foundation +some)… Google, the client and most importantly the end users are better served = Search Industry wins.  Otherwise, we are all fighting the battle of “out- optimizing” the other and not on the ultimate mission- winning the “relevant experience” war.

In sum- a significant focus on creating creative relevant content should be a major focus of every search solution, yet far few do.

Gord Hotchkiss:

Couldn’t agree more with Thad (surprise, surprise)…

And I would go even further. Search is rapidly growing beyond relevance as a metric of success to usefulness. Relevance is, and always has been, simply a measurable proxy for usefulness. Expect Google algos to start finding signals of usefulness, across multiple content buckets, and using that to determine what gets shown when, and to whom.

So, more and more, SEO and prospect intent have to align and chasing algos becomes moot. I think we have to worry much less about systematic testing against a black box algo and worry more about understanding what our prospects want to do. That’s where the search engines have to head.

Eric Enge:

Thad - great restatement of what I was saying.

We all need to remember where Google (and Bing) are going.  They want high quality content.  Over time, they WILL get it.  Winning the "relevant experience" war will help you build great traffic now, and secure your business from the inherent risks of changes in Google’s algorithm (because those changes will likely be a positive for you)

Rand Fishkin:

I’m going to, oddly enough, say that I disagree with a few of these statements.

Much as I would love to believe the engines will eventually reverse into signals that push higher quality content above more popular content, I don’t think that will ever be the case.

Every other field is the same - it’s not the fantastic, artistic, often foreign-language, personally compelling films that win Oscars or sell big at the box office. It’s not the authentic, possibly awkward, but highly dedicated, humble and talented politicians who win elections. It’s not the news with the most substance, science and accuracy that earns the front page headlines. In every facet of human life - it’s what’s popular and what’s marketed.

I believe that as SEOs, we owe it to our clients to let them know that accessibility and quality are certainly bases they need to hit, but they won’t necessarily win the battles or the war, even in the long term.

As Google/Bing/etc turn to new signals, they’re looking at things like personalization, social search, Twitter data, usage data, etc. - these aren’t things that "can’t be gamed" or that predict "quality content" - they’re just like data points society uses to value films, politicians and news stories. That’s why my belief is that SEO isn’t about "great" content or "the most useful" content. It’s about the "most marketable" content targeted to demographics that are likely to fulfill the search engines’ signals. Today, that’s those on the web who create links. Tomorrow it could be those who tweet and share on Facebook. In years to come, it might be a wider swath of web users, but they will still be influence-able the way humans always are - through psychologies that persuade them to take action in the kinds of ways the engines measure.

I’ll ask a final question - does anyone here believe that the highest converting landing page is the one that does the best job explaining the product or the one that taps into the science of persuasion (social proof, ego, scarcity, etc.)?

At the 30K foot level, I think Google is about representing popularity and relevance on the web the same way it’s done in real life. They’re not trying to re-invent the way humans consider/judge/evaluate content.

The above is, of course, opinion.

Gord Hotchkiss:

I think you’re right Rand…increasing, Google will try to pick up sociological and “human” based signals, rather than arbitrary semantic calculations. If you think about PageRank, it’s really a network based signal based on what they had to work with at the time, hyperlinking structures. Today, we have social networks and I’m sure there are a few people at Google smart enough to determine emergent behaviors out of the complexity of that network structure – SocialRank.

The second piece of this is personalization..identifying context relevant tasked based intent, and matching the network wide signals to that. Again, difficult to optimize against this…no universally true baseline to test against!

So, with the absence of a consistent and testable environment, we have no option but to switch our focus to people instead. If that’s where Google is going (and I know Microsoft is heading in that direction), we have to be going there too….

Richard Zwicky:

I’d disagree that there are no universal baselines, nor is it the best quality content, nor the most content that drives this.

Actually, I think that in its own way, Google always has tried to pick up on sociological and human based signals.  The reality is that in the past, the dimensions for input were quite flat, and that allowed us to consider things two-dimensionally:  Very simply; the site, and other sites that linked in, with just a little outside input.

The data points being examined were finite, and relatively easy to manipulate.  As the networks have grown, and the ability and manners in which people have interacted has changed, so have a lot of the notions.  Social networks are a dimension which doesn’t necessarily connect directly to any one site at any time, but the activity therein sends very definite market signals about complex behaviour patterns globally which can be used to alter the algorithmic concepts of relevance.

I’d disagree that there are no baselines to test against, or optimize against.  It’s just the field of perspective to provide the analysis is different. Trends, baselines and norms are hard to determine on the individual, or even among small groups, but norms can be established over time, contextual variances defined, and then norms applied to other new or unique segments.

I would argue that the change in signal measurement is analogous to the change in communities that’s occurred in the last 200 years. (in North America)  As you move through these periods, signals, outreach, measurement all change, as did the tools of marketing. Here’s a very short synopsis, to give you an idea of my perspective….

200 years ago, most people were born, raised, and died within 25 miles of the same place.  Very few people ventured out, went away to school, etc…  This was your community.  You were raised with, worked with, and socialized with the same group of people.  Their interests were your interests.  Any wonder there was a caste / class system?

~150 years ago, rail networks were established, and movement increased.  People traveled, but not too distantly, and usually only to hubs.  Your community expanded a little, but not much.  But you were exposed to more and more.

~100 years ago the automobile age started.  People now traveled through a larger area, their regular range of movement grew to a ~100 mile radius.  Now, you often were working with people you’d not encountered while growing up, your children were traveling further and further away to school, and your community was different based on interests.

~1945 - The modern automobile age began.  Now working 2 hours away from home was "normal" (funny how the Internet’s changing that part back!).  Your home community was distinct from work.  Husband and wife each had different communities and interactions during the day.  Signals became much noisier.  Marketing had to become more sophisticated. Messaging bounced around more.

~194X - Telephones in every home became common (not that long ago!) - first "Buzz marketing"  ??  Still individual to individual…

~1960 - Televisions in every home became common… mass visual communication, and marketing.

~197X - The IT age starts, you know how this goes….

Communities?  Nothing like they even were when I was growing up.

Today, like most of yours,  mine is global, not local. It’s based on a huge range of interests, and people I’ve encountered globally through my life.  I don’t have a single community I participate in regularly, I have many.  I fade in and out from time to time as interest grows and fades.  The buzz in one community is generally on different topics from one to another, and yet there are consistent common threads through all of them, no matter how disconnected.  

Marketing, measuring, and responding the way a search engine needs to? It needs to monitor all the signals, across all communities, and understand how contextual relevance shifts.  In essence, if I use the above analogy, the signals the engines used to monitor would be akin to where we were in community evolution somewhere between 100 years ago and 1945.  The dimensions to be measured, and factored in are so far beyond how most traditional marketers think is unfathomable (which is this group’s opportunity).

Chris Baggott:

This is an opinion I agree with.  My only point from earlier has to do with popularity….compared to what?   It’s a lot easier to be "popular" in a smaller pond.    :-)

Will Critchlow:

I’m a bit late to this party. A couple of late thoughts:

Firstly, I thought today’s xkcd was appropriate:

Secondly, I think that a lot rests on how we define ‘great content’. However we define it, I think Rand is correct that it cannot (except in rare cases) be sufficient - at a minimum it needs a strategy of repeated delivery that leads to enough of a following to bring the links it needs. I would like to bundle up a degree of ‘linkability’ into the definition of ‘great content’ though. Rand - I think your definition (where you compare it to great artwork, or honest politicians) is too narrow. I believe that ‘great’ in this context can be defined as the right combination of populist within the right niche, remarkable (in the Seth Godin sense of "likely to be remarked-upon") as well as the purer content metrics.

Finally, I was thinking about this in the context of the Mayday update, when it seems to me that we saw a change in the relative likelihood of content to succeed depending on where it appears. Best estimates show that we saw a move from long-tail rankings for content on large, powerful domains to rankings for smaller, more niche domains. Although this kind of relative change is nothing new, it is a timely reminder that content doesn’t operate in a vacuum.

I think Will’s actually done a remarkable job summing things up - it all depends what we mean by "great" content and how we think about the evaluation of that word by all the signals the engines measure today and might measure tomorrow.

Hopefully, this debate has been valuable to you - we felt, after looking back through the thread, that there was a lot of great stuff that deserved wider review and more thought. We’d all love to hear what you’ve got to say/share on the subject.

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SMX London: Ranking Factors in 2010 »

Posted by randfish

Somehow, my flight from Seattle landed just before the newest Icelandic ash cloud began shutting down airports across UK airspace. As a result, I was able to present at SMX London this morning. The presentation is included below.

This slide deck focuses on things that are probably in the search engines’ ranking algorithm today (e.g. the reasonable surfer model), might be in today and probably will be more in the future (e.g. tweet data) and may or may not get in (e.g. Facebook’s open graph).

SEO Ranking Factors 2010 SMX London

Everyone at SMX noted that this year’s event is much busier and more active than last year. Goodbye recession; hello London as a new center of the search world.

Looking forward to your comments as always!

p.s. I’m planning to write a much more comprehensive post about the "reasonable surfer" patent, but in the meantime, be sure to read Bill Slawski’s analysis.

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API and Dataset Cheatsheet - Building Quick & Dirty Tools »

Posted by willcritchlow

I recently wrote a post on hacking together a linkbuilding tool where I set myself a challenge of learning a bunch of new technologies in 2 hours in order to be able to build a basic linkbuilding tool. I learnt just enough YQL, xpath, Python and Google App Engine to do the job. Since then I’ve put this to use in at least one tool that’s actually helping me and my team do our jobs better.

Inspired by this (and encouraged by Kate Morris, a recent addition to the Distilled team), I started putting together a cheatsheet of the basic YQL and xpath I had learnt. In the end, it turned into that plus inspiration of APIs and datasets that could make great starting points for tools (either for research or for creating linkworthy content):

Download it: API and data cheatsheet

Or link to it: API and datasource cheatsheet [PDF]:

<a href="http://www.seomoz.org/blog/api-and-dataset-cheatsheet-building-quick-dirty-tools">API and datasource cheatsheet</a> [<a href="http://www.distilled.co.uk/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/api-data-cheatsheet.pdf">PDF</a>]

Or tweet it!

I wanted to create the kind of thing that I’d find useful to have around for inspiration and quick memory-jogs. So I focused on three areas:

Sources

APIs

I have been enjoying digging through Programmable Web to find great APIs that do cool things. The two I’m currently most excited about are:

• Face.com - just for pure awesomeness. I haven’t actually tried it yet, but a face recognition API? Are you kidding me?
• Alchemy - for the time-saving ability of extracting visible text from a page. This is the kind of thing I don’t want to have to code myself for sure.

Data sources

In addition to tools that do cool things, sometimes you need input data. Some of the APIs are designed to give you data, others manipulate data, but sometimes you just need that raw data. In addition to being one of the coolest names around (maybe I’m just a sucker for chimps), infochimps, which catalogues data sets around the web, is perhaps also one of the coolest sites on the web. With everything from the 1,000 most frequently used English words to Trst Rank for Twitter users [data] (check out their big datasets if you really want to get your hadoop on).

Magic

As I discussed in my last post, I’m not a developer. My code is testament to that. I therefore love stuff that makes my life easier. Re-using work that other smart people did was cheating at school, but is a hugely valuable life skill when you are actually trying to get real stuff done. There are a small number of bits of syntax for YQL and xpath that I keep needing to look up, so I included them in the cheatsheet.

Horsepower

You could do all this stuff yourself. Or you could get a computer to do it. The final column outlines the tools I have used to for different kinds of tasks:

• Mozenda: best for one-off site scraping and rapid proof-of concept
• 80legs: best for rapid development of well-defined tasks
• Google App Engine: best for combinations of ease-of-use and flexibility. Great for accessing APIs. Better for beginners than:
• Amazon Web Services: best for experts and production code 

Sometimes things just have to be done by humans, but that doesn’t mean it necessarily has to be you doing it. I have included some links to my favourites, but Rand’s post on outsourceable SEO tasks is the place to start reading for an introduction.

Inspiration

One of the sources of inspiration for this post has been reading on DataWrangling about the work of Peter Skomoroch who is a research scientist at LinkedIn (and whose delicious links are included in the cheatsheet). I love this presentation on the creation of TrendingTopics.org:

If you liked this, I’d love a tweet or a link: API and datasource cheatsheet [PDF]:

<a href="http://www.seomoz.org/blog/api-and-dataset-cheatsheet-building-quick-dirty-tools">API and datasource cheatsheet</a> [<a href="http://www.distilled.co.uk/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/api-data-cheatsheet.pdf">PDF</a>]

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Whiteboard Friday - Google’s May Day Update & What It Means for You »

Posted by great scott!

May Day, Roodmas, Walpurgis Night, Beltane…regardless of the name, it’s a time for dancing around the maypole, enjoying the bounties of Spring, recalling the battle for worker’s rights, and lots of other fun things. But for many a search marketer, May 1st (ish) of this year will be remembered as the day the long tail died (bye-bye Misses High ROI…apologies to Don McLean). 

Old-Timey Folks Gettin’ Their Maypole On

Okay, okay, maybe that’s a bit of a stretch, but the search world (including Search Engine Roundtable and Webmaster World) definitely did notice the effects of Google’s so-called "May Day Update".  Sure, Google makes minor algo tweaks like this all the time, but around April 28th-May 3rd a lot of sites (SEOmoz included) noticed a sudden loss of 5-15% of their normal long tail traffic.  Watch this week’s video to learn more about what may have happened, and what you should do about it, or continue reading below for a summary.

What happened here? Why did you (or someone you love) lose their precious long tail search referrals? There are a lot of theories out there: Google reduced the size and depth of the primary index to keep Caffeine fast; there was broad link devaluation; there was a shift in how phrase match is performed; increased bias was given to authority/brand sites; etc. Some, all, or none of these may be true, the important thing is DON’T PANIC! If you saw a drop in traffic, you need to figure out why…don’t start blindly changing things lest you care to break what may not be broken.

How do you know if you were affected? Well, start by checking your search referral traffic between April 28th and May 3rd; do you see a drop? If so, is the change in the number of referrals, or the number of pages getting traffic?  A drop in traffic to your big terms isn’t likely May Day, but a drop in pages getting search referrals (long tail traffic) could be. If you monitor rankings for a handful of obscure tail terms (which you should do specifically for this reason), did your rankings suddenly plummet? Did your indexation or crawl stats change suddenly (you can use Webmaster Tools, site: searches, etc. to check)? These could indicate you were hit by the update.

What to do? Run! Hide! Grab your anti-zombie defensive shotgun that you keep on-hand at all times in case of a Zombie Apocalypse! Just kidding; that would be bad.  First, look at your links and give yourself a quality check: have you been a little shady lately? If so, maybe you should spend some effort getting a few high-quality links to spruce up the place (Spring cleaning, natch). Can you spare a bit of link juice from a strong page to give those weaker, but targeted long tail pages a little boost? It might help.  Again, most importantly of all, don’t panic…the engines make little changes to the algos all the time. Google made more than 500 changes last year–more than one per day–and 99% of the time you won’t even notice. Even if May Day did impact your site, it could change back next week, so take a deep breath and try to relax. Keep practicing high-quality, fundamental SEO and you’ll be okay.

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Define Competitors: Step 4 of the 8-Step SEO 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.

Congratulations on making it halfway through building this SEO Strategy document with me!  Do you feel your value as an SEO rising?

If you’re jumping into the 8 Step SEO Strategy here in Step 4, or just need a recap, you can find the previous three steps here:

• Step 1: Define Your Target Audience and Their Needs
• Step 2: Categorized Keyword Research: Step 2 of the 8-Step SEO Research Strategy
• Step 3: Finding Gaps and Opportunities: Step 3 of the 8-Step SEO Strategy

DEFINING CATEGORY COMPETITORS

Step 4 is a simple one where we’ll be defining our competitors in SERPs for use in dissection in the Step 5.

We’ll only be looking at search engine competitors here, and not comScore, Hitwise or other types of industry-defined competition by Uniques or Page Views, or any other metric.  For the SEO Strategy we’re building here, we’re concerned with Search, therefore we’ll stick to competitors in search results only. 

I can already hear you saying – this is easy – just do a search for your keywords and see who shows up.  True.  That’s part of it.  But because we’re going to do some serious dissection in Step 5, we’ll want to make sure we get the right competitors to dissect and compare ourselves against.

We broke our keyword research out into categories in Step 2, so we’ll want to define competitors for each category (or pick just a few important categories – especially if you’re working on large enterprise-sized sites).

What I mean when I mention defining competitors by categories is this: If I am working on a site all about celebrities, my competitors might be OMG, TMZ, Perez Hilton, etc.  But that’s only at the high level.  My keyword categories from step 2 might cover subtopics like celebrity photos, celebrity news and more. Each of those subtopics has someone who is dominating those rankings.  It may be the same one or two sites across the board, but it’s likely that each subtopic will have different high-ranking competitors.  We want to know specifically who’s doing well for each topic.

HOW TO FIND YOUR COMPETITORS

There are several ways you can do this. If you’ve already got a method you like and want to stick with – by all means do (and if you’re compelled to share your method with us in the comments – you know we love to hear it).  I’m going to give you an example of how I pull this data together. 

Here’s how I set it up:

Grab a new Excel worksheet and name it something like ‘Competitors’.  Create one tab to keep track of your overall site competitors, and if you’re tracking any subtopics on your site (likely the keyword categories we defined in step 2), create a tab for each one of those that you’re going to do competitive research for.  We’re not going to do any calculations or fancy stuff with this worksheet – it’s just for keeping track of your competitors in one place.  You can use a Word doc or good ol’ pen and paper if you want too.

The easy way to figure out who your competitors are is to type a couple of terms into the search box and see who shows up.  So let’s look at that method. Here’s what I see in the top 5 results for [celebrity gossip]. 

Take note in your Excel sheet of who’s appearing in the top rankings for a couple of terms for each tab/topic.  You don’t have to look up the competitors for every term in your keyword group, just pick a few and make note of what comes up.

You can also choose to check the top rankings in all three search engines, or just pick one. It’s up to you.  In the end you’ll be looking for which site(s) show up the most often for this keyword group.

Another method of doing this is to use SEOmoz’s Keyword Difficulty Tool.  The cool thing about the Difficulty Tool is that you get extra insights along with your top competitors.  But for this example I just want to get my top-ranked competitors in a downloadable csv file that I’ll just copy and paste into my Excel sheet.

To get this info, type in one of your terms:

Below the difficulty score and authority comparison graph are the top-ranked results…

…and at the bottom of the page you can export the results.  I’ll do the same thing for a few more terms that represent the topic I’m researching, and add the results all to the tab for the topic.

In the end I have something that looks like this – here’s my general terms (there’s only two for this example, but the more terms you can use the better idea you’ll get of who shows up in the rankings the most):

I’ve highlighted the sites that show up in the top 5 rankings for both terms and made a note of it on the top.  This is a competitor I know I want to target.

Here’s another example of one of my subcategories:

Here I see two sites appearing for multiple keywords. I’ve highlighted them and made note of them at the top.  These are competitors I’ll be targeting for my competitive dissection of sites for the Celebrity News subtopic in Step 5.   Again, there’s only 3 terms in the screenshot example above – I recommend pulling the data for at least 5-10 per topic.

Note that you can also choose to target 2 competitors or 5 competitors for each category – whatever you prefer (I usually like to do at least 3).  The more sites you choose the more work you have to do in Step 5, but the more insight you’ll get back. 

That’s the jist of it folks.  Now you have targeted competitors defined for each topic you’re interested in.  In the next post we’ll look at how to dig into the competitive landscape to uncover site features, content, and SEO strategy that should be built into your site in order to outrank your competitors. This is where we really start to take SEO to another level. 

In the meantime, if you use any of the vast selection of SEO tools out there to define your competitors, or just do it in a different way, please share with the readers in the comments!

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3 Key Takeaways from Search & Social »

Posted by Lindsay

Last week Jen and I attended the Search & Social Summit here in my backyard of Tampa Bay. This isn’t your typical conference recap post, though. I wanted to focus on the action items that still stand out for me a week later, the things will make a difference in what I do or how I do it. Perhaps you’ll rethink the way you do a thing or two as well.

Outsource, Seriously.

Kevin Henrikson is a low key guy, and one that I hadn’t met until the Search & Social Summit. You won’t see him spouting off on Twitter or elaborating on his accomplishments on LinkedIn. He beats even me in the blog neglect category. Personally, I wish he’d publish more. He has a strong business acumen and seems to find his comfort zone well outside the boundaries that most of us create in our own DIY vs. outsource struggles.

Kevin’s presentation was about outsourcing. I expected the standard cliché we’ve all heard 100 times, “Do what you do best. Outsource the rest.” Good advice, absolutely, but now what? Kevin’s presentation was different. It outlined real, actionable strategies for outsourcing the things you’d expect - like copywriting and development - but he also spoke about his experience delegating some pretty unusual stuff like the hiring of a housekeeper for his parents out-of-state.

Kevin covered more than a dozen solid online sources for building your outsourced empire including craigslist (for local need), Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, and the old standby Elance. None of those excited me like oDesk and 99designs.

oDesk describes themselves as a marketplace for online workstreams. Don’t have time to sift through your email to identify the important ones that require a response? Hire a personal assistant to do the drudge work for you. Need a new site design converted to work with your WordPress blog? You’ll be surprised by the rates. I created my account while listening to Kevin’s presentation and can’t wait to get started.

99designs provides a platform and 192K strong community to facilitate your own ‘design contest’. Open an account, outline your project in seven simple fields, pay a few hundred dollars and within a week you’ll have dozens of designs to choose from that were created by the 99designs community. I did a hack job of my own blog logo design a few years ago. I figured there was no time like the present, so jumped onto 99designs and kicked off my own contest. For a few hundred dollars I’ve received around 200 logo designs. You can check out the contest entries and maybe even help me choose a winner from the frontrunners.

If you want more information on how to leverage the outsourcing vehicles like the ones mentioned above, check out Rand’s recent post on the topic here.

Targeted Promotion on Niche Social News Sites

If you’re like me, when you think ’social news’, examples like Digg and Reddit stand out. Though the traffic from these sites is astounding - IF you can get your story to the front page - obtaining traction is hit or miss and the competition is intense. Brent Csutoras is a wiz in the world of social marketing, and another speaker that presented some refreshing content at the Search & Social Summit last week.

Brent highlighted Kirtsy.com as a great place to post content that would appeal to a female audience, for example. This isn’t the kind of place to post the latest puss video from PopThatZit (view at your own risk. eww) but if you take a look at the current list of most popular content on the Kirtsy homepage, you’ll get the idea of what is possible there. I was surprised to see a few listings from small personal blogs on topics like crafts and parenting.

Despite being more than a year old, Brent says that this list of niche social media sites from Chris Winfield over at 10e20 is still the best out there. Think about the opportunities for sites you represent. No doubt a few more niche social news sites have cropped up since then. If you have another one that works for you, I’d love to hear about it in the comments.

Get New Content Indexed Faster

Michael Gray recommends creating small sitemaps of <100 pages, in addition to your regular sitemap(s), to help get  new content indexed faster.

Michael has found that for sites that add a lot of new pages, or want to get the pages they do add indexed quickly, using a dedicated sitemap for fresh content is the key. In his testing, deep pages on large sites that would sometimes take weeks or months to make it into the index took just 1-3 days with the dedicated fresh content XML sitemap. He suggests playing with the ‘100′ number. That is what the need has been for his clients, but if you are working with a site that has a larger fresh content output you may achieve the same affect by including more.

I’ll be testing this one out for sure! Let us know how it goes for you, too.

Action Items

1. Are you making the most of your time? Think about the things that someone else could do for you and outsource it. Check out 99designs for graphics work and oDesk for nearly everything else.
2. Look through Chris Winfield’s list of niche social news sites. Maybe your content can ‘make popular’ on social news afte rall.
3. Try creating a supplemental fresh content XML sitemap to see if it helps you get your content indexed faster.

Happy Optimizing!

Lindsay Wassell (aka @lindzie)

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